Furious Theatre Company

LA Weekly

Burning Down the House
Simon Block’s Chimps takes a comic view of suburban immolation
--Steven Leigh Morris

From the start of his sometimes clumsy yet riveting 1997 thriller, Chimps, playwright Simon Block has it in for his central character. Young dolt Mark (Shawn Lee) has quit his job delivering mail to create a children’s book based on the alphabet, with each page comprised of a letter and a baroque illustration. Mark is speculating that the profits from his kiddie book will hold up his lagging end of the finances in his domestic partnership with girlfriend Stevie (Sara Hennessy). But first he has to finish the book, and Mark is notoriously slow in every aspect of his life. (That he’s quite literally banking, at Stevie’s expense, on selling his children’s book tells you all you need to know.) Mark’s two ornate renderings on cardboard, perched conspicuously on a bookshelf — “‘A’ is for Armadillo, ‘B’ is for Bunny” — stand as a rim-shot testament to all he’s accomplished in the past several weeks — only 24 letters to go.

Stevie spends most of the play fuming at Mark — that he leaves her laundry to fester on the clothesline while she’s at work, that he keeps refusing to take paying jobs. Pregnant with his child, Stevie pays their mortgage and all their other bills. She’s neither impressed nor beguiled by Mark’s excruciating-to-behold creative process. “When I come home and see you drawing on your hands and knees, in your underwear, I just want to put my fist through a wall,” she remarks dryly.

Hennessy’s preponderance of fury-laced lines could easily render her a shrew, but she downplays her barbs with a consistently muted exasperation that anchors Stevie as the one character we can trust. She’s the grownup and Mark is off somewhere, crayons in hand, circling Pluto. The cumulative effect is less a battle of ideas than a judgment — an open-and-shut condemnation of Mark’s prolonged adolescence and hang-dog solipsism, and an affirmation of Stevie’s eagle-eyed pragmatism — an amusing comedy sketch dressed up as a drama.

Block has made a name for himself in London, breaking onto the scene at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995 with his first play, Not a Game for Boys. Chimps, which premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre Club, contains repartee filled with clipped, rhythmic repetitions that are custom designed for British cadences and sounds. Director Dámaso Rodriguez’s decision to move it from an Anglo to an American suburb strands the actors on something of a linguistic raft floating somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Shakespeare easily leaps from London to the American Midwest because his language is so formalized. But with contemporary English dramatists writing in a realistic mode, the jump becomes considerably more treacherous. Furthermore, both Hennessy and Lee display almost no range because there’s none written into their roles. Lee lumbers dutifully oxlike with perpetually wounded pride, while Hennessy keeps pecking at him.

Despite Rodriguez’s honed, taut staging and Melissa Teoh’s impressive, Ikea-furnished set that details Mark and Stevie’s kitchen and living room with a backdrop of hanging architectural blueprints, watching these two starts to grow wearing, until the arrival of two traveling con-artist salesmen, Lawrence and Gabriel (Richard Hilton and Terrance Ellis, respectively).

Mark and Stevie’s partnership is on the brink of collapse at the play’s start. It’s no surprise then that Lawrence and Gabriel — invited in by a gullible Mark — should finish the job. Yet the way they do it — the skill and psychological insight with which Block dramatizes high-pressure selling — turns both the play and the production into a titillating exhibition of home invasion and domestic terrorism.

Lawrence and Gabriel, reeking with the same comically tinged menace as the two thugs in Harold Pinter’s early one-act, The Dumb Waiter, throw Mark and Stevie’s loyalty on the grill. The salesmen insist that the walls of the house are crumbling (not unlike the young couple’s future), supporting their assertion with bogus photos and pseudo science. The walls must be treated with “Excote,” they insist, or the house could be worthless tomorrow.

Because Mark made the executive decision to let them into the house, their presence is, for him, an endorsement of whatever dubious authority he possesses. Stevie, however, senses that burly Lawrence (a former poultry man, struggling to make a do-or-die commission) and reptilian Gabriel are not just a smarmy nuisance but are in fact sinister — sipping coffee in her kitchen and turning the suitably named Mark against her with ruses and clubhouse misogyny, all in order to close a deal that will assure the young couple decades of poverty.

