PRESS
.
Orlando Sentinel Review: Wiley and The Hairy Man
The Orlando Sentinel, July 19, 2007
Author: Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic
.
"PLAY NICELY BALANCES SMILES AND SCARES"
.
There's atmosphere to spare in Wiley and the Hairy Man, Orlando Repertory Theatre's scary little children's comedy, where long ropes of jungly vine snake down from on high and a big, hairy beast of a guy is apt to emerge at any moment from the swamp.
But any apprehension will be allayed by the genial charm of Wiley, whose goofier moments fill pint-sized audience members with glee. On opening night, when Wiley's old hound dog gave his master a big lick in the face, a little girl's voice called out from somewhere in the darkened house, "Ewww!"
Based on an African-American folk tale first recorded in the 1930s, Wiley and the Hairy Man has been adapted any number of times for kids. And no wonder: It's an engaging ghost story, with a lesson tucked inside. Still, there's nothing preachy about the way Wiley tells you to find courage within yourself and stand up to bullies.
Under Megan Alrutz's direction, the Rep's designers and scenic artists have created a real quagmire of a swamp, all branches and vines, with alarming sounds drifting in from all around you -- the identifiable chirping of crickets and frogs, along with more mysterious shakings and tappings.
Even better, she has fashioned the Hairy Man's four-person chorus of phantasms (two women and two girls, all of them terrific) into the massive trees and briars into which the boy Wiley escapes from his tormentor.
Out in the swamp, Wiley tries to outsmart the Hairy Man, who has destroyed his dad and wants to do the same to him -- assuming Wiley and his mom don't get the monster first.
Susan Zeder's play, which is written in dialect, has a sensuous feel for rhythm and for the sounds of words. Here's how her chorus signals the Hairy Man's arrival: "Stampin', stompin', coming through the trees, shufflin' in the swamp grass, blowin' in the breeze "
Alrutz's actors make wonderful work of this stuff, from the enthralling choreography of the chorus (Kristin Collins, Meghann Henry, Jaime Stout and Lia Stivers) to the extreme dogginess of the adorable Dog (Colin Peterson).
Tina Philips makes a down-to-earth Mammy, and Nick Bazo and Jason Horne are terrific as the title characters -- Bazo as a boy beset by nightmares, who too often allows his anxieties to get the better of him, and Horne as an all-too-human Hairy Man, who may look like Swamp Thing but lets his fears and frustrations show comically through.
Anybody would be scared of a monster who says, "I'se your bad dream come true." But a Hairy Man scared of hound dogs -- well, that's the Hairy Man any child will want to see.
.
..
.
Orlando Sentinel Review: Lonely Planet
.
The Orlando Sentinel, May 25, 2002
Author: Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic
"FIERCE BETTY LIVENS STAGE WITH RICH THEMES OF `LONELY PLANET'"
Jody loves maps.
He loves the way they bring order to the universe. He loves the way they help people make their way in the world.
But maps, like people, are fallible. And no map can help Jody through the universe that is Lonely Planet, a quirky little drama about a world turned upside down.
This first production of Fierce Betty Theatre Company sets out both to stress the new group's mission -- to expose audiences and artists to gay, lesbian and bisexual theater -- and to stretch the definition of what that kind of theater can be.
It's a hefty goal for a very small play. Still, with playwright Steven Dietz's absurdist take on all-too-familiar circumstances, Lonely Planet makes the world of what Fierce Betty calls queer theater a little larger than it was before.
First performed 10 years ago in Chicago, Lonely Planet tells the story of Jody, who runs a store that sells maps but who hesitates to set foot outside his shop, and of his friend Carl, who becomes Jody's messenger from the world beyond his door. Jody likes an ordered universe; Carl embraces chaos. He claims to have half a dozen different jobs -- restoring artwork, replacing broken windshields, writing for a tabloid newspaper, watering plants -- and he rescues chairs that have been left behind by their owners and brings them to Jody's shop.
When Jody says his friends are dying, that he has lost 30 friends in six months, you may figure out pretty quickly what has happened to the owners of all those chairs. But Lonely Planet is only peripherally an AIDS play: It's about friendship, about what one man will do for another to help him get on with life.
Fierce Betty is made up mostly of new graduates of Rollins College and of theater students there, and the sheer youth of Lonely Planet's cast gives the play a little less heft than it might otherwise have. At close range in the college's little Fred Stone Theatre, Nick Bazo's Carl and Anthony Trujillo's Jody don't look old enough to have suffered the losses they're said to have suffered. But the two actors are game enough to rise above opening jitters, and, under Greg London-Williams' direction, their affection for the show shines through.
