"Powell Square," by Emily Stremming, courtesy of phd gallery
St. Louis is a place where every weekend you will find a minimum of two dozen organizations holding trivia benefits in church basements, school gymnasiums, community centers and union halls. Yeah, we “triv.” It’s nerdcore, it’s competitive, it’s often boozy, and it has become as St. Louis as the Friday night Lenten fish fry and Steve Mizerany.
OnSite Theatre Co. has taken the modern trivia-night tradition and mashed it up with a night of comedic theater for a hybrid that is a treat for fans of either genre. The troupe’s performances of Dan Rubin’s The Trivia Job (Through November 9, directed by Anna Pileggi) are staged in what feels like a community center, but is actually the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis, in an industrial block along South Broadway in Soulard.
The play’s action concerns a bank heist carried out for altruistic reasons, marital issues, a lesbian seeking broader acceptance, and a hodgepodge of other doings united by a nearly all-female cast of characters.
There is reason aplenty for a sense of mounting tension—the church ladies are getting closer and closer to a bank robbery that will transpire before the night is over, and in a more immediate sense, audience members are competing in teams to best each other in three rounds of trivia questions.
The trivia violates the 7-2-1 rule. That’s the rule that if you want people to have fun playing trivia, you have to give them questions they have a fighting chance at answering. So for every 10 questions, that’s seven easy ones, two medium and one hard. It seemed most audience members agreed that many of the questions were pretty difficult. Regardless, trivia has a way of lighting a competitive fire under the average St. Louisan, and the shifts between theatrical drama and “trivial” drama made for an unusual, fascinating vibe in the room.
However, the tandem of play and trivia felt a bit long, and a series of awkward confessions by various characters felt like speechifying. The ending was less than satisfying. The utterly blank backdrop could have used some sort of adornment. And then there’s the central conceit of a trivia night used as a sort of cover for a bank robbery, which sounds like some sort of whimsical film made for the Hallmark Channel. It’s maybe a little too cute.
Yet the clever lines, frequent surprises, and joyous audience interaction left everyone in smiles. The stellar cast—Michelle Hand, Donna Weinsting, Ann Marie Mohr, Julia Zasso and Ben Nordstrom—really clicked together, and Nordstrom can surely ad-lib.
Toward the night’s end, a woman at my table held up a chain of tickets and asked “Is this raffle real or part of the show?” It was the perfect summation of a winning theatrical trick that muddled actors and audience to the point that the play itself was a shifting, hard-to-pin-down animal. It wasn’t what you’d call avant garde, but it was a rare experience. The mixture of fourth-wall shifts, competitive trivia and snappy dialogue makes for a unique evening.
A locally made film short offers a warm rat-a-tat-tat of nostalgia in "End of Line,” directed by Caitlin Zera. The glimpse of Maplewood’s Jones Typewriter Co. and its proprietors, Vern Trampe and Charlie May, depicts the men in their element, swamped in typewriter guts in a kind of Sisyphean struggle to repair a massive grouping of ancient machines. The footage, captured in black and white, is a celebration of men working patiently with their hands in a medium with which a full generation has had no knowledge. One machine that a repairman gleefully tinkers with is 130 years old, he reckons. Why restore it to function? We can’t imagine, but it’s a kind of analog porn to watch him at work. The short is screened prior to the documentary Out of Print via the St. Louis International Film Festival, November 16, at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (cinemastlouis.org).
Innovations in digital photography are the order of the day at the Philip Hitchcock Gallery, where a new exhibition teases with cryptic and abstract notes.
An Altered Reality (through November 30, phdstl.com) features the work of Linda Mueller and Emily Stremming. Mueller’s manipulated photos are collections of objects that symbolize people in her life. “HSL,” for example, gathers a clock, an axe, a Bible and other objects for a compelling assemblage that represents the predilections of someone known to Mueller, unknown to the viewer. Another image of two snakes resting atop a huge pile of cash within a briefcase references a less-than-ideal former employer, we hear. A number of the objects in the images have been digitally “bent” into impossible angles for a disturbing funhouse effect that doubles as a nod to Cubism.
Stremming physically weaves multiple photographic prints together for a disorienting effect, making photos taken on Laclede’s Landing and at other area spots look familiar, but slightly off-kilter. Her “Powell Square” is a powerful interpretation of the Arch and the crumbling building of the title in the foreground. Some of her works manage a lyrical breakdown, where a simple visual descends into a thoughtful abstraction, thanks to the effect of the woven images.
Finally, Pat Conroy signs his latest (November15, left-bank.com) at the Ethical Society of St. Louis. The Death of Santini is a memoir that covers the thoroughly improbable—the mellowing of Conroy’s notoriously cruel father after Conroy’s mother divorced him and Conroy attained his fame. In a sick twist, the elder Conroy invited himself to the signing table at book events, where he proceeded to gladhand and backslap autograph seekers—and to sign his son Pat’s books right next to Pat’s signature. Even more chilling: the book contains images of the Conroy family in a photo section at the book’s center. The malignant father of The Great Santini is there in all his grinning evil, presiding over a brood that his depredations would launch into nervous breakdowns, suicide, schisms, endless therapy – and not a few bestsellers. The author’s message of reconciliation leaves the vicarious horrors of his novels—The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, etc.—untouched. Conroy will always remain the male version of Christina Crawford, offering up a “Daddy Dearest” for the ages in nearly every bit of his fiction and non-fiction alike.
