A laughable semblance of the seaside was created by little more than some waves on a chalkboard and voices making sounds of the surf. Roffman and his cast had only the few weeks of interterm to prepare the production and relied heavily on creativity to produce the set, leaving the audience to appreciate small but clever adornments on stage. A plastic pot of singing and dancing daisies was delightfully silly between scenes and a can of Easy Cheese and a roll of Ritz Crackers were used as props.
The script of this satirical play makes most other black comedies look snowy white; it pokes fun at rape, murder, dismemberment and child abuse. It comes close to being very offensive to even the most liberal audience, but the characters' exaggerated personae are so mutant that they cannot possibly represent the victims of real-life tragedy.
Soon after Trudy (Julia Brownell '04) welcomes Betty (Kat Vondy '02) into the ill-fated summer cottage, the other tenants begin to arrive. Buck (Phil Tucker '03E) has to have sex twenty times a day or his brain rots, Mrs. Seizmagraff (Kim Rosenstock '02) reveals herself as Trudy's unstable, attention-hungry mother who won't accept that Trudy was chronically molested by her father and Mr. Vanislaw (Eric Feder '02), a trenchcoated Russian fellow picked up by Mrs. Seizmagraff, reveals himself one too many times. Keith (Mario Rojas '02), a sensitive murderer who has a propensity to keep severed heads in hat boxes, serves as a foil for Buck's sleazeball character-he's celibate.
Rosenstock's Mrs. Seizmagraff was excellently played. The vibrance that she was able to filter through the older character of Mrs. Seizmagraff reminds me of the fantastically wacky Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude." There's something about crazy old women that is always fun ... they're always into sex, cats or eating small children. Boynton and Rojas both led us through their character's emotional journey very well.
It might have seemed 'lame' furnish this satirical play with a laugh track, but by the time the second act started it was apparent that the voices of the laugh track (Keith Boynton '05E, Ethan Katz '02, Erica Sussman '02) had more than a few chuckles in mind. They materialized in the cottage as three pushy people presumably representative of the rampant entertain-me mentality, demanding increased levels of sex, violence and a live simulation of court television.
"Betty's Summer Vacation" criticizes the way in which the American consumer has been allowed to transform modern television into a cesspool of sex and violence as instantaneous entertainment. The satire wasn't always pulled off entirely-I am always a happy critic of modern television, but sometimes the comedy was obvious and a bit wilted-but there are also some great lines, for example when Betty is telling the incarnate voices a story and one blurts "Oooh! Menstruation!"
This kind of wholly unpredictable dialogue, however inane, is so tickling that it's difficult not to find yourself laughing out loud.