Theatre in Review: Ode to the Wasp Woman (Actors Temple Theatre) It was like a sign from God: On the very day that I had recorded a TCM broadcast of the 1959 horror epic The Wasp Woman -- in an attempt at reviving the midnight movie thrills of my remote youth -- I received an announcement of the above entertainment, which purports to tell the true story of the film's star, the tragic scream queen Susan Cabot. The Wasp Woman was Cabot's swan song and if you ever see this cinematic non-gem, you'll know why. (For the record, she plays a no-longer-young beauty executive who tries a new anti-aging treatment derived from the royal jelly of wasps. Overdosing on the stuff, she becomes...The Wasp Woman, whose vampiric ways thin out the ranks of her executives.) Even for those who insist that director Roger Corman is an auteur, it's the sort of film destined for the bottom half of drive-in double bills, consisting of seven reels of filler footage designed to give Eisenhower-era teenagers something to neck to. Of course, my interest was instantly piqued: As it happens, Cabot's life took some horrific turns after she retired from films, ending in madness and grotesque violence. With this peerlessly seedy premise -- as Cabot says in the play's opening, "One obituary called me a B movie actress whose life was the stuff of B movies, and for once, they got it right" -- spiced by the out-of-left-field presence of leading lady Sean Young, Ode to the Wasp Woman seemed unmissable. But Wasp Woman, where is thy sting? Rider McDowell's play is, in fact, a four-pack of tawdry Hollywood tales focusing on the mortifying final acts of four Hollywood bottom feeders: Cabot, beaten to death by her son, a dwarf deranged by human-growth hormones; Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, the former Little Rascals star, shot in a dispute over a lost pooch; George "Superman" Reeves, suicidal over his fading career and marriage to a grasping social climber; and Barbara Payton, a boozing, promiscuous starlet best remembered, if at all, for a little something titled Bride of the Gorilla. The ironic thing about this mini-Hollywood Babylon is that it packs all the professionalism of an Ed Wood production, with laughable writing and direction, a cast desperately at sea, and design values that are better left undiscussed. It's commonplace when criticizing biographical/historical plays or films to complain that they amount to little more than Wikipedia entries. Actually, the online pages for Switzer, Cabot, et al, are far more informative than anything on offer here. (For a rounded, sympathetic portrait of Reeves' final days, check out the 2006 film Hollywoodland.) Each of the four sequences consists of crudely stitched-together scenes that struggle to deliver even the most basic exposition. Cabot's affair with King Hussein of Jordan barely rates a mention. Payton's relationship with the equally self-destructive actor Tom Neal -- which, arguably, proved her undoing -- is only vaguely alluded to. Bafflingly, some scenes feature wax-museum-style tableaux with the actors in silhouette, their dialogue delivered over the sound system. Many scenes beggar belief. Cabot, living in a dump and desperately hoping that an interview with a reporter from Weekly World News will jump-start her comeback, is horrified to discover an explicit skin magazine in her son's possession. (Timothy, the son, is a physical and mental ruin, his brain fried by drugs that have pushed him to a height of 5' 4". By her own admission, Cabot lives in terror of headlines screaming "Wasp Woman Gives Birth to Dwarf.") To punish him for his interest in naked ladies, she says, "Let's read it why don't we? Let's see what the fascination is and what you're so obsessed with." After dragging him (and us) through a passage about a new craze for shaving women's genital hair, she screams. "Aren't I enough female energy in this house?" It's little wonder that Timothy is soon reaching for a blunt instrument. In the George Reeves sequence, Toni Mannix, Reeves' lover (and, notoriously, the wife of MGM's famous fixer Eddie Mannix), complains about the actor's widow, saying, "That bitch broke in past the police tape, stole $4,000 of Georgie's Traveler's Checks, two bottles of Scotch, and lunch meat. Lunch meat!" Her friend, the actor Jack Larsen, replies, "The police made her return the Traveler's Checks, didn't they?" "Yes," Toni says, "but thank heaven, not the lunch meat." After fending off her predatory father, carrying on with men, and cutting lousy business deals, Payton ends up back at home with her parents, sprawled out like a corpse, her body ravaged by cirrhosis and venereal disease. Looking at this semi-comatose wreck, her mother says, "It's so nice to have Barbie home." I hope she has an IV drip at the ready. And, for reasons perhaps known only to the playwright, each of the main characters steps out of the action and sings a totally random number. Switzer gives us "That's the Way the World Goes 'Round" by John Prine and Cabot delivers Prine's "Angel from Montgomery." Reeves gets Thin Lizzy's "The Cowboy Song." Payton has Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night." In an evening marked by random creative choices, these may be the strangest of them all. If the acting and design are terrible, it's not worth naming names; rudderless, amateurish productions like this have a way of dragging down everyone involved. We'll see them all on another day. Anyway, that's show business for you. As Reeves muses, "Hollywoodland. It's all an illusion and we sit by and cower at the shadows, and the shadows are ours." I couldn't agree more. --David Barbour 
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