BELOW THE BELT

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BELOW THE BELT at ACT, A Contemporary Theatre!

We used the first of our “Year of Theatre” tickets last Saturday night at ACT to see BELOW THE BELT by Richard Dresser. BELOW THE BELT is directed by Pam Mackinnon, featuring Judd Hirsch, John Procaccino and R. Hamilton Wright.

BELOW THE BELT is being performed in the Allen Theatre, the same “in-the-round” theatre where I saw Sean Griffin as Scrooge in A CHRISTMAS CAROL last December. Normally, I'm a bit wary of in-the-round theaters because I usually feel, no matter where I sit, that I'm missing something. But both BELOW THE BELT and A CHRISTMAS CAROL worked really well in-the-round, and I never got the feeling I wasn't "seeing" what was going on.

From the ACT website:

Below The Belt is a farcical skewering of globalized corporate culture. Somewhere, in an anonymous factory cranking out units of some unnamed product, three men try to maintain some semblance of humanity and self despite a crushingly conformist and hypermasculine bureaucracy. Cross the sitcom The Office with Samuel Beckett, and the results might look like something like this—darkly funny, and disconcertingly familiar.

To be honest, I was originally interested in this play because Judd Hirsch was in it. My hubbie and I are big Judd Hirsch fans, and loyal followers of his tv shows, Taxi, Dear John and George and Leo. But we loved the play, and having spent a few years of my own in a large corporate setting, can say that it rang hilariously true! And it sounds like a case of art reflecting real life for the playwright:

(From an interview with Richard Dresser in the Encore Program)

Q: In an interview about why you became a playwright, you addressed your time working as a plastic molder at a plant. Did that experience shape the characters of the factory workers?

RD: My own experience working in factories - I worked at a lot of factories in New England - certainly shaped my conception of the industrial compound and the workers. One of my first factory jobs involved making the thighs of G.I. action figures. In another factory I found myself operating a plastics molding machine which produced white cones in twenty second intervals. The foreman came over the first day to see if I had any questions. My first question involved the procedure for turning off the machine, and he made it clear that was never to happen under any circumstances, even if no one came to relieve me on the next shift. My follow-up question was, "What are we making in this factory?" He stared at me and cautioned me not to be a wiseass.

You just can't make that stuff up!

Judd Hirsch was wonderful, as were R. Hamilton Wright and John Procaccino. I really enjoyed John Procaccino as Willie Stark in ALL THE KINGS MEN (at Intiman) where he was directed by Pamela MacKinnon. He just has a way of owning the stage when he enters. As the boss, Merkin, he is able to utter riduculous things, and make them honest.

BELOW THE BELT is totally worth a second viewing for us before it closes. Next up in our "Year of Theatre" odyssey, A THOUSAND CLOWNS at Intiman.

By Suzy Conn on June 11, 2009 10:16 AM | | Comments (0)


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