That '70s Show

By Gary Zeidner, Boulder Weekly
April 1, 2004

Theatre is all about passion. It doesn’t matter how simple your story, how small your stage or how amateur your actors, as long as you have passion you have potential. Take, for example, the Lafayette Community Players and their current production, Lovers and Other Strangers.

Working out of the converted congregational church now known as the Mary Miller Theater, the LCP pour their passion into Lovers and Other Strangers. Lovers, which was written by Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor, was originally performed on Broadway in 1968. In 1970, it made the leap from the stage to the big screen. The film version inspired the TV series Love, American Style, which in turn spawned Happy Days.

The LCP’s Lovers consists of five comic vignettes revolving around love’s many aspects–from first date to divorce. Set against the backdrop of 1970s New York, Lovers is a love letter to the ’70s. The set design purposefully evokes the Rubik’s Cube. (For those of you too young to remember Rubik’s Cubes, think of them as pre-electricity Tomagachi’s that lacked personality or a soul but still required an amazing amount of attention.) A disco ball bathes the theatre in a cascade of light as "Play That Funky Music" opens the proceedings. The cast arranges the set while dancing the Shuffle–or was it the Slide? When the actors appear in character, their costumes scream authenticity. Embroidered leather jackets, fringed coats, oversized sunglasses, floppy hats, plaid polyester and bellbottoms fill the stage. Beads drape the doorways, velvet paintings hang on the walls, leopard-skin pillows rest on the sofas and large, proud ashtrays sit on the kitchen tables. Even if you hated the ’70s, the set and costume designs alone will be enough to make you a little nostalgic.

Lovers opens with two young would-be lovers, Jerry and Brenda (Patrick Collins and Mary Kay Irving) stopping by Jerry’s apartment. Jerry is intent on bedding Brenda, and while part of her seems willing enough another part–the part that quotes Sex and the Single Woman and The Prophet–keeps putting on the brakes. Collins does an excellent job of wringing laugh after laugh from the audience with little more than increasingly frustrated facial expressions. For her part, Irving delivers lines like, "I know we just met 30 minutes ago, but what do I mean to you?" so perfectly that the males and the females in the audience respectively groaned and guffawed.

The next scene has Mike (Gil Shalit) paying a late-night visit to his fiancée, Susan (Kelli Murphy). Mike, it seems, has a colossal case of cold feet. He pleads with Susan to call off the wedding. He makes outrageous, obnoxious claims about Susan and their impending marriage. He is, quite obviously, about to crack. Shalit plays his part well, but the triumph in this scene is Murphy’s Susan. With only a handful of lines to work with, Murphy manages to convey a complex set of emotions and allows the audience to sympathize with her basically mute character.

The remaining scenes variously present a married couple (Ian Gerber and Karen Goodwin) sparring for dominance as they try to get to sleep; a cheating husband (Bill Graham) attempting to placate his fed-up mistress (Joanne Porter); and an old-fashioned mother and father (Ray Viggiano and Linda Orr) trying to understand their son’s decision to divorce his wife (Patrick Collins and Beth Davis).

It is apparent that Director Jackie Tisinai and the rest of the LCP have a blast performing this show. Their passion results in an almost uniformly funny and entertaining production. Certain scenes may not fire on all cylinders or are slightly mis-paced, but for some good-hearted laughs, Lovers and Other Strangers won’t disappoint.

Lovers and Other Strangers was a production of the Lafayette Community Players. Their next production will be Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. For more information, call 303-604-3841 or visit www.lcptheater.org.

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