Bazo is a quicksilver Carl, perhaps a little broad for the Fred Stones's tiny space but with a sweetness and directness that is true to the character. Jody is more guarded, more discreet, and his fear is all the more affecting for being underplayed. When Trujillo, as Jody, speaks directly to the audience, what he doesn't say comes forth as vividly as what he does.
Lonely Planet feels both a little dated and a little too neat: Throughout the play, Carl's revelations come across as surprising and, strangely, as no surprise at all. And maybe the play would have been better off if Dietz had left some of the characters' feelings implied rather than said.
Still, the need these two men have for each other is palpable, and it's a need that has nothing to do with sex. Surely seeing this play along with Fierce Betty's other two offerings -- Holly Hughes' The Well of Horniness, which opened Friday night and runs through June 8, and Diana Son's Stop Kiss, which runs Wednesday through June 9 will give audiences a better idea of what queer theater might be.
.
.Orlando Sentinel Featured Article: Fierce Betty Theatre
The Orlando Sentinel, May 22, 2002
Author: Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic
.
"NEW THEATRE TROUP GIVE VOICE TO GAY THEATRE"
.
Everybody knows the meaning of the word fierce.
But put it together with the name Betty -- as in Fierce Betty Theatre Company, a new gay and lesbian troupe in Winter Park -- and you'll have to ask Courtney Miller for an explanation.
Miller, 22, is one of three young founding members of Fierce Betty, a company dedicated to providing gays and lesbians a place to see people like themselves onstage.
When they were trying to think of a name for the group, the three each came up with 100 words they wanted their company to be. Fierce turned up on everybody's list. But on Miller's list, also, was Betty.
"I said, `What does that mean?' " artistic director Greg London-Williams says with a laugh. "She said, `It's a feeling.' "
Actually, Betty means a lot of things, Miller says, and that's in keeping with the goals of the new company, whose logo of a woman in a kerchief flexing her muscle comes from the poster of World War II's Rosie the Riveter.
To Miller, Betty means Bettie Page, the pinup queen of the 1950s. It also means the typical '50s housewife. In the movie Encino Man, she says, it's a noun: Somebody's a Betty, a babe.
And, says London-Williams, "Our friend Anthony's truck is named Betty."
That combination of high seriousness and high-spirited silliness goes a long way toward explaining Fierce Betty, which will produce three shows in repertory beginning tonight.
The shows they'll be presenting also tell the story: Steve Dietz's Lonely Planet, a bittersweet look at the friendship between two young men; Diana Son's Stop Kiss, a drama about two young women who surprise themselves by falling in love; and Holly Hughes' The Well of Horniness, which the company describes as a "psycho-lesbian-murder-mystery" performed in the style of a 1930s radio show. The three plays will run in rotation through June 9 at the Fred Stone Theatre, the small red-brick building that serves as the Rollins College theater department's second stage.
Miller is a rising senior at Rollins, where London-Williams is head professor of acting and directing. Danielle Fernandez and Nick Bazo, the two other founding members, graduated from Rollins this month.
The idea for Fierce Betty started with London-Williams, who came to the Winter Park campus last fall after running a theater company in Phoenix. But the drive is coming from young company members intent on creating their own work in the theater.
"There's so much potential in Florida, and not so many opportunities," says Bazo, 21, who grew up in Key West but whose family now lives in Polk County.
.
Miller, who comes from Daytona Beach, says she and other students have been taught to make their own opportunities.
.
"That's been emphasized this year," she says. "We've heard again and again: Don't wait for work. Make it."
.
London-Williams says one of his jobs as a professor is to give students options for creating theater, so they don't all think they have to join the auditioning hordes in New York. "
.
My hope is I can be an anchor," he says. "I want to give them a chance to do works of passion, rather than running off as a chorus singer."
.
The idea also was to give them something to do this summer, with the hopes that the company will find its own storefront theater after the summer season at the Fred Stone winds down.
"As a student," Miller says, "it's very odd to spend eight to nine months doing theater and then you go home and get the job at McDonald's and you're out of it."
.
A NICHE TO FILL
Fierce Betty's founders decided they wanted to make theater relevant to them as gays and lesbians. As soon as he moved here, London-Williams noticed that the Orlando area has little theater aimed specifically at gays -- just occasional shows at the Parliament House -- and nothing created for lesbians or bisexuals. The younger company members have lived with that lack.
Fernandez, 22, points out that Orlando, where she grew up, has a thriving gay community. "But right now, it's just the clubs and bars," she says. "They're begging for some culture. We just hope they'll support it."
To Miller, the impetus to do plays about gays and lesbians comes from wanting to see people she can identify with onstage. On TV, she says, most of the characters are heterosexual, and those who are gay or lesbian tend to be flamboyant or offbeat or something else far from the norm.
"What there is in the mainstream [media]," Bazo says, "isn't who we are as people.".
The company, which has grown to include about 30 members, is starting out with three wildly different plays.