Living & Arts

Criminally stellar cast enlivens flawed ‘Hearts’

In print | April 9, 2009

Jennie Eisenhower makes a great crazy lady. In the current production of “Criminal Hearts” at the Walnut Street Theatre’s Independence Studio on 3, Eisenhower plays Ata, a delightfully screwy, recently abandoned trophy wife who subsists entirely on Dr. Pepper and pizza and can’t leave her apartment.

The play opens when Bo (Kaci M. Fannin), a versatile thief, breaks into Ata’s apartment only to find that everything in the apartment has already been lifted, with the exception of the mattress and Ata’s large supply of old pizza boxes and soda cans. The one who is truly in a fix, however, is not Ata: it’s Bo. Ata suffers from a very literal interpretation of ‘freezing’ under pressure, so when she manages to wrestle Bo’s gun away, her hand promptly locks down and will not let go of the gun. Her unstable antics (and finger hovering over the trigger) force Bo into a corner, but Ata eventually releases her, having bonded during the high-pressure situation. The next time Bo is robbing an apartment in Ata’s building, she swings by to ask for her gun back, only to find that Ata hasn’t let go of it yet. Unable to pry the gun away from Ata, Bo is delayed on the job and her partner Robbie (Damon Bonetti) bursts in to see what’s up. Robbie sees the potential for collaboration with Ata; Bo and Robbie want the stuff that they were expecting to steal from Ata and Ata wants revenge on her sleazy husband Wib (Lenny Haas).

The action of the play happens in Ata’s apartment and the story is driven by Ata’s troubles and her neuroses, so Eisenhower’s performance is understandably at the core of the show’s success or failure. Eisenhower has solid comedic timing, enough facial expressions to keep things thoroughly entertaining, and the ability to charm with traits that would be gratingly annoying on anyone else.

On the page, Ata isn’t the only character with the potential to get on your nerves. All four characters are composites of recognizable personality types and the obnoxious, obscene and stupid. The comedy here stems from the absurdity of the people, not from the ridiculous plot. In fact, the Walnut Street’s production is more about a bunch of kooky characters than it is about the story, the bonding experience between two women negotiating the desire to trust one another in a world that doesn’t reward such decisions.

Relying on the individual abilities of the actors was the right decision for director Madi DiStefano. The script isn’t particularly crafty beyond its characterizations, and the situational farce could very easily bomb. When Ata makes her dramatic exit from a fight with Wib into the closet (where Robbie is hiding) instead of out the door, we could be watching any number of plays. The story has nothing new to offer to audiences, no quirky twists or subversive alterations, and the play is very talky. The play could’ve been written by a high school student, albeit one with an excellent vocabulary — Ata’s words would be at home in an SAT prep book.

What no high school student could do, however, is make the very limited space of the Independence Studio as vibrant and lively as this cast of misfits does. The lights haven’t even come up on the scene when Bo and Ata kick into gear, and the first half is pure pep. After the intermission, the play loses momentum — a feature of the writing, not the individual performances — boosted only by the arrival of Ata’s husband Wib, complete with orange self-tanner, country club attitude, and a grin that could induce nausea. Haas’ performance as Wib is fun and fresh, but it isn’t enough to bring the second act up to par.

Playwright Jane Martin, if that is indeed his/her name (there is some debate), made it simply impossible for even the best performers and directors to keep the second act going strong. The end of the play sags with the weight of sudden humanity, overestimating the power of the sincerity when the audience has spent the past hour and a half learning to love everything sordid and ludicrous.

The Walnut Street Theatre production of “Criminal Hearts” runs through April 19.