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Stanton's Garage

Joan Ackermann's bawdy and touching comedy "Stanton's Garage" is at IU's intimate T-300 in a nicely put together production directed by Dennis Black with some fine performances.

It's an old rule of review readers that if the first thing you hear about is either the set or the costumes, the show is a turkey. Don't let this rule fool you. At IU in both T-300 and the main stage theatre there are no curtains. If you're a prompt playgoer, you'll sit looking at the set for a good fifteen minutes before a word is spoken or an act acted. Those sets tend to get a good deal of attention and some of them deserve it. In the set for "Stanton's Garage" scenic designer I. Christopher Berg has done a terrific job of recreating a crumby looking gas station interior. The posters on the walls, the supplies on the shelves, the general dirty quality, even the magazines strewn under the couch, all contributed to the atmosphere. I kept being surprised that the whole theatre didn't smell like a garage.

Into this awful small town haven come a couple of hapless motorists, Sheila Cecilia Regan as Dr. Lee and her soon to be step daughter Frannie played by Jennifer Bulla. Their broken down Volvo is far too much of a technical puzzle for the garage's elderly Silvio played by Jose Antonio Garcia or James D. Bezy playing the teen aged Harlon. The only hope is that Denny, Scott Cupper, the resident mechanical genius can recover from what appears to be an incipient brain tumor in time to help.

Playwright Ackermann has created some wildly engaging characters for "Stanton's Garage." One customer is the co dependent Ron played with wonderful exuberant comic energy by Erik Anderson. It is Ron who decides to take his former wife a wedding gift of a case of antifreeze and forty-eight car air fresheners. Another is the part time book keeper Mary, played with a bit of earthly wisdom by Jamie Brown Acres. Mary is fond of recalling her prior married state with her "third and last, but don't say final husband." She's also the source of comments like, "ugly enough to make a train take a dirt road," and "I haven't had this much fun since the hogs ate my baby brother."

I do have to put in a couple of caveats. A couple of times Ackermann stretches our attention span past the breaking point with a monolog. Both Erick Anderson and Jamie Brown were gifted with some of her best lines, also got a couple of overlarge helpings. And Ackermann, like a lot of good mechanics, is a bit better at taking things apart than she is at putting them back together. Everything gets sorted out in "Stanton's Garage," but the final resolutions take place in separate disconnected scenes. It didn't feel right to have an eight character show come down to just two men fixing a gum ball machine. But, I enjoyed "Stanton's Garage" and with the Saturday matinee audience laughed a lot and clapped loudly for both the first act and the curtain call.

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