By Warren Day
Whether it’s on Broadway or at a local community theater, putting on a successful play is a crapshoot. In Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy “As Bees in Honey Drown,” the Rising Action Theater in Fort Lauderdale has produced one of their best productions and given us one of the best reasons to see current live theater in south Florida. For that to happen, many different variables have to come together in just the right way.
First of all is the play itself. You want it to be a really good play, but not one that has been widely available to local theater- goers before or made into a film that can be easily seen on cable or DVD. The Obie winning “As Bees in Honey Drown” certainly fits the bill, providing a sparkling evening of laughs, wise observations, and fascinating characters, a frothy mixture about the dangers of frothy mixtures. It is that rare play where the second act is stronger than the first.
Secondly, you want the production to enhance the script, not encumber it. The director Avi Hoffman has an impressive list of credits, giving the play a professional pace and polish, and makes the best utilization of the theater’s space at Sunshine Cathedral that I’ve seen. The set is also imaginative, with a clever use of ever-changing panels that resemble a honeycomb.
Finally, the overall acting is quite good. Four of the six actors play various denizens of Manhattan, and seldom has a local ensemble added so much to the final result. The most effective acting from the beginning to the end belongs to Andrew Wind who plays the young naïve gay writer with a well-received first novel, but who hasn’t set the world on fire, something he desperately wants to do. It’s what he does in small moments that make his acting so memorable, such as the scene where he’s trying on his first expensive suit at Saks. When he stares out into the audience, but is supposed to be gazing into a mirror, you genuinely believe he’s seeing his reflective image.
The central character around which the whole story revolves is a daunting figure with the daunting name of Alexa Vere de Vere, a life-force of a woman who’s one part Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one part Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret,” and a big hunk of Rosalind Russell in “Auntie Mame.” She’s a glittering con-artist who has the uncanny ability to tell you the very things about yourself that you so desperately want to believe. She perfectly understands that so many of us have become fame whores, either in seeking it for ourselves or by being fascinated by those who have it.
Some of the wittiest lines in the play belong to Alexa: “Art is eternal, but eternal isn’t as long as it used to be.” “In England everyone is gay, so when you say ‘Queen’ you have to specify.” And what is almost the mantra of the play: “You’re not the person you were born. Who wonderful is? You’re the person you were meant to be.”
This Queen Bee is played by Actor’s Equity member Amy McKenna, who often approaches this larger-than-life role with an over-the-top consonance that lacks the nuance and variety to carry the evening. We reviewers usually see a play in its first or second public performance, so the highly-experienced Ms. McKenna will probably settle into the proper zone for Alexa by the time you see it.
It’s part of the richness of Mr. Beane’s delightful comedy that he takes a somewhat familiar character, the Auntie- Mame type, and shows how destructive such divas can be. From afar, they can be quite entertaining, just the answer to a bland life. But up close they can mess you up in ways that last a long time.
And the gullible gay writer is ripe for such manipulation, because he buys into our celebrity-mad culture, and nothing is as vain as the love of fame.
It used to be that fame was the indirect result of doing something exceptionally well. But now, it’s often the means and the end, becoming so fashionable that there are those who eagerly buy it even when it’s a rip-off of the real thing, thus confusing being widely-known with being wildly-successful. Kim Kardasian is one. Meryl Streep is the other.
And in this play, the playwright suggests that when fame becomes the wherewithal of our existence (or culture), we can be destroyed by the very thing we have made… or to put it another way, as bees in honey drown.
Plays through October 9, Fri. and Sat. at
8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35
at www.risingactiontheatre.tix.com
or call 1-800-595-4849. Rising Action
Theatre is located at Sunshine
Cathedral, 1840 SW 9th Ave, Fort
Lauderdale 33313.
Send any comments or questions you have to AgendaReviews@aol.com.
