"Babylon" Breaks Taboos and Tradition

By Noreen Lewis Cochran, GSU Signal

Once again- just like in "Relations Unknown" when Chris says goodbye to his friends-I find myself at the Whole World Theatre's Third Space, fighting back tears. It's the way Topher Payne as the transvestite prostitute Virgin Mary looks at his imaginary reflection in a cathouse mirror. I can't tell you why it bust me up inside or how he does it. It's the magic of theatre. It is also some kind of magic that keeps playwright Marki Shalloe's characters from being stereotypes, even though she gives us characters like the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans (Barbara Washington as Madame).

If Madame were a Tarot card, she would be the Queen of Coins. She reads the cards to find a missing negligee, conjures a spell to find lost money and asserts her dominion over her famous house of ill repute like Cajun royalty. Ms. Washington wears the role as naturally as she does her flowing caftans and her Creole accent is flawless.The Two-Faced Do-Gooder (Barbara Cole as Persephone) is also potentially a stock character, but Ms. Cole turns it into a continual unveiling of the beige persona she wears like her beige costume.

Gradually we learn the truth behind her concealed charms, her hidden intentions and her easy seduction by the gin that flows like water.We've all seen Wisecracking Hooker with the Heart of Gold before, and Virgin Mary is no exception."You're more screwed up than the whore next door," she says to Persephone, "and she hits men with a riding crop for $20."

Payne, however, transforms himself into a woman deploying wit like a weapon against the stings of the world's cruelty. As a man, he uses the world's own prejudice against it to fool the police and protect his savior.

Ms. Shalloe also gives us the Lecherous Musician. Once again (see "Urinetown"), I am glad to see the leading man killed off. This is not a spoiler alert: the show closed March 25 and you have my abject apologies for not getting to it sooner. However, DeWayne Morgan as the decadent harmonica player, brothel customer and drug pusher stands out as a symbol of evil even as the women around him break the law on a daily basis.

They break taboos, too, using a two-way mirror to spy on each other. Director Betty Hart guides the production, lit with subtlety and naturalness by Nina Gooch on a lush set designed by actor Payne, until the audience feels like it, too, is spying on the occupants of Babylon.

There's one more break that cannot go unnoticed, like an 800-pound gorilla in the room. When a leading lady breaks her leg, custom demands that the understudy fill in. Yet Ms. Cole walks the stage in a prescription boot to which no character, even the immensely curious Virgin Mary, refers. Maybe like Ms. Shalloe, Ms. Hart has also refused to give in to stereotype.

Grace Under Fire

Two local playwrights examine the soul of the South
by Curt Holman, Creative Loafing

