Automobile Graveyard

The Ex is covered with polka dots tonight. Some are painted on the floor (actors act on them); some are painted on pieces of canvas hung from the ceiling (actors hide behind them). Actually the canvas pieces are supposed to be cars, or maybe hotel rooms. A red-coated manager trundles back and forth waiting on the guests hidden behind the canvases, supplying them with hot water, bed-pans, binoculars, or women, and laughing a whole lot. Meanwhile, an exhausted athlete and a domineering lady keep running around the stage (they go to bed together, and emerge as policemen in the second scene), and then there are those three epicene jazz musicians.

Yeah, it's one ofthose plays. Producer-director Joel DeMott said it was about the failure of Christianity, but that she had deliberately played that down in her production because her actors didn't want to do a play about Christianity. Apparently the skinny guy in the blue silk shirt who blows trumpet is an okay guy, and everyone else represents the selfish elements of civilization. But I'm probably misquoting her, so I'll stop the plot analysis here.

In any case, Miss DeMott obviously understands and admires the play she's directed. Regardless of my opinion of her production, what's there is what she wanted; she knew exactly what she was doing.

For the record, Pat Hawkins, who played Major Barbara on the Loeb mainstage last year, is beautiful and an extremely talented acress, by far the best in the show. Buddy Mear as the manager gives a restrained and frequently persuasive performance, though I've seen him funnier at dinner in Adams House. The Automobile Graveyard runs for an hour and five minutes, which isn't as long as it might have been in the hands of a less capable group of people.