By their very nature, world-premiere plays are often works in progress: It’s not until the play is produced that flaws both major and minor rise to the surface, improving with future iterations. Seldom does a new work land quite as ready for prime time as Gina Montét’s “Overactive Letdown,” currently receiving its exhilarating debut at Theatre Lab at FAU. Under riveting direction from Margaret Ledford, there is nary a word out of place, or a scene that overstays its welcome. It’s award-worthy on its first bow, and it’s one of the season’s must-see productions.
Montét’s play presents what, for most couples, is supposed to be a time of joy and renewal. Christine and Mark (Lindsey Corey and Timothy Mark Davis) are expecting their first child. In the opening scene, Mark is completing the final touchups on a plaster cast of his wife’s pregnant belly some eight months in. They’ve absorbed all the parenting books, and Christine, ever the fastidious mom-to-be, has already divided the baby’s future recordkeeping into a series of binders. In uncertain situations, there is comfort in data. Sure, this change may stress their relationship: With Christine leaving her job to care for the baby full-time, Mark, a professor, has taken on more classes. But they’ll make it work. They’ve got this.
“Overactive Letdown” is about what happens when this road map veers off course. It starts with Christine’s inability to breastfeed her child. The problem isn’t lack of milk—“I’m a human Mount St. Helens,” she tells her lactation consultant—but an issue of technique, or perhaps a kind of incompatibility. “I’m constantly leaking and swollen,” she says, and through Corey’s performance, her agony, frustration and exhaustion are palpable.
With Mark away most of the day, and feeling increasingly anxious about leaving the house, and newborn Jack, for even a split second, Christine wiles away her free hours binging Netflix, finding comfort in the dopamine rush of the brand’s iconic percussive overture. In one subtle beat, Corey gazes at the remote control like an addict eyeing a line of cocaine.
Montét shows us what Christine sees. At first, it’s an exaggerated Victorian bodice-ripper playing out in Christine’s living room, in which a wealthy nobleman (Alex Alvarez) seduces and strong-arms a fair maiden (Maha McCain) into marriage. But soon there is leakage in more ways than one: This parasol-twirling damsel has excreted milk onto the chest of her suitor. Thus initiates Christine’s fraying blur between reality and fiction, and between sanity and madness.
A number of extraordinary sequences follow, as Christine’s Netflix queue mirrors and exacerbates her increasingly irrational fears—of inadequacy, of failure, of losing her child and her marriage, of the end of the world—and of the lure of escaping all of them. Alvarez, relishing the work of embodying one cinematic archetype after another, appears in each, portraying an escapee from a sinking cruise ship, a poetic cowboy, a militant detective and a zombie-apocalypse survivor.
Ledford expertly guides Montét’s tonal shifts from parody to visceral terror, aided by immersive sound design from Matt Corey (when the baby cries, it feels like it’s coming from the audience) and dazzling lighting from Eric Nelson. The result is a purely theatrical experience of the sort that, for their own mental health, you hope the actors do not take home with them.
It’s tough to say this is Corey’s finest hour, given her history of exceptional performances, but it’s a master class in duality; you can feel the groundedness of real life fighting a losing battle with her character’s hallucinations. It’s a draining performance—physically, mentally, emotionally.
Timothy Mark Davis, in another deeply persuasive performance, walks on a razor’s edge for much of the play, delicately accepting his wife’s extended postpartum anxiety and depression, and exhibiting a plenitude of patience until he exhausts its supply. Maha McCain delivers excellent supporting work in three varied roles, including the lactation coach and Christine’s college friend.
As a cautionary tale about the largely unspoken mental health challenges that can accompany one of life’s miracles, “Overactive Letdown” is as thematically vital as it theatrically demanding. Its future is as bright as its subject is dark.
“Overactive Letdown” runs through April 10 at Theatre Lab at FAU, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Tickets cost $32-$40, or $10 for FAU students. Call 561/297-6124 or visit fauevents.com.
To deploy a phrase I kind of hate, it is what it is. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the crowd-pleasing 2004 musical based on the 1988 Hollywood comedy, was never intended to vie for a Pulitzer. It’s never deeper than a hot tub, but when done right, it can be just as bubbly. And that sense of effervescence goes a long way in Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s winning production, which throws everything and the kitchen sink onstage, gliding over the source material’s superficiality with lacquered humor and generous technical pomp.
The plot is familiar enough to devotees of the cult film. Longtime grifter Lawrence Jamison (David Engel, hitting all the suave and debonair notes) has a good thing going: Possessed of a gleaming smile, an array of well-pressed three-piece suits, and a tongue for persuasive fabrications, he has made his fortune bilking naïve heiresses out of their largesse while they holiday on the French Riviera.
One day, he happens to bump into an amateur or, rather, the amateur bumps into him: Andre (John Scherer), a small-time fabulist infringing on Andre’s territory, soon realizes he can learn a thing or two from his more experienced, and far wealthier, competitor. Before long, they’re teaming up on elaborately staged cons and ultimately vying to see which dirty rotten scoundrel can successfully squeeze $50,000 from their latest victim: A charming “soap queen” (Julie Kavanaugh) from Middle America.
Though Engel tripped over a few of the script’s lines on its second performance, he credibly embodies the refined, well-coiffed foil to Scherer’s uncouth boisterousness, and both have plenty of opportunities to unleash their comic ids: Scherer, in reprising Steve Martin’s classic folderol as “Ruprecht,” the savage and mentally ill “brother” concocted by Andre to dissuade an overzealous mark; and Engel, in milking a thick Freudian accent for all its worth as Dr. Von Shuffhausen, a sham psychoanalyst.
Kavanaugh is a delight as Christine, the so-called soap heiress hiding a hidden agenda, and Kirsten Wyatt is a deft and nuanced comic talent as Muriel Eubanks, a woman defrauded by Andre who can’t help but stick around and impact the plot. Though only present in a couple of scenes, Jen Coy makes a standout impression as Jolene, a pistol-carrying Oklahoma doyenne intent on marrying Andre and bringing him back to Hickville, U.S.A.
The latter involves the show’s most random musical number (“Oklahoma”), a satirical skewering of the state’s backwoods reputation. It could have been a bit of throwaway filler, yet in director Mark Martino’s hands, Coy’s exuberant rendering and some design-work TLC, it’s a highlight of the Maltz’s production, with the ensemble dressed in witty western attire and a backdrop of downtown storefronts setting the scene (one of which, Trudy’s hair salon, nods to “Steel Magnolias,” which the Maltz produced in 2018).
This exquisite attention to detail carries this production throughout. And thanks to the Maltz’s top-notch sound design, each of the musical’s ribald lyrics can be understood, striking a perfect balance with musical director Eric Alsford’s live orchestra and David Yazbek’s eclectic score, with its mix of bluesy, country and traditional Broadway melodies.
The miracle of the show’s success is partly the fact that it’s happening at all: The Maltz’s first production in its reopened, extravagantly renovated building was postponed a week and nearly was canceled entirely due to building delays and the Certificate of Occupancy that arrived four days before the revised opening night. Technical issues, a rarity at Maltz, did persist well into its second day of performances; chances are you’ll be having too much fun to be bothered by them.
“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” runs through April 10 at Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Tickets start at $66. Call 561/575-2223 or visit jupitertheatre.org.
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