Call
Me Waldo starts out well. Gus
(Brian Dykstra), an
electrician and contractor, is on the job with his best man Lee (Matthew
Boston). Suddenly and seemingly
out of nowhere, Lee’s blue collar personality drops, his voice and physicality
completely change, and he’s channeling the essence, if not the actual spirit,
of Ralph Waldo Emerson. But maybe the spirit too. Needless to say, it spooks
Gus and deeply concerns Lee’s wife, Sarah (Rita Rehn); but Sarah’s concern turns into a peculiar
fascination when her medical colleague and well-read best friend, Cynthia (Jennifer
Dorr White), starts hipping her
to Emerson’s jive.
Unlike
playwright Rob Ackerman’s
excellent Tabletop, likewise
written for the Working Theatre
(a company that specializes in plays about the workplace), Call Me Waldo suffers from a diffused sense of purpose. Once it
gets past the implicit message that blue collar minds go deep and are as
capable of abstract philosophical thought as they are of associating nuts to
bolts, it runs seriously out of steam and wanders in search of a story.
Director Margarett Perry and a
uniformly excellent cast (with my college classmate Rita Rehn [not looking a
helluva lot older either] carrying, by small margin, the predominant role, as
Sarah’s the play’s pivot point and revelation finder) do their best to keep the
play buoyed and sitcom-light, but there simply isn’t a strong enough structural
spine. They manage, though, to sustain the dignity of professional polish.
They’re a good quartet of actors to know.
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