from the Ann Arbor News
Sunday, March 10, 2002

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER


Shortly after the debut of "The Lucky Spot," playwright Beth Henley wrote: "Believing in luck is a form of hope, and hope is something we all need when our lives are visited by more trouble than happiness.

"But hope for a better future will not necessarily make a better future."

Certainly the bedraggled characters of "The Lucky Spot" - a 1987 Henley play opening Thursday at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre - could use a little luck. Better still, a lot of luck: It's Christmas Eve 1934 in Pigeon, Louisiana, a hole-in-the-wall hamlet 60 miles west of New Orleans. The setting is a once-elegant ante-bellum mansion, now devolved into the Lucky Spot Dance Hall, a taxi-dance dive gussied up for its "grand opening."

Pseudo-suave entrepreneur Reed Hooker (played by Rob Roy), who won the house in a New Orleans poker game, is convinced his abode will not only pay off his multitudinous debts but will lift him clean out of Depression-era poverty onto Easy Street. "Assistants" include a young rube named Turnip (Aaron Rabb) - who everyone mistakenly assumes is dull-witted - and Cassidy (Amelia Martin), a 15-year-old waif Reed "won" along with the house, and who's now eight months pregnant thanks to her "owner."

Reed's paradoxical pitch for The Lucky Spot as "the first genuine taxi dance hall set in an isolated rural area" is comically pathetic, a dream further complicated by the release from prison of wife Sue Jack Tiller Hooker (Emily Phenix), a trigger-tempered tigress Reed regards as his worst enemy in the world (though they're still married). Then there's Whitt Carmichael (Kevin Branshaw), an oily-handsome upper-cruster who threatens to confiscate the Lucky Spot for his own conniving reasons.

Wrote Henley, "We all fool ourselves into believing that if we have recently suffered a string of losses, that somehow we are due for our luck to improve." And for most of Act I, "The Lucky Spot" comes across as slapstick rube comedy (with fights galore) about archetypal losers, a show riddled with Henley's standard Southern-Gothic grotesqueries (Cassidy has six toes on one foot; "dimwitted" Turnip is in fact a bleak nihilist philosopher). And despite Henley's warnings about fortune's capriciousness, "The Lucky Spot" seems fine-tuned to make one believe that yes, somehow good luck will finally smile upon God's luckless little people.

Or will it? "I don't see it as a broad comedy," says Civic director Wendy Wright. "These characters are all desperate in some way. (Other personae include Lacey, a weary taxi dancer played by Elise Stempky, and Sam, a lonely old man played by Larry Rusinsky). And by the end, their situation hasn't changed much. When I pitched 'The Lucky Spot' to (Civic's) selection committee, they all said 'Oh, it's so hopeful at
the end!' But it really isn't."

Accordingly, Wright is altering a dreamlike sequence used in the original "Lucky Spot," though she won't say what she'll replace it with. "I'm still struggling with it. I'm not sure yet what you'll see."

At the same time Wright is exerting tender loving care over what we'll hear. "I'd call this show a musical, even though the characters don't sing songs. The music is absolutely integral to what's going on. The play is very much a product of time and place. It's about the New Orleans underworld, about the sinister 'Tango Belt' in the French Quarter. The characters in Henley's play are very much creatures of this era, not just of the Depression but of the jaded world of New Orleans.