Theater
Jeremy Childs is a talented man of the theater: he acts, he directs and he’s written a few interesting plays that have been produced locally and feature outré characters and a sardonic point of view. Clearly, Childs is interested in the otherworldly—previous titles like Zombies Can’t Climb and Vampire Monologues tell us so—and it’s a good lens through which to glimpse American culture and media, in particular its tackiness and the way it foists the oddball upon us.
With his latest work, Childs must’ve turned right at Albuquerque when he meant to turn left. Grimm Shorts is a peculiar, annoying, disjointed charade that leads the viewer one way, alters course spasmodically, then meanders on into oblivion.
Though the 80-minute play is purportedly a comedy, laughs are few and far between; mostly, theatergoers will be aghast at what’s been perpetrated. The biggest shame is that two talented actors expend their time trying to infuse sense and humor into a script that has very little of either.
In her Nashville debut, Karen Garcia is an exciting stage presence. She’s got a fresh look and it’s intriguing to wonder what she’s capable of doing in a decent role with some smart direction. She gets neither here, though things actually start out with promise.
The faux set-up is a self-help seminar. Audience members are issued name tags as they enter the theater, and it’s logical to assume that perhaps this will be one of those interactive shows, with spontaneous responses from the gallery and a clever conceptual framework that will tie the broader, tongue-in-cheek theme together—in this case, “The Power Within.” But after a brief snippet near the beginning, the audience interaction stops.
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Garcia sets the pace as a modern-day, easy-talking guru of positive thinking. Then her (un)able assistants, played by Josh Childs and Don Griffiths, hijack her gig, turning the “seminar” into a launch-point for the playing out of various, untoward fairy-tale scenarios.
Any coherent attempt to lampoon the cartoonishness of bogus self-help seminars is swept away by a series of rambling, radically unfunny retellings of “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella” and other fables, their bumbling execution designed presumably to shine some light on specific neuroses (finding the inner child, for example), or to probe human relationship issues, or simply to be comical.
There’s a rap number, deftly executed but tiresome; a lot of overdone sniping at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (ho-hum); a folk sing-along; vague banter about Jung, the ego and sex; pointless references to the aforementioned Zombies and Bongo Java coffee; and an interminably lame “rewind” sequence (the scene played over and over), which is reminiscent of bad improv.
Besides stranding Garcia with a blurry persona, Childs the author (and director) also banishes brother Josh to a castaway island of performance that includes shameless mugging and predictable double-takes, occasionally seeming like he’s ad-libbing the text. Josh sings and plays his guitar with charm here, and in previous stage roles he’s been interesting to watch. But his abilities are sadly wasted—instead of having a well-crafted role in which he might shine, he’s forced to bear the burden of trying to spin comic gold out of puerile straw. He is not successful, and it gets worse watching him try.
The third player, Griffiths, is simply not an actor, despite his success recently as the director of Steve Martin’s The Underpants for Actors Bridge Ensemble. If it’s any consolation to the playwright, it’s doubtful Griffiths would do any better with King Lear than he does with Grimm Shorts—though it’s possible he’d get more laughs. Griffiths is self-conscious, looks wholly undirected and manages a characterization that is as misshapen as the brain fart that expelled this self-indulgent, humorless tripe of a play.
Oddly enough, Grimm Shorts isn’t really boring—it’s just agonizing. Maybe it’ll find itself an audience of masochists.
It has two more weekends to do so.