Three-play ‘Paws’ both funny, sloppy

The Asylum Theatre, which seldomly performs these days, came up with an interesting idea to fill in for a recently canceled production at the budget-strapped College of Southern Nevada: three simple, short plays, all having something to do with dogs, under the banner title "Moments of Paws." Most of the scripts have a lot more on their minds than animals. The evening alternated between enchanting, funny and sloppy.

"Dog Lady" (by Los Angeles writer Milcha Sanchez-Scott) gives us an L.A. barrio street with mystical things going on between neighbors. Rosalinda (Chanel Christen) is determined to win a local marathon and is aided by an old woman (Alisha Fabbi) who seems to turn Rosalinda into a dog to help her ace the race.

It was fun to watch Maria May, as Rosalinda's self-doubting sister, become transformed into a self-assured beauty. Morgan Schefflin made for an amusing, often neglected suitor (of both sisters, yet), and Norma Hernandez was a fiery, sensual, domineering and loving mother.

"Good Dog" (by Bret Fetzer, artistic director of Seattle's Annex Theatre, and Seattle choreographer Juliet Waller Pruzan) is built on an amusing one-note joke: a young man (Tyson Croft), who accidentally kills a blind man's pet, attempts to impersonate the dog because he can't bear to tell the man what he's done.

Croft did some first-rate mugging, and Eric Nelson was amusingly oblivious as the amiable blind man.

"The Man Who Turned Into a Dog" (by political organizer Osvaldo Dragun) was a nifty little parable about a working man (Rommel Pacson) who is reduced to literally living like a canine in a feeble attempt to make ends meet.

The piece had a wonderfully lyrical feel highlighted by an intimate dance with the short, thin, Chaplin-esque Pacson and his suffering wife, played by the tall, heavyset, divalike Fabbi.

Director Sarah O'Connell infused the stories with sufficient poignancy and laughs. And Axis deBruyn's lights added an appropriately mysterious beauty. But the show was blocked to face only one side of a three-sectioned blackbox audience, so that for too much of the audience, "Paws" was a play about sides and backs.

Too often, the acting was surface-y, and the pacing frequently seemed a beat off.

At a recent matinee, you saw the director, visible to one-side of the audience, scurrying the actors onstage for what seemed like an impromptu curtain call.

Nothing like a decent rehearsal schedule to clear up these easily correctable embarrassments.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.