Review: Early Girl at Salvage Vanguard [Theater]
Through August 22nd
Salvage Vanguard Theatre (2803 Manor Road)
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 5:30pm
[info]
Attention to detail in Paladin Theatre Company's production is, on the part of the director, piss-poor. Anachronism frolics across the production, and stage directions and character development built into the script are commonly ignored. In a play full of references to cutting-edge technology (digital watches!) and newspaper-worthy figures of the early 80's, a character would not receive Stephen King's 2006 novel Bag of Bones as a Book of the Month club selection. If a mug is still featured on a kitchen shelf (instead of the hooks mentioned in the script) after a character "breaks" it, the world is what gets fractured. If a girl is wearing a diamond necklace (that defies the description in the piece), another character's reminder that she shouldn't forget it makes little sense. A living area looks like it belongs to a frat makes claims that the bordello is "the best house" risible. A prostitute's cheek gets slapped less often than this world's credibility.
What's worse is that the actresses are clearly uncomfortable with laughable staging and inattentive direction. It's grimly appropriate, given the story, that these characters should feel lost and conflicted in the hands of their caretaker. That rarely-definable fault line between acting and direction is a chasm here, and they can hardly be held accountable. Take the case of the central character, Lana. So much of the world is contingent upon the madam, a character written to be weathered, proud, delicately manipulative, and alternately icy and reluctantly warm. Wendy Zavaleta's matriarch comes off as a June Cleaver-cum-whore rather than a hardened maven, and because the aforementioned traits remain unrepresented in her performance, the play lacks the sense of danger and risk crucial to its watchability, cohesion, and the justification of its content. The production's ludicrously advertised nudity (spoiler: breasts covered by hair hardly count) is rendered completely unnecessary and off-putting. Certain conversations involving allegations of lesbianism, and conniving attempts to keep a prostitution prodigy in the house, are flat and confusing. In Zavaleta's defense, she plays the mom so well as to beg the question as to whose shoulders the fault falls upon. In fact, most of the women in the show play their misinformed characters with such conviction and varying but obvious shades of talent as to spur suspicions of a roving and unfocused directorial eye. It is unfair and wasteful to leave an actress, whose job it is to be immersed and present, to function without guidance and information as to how their interactions affect as a whole.
In fact, the direction is so incompetent as to hinder further analysis of the acting. Clearly they all have certain strengths, but the possibility of untapped and ignored potential etches a huge question mark across the show. Karen Alvarado, Keylee Paige Koop, and Lindsley Howard certainly earn their positions as central characters, and it is aggravating to think how much better their already-notable performances would've been with directorial nurturing.
All together, it's an experiment in underutilized potential which, given the fact that the show is about prostitutes yearning for a way out, is at least strikingly appropriate.
