By Harry Duke
I last spent time with The Sugar Bean Sisters eight years ago at a production by the Spreckels Theatre Company in Rohnert Park. My general reaction at the time was that it was a very strange show.
The sisters have returned to Sonoma County—Cloverdale to be exact—with a production running at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center through July 27. Having just revisited them, my reaction remains the same. This is a very weird show.
The Center’s stage has been transformed into the ramshackle home and surrounding swamp-adjacent Sugar Bean, Florida, property of Faye Clementine (Rebecca West) and Willie Mae Nettles (Lynn Stevenson). They’re the last two surviving members of the Nettles family, having lost their father to a mob (after he poisoned 14 beauty queen contestants), their mother to old age and their younger sister to a rogue alligator.
Willie dreams of running off to Salt Lake City with the much younger Mormon Bishop Crumley (Morgan Hamilton-Lee) while Faye prepares for the return of the aliens she first spotted years ago that landed her on the cover of the Weekly World News. She hopes to join them on their home planet.
Their plans get interrupted by a visit from Miss Videllia Sparks (Jackie Rosas), an “entertainer” who’s come to see the aliens return on the anniversary of their visit. Or has she?
If that setup doesn’t sound strange, add flying wigs, Disneyworld, a Reptile Woman, voodoo curses, a haunted chair, sororicide, an outhouse, the Book of Mormon and spontaneous human combustion to the mix, and you might have a better understanding of why I think this is a weird show. Playwright Nathan Sanders must have a very macabre sense of humor.
As must director Robert Zelenka and his cast. West and Stevenson play well off of each other, with West’s foul-mouthed Faye garnering a lot of laughs. Stevenson’s more genteel Willie gets laughs from dealing with a perpetually bad-hair day. Rosas does well as the duplicitous Videllia, and Emily Stryker adds even more layers of weirdness to the show as the mysterious Reptile Woman. Hamilton-Lee is appropriately bland as the Mormon bishop.
The CPAC stage is dripping in moss courtesy of set designer Dan Seisdedos. He manages to get a holiday-festooned house, a sugar cane field, an outhouse and a cemetery on the relatively small stage without things feeling too cramped. The house is nicely detailed with kitsch, as is the costuming by Jamie Smith, in particular Videllia’s bird-like couture and the Reptile Woman’s accoutrements.
Lighting designers Senya Stein and Diego Orozco also get an assist in maintaining the gothic mood of the play with both detail and simplicity. Why not beam a flashlight from the booth to simulate an approaching car? It works!
Part comedy, part family drama, part ghost story, part sci-fi and all Southern, The Sugar Bean Sisters is a weird amalgam of genres that somehow works. It’s Tennessee Williams on acid.
‘The Sugar Bean Sisters’ runs through July 27 at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center, 209 N. Cloverdale Blvd., Cloverdale. Saturday, 7:30pm; Sunday, 2pm. $15-$25. 707.894.2219. cloverdaleperformingarts.com
