Red Herring
Political satire and romantic comedy don’t mix easily. Satire is sharp, skeptical, and at times downright caustic (think of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”: eating Irish babies to reduce the island’s surplus population). The goal of a good romantic comedy, on the other hand, is not to expose moral failings but to bring lovers together. Satire is a rant, romantic comedy a love song with punch lines.
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Playwright Michael Hollinger has no such excuse. His Red Herring, being given its midwest premiere by the year-old Breakdown Theatre, begins as a solid satire with arch, hard-boiled dialogue, underscored in this production by Aimee Whitmore’s wonderful noirish lighting. But eventually the play turns into a fairly silly romantic comedy. There’s something cowardly about the way Hollinger avoids all controversy while touching on such potentially charged subjects as communism in the 50s, Joe McCarthy’s cockeyed red-baiting, nuclear proliferation, and the selling of state secrets to Stalin’s bloody regime. I felt cheated by this bait and switch because political satire is more rare, more intellectually challenging, and more difficult to do well than romantic comedy.
But then the plot line involving the spy-scientist and McCarthy’s daughter takes over, devolving into standard sitcom farce: she loves him but doesn’t think daddy will approve of his profession (!) so makes up a series of half-baked lies. In one silly sequence, she tells her mother that her Jewish lover–the McCarthys are portrayed as inflexible Irish Catholics–is Quaker, then hurriedly adds that that’s OK since notorious red-baiter Dick Nixon is also Quaker. But this oblique bit of social satire is soon overwhelmed by farce.
Only on reflection does one see how Hollinger shrank from the promise of his opening scenes. And Elise Aliberti’s bland but technically proficient production does nothing to overcome the weaknesses in the script. All the actors know their lines and blocking. No one pushes too hard to make the comedy work. It’s all very nice, but not very good.
