THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607090113
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater Review
SOURCE: Montague Gammon III
LENGTH: 72 lines
The Regent University student production of Beth Henley's comedy ``The Miss Firecracker Contest'' absolutely overflows with energy and enthusiasm.
With all the laughing and shouting, the crying and shouting, the yelling and shouting, and with a touch more shouting thrown in to liven up the mix, it's as high volume as a string of firecrackers exploding.
Once the dancing and prancing, the jumping, leaping, crawling, falling, twisting, turning, nonstop mugging and various contortions through which the cast members put themselves are considered, one has something more comparable to a two-and-a-half-hour cannon volley.
Of course, Mr. Shakespeare once made a worthwhile comment about the minimal significance of loud noise and furious action. Henley's characters are written as an antic group; but this does not mean they must be incessantly frantic.
The show is set in a small Southern town, as Carnelle Scott prepares to compete in the local Independence Day beauty and talent contest from which the play takes its title. She was raised in a family that was dysfunctional in ways that only a Southern playwright's creation could be.
By the time Carnelle goes after the title of Miss Firecracker, all that survives of the folks who adopted her are sister and brother Elain and Delmount. Even less survives of her reputation; her earlier promiscuity had earned her the nickname ``Little Miss Hot Tamale'' along with a regimen of treatments for a sexually transmitted disease.
Delmount has recently been released from a mental institution to which he was confined as an alternative to being jailed for an assault charge. Besides a violent temper he has what he himself terms ``an obsessive eye for beauty.'' In other words, he's a compulsive and singularly indiscriminate skirt chaser, besides being vain and somewhat pompously cynical.
Elain, a former Miss Firecracker herself, returns to the ancestral home when she abandons her wealthy, supposedly dull husband along with her two children.
These three have an impromptu reunion as Carnelle and a young seamstress called Popeye Jackson, whom Carnelle has hired to make her costumes, ready themselves for the contest.
Popeye is herself quite a character. Raised in backwoods poverty, visually handicapped, and utterly unfamiliar with much of the modern world, she finds items like an old typewriter ``scary.''
All four are strange and engaging creations, but the emphasis this production places on their emotional excesses results in subtleties of their personalities being ignored for a broad, ultimately superficial display of outward eccentricities.
This isn't to say that director Michelle Hoppe hasn't given the show some delightful moments. Tonya Elredge, as Popeye, creates a bit of wonderful comedy when she takes a slow motion fall over a high-backed chair.
Catherine Segars, as Carnelle, gets some fine passages, especially when she teams up with Darian Jaynes in the part of Elain. James Frizzell, in the role of a doomed young man named Mac Sam, delivers witty lines convincingly. Janie King, as a self-important young woman who's altogether too eager to forgive Delmount for having seduced her years before, is clear and confident in her character.
There's plenty of talent on the Regent stage, and they do put forth almost superhuman efforts in a show that is anything but easy to stage. The unfailingly strange personalities of these characters makes it all too easy to approach their weirdness as if it were an end in itself, rather than a critical facet of their three-dimensional personalities. ILLUSTRATION: AT A GLANCE
WHAT: ``The Miss Firecracker Contest,'' by Beth Henley; part of
the A.C.T.S. Series at Regent University
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, July 12 and 13; 3 p.m. Saturday
and Sunday, July 13 and 14. (A.C.T.S. Series runs weekends through
Aug. 18).
WHERE: Regent University
TICKETS: 579-4245 by CNB