Supposedly, whenever you meet new people in the South, the first question they ask is, "What church do you go to?" Which is not to be confused with asking what religion you are. In the rural South particularly, church takes on a social significance arguably equal to -- if not greater than -- a person's spiritual well-being.
Two new plays peer into the soul of the South, one from the godly side, one from the civic side. At the Process Theatre, Marki Shalloe's Babylon airs a moral debate in a New Orleans brothel in 1961. At Onstage Atlanta, Topher Payne's The Attala County Garden Club uses a supernatural twist to satirize gossipy small-town class dynamics in 1987 Mississippi. Both plays have rough patches, but together they imply that in the South, people pray with their fingers crossed behind their back.
Set in New Orleans, Babylon can't help but evoke Hurricane Katrina and the city's struggle to rebuild (although Shalloe wrote the first drafts more than a year ago). Taking place in a whorehouse called Babylon, the play contains an evocative passage about the city on the verge of an earlier flood, which doesn't deter the regular johns from keeping their appointments. Throughout the play, people's primal impulses supersede their self-preservation.
Babylon's plot seems less influenced by Katrina than Blanche DuBois. Comparable to a more decadent A Streetcar Named Desire, the plot concerns a righteous but haunted woman living under the same French Quarter roof as some confrontational hedonists. Persephone (Barbara Cole) takes a job at Babylon as a housekeeper and manicurist, although the Madame (Barbara Washington) also instructs her to keep tabs on the brothel's star attraction, a transvestite and heroin addict nicknamed "Virgin Mary" (Topher Payne).
Persephone's piety collides with Madame and Mary's pragmatic attitudes toward pleasure. Resorting to some overly formal debates on the sacred vs. the profane, Babylon risks being heavy-handed, but the play's pungent whorehouse atmosphere and credible slang terms give the material some grounding.
Babylon's lurid subject matter doesn't lend itself to underacting, but the players, directed by Betty Hart, keep their roles restrained enough to be realistic. Cole's intensity unifies Persephone's bizarre traits while Payne reveals the transvestite's melancholy shadings beneath a jailbait pout.
If Payne's play, The Attala County Garden Club, proves more efficient than Babylon, it also plays for more modest takes. The droll Southern-women comedy, explicitly written in the Steel Magnolias mode, begins with Rose Chipley (Amanda Cucher) moving into her first house with her young husband (an amusingly nonplussed Mark Russ), new baby and beloved "heirloom dining table." Like many a young Southern belle, Rose reveals anxieties about being downwardly mobile and that "the people we are" don't live up to "the people we came from."
When the city garden club (including Rose's own mother) rejects her membership application, Rose considers an offer to join the Attala County Garden Club, despite its reputation as a group of misfits. The play is an insider's view of gardening, status and conformity. The county club's members include African-American Danita (Cheryl Rookwood) and "white trash" Effie Joe (a hilarious Kellie Fortner), setting up a potential snobs-against-underdogs conflict.
Rose learns more about the club's eccentric approaches to gardening, the strange misfortunes that befall its rivals, and its seemingly mystical ability to cultivate hybrid plants. When Rose discovers the garden club's more sinister attributes, the airy play builds to effective moments of both horror-flick suspense and kitschy Southern comedy. Rose's wisecracking hairdresser (Patty Siebert) uses a comical, Sunday school-style felt board to lay out some of the folklore backstory.
Babylon and Attala each build to characters enacting a non-Christian ritual. With Madame's voodoo practices in Babylon and the echoes of Native American lore in Attala, both plays provide reminders that in Dixie, the white Christian culture lays atop other races and religions.
As writers, Payne and Shalloe have little in common besides being attentive students of comic timing, but they both are representative of rising regional playwrights. Neither seems to chase the trends that come out of New York or other, bigger theater cities. They don't dabble in the austere archetypes of the Sam Shepard model, or resort to dysfunctional dark humor like David Lindsay-Abaire or Nicky Silver. Payne specializes in light, accessible comedies while Shalloe relishes delving into strange historical factoids or provocative issues like suicide or masturbation.
Both writers have room to build on their strengths. Payne can explore challenging his audiences and himself more deeply, and Shalloe could benefit from more ambiguity and a willingness to leave points unsaid.
Babylon and The Attala County Garden Club both showcase the playwrights' enthusiasms. The playwrights show affection to eccentric characters while exposing Southern hypocrisies. They hate the sin, but love the sinners.

No Payne, No Gain

Columnist works it out on three concurrent theater projects
by Jimmy Hilburn, David Atlanta Magazine

