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.