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‘The Jammer’ @ Dad’s Garage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “The Jammer” Grade: B-
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Through July 14. $9-$24. Dad’s Garage, 280 Elizabeth St., Atlanta. 404-523-3141, dadsgarage.com.
The verdict: Roller derby play captures the hard-knock nature of life.
On the surface, Jack Lovington appears to be a bumbling fool. But there is poetry in his soul — and a trinity of conflicts piercing his heart.
There’s his girlfriend, Aurora. He thinks she’s beautiful, but his acquaintances call her “dog face” and wince at the sight of her photograph. There’s the Catholic Church, which has become an anchor for this orphan who works in a cardboard factory and moonlights as a taxi driver. And there’s his new love, which is fast pulling him away from his more sacred motives. Jack, as he confesses to his parish priest in the opening moments of “The Jammer,” has been Shanghaied by the thrill of roller derby, and he is about to embark on a journey that will take him far from his Brooklyn comfort zone.
Jack’s dilemma is the central premise of playwright Rolin Jones’ “five-stridin’ valentine” to skating, which Dad’s Garage is staging as “a violently funny roller derby drama.” To its credit, the production finds resident ham Tim Stoltenberg as Jack, a character who brings to mind Ignatius Reilly, the outrageous wiener vendor in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Ridiculous to the extreme, Jones’ play is a prototypical tale of initiation in which a naif character goes on a ramble to discover the world and in the process acquires his education.
True to form, director Kate Warner reaches for the most lunatic and depraved impulses of the ’50s-era script, with its procession of eccentrics: salty-tongued derby competitors, fast-talking sports announcers, desperado skating impresarios and dysfunctional clerics. When it comes to vomit, venereal disease and violence, nothing is off limits here. So if you’re thinking of taking your young skating aficionados to this show, you’ve been dutifully warned.
“The Jammer” is scabrous, hard-core, fascinating and funny.
The skating sequences are vintage Dad’s shtick: a combination of nimble actor-athletes and cardboard cutouts that get moved around by ensemble extras. It’s also chock-full of good performances that luxuriate in the essential weirdness of the material: Luis Hernandez as pigeon-petting Father Domingo, Randy Havens as commentator Bert Fineberg, Tiffany Morgan as femme fatale Lindy Batello and Enoch King as derby boss Lenny Ringle.
Unfortunately, some of the New York patois and ethnic dialects are a jumble of indecipherable speech. As much as you enjoy this 90-minute show, you may also find yourself wondering if the nuances aren’t buried in the collision of jokes and outsize showmanship. A little more restraint would heighten the emotional contours of this see-sawing comedic adventure.
Jones, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” is a virtuosic and original storyteller who seems as interested in the quiet questioning of the heart as the cacophony of nonsense that exists in the outside realm. A roller-derby rink may not be the most obvious place to conduct an investigation of grace. But as it turns out, skating is a nifty metaphor for the rough physics of life. Soaring, falling, then getting up again.
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