Friday, June 9, 2006

 Theater: Horror and humanity deep in 'Mysterious Skin'

 Review: Rude Guerrilla's Southern California premiere is an unblinking look at the effects of child molestation.

 By ERIC MARCHESE

 Special to the Register

      Can repressed memories from childhood lead a person's life into dysfunction? Can enhanced childhood memories caused by abnormal adult behavior do the same?

      Those were the questions posed by Scott Heim in his 1995 novel "Mysterious Skin," which made its way onto the stage in 2003 through Prince Gomolvilas' adaptation, and onscreen a year later via director Gregg Araki's film. Heim examined two 18-year-olds from the small Kansas town of Hutchinson (Heim's own hometown) whose lives took radically different directions springing from a common experience they had as 8-year-olds on a Little League team.

      In the play's Southern California premiere and only its second U.S.  staging (the world premiere was in San Francisco), director Dave Barton infuses an already honest narrative with the raw elements of nudity, brutal sex and the intense torment of dredging up childhood memories. The text includes moments of wry humor, yet in the end, "Skin" is a  devastating look at the terrible toll of child molestation on its victims.

      The play's approach to its sensational subject matter is low-key rather than melodramatic. Its aim is to trace the paths of the victims from childhood through early adulthood rather than to assign blame for the way their lives and personalities have evolved. Like a sociology text, "Skin" shows how children adapt to their surroundings, defining the world based on whatever information is at hand--and though its methods are harsh, the play elicits not judgment, but empathy.

      Gomolvilas captures our interest by stoking our curiosity about the teens, Brian Lackey (Tim Zimmer) and Neil McCormick (Keith Bennett). The play begins with the two separate stories – Brian's and Neil's – of what happened to them when they were 8, then leads to the point where the  perceptions of each young man fuse into the same reality.

      The intensely introverted Brian suffers nightmares while clinging to the memories of two blackouts that occurred at ages 8 and 10. Having heard that victims of alien abductions often have similar blocks of missing time, and obsessed with UFOs, he has crafted an elaborate rationale for his lost time: He was abducted, and probed, by aliens. That belief leads him to a chaste, often humorous friendship with Avalyn (Kerry Perdue), a spacey 32-year-old living 80 miles from Brian who's convinced she has, on many occasions, been taken aboard an alien ship and experimented upon.

      Neil's memories of his Little League coach's warped attentions to him, and his reactions to that attention, are markedly different: He felt special for being singled out. He defined the coach's sexual advances as love.

      Prematurely exposed to sex, he begins to hustle for a living – not out of any homosexual inclination, but simply because it's what he knows best. Living in New York satisfies him until an encounter with a sadistic john (Rick Kopps) sends him back to Kansas. Reeling, he winds up on a collision course with Brian, the start of a painful journey of self-understanding for both.

      Whether portraying Brian's tentative reactions or the bold Neil's confident forays into the seamy world of the male hustler, Barton retains a steady, even hand. Zimmer's Brian is a tragicomic figure: Fragile, bespectacled, with a diffident, defeatist air, he lives in denial. Even as we chuckle at his misreadings of his symptoms, we empathize with his      bewilderment. He reacts viscerally to the truth, yet bravely presses Neil to inform him.

      Bennett delivers a forceful turn as Neil: However wayward his impulses, and however perverse a path he has chosen, we have to admire the youth's fierce independence and the fervor with which he clings to those memories of his coach. Bennett walks that delicate line between tough self-reliance and trembling vulnerability. In his own way, Neil's psyche is as brittle as Brian's – a fact well defined by Bennett and Barton.

      Perdue shows the undertones of panic and despair beneath Avalyn's daffy exterior. Michelle Trachtenberg reveals how Wendy's years of loving friendship with Neil--and worrying about his safety and well-being – have rendered her façade hard and her temperament corrosive. In slim roles--some of a mere handful of lines of dialogue-- Barton's supporting cast members (Kopps, Shannon Lee Blas, Ron Javier) adroitly limn the various figures whirling around Brian and Neil.

      Lighting designer Lindsey Suits bathes the flashback scenes, which offer insight into Brian's and Neil's now-troubled lives, in eerie greens and blues. Barton's set features dozens of childhood and infant photos of Bennett and Zimmer, linked with strings. The images lend a special poignancy, while the strings suggest both the often-unseen connection between Neil and Brian and a web that enmeshes each.

