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This is, I suppose I should say at this juncture, apparently the point. The title of Sibyl Kempson's work refers to a 1960s radio show that represented the beginning of the end of shared culture, not long before everything split into an eternal battle of us-versus-them. "Everything was so easy to understand," Collette (April Matthis) says at the beginning of the show, of the radio programs everyone, everywhere, heard when she was a child. "And fun! We all laughed at the same parts, squealed at the same parts, and came away with the same sort of understanding." Fondly, Collette Richland seems to present itself as the ultimate outgrowth of what happens when that goes away, and everyone is left adrift and alone on a sea of possibilities. Like domestic comedies where the "stars" have forced speech impediments? Have at it. Want a workplace (or "social group") piece where those in attendance are united by a single ideal? Here you go. Dream of terrifying climbs in the mountains, battling the devil, or inviting your elected representative for dinner? It's all yours. And if you've ever longed to have a cat wearing red high heels that answers the door for you when it's not coughing up hairballs, do I have a surprise for you! These mere mentions do not begin to describe the scope of this meandering mélange, which is, thankfully, almost as stunning in its execution as it is inscrutable (and that's no small feat). Director John Collins has presided over a sumptuous feast of shape, color, and movement that never slows down and, in fact, never has only one or two things happening at a time. With the help of Jacob A. Climer (costumes), David Zinn (sets and additional costumes), Mark Barton (lights), Mike Iveson (music), and Ben Williams (sterling sound), you're transported time and time again into dizzyingly disjointed realms of fancy that super-glue together nightmares, fever dreams, and fairy tales with gleeful abandon. Shouldn't two hours and 40 minutes of this kind of hallucinatory bedlam eventually add up to something? The closest the evening gets is the final scene, when the various individual elements that have been colliding all along—from the suburban married couple to the representative to the piano-playing-priest-turned-French-waiter to the very devil himself—sit at a kitchen table while Collette dreamily intones something approaching a moral. "They clung desperately to the literal at first, but they were destined to be part of something greater than the literal, greater even than the literary," she says. "And it was something they were never meant to quite comprehend. They had long suspected and even believed that these phenomena formed a kind of structure, but it would have been a structure much larger and more complex—oh what the hell, and also more simple—than the rational side of the human mind could ever conceive or understand. Certainly less predictable than. In their absence things really started to disintegrate in the now-empty house and for the entire civilization." Well, okay. And if such theories, as married to a robust theatricality, are enough for you, so too will be Fondly, Collette Richland. But aside from celebrating the randomness of society when it's no longer tethered to definable core experiences, and presenting itself as the live-performance equivalent of the word "relevate" (defined in a program note as "the spontaneous and unrestricted act of lifting into attention, again, a certain content, for a particular context, as indicated by thought and language"), it doesn't add up to anything profound, or even particularly entertaining. It exists for the sake of existing, a living proof of concept much more than a play with anything relevant to say. (This type of elevation of style so far over substance has often bothered me about Elevator Repair Service's outings.) As for the acting, it must be expert, because it's inseparable from the show around it. I was particularly fond of Matthis (if more as the ethereal Collette than as the chaotic Dora, whom she plays much more frequently), Iveson as the understated priest and waiter, Laurena Allan as the bubbly, stereotypical '60s housewife, and Lucy Taylor as "The Deposed and Dethroned Grand Queen Empress Queen Patrice" and a Goth horror referred to only as RMR. I could have done without them all shouting most of their lines, but given the nonstop layering of sound they have to endure, that's perhaps understandable. How nice that something in Fondly, Collette Richland is. On the off chance you've needed convincing about who we are now, collectively, as Americans—or, perhaps more accurately, who we are not—chances are you won't find a more persuasive argument than this one. But while watching it, you may find yourself haunted by the notion that just acknowledging the existence of the problem is not, in itself, a solution. Maybe that's the real point? Who knows? And, Kempson and Collins seem to be saying, who cares?
Fondly, Collette Richland
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