There is something irreconcilable about a satire of reality TV that requires its audience to suspend its sense of reality.
Curious’ shaky and simplistic world premiere of Eric Coble’s “The Dead Guy,” while amusing and a triumph of multimedia stagecraft, neither begins nor ends with a shred of plausibility, which renders specious much of the great work that takes place in-between.
First, the problematic beginning. Eldon (Todd Webster) is an average guy who has been researched and targeted by ruthlessly ambitious reality-TV producer Gina (Elizabeth Rainer). She flirts with him in a bar and within minutes has him signing his life away. Eldon will get $1 million and a week to spend it. The catch? On the seventh day, viewers will choose the method by which he will be die. If they like him, they’ll vote for him to go quietly in his sleep. If they don’t, Eldon just might get chainsawed in two.
This critical opening scene is just impossible to buy. Eldon is an oblivious fool but he’s fun-loving and remarkably successful with the ladies. He’s the furthest thing from a man so deeply gripped by an existential crisis that he would consider this offer. Yet he accepts when Gina convinces him his death will spark moral outrage and bring civility back to the airwaves. Yeah, right. She’s already angling for season two.
This is all familiar terrain – “The Truman Show,” “To Die For” and most blatantly, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Running Man.” The only particularly revelatory thing about “The Dead Guy” is the notion of honestly exploring the mindset of a man who would give up his life for a week of celebrity and riches. If only Coble had allowed us to discover Eldon, his past and his reasons for saying yes more slowly, his premise might have a much higher survival probability.
Coble shouldn’t waste one second showing us Eldon’s acquiescence because if you see it and don’t buy it, game over. This problem could be easily fixed if the play simply started with the second scene – Gina emerging on air amid the glitz, lights and noise of her show, introducing to us in her faux British accent (a blatant rip-off of “Joe Schmo”) to the man who has agreed to a nationally televised death. We’re more likely to accept the premise here because it’s already done. We have entered a mystery and we have time to decide whether we really buy it.
Eldon grows up some as his dying day approaches, but Coble seems much more interested in at least superficially exploring the crisis of conscience Gina undergoes as the architect of all this madness. Gina morphs from predictably shallow to, if not exactly complicated, at least conflicted.
Which leads us to that messy, messy ending. The cast tinkered with four possible endings, which shows just how unsure even the playwright is about what he is ultimately trying to say here. The ending that made it to the stage is ludicrous and full of holes.
“Running Man” was set in a futuristic capital-punishment, audience-participation game show that no one survives. But while televised murder was acceptable and even entertaining in that world, Coble is attempting to satirize our real pop-culture society today, so it must be grounded in our world. Without giving anything away, there is no contract Eldon could sign that would release Gina, her TV show or her network from all criminal and legal responsibility resulting from his death.
All this hastiness and indecision shows up in some surprisingly unsure acting, with the exception of Dee Covington and Ed Cord in multiple support roles. But director Chip Walton has so completely abandoned his two likable leads, they may have to issue an Amber Alert. Webster’s joyful, guileless Eldon seems the antithesis of a man in his situation. And, for some reason, Walton has directed Rainer to employ distracting, hyper-affected mannerisms, which makes any ultimate consideration of her conscience seem all the more contrived.
Though “The Dead Guy” needed one more thorough round of development before being performed, it is daringly staged and thrilling to watch. Most of the action is captured by cameraman Bryon Matsuno and projected onto six onstage TV screens that offer an additional yet simultaneous perspective. Even though the audience is feet away from live actors on the stage, I noticed nearly every eye in the house trained instead on the TV screens. Perhaps this reflects the power of amplification, but more likely is a commentary that TV is such an ingrained habit for most Americans, we will look past live actors and gravitate toward the comfort and familiarity of television, even subconsciously.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
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** 1/2|”The Dead Guy”
REALITY-TV SATIRE|Presented by Curious Theatre Company|Written by Eric Coble|Directed by Chip Walton|Starring Elizabeth Rainer and Todd Webster|At the Acoma Center, 1080 Acoma St.|THROUGH OCT. 15|8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays|2 hours, 5 minutes|$20-$26 ($13 THURSDAYS)|303-623-0524
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-John Moore
