``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)