Actors give it their all, but 'Hinterlands' goes nowhere
Rough & Tumble has built a reputation over the past few years as a fresh, lively theater troupe that wants to attract people who don't usually go to plays. Great idea. Unfortunately, the company's latest effort, ``Hinterlands: Season One," isn't likely to win many converts.
The premise is charming enough: a wandering band of vaudevillians tours the tiny towns of 1930s America, juggling and balancing and declaiming and generally trying to entertain audiences enough to earn gas money to the next gig. You can see how a young band of actors would find a particular appeal in playing such a group; they don't have to stretch far to know what it's like to work your heart out in front of a tiny house for even tinier pay.
The actors of Rough & Tumble, who often collaborate in developing their scripts and apparently did so here (no writer is credited), bring a winning blend of sweetness and skill to the piece. You want to like it because you like them; you want it to succeed on its own slight terms.
But then it goes on. And on. For two hours. What might have made a winsome sketch in 45 minutes or so sags, then drags, then sinks entirely as its characters meander through every cliché of the performer's life on the road. The cynical but caring manager, the stagestruck but untalented gal Friday, the impossibly innocent ingenue, the skirt-chasing ham -- they're all here, but we never get a sense of how these people connect with one another, or fail to.
In fact, that's the crux of the trouble: In a backstage story, which ``Hinterlands" is, you expect to see the tensions and conflicts and passions of people who have to put all that aside when they get in front of the curtain. ``Hinterlands" offers almost none of that; the interactions are slack, slow, and anything but crackling. Not what you'd imagine in vaudeville.
What you also wouldn't imagine, unless you were very young or very tone-deaf, is 1930s characters using expressions like ``This totally sucks." Maybe the glaring anachronisms, like the sometimes cinematic ``cuts" from one scene to the next and the puzzling, never-explained subtitle, are supposed to clue us in to some kind of meta-meaning, by which ``Hinterlands: Season One" would be a TV broadcast of a play about a vaudeville troupe. Or something.
If so, it doesn't come across. But the way the actors throw themselves into whatever it is they think they're doing makes you hope that next time, they'll have better luck.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 