jh+Fuddy+Meers+Critique

Jenna Huckaby Dr. Richmond Theater 2100H 8 February 2011

Fuddy Meers Capturing the essence of the UGA production of Fuddy Meers in a few pages would be like trying to capture an Athen’s rainstorm in one puddle: impossible, but worth a try. While a plot recap is generally distasteful in a performance critique, it would be downright painful to try and execute for the play, Fuddy Meers. Asking an audience member for a synopsis immediately after leaving the theater would be a stretch for anyone’s memory retention. This difficulty lies in the unique intricacy of the plot itself. Throughout the entire play, the audience’s main goal is to figure out and discover the plot as they follow Claire’s struggle to discover her own past and discern fact from fiction, truth from lies. The mystery and confusion, which encompasses the play’s format, keeps the audience intently engaged in the storyline and actively listening for the revelation of new information and helpful clues to the unraveling mystery. The audience instinctively wants to beat Claire to the solution and solve her own story before she does. This engagement makes the play wildly entertaining in itself as it captivates the attention and focus of the audience. Rather than sitting back and enjoying the telling of a character’s transformation and self-discovery, as in most stories, the audience is riveted to the action and is placed within the conflict as they try to relieve the confusion created by the chaotic plot. The success in audience engagement primarily stems from the obscure and well-developed characters. Each character played a defining role in developing the main character, Claire. As an audience, we found ourselves involuntarily attached and relating to each character in a way that tempted us to trust them. We immediately trust the husband of Claire because his initial role is that of a caretaker and lover of Claire. Through his lighthearted humor and understanding of Claire’s plight, we are immediately drawn to accept him as the good guy, believing that he loves and wants the best for Claire. When “Zach” crashes the scene and urgently pushes Claire to escape with him, the audience is torn between our initial trust and faith in the husband and the frantic and desperate behavior of the assumed brother. The audience is immediately given a choice between remaining loyal to the loving husband who has been faithfully caring for the helpless Claire and the brother who’s fear and intensity is hard to resist. A large portion of us wants Claire to escape the seemingly harmless husband, merely because the brother is so convincing in his concern. The alternate pull of the audience to hope Claire remains at home comes from the presence of her son, Kenny. As the troubled and attention-grabbing teenager, Kenny warrants the sympathy of the audience as we recognize his struggle with having a forgetful mother. We see the deeper need for her to stay home for his own troubled sake, so as to not add to his unsettling issues. Once Claire is brought to her mother’s home, our opinion of Zach is further is muddled further by Girt’s distrust of him. We tap into our instinctive maternal instinct and assume that Girt is honest in her need to protect Claire and assume that she has sufficient motive to distrust and even fear Zach, but we cannot be certain due to the unfortunate inability of Girt to articulate her thoughts. Though we have no reason to assume her mind is confused, her worry is made slightly illegitimate solely based on her lack of speech. She is automatically placed on the level of a child because of her handicap and therefore does not hold the power to completely turn the audience against Zach altogether. Our faith in the husband is shaken as his character gradually develops the evidence of a sketchy past, first revealed by himself as he talks to his son about past drug habits and further solidified by the incident between him and the cop. When he reacts violently to having a background check performed on him, the audience has no choice but to lose faith in him and his innocence in Claire’s past. The addition of minor characters, like Millet, add depth and play off of our assumptions of the main characters by providing an outside input to the family’s story. As an escaped convict, we cannot place too much trust in Millet’s side of any story, but his nervousness and apparent struggle to keep secrets makes us pay attention to anything he lets slip, such as his confessions that Zach knows and hides secrets about Claire’s past from her. By this point in the play, we are questioning every character and don’t really trust anyone. Each of these characters exhibited comically quirky characteristics and behaviors, but there were several moments of genuine insight into the deeper part of their nature, and it was in these fleeting moments that we began to piece together important truths that would eventually lead us to an understanding of the story. Although Kenny is the epitome of the angsty teen boy, we see many facets of him at Girt’s house. We first see a very gentle and intimate moment shared between him and Claire in which he confides in her and she reminisces about him as a child, even remembering that he weighed 6 pounds and 14 ounces. While this is generally expected knowledge for any decent