‘The Nerd’ Production Silly But Enjoyable
“The Nerd,” Saturday, Sept. 30, The ACT
File “The Nerd” under guilty pleasures. A gloriously stupid show, Larry Shue’s comedy utilizes a classic “guest from hell” plot to illustrate just how far people can be pushed before changing their lives.
Although the play suffers from excessive exposition and has several slow spots, the comic payoffs in the ACT’s production are large, inspired and enjoyably sophomoric.
Half the cast is already familiar with Shue’s writing, having appeared in last year’s production of “The Foreigner” at the Civic Theatre. Scott Dunckley, Brian Kitt and Jack Lippard work well together again, and Lippard is a particular pleasure as the title nerd, Rick Steadman.
Slender as a beanpole, dressed in the requisite high-waisted flood pants, short-sleeved shirt and skinny tie, with black-rimmed glasses and a grating voice, Lippard takes these stereotypical details and creates a riveting, believable loser. He finds the comic rhythm in Shue’s dialogue and makes the show move. The pace suffers whenever he is offstage.
Much of this is due to the playwright. The sharp humor so evident when characters’ desires are thwarted is built upon a foundation of slow, often laborious setups of relationships and situations. This could be remedied by a bit more urgency at the beginning of the play on the part of Jamie Flannery, Katy Kapelke and Dunckley.
Flannery’s Willum, a frustrated Terre Haute, Ind., architect, is in the midst of compromising his vision with a cookie-cutter hotel design at the same time that he pines for Kapelke’s Tansy, who plans to move to Washington, D.C., for a TV weather job.
Dunckley’s Axel, a jaded local theater critic (ouch!), snipes from the sidelines as the third wheel while he watches his two friends deal with the strain.
Director Kimberly J. Roberts finally gets the action moving when the Waldgrave family arrives for Willum’s birthday party. Brian Kitt’s bullying cheapskate tycoon Warnock Waldgrave pesters Willum into stripping his new hotel of all character and detail and rides herd on his neurotic wife and son.
Judy Brender’s Mrs. Waldgrave finds release from the tension only in breaking crockery, and young Thor (alternated by Ryan Patrick Flannery and Abram Manion) takes to locking himself in closets and bathrooms. This madness is only heightened by the arrival of the nerdy Steadman.
Willum is indebted to Steadman, who saved his life in Vietnam, and this obligation is the central comic cog the play turns upon. Willum will do anything to make Steadman feel welcome, which gives the clueless nerd license to engage in outrageous behavior. Steadman moves in, proceeds to utterly ruin Willum’s life and, by the last scene, drives Axel, Tansy and Willum to hatch a plan to scare him off. Their improvised “authentic Terre Haute dinner,” complete with sand tea, warm, watery cottage cheese and porcine transformations, is a triumph of escalating desperation.
A final note: The ACT was recently victimized by the theft of a substantial amount of technical equipment. Perhaps the best way to help the theater recover from the loss is to support it throughout the season.
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