Kathleen Akerley does a commendable job of wrestling Kurt Vonnegut’s blackly comic novel onto the stage, trimming it to a two-and-a-half-hour evening while retaining good chunks of dialog intact—for instance, the memorable warning by Claire Minton to never index your own book. The script also maintains narrative drive by focusing on narrator Jonah’s (the bemused, solid Michael Glenn) urge to finish the book he is writing about Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his family, in much the same way that the reporter in Citizen Kane maintains a line through that film’s various episodes and reminiscences—or at least until Jonah arrives in San Lorenzo and all hell breaks loose.
The play is also cinematic in its distortion of space and scale: Jonah looks at Franklin Hoenikker’s scale-model town through a magnifier, and the actors become full-size representations of the plasticine people that he sees: bodies as set dressing. In a reversal of scale, Jonah re-enacts in act 3 the destruction of San Lorenzo with a paper doll theater, lip-buzzing the island as the planes in the air show, knocking the six-inch puppets with his hands into the abyss. And in the stunning opening scene with Jonah, a bartender, and a prostitute, Akerley solves the sight-line problems of the Callan’s black box performance space by placing the players in three different playing areas, each with a duplicate set of props: three letters from Newt Hoenikker to Jonah.
Alas, the technical reset necessary to get us into act 3 is a bit of a momentum-killer.
The Longacre Lea regulars are augmented with additional cast members, bringing their numbers to ten to fill the roles of three dozen named characters. Of particular note among Joe Brack, who gives us a manic Franklin Hoenikker, and Danny Gavigan’s clearly defined bartender, cabbie, and Angela Hoenikker.
- Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington