arts

The Theatre Guild of Ancon's current production, "The Tender Trap," is set slightly before my time. I was a toddler then, rock and roll was just germinating among whites with an appreciation for "race records," there were hepcats but no hippies, Tim Leary was a hard-drinking young Irish-American scholar who had yet to discover eastern religion or the joys and terrors in a lysergic acid derivative and lechery's limits had yet to be shattered by The Pill.

Ah, but human nature doesn't really change very much. In the 60s and 70s I became well acquainted with many of the sorts of people lampooned in this 50s play that Panama's English-language theater group has revived. The late Frank Zappa helped me with my taxonomy.

"Let's get blind!" is leading man Charlie Reader's (Patrick Casal's) call to celebration. Zappa put his finger on many aspects of the phenomenon in compositions ranging from "America Drinks and Goes Home" to "Wino Man." Twenty years later, the offspring of Charlie Reader types tended to praise Jah and through the medium of the sacred ganja weed seek to activate their third eyes. At best they found a more pleasant buzz.

The trap for which Reader fall is Julie Gillis (Stephanie Bodden, shown above on the telephone). I think Frank Zappa had her in mind when he wrote "Plastic People." The statistical probability was that her trap would not hold her prey indefinitely. As the saying goes, "I dunno, honey --- maybe it's your hairspray."

The main supporting characters, Joe McCall (Andrew Moeser) and Sylvia Crewes (Caroline Ribi), ably played the straight man and woman who make Casal's and Bodden's antics funny. The rest of the cast, Cristina Chewning as Poppy Matson, Hillary Hughes as Jessica Collins, Cris Garza as Earl Lindquist and Fred Schwartz as Sol Schwartz, add the campy supporting performances necessary to turn this slightly sordid tale of messy romance into comedy that works.

I caught the second of six performances of "The Tender Trap." If you haven't seen it, you should catch one of the latter three on April 3, 4 or 5. It's a worthy alternative to cable TV's all war propaganda all the time and the slicker mind rot that dominates the rest of the channels. Moreover, and though I saw not a single one of the politicians who recently decreed the importance of English to the Panamanian people in attendance, the Theatre Guild of Ancon is a 53-year-old bastion of English-language culture that deserves your support.

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