Hilton plays Lawrence like Larry King desperately auditioning for a new job and making ingratiating, off-color jokes. “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit?” he quips, not realizing that Mark’s brother is a lawyer — “The bucket.” Lawrence has a daughter of his own, and his wobbling conviction to destroy this young family to close the sale provides, between the salesmen, a kind of parallel marriage as much on the rocks as that of the central couple.

Stevie entrusts Mark to boot them out. But what is trust? Obedience school? They offer Mark compliments, girders for his flimsy backbone and salves for his artistic insecurity. Though Mark betrays Stevie with one transparently stupid decision after another, the melodramatic power of the salesmen’s calculations gives the play a vicelike grip. And though the play would have a deeper reach if the visitors’ fraud weren’t so naked from the start, it contains a sizzling insight that extends from home repair to homeland security to foreign policy: If you want to close the sale, tell them that the sky is falling and that immediate action is imperative.

Back Stage West

Critic's Pick
--Hoyt Hilsman

Have you ever been tempted by one of those "free" rug cleaning scams? You know, the ones that promise no charge for cleaning but end up selling you hundreds of dollars of useless cleaning products or some fancy treatment you never needed? High-pressure con games, certainly around since the first salesman knocked on a caveman's door, are the subject of British playwright Simon Block's wonderfully pointed and darkly humorous script.

Stevie (Sara Hennessy) and Mark (Shawn Lee) are a young couple who have just moved into their first house and are expecting their first baby. Stevie, panicking about the cost of their new lives, is out earning money as fast as she can, while Mark stays at home, working on an illustrated children's book in fits and starts, having quit his job at the post office. When a pair of salesmen, Lawrence (Richard Hilton) and Gabriel (Terrence Ellis), arrives on their doorstep offering a "free" inspection of the house, Mark blithely agrees.

What ensues is a knock-down, drag-out brawl of wits as the salesmen probe and cajole, looking for psychic weaknesses in the couple that they can exploit to close the deal. They lie, exaggerate, browbeat, seduce, flatter, insult, rant, and weep. In short, they do whatever they can to get these nice people to part with a larger amount of their money for a service that they don't need and that has no value whatsoever. This is capitalism in action, folks.

But Block's script is not simply a diatribe against human greed and deceit. It also explores the vulnerability of human beings, not only the victims but also the salesmen themselves. Lawrence (wonderfully played with raw grit by Hilton) is a middle-aged man with no future, thrust into this petty larceny by the circumstances of life and his own fumbling personality. Mark is a tortured soul, caught between childhood dreams and adult responsibility. Stevie is burdened with the anxieties of new responsibilities--most important, the arrival of a baby--and responds with manic stabs at control. And Gabriel, the slick mastermind of this sleazy operation, struggles with whatever bit of soul he has not bartered away.

Director Damaso Rodriguez masterfully steers this production; he and his actors approach the text with a slightly stylized lilt that nicely bridges the trans-Atlantic gap and adds a surreal flavor to this everyday situation. In addition to Hilton's fine work, Hennessy is dynamic in her portrayal of a wife on the ropes, Lee is suitably engaging as the hapless husband, and Ellis is solid as the crown prince of hucksterism. Scenic design by Melissa Teoh and lighting design by Vonessa Martin are exquisite in their detail.

Pasadena Weekly

'Chimps' off the old block
Furious Theatre knocks on suburbia
--John Esther

Welcome to the world of Simon Block's "Chimps," where modern-day medicine showmen hunt down chumps on the tract housing blocks of postwar suburbia, selling things you do not want but think you need. It is another Saturday afternoon for Stevie (Sara Hennessy) and Mark (Shawn Lee). They have done their shopping, purchasing all the brand names their little minds and smaller wallets have been induced to consume in the name of suburban tranquility.

She is a graphic artist. He is an unemployed artist working on children's illustration book. They are young, new homebuyers with a baby on the way. Today she plans on attending a self-defense class. He promises, again, to start building a nursery. There is just one tumultuous thing they need to get through first - a pair of pushy salesmen.

Originally a British play, Pasadena's Furious Theatre has adapted "Chimps" for American audiences with Dámaso Rodriguez, recent NAACP winner for Best Direction for "Saturday Night at the Palace," directing. After a rather stodgy performance by Hennessy and Lee in the opening scenes, which dictates rather than hints at the relationship between the unmarried couple, salesmen Lawrence (Richard Hilton) and Gabriel (Terrance Ellis) arrive and push their way through the door and into their lives.

