Review: Motel Cherry, part of Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks 2012

HERE. By Peggy Stafford. Dir. Meghan Finn. With ensemble cast. 1hr 35mins. No intermission.

Much like June itself, Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2012 is ending with uninspiring weather: rather muggy, slightly damp.  Peggy Stafford’s seriocomic Motel Cherry doesn’t bomb, there’s too much competence arrayed around it for that. Instead it fizzles slowly, smothered by a welter of ideas and a certain pervading glumness. Everyone does their respective jobs in realizing Stafford’s tale of injured eccentrics at a sad little highway motel: There’s a clever, row-of-doors set by Daniel Zimmerman, and director Meghan Finn hires some of our smartest theater creatures to roam it. The magic never catches, though; the fire never lights.

When we realize Motel Cherry stands in Washington State, we automatically expect the uncanny—touches like the anxious lady with her covered birdcages (Linda Marie Larson) and a mysterious dragonfly figurine (is it sentient?) could have oozed over the county line from Twin Peaks. Stafford’s basic pattern is Lynchian too—domestic upsets (a reverend rejects his sexually desperate wife) alternate with mentions of the Dark Woods and eerie magical bits.

All these elements pull hard, but they haul in so many different directions that the dramaturgy comes to a standstill. We’ve just started getting a nice Psycho frisson from twitchy proprietor Albert (Stephen Boyer) when we reverse course to worry about a new tenant, a realistically abused waitress (Boo Killebrew). We then lurch into pseudo-Lovecraftian mode (the dragonfly tchotchke becomes a demiurge), only to be yanked into a teenager’s monologue about miscarriage. Stafford means this to be a plenitude of plenitudes, with a new genre behind every motel door. Instead it just lingers in an unhappy, crowded stasis—the wheels never go, despite everyone frantically shifting gears.