Review

Company meets play's challenge

Aunt Dan and Lemon at Gorilla Theatre, 4419 N Hubert Ave., Tampa, through May 16. 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. $25 general, $20 students and seniors. (813) 879-2914 or gorillatheatre.com.

TAMPA - Wallace Shawn's play Aunt Dan and Lemon ends with a long, dispassionate monologue that praises the Nazis. Virtually all cultures and governments, including ours, have practiced genocide, the monologue says, and at least the Nazis weren't hypocrites about it. Besides, you have to admire the Nazis' efficiency.

It's a tough speech to sit through. You end up being fascinated and repulsed by the arguments, delivered by an attractive but frail young woman. You leave the theater feeling drained, dazed and devastated.

Dog and Pony Productions deserves kudos for staging such an uncompromising play at the Gorilla Theatre. But even more substantial kudos are due the company because it has realized Shawn's difficult play so forcefully.

As the play opens, with house lights still bright, we meet Lemon (Barbara Eaker), a chronically ill and isolated young woman. She welcomes us, congratulates us for spending the evening at the theater, and as the lights dim, she segues into her autobiography.

Raised in England by a workaholic father (Jim Wicker) and a free-thinking mother (Linda Slade), Lemon always felt closest to her parents' best friend, "Aunt" Dan (Karla Hartley, who also designed the effective set). Dan is an Oxford professor who's obsessed with Henry Kissinger (the U.S. secretary of state as the play unfolds). She'll brook no criticism of him and even ends her close friendship with Lemon's mother because they disagree about Kissinger's policies.

While recounting her relationship with Aunt Dan, Lemon introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, most notably an avaricious semiprostitute named Mindy (Jacqueline Raposo).

The cast is as talented and focused as any you'll see in a local production. Hartley, Eaker, Wicker and Raposo could be called standouts, but the entire cast does able work.

Director C. David Frankel holds the purposefully disjointed script together with stylistic tautness, and he doesn't pander to the audience by restraining ideas or actions. There's a fairly realistic simulated sex scene and a pretty graphic murder.

If you wanted to quibble with Frankel's artistic choices, you could say that playwright Shawn must have meant for Aunt Dan's obsession with Kissinger to have darkly comic underpinnings. She's a grown woman, an academic and a lesbian, but she worships Kissinger as a schoolgirl worships a pop star. Frankel chooses not to plumb the irony.

More substantially, though, using actors in multiple roles (a common choice for this play, including the original 1985 production) is often confusing.

The cliche that applies most aptly is that Aunt Dan and Lemon isn't for all tastes (which is true of anything). Specifically, it's harrowing, challenging and deliberately offensive, meant for people who want theater to engage them, not divert them.

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