The premise is simple: 50 brides from Greece are betrothed to marry their 50 cousins. They set flee their grooms by sailing to Italy, but the grooms track them down. Before it’s time to toss the garter, though, only one couple survives. Literally.
But the current that runs through Charles Mee’s “Big Love” is anything but simple — it’s a whirling, swirling, raging undertow of all the complexities associated with gender, sexuality, age, hormones, compulsions, romance, matrimony and even murder.
Mee’s modern meditation on the politics of love and the folly of the human heart takes poetic license with Aeschylus’ ancient tetralogy “The Danaids.” Borrowing only the skeleton of that story, he juxtaposes contemporary pop culture with eternal themes of socio-political responsibility and submission to the will of another, mashing them up in an altogether satisfying though thoroughly whimsical concoction.
His “Big Love” takes an unlikely turn early on in Kirsten Kelly’s production for The Hub Theatre, and stays mostly flippant throughout the performance. Kelly takes more than a few liberties with Mee’s open-air script, free-styling through ’80s pop rock and a few indie hits, and adding a distracting trio of minstrels lurking in the shadows.
| Onstage |
| ‘Big Love’ |
| Where: The Hub Theatre, 9431 Silver King Court, Fairfax |
| When: Through August 12 |
| Info: $15 to $25; 1-800-494-8497; thehubtheatre.org |
With choreography that runs the gamut from bizarre to beautiful and back, Kelly’s cast has no problem executing heroic physical demonstrations from choreographers Susan Shields and Casey Kaleba, though her principal trio of women struggle to articulate authentic emotion and exhibit an irritating proclivity to over-enunciate. To be sure, it’s all a rather dreary affair — that is, until the men come rappelling down from their helicopters.
Michael Kevin Darnall’s cocky Constantine and David Zimmerman’s smitten Nikos are among the evening’s central pleasures, aside from a couple of clever monologues delivered gracefully by S. Lewis Feemster, who also tickles a few notes from a tiny toy piano. But moments like these are fleeting, too quickly erased by Kelly’s overwrought direction and a cast too cautious and too careful with Mee’s delicious dialogue.
Ultimately the biggest moments in “Big Love” aren’t expressed through words or stage directions, but in the middle of a bloody musical montage featuring Etta James and Dexys Midnight Runners — a burst of pure aural joy in the midst of what feels too often like stale experimental theatre.
