Audience stays way ahead of ‘Monaco’

You go to a Master of Fine Arts workshop production looking for possibilities, rather than polish. But "Take Me to Monaco" makes you wonder if anyone at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' playwriting department is minding the store.

It's difficult to describe what Laura V. Turner's script is about, because she keeps switching gears.

At first, we think we're at a backyard wedding ceremony for a loopy, rural Tennessee family, a la "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." There's an interfering mom (Elisabeth Bokhoven), a rebellious daughter (Sara Glass) and a photographer (Ryan Fonville) who keeps taking pictures of very delicate moments.

Soon, we're thrown into nightmare flashbacks involving the mother's disastrous relationship with her husband (Robert Hamilton). Not so far off is what feels like a spoof of exorcisms, led by a gossiping, unloving, self-ordained minister (Jaime Puckett) and a well-meaning but bumbling priest (again, Fonville).

Things get serious again toward the end, when we find out the "deep" meaning of the title, and whether or not the daughter is going to wind up happy, or miserable like Mom and Pop.

Turner's dialogue is overdone when comic, moronically simple when serious. The audience is always way ahead of her. Shouldn't a faculty member at least have pointed out to her the obvious clashes in style? And the lack of character and plot focus?

I can't imagine how director Mandy Peters could have solved these problems, so let's just say too many of the actors seem to be in different plays.

Bokhoven's particularly annoying, since she has not learned to internalize the qualities that make a character eccentric. Her performance is so overstated, you want to take cover.

I chuckled at Fonville, not because of dialogue or acting skills, but his self-mocking mannerisms, even to the point of laughing at himself when it wasn't appropriate. It was as if he were shrugging off the evening and saying, "Look, let's just try to get a yuk or two out of this."

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.