May 17, 2001 |
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By Zack Graham |
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| Ah! The joys of serial killing, cross-dressing, and talking monkey puppets. NORMAL PEOPLE now playing at the Sidewalk Theatre Company, is a funny, but be warned remarkably dark play concerning, what else, but normality, and in particular if there truly is such a thing. One gets a pastel filled vision of a seemingly normal American couple at work until the deliveryman refuses to take a check and things get slightly more complicated. Without saying too much, and giving away the manifold surprises within the play lets just say it concerns Kermit Smithe a mild mannered accountant, turned not so mild, but sill well mannered, serial ax murderer. Meg, his cleaning and sex obsessed wife who feels that the passion has gone out of their marriage and into his homicidal tendencies and the religious doorknockers that feel the wrath of those tendencies. Patrick T. Gorman, who plays the accountant gone mad, think Lester Burnham in American Beauty meets Patrick Batement in American Psycho, is intriguingly capable of carrying the banal with the sadistic, his face remains calm, but in his eyes there is something a little more wicked, but strangely humorous. It is difficult to take your eyes from any of the characters in this play for a movement, especially Sally Monroe, who plays Mrs. Smithe the quintessential working housewife of the modern age trying desperately to keep her life and marriage together with hairpins. This is an intriguing play, that refrains from getting bogged down in the depths of profundity and sticks to the purpose of entertaining the audience, which it accomplishes in spades, though I wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids. |
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