By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
We’ve seen this sit-com before. It’s spring, 1950, and two younger couples are hosting the boss and his wife for dinner.
They ask for recipes and trade witticisms, true. But as Jim bustles between kitchen and the living room preparing his “Baxter’s Special” cocktail, it’s evident that this may not be your usual sit-com set up.
When Kitty, the boss’s wife, asks when there’ll be the patter of little feet in the house, the wives divert her attention with what sounds like an advertisement for the furniture polish she uses.
Then the boss, in true sitcom fashion, drops the bomb primed to blow up this perfect arrangement.
Barbara Barkan directs the Black Swamp Players’ production of “Perfect Arrangement” by Topher Payne. The play runs Sept. 27-29 and Oct. 4-6 in the Players’ theater at 115 Oak St., in downtown Bowling Green. Showtimes are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 1:30 p.m. Click for tickets.
The boss, Sunderson (Joe Capucini), works for the U.S. State Department, as does Norma (Rin Moran), who is married to the cocktail maker Jim Baxter, (Heath Diehl). Norma’s the secretary to Bob Martindale (Kevin Caudill) the head of personnel at State, who is married to Millie (Hali Malecki).
In true sit-com fashion, Sunderson, played with perfect threatening amiability, drops a bomb as the first scene seems to be wrapping up. His announcement will not set up any comedy, rather, it will explode this “perfect arrangement.”
To date, State has been focused on rooting out Reds. Now it will turn its attention to those accused of moral turpitude — gamblers, drinkers, the promiscuous women, and homosexuals.
Kitty (Monica Hiris) needs explanation as the others hedge on what to call the latter group. Then it hits her, “fags!”
Jim ventures to say that they don’t call themselves that, but clearly that’s who the State Department is concerned with.
That is, they are concerned with people such as Jim and Bob, Millie and Norma.
Their perfect arrangement is built on the shifting sands of lies.
The marriages of the Baxters and the Martindales are shams. Jim and Bob are lovers as are Millie and Norma. They live in homes, guys in one and women in the other, next to each other with a secret connection through a closet — of course!
And the lies just pile up, and sometimes can’t even last for a minute.
When asked how Norma met Jim, Millie spins a fanciful yarn involving lipstick stained handkerchiefs. She used to write poetry.
“You are now on the frontline of the new war,” Sunderson tells Bob, That means Norma is also a foot soldier.
Bob rationalizes that only those most flagrant individuals will be fired. But flagrant means being stopped in a certain park. The man says he was walking his dog, but as a single man he’s an easy target for the police.
But the State Department doesn’t conduct trial. To be accused is to be guilty.
Most slump out of the office, passing Norma’s desk, their lives ruined.
Jim is well aware of the stakes. If his sexual orientation was revealed he would be fired from his teaching job, and would never get another.
And he and Jim could be imprisoned given engaging in homosexual behavior at the time was illegal.
A lot is stake … as Jim says, not only would he, as a teacher, be unemployable, but he and Bob could be imprisoned. Not if they maintain this perfect arrangement.
Not everyone, though, goes quietly.
Barbara Grant (Thea Grabiec), a translator, has a reputation for sleeping around. As Bob says she has a closet full of ill-gotten minks. There’s more in her closet though, including a long ago tie to Millie.
Grant is statuesque. She wears high makeup — Grabiec designed and applied it herself — that sets her apart for the rest. She’s also highly intelligent and unbending.
Her opposite is Kitty Sunderson. Hiris embodies this character who appears flighty and clueless. A stock sit-com figure. Yet that demeanor may just disguise inner secrets she doesn’t not even want to admit to herself.
While there’s a certain symmetry to the arrangement, Norma, Millie, Bob, and Jim, each have their own agendas. As the plot makes clear, the men, while facing greater scrutiny and possible punishment in society, are still men with greater power than any woman, gay or straight.
In the end, the audience knows this is not a sit-com with all the loose ends tied up with laugh before the theme song plays. The stakes are too high, the situation too unstable.
We do know how the history will play out. But the play offers a subtle warning that maybe those gains are no more permanent than the Baxters’ and Martindales’ perfect arrangement.