Since Mark has invited them, Stevie insists that he get rid of the two. But Mark is no match for the savvy salesmen, who know just how to push Mark's buttons.

Adding a layer to "Chimps" subtext, Gabriel, who is African American, poses as Lawrence's subordinate when, in fact, Lawrence, a fifty-something man who was fired after 30 years with a chicken corporation, must make the sale or else Gabriel will have him fired.

In one telling moment, Lawrence, believing the hype of the arrangement and holding the deep, hidden resentment of a white man working for a minority, assumes Mark is hinting that Gabriel is an Uncle Tom with six kids to support. In reality, Gabriel has one daughter - who sounds like a spoiled brat. It is a telling moment, capturing both the way racism subconsciously feeds the white man's ego in America while igniting patriarchal instincts of protecting home and child (in Mark's case, future child) while lending a hand to society. It is something Mark needs. For in his irresponsibility in being "the man of the family," he has been rendered a subject in Stevie's matriarchal household.

In other words, the macho world of sales has Mark's testosterone sweltering to unsafe highs. Stevie's reluctance to buy into their product increases the play's drama to the boiling point of no return. Mark wants to believe the two salesmen so much so that as they contradict themselves with deal upon deal and bargain upon bargain, only Stevie catches the incongruities. This only exasperates Mark, who begins cracking under the pressures all around him. He wants so desperately to be right that his ego drives him mad. While the acting itself splinters at points, Hennessy, Lee, Hilton and Ellis have one's suspension of belief in line as the play reaches its painful crescendo.

Rodriguez's direction, highlighted by lighting snapshots of suburban life in decay, gives the support the play requires.

However, it is Melissa Teoh's (recently a NAACP nominee) masterful scenic design that captures the brilliant text of the play at its zenith.

In front of an omnipresent sketched outline of the house stand half-built doors, half-empty shelves and counters with unnecessary knickknacks. In front of that are the stuffed cupboards of superfluous products, capturing the emptiness of suburbia and the stuff used to fill the void.


