A review of the play “MilkMilkLemonade”

by Warren Day

When you consider all the live theater that’s available from Miami to Palm Beach, you realize how lucky we are that there are so many opportunities to see stage productions that are not the tried, true and very tired that make up the community offerings in most of America, and which never threaten anyone’s understanding of theater or of life.

So you want to applaud Thinking Cap Productions and Empire Stage when they attempt a different and difficult play never performed in Florida before, yet you still have to review the results and not the intentions.

Part of the humor and meaning of “MilkMilkLemonade” is conveyed in its counter casting where two grown men play 5th graders, a woman is a chicken named Linda, a man plays the grandmother, and the Lady in a Leotard, a kind of one woman Greek Chorus, is a spider at one point and a character’s evil twin living inside his thigh at another.

The playwright and director are using such casting to have us take a fresh look at the stifling categories we cast everyone into, particularly the two ten year-olds at the heart of this story.

Emory is what people often call a “sensitive child,” which simply means he doesn’t fit into the stereotype of what boys are suppose to be. He likes to do “girly things,” play with dolls, doesn’t care for sports, dying to perform on the stage, and probably is gay.  The classmate from the farm next door appears to be the opposite, the kind of all-out boy parents want their sons to play with, but his “fag-bashing” probably hides his own homosexuality.

The key to understanding the playwright Joshua Conkel is to realize you’re seeing these characters and how they interact with each other through the imaginative eyes of that “sensitive child,” a perspective the director Nicole Stodard could have made more creative use of in the set and costumes.

“MilkMilkLemonade” belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, that movement that originally grew out of the disillusionments of World War II, but had its roots in the theatricality of commedia dell’arte and the off-the-wall humor of such vaudeville comedians as the Marx Brothers. To these playwrights realism on the stage was often a barrier to them dealing with the reality around them. They preferred to be like a surrealist artist who paints melting watches to say something about memory.

Because such shows deal with the discrepancies between what we’ve been told life is and what it actually is, most absurdist plays are comedies, but in order for it to work, that zaniness requires razor-sharp timing and the whimsy needs a feather-light touch. They get neither in this heavy-handed production.

Edmund Kean. a famous actor of the early 19th century, said on his deathbed, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”  It can also be hard to watch a comedy that isn’t working.

“MilkMilkLeonade” runs until June 27, Thursday through Saturdays at 8 pm. and Sundays at 5. Tickets are $25 and may be obtained by calling (954) 678-1496.  The Empire Theater is located off  Sunrise Blvd. at 1140 N. Flagler Dr., Fort Lauderdale.