The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 42

The Orlando Sentinel How close are today's families? Ann Landers, D-11 Sunday, June 24, 1984 Planting seeds of tomorrow's theater By Elizabeth Maupin SENTiNEL THEATER CRiTC Kulture i r- NATHAN COBB LU if 1 i I T-f T7 j-. i 5 MIKE SARGENT SENTINEL The Tropical Theater is an alternative for playwright T. Neil Fritz and actress Miriam Saunders. The lights go on just about every night in the rundown warehouse on a forgotten street just up the hill from Lake Ivanhoe. But this is not a clandestine operation.

This is theater being born. At the Warehouse Gallery on Philadelphia Street, at the Parliament House on North Orange Blossom Trail in fact, just about any place a spotlight can be attached to a rafter and a platform transformed into a stage the labor pains of nascent theater can be heard. For one reason or another, some of the talent that ordinarily would feed into Central Florida's established theaters is branching out on its own. For actress Miriam Saunders, it was the chance to do something new that convinced her to help form the Tropical Theatre Company, which makes its home at the Warehouse Gallery, an alternative art space near downtown Orlando. "Orlando's trying to say they're promoting the arts, but I don't think they are," Saunders says.

"People keep saying they're doing new things, but then they do Oklahoma! and Hello, Dolly! They keep renovating Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre, but they don't build a new theater. "After doing the same old tried and true shows at Theatre on Park and Once Upon a Stage for years, it got to the point that I felt I was taking money under false pretenses. I said, There's got to be a way of doing things I want to do." For playwright T. Neil Fritz, who is Saunders' partner in the Tropical Theater, it was a chance to collaborate with other artists in his work. Fritz studied playwriting in Washington, D.C., for three years, and he worked in a theater that was even smaller than the tiny Warehouse Gallery.

"I was intrigued by the collaborative effort," he says. "There's no reason an area of this size can't sustain creative work. I think people love theater, and yet the local area doesn't offer much diversity. But an experimental theater like this one offers the audience the opportunity to participate." When he and Saunders teamed up to produce his play Call Waiting in early May, the response was "amazingly positive," he says. "It was standing room only at 50 people," Fritz says with a laugh.

"And people seemed to want more." So the two formed the Tropical company, which will produce a summer season, called Drama-in-the-Tropics, to begin at 8:30 p.m. Friday. The season will open with another production of Call Waiting and will continue with Lanford Wilson's Home a new Fritz play called Impressions of a New Work and possibly another local play performed with an evening of works by Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Productions will be Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays, when theaters are usually dark, so that other local people involved in the theater can attend. Ad- I i I I Tom Stearns, Candice Critchfield in 'Home 'David's Time author Michael Wanzie.

Please see THEATER, D-4 She plays the fool to college doubters BOSTON In the days when she was nobody's fool, Patricia Limerick was a clown. That was at Yale University, which suffered fools gladly but, alas, not formally. Most recently she has been officially playing the fool at Harvard, a place some people would claim is less than foolproof anyway. Next month, however, she will become an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Limerick, a 33-year-old assistant professor of history at Har- vard, teaches courses on the American West.

After coming here four years ago from New Haven, she lobbied hard for the position of Harvard Fool, frequently buttonholing university President Derek Bok at parties and committee meetings. Her qualifications included a stint as Yale's self-appointed fool after that school's president, A. Bartlett Giamatti, had turned down her request for official status by stating that the position of University Fool was "a responsibility I am particularly loath to give up." At Harvard, Limerick recalls, Bok's initial tack seemed equally forthright: He argued that he had already appointed enough fools. Apparently wary of being considered foolhardy, Bok at first relented only verbally. But later, in March of this year, there was a half-hour installation ceremony in his office, complete with champagne.

The appointment was tongue in cheek and covered the rest of the 1983-84 academic year only, but Limerick was thrilled by the foolishness of it all nonetheless. The history of professional fool-dom covers the days from the Eqyptian pharaohs and continues well into the 18th century. Often deformed and dwarfish, fools were intended to lighten the loads of royalty and other well-placed persons. They existed in Eqypt and Rome, later in western Europe and Russia. Shakespeare created several noteworthy fools, although it was Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet, who first proclaimed that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." The California-born Limerick, who prepared for her fool's roles as a sometime street clown in New Haven while a graduate student at Yale, concedes that she has not rushed to fulfill her fool's duties at Harvard.

True, she occasionally lectured to her students in fool's garb consisting of makeup, a crimson leotard, white drawstring pants, and long crimson and white ribbons that "are supposed to signify loose ends." And she will shortly make something of a farewell speech before the Harvard Alumni Club of Chicago. Why do universities like Harvard and Yale need official fools? Limerick is glad you asked. "It's the universal pattern at Harvard and Yale that everyone at every level feels strong moments of inner doubt about their legitimacy and their right to be whatever they are," she replies. "So you have all these people students, faculty, administrators who are doing their best to never let their inner doubts show on the surface. Everyone tries to et gray plumage and blend in.

