LAKE COUNTY — Do you like a mystery? When you see one, do you try to figure it out before the end when the hero elucidates all? This one is for you, perhaps, but if you need to have it all wrapped up for you, you”ll want to see it twice. That would take nerve, though.
“Mindgame,” starring John Tomlinson, Rod Rehe and Pam Bradley, is a mystery for sure and a story that will leave you speculating, maybe stunned. It is directed by Tim Barnes, who has a pretty good idea of how far he can push a Lake County audience.
This play pushes pretty hard. The audience leaving the theater after we saw the play was moved, admiring and what, horrified?
It has a plot with many twists and turns. Reality that seems so clear in the beginning gets more and more elusive as the story progresses. It takes place at an asylum for serial murderers.
More than that, I don”t want to tell you. Giving you the ending would reduce your enjoyment to some extent and would relieve you of some of the stress that the violence on stage produces but there is no way to summarize the whole.
If you have the inner strength to see a play with a great deal of physical and emotional tumult, one that plays with your fears, you will want to take the whole roller-coaster ride, no hands.
Sometimes difficult stories are made to come out all right in the end and all the struggle and pain is neutralized by a happy ending. Sometimes it doesn”t all come out all right and the tragedy that you can see coming is fit and proper. This play doesn”t fit either of those patterns.
That”s all, that”s all. I want so badly to tell you, but if you see it, you will get so much more from it if I keep my mouth shut. And does it really matter what color a telephone is? (There are three hints in this paragraph. Sorry. Can”t help myself.)
I can safely say a few things about the production. Barnes directed, the same fellow who brought us “The Rocky Horror Show.”
There were many who predicted that Lake County would never accept a raunchy, surreal comedy like “Rocky Horror” and they were wrong. It was a smash and that was partly because Barnes didn”t hang back out of some kind of deference to an imagined timidity of consciousness in the Lake County soul.
Barnes directed this play with the same assurance, the confidence that we can safely take a walk “out there” with him.
The cast is dynamite. The roles are tricky, the script is complicated, a lot is asked of Rehe and Tomlinson. There are layers and layers, truths and truths and then the new truth, followed by the final truth, and finally the truth dissolves into a question.
These guys make these complicated characters believable.Sometimes you wish that they were not so believable. Tomlinson can be really scary.
Bradley”s part is not so complicated, but she has to convince you and then convince you of the opposite and help you up off the floor a few minutes before the end, just before you go home, realizing that you are finally “getting it” in the car.
There is some clever stagecraft by Wink Winkler that I can”t tell you about, except that it helps create the layers and layers of reality.
Look, I”d say you should go see it. You don”t get the chance to see theater this powerful very often and you won”t be harmed by it, you will be a fuller human being.
In the end, if you have a bad heart or if you are 8 years old or if the need to feel superior to the rest of humanity is your guiding light, you might not want to go. Too bad, though. It”s a great ride.
“Mindgame” performances take place at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Lower Lake Schoolhouse Museum. Performances follow in May at the Willits Community Theatre.
All tickets cost $10 and are available at Watershed Books in Lakeport, 263-5787, Shannon Ridge Winery in Clearlake Oaks, 998-8656 and Griffin Furniture in Clearlake, 994-2112. Tickets will also be available at the door. This show is for adults only due to violence and sexual content.
