Mulligan’s Jacket: Boy Gets Chick
Hyde Park Theatre, through August 31
Running Time: 2 hrs, 25 min
Freedom is, as the poet Kristofferson reminds us, “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” By that measure, then, one might reasonably expect Mulligan Lankwood, the protagonist of Ronnie Karam’s ingenious and consistently entertaining solo show Mulligan’s Jacket, to be free. He has never had much in life, not since the day his devoutly Christian mom handcuffed him to the radiator in the basement, constricting his world to endless hours of television viewed through the bottle-thick lenses of his prescription specs, but with the departure of his only friend in the world — a baby chicken with a somewhat mystical ability to divine the future and certain peoples’ true desires — the hapless Mulligan really has nothing left to lose. But he’s still far from free, and as we make our way through the tale of this sad and shackled lad, we come to understand why.
Actually, Mulligan himself doesn’t appear until very late in the play. Most of what we come to know of him is communicated through a series of monologues delivered by characters who have encountered either him or his mystic chick. They are, by and large, an outlandish lot: Mulligan’s Wal-Mart-working, hooked-on-prayer mom, who spends so much time on her knees that they’re no longer skin color; a bespectacled and be-turbaned past-his-prime chorus boy, anxious to survive the groaning near-corpse he latched onto for money; a toxically friendly telemarketer who hawks potentially lethal fat-burning pills from “exciting New Yawk City;” a four-year-old Mexican boy who was pushed into the Rio Grande by his mom and sent to find his destiny in an American McDonald’s; a blond Brit twit desperately seeking his own sugar daddy via video dating and the adoption of foreign orphans on eBay; and so on. That such odd and disparate characters should somehow be connected is part of the fun of Karam’s creation. Each exists in his or her own absurd corner of reality, impossibly remote from the rest, and yet with Olympic-size leaps of coincidence and silliness, they fit together.
Of course, Karam plays them all, and in this Buzz Productions staging he appears to be having a ball doing it. He throws himself into each high-pitched, queeny giggle, each wink up at the Almighty, each impatient flip back of a recalcitrant ‘do, each saucer-eyed, Spanish-inflected description of American excess. And as if it weren’t enough fun simply embodying such loopy characters, he gives each one a song to sing, generally a parody version of a well-known musical number, such as West Side Story‘s “America,” reworked with satirical references suited to the Mexican boy Pedro, or the Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer standard “Skylark,” rewritten as “Chick” and addressed to you-know-who. The writing is on the level of the performance: smart, fully invested with character, and presented with an enthusiasm that’s infectious.
Indeed, without the strength of the writing, the ending of the piece might not work as well as it does. All the characters appear simultaneously and engage in a group conversation that fills in the missing pieces of Mulligan’s history and sets up his ultimate fate. It’s the text, the things that the characters have shared about their lives and how they’ve expressed them, that draws them together and reveals them to us in one tightly bound bunch. We’ve been shown how they’re all confined in some way — shackled to their images of themselves or of the world or of love or life — and in recognizing that, can glimpse the path to freedom that might exist for Mulligan. No doubt many local theatregoers have grown accustomed to the sight of one actor carrying on a complicated conversation in multiple voices; Rob Nash has spent a decade refining it into his creative specialty. Without drawing comparisons to another artist, let me just say that Ronnie Karam’s execution of this solo exercise is fresh and fixating and emotionally satisfying. It shouldn’t spoil things to let you know that in the end, boy gets chick, and we’re set free into the night, smiling and content.
This article appears in August 30 • 2002.