“KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF!”

Mark Jackson & Beth Wilmurt

First, I must make an upfront confession.  Either I missed all the particular “Saturday Night Live” shows between 2004 and 2010 when various versions of Rachel Datch’s character, “Debbie Downer,” appeared; or that party pooper who could suddenly burst the balloon of any happy gathering with her negativity just did not leave a lasting impression on me.  For that reason, I arrived at Shotgun Players premiere of KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! totally in the fog what to expect.  By the end of the two hour, no intermission conglomeration of spoken text, interpretative dance, vocal and instrumental music, modern film clips, and audience sing-alongs, my fog had somewhat lifted but how all these elements related to one of my favorite Anton Chekhov plays, Three Sisters, was still quite cloudy for me.

Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt have created and directed what is touted in the program as “a new theatre piece” – with “play” not being an adequate description since a plot with beginning, middle, and end does not fit this creative but oft-confusing – and sometimes a bit boring – mishmash of visual and aural occurrences.  Their production does refer to each of the four acts of Chekhov’s masterpiece (as announced via projected titles); and the sisters’ paralyzing dissatisfaction with their lives and inabilities to make decisions to better those lives are played out by the fine cast assembled.  There is also fine usage by the creators/directors of pauses that speak volumes about the sisters’ boredom with life and their perpetual state of stasis.  There are sequences of repeated lines delivered in different manners that illustrate the probable ways that memories play out again and again of better days when the sisters lived in Moscow with their dear, now-deceased father and of their repeated desire – one that never goes anywhere – to leave their present small town and go back to the big city.  And there is an opening sequence of meeting individually the six characters (of the over dozen in Chekhov’s original) of KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS that for me was the highlight of the evening, with each actor capturing in various ways the essence of that particular Chekhovian personality.

But as the acts progress, crazy diversions multiply that for me did not always add up to amplifying or enlightening the original source material.  When there is a declared attempt to focus on “one particular unparticular day” taken from Act Two, snippets of conversations proceed, sometimes with characters unseen or with an actor switching to another character.  Even for the well-versed Chekhov lover, following what is happening becomes difficult.  (I kept wishing that I had re-read the play before coming.  I cannot imagine how anyone who is totally or even just vaguely familiar could understand what is occurring.)

A birthday party for the youngest sister – twenty-year-old Irina – becomes an all-cast dance-a-thon with everything from Russian steps, Broadway kick-lines, chair-hugging knee-slapping, and even patty-caking with quite shocked and mostly reluctant audience members.  A soldier who transforms into a beat poet delivers something just short of jibberish while a sing-along with the audience about the never-seen brother Andrey (“This is Andrey’s happy song; it’s not very long”) goes on for seemingly forever.  A harrowing, five-or-so-minute video of recent devastating and disturbing current events – the video opening Act Three – begs for explanation of how it relates. (Is it referring to the chaos coming soon to 1901 Russia, the setting of the play?).  While all these and many more innovative inserts add a mixture of farcical, sinister, and foreboding flavors to this set of lives where nothing is happening fast (another Chekhovian favorite theme), the creators fail too often, in my opinion, to tie them enough to the original and to make them interesting and compelling.  As the minutes ticked, I found myself (and watched numerous others around me) checking my watch to see how much longer before the two hours would finally end.

With those rather severe caveats aside, the efforts of the cast are to be commended.  As the oldest sister, Olga, Sam Jackson is outstanding in delivering the thrice-repeated opening lines of Paul Shmidt’s translation of Three Sisters (“It was a year ago, it was years ago, that father died”) – first intensely and with fervent determination to “go back to Moscow,” second with cynical sarcasm bordering on anger, and third as if frenetically chatting as a local gossip.  When she declares with an exclamation point, “I’m tired of being Olga,” Ms. Jackson had me convinced we were in for an exceptional production.  (Later, her sung rendition of “That’s Life” is another musical and thematic-capturing highlight of the evening.)

Gabby Battista too is excellent as the young Irina, bringing a spark of youth that slowly takes on the desperation of feeling and acting like she is already an aged woman with her oft-repeated “I can’t remember” and a gasping conclusion of “Life is choking us up.”  The middle sister, Masha, is played by Erin Mei-Ling Stuart with mysterious airs that repeatedly become sullen and angry about her own dissatisfied plight in life. 

Joining the sisters – who often are looking out opaque windows that reveal nothing of the world outside of the house they now live as if in prison – is Amanda Farbstein who brings a vivid sense of what it is like being isolated and rejected as the sister-in-law, Natasha.  She is the target that the sisters pleasure themselves mocking, but she later transforms in her bold stance and steps into a woman no longer willing to sit in the corner unseen.  Rounding out the inhabitants are Nathaniel Andalis as the soldier Solyony and Billy Raphael as the good doctor Chebutyken (and in this production, talented piano and accordion player), both of whom are attracted to the young Irina in ways bordering on crude and creepy.

Along with the opaque windows that hang to form invisible side-walls, Mikiko Uesugi’s set includes a likened opaque back-wall that emphasizes the inabilities of the house’s inhabitants to see or go beyond where they have become permanently stuck.  The lighting of Ray Oppenheimer brings an array of shimmering colors that reflect on that back wall in blues, browns, and purples the characters’ and scenes’ current moods.  From trains to clock chimes, Sara Witsch’s sound design adds its reminders of the loneliness and the isolation of this family. 

Shotgun Players’ KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! has wonderful moments of both honoring and poking fun at Chekhovian characters who cannot get their butts off chairs (literally at times in this production) to move on in their lives to places they would rather be.  However, in this Mark Jackson & Beth Wilmurt oft-bizarre collage of comic and tragic, there are also instances where the choice of an obscure song, a floor-hugging dance movement, a collapsing building film clip, or a truncated dialogue from the script goes places that do little to enlighten or to entertain.

Rating: 3 E

KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! continues through April 21, 2019 on the Ashby Stage of Shotgun Players, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley.  Tickets are available online at www.shotgunplayers.org or by calling 510-841-6500.

Photos by Robbie Sweeney