Hand To God

Play (2011)
by Robert Askins

With Marianna Bassham (Margery), Josephine Elwood (Jessica), Eliott Purcell (Jason/Tyrone), Dario Ladani Sanchez (Timothy), Lewis D. Wheeler (Pastor Greg)

Margery (Marianna Bassham), a middle-aged widow and mother of teenage Jason (Eliott Purcell), runs, at the request of Pastor Greg (Lewis D. Wheeler), a puppet club at a Fundamentalist Christian church in the heart of Texas. Participating in it are Jason, Jessica (Josephine Elwood), the girl next door on whom he has a crush, and Timothy (Dario Ladani Sanchez) a troublemaker whose mother is attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at the church. As the puppets come alive in the hands of the characters, unexpected words emerge and the tightly sewn seams of the characters and their relationships begin to get torn apart. The result is mayhem, delightfully chaotic and revelatory.

As the stage within the stage (cleverly designed by Cristina Todesco) opens at the outset of this small, hilarious comedy, one sees the perfect, composed world of the buttoned down and perfectly ordinary puppet room.

Margery is prim yet sensuous and the world she governs is concisely managed, and, as yet unbeknownst to the viewer, on the edge of total collapse. All it needs is a little tilt by Timothy, a nice-looking outcast with a daring mouth, and his subliminal partner in crime, Tyrone, Jason’s puppet alter-ego. Between them, they tear up the tracks of convention, and before long what had seemed like an extended run of tameness on the dry prairie becomes a rip-roaring flood of broken boundaries and shattered idols.

The unexpected suddenness with which things go haywire is beautifully unleashed, as one watches a contained and most proper setting turn into something that looks like a Basquiat painting on acid. Shirts fly on and off, the most unexpected sensual bonds get made, all the while Tyrone, declaiming with abandon from Jason’s lyrical hand, ruling the revolutionary roost.

With wildness growing out of the established order, Pastor Greg, a seemingly squeaky clean cleric clone, reveals his not so squeaky clean intentions towards Margery. Trying to hold order in herself as well as in her class, Margery does about as well as one might expect, dealing with an errant pastor, an oversexed fringe teenager, and a possessed son.

The amazing Marianna Bassham, known for her many wonderful contributions to the Boston stage, here brings her quite amazing capacity to keep a boiling pot contained in a demure outfit until it can hold it no longer. She is at once the girl next door and the girl in the really bad house next door and does wonderful justice to this role with her unselfconscious stripping of the layers of decency and returning within them as though nothing happened.

Lewis D. Wheeler’s Pastor Greg is a carefully seasoned mixture of sweetly dutiful purity and spicily ardent pursuit.

Dario Ladani Sanchez is a nicely balanced bad seed, offering adolescent Brando-ness and stunned boyishness as the need requires.

Eliott Purcell’s Jason and Tyrone are a great duo: angelically naive and demonically omniscient. Purcell’s ventriloquism is excellent and his Tyrone is truly as funny as he is nasty. Josephine Elwood’s Jessica, Jason’s next-door heartthrob, dutifully provides the required energetic stimuli and wry commentary.

Overall: a funny, wild and enjoyable takeoff on a widespread, but in some places little-known, cultural phenomenon.

– BADMan