Stage Review
Southern discomfort a bit too chaotic

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Theatre Critic

•	"The Debutante Ball" An Army Community Theatre Sunday @2 Matinee Readers Theatre production 2 p.m. Sunday and again Sept. 30 Richardson Theatre, Fort Shafter Tickets: $6, call 438-4480

Henley enjoyed early and wide success with "Crimes of the Heart", which explores the quirkiness inherent in tight-knit families, but stays within general bounds of normalcy. In this show, the love/hate relationships created by blood and marriage are thoroughly doused in festering pathology.

A genealogical chart will help you follow the action.

Jen married Theodore Parker when she was four months pregnant by a fruit-picker. Within the family, it's impolite to notice the lack of any resemblance in daughter Bliss. Next came daughter Teddy and — despite Parker's drunkenness and cruelty — things stabilized for several years, until Parker was found dead of multiple blows from a cast iron skillet. Jen was tried and acquitted, but the town continues to considers her a murderess despite her subsequent second marriage to wealthy Hank Turner.

As the play opens, Jen is rehearsing Teddy for her "coming out" at that evening's debutante ball. Teddy is an emotionally crushed and broken young woman, a result — it is theorized — from witnessing her father's murder, then being forced to lie about it at her mother's trial.

To round out the household, Bliss crawls home, and Turner invites his niece Frances, whose advancing age and speech impediment make this her last chance to land a husband. A meddling Parker nephew and a long-suffering black maid round out the cast.

Director Vanita Rae Smith has until now been able to sustain clarity while multiple casting her readers' theater productions, but seven roles read by four actors is a challenge made more difficult by several scenes of shouting and sobbing. You may need to keep that genealogical chart handy to track who's who.

While Act One takes place before the ball, Act Two immediately follows it. What happens in between could be retitled "The Debutante Brawl." To follow it, you might need a score card.

In this play, the plots and subplots don't conclude, they're simply abandoned. Persistence may be the only value we're left with, but trudging through mud for it's own sake is not satisfying unless we reach firm ground. And while the dark humor in the play offers laughs, they're laughs we ultimately don't feel good about.

Familiar cast members Stefanie Anderson, Shari Lynn, Richard Pellett and Jo Pruden again do yeoman work.