The Brick
Theater in Brooklyn New York has a Comic Book Theater Festival throughout June,
and Player Affinity will be reviewing the shows all month long. Closing today is All I Want Is One
More Meanwhile, a
play about a former superheroine who renounced her powers, and became a
middle-aged woman struggling with ordinary life.
It starts out with a great theme song (Patrick Spencer
Bodd, Melanie Adelman & Ellie Dvorkin), which provides the audience a bunch
of exposition about the show’s heroine, Perfectra. Unfortunately, the exposition just keeps coming as the show
progresses, with several very long monologs filling in the complicated
backstory. I’m glad to see that
the playwright, Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons, has put so much effort into fleshing
out her fictional world, but much of it is unnecessary, and audiences could
probably fill in details if left to themselves. This is especially true, because the show takes place twenty
years after Perfectra has retired from crime fighting. The specifics on her powers and how she
got them don’t matter when there isn’t a single scene in the show where she
uses them.
You see,
decades ago, Jane (Played by Elizabeth A Bell) was the crime-fighting robot vixen, Perfectra but she decided
to retire and become a normal human so that she could raise a child. Now she’s
powerless, middle-aged and has a grown daughter who doesn’t come around very
often. This is a good set up for a bit of family drama as the two women work
out their mother/ daughter issues about being perfect. However the show isn’t
entirely a drama. It’s also not a
comedy either; it’s stuck in the middle and never quite succeeds on either
level. While it has elements of
parody and a few amusing lines, the script rarely does anything inherently
funny. To compensate for this, the direction (By Ivanna Cullinan) and performances are done with all manner of outlandish camp that only
serves to highlight the problem rather than correct it.
Aside from
the overall tone, a major problem with Meanwhile is that the audience never gets to
see Perfectra in her heyday.
Rather than witnessing these exciting adventures, the audience gets
people sitting on couches and talking about Perfectra’s crime-fighting days. There aren’t any action sequences, and
only a couple of scenes involving the use of super powers. I don’t expect an off-off Broadway show
to have people swinging around on wires like Spiderman Turn Off The Dark, but that doesn’t excuse Meanwhile for having a scene where one of the
actors reads aloud from a prop newspaper that recounts the escapades of an
unseen hero. 
The show is
also under-funded and under-rehearsed.
Actors flubbed lines, blocking was clumsy, and there were lengthy set
changes, including a lull that was obviously to cover a costume change. Speaking of costumes, in a superhero
show they’re quite important, and this project puts the characters in
lackluster outfits; one hero is just wearing red tights and boxer shorts, all
while the dialog discusses the high-tech features of his cool new super suit.
I do
suspect that I’m out of the target audience for All I Want Is One More
Meanwhile. I’m neither a single mom, nor a young
woman, and I’ve seen this sort of superhero deconstruction done many times
before. However, those interested
in seeing what becomes of Perfectra can catch the final performance tonight
(Saturday the 11th) at the Brick Theater. Check back with us over the course of the Comic Book Theater
Festival for reviews of other shows. More about the festival can be found on the Brick Theater's website.