NAMBLA Love Letter

 Mysterious Skin at Rude Guerrilla

By REBECCA SCHOENKOPF

Thursday, June 15, 2006 - 3:00 pm

Act One ends with a violent (and all-nude) anal rape at one side of the stage and a young man sobbing during an enthusiastic handjob at the other. One man’s getting his face beat, the other—sorry—his meat. Both are loud and scary—the screams, the cries, the slap-slap of dick—and the audience sat traumatized to the strains of “My Favorite Things” until a giggling stagehand whispered, “It’s intermission.”

 Naturally, Act Two was worse.

 Don’t expect Love Letters from the Rude Guerrilla.

 Mysterious Skin signals early on that our two traumatized young heroes will intertwine themselves (and, oh, how they will) and parallel to get to the story of what really happened when they were 8 and 10 in Kansas. Their town may host the longest grain elevator in the world—the world, not just the country!—but this is the Kansas of In Cold Blood. Auntie Em was probably ax-murdered in her sleep.

 Each has a woman who wants to consume him. Brian (Tim Zimmer) is a nerd loved wholly and threateningly by a frumpy woman of early middle age who hasn’t another friend in the world and thinks they’ve both been abducted by aliens; Brian is scared to death and frozen in time. Neil (Keith Bennett) is a street hustler with a cool, punk fag hag who wants nothing more than to keep him safe and to herself; Neil, who has a daddy fetish and a taste for rough trade, is acting out. The women are wonderful: the frump, Avalyn (Kerry Perdue), gives us a lisping eccentric who dresses in prairie garb like Nicki in Big Love but with a KISS concert T-shirt under her clothes and a libido that’s been smothered till now. She has wonderful lines, all-blabbermouth peppiness and stunted love, the joy of finally finding a fellow UFO traveler. She writes with a pink troll-doll pen.

 The fag hag, Wendy (beautiful Michelle Trachtenberg), is angry at Neil. He’s taken up tricking again. She’s angry, she’s vulnerable, she tells him his cock is not a candy cane, and the audience laughs. Act One, with its wonderful women, is funny.

 Act Two is just fucking gross. Would you be surprised to learn that Brian wasn’t really abducted by aliens at all, but rather by a man with a bushy mustache? Well, Brian is. Our problem is that where Act One showed us peppy scenes in flashback—Neil getting hustling lessons on how to hold his thumbs in his pockets just so, Neil popping his cock out of his pants to show Wendy some nifty bruises, Brian crying in the fetal position in a crawl space (okay, so little of what Brian does is “peppy”)—Act Two is one long confrontation that’s supposed to set us up for a dramatic surprise that has been telegraphed since Scene Two. One long stretch of filler goes a lot like this:

 “Tell me what happened!”

 “Are you sure you really want to know?”

 “Yes, I really want to know!”

 “I don’t think you really want to know.”

 “Yes, tell me!”

 “You’re sure?”

 “I’m sure!”

 “I don’t think you really want to know.”

 Since there can’t really be any surprise with the outcome, the adaptation by Prince Gomolvilas (from the novel by Scott Heim) aims instead for absolutely disgusting. And as Neil narrates for Brian the exact sequence of just what he’s blocked out, he’s like NAMBLA’s Miss April: Neil truly loved his man with the bushy mustache, and Neil truly felt honored. But he sure feels bad that Brian’s so fucked up, and maybe he’s got some damage himself.

 Perhaps Gomolvilas felt that, in this case, he had to tell, not show. But the strings of narrative he puts into Neil’s mouth (among other things) are far more obscene than showing it would actually have been. The sinister and wonderful Rick Kopps, who plays the violent trick, the violent dad and the other violent trick, could easily have come back for a turn as the bushy mustache and, with just a sloppy kiss for the two boys (and then a sloppy kiss between them), could have foretold everything that would come in a far more frightening and saddening way than Neil’s frankly prurient recital—and without having to become NAMBLA Forum to provide its climax. It’s a truism in horror movies that the monster that remains unseen is always scarier than the one that’s charging through the door, but here we must hear every moment of each abuse that’s been perpetrated on the boys, and the ante has already been upped so high—what with the anal rapes and the cock-flopping—that Gomolvilas has to strive mightily to shock us.

 Dear NAMBLA Forum:

 I always wanted a boy’s arm in my ass up to his elbow, but I never thought it would happen to me!