Jay (Gabriell Salgado, left), Clarence (Allen Lewis Rickman), Jean (Jeni Hacker) and Ronnie (Ronnie Larsen) celebrate a difficult birthday in Larsen’s The Actors.
Boundaries of all types are tested in Ronnie Larsen’s comedic and big-hearted family chronicle, The Actors. The line between Democrat and Republican is pulled taut, as is the division between atheist and religious believer. But those are relatively minor concerns for the playwright. More to the point are the boundaries of grief and how to break through them, the borders of what constitutes a family, and what limits stage actors might burst through when their roles take over their lives. As farcical as it is melancholy, there are as many surprise door knocks in the play’s two acts and two hours as there are woeful revelations.
Larsen, whose parents were conservative Mormons, is a prolific writer, having penned over 35 mostly adult-themed plays. With titles like Making Porn, 10 Naked Men and Sleeping with Straight Men, it is clear he knows his way around a kink. This work, which had its premiere in 2018 in Provo, Utah, indeed has a kink all its own, but one that is much more family-friendly.
Ronnie (Larsen) lifts off in his Superman pajamas as Clarence (Rickman) holds tight.
Performing quasi-autobiographically as his own lead, Larsen portrays a character named Ronnie, a 48-year-old loner with a nice apartment and, thanks to a family inheritance, an even nicer checking account. What he doesn’t have is a handle on his sadness. Though his parents have been dead for a decade, he still finds himself stricken by the loss. Rather than seek out a good therapist, Ronnie takes matters into his own hands. Figuring that a little age regression will do the trick, he puts out a casting call for a pair of part-time parents so that he might revert back to being a 5-year-old, when the most he had to deal with was disco music and The Love Boat.
The first to answer his ad is Jean (Jeni Hacker). Thinking that she is headed toward a stage play audition at a producer’s office, she is understandably concerned at suddenly finding herself in a private apartment, alone with a strange man who wants his mommy:
Ronnie: You would come over, once or twice a week and act out scenes from our life together.
Jean: What kind of scenes ...
Ronnie: Like baking a cake for my birthday or making me clean my room. You can make me do my homework and just ignore me. Or we can argue or we can pray together just ... be a family ... just come over a few times a week, be my Mom and um, you know, just um ... love me.
With mouths of her own to feed and a healthy salary being proffered, Jean reluctantly signs on. Similarly, down-on-his-luck actor Clarence (Allen Lewis Rickman) sees easy money in store and quickly accepts his role as daddy dearest.
Thumb-sucking and pajama-wearing ensue, but there are drawbacks. Where Ronnie was imagining a few well-structured weekly visits, he soon realizes that family life is complicated and subject to unscheduled events, even when one’s parents are payrolled. Meanwhile, Jean and Clarence embrace their roles in the extreme, revealing their own emotional needs along the way. Clarence wants to be a dad more than he imagined, though when he asks Jean if he is a “good father” he is just as curious as to whether he is good at portraying a father. They also can’t help complicating matters by breaking their non-disclosure agreements and telling their own loved ones. “My ‘actor-parents’ seem incapable of taking direction,” bemoans Ronnie.
Clarence (Rickman, right) tries to be a father figure for Ronnie (Larsen). Photographs by Russ Rowland.
The second act is stocked with fateful twists, surprise encounters and unearthed revelations that will bring the curtain down on Ronnie’s production, but also lead him to a more truthful existence and toward too pat an ending. His redemption comes slowly, then all at once.
In performing his own work, Larsen sometimes comes across as more unbalanced than grief-stricken, stammering when gob-smacked and harboring a nervous twitch or two. In the meta-tricky task of being actors portraying actors portraying characters, Hacker and Rickman succeed in gaining one’s sympathy as artists drawn into a messy situation that complicates their own real- world problems. They, and director Stuart Meltzer, seem less interested in evolving into believable parents for Ronnie to love. Gabriell Salgado, in his Off-Broadway debut, brings a raucous energy to the underwritten role of Jean’s son, and Jason Guy, as a far-flung family member who pops in to shake things up, gracefully dishes out the compassion Ronnie hungers for when his favorite cereal (Apple Jacks) fails to fill the “big hole” of loss he carries inside.
The Plays of Wilton (POW!) production of The Actors plays through June 1 at Theatre Row (410 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday, and at 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit theactorsplay.com.
Playwright: Ronnie Larsen
Direction: Stuart Meltzer
Sets: Stone Dog Studio
Costumes: Laura Turnbull
Lighting: Leonardo Urbina
Sound: Stuart Meltzer
