What on earth (or any other planet) could Actors Theater of Louisville have been thinking to lead off its prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays this year with Jordan Harrison's Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh? Someone must have thought its derivative pop- culture plot would qualify as a cutting-edge attraction for an MTV-type crowd. But its blade, alas, is decidedly dull and encrusted with juvenile pretension. This frenetic, much-ado-about-nada play is pastiche without panache, a feverish adolescent concoction that one longs to flee after the first 20 minutes.
Moll (Maria Dizzia), a know-it-all little genius who demands that her generic Fifties parents "never interrupt me when I'm making things," has holed up in her room and come up with a miraculous machine called The Third Ear for hearing sounds that can't be heard (such as the sound of a broken heart, toenails growing on field mice, and schoolroom sounds extracted from a blackboard). So of course the bad guys, exemplified by The Mercenary (Michael Ray Escamilla), "a master of disguises," want to get hold of it for nefarious purposes.
Materializing before her as a sexy ill-groomed slacker of few words, The Mercenary tells her, "I'm Garth." She has trouble hearing him because she's a bit deaf, having extracted a tiny bone from her inner ear to install in the contraption to give it a human touch. But she falls hard for him, and they quickly go all the way, as they say in PG films.
The villainous lover, however, soon absconds with The Third Ear. And so begins Moll's torturous quest to recover it as she enlists the aid of childhood friend Oliver, "a virgin" (Max Ferguson), thus telegraphing that more simulated sex of various kinds is in the offing. Through it all an overwrought Narrator (Glynis Bell), "a mellifluous voice" in old-fashioned radio drama style, keeps the story unfolding though losing her cool at strategic times while trying to pump life into Harrison's suffocatingly arch lines. "Did I mention that Moll has a temper?" she asks after Moll yells at Garth. Later, in a fit of self-pity for the role she is forced to play, she steps out of character to say, "At this point The Narrator wondered what she'd done to deserve this. She wondered when the sense of narrative order would return to the universe." Amen to that.
Great chunks of the show take place in complete darkness while cacophony dominates and creatures with eyes that glow like coals unintelligibly discuss things. (The sound is rather problematic in this play about sound; it's often hard to hear what's being said.) One voice sounds a lot like slimy Golem from "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. There's a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" feeling mixed in with magpie parallels to Huckleberry Finn's drifting on a raft down a river. And "Climb Every Mountain," the anthem from The Sound of Music, could have been the inspiration for Moll's fording streams and scaling peaks in search of the purloined machine.
Billed as Foley Artist (not explained in the program but you can figure it out when he bangs together hollowed-out coconut shells), ATL apprentice Clifford Endo Gulibert presides over a Rube Goldberg apparatus - "a baroque assortment of instruments, household objects, and noisy junk" - to create the pseudo SciFi sounds deemed crucial to the play, including a colossal explosion that shatters the device. Dizzia puts tremendous energy into her portrayal of Moll, but the character has as much depth as a comic-book drawing. And she's not very likeable. Maybe this is a misogynist play with a subtext that girls can sometimes be too smart for their own good.
The best acting comes from Jason Pugatch and Carla Harting as Moll's clueless parents and as voices in a radio mystery play called "Death and the Music Teacher" that the family listens to religiously. Harting also stands out in a cameo as an Amway salesperson Moll encounters during the quest. But for this reviewer, Harrison's "Kid-Simple" is simply unsound and falls on deaf ears.
