Inspecting Carol

Review by: Sharon Wilfong                          
Venue: The Seattle Repertory Theater 
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Closes December 23rd!
Playwright: Daniel Sullivan                
Director: Jerry Manning
Setting: Inside the theatre at The Soapbox Playhouse

Daniel Sullivan’s, Inspecting Carol is a farce about a mid-size theater company, The Soapbox Playhouse. The organization’s original stakeholders are exaggerated classic theater types including: Zorah Bloch the director who started out wanting to “… erase the borders between theater and life,” only to end up desperately clinging to simply keeping the doors at The Soapbox Playhouse opened. MJ McMann is the mouthy, cynical stage manager and Larry Vauxhall, the prima-donna who insists on making a statement with his work. The cast has been performing the same holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, together for twenty some-odd years and are bored with the process. The child actor who plays “Tiny Tim” is now too old for the part and they are missing one member, Sherman (Bloch’s husband, who committed suicide the previous year).

The Soapbox Theater Players are attempting to rehearse for their annual fundraiser, with little luck. Bloch is determined to make an impression on their main donor, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). She hires a black actor, Walter Parsons, to show that she is developing a “multicultural program”. She re-hires Vauxhall, whom she fired last year for re-writing parts of the script and rallies the troupes when Kevin Emery, the budget director becomes frantic because they are most likely going lose their funding. According to Emery, the NEA is sending an auditor to observe them and make funding recommendations based on this season’s production.

Meanwhile, a self-proclaimed actor, Wayne Wellacre tries to talk McMann, into letting him audition. McMann forces him to leave. He returns and is mistaken for the (undercover) auditor from the NEA. Bloch is committed to making sure they get their funding and will do what it takes to make it happen. She decides that she should use her feminine wiles to convince Wellacre to approve the annual $30,000. Desperate to win his approval, she gives him a part in the play. In the meantime, “Tiny Tim” lands a part on a television program and leaves the show. Realizing that he has been mistaken as someone of extreme importance, Wellacre decides to take over and teams up with Vauxhall to re-write the script. The other members throw tantrums and fight amongst themselves while Bloch and McMann try to hold things together.

In act two, all hell breaks loose when the real NEA auditor shows up to critique the show. Wellacre is now playing the role of Tiny Tim and the entire plot has been changed to reflect Vauxhall’s political views. Everything that could go wrong does. Parsons doesn’t know any of his lines because Vauxhall and Wellacre have changed them so many times. After a series of misfortunate events, the set falls apart, the stage platform breaks and everyone and everything comes tumbling forward. The auditor is bathed in light as she watches in horror.  After the madness subsides, Bloch and a few members of the cast help her out of the theater. She unexpectedly returns and announces that she has decided to recommend additional funding because the play was fresh and innovative.

The theatrical element of lighting is used throughout the play to highlight plot twists and showcase the Soapbox Players’ relationships. Lighting focuses our attention on what Manning wants us to notice. The use of lighting becomes a narrative of the actual drama that is taking place between the characters.  One example is when the lights in the tech room come on to reveal Bloch who is having an argument with one of the actors. We find out that she slept with him, giving us insight to her character. His reaction establishes their relationship and sets up the humor that comes when he becomes jealous of her pursuit of Wellacre. Another case where lighting is used to reveal personality traits is the exaggerated spot-light on Wellacre’s face as we see him come to the realization that he has a lot of control. The previously shy, soft-spoken man becomes a tyrant who is set on running things his own way. The dramatic lighting reveals this change in his character. The spotlight effect is used in several scenes. It refers to the fact that these are all theater people who we are watching. The semiotics of this lighting style tells us that the spotlight always shines on what is important and adds to the believability that we are watching theater drama as it is happening.

Inspecting Carol’s climax throws the spotlight on the auditor’s overwhelming reaction to the play that she is watching. She is bathed in light, gazing shocked as the set falls apart, which causes her to appear to be part of the production that she is watching. It reminds us that she is a “theater person” too. Her unlikely decision to recommend increased funding adds one last laugh. It stands as a parody of a resolution that a director such as Bloch might imagine. It would be a hallmark of her career to receive additional funding from the NEA for her innovative work and programming.

Gretchen Krich’s acting in the role of Zorah Bloch is one example of the theatrical elements in the play that adds to its farcical nature. Krich’s performance embodies Bloch’s “passion” for the theater, and she uses the character’s “Lithuanian heritage” as a source of humor in many of her scenes. She accentuates Block’s emotional nature, showing how desperate her character is to keep the theater afloat. Bloch will submit to any means available, including seducing the person she believes to be the auditor from the NEA. Kirch finds the humor in this scenario by over-exaggerating her character’s attempts at seduction. She further illustrates that Bloch is a “drama queen”, by how passionately she has her character describe having created a “multi-cultural program”. Bloch believes that she accomplished this display of diversity by hiring a black man, Walter Parsons, to fill her departed husband’s roles (and costumes).

