Reviews

The Butcher of Baraboo

Playwright Marisa Wegryzn exhibits a compelling and idiosyncratic voice in this macabre and often hilarious play.

Debra Jo Rupp and Ashlie Atkinson
(© Joan Marcus)
Debra Jo Rupp and Ashlie Atkinson
(© Joan Marcus)

You can’t say that Marisa Wegrzyn’s play,
The Butcher of Baraboo, which opens Second Stage’s Uptown summer season, is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. From its first grimly funny opening moments, there are glimmers of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, Ethan and Joel Coen’s Fargo, and Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. The play’s report on macabre yet unexpectedly hilarious activities among small-town working-class citizens has been glimpsed before; still, the play is a delightful instance of someone expressing observations made by others in her own idiosyncratic and compelling voice.

Wegrzyn surely has an already sharpened knack at trotting out lively characters primed to clash with each other the minute they come into the same room. The roomy kitchen Beowulf Boritt has designed, which features a butcher block and ominous cleaver in its cluttered middle, belongs to Valerie (Debra Jo Rupp), a Wisconsin butcher whose husband Frank disappeared in circumstances that look fishy to the town gossips. For the record, the first of Valerie’s string of battles consists of silent glares exchanged with pharmacist daughter Midge (Ashlie Atkinson) over an almost empty plastic container of milk. With that clever shorthand, the tangled mother-daughter relationship is established.

The sometimes verbal, sometimes physical imbroglios continue as three other Midwest nutcases crowd around for coffee and snacks. (The numerous physical brawls are overseen by fight director Robert Westley.) Casual visitors include Frank’s brother and onetime Valerie swain Donal (Michael Countryman) and his wife Sevenly (Ali Marsh), who’s the mother to six and is suffering from the misfortune of her given name. Also regularly bombing through the always unlocked back door is Frank and Donal’s policewoman sister Gail (Welker White).

Because Gail thinks she knows Valerie snuffed Frank out somewhere in the nearby woods, and because Midge is dispensing too many of her pharmaceuticals in suspicious ways, and because Sevenly is attempting to keep from Donal some news bothering her, the agitated quintet keep trying each other’s patience to the point of gathering dramatic momentum. In the first act, all goes smoothly — which is to say amusingly higgledy-piggledy, but the playwright runs into second-act trouble. You can’t quite say she runs out of steam; it’s more like she’s worked up so much steam it’s clouded her view of satisfying structure.

In order to force the plays’ final revelations — about things like Valerie’s actual treatment of the vanished Frank and Midge’s precise parentage — she accumulates a few too many outlandish turns of events. Sure, it’s fine that Midge has already evidenced more than an unusual interest in Sevenly and Gail takes too far her need to understand the effects of certain illicit drugs, but too many of these complications threaten to collapse her plot.

Nevertheless, the rampant gymnastics provide director Judith Ivey and her cast with plenty from which to make acting hay — and hayseed. From the heft with which Rupp’s Valerie slams the much-used cleaver into her butcher’s block, there’s no doubt she could have chopped Frank up like prime beef. She shuttles around the kitchen with purpose and even sitting still looks fit to kill.

Atkinson is also a powder keg, although she gets her laughs and makes her effects through a masterful demonstration of underplaying. At one point, Midge describes herself as “the coolest,” and that’s just what Atkinson is.

Countryman, the lone man in this vortex of women, holds his own, whereas Marsh hasn’t entirely found the right balance for the desperate though seemingly naive Sevenly. (In a mad minute, Sevenly utters an uncharacteristic obscenity that Wegrzyn might want to rethink.) As policewoman-on-the-verge-of-something Gail, White is so adroit that she even brings off some of those act-two excesses. Hers is an extremely funny performance that’s strongly reminiscent of what Ellen DeGeneres might have done with the role.

The Butcher of Baraboo isn’t a perfect play, but sometimes great promise is more seductive than perfection.

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