City Theatre's 'Clockmaker' a little cuckoo despite moving moments
-
Harry Bouvy portrays Henrich Mann with earnestness and Tami Dixon plays Frieda Mannheim with pathos and dignity in "The Clockmaker" at City Theatre.
Share with others:
For its midwinter entry, City Theatre brings us wife-beating, personal failure, murder and metaphysical murkiness with misogyny on the side. It's a comedy.
Written by Canadian Stephen Massicotte, "The Clockmaker" is sprinkled with crowd-pleasing bon mots and simple jokes, but it steps in so many directions that no cogent theme emerges. According to the playbill, the show opened last year in Alberta. Somehow it made it through U.S. customs without editing, unlike his first and more polished effort at City, last year's "Mary's Wedding."
City's artistic director Tracy Brigden and her dedicated cast of four do their best with Massicotte's complicated script, but she needs to work harder to help the audience find clues to this confusion and settle on a focus.
- Where: City Theatre, 1300 Bingham St., South Side.
- When: Through Feb. 14. Tuesday 7 p.m.; Wednesday 1 and 8 p.m., Thursday-Friday 8 p.m.; Saturday 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m.
- Tickets: $23-$48. 412-431-2489 or www.citytheatrecompany.org.
There are moving moments of humor, romance and realistic brutality played out on a compelling set designed by Jeff Cowie. He manages to reflect Massicotte's theater of the awkwardly absurd through an impressionistic design with touches of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" -- distorted angles, monotone colors and a raked stage.
The City prop shop also needed to build some bizarre cuckoo clocks, invented by HeinÂrich Mann, the title character. Bear with me, now. The clocks both tell time and emit aromas, like his farm-theme clock that smells like, well, cow manure.
Mr. Massicotte expects the audience to accept this off-the-wall concept, possibly one of the strangest ideas to hit the stage since "Cats." It's no surprise that Mann's clocks don't sell.
Things perk up when Frieda Mannheim, a shy, fearful woman arrives at his shop with a smashed cuckoo clock. She's an abused spouse whose husband Adolphus, wearing, what else, a "wife-beater" undershirt, alternately whips her with a belt and then abjectly professes his love and regret.
Tami Dixon shapes her role with both pathos and dignity while Joel Ripka brings a manic energy to his soap-opera villain.
Now in love, Mann devises a Frieda-smell clock to save her. Yes, the cuckoo clock, dismissed as the symbol of dull conformity by Harry Lime in "The Third Man," will now bring peace and harmony to an abusive relationship.
First Published February 3, 2010 12:00 am
