Billy-Club Puppet

One summer day in 1936, during the tumult of the Spanish Civil War, a Fascist squad arrested Federico Garcia Lorca in a friend's house and on the following morning, shot him.

It's difficult to imagine the man who wrote Billy-Club Puppet facing a firing squad. While Lorca's fame lies chiefly in his tragic plays and his poetry, Billy-Club Puppet is a gay little fantasy, modeled on the puppet theatre, and as innocent as a flower.

Although the play's charm is evident in the production at the Experimental Theatre, a sea of troubles often threatens to drown it. Despite some good individual performances and occasionally imaginative directing, the production is a makeshift job. What is worse, the company never seems to relax and devote itself unselfconsciously to making the fantasy work.

The best members of the cast were those who managed to give themselves up wholeheartedly to their parts. Libby Franck, as Rosita, was the best of all. She pouted and pirouetted, rolled her eyes like a fawn, and was a totally engaging ingenue. James Mann, as Don Christobita, the pot-bellied troll who buys Rosita's hand, also did a good job as a club-swinging bully. He never failed to get a laugh when he stalked onto the stage, though he lost some of the menace by too much shouting.

But even these two were a little too forced and stiff, and that was the problem for most of the other actors, too. Thomas King, playing Rosita's sweetheart Cocoliche, was appropriately moonstruck. Buddy Mear, as Currito, her rejected lover, and Chris Simmons, as her father, were simply wooden, and the scenes they were in never quite came off.

The smaller parts varied widely in quality. As well as playing Mosquito, a sort of Andalusian sprite, Wendy Miller took two bit parts and was delightfully joyous in all of them. Frederick Davis, Larry Gonick, Ken Sateriale, and Peter McKenzie, as villagers of all sorts, ranged from fair to unfortunate.

The performance was cursed with an incredibly large number of small but obvious accidents: props broke or became entangled with the actors' clothing, pieces of scenery broke loose, furniture tottered as the characters blundered into it. Many of the mishaps might be passed off as bad luck, but just as many could be blamed on inadequate preparation.

Director Joel DeMott may have spread herself too thin. She was director, producer, and played one of the small parts as well. Consequently, she didn't give enough attention to detail, and there were a number of rough spots.