I'M NOBODY; WHO ARE YOU? Just your
spouse, my dear. |
Susan’s top bone of marital contention involves “Romance.” Her husband, she claims, has demonstrated a mere CliffsNotes-level mastery of Romance 101. Where is the passion, where the hourly deliveries of irises? Gordon, on the other side of the gender chasm, can neither fathom nor condone $25 hair products, and he names “Frivolous Spending” as his own number-one bone. And of course both Susan and Gordon harbor many, many others. They pluckily air them all in Spousal Deafness...And Other Bones of Contention, a musical marital comedy written and performed by regional artists Susan Poulin and Gordon Carlisle, on stage now at Lewiston’s Public Theater.
In musical-revue style, accompanied by Carlisle on guitar, the couple breaks down their domestic discord into a series of scenes and songs (written by Carlisle). The music ranges spunkily from cha-cha to country-western, while the nature of the marriage plaints remains in the bright, tongue-in-cheek realm of gender stereotype: Susan rents Merchant Ivory chick-flick “films,” while Gordon likes buddy/action “movies.” Susan changes her clothes a million times, while Gordon will go to a dinner party in grubby whatever. Susan keeps an obsessive-compulsive set of lists and lists of lists, while Gordon can make his list, a folded corner of paper, last a whole month in his shirt pocket. Susan sees romance embodied in picnics, while Gordon’s romantic touchstone is sexy underwear. “If picnics were that much fun,” he memorably protests, “guys would picnic with other guys.”
This is an exceptionally light, recreational, and slap-stick send-up of marital discord, performed by two actors with high energy and deft, quirky comic timing. The professional partnership of the husband-and-wife pair goes back over a decade (past productions include In My Head I’m Thin and Ida, Woman who Runs with the Moose), and the strength of their rapport is clear on stage. Their stage characters complement and provoke each other nicely as their tones range through irritation and exasperated affection.
One running conflict encapsulates most of the couple’s macro differences and misunderstandings in one micro, representative quandary: Where to go on vacation? The very word conjures entirely different fantasies. Susan has visions of lounging on a beach on St. Lucia, while Gordon imagines them bearing rugged backpacks into the White Mountains — as they apparently wind up doing every year, much to Susan’s longstanding irritation. The couple returns to the vacation problem again and again, in between issues like finances and housekeeping, gradually easing toward compromise.
Peppering the skits and installments of the running vacation story line, in true music-show fashion, are advertisements for would-be marital aids. “Shut it, Bub” is a motion-sensor device that triggers an alarm when a spouse has walked away from a drawer (or toilet seat) without properly shutting (or lowering) it. The device is available with several motivational alarm-tones, including the voice of General George Patton and the sound of the offending husband’s mother crying. Also available is a product called “Listen Up,” which claims to remedy the play’s title malady. This and the “Shut it, Bub” are both “advertised” using clever prop designs (by Carlisle) that are the mainstay of this production’s set pieces: plywood boards painted to depict various characters who have holes where their faces would be. Carlisle and Poulin pop in their own heads to cartoonishly portray, for example, an Iowa housewife whose marriage was saved by the ingenious “Listen Up;” or the protagonist in the steamy Harlequin romance Untamed Bodice, by Ida Love Muchmore.
