Metro Pulse/Backstage/Knoxville New Play Festival

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What:
Hit and Miss, a new play by Barry Bardford

When:
Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. until April 22

Where:
Jackson Avenue Antiques, upstairs

Tickets are $12/$8. Call 523-0900 for reservations.

Hit and Miss proves it's hard work to bring a script into the world

by Adrienne Martini

One of the problems with being a theater reviewer who used to do theater is that you often find yourself hanging out with theater people—which is a good thing, no doubt about that, since folks who know the siren call of the stage are wonderfully strange and nifty to be around. But it can be a problem, at times, when you get more deeply involved—beyond casual, beer-inspired chit-chat into becoming a part of one of the group's projects. It's a problem the world 'round, I'm sure. When I wrote in Austin, the standard rule was that you didn't write about anyone who you had A) received a paycheck from or B) had slept with. I'm sure there is a subset where those two qualifications intersect, but, fortunately, it never came up.

The rules, apparently, are different here, as I discovered in my first year writing about this community. Suddenly, it was assumed, judging from some of the helpful mail I received, that I had a secret agenda that involved promoting the work of my friends—an odd thought considering that I hadn't been in town long enough to have any. Now, however, I've been in Knoxville for two years, almost to the day, and I've learned that it is almost impossible to not get to know folks in this theater community, given that it is fairly tiny (yet mighty, despite the small number of people really involved in it) and you see the same faces show after show.

So when Amy Hubbard called to see if I would read some of the scripts that had been submitted for the First Annual Knoxville New Play Festival, I said sure. My reason was twofold: The other members of the panel—like producer Tom Parkhill, UT professor Elaine Oswald, and renaissance woman Roberta Niederjohn, among others—know quite a bit about Knoxville theater, and I have always had a deep love for new work. And that's why, after a small amount of hand-wringing over any possibly perceived impropriety, I'm writing about a script that I was one of the readers on, which would be Hit and Miss, the gangster comedy chosen from over 50 scripts submitted from all over the U.S., which the Actors Co-op and Tennessee Stage Company combined forces to produce.

Hit and Miss, the script itself, is a prime example of all that is intriguing about new work. The characters are still raw around the edges, not fully fleshed out and looking for their real centers. The plot is loose, like a bread dough that needs to be kneaded a few more times to get a good rise going. For every joke that works, one doesn't. And the pace can best be described as uneven.

But these aren't so much flaws as they are opportunities for input—from the production crew who has painstakingly analyzed the script to get this show on its feet to the actors who are developing these characters to the audience who can provide direct feedback by laughing (or not). By seeing this show on an actual stage and listening to these responses, Chattanoogan playwright Barry Bardford can take his script home and rework it into something even stronger.

The same malleability that makes new work exciting, makes it nearly impossible to review in any traditional way. This is not an old chestnut by a dead playwright. These actors and designers and technicians worked with what they had, and, for the most part, did a fine job. Patrick McCray and Michael Goleiwbeski play would-be hit men Heime and Willie as lovable goofballs, like Costello and Laurel played by the young Steve Martin and Anthony Edwards in a stage version of Jimmy Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Heime and Willie are hired to bump off "cement man" Angelo, played by Doug Mason, who in real life is the theater critic for, ahem, that other newspaper. He's not bad. 'Nuf said.

Joining these bumbling gun men are a host of other nutty characters, like Sara Schwabe and Jim Clement, who show us exactly what would have happened had Elvis married Cybil and moved to Brooklyn. Brian Prather and Metro Pulse cartoonist Rick Baldwin invest themselves in their characters, while Andrew Miller and Pat Fitch wear Bardford's loosely-drawn outlines for their characters as best they can. Again, this is not a finished script, but the talents of this cast and their willingness to jump into this world with both feet, trusting it to hold them up, pulls the show off. Well, that and Miller's inspired interpretive dance.

Of course, director Hubbard had a hand in assembling this as well. Her gooney direction pulls out the cartoony-ness of the script, which is punctuated by Mitch Rutman's oddly ingenious sound design, Prather's boldly-colored set, and Ellen Robinson's eye-catching costumes. Plus, Rob Link's hair and make-up design is ingenuous, adding a layers of insight into these characters by a stroke of lip-liner or veneer of hair spray. From a technical standpoint, including the aforementioned solid performances, Hit and Miss mostly hits, despite some of the misses in Bardford's new script.