"Tomorrowland Review"
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 1997 · Page C 3 ©1997 San Francisco Examiner
Relates to writer for "Clarissa Explains It All, Neena Beber.
Satire on puberty never matures into something fulfilling
Robert Hurwitt EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC
ORLANDO is the theme-park capital of Florida and "Orlando" is a novel by Virginia Woolf. Place the two Orlandos like brackets around a children's TV show, and you've got some sense of the oddball originality, curiously skewed ambition and ultimately unrealized potential of Neena Beber's "Tomorrowland," which opened Friday in a Signal Theatre Company production at 450 Geary Studio Theatre.
Offbeat themes, a provocatively surreal imagination and a degree of frustrating opacity were also hallmarks of Beber's last local production, "The Brief but Exemplary Life of the Living Goddess" at the Magic Theatre in 1993. But that play - inspired by the lives of the girls raised as virgin Hindu goddesses in Nepal - was more fascinating than frustrating, overcoming some awkward construction and untidy loose ends to achieve an intriguing resonance.
In "Tomorrowland," Beber returns to the theme of puberty as a liberating loss. Just as the girl who serves as a Hindu goddess is cast out into the streets when she has her first period, the star of the children's show being made in Beber's Orlando (shades of a certain beloved Mouseketeer) is developing herself out of a job. Her pubescent quandary is the central metaphor for that faced by the main character, a grown woman still waiting for her life to begin.
This time, however, Beber has more trouble keeping her story on track, and her metaphors from spinning out of control for what feels like a long 2-1/4 hours.
"Tomorrowland" is the story of Anna (Eowyn Mader), a 30-year-old onetime literary scholar who's come to Orlando to work as the writer for "Emily's Room," a new show angling for syndication. Anna seems to be churning out scripts OK, but her mind is on everything but the show.
She keeps returning to her thesis subject, a study of the feminist ramifications of the use of parentheses in Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." She muses about finding the "real" world in a land of theme parks and TV studios. And she obsesses about composing letters to a potential lover named Michael who has long since passed out of her life.
Meanwhile, her manic producer, Wyatt (Jack Davis), gives her the job of sacking the show's star, Emily (Janna Sobel), because of her inconveniently obvious new breasts, and rewriting the show as "Doug's Room." (The reversal of the male-to-female transformation in "Orlando" is only one among many Woolf-ian references, as Emily loses the room of her own.)
The amorally ambitious director, Carl (Samuel Gates), keeps demanding fresh material. Anna is dogged by a hero-worshipping continuity assistant, Vicki (Carolyn Doyle), a blind believer in greater good through Disney-fication who still dresses for her former role as a theme park Snow White (clever costumes by Max Davidson). And she gets stuck dealing with love-struck teen Emily fan, Rodger (Michael Carroll), and his crafty-dumb mom, Del (Lorraine Olsen).
Presumably, Beber, head writer for Nickelodeon's "Clarissa Explains It All," knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the world of TV production. But, as funny as much of her dialogue is, there's little that's new or particularly insightful in her satire. More problematic is the extent to which the script keeps spinning its wheels.
Anna is obviously undergoing a profound personal crisis, but her long ruminations on Woolf, the significance of parentheses and her emotional rootlessness - though, again, peppered with some sharp comedy - feel increasingly repetitious in the long second act. Beber doles out the story of Michael's Woolf-like fate so slowly that its payoff becomes insignificant.
It's a tough script to bring to life, and the young Signal company (best-known for its popular "Shylock on Valencia Street" last year) isn't quite up to the task. Director Reid Davis, who also designed the set, has staged it in the round, keeping up a smooth flow from scene to scene but without enough attention to sightlines (Emily is hidden from some of the audience behind a TV-style frame).
And, though Davis does a good job of exploiting Beber's comic rhythms, he has more trouble creating the necessary moments of tension. The tenser the action should grow, and the more manic a few scenes are supposed to be, the slacker the pace of this production.
Mader is an engagingly thoughtful and distracted Anna, but she doesn't draw us into her existential quandary enough to make us feel that the character has earned the play's resolution. Doyle, who co-founded Signal with Mader, is delightful as a Pollyanna eerily on the verge of eruption - though, here too, Beber's writing is a bit too repetitious. Jack Davis captures Wyatt's creepiness with a carnivorously ingratiating grin.
Carroll is hilariously nerdy as the hologram-infatuated Rodger. Olsen revels in Del's predatory sexuality. Gates seems mostly to be waiting for his character to be given something to do. But then, the same could be said of too much of a play that is essentially one long parenthetical phase in a life on hold.
Theater Review "Tomorrowland' * PLAYWRIGHT Neena Beber * DIRECTOR Reid Davis
* CAST Eowyn Mader, Jack Davis, Janna Sobel, Carolyn Doyle
* THEATER Signal, 450 Geary Studio, through March 8 (510-273-9277)
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eric@ezz.u-net.comEric Last, 25/5/97