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Professor Dilexi Presents…

nytheatre.com review by Kimberly Wadsworth
August 15, 2005

Some readers will remember the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of kids' books; at the end of each page or so the reader got to choose where the plot went next ("if you go inside the haunted house, turn to page 4; if you peek in the back window instead, turn to page 7").Despite billing itself as a "choose-your-own-adventure play," Professor Dilexi Presents Dramatis Personae of the Apocryphal Menagerie is nothing like that.The show gives a nod towards this conceit at first; we’re welcomed by Professor Dilexi (Lilah Rahn-Lee), a ringmaster character who, together with her clown assistant Thinkandjump (Crista Fuentes), promises a grand show “for all those over the age of reason.” They introduce us to our story’s heroine, Wilma (Chelsea Philips), and we are given our first chance to choose a plot point, by voting with our applause: should Wilma have milk or orange juice with breakfast?To be fair, the rest of the decisions made by the audience have more impact. (And I noticed a rowdy group at the back of the audience won all such votes; I may be overly suspicious, but I don’t remember seeing them in the house before the show started.)The gimmick only comes up five times in the 90-minute show, anyway. The rest of the plot is simply a melodrama about Wilma, her husband Frank (Rachel Hochberg), her lover Ian (Charlotte Rahn-Lee), and her friend Annie (Amy Sullivan). Mostly, we just watch as Wilma and Ian have a tryst or Annie contemplates suicide, while Professor Dilexi lurks to one side, giving us a leering grin or freezing the action to speechify about the characters. Towards the end, they suddenly drop the conceit that no one else can see Professor Dilexi, allowing Wilma and the Professor to argue about things like fate and free will. Wilma also turns to the audience at one point and begs us to choose carefully, because this is affecting her life.The play, written and directed by Rebecca Fullan, attempts a lot—it tries to be a parody of the book series, a commentary on control over one’s fate, and even a circus act at some points. But pulling the show in so many directions just blurs the focus, so it falls short on all fronts. The company also seems overly challenged by the material—and by the size of the Connelly Theatre, which simply swallowed up their voices. Even though I was in the second row, I frequently couldn’t hear a word anyone was saying. The production elements are also uneven: Rachel Hochberg and Liz Tucker’s costumes for Professor Dilexi and Thinkandjump are impressive, but Wilma runs around in a bathrobe throughout the show. The lighting design by Elizabeth Hanson has similar rough spots.Fuentes’s performance does stand out, in part because she speaks throughout with a such a squeaky voice that it sounds like she’s eaten helium balloons whole. She also shows impressive concentration during a scene in a hospital, where for five solid minutes, while doing such things as digging through characters' handbags, tying ribbons around people's legs, turning somersaults, and blowing up a balloon, she makes regular “beep” noises, to represent a heart monitor. It’s probably telling, though, that in a five-minute scene that involved the whole ensemble, my attention was most held by a woman who only said “beep.”