| | Issue #19.37 :: 04/09/2008 - 04/15/2008 | Sorting lives
Everyone’s crazy in Le Chat Noir’s staging of ‘Sordid Lives,’ a dark comedy that explores one Southern family’s twisted entanglements
| BY STACEY HUDSON
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AUGUSTA, GA. - They say in the South, you don’t ask if there is mental illness in a family. You just ask which side it’s on. In the play “Sordid Lives,” they’re all around you — you just may not recognize them until you’ve spent 23 years in a mental institution.
It’s the kind of play where the sanest person on the stage is the narrator, Ty, who is on his 27th therapist in three years as he tries to deal with his sexuality. At hand: the question of whether or not he should attend the funeral of his grandmother, Gloria. A real quandary, seeing as she had her own son committed to the aforementioned mental hospital when he was just 18.
Director Richard Justice says that the character development and the dark comedy are the real draws, in that the play exploits “the eccentricities of the Southern stereotypes… they’re all extremely colorful characters.”
Gloria is dead. Her three children, Latrelle, LaVonda and Brother Boy, are battling — the sisters over property and propriety, and the brother over his freedom. As it turns out, Gloria was having an affair with a younger man, G.W. Nethercott, with two wooden legs. Her sister, Aunt Sissy, attempts to bring order. But Nethercott and his wife have some marital issues to work out.
Of course, no one works them out privately. It all comes out at the funeral.
“The underlying themes of the play are very sad,” Justice acknowledged. “But a lot of comedy is based on real-life sadness.”
And, after all, man is the only animal that truly laughs. It must be used for some good purpose. And unlike plays that hit the same high note repeatedly, “Sordid Lives” sings a number of different comedic tunes. It uses irony, sarcasm, slapstick and one-liners as the movements in a symphony that reveals the truths about the unsorted lives of these small-town souls.
“They’re all connected and intertwined,” Justice said, laughing at a bit about grandma’s late-in-life infidelities, which lead to her accidental death. “She sort of cut loose toward the end of her life, went out honky-tonkin’.”
And the family members raised by a proper Christian woman don’t necessarily know how to explain her unusual behavior. Latrelle, ever concerned with the family name, explains to mourners that her mother had a brain tumor that pressed against the part of her brain that regulated sexual desire.
Her laid-back sister, LaVonda, turns to a seatmate: “And this is supposed to make us look better?”
LaVonda’s point — and the greater point of the play — is that try as some people might, hiding such situations (like mama was a loose woman) is putting a pig in a dress. The pig may look more attractive, but it’s still just a smelly old pig.
The cast, an ensemble of some of the area’s most experienced actors, has the audience laughing through its lessons on acceptance, unconditional love and “coming out” in a family in a small Texas town.
Shows are currently sold out, but the theatre will add another performance on April 22.
‘Sordid Lives’
Le Chat Noir
April 11-12, 18-19, 24-26
706-722-3322
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