Theatre in Review: Rantoul and Die (The Amoralists/Cherry Lane Theatre)

	Vanessa Vaché and Sarah Lemp. Photo: Russ Rowland.

Whatever else you think about Rantoul and Die, you'll be glad you met Callie. The preternaturally perky manager of a Dairy Queen, she is more than happy to tend to the basket cases who populate Mark Roberts' play, just as she does her ailing mother and the her legion of felines. ("Thirteen cats in one bed is plenty," she notes. "It's about all the love I can handle.") She's perfectly happy to tend an acquaintance who, by his own hand, has been reduced to a near-vegetative state, cracking unsettling jokes about his inability to speak and filling him full of Dairy Queen treats, whether he wants them or not. ("I tell you what, for a fella with a pieced-together jaw and two-fifths of a working tongue, he sure can gobble him up some DQ.") She earnestly instructs her assistant manager, whom she terms "a dark cloud," in the necessity of staying on the sunny side while on the job. ("People come to the DQ for fun. Not to see the employees mopin' around like they've got bone cancer.")

And, putting all her trust in "His Divine plan," Callie sets out to comfort a friend and colleague who is consumed with guilt over the reckless way she handled her marriage, offering an example from her own life where she, too, wandered from the straight and narrow. What, you wonder, could this cheery little chipmunk possibly have to share? Well, hold on tight, because a simple tale about a grabby Dairy Queen customer turns into a grisly account of death and dismemberment. As delivered by Vanessa Vaché in mixed tones of casual regret and moral certainty, as if recalling some embarrassing, yet necessary, duty, this quiet scene is thoroughly hair-raising, an effect that Roberts and Jay Stull, the director, have been seeking all along.

Before that, however, Rantoul and Die is a blackly comic melodrama, populated with working-class grotesques, each of them a specialist in some form of appalling behavior. Rallis, who, even among this crew, is a low performer, has slashed his wrists out of grief over the death of his marriage. He has been rescued by his friend Gary, who is fresh out of sympathy: "Your heart is broke? Boo-fucking-hoo! Everybody's heart is broke. Why don't we all put up a billboard when we get our hearts broke. Wouldn't be able to find a fuckin' Wendy's." When Debbie, Rallis' estranged wife, shows up, waving the divorce papers, she, too, is notably out of patience. "If you're hell-bent on dying," she says, "why don't you just grab the gun out of my nightstand and be done with it?" Neither Gary nor Debbie is as disinterested as he or she seems; given their mutual taste for rough sex, they are a match made in hell.

And so it goes, the level of desperation increasing after Rallis commits a drastic act and the ugly, and physical, recriminations set in. In its best moments, Rantoul and Die is written with a fury that burns these small-town losers into your brain. In its less successful moments, it seems desperate to shock by any means necessary. In its worst moments, it seems like a freak show designed to give permission to a New York audience to laugh at a bunch of losers from Nowheresville. (The setting, Rantoul, is a village near Champaign, Illinois.)

Nevertheless, under Stull's direction, the performances frequently have the impact of a pickup truck striking a brick wall at 60 miles an hour. Matthew Pilieci's Gary is a natural predator on an endless talking jag, a bully with women who, when then tables are turned, turns into a whiny, aggressive child. Derek Ahonen's Rallis is an overgrown baby of another sort, aggrieved, self-loathing, and moaning about the pothole in his heart with a whine that oddly reminded me of Pat Buttram as Green Acres' Mr. Haney. Sarah Lemp's Debbie is one tough cookie, ready to write off any man who gets in her hair, and achieving a kind of odd dignity when forced to face up to her own hatefulness. And there is Vaché, spreading inspiration and horror in equal measure in the guise of her own brand of healing.

It all unfolds on Alfred Schatz's supremely seedy set, marked by dumpy furniture, torn-up walls, and junk scattered everywhere. Jaime Torres' costumes feel right for the characters -- especially Callie's T-shirt, which is creepily adorned wth a giant cat's face. Evan Roby's lighting is solid, as is Jeanne Travis' sound design, especially the excerpt from "I Write the Songs" heard on the radio, prompting Gary to note of Barry Manilow, "I always had a somewhat dismissive attitude toward his work. But on further reflection, I find him to be an important voice in American music."

Roberts isn't an important voice in American drama -- not yet, anyway -- but he has a gift for scalding language and characters who aren't as easily pinned down as you might guess. Right now, he needs to pick and choose his effects more carefully, as opposed to carpet bombing the audience with freakish behavior. Each act begins in darkness, with dialogue that sounds sexual but proves to be anything but. Each character steps out of the action for a brief moment of direct address, an unnecessary gambit that exists only to set up a cruel joke about Rallis. Such tricks only provide distraction. Rantoul and Die is really just a collection of scenes, all of them overloaded with shock tactics, but the best of them definitely scald. -- David Barbour