Bloch’s claims of diversity are reduced to laughs because of the way Parsons’ character is handled. There is a racial reference in every one of his scenes. He paints one of the props, the white hand of the ghost of “Christmas yet to come”, black; because there is no representation of his race if he is holding a white ghost hand. When he plays his role as the ghost of “Christmas present”, his costume makes him look like the pop-star, “Prince.” In one of the final scenes his costume has morphed into a combination that looks like a baby new-year/ piñata. The humor is pointedly racist, gleaning its comic effect from blatantly making fun of the fact that Parsons was the designated “black man.” This humor works because it is done in such a way that we are laughing at the perpetrator’s (Bloch) ignorance. It is her desire to make everything work out that makes her character likeable even though she makes questionable decisions.

Manning sets the audience up for an unexpected turn of events by building a believable world in terms of the play. The set for Inspecting Carol is built to look like the inside of The Soapbox Playhouse Theater. Center stage left is theater seating that lines both sides of a stairway leading up to a door with an “exit” sign. Upstage left, high above the theater seating, there is a window leading to the tech room where some of the action takes place. Upstage center is a door leading to the backstage. To the left of the door is the stage manager’s area and stage right is the “stage and set” for A Christmas Carol. There is a break-away platform, which acts as a type of stage known as a “thrust stage” in the world of the play. Steps lead down from The Soapbox Playhouse stage to the area in front of the theater’s seats. In front of the platform, stage right is a coffee area and a hallway leading back stage. The realism of the set, in terms of a theater representing itself, creates a parody ripe for comedy. We feel as if we are watching and actual theater company bumbling through their rehearsals and production. When the set falls apart in the world of the play, it seems as if the set is actually falling apart. The set is, in fact, falling apart. But everything is staged and timed to happen in a specific sequence. At this point the humor becomes slap stick. Everything happens very quickly and it is pure madness and mayhem, as the production go to pieces.

Inspecting Carol’s main theme is obvious; most small to mid-size theater organizations have to operate on a small budget, and are often at the mercy of government funding agencies. The donors have rules that must be followed in order to “earn” the money and often times the productions don’t live up to those standards. Sullivan develops the theme by constructing a set that acts as a realistic display of what the inside of a theater looks like. He plays up the natural eccentricity of theater life and connects it to a well-known Christmas story, A Christmas Carol. This enhances the cohesiveness of the theme because we get to see the Soapbox Players in action as they attempt to pull together their production. Much of the humor in the play is derived from the characters actions and reactions to each other as well as straight up slap-stick comedy. By using a well-known Christmas classic, Sullivan is able to highlight some of the “mistakes” and “innovations” that The Soapbox Players make in their production of A Christmas Carol. The acting, the choice of lighting to highlight the “drama” and the set itself all work together to construct the ambiance of the reality of theater life.

Inspecting Carol is a good holiday comedy. In places it is hysterical. The actors were all well-rehearsed and believable in their roles. There were some stand-out performances as well. Reginald Jackson was hilarious as “the designated black man”. He played the part up and executed a large part of his performance without any saying anything. His character, Walter Parsons, was operating at a disadvantage because of script changes and didn’t have an opportunity to memorize his lines before the performance.  Jackson used this for full comic effect, becoming overcome with stage fright and alternately taken by surprise and angered by script changes. Jackson’s costumes were ridiculous and his reaction to having to wear them made it even funnier. Ultimately, it is his shocked reaction to unrehearsed scenes which sets off the series of events that sends the stage crashing down.

Sullivan uses the Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol to give the audience a sense of familiarity and it works well. The Soapbox Playhouse’s stage is designed to look like the spooky Christmas tale, complete with the door-knocker on Scrooges castle. The set and staging are well-worth seeing, especially when everything falls apart. The construction of the stage platform which enables it to collapse during the climactic scene is phenomenal. The mayhem it causes is hilarious and a stage techs worse nightmare. It does have some adult themes and probably wouldn’t be appropriate for young children. For the Scrooges out there, it is just the right amount of Christmas hum-bug. Anyone who has been involved in theater is sure to get a kick out of the cast of characters. Everyone else is sure to enjoy at least the slapstick humor. I highly recommend seeing this Anti-Christmas classic.