Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)   (1988-Current)
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LIKEABLE `VARMINTS' IS AMUSING BUT IT'S NOT SATIRE
Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
April 30, 1989
Author: BOB HICKS - of the Oregonian Staff
Estimated printed pages: 2


``Varmints'' is Charles Deemer's comic ode to venality, double-dealing and all those other deadly vices that won the Wild West.

With five characters as pure as the driven sludge and a sixth who's merely pompous, Deemer's newest play -- which had its premiere Friday night at Firehouse Theater -- pushes beyond black-heartedness to a kind of mythic celebration of humankind's sheer cussedness.

``I sing of the West,'' crows Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, Deemer's poet laureate of fools, ``and I sing of the greed that makes a man act outlandish.''

A tale of ambition and revenge in the Oregon gold fields of 1865, ``Varmints'' is something of a cross between John Huston's ``Treasure of the Sierra Madre'' and ``Beat the Devil,'' which Huston and Truman Capote wrote as an elaborate joke.

The moralistic finger is a-wag here: What good to gain the whole world if you lose your own scalp?

But Deemer also takes a huge liking to his con artists and petty desperadoes, and mostly just enjoys the elaborate switchbacks the ``double-crossing scumbags'' pull on one another: It's like Jacobean revenge comedy.

tionist's anger beneath the surface. Parts of ``Varmints'' fillet the Western myth to reveal its backbone of intolerance and rapacity, he argues, it was Jack Nicholson

But ``Varmints'' is more sendup than satire -- amusing rather than fully comic, though the characters are wonderfully conceived.

Deemer wants to talk about what went wrong in the colonizing of the Oregon Territory -- and by extension, what remains wrong in the exploitative West -- but he needs a stiffer structure to root the humor and make the play provocative in contemporary social terms. Genuinely likable for its rough wit and inventiveness, ``Varmints'' remains small-scale, lacking the philosophic reverberation of Deemer's recently revived ``Half-Life Conspiracy.''

Yet Director Gary O'Brien's production survives some bumpy transitions -- partly in the writing, partly in the playing -- to deliver an evening of diverting fun.

Ruby (Joanna Malandruccolo), the one-eyed owner of the Canyon City Room & Board, keeps her guests ducking while she shoots lizards out of her doorway; Stump (Bob Friedman) fingers his knife and hides gold dust in his hollow leg; Miss Lee (Georgia Cacy) sheds crocodile tears and plays black-widow spider to all the varmints in the neighborhood. Paddy (Hank Cartwright), the Pinkerton man on the trail of the crime, acts as ironic commentator while revealing his own less than Sunday School grasp of situational ethics.

Gary Powell has great fun as the terrible, pose-striking poet Miller (``humility is my very breath''). He is, we eventually discover, the actual Western poet-adventurer Joaquin Miller, who may or may not have been a buffoon but is very funny as one in the play. Powell and Rick Jones, as a black cook and Shakespearean actor stuck in a white man's desert, provide an amusing travesty of ``Othello.''

THEATER REVIEW Varmints Where: Firehouse Theatre, 1436 S.W. Montgomery St. When: 8 p.m. Fridays- Saturdays through May 27 Tickets: $6-$8.50 (280-6592)
Edition: Fourth
Section: Lively Arts
Page: B07
Index Terms: Theater Review
Copyright (c) 1989 Oregonian Publishing Co.
Record Number: 8904300141

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