Metro Pulse/Backstage/Speaking in Tongues

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What:
Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell

When:
Aug. 22 through Sept. 13, 8 p.m.

Where:
The Black Box Theatre

Cost:
Thursdays: $5; Fridays & Saturday: $10 for students/seniors, $12 general admission. Call 909-9300 for reservations.

Actors tackle a complex Australian play

by Paige M. Travis

It's been almost three years since Zack Allen appeared on stage in a play. He's directed them, and even lent his witty delivery as a host of the Actors Co-op's holiday cabaret. But his return to the stage, in the Co-op's production of Speaking in Tongues, has turned out to be his greatest challenge as an actor.

"The play starts out like a freight train," he says of the 1998 work by Australian playwright and screenwriter Andrew Bovell. "You really have to get into it immediately." Previously, he thought the part he performed in a Samuel Beckett play during a night of experimental theater at the Bijou was the most difficult role he'd faced as an actor. "But this one I think is harder," he says. "It's a challenge to keep your focus when you're playing different people. Parts of the play are disjointed, and then we go back and forth in time." There is a certain emotional intensity the play requires, he says.

Allen discovered the play, so he feels partly responsible for the play's inclusion in the Co-op's 2003-2004 season. When the time came time to audition, he said the timing was right. Perhaps he only guessed what he found intriguing as a reader would challenge him so greatly as an actor.

Speaking in Tongues features four actors in nine roles. "It plays like a mystery in the first act," Allen says, "and just when you think you have a hold—Oh, I see! I understand who all these people are—then the curtain goes down at intermission, and when you come back there are four different people you've never met." But they've been mentioned before, or they are connected in a soon-to-be-discovered way.

"One thing that makes it so suspenseful," says co-star Kara Kemp, "is that all the characters are entangled with each other in some way. It may be one very loose thread, or it may be a very strong one. That they're married to someone, or they just met someone."

As the plot and the mysteries and the relationships of the characters unfold, so does the set. Designed by director Buddy Lucas, the set reminds Allen of a Chinese box that unfolds and changes shape like a puzzle. The four quadrants represent the relationships as they shift and change positions, and they are physically moved between acts—not by stagehands under darkness, but by the actors themselves as the audience watches. The play's inner workings are laid bare, much like the characters' volatile situations and emotions.

Allen's costars agree that the intensity and the complexity of the play make it a challenge to perform and watch. Mandi Lawson, last seen in the Co-op's production of Charlotte's Web, plays two different characters that test her ability to adapt on stage.

"The characters I play are fairly contrasting," she says. "One of them is very inward and reserved, and the second one is bohemian. I'm playing characters that are probably 10 years older than I am. But I've worked with Buddy—he directed me in Moonchildren—so I think he knows what I'm capable of doing. I feel like he's put a lot of faith in me to be able to play these two characters. It's probably the biggest challenge I've had in theater."

Eight days before opening night, the actors practice their Australian accents with a sort of glee mixed with nervousness. The show's producer and dialect coach David Brian Alley says he received advice from fellow actor Susannah Devereux, who is from New Zealand.

"It's like a Cockney dialect, but you've got to keep your teeth together like this to keep the flies outta your mouth," Alley mimicked. Even with its Australian nativity, the lines don't include the typical Aussie slang. "There's no 'G'day mate,'" Allen reports. "Or 'Crikey.'"

Cage Beals, a newcomer to the Co-op stage, rounds out the cast. Although he hasn't acted for about 10 years, Beals seems confident about the role and the accent.

Speaking in Tongues, which doesn't include any Pentecostal-style snake handling or crocodiles, is a very contemporary analysis of relationships.

"It hits on things you don't necessarily talk about at parties," Lucas says. "It explores the deep reaches of desire." That's the kind of theater he believes the Actors Co-op does best, the kind that leaves you with questions.

"We definitely want to entertain, but it's also our mission to make engaging and thought-provoking theater. And this is both engaging and thought-provoking," Lucas says.

Bovell co-wrote the screenplay for Strictly Ballroom with Baz Luhrmann in 1992. In 2001, he adapted Speaking in Tongues into a screenplay for the film Lantana. Starring Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey, the film earned Bovell awards from the London Critics Circle Film Awards, the Australian Film Institute and other Australian groups.

With juicy writing, complex characters and innovative staging, Speaking in Tongues promises to be an interesting production by the Co-op. "It's these kinds of shows where we really shine," Lucas says.