“The Deer and the Antelope Play” is basically “Steel Magnolias” – with a little arson, emotional disturbance and attempted suicide thrown in.
Theatre 13 director Michael French infuses this unrelentingly heartfelt tale about three generations of small-town Texas women with substantive (if confounding) little stage tricks.
When the audience enters the loft theater at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, two actors are frozen at the breakfast table, like so many paintings lining the museum’s walls. In a brief prologue, the youngest moves backward into place, as if in rewind mode. Each scene transition, shifting to and from this girl’s therapy sessions, is punctuated by a sullen bit of classical music that makes things even more somber and dreamlike.
I don’t have a clue what any of those things mean, but they add further weight to this weepy family tale that, of course, inevitably turns life-affirming.
“Deer,” written by Mark Dunn, made its world premiere at Denver’s Avenue Theater in 1996 with a powerhouse cast including Patty Mintz Figel and Denise Perry. It begins with harried Carol begrudgingly moving in with widowed mother Eleanor after daughter Mindy has torched their home. Because Mindy also happens to have mowed down a neighbor boy in a car two years before, she’s a bit catatonically depressed – until Eleanor takes in a brash border named Kenetta.
Carol (the excellent, underutilized Joan Bruemmer) is the hard-luck nurse and a single mom. Eleanor (Miriam Paisner) is the whimsical 63-year-old grandma who’s decided to head off to Denton in search of the engagement ring she lost four decades before from the lover she should have wed. And Mindy (Emily K. Harrison)? Well, she’s … seriously messed.
The trio is mired in a generational curse of making bad decisions until oddball ex- hooker Kenetta (Kjersti Ingela Webb) enters the family dynamic and pals Mindy out of her funk. She’s a stock character, the eccentric who teaches others to “drink from the well of life in big gulps,” so the weight of the play’s success lies in how convincingly Webb rallies not only Mindy but the audience itself.
Despite gaping holes in the narrative, a propensity for giving up its secrets too easily, inequities in character distribution and tangents that rob the play of a satisfying climax, “Deer” is a worthy play if only for being the rare script to spotlight four strong and distinct female characters. The best part of the play is that these women are not antagonistic head-butters. Their relationships are strained by circumstance but rooted in love. But the acting could use more abandon and less reverence.
Harrison is responsible for a soundtrack that includes tunes by Neko Case and Patty Griffin, adding to the Lilith Fair feel of things. There’s also an intriguing, though oddly uncredited set design. French has cleared out three- quarters of this normally round playing space. Emily’s therapy sessions take place before us in the usual stage area, creating an intentional immediacy and intimacy. But Eleanor’s house, where the bulk of the story plays out, spans the back sections where bleachers once stood – creating an intentional distance. It’s a neat effect, though I’m no more sure what we are to make of that than that rewind prologue.
The playwright Dunn is a Tennessean, but he’s bowed several of his 25 plays at Denver theaters, including the late Changing Scene. But he’s best known for having filed a $200 million lawsuit against Paramount, claiming Jim Carrey’s “The Truman Show” ripped off his play “Frank’s Life” (and he won).
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“The Deer and the Antelope Play” | ** 1/2 RATING
DRAMA | Theatre 13 | Written by Mark Dunn | Directed by Michael French | Starring Miriam Paisner, Emily Harrison, Joan Bruemmer and Kjersti Ingela Webb | THROUGH MARCH 3 | 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays | 2 hours, 5 minutes | $11-$15 | 303-443-2122 or bmoca.org
