TheatreAddict.com - Bakersfield Drama Blog

Bakersfield missed out on a fantastic show in March at the Empty Space. Pterodactyls was wonderfully bizarre, superbly dark & disturbing, and personally the best show I have seen all year.

The play tells the story of the Duncan family which slips slowly into darkness & ultimately, extinction. They live, die, and are gone forever, just like any species of dinosaurs that once roamed the earth. We cannot know for sure how or why the species of flying reptiles called Pterodactyls died out, but after watching the show you may have some idea of what happened to the Duncans.

This concept, I suppose, is offered as a general outline for the story by the author. It is a framing of the show, but not the show itself. What the show is, if I am to go by my impression of Bob Kempf's directors notes, is an experimentation regarding the darker side of absurd comedic characters. Take as an example any silly comedy in which the serious ramifications of the characters' behaviors & history are ignored. Then, latch onto the dark possibilities behind them. Probably confusing, I know, so let me illustrate. What if we took the hapless goof Elwood P. Dowd from "Harvey" and dug into him a little more. What if we found that all of his silly behavior masked serious problems. Say, he and his sister had a lifelong incestuous relationship and that is why she loved him so much. Elwood had a homosexual affair with his drinking buddy who was killed in WWII, and replaces him with a giant pink rabbit. He and Harvy have a sexual relationship, but Elwood has to get drunk and beat himself near death each night to enjoy it. All of this comes out in the first act, and by the end of the show all of the characters have met some sort of tormented, painful & embarassing death and at the end of the show everyone is dead, like a f---ed up Shakespearean tragedy. Fun, yes?

Call him demented, but it seems director Bob Kempf found this idea sort of sexy and romantic. Call me demented as well, but it was, and I loved this show.

The first half of Pterodactyls starts churning your stomach pretty quickly. No not turning, churning. As in twisting into knots. The playwrite offers up this family of equally absurd and superficial characters. In fact, I was very worried for the first twenty minutes of the play because all of the characters were so silly and non-real. But then comes the one-two punch. Lots of big belly laughs keep coming, the actors are over-the-top and ridiculous (in a good way). Mom, played by Kimberly M. Chin, is out of touch with reality and parades around like a valley girl on steroids. Sis, played by Sarah Taylor, represses everything so much she can't even remember her brother who left when she was 10, and confronts him with a knife (or a letter opener, I think it was). Older brother, played by Jeremiah Heitman, giggles about dinosaurs and inexplicably digs one up from the backyard. Finally comes Jason Monroe who has shaved his head into male pattern baldness as Dad, who smoke a pipe, wears a light-blue suit, and is a nutty charicature of every father character depicted in entertainment history. Doug Cheeseman rouns out the cast as sis's fiance who throws out random movie references and ends up wearing a french maid's outfit for more of the show.

So the audience is roaring with laughter, and then every once in a while something dark and disturbing is thrown in that quiets everything down for a second. Then back to laughing. Then, more frequently, darkness that is hardly funny. The two keep mixing and darkness keeps increasing until you feel you are on some kind of screwed up merry-go-round. You feel disturbed, though still chuckling at all of the antics. This brings you to intermission.

From there, the play enters its own domain. The first act builds things up to a fervor and the second half of the show is all glorious crescendo as the concept plays itself out. The author, director, and wonderful cast of actors play the audience like a well tuned instrument. By the end of the night, you have witnessed a mind-altering, shocking, touching piece of great theatre.

And that is just about all there is to say. I wish more of Bakersfield had seen this show. I was dissapointed that we, the audience for the final show, only filled up about 1/3 of the space. Despite this, it was fantastic and I think the actors really appreciated us because we really appreciated the performance. We gave them a deserved standing ovation and that was the end of Pterodactyls. Poof. Extinct.

See all of the pictures in the gallery here. Listen to my short interview with the cast in Episode 3 of the Podcast.