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November 16, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Dead Guy from Wiess Tabletop gives lively set, somewhat unhealthy cast

Dead Guy from Wiess Tabletop gives lively set, somewhat unhealthy cast

By Matthew McKee | Thresher Editorial Staff

Dead theater can come to life with just a little morbid humor. Scripts like The Dead Guy hit a golden form of comedy when a character is scheduled to die at the end of a play, and the audience laughs at him constantly.

Wiess Tabletop Theater’s performance of The Dead Guy has plenty of morbid jokes to throw around. The comedy will have the audience in stitches. And while the acting in this company lacks a pulse in too many places, a lively technical crew gives this production a great shine.

Deadbeat Eldon Phelps (Wiess College senior Darren DeFreeuw) and television producer Gina Yaweth (Baker College sophomore Linda Permenter) open The Dead Guy in a restaurant, talking about Gina’s new idea for a reality show. She proposes that Eldon, who seems to live every day like April 20, be the star of “The Dead Guy.” He will receive $1 million to live as he pleases for a week, but after seven days, he has to die in a way the audience chooses. After this exposition, the premise is set, Eldon signs the fatal contract, and the camera starts rolling. Unfortunately for him, the clock also starts ticking.

Directors Alex Mainor and Adam Ellsworth, both Wiess juniors, chose to literally have a camera rolling on stage, with two screens displaying live feeds on either side of the audience. The studio audience atmosphere captures the spectator feeling of reality shows, and fake commercials projected on a screen heighten that effect. This is a complicated electrical set-up that goes a long way to take the audience somewhere besides the Wiess Commons. It works well and steps out of the mold of the typical audience-stage separation.

Unfortunately, many acting misfires hinder the production. Permenter and DeFreeuw, the stars of the show, start off awkwardly. Maybe Rice theater has trouble with two-person meal scenes this semester, but the amateur timing and interaction happens around the staged tables all too often.

DeFreeuw, in this scene and throughout the play, is as compelling as an autopsy report. He exhibits no dramatic range. This could be a constructed way to show Eldon’s loser personality, but as the character changes from drunken profligate to struggling philanthropist to troubled lover, DeFreeuw never changes his flat vocal delivery and stiff body language. Because Eldon’s shift is really quite dramatic, DeFreeuw is a major disappointment. He only changes tone in a hilarious scene when he is raging drunk with two hookers in Disneyland. If DeFreeuw had just let go of his inhibitions more often, his role would have come off much better.

Permenter’s performance, luckily, goes much differently. Gina is the play’s heart. She grows attached to Eldon and struggles with the problem of killing him, illustrating a key theme of The Dead Guy. In her is the age-old conflict of duty and desire — here, profit and humanity. Permenter misses a few chances to tackle this conflict more, particularly in the scenes with Eldon. Permenter tends to be melodramatic as the overbearing producer here, especially when scolding Eldon.

However, when Permenter catches her stride, she is captivating. A few precious night-time scenes show Gina at her weakest and most revealing, and when Permenter gets into those moods, she holds the audience in the palm of her hand. Those scenes have a magic found in few college theater productions.

The dramatic conflict in Gina laced with morbid jokes about Eldon’s death comes to a climactic finale that makes a rather listless hero and mediocre cast of extras worthwhile. Wiess Tabletop might have spared a few moments from the cords to improve their cast, yet The Dead Guy is one this semester’s best spoken performances.

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