	*LA Weekly* *Burning Down the House* *Simon Block’s Chimps takes a comic view of suburban immolation* --Steven Leigh Morris From the start of his sometimes clumsy yet riveting 1997 thriller, Chimps, playwright Simon Block has it in for his central character. Young dolt Mark (Shawn Lee) has quit his job delivering mail to create a children’s book based on the alphabet, with each page comprised of a letter and a baroque illustration. Mark is speculating that the profits from his kiddie book will hold up his lagging end of the finances in his domestic partnership with girlfriend Stevie (Sara Hennessy). But first he has to finish the book, and Mark is notoriously slow in every aspect of his life. (That he’s quite literally banking, at Stevie’s expense, on selling his children’s book tells you all you need to know.) Mark’s two ornate renderings on cardboard, perched conspicuously on a bookshelf — “‘A’ is for Armadillo, ‘B’ is for Bunny” — stand as a rim-shot testament to all he’s accomplished in the past several weeks — only 24 letters to go. Stevie spends most of the play fuming at Mark — that he leaves her laundry to fester on the clothesline while she’s at work, that he keeps refusing to take paying jobs. Pregnant with his child, Stevie pays their mortgage and all their other bills. She’s neither impressed nor beguiled by Mark’s excruciating-to-behold creative process. “When I come home and see you drawing on your hands and knees, in your underwear, I just want to put my fist through a wall,” she remarks dryly. Hennessy’s preponderance of fury-laced lines could easily render her a shrew, but she downplays her barbs with a consistently muted exasperation that anchors Stevie as the one character we can trust. She’s the grownup and Mark is off somewhere, crayons in hand, circling Pluto. The cumulative effect is less a battle of ideas than a judgment — an open-and-shut condemnation of Mark’s prolonged adolescence and hang-dog solipsism, and an affirmation of Stevie’s eagle-eyed pragmatism — an amusing comedy sketch dressed up as a drama. Block has made a name for himself in London, breaking onto the scene at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995 with his first play, Not a Game for Boys. Chimps, which premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre Club, contains repartee filled with clipped, rhythmic repetitions that are custom designed for British cadences and sounds. Director Dámaso Rodriguez’s decision to move it from an Anglo to an American suburb strands the actors on something of a linguistic raft floating somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Shakespeare easily leaps from London to the American Midwest because his language is so formalized. But with contemporary English dramatists writing in a realistic mode, the jump becomes considerably more treacherous. Furthermore, both Hennessy and Lee display almost no range because there’s none written into their roles. Lee lumbers dutifully oxlike with perpetually wounded pride, while Hennessy keeps pecking at him. Despite Rodriguez’s honed, taut staging and Melissa Teoh’s impressive, Ikea-furnished set that details Mark and Stevie’s kitchen and living room with a backdrop of hanging architectural blueprints, watching these two starts to grow wearing, until the arrival of two traveling con-artist salesmen, Lawrence and Gabriel (Richard Hilton and Terrance Ellis, respectively). Mark and Stevie’s partnership is on the brink of collapse at the play’s start. It’s no surprise then that Lawrence and Gabriel — invited in by a gullible Mark — should finish the job. Yet the way they do it — the skill and psychological insight with which Block dramatizes high-pressure selling — turns both the play and the production into a titillating exhibition of home invasion and domestic terrorism. Lawrence and Gabriel, reeking with the same comically tinged menace as the two thugs in Harold Pinter’s early one-act, The Dumb Waiter, throw Mark and Stevie’s loyalty on the grill. The salesmen insist that the walls of the house are crumbling (not unlike the young couple’s future), supporting their assertion with bogus photos and pseudo science. The walls must be treated with “Excote,” they insist, or the house could be worthless tomorrow. Because Mark made the executive decision to let them into the house, their presence is, for him, an endorsement of whatever dubious authority he possesses. Stevie, however, senses that burly Lawrence (a former poultry man, struggling to make a do-or-die commission) and reptilian Gabriel are not just a smarmy nuisance but are in fact sinister — sipping coffee in her kitchen and turning the suitably named Mark against her with ruses and clubhouse misogyny, all in order to close a deal that will assure the young couple decades of poverty. Hilton plays Lawrence like Larry King desperately auditioning for a new job and making ingratiating, off-color jokes. “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit?” he quips, not realizing that Mark’s brother is a lawyer — “The bucket.” Lawrence has a daughter of his own, and his wobbling conviction to destroy this young family to close the sale provides, between the salesmen, a kind of parallel marriage as much on the rocks as that of the central couple. Stevie entrusts Mark to boot them out. But what is trust? Obedience school? They offer Mark compliments, girders for his flimsy backbone and salves for his artistic insecurity. Though Mark betrays Stevie with one transparently stupid decision after another, the melodramatic power of the salesmen’s calculations gives the play a vicelike grip. And though the play would have a deeper reach if the visitors’ fraud weren’t so naked from the start, it contains a sizzling insight that extends from home repair to homeland security to foreign policy: If you want to close the sale, tell them that the sky is falling and that immediate action is imperative. *Back Stage West* *Critic's Pick* --Hoyt Hilsman Have you ever been tempted by one of those "free" rug cleaning scams? You know, the ones that promise no charge for cleaning but end up selling you hundreds of dollars of useless cleaning products