New-to-me (I believe this is their second production) company Tipping Point presents Lauren Gunderson’s timely satire The Taming in a handsome production directed by Patricia Wallace-Winbush that never quite takes flight or lands for me.
The concept is ripe for juicy, knives-out comedy and truth-telling: Sartre’s No Exit with hell played by a shabby hotel room and a hangover in Atlanta. Beleaguered but still believing Republican congressional aide Patricia (Demia Kandi) and self-satisfied left-wing blogger Bianca (Colleen Kochensparger), both on the verge of breakthroughs, are drugged and locked in a hotel room by reigning Miss Georgia, Katherine (Kelsey Hopkins), on the eve of the Miss America pageant, to test-run Katherine’s plan for a more equitable union based on principles that have gotten lost over the centuries.
The first third of The Taming has enough frenetic, classic-farce energy to mostly get past the deeply unbalanced writing. Katherine is a crackling character we haven’t seen enough of – it shouldn’t be a surprise someone running in a beauty pageant has a Constitutional Law degree or an intricate plan for setting things straight, but that still feels a little like a contrast in this day and age – and Kelsey Hopkins finds every funny nuance and barbed turn.
Katherine’s effort to bring people together – even with some uncomfortable shades of “we just don’t have good candidates” – through data-driven understanding and compromise had me rooting for her, and the fissures in the character’s implacable confidence (as when she stumbles over which of the other two women is the chief of staff and which is the press secretary in the denouement) add some interesting texture.
The fact that all three characters feel like they stepped out of different plays has a strong conceptual charge, an indictment of the way so many of us live in different Americas and different worlds, but in practice it felt grating and frustrating. Kandi gives Patricia a stunning performance, full of subtle detail and shading, but she also gets to start by playing a full-fledged character: a woman whose ideals have been ground down and sold out by the pressures and realities of the world, as so many of ours are. Watching her transformation felt a little too pat at the end, but the speeches getting there are jaw-droppers.
But while Patricia gets to have feelings, Kochensparger has to find a character in Bianca who only gets buzzwords and a fever pitch. I couldn’t get a handle on how experienced in journalism or life the character was supposed to be, and the repeated insinuations that they didn’t believe in anything, that they’d latched onto a “trendy” cause because it was a way to get her foot in the door, set up a deeply uneven battle against Patricia who does believe in things even if they’ve mutated into something she doesn’t recognize. The character never rises above being a cardboard target for “those flighty liberals” jokes delivered in the same rapid-fire tone over and over again. I’m hesitant to blame the actor because I struggled with how anyone could have breathed life into this role.
It gets worse with the ether-induced historical fever dream middle section. Kandi as James Madison, Kochensparger as Charles Pinckney, and Hopkins as George Washington (and briefly Martha Washington and Dolley Madison) could be an opportunity for the wild comedy to take on even more surreal and exaggerated hues, but instead, we get an earnest laying out of Madison’s principles and struggles at the Congressional Convention. These scenes are a slog, not helped by momentum-killing extended changeovers between the three locations. There are some plot twists in the third section I won’t give away but baffled me and raised more questions about the plot than I think the piece supports.
There’s an extremely funny 15-20 minute sketch in the 90 minutes (with no intermission) run time of The Taming, and a handful of terrific ideas. But for me, it sags under the weight of its ambition and topples from only building half a structure. The Taming runs through April 15 at MadLab, with performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, visit madlab.net.