Review
MIGHT AS WELL LIVE:
The Words of Dorothy Parker
The Art Ranch
Starring Laura Parken
Adapted by Ken Cameron and Parken
Directed by Gail Hanrahan
Runs until November 8
Beat Niq Jazz & Social Club
Dorothy Parker was a major wit but a minor writer.
Her stories and poems tend to be limited in scope, employing similar characters and settings and repeating the same themes. As The Art Ranch’s new one-woman show, Might As Well Live, cleverly reveals, Parker’s short fiction can be seamlessly woven into one long story with little more than a few name changes and the substitution of one kind of liquor for another.
Actor Laura Parken and playwright Ken Cameron have turned one of Parker’s best and longest stories, "Big Blonde," into the tale of small, dark Dorothy herself, expanding the work into an 80-minute performance by adding the shrewd comic scenarios of such short pieces as "A Telephone Call," "You Were Perfectly Fine," "The Last Tea" and "Here We Are." The result is a picture of a smart, wisecracking young woman disappointed in love, driven to drink and pushed to the brink of suicide – certainly the Parker of the 1920s, or at least the image she projected in her work.
Telling this funny-sad story, Parken doesn’t so much play Parker as embody her spirit of melancholy panache. Decked out as a black-clad flapper with a string of pearls, and scooping her gin, Prohibition style, from a bathtub, she moves languidly about the small stage of the Beat Niq club like a good-time girl making the rounds at yet another party.
And, like anyone arriving sober at a bash, it takes her a while to get into the mood. The early part of the show is slow going and the celebrated witticisms are either uttered too deliberately, without the requisite spontaneity, or tossed off without context like a handful of gems summarily thrown away.
It isn’t until Parken begins to perform some longer passages that the play really takes off. She makes a good comic turn out of "The Waltz," Parker’s hilarious interior monologue about dancing interminably with a graceless oaf, and does a deft depiction of the slow slide into drunken silliness in the speakeasy monologue "Just a Little One."
Yet, somehow, the show’s conclusion misses the quiet, unsentimental pathos at the heart of "Big Blonde" – perhaps because Cameron and Parken have omitted the final, prosaic details of the title character’s recovery from her suicide attempt.
Director Gail Hanrahan fares better here (see the Truth Factory review), even opening up the limited playing space by having Parken’s accompanist, sax player George Langdon, wander through the club providing the live equivalent of surround sound. But Langdon’s jazzy doodlings don’t always enhance the text and, on opening night, his timing with Parken was off.
If you don’t know anything about Dorothy Parker, you won’t find the biographical details here, but by using her words exclusively, Might As Well Live skilfully captures the essence of her personality and her writing. |
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