We had a sense of what to expect from Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, at the Echo Theater through October 29th. Laws, after all, is a writer for the incredibly dark, subversive, yet exceedingly well-written Preacher on AMC. Comic-book based characters and taste for the very morbid are a highlight of her work on that show – and morbid events and humor are also a keynote of Blueberry Toast.
The four character play also has a bit of a comic-book sensibility, with its candy-colored suburban set, it’s broadly drawn characters who are certainly not the cheerful mom, dad, and two kids contingent they appear when first on-stage.
Directed by Dustin Wills, the play is as scabrous as it is hilarious, the tale of disgruntled Walt (Albert Dayan), a middle school poetry teacher; his long-suffering and deeply angry wife, Barb (Jacqueline Wright), and their two children, Jack (Michael Sturgis) and Jill (Alexandra Freeman), who are hell-bent on performing a bizarre play within the play for their parental audience.
The action gets started when Barb offers to make the likely having-an-affair and anxious to get on with it Walt breakfast. He says blueberry toast, she makes it, he says he meant blueberry pancakes, and a power struggle ensues with drastic and bloody results.
Splaying their vitriol everywhere they can, the adults make love, war, and twisted commentary their compulsions; the kids are clearly twisted in their own way from their exposure to mama and papa’s war.
Fresh and crazy, shocking and idiosyncratic, Blueberry Toast entertains in a vibrantly depraved fashion, encouraging the audience to immerse themselves in a world all the more bleak for its sunshiny set and seemingly comfortable middle class home.
Both brutal and highly amusing, this is one piece of toast audiences will enjoy crunching, while delighting in the fact that whatever dysfunction they may have in their own home lives, it ain’t nothing like this.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the Echo Theater.