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This is one of the many hilarious one-liners that the audience takes home at the end of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston's performance of "Red Herring"--this, and a pleasant what-the-hell-just-happened-on-stage feeling. In fact, so much happens in Michael Hollinger's play that it becomes meaningless for those unable to keep track of the absurd relationships and the whodunit details. There are spies, dead fishermen that are actually alive, guns, love stories, more love stories, more guns, shot-glasses with vodka, secrets of national importance inside a Velveeta cheese pack and much more.
If this sounds overwhelming, wait until the setting on stage starts changing almost every two minutes, and the actress who plays the mother of the engaged girl becomes the owner of a wedding dress shop who sells the girl a wedding dress. Confusing?
Supposedly, an artistic rationale behind the snap-shot chaos of the young playwright's work exists, and the movie-like dynamic of the action makes sense: the play is meant to be a hodge-podge of "film noire" aesthetics. The "film noire" genre, which emerged in the '30s, is characterized by detective, crime, and gangster themes, as well as shadowy black-and-white vision. True to the tradition, "Red Herring" takes up a complicated spy plot. But most importantly, "the enemies" are the commies.
Since the actions and relationships between the characters are meant to build on top of one another, it is futile to try to summarize the rest of the plot, because it reaches an absurd proportion: two detectives to be married, one of them to a second spouse, a newly engaged Jewish Russian spy who is supposed to pretend to be a Quaker in front of his fiancée's Catholic mother and deliver secret blueprints for a fusion bomb, and a dead Russian fisherman who is actually alive and cooperating with the Americans to save his wife from a gulag in Siberia. All this conveniently ends with a triple wedding in the middle of a police arrest. You get the point.
The long-term intellectual effect, however, does not transcend the hour and twenty minute Friday night laughter and the slap-stick one-liners. Unfortunately, I cannot quote any of them with precision because, despite the fact that playwright Michael Hollinger has been quite popular in recent years and staged at the Lewiston Public Theater among many other national theaters, the Bates College Ladd Library does not own any of his plays or books.
What saves the performance is director Courtney O'Connor's choice of a remarkable cast. Among the six-person cast standouts were Richard Snee, who also stars in independent movies, Tufts graduate Allison Clear, who was Lady Macbeth with the Shakespeare Now! Theater Company and Sarah Newhouse, who recently performed as Lady Ann in "Richard III." Five of the actors tackle the difficult task of constantly switching between radically different roles. Whereas such a directing approach hides the risk of creating an aesthetically messy and amateur performance if not well acted out, the cast of "Red Herring" handles the challenge quite professionally and manages to switch accents and personas so aptly that the audience gets the illusion that the cast is much larger. Director O'Connor also deserves thumbs up for managing to keep the pace of the play up in the narrow physical space of the Lyric Stage Company's stage, and to shift settings from Boston to Wisconsin to the South Pacific with the very limited means of a low-budget stage set. The actors' energetic performance and O'Connor's taking the preposterousness of the storyline and building the dynamics of the play precisely on the assumption that piling up overwhelming absurdity is funny, saves the otherwise mediocre plot from dragging. And although the play hardly transcends the limited good-laughs parameters, the quality of the acting makes it enjoyable. "Shazaaam!"
Red Herring is currently playing on the stage of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston from February 18 to March 19, 2005. Price of tickets: $22 per person at Bostix