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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Glut
Swirling with the deft direction of Taijha Silas, the story is completely engrossing. The top-flight cast is headed by Reagan Posey as Sarah and Ronmal Mottley as her fiancé Steve in a bold, two hour and fifteen minute show. A young couple begins their wedding preparations but finds the world wont recognize their love because... They are fat. Glut (a slur based on one of the seven deadly sins) takes us into a future where places and people are still quite recognizable. But theatre is always flirting with madness, and here, plus-sized men and women have been coldly out-grouped for using up too many of the world's remaining precious resources. Sometimes, in fact, they are dangerously out-grouped. We observe all this in our own slippery moment, where people can lose weight overnight with a GLP-1 shot, and in Glut, laparoscopic surgery still remains in vogue. So none of this seems terribly far-fetched, though we cringe to think the spirit of condemnation will always be with us in one way or another. It's true that Sarah and Steve are sensualists, but you can't knock them for enjoying life. Except that that's exactly what happens here. And, under director Silas, a dyed-in-the-wool opprobrium in the not-too-distant future is shown in the driest possible hostility, registering almost as a form of jealousy. The laughs are manifold, smartly bulldozed onstage by Kelly Howe as "Player One"–popping up as a wedding planner and as Sarah's mom, and in other roles–and filling me with a critic's delight at her carefully tailored comic exaggerations. And Brian McKinley is outstanding as Player Two, startlingly rich as a snooty waiter, a wary trash collector, and Steve's self-consciously slender brother-in-law. It's the crazy assortment platter of comic acting you probably never expected from Mr. McKinley. And the psychological calorie count in his performance is off the charts. Joshua Mayfield is terrific as Cab, Steve's brother, facing headwinds from a lot of complex emotional changes from moment to moment, but smoothly twisting through each new psychological tack. He shows great, authentic anguish over the fate of the bride and groom to-be in a "raisonneur's speech," an appeal to conscience that rings forward, not just from the French stage but up through a hundred years of modern drama as well. His final monolog is a "found object" of lost humanity. Mr. Mottley, as Steve, does very nicely in a harrowing scene near the end. And Rachel Bailey is fantastically over-the-top as a church minister: a bit new-agey and very keen to increase her flock. It all stays wildly alive and probability refuses to collapse into the mundane because, somehow, her "Reverend Jody" (and all the other side characters in Glut) has no gift for self-observation. All the comedy is fresh and new, though, merged with a kind of dread and anguish that zips together without a hitch. The very admirable costumes are by Elena Jaquez on a spare, flexible set by Erik Kuhn, with fast scene changes by Nayomi Shackelford and the cast, under professional lighting by Theresa Comstock. Again and again we're reminded of how our own recent social landscape has changed so quickly, with vastly heightened sympathy to the LGBTQ community. But that sense of enlightenment is balanced by an unspoken dread of popular sentiment, which can easily shift the other way around. And societies must always have some kind of stalking horse–in this case, the overweight population. Playwright doolin lays down a great storytelling gambit, partly because fat-phobia makes for a long list of self-deprecating jokes. It's also a show that gleefully throws a heaping helping of prissy, skinny-person disapproval onto the scales too, for added comical heft. Glut, produced by Contraband Theatre, runs through October 24, 2026, at The Chapel, 6238 Alexander Drive, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.contrabandtheatre.org. Cast: Production Staff: |
