After “The Smell of the Kill” opened on Broadway in 2002, playwright Michele Lowe was stalked down an alley by a man made livid by her unflattering depiction of three lousy husbands. Often the first query she gets from any male journalist is, “So why don’t you like men?”
To the critics and the crazies (hey, isn’t that redundant?), Lowe’s stock response is, “It’s a comedy, hello!” So she said last week while visiting the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Colorado New Play Summit.
In a bit of irony as delicious as the insecticide-flavored bowl of creamy frosted golf balls her protagonist serves as a dinner-party dessert, the Avenue Theater opened Lowe’s cynical comedy on Valentine’s Day.
“The Smell of the Kill” is the very funny though ultimately slight story of three suburban Chicago housewives who want to kill their husbands – and get the chance to do so without even lifting a finger. Maybe not the greatest date-night premise, but I’m just guessing the women in Tuesday’s audience got treated extra-special by their man-toys when they got back home that night.
The Avenue’s sleek new production is directed by the ubiquitous Terry Dodd and sports a powerhouse cast of the ever-more remarkable Emily Paton Davies, the criminally underused Laura Norman and the pistol Megan Van De Hey, a former Coloradan who has come home and taken to Denver stages with gale force. While the trio’s comic rhythm and confidence have not yet congealed quite as nicely as their husbands’ frozen blood, this production surely will soon be clicking on all cyanides … I mean cylinders.
The story revolves around Nicky (Van De Hay), Molly (Norman) and Debra (Davies), three vastly different wives who tolerate each other at monthly dinner parties only because their creepy and abusive husbands are old college pals. In Lowe’s masterstroke, these men are heard carousing like juveniles but never seen as the women dish and dote from the kitchen.
Humiliated hostess Nicky’s husband, Jay, has been indicted for embezzlement. Debra’s Marty is a serial cheater, and Molly’s cooing Danny boy turns out to be an obsessive control-freakazoid. Comparisons to “Desperate Housewives” are unfair, as this play preceded the hit ABC soap, but so easy they fit like a jigsaw puzzle.
What’s fascinating about this play isn’t the men – Lowe has written them so over-the-top that they clearly deserve what’s coming to them. The flash point is the wives and how they react to opportunity after having been abused, ignored and objectified.
Frisky Nicky first casually announces she’ll be killing Jay, through her upstairs baby monitor to the wives back onstage in the kitchen. But fate intervenes, offering the three a lethal crime of opportunity by merely taking a walk for some ice cream. Doe-eyed Molly, whose self-esteem has been shattered by Danny’s emotional smothering, needs little convincing. The key is in getting the judgmental and quietly vicious Debra on board, for joining in on the scheme means our most complex character will first have to acknowledge her perfect home is a shambled house of cards.
The play shifts radically in tone, and not to its benefit. It starts out as a ribald, jokey farce, then shifts to a more literal suburban comedy, then into a stark morality play. That’s too much for an 85-minute, blink-and-it’s-over play because once you leave the exaggerated world of farce behind, the literal drama that ensues strains credulity.
Another structural problem is that Lowe spends too much time establishing justification, which to the audience is pretty clear within the first five minutes. I would have preferred she either stayed entirely within the farce genre and let that play itself out for laughs as an amusing domestic commentary, or rolled up her sleeves and delved head-first into the more consequential psychological terrain regarding these women’s consciences. The play might have more weight and staying power it were more fully fleshed out in that direction, or if even one of the husbands were borderline redeemable. When confronted that the women are no better than the men, all we get is a superficial rimshot rejoinder from Nicky: “I have no problem with that.” We’d care more if she did.
As is, “The Smell of the Kill” is an enjoyable character study and a showcase for three very talented actors.
I only wish the program also credited the great voices of the off-stage husbands, who make misogyny something to snicker at.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
*** | “The Smell of the Kill”
COMEDY|Avenue Theater, 417 E. 17th Ave.|Written by Michele Lowe|Directed by Terry Dodd|Starring Megan Van De Hey, Laura Norman and Emily Paton Davies|THROUGH MARCH 18|7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. March 5 and 12|1 hour, 25 minutes with no intermission|$15-20|303-321-5925
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-John Moore
