Blog Broom Street's Tales From The Dork Side: Sci-fi screwball comedy, at great length

On a recent weekend, I and many like me spent nearly three hours watching grown men getting paid a staggering amount of money to physically maim each other in a “game” called football. I also happened to watch a nearly three-hour production (including intermission, it ran about 2 hours and 45 minutes) of Broom Street Theater's Tales From The Dork Side (running through Nov. 1). If a football game can run that long, why can't a local community-theater production? Do rich athletes somehow have more of a right to occupy that much time than a troupe of actors, managers, designers, artists, and a writer-director who’ve all worked their asses off to put on a show for zero financial gain?

Well, one can get up, go to the bathroom, blow one’s nose, and generally nap in one’s underwear while “watching” football for three hours. Not to mention all the gambling and drinking options. But local playwright Brian Wild’s Tales From The Dork Side (a sequel to one of his previous Broom Street shows, Dork Side Of The Moon) has the disadvantage of, well, taking place in the inherently more formal environment of theater. Granted, it's an epic sci-fi screwball comedy with supernatural overtones, but the fact remains that it asks its audience to sit pretty for a rather long time—almost as long as, if not longer than, some of American Players Theatre's smartly condensed Shakespeare productions.

The narrative follows comic-book artist-writer Scott Herrick (Matt Kenyon), his best friend Corey (Anthony McKenzie), Scott's girlfriend Raven (Melissa Graham), his sister Sheila (Kate Boomsma), her awful son Damien (Luke Kokinos), and her best friend Nicole (Odari McWhorter, a tall young man in a long platinum-blonde wig), as they all follow a mysterious letter informing them of a distant relative’s fortune in one of those haunted mansions all distant relatives have. That is just the beginning of one of many tropes that the play relies on, including twins who talk simultaneously and a candlestick that leads to a secret passageway.

Of course, most of Scott’s relatives gathered for the reading of the will and subsequent treasure hunt are semi-inbred southerners who have a penchant for saying things that like “indubitably” and don cowboy hats or Confederate uniforms. “The hunt” for the Herrick treasure is interrupted by “bilocation incidents,” according to a moon dweller from Wild’s earlier play, who shows up once just to explain in convoluted terms that the place has ghosts. That’s not out of place among lines like, “Her astroform was lost when her body was killed.” Throw in some dated Star Wars and Star Trek quotes, some Poltergeist aping, and a telegraphed romantic subplot and draw them out, and that’s the play in a nutshell--if said play could fit in one.

Wild succeeds when he avoids things everyone's seen before, which isn’t often enough. An inventive pantomimed family history and an enactment of a comic book while it’s being written are two rare bright spots. If the play offered more set pieces like those and less tacked-on foreshadowing and melodrama, perhaps Tales From The Dork Side could justify its run-time. But in reality, it's a tall order for anyone to be entertaining for anywhere near three straight hours, whether they're rich or poor, athlete or thespian.