Decameron Day 7: REVENGE!

Decameron Day 7: REVENGE!

The Off Center, through April 28

Running time: 1 hr, 30 min

You've been wronged. You've been horribly, horribly wronged, and the only thing for it is to return injury for injury, inflict pain on the one who brought you pain. Payback is what we like to call it, because when you've been wronged, that's how it looks to you: an evening of scores, a balancing of the cosmic scales. What you can't see, because you're right in the middle of it, in that midnight pit, that burning black pool of vindictiveness, is how easily it can go wrong, how payback can backfire, hurting you or, worse, hurting others innocent of any injury to you. Moreover, you can't see how easily your plan to get even, conceived as high tragedy, can slip into hokey melodrama, even comedy.

The Rude Mechs offer us the blessed distance to enjoy those perspectives in their Decameron Day 7: REVENGE! While initiated, as the title suggests, as a stage adaptation of the 14th-century orgy of storytelling, the show has evolved beyond Boccaccio (sorry, Giovanni!) into a meditation on vengeance refracted through the lens of pop narratives of our era: urban legends, ghost stories, the how-to guide, Star Wars, and soap operas. It's this last form that serves as the foundation for the production, with the Rudes concocting their own soap, which they play out simultaneously on prerecorded video and on stage in front of the screen. In the redundantly named (but so spot-on) Harbor Cove, we're treated to the usual intrigues – romantic triangles, unspoken passions, tenderly nurtured grudges, and, yes, plots for revenge – executed by the cast with pitch-perfect Sturm und Drang: the brow knit with angst, the mouth agape in shock, the bitter sneer, the pleading gaze, the apoplectic rage, and (a personal fave) the anxious, silent stare into the distance while absorbing some revelatory bombshell, typically held in close-up before a commercial and underscored by a chord of foreboding (supplied here with proper portent by sound king Robert S. Fisher).

The thing about soaps is from the inside the characters are heart-attack serious about their tangled lives, but where we are, watching them, the social machinations and superheated emotions come off as laughable. So it is with the dark deeds and denizens of Harbor Cove, though the Rudes aren't content with simply serving us a Grade A parody of The Bold and the Beautiful. Just as you get a firm grip on this sudser, playwright Kirk Lynn spins it slightly, spiraling into an alternate reality far from Pine Valley or Genoa City, where a cheesy seduction can morph into a theological debate, a bedroom confrontation becomes the murder of Polonius in Hamlet, and a clan of Boba Fett action figures (Daddy Boba Fett, Mommy Boba Fett, and Baby Boba Fett) serves as metaphor for the fresh start of a family founded on an act of revenge. That and the onscreen/onstage double vision adds an extra layer, fleshing out the soap, as it were, bringing it into our world and giving it a touch of reality that makes it a little harder just to laugh off. It makes it feel more of a piece with the show's other, more involving aspects: the deadpan descriptions of ways to screw your enemies using simple office supplies and equipment; the tale of the ghost who haunts the building where the play is performed (delivered with understated intensity by Jason Liebrecht); the request that we write on a slip of paper the name of the person we would most like to settle a score with. This is the world we know, of grievances and dark desires and forwarding address cards.

We are welcomed into this world, quite literally. Elegantly attired in tuxedoes and evening gowns, the performers greet us at the door with smiles and handshakes and direct us to seats at long tables set with bottles of wine and water and dinner rolls on plates. This may seem uncharacteristically formal for the rough-and-tumble gang responsible for Get Your War On and Lipstick Traces, but the Rudes are ever willing to reinvent themselves, and here the elegance and conviviality suits their purpose. For, ultimately, this isn't the celebration of vengeance we might expect in our mayhem-happy age, but an invitation to forgive, to see the folly in vendettas and the wisdom and beauty in absolution. We're asked to join in toasts, and so the whole evening becomes a ceremony of mercy, a cleansing ritual rich with mythic resonance and good will.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but the Rudes have put the lie to that. It is, it turns out, best served with bread and wine, a toast, a tango, a laugh, and a flash of fire.