Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 1, 1992 TAG: 9202010317
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`WHITE MONEY' TACKLES SOCIETY'S CELEBRITIES
There's a telling line in "JFK" when New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, underscoring the weirdness of events surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy, tells his staff, "We're through the looking glass, people."The same description applies to "White Money," the second play in Mill Mountain Theatre's Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works.
Playwright Julie Jensen takes the audience into a surrealistic roadside America of trailer houses, cut-rate motels and hash houses. It's a terrain in which the insidious influence of television shapes human expectations and behavior, distorting forever the reality of the people who populate it.
Alice in this case is Ella, the only "normal" character as the play begins. She lives in a trailer in the Nevada desert and is married to a yahoo by the name of Snakes whose leisure time is occupied by beer guzzling and professional wrestling. His hero is Killer Bovine, a bruiser he regards as the greatest man in the country. Ella tries to get her man away from the tube with little success. Then one day a strange and sinister character - the first in a string of strange and sinister characters - interrupts Ella's routine.
Nervene barges into Ella's house, swilling Vodka laced with chocolate syrup, insinuating an affair with her ex-husband Snakes and singing the praises of a ubiquitous televangelist.
Eventually, Ella hits the road. She visits her mother who is vegetating in front of the televangelist's money-grubbing TV messages, lands a job at a roadside diner where she meets a sinister manipulator of the news, winds up at a motel run by a woman from India and encounters the legendary Killer Bovine and his wife, Seattle.
Throughout her odyssey, Ella is confronted by the pervasive power of television and the cult of celebrity - the true opiates of the masses. Killer Bovine and the televangelist are locked in a power duel for the pocketbooks of gullible Americans. The preacher exhorts his flock to feed the "money-seeking vortex."
Televangelists, professional wrestlers and TV are fat targets, but Jensen blasts them with a precise, inventive wit. Jensen flavors the proceedings with liberal doses of black humor and skewed dialogue.
The cast is first-rate. Jane Ridley plays Ella, who recounts her strange tale in a funny, matter-of-fact way, as if the increasingly odd events that beset her are business-as-usual.
David Bridgewater, a true comic find at Mill Mountain, tackles three roles: the insensitive Snakes, the eerie news engineer with a truckload of explosives and the ruthless Killer Bovine.
Mimi Wyche has a great time with even a wider range of roles: the brazen Nervene, Ella's vegetating and mean-spirited mother, the Indian motel clerk, and Seattle, the lady wrestler.
And director Ernest Zulia stages the production with a liveliness that perfectly accents its nightmarish but comic underpinnings.
"White Money" plays through Feb. 8 at Mill Mountain's Theatre B. For reservations and information, call 342-5740.