Rantoul and Die, for old times' sake

My review of Rantoul and Die, first posted in 2006, is revived here in commemoration of the current new production in Los Angeles. I should note that the publicity for the new production (http://www.rantoulanddie.com/about.html) refers to people here as the "ugliest" people, who live in the "grimy little world" of central Illinois, which pretty much confirms my first impression of this Mark Roberts sitcom.


RANTOUL AND DIE

The first act of “Rantoul and Die” repeats an old fable about a scorpion crossing a road on the back of a turtle. Or maybe a rabbit. There is disagreement on this point.

The animal is inconsequential. More to the point, playwright Mark Roberts does not tell the story in the traditional sense. As usually told, the scorpion rides over a body of water, not a road, on the back of the animal. The scorpion promises not to sting the animal. After all, if the animal drowns, so will the scorpion. Halfway across the lake, the scorpion stings.

"Why would you do that?" the animal asks when the scorpion strikes, and the scorpion, although about to die, claims he has no choice. It is his nature.

“Rantoul and Die” takes the sting out of the story. In Roberts’ version, the scorpion strikes because it is his nature... and then goes on to kill another day.

After the first act of the play, my fear was that Roberts himself was like his specialized scorpion, the stinger shown on the ad for the play. He could make vicious fun of the low-rent service employees of Champaign County and enjoy watching the local audiences laugh, unwittingly, at themselves.

When someone writes a comic play about rural Americans, the operative word is usually "affectionate." You can spoof them, even ridicule them, but in the end there is some feeling for the bizarre and simple foibles of the characters, characters you have come to know and love. Think "Junebug." Think Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." Think Larry Shue's "The Foreigner."

“Rantoul and Die” is given a smidgen of this sensibility in the second act, with the entry of a new character played by Joi Hoffsommer. As Callie, the manager of the Dairy Queen, she spoonfeeds the afflicted her soft serve ice cream while rattling off the reasons for her quirky behavior, her fondness for her 13 cats, her early memories of Peanut Buster Parfaits. Her unaccountable bursts into one-note laughter, a sound that trails off into the far distance, is a kind of laugh you are likely to recognize.

The first laughs in the first act on the night I attended were drawn at the first mentions of 1) Rantoul High School, 2) Rantoul Dairy Queen, and 3) vomiting while giving a blow job when drunk.

"Rantoul and Die,” act one, contains a similar degrading string of jokes, plus a constant stream of explicit sex talk and foul language. Whether these jokes emerge from a place of superiority and condescension is hard to tell, since Roberts writes in lengthy, personal program notes that the play was written "during one of the most insane, self-destructive periods of my adult life."

But why did he write it? These are not stories from his life. I doubt he would be associated with any of these characters. By the second act, there is a sort of sympathy generated for a character, brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The final image of that character falling to one side is inexplicably funny and almost moving.

Mostly, though, I think Roberts deals in the stock in trade of the Los Angeles television and movie industry: contempt. I don’t think he is willfully mean toward his characters; he merely writes in the language which he’s most familiar, and I don’t think it’s all that funny unless you are willing to laugh at the people themselves, the characters in his play.

"Rantoul and Die" is not by a long shot the worst play I've ever seen. I seriously tried to consider if it would have a chance to be performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where they are known for their midwest rural shit-kicking comedies. But I think the answer is clearly "no."

The problem is, at least in the first hour of the play, nothing happens. It is not “plot-driven,” the reviews admit, hard pressed to discover any story or theme at all.

The performers can't be faulted. Nor can the director. These are well honed, professional performances. I laughed at non-joke lines because of the delivery given them by Mike Trippiedi and Anne Kearns, not by the jokes themselves, which often seem incongruous (or randomly ascribed) to the action and characters.

Just hours before the play began, I flipped channels and landed on the redneck comics on Comedy Central: Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and a fourth guy. I was impressed at their timing, their wit, and their interaction with the audience, despite the trailer park stance and crude perspectives about life in rural America.

I didn’t feel bad identifying with their rural, redneck jokes. You sort of know they’re kidding, that they identify fondly with the people they are making fun of. I’m not sure I got that impression in “Rantoul and Die,” where the people behave the way they do because "it is their nature" -- in this case, to be venal, unfaithful, violent and stupid. Other than “sweet” (but perhaps also mentally challenged) to describe Callie in the second act, one would be hard pressed to find other adjectives to apply to the characters in “Rantoul and Die.”

I originally posted comments about “Rantoul and Die” on this site, so that my lawyer friend could read them and argue with me. We Tweedledee'd and Tweedledum'd back and forth heatedly. There was never any intention for those notes to be read or published openly. Mark Roberts found those notes with a Google search and was offended, not surprisingly, in what he saw as a personal attack. I guess it is my nature to write criticism. I’ve done it for too long. Far too long. And, in keeping with the correct telling of the parable, both scorpion and target got hit by this particular poison.