Ryan Manning provided a lot of the energy for the Austin Community College Experimental Student Performance Lab. This summer 2009 enterprise put on four pieces, all student-written and student-directed, all performed by ACC students. Manning wrote three of them and performed in three. Whatever ESPL show was up there, Manning was an important part of it.

Bravo for that energy and engagement.

Austin Live Theatre published a review of Manning's "Beckett" piece An Empty Stage on July 25. The Manning canon is filled out with this double bill of his goofy-but-fun The Men from Mars and his "Pinter/Sam Shephard" work Careful as Mice.

Austin Community College students can whoop it up as well as anyone, and the intimate Gallery Theatre on the third floor of the Rio Grande campus was a fine place to do so. Think of every space opera you've ever seen, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica, put them in a blender and dress up your actors with intentionally campy outfits and attitudes. That was The Men from Mars. We whooped right along with them in the electronic music as those creepy Martians with stockings over their faces came attacking our noble troops, who were Good Guy Macho stereotypes from every war movie you've ever seen.

We served as the public for the meeting of the High Council on earth as the counselors in their dizzy outfits met to consider the End of the World. Space cadets on either side of the audience chatted, joked, and fizzled out in space under the attacks. Actors had warned that this was going to be an audience-participation show. That guy in the back, Carlos, got caught talking to his girlfriend, so he found himself to his manifest surprise hauled before the counsel and frog-marched off to prison.

The audience got to participate in the battle, too, throwing rubber balls at the two or three attacking Martians who were flinging around the stage with our earthly heroes.

It's fun to send up clichés, and Manning's script cleverly set up a twist at the end, in which we all had to wonder just what was going on. Were we all participating in the same hi-jinks? Yes, there was a common conspiracy to join the story, but what part of the events actually constituted the intended story? The Men from Mars was inevitably going to come to a moralizing conclusion (you earthlings are the source of the problem. . . ) but with a student's glee and mischief, the playwright traded on our common assumptions of theatrical permissions. We realized, finally, that we'd all been artfully duped, and we were amused by that.

Manning's two-act piece Clever as Mice, seeking a tone of enigma, menace and mystery, was far less successful. He dribbles the characters into the action with very little exposition or explanation. Manning himself is Job, a young man living in an attic apartment who has somehow brought back Sam (Nathan Kinsey) after a night of drinking. Sam spends a lot of time sleeping, then tottering around the stage and not explaining himself. Job's girlfriend Joy (Jayme Ramsey) finds them there; someone named Alice (Hallie Chaney) comes on the scene and has some unexplained power over the others. The landlord from downstairs Mr. Rosewater (Kendall Myers) comes visiting, doesn't say much, and drops dead in the bed, sharing it for a time with the somnolent Sam, to no one's great alarm.

Mrs. Rosewater (Jessica Salinas) may or may not have been informed of this -- there's a confusing scene in which the mysterious Alice does all the talking while other actors stand on the auditorium floor miming the dialogue. (Why?) In any case, la Rosewater is an idiot or at least a lunatic, and we get to sit through a fairly lengthy demonstration of this in her living room. Oh, and did I mention that Sam has a gun and at Alice's behest he is threatening everyone but Mrs. Rosewater in order to oblige them to burgle the Rosewater apartment?

Alice peers through the window, joins the group, and Mr. Rosewater --rather, probably the ghost of Mr. Rosewater, since he is perceived only by crazy Alice -- walks in for a tête-à-tête. The reason for this we do not understand until later, after Mrs. Rosewater has poisoned Alice with a cyanide pill in some sleight-of-hand that none of us noticed. Cue dramatic scene of death by poisoning, with much writhing on the couch.

We learn that Alice and Mr. Rosewater were lovers!!! That's why the Rosewaters and Alice were crazed, while the young couple and manipulated Sam were only slimy, grasping and suspicious!!

Well, you can imagine that it all ends badly. Sam is splashing gasoline happily around the upper floor apartment and testing his cigarette lighter as the youngsters face their grim future, now that Job has broken up with Joy after he shot Mrs. Rosewater.

During this, director Sally Ziegler intervenes at the breaks, apparently to interject some levity as she puzzles through her notes, mumbles and covers the scene changes. Her comments are profoundly uninformative, but she's appropriately apologetic about that.

But seriously, folks, as the stand-up comedians used to say in vaudeville. . . Manning has an idea here, but his script is too slow, too long, and too unexplained. We in the audience were ready to play along, if only we could have understood the motivation of at least one of the characters sometime in the first half of the play. Though Manning, Kinsey, Ramsey and Chaney acted this mess with great seriousness, it seemed interminable.

Cut, cut! Focus, focus! and let us know why we should care!

EXTRA

Click for programs from The Men from Mars and Careful as Mice

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