UFTA—Here
comes the Norwegians!
Having spent
parts of several years in Minneapolis working on a degree at the University of
Minnesota, I have heard most of the jokes tossed around in the wild and wacky production
of The Norwegians at the tiny Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson. C. Denly-Swansen’s ninety minute
intermissionless work moves rapidly, but ultimately succumbs to its origination
as a ten minute play that has been extended beyond the capacity of its core
idea.
The fun of
the setup is all in the first forty minutes or so. A woman from Texas (with none of the popular
Texas attributes of old cowgirl, ranch life, hosses, six guns, blond tresses,
etc.) travels all the way up I35 to hire two Minnie-Sotan Norweigian hit men to
dispense with her ex-boyfriend. While
the dour northerners interview her before accepting the contract, the woman
(Avis Judd as Olive) meets a sleek blond with a fowl mouth and a vicious
twisted sneer in a bar. It turns out
that she also has put out a contract on her ex and as she is from Kentucky and
has had a horse, she is ready and waiting to round off on the Norwegian punch
lines. Her name is Betty; she is played with monstrous gusto by Samantha
Courmier and she has a couple of roof raising monologues that skewer Minnee-soda
winters, Norwegian foods, sex practices, and philosophy. She is just plain delightfully over the top and
scary at the same time.
The two hit
men make a kind of Martin and Lewis pair.
Steven Frankenfield’s Gus is the unsteady action guy who apparently
wields the Twins baseball bat that has lines on it for the kills. He has had a
previous unfaithful wife and now wants some real action, but doesn’t have much
to offer personality wise (but then what Norwegian does?} His partner is the philosopher king and
manager. His tag as he claims Norwegian
invention of all philosophies and even baseball is “We’re Norwegians.” They stand alone and imperious master of all
things. Keith Wick as Tor (named for the
Norse God of Thunder) has mastered the
dialect with that first phrase or syllable emphasis and is pretty much
hilarious every time he opens his mouth.
As director
Roberto Guajardo says in his brief playbill notes “You probably won’t come away
from this production with any new insights,” but it should put a smile on your
face. I agree there were smiles aplenty, yet there just didn’t seem to be an
end. The show just stopped as if the
author had finally run out of ammunition. In the final minutes there are a number of
suspenseful blackouts and on about the third of them the lights came up and the
actors started taking their bows. The guy sitting next to me said out loud “Is
that it?” I was as surprised as he
was.
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