IF YOU'RE A REGULAR David reader, then you know Topher Payne's face, with the quirky wit with which he chronicles his trials and tribulations as a twenty-something gay man living in Atlanta in his column Maybe It's Just Me.
But, if you knew what else is on Payne's plate, you'd be amazed he has any time to reflect on his life, let alone laugh about it. Just for starters, the month of March sees the world premiere of a play Payne wrote at Onstage Atlanta, his acting in another play across town, and his set designs for yet another play.
And as the life of a playwright/ actor/columnist goes, he still finds time to squeeze in the proverbial day job - restaurant managing at Metro Fresh, the new Midtown café owned by fellow thespian Mitchell Anderson.
Payne's newest script, "The Attala County Garden Club" marks a unique milestone. After more than half a dozen plays - including productions in Atlanta and New York - he is finally setting this one in his hometown of Kosciusko, Miss., at the time of his childhood.
Payne describes "Attala" as a comic thriller that is "Steel Magnolias meets Buffy The Vampire Slayer." Be prepared for an evening of ruthless social climbing, cryptic spells and rituals, and, of course, handy gardening tips.
In the small-town setting, a woman named Rose has only one avenue to the top tier of society: Membership in the City Garden Club. When Rose is shunned by the club, she has no choice but to join the less esteemed Attala County Garden Club, where a bevy of scorned women engage in witchcraft to exact their revenge.
Rest assured, all the witchcraft is "witch-approved," according to Payne.
"I talked to witches," he says. "I had a friend who hooked me up, because I didn't want it to be like an episode of 'Charmed.'"
GROWING UP IN KOSCIUSKO, mixed with adolescent and teen years in New England and California boarding schools, definitely gave Payne a unique perspective. He found the South to be a fount of source material for his writing.
"Southerners are more interesting than other Americans," Payne says, "because we have the gift of gab. Storytelling is part of our culture. You always have the person that is elected to tell every family story. 'No, no, no, you have to hear Mary Ellen tell it. She tells it better.'
"Southerners have such a casual relationship with the truth," he adds. "What happened isn't as important as the story that comes out of it later."
Let's hope Oprah Winfrey doesn't hear him say that. "Attala County" is undeniably fiction, but its real life setting isn't just Payne's hometown; Oprah was born in Kosciusko too.
"How much do you love that the most notable citizen to come out of this small, very conservative community is a single black billionaire woman," Payne laughs.
CERTAINLY ANOTHER OF PAYNE'S current projects would raise the eyebrows of those hometown conservatives. The day after "Attala County" opens, Payne begins portraying an aging transgender prostitute called Virgin Mary in Marki Shalloe's "Babylon," produced by the Process Theatre.
With high heels and wig, Payne's drag persona measures a towering 6'5" - making sure his first entrance onstage is a showstopper.
"It is absolutely the hardest work I've ever done as an actor because I want to get it right," he says. "This isn't camp drag. There's this simplicity and this beauty to the character that I've never had to tap into before."
Will Topher Payne ever get a week off? Not likely. With 32 relatives coming to town for opening weekend, several new scripts in the works and a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in his near future, he makes Oprah look like a couch potato.

March In Like a Lion

by Jim Farmer, Southern Voice

Topher Payne is one busy playwright these days. Two of the local gay thespian’s works were staged in the last year, and his new show "The Attala County Garden Club" receives its world premiere next week at Onstage Atlanta.
"Attala" takes place in Kosciusko, Miss., where Payne himself grew up. In the play, young Rose Chipley decides to join the City Garden Club. Rose is a woman in her 20s who just had a baby. Joining the high society club is part of an effort to stake out her own identity. But she is rejected by the garden club president, who ironically is her own mother. Rose is told it is too early for her to join, that the responsibility is too large.
In retaliation, Rose decides to join the Attala County Garden Club, which is unofficially known as the Reject Bin. Inside the new group, the young woman finds a few surprises, including witches who plan to avenge the town that rejected them.
Payne wanted to write a piece about his hometown, but the format strayed a little while he wrote it.
"I haven’t been back in 10 years now," Payne says. "… The child in me has wonderful memories, but the person I’ve become could never live there. As I started writing this, the show changed from being a Southern comedy, a love letter to my home, to something a bit darker."
As part of his research, Payne talked to witches.
"The one thing I wanted to do is respect their world," he says. "So many of the people I interviewed said that often it’s done wrong- I know how I feel when I see the gay community represented on stage or screen and they just get it wrong."
With the Internet, the playwright feels small towns aren’t as isolated as they once were.
"For teenagers growing up in small towns 20 years ago, there was the sense of not being in the norm," he asserts. "They didn’t feel the sense of belonging, and weren’t able interact with anyone outside your immediate environment. It was a time without much connection for those of us who felt different."
Payne says that "Attala" fits well with his other works.
"My plays have a theme: that of finding a common bond, acceptance in unlikely places," he says. "In this show, women who probably would never as much as have conversations with each other find they need each other. One is called white trash, another a home wrecker, another is black, but they unite and join forces."

