Scott Feiner
Romance blossoms between a hard-driving businesswoman (Vanessa Vesperman) and a lonely widower (Dunes).
Broom Street Theater’s tiny black box theater is the perfect venue for experimentation. Tucked into a driveway off Willy Street, the actors and directors have tackled just about every topic you can think of. And now there’s Pudding.
At the end of the theater’s tree-lined concrete pedestrian entrance, signage depicts the faces of the main conflict: the struggle between a sallow-faced widower and an uptight young woman who is obsessed with his oblique existence.
Pudding is also a satirical look at the potential absurdities of marketing strategies, illustrated by a televised campaign for pudding. A comfort food by nature, pudding in the play is wedded to the Santa Claus-esque quality of the naive main character, John (played by Dunes).Written by Michael Tooher and directed by Eric Holz, the play consists of nine scenes bridged together by musical interludes from various popular rock songs.
In the first scene, John sits alone at a desk in his nondescript home on Hillcrest Drive in some town, in some state. He puts together care packages to send to names chosen at random from an assortment of phonebooks, placing a single packet of chocolate pudding into each package. Recently widowed, he is essentially closed off from the outside world, except for these off-kilter acts of kindness to strangers.
When the driven businesswoman Mary (Vanessa Vesperman) mistakenly arrives at John’s home, she encounters a man whose most frequent facial gestures are those of confusion; his common responses are “okay” and “I don’t care.”
At first, she annoys John, as she surreptitiously tries to make him into a mascot for a marketing scheme that exploits his random acts of kindness. Eventually, her marketing team gives the aging, boring John a curious makeover, reinventing him as “crazy pudding man.”
Meanwhile, a farcical romance develops between the two. One scene involves a revealing pink nightgown, a bathrobe and a chair on which they make love.
The play strikes a tender note when John falls asleep beneath his desk, waking to ruminate with Mary on the true nature of loneliness. The physical placement of the couple — basically under a desk —suggests a parody of love at first sight. However, many of their quips on love and loneliness veer in the direction of cliché, detracting from the play’s deeper currents.
One of the play’s highlights is John’s outburst as he takes a stand against his exploitation in front of a live television audience. The normally subdued character has been transformed.
And that — in the end — boosts sales for the pudding.
