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Review: St. Matilda's Malady at FronteraFest Short Fringe: Best Of Fest [Theater]
There's a running joke among some members of the Austin theater community that Austinist hates fun, given reviews that haven't always shined favorably on shows that aim for the lowbrow audience. We've dismissed these criticisms with a dreary no one understands us, and gone on to busy ourselves with collecting driftwood and pondering the inherent futility of existence.
A show like St. Matilda's Malady, which anchors the "Bill A" of the FronteraFest Best of Fest performances at Hyde Park Theater, however, offers us some reprieve: The play is a boatload of fun, and we loved it. There are a few things going on in the piece, in fact, that can be instructive to Austin theatermakers seeking to succeed with a piece that sets its sight on creating a fun evening's entertainment, rather than trying to out-bummer Sartre.
Overheard audience testimony is generally unreliable in a review, but one comment of note, following the series of five performances—four of which were monologues, and the last of which was the pirate/brothel ensemble-based St. Matilda—was this: "It's funny, but my favorite show of the night was the low-brow one." And, while the setting of St. Matilda's Malady isn't a hospital, and its themes don't include the depression that accompanies motherhood, and it fails to document even one crumbling marriage, the piece is anything but lowbrow. There's a tendency, however, to confuse "engaging" with "lowbrow", and "boring" with "culture". Ergo, a piece like St. Matilda's Malady, which succeeds at engaging an audience throughout gets painted with the "lowbrow" brush, because the audience actually saw something that didn't feel like they were taking medicine. And that confusion runs both ways—shows that aim to be lowbrow often expect that that trait alone will make the piece engaging.
Meanwhile, St. Matilda's Malady, the ostensibly lowbrow play, is written entirely in trochaic verse. Sure, it's a play about pirates and prostitutes, but it's also about three kinds of love (romantic, friendly, and familial), acceptance, and the dangers of expectations. It may have laugh-lines, but those laugh-lines are conveyed in a meter that hasn't been in vogue since Longfellow. In short, it's a smart play about pirates and prostitutes.
The basic premise is that Molly Forge (Chaille Stidham), the most popular prostitute at Connie's Brothel, has come down with a sexually-acquired disease ("a sad") called "St. Matilda's Malady". The chain of events that this inspires sends a pirate queen, a dashing captain, a juggling prostitute, an ornery madame, and a charming naive named Sampson all crashing through the doors of the brothel, as the sad spreads and the characters' complicated relationships reveal themselves. The plot's surprisingly complex, for a 25-minute piece, but it's not really the point: The point is the interaction between the wordplay and the cast.
The highlight of the show is Talleri McRae as Tammy, the least popular prostitute at the brothel, who enjoys the most stage time and runs around like a screwball comedienne, hiding characters and taking on assumed identities. McRae takes a thankless role (her character's primary distinction is how unappealing men find her) and sets a tone that makes St. Matilda irrepressibly fun, all high energy and grounded goofiness that only makes the sincere emotional connections that the characters seek all the more charming.
And this is something else that could prove educational to theatermakers who've confused making art with staidness: It's easier to connect with characters we like. It's impossible to come to a nuanced understanding of what drives Jenn Hartmann's Dirty Vicky the Pirate Queen, but since we're seeing something compelling every time she's on stage, we want her to succeed. While no one would confuse St. Matilda's Malady with a serious, heavy piece of theater, it accomplishes something that a lot of the performances that aim to be exactly that fail to do: It makes us care, even briefly, about what's happening on stage.
We love fun here at Austinist. (You should see our toy collection.) We're just not generally fond of seeing "fun" used as a synonym for "lazy". And we're lucky to have shows like St. Matilda's Malady to remind us that there's a difference.
Jenn Hartmann as Dirty Vickie and Jennymarie Jemison as Connie the Madam. Photo by Caroline Poe.
