Betty’s Summer Vacation
By Christopher Durang. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set design by Thomas Lynch. Costumes by Michael Krass. Lighting by Kevin Adams. Sound by Kurt Kellenberger. Original music by Peter Golub. With Jessica Stone, Colleen Quinlan, Nat DeWolf, Andrea Martin, Terrence Riordan, Jeremiah Kissel, John Kuntz, Bonnie Lee Whang, and Jonno Roberts. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through November 25.

" Life has to have some dignity, too, it’s not all disgusting and vicious, " remarks the Pollyanna-in-Pandora’s-Box title character of Betty’s Summer Vacation. She might be speaking for playwright Christopher Durang, who’s as appalled as anyone by what his imagination has spewed onto the stage following a steady diet of tabloid journalism and Court TV. For the sex-and-mayhem-filled Betty’s Summer Vacation is a cartoon as outraged as it is outrageous.

I admit, the cultural forces at which Durang’s play shakes its fist — one clutching, among other things, a severed penis that stretches like silly putty — have been somewhat subdued since September 11, when Gary Condit got pushed to a far corner of the national consciousness. Betty’s Summer Vacation, which earned several Obies when it debuted at New York’s Playwrights Horizons in 1999, hails from, and harks back to, an age of salacious innocence when the Menendez Brothers and Lorena Bobbit, rather than anthrax and smoking Ground Zero, filled the airwaves. Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin, who helmed the award-winning Off Broadway staging and reprises it here, is betting the play holds up. In fact, it seems both merrily horrifying and a little silly. But Martin’s production, buoyed by Andrea Martin’s bravura performance as a comic Life Force who takes everything from beheading to incest in stride, is as airy and over-the-top as some lurid soufflé.

Nice, normal Betty may be " the voice of reason " in the play, but she’s hardly the picture of judgment, having opted for a seaside summer share with a bunch of psychopaths, of whom the only one she knows beforehand is a neurotic chatterbox with childhood-sexual-abuse issues. I mean, if that’s the devil you know, why be surprised that the other roommates do not turn out to be a beachfront Brady Bunch? In any event, Betty and friend Trudy open the door to Thomas Lynch’s pastel-hued seashell-decorated beach bungalow and all hell breaks loose, a lot of it as matter-of-factly hilarious as it is monstrous.

Durang says of his particular slant on the world, " It’s a kind of carton style that grows out of Joe Orton and Monty Python and Dr. Strangelove and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s Candide and theater of the absurd. It’s about exaggeration, and presenting awful things in a cheery style that makes you look at them in a different way. " That about sums up Betty’s Summer Vacation, with Betty as Candide in pedal pushers and Pangloss replaced by a sex-crazed, insanely accepting, self-described combination of Auntie Mame and Zorba the Greek. That would be fun-loving, life-affirming landlady Mrs. Siezmagraff (who is also the traumatized Trudy’s guilt-proof mom), here brought to gargle-voiced, hip-waggling, bulldozing life by Tony winner and SCTV vet Martin.

The lunacy does, of course, have a point, and it’s most forcefully if somewhat stridently made by a trio of Voices — sort of a cross between a laugh track and a Greek Chorus — that emanate from the cottage ceiling. As the play progresses, this crew move from benign chortles and comment to a menacing demand to be entertained by sleaze, sleaze, sleaze! And though Durang’s indictment of enquiring minds’ need to know gets overbearing in the more cumbersome second act, it does lead to a simulated Court TV trial in which Martin’s Mrs. Siezmagraff outdoes even herself, playing three parts at once.

Although I love The Marriage of Bette and Boo, I have never been inclined to jump on the bandwagon tootling Durang as the American Molière. But Betty’s Summer Vacation, albeit too Court TV-specific in the second act for its own shelf life, may be the pinnacle of the audacious lampoonery in which he specializes. And Martin’s production captures its anarchic spirit while being so sharply drawn and precisely executed, it almost seems like live animation. From Colleen Quinlan’s Betty Boop–ish motormouth victim to Nat DeWolf’s babyfaced and blurting killer in pajamas to Terrence Riordan’s idiot sex machine to Jeremiah Kissel’s scabrous, cheerily barking derelict, the performances are spot-on. As eye-of-the-storm Betty, Jessica Stone folds primness and practicality into panic and issues soprano screams that could break glass. As for the Martins, it’s difficult to say which is the more virtuosic, the one who can jump from I Love Lucy to Scream 3 or the one that can jump from Hedda Gabler to Betty’s Summer Vacation.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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