Audio By Carbonatix
Everybody has a story–sometimes several stories. But a good story isn’t enough; you have to know how to tell it well. So a retired sailor named Ralph discovers during the course of Ralph’s Play, the first and best of two one-acts now playing at the RiverTree Theatre.
Denver playwright Pat Mahoney creates an eccentric and engrossing little microcosm with this story about a sailor and a barkeeper who meet and discover their destiny as future writing partners. There’s so much mad truth to the odd little tale, so much of the whole world impinging on the action of the two captivating misfits, that the most unlikely elements of the story are the most charming–and the most believable.
The barkeeper, Pat, owns Monk’s Place, and as the lights come up he stands at the door looking out, languidly polishing his glasses and smoking. After he straightens up the empty dive, singing along to a country-western song about whether or not they have Mogen David in heaven, Ralph walks in, fresh from the Navy. An odd exchange about the price of beer ensues, revealing Pat’s impish humor and, obliquely, the sweetness of his temperament.
Pat asks all the questions. It’s obvious that he’s interested in the sailor as a human being, and equally apparent that he’s bored with his life and looking for some kind of inspiration. Ralph tells him he is about to go to New York and become a playwright. He has a play already outlined in his head, titled The Tap-Dancing Cat Is Only a Lead-In; the Real Act Is the Three-Dog Choir. As Ralph tells Pat about his life in the Navy, the kind of people he has met and the places he has been, it becomes clear that the sailor has some very good tales to tell. But as Pat questions him, it is also clear that Ralph knows nothing about writing.
Pat knows how to write, but he has run out of stories. A match made in heaven? Maybe, maybe not. But the quirky unraveling of character and story is so pleasant, so funny, so natural that you have to hope the budding playwrights make it to off-Broadway.
Mahoney himself plays the barkeep with gruff grace and perfect comic timing. Ralph Jorba invests his salty sailor with the energy and oafish style the role demands. These guys go well together.
The show is only 25 minutes long, and it goes by much too quickly. My only complaint, in fact, is that it might have been a little longer–I wanted to know them both better.
Pat Mahoney surfaces again as an inept barrister in the second one-act, The Dock Brief, by John Mortimer of Rumpole of the Bailey fame. It’s one of Mortimer’s lighter works, and certainly a lightweight entertainment. Yet it has grim underpinnings that seem dark indeed–once you have time to think about them.
Herbert Fowle, a taciturn little man, has killed his wife because her jolly, joking disposition drove him nuts. Oh, he tried to rid himself of her by less desperate means, but as moral as she was, she refused the advances of the jolly, joking cop he brought into the house as a lodger. It was too much for poor Mr. Fowle, so he killed the awful woman. The barrister, Morganhall, tries his best to find a defense for the indefensible crime, but everything he comes up with turns out to be remarkably wrongheaded. Still, incompetence has its own rewards.
Mahoney does a superb job of skewering a man who has learning but is hopelessly stupid. Each squint of his eye, each blustering rant about some aspect of the law makes the barrister more pathetic. Mahoney is well matched again, this time with Sam Dodero as the squirrelly Mr. Fowles.
Dock Brief is clever and amusing. But it has far less appeal as theater or thought than Ralph’s Play because it lacks a kindly spirit. Mahoney really likes his characters; Mortimer only tolerates his. And finding humor in cruelty is so much a part of daily life these days, it seems banal in the theater.
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