Emcee visits GOLDEN AGE

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 4/14/05 at 4:28pm

I saw this last night, and had a lot of fun. I think it's a neat, clever idea, and has the potential to be a really great piece, though I had a few pretty big problems with it, which I'll get to in a second.

The play is a take-off on the Archie comics. I'm not all that familiar with them, but from what I am familiar with, as well as what I was able to gather from people who are more familiar with them, the characters here are easily the perfect stereotypes, and capture the comic book characters well. Their names are perfect for a comic book setting: Buddy Baxter, Monica Posh, Tapeworm Smith - you laugh right away when you "meet" them, it's inevitable. It tells a modern story, but puts it in a comic book setting, complete with the perfect, quaint small town and crazed criminals. It also has basis, I think, in a real legal issue that did take place about the alledged correlation between comic violence and juvenile delinquency. A similar case actually takes place in the story.

The most obvious problem I found was the discrepancy in when the play is actually supposed to take place. There is one reference to it being in 1922, yet the characters' outfits seem decidedly fifties. But they also have cellphones and other luxuries that are distinctly modern. It's not truly a major problem, but it was a bit annoying to constantly be trying to figure out when the story was taking place.

The other problem is a more wide-spread one, but it's mainly with the flow and coherency of the piece as a whole. At first, it seemed to be aiming for that Avenue Q sort of idea, where real life situations are taken lightly, in a silly context. The characters deal with homosexuality and going to college, and basic adolescent successes and failures in the first of the play's three acts. From here, the problems sort of spiral. A former friend of Buddy's commits suicide, immediately making the issues that Golden Age deals with much more serious and much darker than anything in Avenue Q. The issues continue to become far more serious - Buddy's lover, Nathan, and a cohort of his take on Nietzche's philosophy of the elite controlling the world, and begin to plot this type of takeover, beginning with the kidnapping and planned murder of a child. The characters move to New York City after college, and are confronted with prenatal illness, mysterious deadly diseases and other, quite frankly, horrific things. There are many parts between the tragedies that are truly hilarious, but the shows fails to make the funny parts mesh with the serious parts, even when a joking line is in a scene that happens to be about death. The audience still laughs, but unlike a show such as Q where the real-life situations are successfully made fun of, in Golden Age, there feels like there is too much of a distinct separation between the funny and the serious; they don't fit together.

It may be because some of these issues are, in fact too serious to laugh at. For example, there's a strange disease that ultimately kills two of the characters. After the show, I was discussing it with some classmates, and replaying the one shown death scene in my head. I hope that the writers of this wouldn't be so tasteless as to lighten up AIDS and put it into a comic book situation, but the scene was a little bit too reminiscent of theatrical AIDS-related death scenes, AND it was billed as some mysterious, unknown disease that depletes the body. It was ambiguous enough to have been anything, but I was sort of bothered by the prospect that it may have been a reference to AIDS, especially since several of the characters in the play are homosexual men, as is one of the characters who will die of the disease. If, in fact, that's what it was supposed to be, I think that's very wrong. I know the play isn't overtly making fun of said situation, but AIDS is certainly not something that should be lowered to the level of a comic book-esque story, no matter what serious issues it addresses. I suppose the same could be said for suicide, but this one in particular really bothered me.

Moving on, the play actually gets even weirder. Toward the end, it has a Twilight Zone sort of feel to it, and the characters deal with recurring dreams, premonitions of death, and alternate universes. These are not themes that should go untouched, but by the time the play got to it, on top of everything else that was going on, especially with the troubled dichotomy of drama and humor, there was just entirely too much going on to add something so confusing and abstract as this. I don't want to explain the scenes about these things, because it's kind of a spoiler, though.

I lost my playbill booklet thing, so I don't know who played who and therefore can't speak very specifically about the cast, but they're all very talented actors. There's one definitive lead, as Buddy Baxter who is just excellent and absolutely adorable. He has a lot of monologues in which he speaks to the audience, narrating the story as well as his own thoughts, but he is also the central character in the story. The cast is small, so the rest of it is very much an ensemble. They all play beautifully off one another, as well as in their shining solo moments. I hate commenting on actors by saying "the person who played ___," so I guess rather than do that, I'll just leave it there. They're all highly talented.

There are also some cute theatre references that I enjoyed... I specifically remember ones to Our Town and RENT. A total sidebar to most of this post, but I enjoyed them.


Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has seen this. I'd kind of like to hear some other thoughts.

Updated On: 4/14/05 at 04:28 PM

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 4/14/05 at 4:53pm

It sounds somewhat Durang-ish.

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 4/14/05 at 9:35pm

bump - anyone else see it?

[popcultureboy]

Posted: 4/15/05 at 10:51am

Yes, I saw the invited dress and started a thread imploring people to see it as I loved it so much.

[popcultureboy]

Posted: 4/15/05 at 11:26am

Updated On: 4/15/05 at 11:26 AM

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 4/15/05 at 11:35am

aww. Christopher is just so cute!

[popcultureboy]

Posted: 4/15/05 at 11:48am

Found another one, it's even cuter, if that's possible. Couldn't you just eat him alive?