Exhibitionism

Fuddy Meers: Cartoon Cut-Ups

Running Time: 1 hr, 35 min

Claire didn't know him from Adam, but the man with the ponytail said he was her husband, and he certainly seemed nice enough. And the teenager who said he was her son seemed nice, too (if you overlooked his surly attitude and the stream of expletives flying out of his mouth). And the man in the black mask, who hustled Claire out of the house because, he said, Mr. Ponytail was going to kill her, sure seemed to have her best interests at heart, as did that sweet woman who said she was Claire's mother -- well, what she really said was closer to "mutter," but then she's had a dickens of a time talking since the stroke. Even the man with the obscenity-spewing hand puppet was sweet in his own way. Claire couldn't recall a single one of them, thanks to the pesky condition that wipes her memory clean every day, but they were all so nice, she just took them at their word. Which is how Claire got mixed up in a prison escape and assorted mayhem with knives, guns, and shovels.

Fuddy Meers arrives in Austin well after a much-talked-about film that also features a memory-disabled protagonist mixing it up with the criminal element, so it might strike some viewers as the Anti-Memento. Where Christopher Nolan's movie wrings paranoiac tension from its hero's vulnerability, David Lindsay-Abaire's play -- which premiered a year before Memento, by the way -- generates gut laughs. Memento's hero feels he can trust no one. Claire blithely accepts anything and everything she's told, no matter how outrageous. Far from being damaged and doomed like the figure without memory on film, Claire seems to exist in a state of grace; misrepresentation, manipulation, and violence swirl around her, yet she remains unharmed. She's the Road Runner, an innocent who, though lacking natural defenses, can't be touched by the world's brutality or the unsavory schemes of its Wile E. Coyotes.

That sense of a cartoon shows up in more than one place in this Different Stages production. The plot moves at something of the same frantic pace, fed by a madcap energy. The characters are exaggerated comic personalities straight out of Looney Tunes -- sometimes complete with speech impediments! Frank Benge's limping, lisping kidnapper puts the voice of Sylvester the Cat into the body of Foghorn Leghorn and suffers the ineptitude of his dim-witted cohorts with a droll resignation recalling both. As one such cohort, Norman Blumensaadt looks incapable of lighting a 40-watt bulb; his empty-headed stares are ever funnier than his foul-mouthed exclamations through the puppet Binky. And as the smooth-voiced husband of Claire, Joel Crabtree is all long, lean limbs at sharp angles, a stork in a ponytail with an uptight edge just behind his mellow façade. The grid-patterned walls of Stephen Pire's set may be swiped from Mondrian, but they also suggest the panels of comic strips and books, within which Krazy Kat is forever taking bricks to the head from Ignatz Mouse, the cartoon frame in which Elmer always takes the shotgun blast intended for Bugs. The play's violence, while darker in tone, shares something of that disconnect from reality; physical injuries are recovered from almost as easily, and pain is absent except when it can be used for comic relief. If an Acme safe were suddenly to drop from the sky and flatten a character into a pancake, it wouldn't seem too out of place.

The production never quite manages the chaotic verve of Warner Bros. animation to which it seems to aspire; the performances occasionally get stiff, and the short scenes and long scene changes conspire to diffuse whatever frenzied momentum director Karen Jambon whips up. Plus, there is a sober heart to the play, likening memories to funhouse mirrors -- or "fuddy meers," as Claire's stroke-victim mom says; our images in them are warped and twisted, so we stop looking at the past, wipe away memory. Even so, there are laughs to be had from the consistently inventive and surprise-filled script and from these actors' handling of it. In addition to those named, Josh Meyer, Jennifer Underwood, and Julie Winston-Thomas all contribute choice moments of fun, and Katherine Brewer leads the way as the relentlessly cheery, trusting Claire. The shine in her eyes and quickness to accept whatever comes her way almost make a lack of memory seem a blessing. But then, of course, you'd forget her sweet, endearing performance, and it's one that deserves to linger in the memory.