Tigers Be Still at The SF Playhouse
Sherry (Melissa Quine) sinks into her sisters’ depression and sing-a-long to Top Gun.
Photo by Jessica Palopoli
Depression and humor get neurotically blenderized in Tigers Be Still by Kim Rosenstock. The SF Playhouse has just opened a deliciously staged production of the ninety-minute off-Broadway hit comedy. The play documents the frustrations of a newly minted Art Therapist. Practicing her chosen profession from her home office does not provide the rewards she was expecting. The other three characters plague Sherry in her apartment with their own anxious needs.
The Setup
Sherry Wickman (Melissa Quine) has earned her master's degree in art therapy and expects her career and life to fall into place perfectly and immediately. However, OCD Sherry in her home office has to argue with her self-indulgent sister over the use of the couch for her therapy sessions. Sherry’s well-directed interactions with sister Grace (Rebecca Schweitzer) establish the sibling dynamic. Then playwright Rosenstock introduces further complications.
The Neurotics
In this incongruously enchanting play, all three women deal with depression in different ways. Their mother upstairs won’t get out of bed or let anyone see her after being abandoned by Sherry's father. They only communicate by telephone.
Despondent about having broken up with her fiancé, Grace spends her days in a boozing on the couch and watching one movie over and over. She steals stuff from her ex-boyfriend's condo in hopes it will make him give her a call.
Sherry has sexual yearnings and a desire for “only reasonably attractive children.” For an unusually intimate effect, Quine delivers this as a monologue to the audience meant to heard by her sister. Sherry also has regular classroom duties at a middle school. Her boss, Principal Joseph Moore (Remi Sandri) has asked Sherry to take on her first client, his troubled teenage son Zack (Jeremy Kahn), who still hasn’t gotten over the recent death of his mother.
From the unseen mother to the teenage son with anger-management issues, the characters are dealing with deadly serious issues, but Rosenstock's distinctive dialogue finds laughter at their pain while giving you an empathetic cheer for their recovery.
The First Client and the Tiger
And now Sherry faces her first client in her home, Zack a dim, slow patient who readily misunderstands anything. Kahn plays this role with a genuine sense of distraction. Then to set Sherry more on edge she hears that a tiger has “escaped from the local zoo.”
The Acting and the Production
When the first student rings the doorbell, Quine makes Sherry effusively happy. She projects an exciting sense of eager anticipation. Schweitzer as Grace seems to wallow in the laziness of her character. She appears to like her misery. Sandri as Joseph seems right in his self-effacing character with an agenda. Kahn as student Zack marvelously projects the attention span of a slacker. They all interact with a high degree of verisimilitude under the guidance of esteemed Bay Area director Amy Glazer on an intricate, compact set by SF Playhouse Artistic Director Bill English.
There is solidly consistent character inhabitation between the sisters. Zack and Joseph are forthrightly and sensitively delivered. A script problem is that these characters as written do not have a lot of room for imaginative inhabitation. They are not fully dimensional; they are one-trick ponies. They are their hapless, neurotic selves and that is all, funny as they are. “This is the story of how my mother got out of bed,” Sherry declares in the end.
This is the west coast premiere of a quirky dark comedy that was featured in SF Playhouse’s 2008 reading series. It then went on to a critically acclaimed 2010 New York premiere.
Get Tickets through July
Tigers Be Still plays through July 30 at The SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street (between Powell & Mason Streets), San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $50) are available online at http://www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596.
____________________