Students write safe, boring papers. Everyone lives in terror of being thought a fool. "So I thought it would be very liberating to have someone publicly appearing as a fool. It reassures people about the widesprea-dedness of inner doubt and about the potential to express it publicly without suffering penalties." columnist Elizabeth Maupin will return next Sunday. Nathan Cobb writes for The Boston Globe.

Offbeat Top Secret5 is only good for a few laughs By Jay Boyar SENTINEL MOVIE CRITIC I I filovio roviow Top Cast Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge Direction: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker Screenplay: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Mar-tyn Burke Cinematography: Christopher Challis Music: Maurice Jarre Theaters: Northgate 4 and Conway 2 theaters, Pine Hills and "Colonial drive-ins Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes Industry rating: PG (parental guidance suggested) Reviewer's evaluation: by Lucy Gutteridge). Neo-Nazis are forcing her scientist father to create a weapon to help them conquer the world. Their motto is "Better government through intimidation." If the story sounds a little familiar, don't worry. The moviemakers' basic intention in Top Secret! is to parody World War II era espionage movies, just as their Airplane! sent up another sort of film. The jokes come pretty fast in Top as they did in Airplane! But I would have liked both pictures better had the jokes come even faster.

The ideal pace is that of Airplane II: The Sequel, which seemed to have four or five gags per minute, about twice the ratio in Top Sfcret? "Anything goes" comedy seems to work best if the script is so rapid fire that you don't have time to worry about the jokes that miss. Ironically, the Zuckers and Abrahams were not involved with Airplane II. But if the new film doesn't measure up to Airplane it's amusing enough in a Mad magazine sort of way to be worth a look. Especially if your dog ran away and the neighbors won't come out and play. If you're in the mood for some quick, cheap laughs you could have a water pistol war with your next-door neighbors, put a funny hat on the dog or take in a showing of Top Secret? The new film isn't great cinema, but it's unpretentious, wacky and easy to take.

Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker (the men responsible for Top Secret! has some verbal humor, but it specializes in sight gags. In one scene, a waiter pours wine so caustic that it eats through glass. In another, a man falls from a watch tower, hits the ground and shatters like porcelain. Visual humor loses something when you try to describe it, so you'll have to take my word that the film is reasonably effective. The plot involves an American rock star (played by Val Kilmer) who goes to East Germany and falls in love with a beautiful but troubled woman (played Val Kilmer film full of sight gags.

Reviewing key excellent, good, average, poor, awtul Twisted-wing fly has a way of barging in on neighbors I hs'J yJ (j By DenUe Salvaggio TmE SENTiNE, STAPF The pushy pest dosen't kill its host, but simply sets up home sweet home within the host's body by feeding on its blood and fat. Poking its little head out from between the host's abdominal segments, such an emerged fly gives the appearance of being Siamese twins with its reluctant roomie. Although the twisted-wing fly's host survives this intrusion and moves about as freely as possible, its reproductive organs are usually damaged, and the shape or color of its abdomen may be changed. Like people who live according to traditional male-female roles, the female f.y is much more domestic than the male. She spends her entire life inside the host as a legless larvalike creature, never developing wings.

The male earns his wir.gs upon adulthood a pair of translucent, appendages with thin, radiating veins. After mating (which manages to be accomplished somehow; scientists don't know much about the fly's intimate life). Privacy, like health, is something you don't think about until you no longer have it. As the real estate market makes multifamily housing more common, a quiet place for oneself is becoming quite a luxury. But if the worst you have to put up with is neighbors' arguments that penetrate your paper-thin walls, consider yourself fortunate.

At least you're not an insect that finds itself the neighbor of the twisted-wing fly (order Strepsiptera). Because this insect order includes the Stylopidae family, which contains about 40 species throughout North America, you may find yourself next door to some variety of the twisted-wing fly if you have a garden. Fortunately, however, the tiny-black insect is harmless to plants and has a complete lack of interest in people. (The name "fly" is misleading, since it isn't a member of the order Diptera that includes all true Hies.) The twisted-wing fiy is interested in other insects, especially bees, wasps and planthoppers. Unlike a human neighbor, the strong-legged larva of the twisted-wing fly isn't content merely to borrow a cup of sugar.

It has quite a different motivation in mind it wants to move in, in the most literal way possible. Before the unwilling host has a chance to make clear that living space is at a premium, the larva attaches itself to and burrows into the insect, where it molts into a legless stage and lives as a parasite. the female's eggs develop within her body, allowing her to give "birth" to thousands of live larvae that fall to the ground or on flowers. The individual offspring then crawl around in search of a host to begin the cycle again. In the case of the twisted wing fly and host, two really do live as cheaply as one.

NEXT WEEK: The planthopper..