or some fancy treatment you never needed? High-pressure con games, certainly around since the first salesman knocked on a caveman's door, are the subject of British playwright Simon Block's wonderfully pointed and darkly humorous script. Stevie (Sara Hennessy) and Mark (Shawn Lee) are a young couple who have just moved into their first house and are expecting their first baby. Stevie, panicking about the cost of their new lives, is out earning money as fast as she can, while Mark stays at home, working on an illustrated children's book in fits and starts, having quit his job at the post office. When a pair of salesmen, Lawrence (Richard Hilton) and Gabriel (Terrence Ellis), arrives on their doorstep offering a "free" inspection of the house, Mark blithely agrees. What ensues is a knock-down, drag-out brawl of wits as the salesmen probe and cajole, looking for psychic weaknesses in the couple that they can exploit to close the deal. They lie, exaggerate, browbeat, seduce, flatter, insult, rant, and weep. In short, they do whatever they can to get these nice people to part with a larger amount of their money for a service that they don't need and that has no value whatsoever. This is capitalism in action, folks. But Block's script is not simply a diatribe against human greed and deceit. It also explores the vulnerability of human beings, not only the victims but also the salesmen themselves. Lawrence (wonderfully played with raw grit by Hilton) is a middle-aged man with no future, thrust into this petty larceny by the circumstances of life and his own fumbling personality. Mark is a tortured soul, caught between childhood dreams and adult responsibility. Stevie is burdened with the anxieties of new responsibilities--most important, the arrival of a baby--and responds with manic stabs at control. And Gabriel, the slick mastermind of this sleazy operation, struggles with whatever bit of soul he has not bartered away. Director Damaso Rodriguez masterfully steers this production; he and his actors approach the text with a slightly stylized lilt that nicely bridges the trans-Atlantic gap and adds a surreal flavor to this everyday situation. In addition to Hilton's fine work, Hennessy is dynamic in her portrayal of a wife on the ropes, Lee is suitably engaging as the hapless husband, and Ellis is solid as the crown prince of hucksterism. Scenic design by Melissa Teoh and lighting design by Vonessa Martin are exquisite in their detail. *Pasadena Weekly* *'Chimps' off the old block* Furious Theatre knocks on suburbia --John Esther Welcome to the world of Simon Block's "Chimps," where modern-day medicine showmen hunt down chumps on the tract housing blocks of postwar suburbia, selling things you do not want but think you need. It is another Saturday afternoon for Stevie (Sara Hennessy) and Mark (Shawn Lee). They have done their shopping, purchasing all the brand names their little minds and smaller wallets have been induced to consume in the name of suburban tranquility. She is a graphic artist. He is an unemployed artist working on children's illustration book. They are young, new homebuyers with a baby on the way. Today she plans on attending a self-defense class. He promises, again, to start building a nursery. There is just one tumultuous thing they need to get through first - a pair of pushy salesmen. Originally a British play, Pasadena's Furious Theatre has adapted "Chimps" for American audiences with Dámaso Rodriguez, recent NAACP winner for Best Direction for "Saturday Night at the Palace," directing. After a rather stodgy performance by Hennessy and Lee in the opening scenes, which dictates rather than hints at the relationship between the unmarried couple, salesmen Lawrence (Richard Hilton) and Gabriel (Terrance Ellis) arrive and push their way through the door and into their lives. Since Mark has invited them, Stevie insists that he get rid of the two. But Mark is no match for the savvy salesmen, who know just how to push Mark's buttons. Adding a layer to "Chimps" subtext, Gabriel, who is African American, poses as Lawrence's subordinate when, in fact, Lawrence, a fifty-something man who was fired after 30 years with a chicken corporation, must make the sale or else Gabriel will have him fired. In one telling moment, Lawrence, believing the hype of the arrangement and holding the deep, hidden resentment of a white man working for a minority, assumes Mark is hinting that Gabriel is an Uncle Tom with six kids to support. In reality, Gabriel has one daughter - who sounds like a spoiled brat. It is a telling moment, capturing both the way racism subconsciously feeds the white man's ego in America while igniting patriarchal instincts of protecting home and child (in Mark's case, future child) while lending a hand to society. It is something Mark needs. For in his irresponsibility in being "the man of the family," he has been rendered a subject in Stevie's matriarchal household. In other words, the macho world of sales has Mark's testosterone sweltering to unsafe highs. Stevie's reluctance to buy into their product increases the play's drama to the boiling point of no return. Mark wants to believe the two salesmen so much so that as they contradict themselves with deal upon deal and bargain upon bargain, only Stevie catches the incongruities. This only exasperates Mark, who begins cracking under the pressures all around him. He wants so desperately to be right that his ego drives him mad. While the acting itself splinters at points, Hennessy, Lee, Hilton and Ellis have one's suspension of belief in line as the play reaches its painful crescendo. Rodriguez's direction, highlighted by lighting snapshots of suburban life in decay, gives the support the play requires. However, it is Melissa Teoh's (recently a NAACP nominee) masterful scenic design that captures the brilliant text of the play at its zenith. In front of an omnipresent sketched outline of the house stand half-built doors, half-empty shelves and counters with unnecessary knickknacks. In front of that are the stuffed cupboards of superfluous products, capturing the emptiness of suburbia and the stuff used to fill the void.