The Perry High School Drama Department delivered a smart and sprightly production Friday and Saturday nights of “Get Smart,” a stage adaptation of the popular television comedy from the 1960s.
The play was the first to be directed by PHS Spanish instructor Ami Blum, who takes the lead as the drama department’s new faculty advisor following the retirement of longtime director Merrilee Bales.
“Get Smart” has a back story. Order and chaos, light and darkness, good and evil, heaven and hell — twins like these help us arrange our ideas but only up to a point. In the end, they probably obscure as much as they reveal about the nature of things.
We are good, and they are evil. This is the first principle of all tribes and all cultures and is still in service to a very great extent. Many people conceive today’s Global War on Terrorism, for instance, in just these basic terms, much as the Cold War of the 1950s through the 1980s pitted the Free World (us good) against godless socialism and the international communist conspiracy (them evil).
Good won that one, in case you missed it.
“Get Smart” was a TV sit-com appearing in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, produced as a deliberate spoof by comedy writers Mel Brooks and Buck Henry of more serious shows about espionage then popular, such as “I Spy,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Mission: Impossible,” which themselves were capitalizing on the popularity of the James Bond novels and films.
This weekend’s PHS staging of “Get Smart” preserved the basic mythical dualism: we the good were master spy Maxwell Smart and the free agents of CONTROL, and they the evil were Mr. Big and the brainwashed slaves of KAOS, conveniently identified as “the international organization of evil.”
But the production was also faithful to Brooks’ and Henry’s irreverent original. Players for both team CONTROL and team KAOS were equally bumbling and bumptious, witless and whimpering. In other words, it was a funny play.
PHS junior Dax Kresse led the 20-person cast as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, CONTROL’s pompous, vain and rather obtuse master spy. Kresse had many lines and appeared in nearly every scene, usually at the side of Agent 99, played by senior Katarina Leesley.
Agent 99’s obvious admiration for Smart, who does not seem altogether deserving of it, was one of the puzzling elements carried over from the TV version of “Get Smart.”
Without delving into the plot’s complications, it will suffice to note that freshman John Borjas played the part of Chief, the leader of CONTROL, junior Andy Chic played Mister Big, the evil mastermind of KAOS, junior Sarah Sweet acted the part of the Scandinavian Princess Ingrid and senior Gil Garcia played Professor Dante, inventor of the Inthermo, a weapon of mass destruction that falls into the hands of KAOS, the evil empire.
The character of Professor Dante was apparently so named for no other reason than to bring in his throw-away lie near the end of the play, “I should have called it Dante’s Inferno,” spoken when Mister Big is tricked into self-destructing.
But Smart was earlier tricked by Mister Big into leaving the Inthermo unguarded, and the way Smart was tricked is instructive. KAOS kidnapped four blonde teenage girls. When Smart heard their screams on the phone, he assumed they were being tortured by the evil agents of KAOS, and that was more than his humanity could bear. He put all his resources into freeing the girls and so took his eye off the Inthermo and let it fall into the hands of Mister Big.
But in fact what Smart heard was not the girls’ tortured screams of pain but their musical screams of pleasure. They were listening to the croons of some teen heartthrob, such as our Justin Bieber or whoever now surpasses him in hearthrobbery, and Mister Big tricked Smart into mistaking one class of screams for another.
Thus Smart’s good nature was used against him. His humane feelings became his weakness. His compassion became a liability. We are good, certainly. It is the first principle. But can we be too good for our own good? Luckily, perhaps, we have more recently accustomed ourselves to the necessity of torturing evil-doers in the pursuit of good, but who can know when our excessive goodness might not again put us at risk?
Other touches of the Brooks-Henry original glimmered in the script: “I’ll have the Paradise Chicken, but first I must — save humanity!”
Very credible performances were also turned in by seniors Rebecca Dobson, AnaRosa Funez, Margaret Lamphier-Meier and Heaven Vandorn, juniors Amani Al-Rashid, Alicia Calderon, Allie Hopkins, Zachary Mills, Cinthia Naranjo and Karley Whelchel, sophomore Breanna Dittert, and freshmen Halmar Arteaga, Madison Mason and Trinity Summerson.
Backstage duties were ably discharged by a crew who included juniors Devon Archer, Lauren Benjamin, Grant Eklund, Jacob Murillo and Jairo Murillo and freshmen Carly Anderson, Alondra Avila, Elizabeth Cornejo and Cristal Ruiz.
The PHS Drama Department will lose talent with its graduating seniors, but the underclassmen and underclasswomen show emerging skills, and Blum’s directorial debut promises good things for theater goers next year.