"Garden Club" Play Has Roots in Kosciusko

by Nancy Green, The Star-Herald

The world premiere of “The Attala County Garden Club” will be March 3 in Onstage Atlanta’s O2 Theatre.The play is the latest project of Atlanta playwright and columnist Topher Payne, son of Cleve and Sheryl Payne.
“Attala County” is a personal milestone for Payne, as it marks the first play he has set in his home state.“Not just in my home state,” said Payne. “It’s my hometown of Kosciusko, during the period I was growing up there. The story surrounds the experiences I think everyone has living in a small, close-knit community. You want to stand out as an individual, and know your own value, but you also want the comfort of acceptance, fitting in. And that can create some conflict.”

The play, a comedy directed by Jeanette Stinson, tells the tale of a young woman in the 1980s who joins a group of local gardening enthusiasts, then begins to suspect that she has signed up for more than she thought.
Payne is also the author of the comedies “Beached Wails,” “Relations Unknown” and “Bad Mama.”The director describes the play as “Steel Magnolias meets Rosemary’s Baby.”

“That’s the strength of Topher’s writing. There’s some complex issues presented in the story about race, isolation and the fear of people and things we don’t understand. And he addresses all of that while keeping the audience laughing, which I think is the best way to get people to listen,” said Stinson.

"My mother’s only concern was that I don’t use real names. I told her she’d have to wait and see,” said Payne.

Payne attended Kosciusko schools, The Taft School in Connecticut and The Idyllwild Arts Academy in California.His humor column, “Maybe It’s Just Me,” appears weekly in David Magazine distributed in metro areas throughout the Southeast.His plays have been produced throughout the United States, including New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

REVIEW: The Book of Liz

by Wendell Brock, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sister Elizabeth Donderstock has pretty much had it with her conservative Christian community, the Squeamish. (Think “Amish.”) She’s sweated herself skinny making the group’s signature source of income —- cheese balls —- and when the swishy, upstart Brother Brightbee begins to encroach on her territory, she decides to run away.
Wouldn’t you know the first person she encounters is a woman in a Mr. Peanut costume, who soon enlists Liz to work in a Pilgrim-themed restaurant that’s run by a bunch of recovering alcoholics. Alas, the 12-steppers are so cliquish that they won’t even let Poor Liz keep her transportation in an employee parking spot. (She drives a llama.)
Oh, goody.
“The Book of Liz” —- by the brother-sister team of David and Amy Sedaris —- has arrived in Atlanta, courtesy of Peter Hardy’s Essential Theatre Festival.
Director Lee Nowell’s cast is game to wallow in the tasteless fun and chew on a script that riffs on religious hypocrisy and the empowerment kick while sending up vintage Hollywood potboilers and American classics from “The Scarlet Letter” to “The Crucible.”
This means stock characters like town snoop Sister Butterworth (Dede Bloodworth), slimy interloper Brother Brightbee (Topher Payne) and the humble, put-upon Liz (Rachel Craw), who must go on a journey of initiation before discovering there’s no place like home.
That Payne invests Brightbee with a touch of Charles Busch’s Angela Arden says a good deal about this show’s camp factor. Payne, who has a wry and distinctive monotone, has certainly made himself over since he appeared as a drag queen in “Wizzer Pizzer.”
...In “Liz,” Essential Theatre picked a turkey —- in a good way. Stuffed with cheese and sleaze and covered with nuts, the show is a sinful treat for Sedaris fans and their brethren. Praise the Lord and pass the Williamsburgers.