One Big Lie

by Liz Duffy Adams

 

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Crowded Fire's 'One Big Lie' is one big blast

review by Chad Jones in the Oakland Tribune March 22, 2005

 

INSPIRED by a Bob Dylan lyric — "All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie" — and a world in chaos, playwright Liz Duffy Adams decided to write a merry musical about death, destruction and devious deities.

 

Adams' "One Big Lie," given its world premiere Saturday by Crowded Fire Theater Company and the Playwrights Foundation, reaffirms that Adams is a voice meant for our time.

 

Her previous Crowded Fire show, "Train Play," revealed a gift for dialogue and enigmatic storytelling. Last year's "Dog Act" with the Shotgun Players — the 2005 winner of the Glickman Award for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area — whipped words into a post-apocalyptic frenzy.

 

And now "One Big Lie," another exercise in lively, kinetic language, teases us with the answers to all the world's problems.

In tone and ambition, "One Big Lie" most closely resembles Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" in that each of the play's three acts shows us how things change yet remain the same.

 

In "The Pastoral World" of Act 1 the gods rape, pillage, torture and test the faith of mortals simply because they can, and therein lies the "big lie" of the title: The gods only have power because we so willingly surrender it to them. "People gave us our power capital and we're darn sure gonna spend it," one
god says.

 

If the secret ever got out that humans could rule their own lives without the gods, well, there'd be hell to pay for the denizens of heaven.

 

Act 2, "The Mechanical World," finds things in further disarray. Lu-Lu, the god of lies (Linda Jones), has been banished from god land because she pities the people and wants to reveal the lie of their faith. In a cruel trick, her fellow gods Cassoulay (the truly divine Cassie Beck), Mauvelous (Mollena Williams) and Pow (Paul Lancour) have garbled her speech.

 

While Lu-Lu speaks fervently of rebellion, all that mortals hear is a rant about trout. Luckily, The Oracle (Alan Quismorio) can understand Lu-Lu,
so he can serve as a translator and help spread the truth.

 

But the revolution is not to be. By Act 3, "The Po-Mo Mo-Fo Freakshow World," we're in modern times and chaos has pushed the world and the heavens to the breaking point.

 

The gods begin taking revenge on human rabble-rousers while Marie Antoinette (Juliet Tanner) stands off to one side eating cake.

Director Rebecca Novick's production is so ambitious that it's actually too big for the EXIT Theatre. Set designer Melpomene Katakalos has built a proscenium around the stage in the small theater, thus eliminating the first few rows.

 

And with composer/pianist/conductor David Rhodes and his excellent quartet taking up space on one side of the auditorium, the show overwhelms the audience.

 

That this production doesn't quite meet all this "Lie's" challenges doesn't diminish the spirit and vitality of the effort. As a full-blown musical — Rhodes' score is accessible without bending to pop conventions — "One Big Lie" borrows from Brecht, Weill and vaudeville, which means it's challenging.

 

And none of the performers here, except maybe Beck, seems truly comfortable singing. The actors are much more successful with the comedy's blend of humanism and righteous nastiness.

 

Along with her terrific dialogue and fantastic sense of humor, Adams maintains a somewhat oblique approach to drama, but that's calculated. As her fallen god says, "You reflect the truth but don't hit it head on. Then maybe people can hear it better."

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