Theatre in Review: Call Me Waldo (Working Theatre at June Havoc Theatre)

	Matthew Boston and Rita Rehn. Photo: Lia Chang

A romantic comedy about transcendentalism? That's a new one. Don't misunderstand me: If you attend Call Me Waldo, you won't see Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson having a catfight over Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, nor can you expect to see Herman Melville and Walt Whitman standing up for marriage equality. Call Me Waldo is set in the present, on Long Island. It begins with a couple of working stiffs -- Gus, a master electrician, and Lee, his assistant. Their on-the-job conversation is mostly about plugs and electrical lines until Lee, normally the milquetoast type, begins shouting in a stentorian voice, "I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin." Soon, he is having similar episodes at home recalling his attendance at Harvard and his speech, "The American Scholar," to his baffled wife, Sarah. Meanwhile, Gus, who'd rather talk about circuits, is completely freaked out whenever Lee starts making announcements such as "The years teach much that the days never knew."

American studies majors will recognize these as the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, indeed, the main conceit of Rob Ackerman's play is that Lee has begun channeling the words and personality of the author of Self-Reliance and The Oversoul. As Sarah points out, Lee is a direct descendant of Emerson, and there's a complete set of his poems and essays in the attic, but exactly why he is occasionally turning into the Sage of Concord is never really made clear. Cynthia, a physician and Sarah's best friend, chalks it up to post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by the recent serious illness of Lee and Sarah's daughter. (One of the odder aspects of this rather odd play is that the daughter, who figures so prominently in Lee and Sarah's lives, never makes it on stage.) Meanwhile, Sarah notices that when Lee slips into Waldo mode, there's a definite uptick in their sex life. As she confesses to Cynthia, it's like sleeping with a sexy, romantic stranger. "You've been seduced by aphorisms," Cynthia concludes, not entirely approvingly. (And yes, Sarah, hoping that Lee will get fired up again, plaintively asks him, "Where's Waldo?") Meanwhile, a video of Lee making like Emerson ends up on YouTube, where it racks up 22,000 hits.

Well, call me baffled. Not because I don't understand the idea behind Call Me Waldo -- as Ackerman makes clear, Lee, Gus, Sarah (who is a nurse), and Cynthia are all beaten down by their dull workaday lives and could use a little transcendence to spice things up. But, by any standard, Call Me Waldo is a pretty fuzzy piece of work. It's never quite clear if Lee is channeling Emerson voluntarily or not ("Sometimes it gushes up," he says, enigmatically), and it's even less clear why these little episodes should prove so upsetting to everyone. But then, Call Me Waldo tries to straddle a middle ground between high-concept farce and a more substantial consideration of the evanescence of life, and ends up doing justice to neither. It almost always feels forced and unbelievable, especially in a subplot in which Gus, a loudmouthed vulgarian who says "fuck" every other word, and Cynthia, a very well put together physician, turn out to be soul mates after he teaches her to appreciate the finer things in life, like maple syrup and miniature golf.

There's a very appealing idea behind Call Me Waldo, but laughs are awfully thin on the ground, and it's hard to escape the feeling that, in setting out to celebrate his hard-working characters, the author is patronizing them a little. The entire cast, under the direction of Margaret Perry, works hard at being bright and funny, and Matthew Boston manages to invest Lee with genuine inflections of sorrow and fear of the sort that will be instantly recognizable to anyone over 40. Rita Rehn and Jennifer Dorr White, as Sarah and Cynthia, bring a certain amount of just-us-girls bonhomie to their scenes, even if they could use better lines. Brian Dykstra doesn't totally cleanse Gus of his more obnoxious qualities, but he comes close.

Everyone involved is determined to be amusing and heartwarming, but a sense of strain sets in early on and never really goes away. Kudos, anyway, to David L. Arsenault's set design, depicting the frame of a house under construction, which cleverly becomes any number of locations, including a hospital, a suburban bedroom, a diner, a synagogue, and a golf course. Arensault's lighting is also solidly professional, as are Hannah Kochman's costumes and props. Don Tindall's sound design paces the scene changes with a playlist of '80s pop hits, including "Blinded by the Light" and "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" along with thunder, traffic, and other ambient sounds.

The real problem with Call Me Waldo is that it's a comedy about finding meaning in everyday life, but the characters and situations feel totally manufactured. As I'm sure Emerson said at one point or another, You can't have it both ways, no matter how hard you try.--David Barbour