How does a work of theatre confront the issue of domestic abuse but at the same time walk the fine line between painful tragedy and unseemly comedy? For playwright Lauren Gunderson, the solution was to construct a “revenge comedy,” an intriguing theatrical sub-genre that most often involves a despicable bad guy being given an ironically comic comeuppance by a woman, or women. Gunderson’s revenge comedy, Exit, Pursued By A Bear, which opened on Friday evening in Clarence Brown Theatre’s Lab Theatre, doubles down on the “theatrical” by employing flashbacks, theatrical and TV references, second-person portrayals, and even projections that communicate the script’s stage directions. The most obvious theatrical allusion is the play’s title itself, taken from the comically improbable stage direction for Antigonus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Gunderson’s victim/protagonist is Nan Carter (Emily Stiles), a young woman in a north Georgia mountain town who has reached the confrontation point with her abusive, antagonistic, redneck husband, Kyle Carter (Andrew Shipman). She is enthusiastically joined in a plan for theatrical revenge by two of her friends—the wannabe actress/part-time stripper, Sweetheart (Callie Bacon), and a flamboyant, endlessly supportive gay man, Simon (Alan Toney). Nan’s plan is to duct-tape the unconscious Kyle to a chair in their home, then force him to view a re-enactment of scenes of dysfunction and abuse from their marriage, afterwards leaving him bound, surrounded by honey and thawing deer meat—with bears in the neighborhood.
Director Casey Sams has taken Gunderson’s material and given it an energetic and clever production that sizzles with attitude and marvelous stagecraft, while, at the same time, providing the cast of four with a boatload of entertaining showcase moments. However—and no fault of director and cast—it is easy to lose track of the underlying topic—domestic abuse—amid all the entertaining comic naughtiness that Gunderson has packed into her script.
At the pinnacle of this confusion is the character of Nan. Stiles does a remarkable job of painting a specific character type with what the playwright gives her, but one is ultimately left with a lot of questions. There is a substantial chasm between Nan’s psychological state of acceptance and a quite different motivation that involves concocting a plan for spousal revenge intended to both educate and punish. After all, while justice in real life is far more difficult to achieve, where would theatre be if the bad guys aren’t punished?
Gunderson has constructed her character of Kyle with a blatantly obvious checklist of shallow, inconsiderate, bad-guy characteristics that are sure to draw sides for the audience: illegal hunter, a drunk with a slovenly and hateful demeanor, FoxNews watcher, and wife-abuser. While the script tries to balance that behavior with a softer scene depicting Nan and Kyle’s first dates, that scene speaks not to Kyle’s positive attributes, but rather to the less-than-healthy Southern Gothic gravity of a small-town social structure where that kind of person could be found attractive.
Bacon draws every last ounce of dramatic depth and vibrant spirit out of her character of Sweetheart, despite the fact that Gunderson has left the character with mostly dead ends in the plot. Similarly, the showy character of Simon could easily overwhelm the action, but Toney miraculously finds a middle ground, despite the playwright offering him up as a one-dimensional caricature of the over-the-top “gay male friend.”
CBT’s Lab Theatre is a small space, which makes the play’s visual work all the more impressive. Director Sams was helped along by a creative staff that fashioned a perfect environment for the physical action—Katherine Stepanek’s marvelous Southern Gothic living room set, lighting designer Helen Garcia-Alton’s side-keyed realism, character-revealing costumes by Margo Birdwhistell, and a marvelously dimensional environmental soundtrack by Chandler Oppenheimer.
In many ways, theatre is often like the metaphoric “preaching to the choir”—there will obviously be no one leaving the theatre feeling sorry for Kyle Carter, or those like him. But will those leaving CBT’s Exit, Pursued By A Bear realize that there really are Kyles—and Nans—walking among us? Gunderson’s ultimate belief is that the Kyle Carters of the world are incorrigible liars and deceivers. Unfortunately for us, there’s not enough honey in the world, or bears, to solve the problem.
CBT’s Lab Theatre on the UT Campus
Runs through November 10 – Information and Tickets