mother, this small recall revealed the maternal side of Claire to her suffering son and he broke down in the face of her attention. They held each other and in his gentleness, Kenny’s apathetic exterior was briefly lifted to see his desperate need for his mother underneath. He later had a strong reaction to his real father, Phil, which revealed just how affected he was by what we come to know as his own history of abuse by Phil. When he lashes out against Phil in attempts to protect his mother, Claire scolds him for turning into his father and being just like him, a deeper problem often seen in cycles of domestic violence. Phil himself, who is revealed to be the true husband of Claire and father of Kenny is affirmed as the original villain in the story as he admits to beating Claire. He reveals his part in the story in small slips of affection throughout the play, such as when he kisses Claire in the basement, but it is not understood fully until later in the climax of the action. He then pleads with Claire, insisting that he is a changed man and that he will cherish her and take care of her. His nature is not fully repentant though as he behaves violently to his son, a flaw that is enough to prevent Claire from going to Canada with him. Even Millet is absolutely insane but becomes more human in the moment that he talks about his plan to go back and fix his past. We later find that he was honest about not stealing the ring and becomes one of the most genuine characters in the story, despite his surface insanity. The crazed cop is gentled in the midst of her heartbreak over the lies of Phil and even she shows a gentle and broken core within her tough and masculine shell. The dynamics among the plot twists and the characters’ transformations and revelations add to and create the overarching theme: a vague and deep plot with light-hearted overtones characterized by a deep message of domestic violence personified by quirky characters and incidents. The humor laced throughout the play is merely a blanket over the dark meaning behind the story. That theme is mirrored in the eccentric personalities which mask the troubled and highly personal souls of the characters. The title, “Fuddy Meers”, is a slanted phrase to shift the understanding of “funny mirrors”, a theme that arises when Claire reminisces about a fair and the funny mirrors, which distorted her image of reality in that moment and later reflects the distorted reality of her entire life, and more broadly in life in general. The entire complexity of the plot was interpreted well by the audience because it was performed well stage, with astounding clarity of characterization through the acting. Claire’s optimism shone through her circumstances with her easy going attitude which was portrayed through her voice and her body movements which were both lifted and soft. Phil’s lisp and limp added a dimension of a mysterious past to his character and made him stand apart in the audience’s mind. The actress who played Girt did an excellent job in maintaining her stroke-induced slurred speech to intensify her plight of a language barrier. The actor of Kenny was especially dynamic between his hard, apathetic demeanor and his genuine soft moments, in which he changed his entire personality through the softening of his body posture and voice. An exhaustive analysis of the elements working together to create, benefit and complete the production could not possibly be covered in any concise means, but the characterization was one that could not be overlooked. Briefly delving further into the components of the production was the outstanding tech work. The lighting, in particular, caught my eye. The light mirrored the mood so well that it almost escaped notice, but merely subconsciously drew more emotion out of the scene. It was subtle, yet highly effective, such as when Claire told the childhood story about her dog memory. The lights gradually faded into a serene moment on the scene with the focus on Claire, but dark enough for us to not focus on the present scene, but rather to focus on her memory along with her. We noticed the change in the lights when they abruptly flashed back with her turn of attention to the present moment. Similar to the lighting, the sound turned my ear. This production incorporated a wide array of audio effects which created a sense of realism for the audience. By using sound effects in the scenes, the audience was brought into the scene, experiencing the action alongside the characters, such as in the car scene when the sirens are heard pulling over the husband. The sound of the siren pulled on our instinctive stress rising with our association of police sirens to empathize with his stress. Further connecting the audience, the audio taps into the mind of Claire, allowing the audience to really see life through her warped and confused perspective. We are allowed to hear what the other characters cannot, such as the dogs barking in her momentary flashbacks, which reinforces the association we share in Claire’s plight of unveiling her past and reaffirms our loyalty to her as the leading lady. These and many other elements of this unique production contributed hugely to the shifting emotions and truths of Fuddy Meers. UGA did a fantastic job in the portrayal of such a dynamic story and life theme.