Mommie Queerest

You know how little kids play-act distillations of favorite movies they barely understand? They skip everything but the best parts, change characters at will, announce things that should be implied, and probably prod and hiss among each other when they’re getting it wrong. Some people look at such a precocious endeavor and see nothing but sweetness and light; the less pure among us see comic gold. If you’re the type who thinks the only things that could further improve such a delectable scenario would be permission to laugh openly and a disturbing preoccupation with genitals, then The Ringwald Theatre’s Mommie Queerest is calling your name.

Playwright Jamie Morris’s gutter-diving romp is inspired by the camp classic Mommie Dearest, a shrieking public excoriation of real-life movie star Joan Crawford based on the furious tell-all book by her adopted daughter Christina. The film, in particular its lead performance by Faye Dunaway, aims for deadly seriousness, but overshoots so far that it all but satirizes itself. Thus, left with no room to heighten, director Dyan Bailey piles the comic layers and filthy inferences high, in a winning bid to effectively shoot the moon.

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Making Porn

Let’s dispense with the nitty-gritty. As would be expected, a show entitled Making Porn is replete with full frontal male nudity, explicit sexual content, almost clinically filthy language, and an age limit: 18 and over. Longtime devotees of Ferndale’s gonzo Ringwald Theatre should be neither surprised nor fazed at this news. Nor should any raise an eyebrow at how much more this brazen production has to offer. Director Joe Bailey boasts a long history of touring with this Ronnie Larsen comedy, and it shows in his ability to render the potentially exploitative material almost beside the point, instead coaxing out a smart and savvy web of stories as keenly contemplative as they are starkly hilarious.

The place is San Francisco, the year around 1982, the mood pulsing with panting desire, courtesy of sound designer Ari Zirulnik. Larsen begins by laying out types familiar to most depictions of performance-based industries. There’s young mega-fan naif Ricky (Bailey Boudreau), who hopes to break into male-on-male pornography via established star Ray (Dan Morrison), long past creative hunger and now merely cashing in on old successes. Meanwhile, empty-worded, ruthless producer Arthur (Bailey) would sell his own soul for profit — or, better, someone else’s, like his sainted partner/assistant, Jamie (Richard Payton). Finally, there’s down-on-his-luck Jack (Brenton Herwat), a straight actor who finally finds success in this surprising demographic, while his gullible, daffy wife, Linda (Lisa Melinn), chirps with guilt-compounding approval. Although the timeline hops and skips, the first act covers about a year’s time, during which Ricky, Ray, and Jack angle, negotiate, and reluctantly agree to take part in scenes for Arthur’s films, a few of which are enacted and/or staged with riotous detachment and git-‘er-done brusqueness.

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When the Rain Stops Falling

A man waits to reunite with his son — a simple story, on its face. But even the most straightforward premise is infinitely informed by surrounding events, up to and including information unknown by the parties involved. The immeasurable heft of this interconnectedness forms the backbone of When the Rain Stops Falling, by Andrew Bovell. Now at the Ringwald Theatre, director Jamie Warrow takes this contemplative text and imbues the current production with depth of feeling that draws together scattered tales of dissolution into a cohesive big picture.

A quick triptych of video vignettes (given a distinct silent-movie feel by designer Mikey Brown) gives way to the domicile of Gabriel York (Travis Reiff), a rough-looking Australian man waiting to host his adult son (Bailey Boudreau) after years of estrangement. Reiff captivates through a jumpy, complex preamble of a monologue, attributing as much nervousness to the impending reunion as to the mysterious appearance of the intact fish he’s preparing, which gently emphasizes the future year-2039 setting and attendant preciousness of natural resources we currently take for granted. This initially meager groundwork carefully laid, the rest of the company pitches into a cyclical whirl of scenes, spinning out into exponential context surrounding Gabriel’s ancestry.

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Flowers Up Her Attic

Take a pulpy young-adult novel made famous for its taboo subject matter, and turn up the dial on the salacious stuff until it breaks. That’s the simple, winning recipe used by Marke Sobolewski and Joe Bailey to cook up Flowers Up Her Attic, a wickedly comic distillation of the similarly titled 1979 V.C. Andrews book. Now in its world premiere under Bailey’s direction, the Ringwald Theatre rocks with storybook scandal even as it keeps viewers rolling in the aisles.

In Flowers in the Attic, both the book and the 1987 movie adaptation, a group of siblings frantically languishes in the top room of their grandparents’ house, indefinitely trapped and neglected for unknown reasons, with inappropriately racy results. This show follows in the same melodramatic mold, from Traci Jo Rizzo’s forgotten storage-room set to Joe Plambeck’s Amityville-style devil lights and thriller score. Costumes by Vince Kelley double down on the horror show of circa-1980s fashions with a horror show of fakey-fake blond wigs as far as the eye can see. It’s just the right tone for the kind of campy homage that reveres its source material with feats of soaring irreverence.

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The Divine Sister

Biting wit Charles Busch sinks his satirical fangs into The Divine Sister, citing the many nuns that have dotted pop culture over the last half-century or so. Yet in this telling, whether the collective brides of Christ have a cultural imprint strong enough to make this skewering feel like long-deserved comeuppance remains unconfirmed. Director Jamie Richards approaches this gotta-nuke-something Ringwald Theatre comedy with reigning silliness, skipping daintily over patchy references to mine the moments and characters for their brash, irreverent comedic potential.

The play’s single act borrows from just about every nun source you could name, plus several you probably couldn’t, or maybe heard about once, or barely remember. Alongside ponderous dramatic Agnes of God models — exploring the line between disturbed, possessed, and miraculous — are peppy Sound of Music types with a song always on their lips, brought to intentionally cloying fruition by music director Jeremy Ryan Mossman. Busch lines up his types and scatters story arcs among them: the driving plot is that old chestnut, The Convent Needs Money, Let’s Get Some Money, How Will We Ever Get The Money?; however, numerous other pots are stirred and hints dropped, from the return of one lifetime-ago romance to a literally underground scheme rife with nefarious DaVinci Code secrecy. Bogged down by development after murky, half-baked development, the show falters by the playwright’s hand; Busch’s degeneracy is universally stronger than his cleverness, so the energy expended on loose ends hauled together into a crash-landing resolution feels like it’s elbowing out the superior raunchy-profane material.

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