Review: The Shoplifters

By Wendy Rosenfield

for the Inquirer

In Morris Panych's The Shoplifters, the season opener for 1812 Productions, right and wrong all depend on where you're standing, and even then, you still run into some blind spots. The same can be said about this breezy comedy, in which two male supermarket security guards meet their matches in a pair of female pilferers.

Alma (played with a hard edge by Mary Martello) sticks some steaks up her skirt, while her reluctant young protégé, Phyllis (Marla Burkholder), just needs a few ingredients for a proper birthday celebration. We meet them after they've been apprehended, during a series of storage-room interrogations, each presented as a brief television-style episode followed by a blackout. The guards are Otto (Johnnie Hobbs Jr.), a disenchanted senior on his way out, and Dom (Daniel Fredrick), a novice on his first shift who's as zealous about Christianity as he is about justice. They meet with varying degrees of success in their attempts to corral and collar the ladies.

This is a more-than-capable cast and an often-funny production, but it's hampered by Jennifer Childs' one-dimensional direction and Panych's own ambivalence toward his material. Childs yanks its comedy to the forefront, as she should, with Fredrick's twitchy-eyed, sensitive psychopath a highlight. When it's good, it's very good. Otto reminds Dom of his prior employment and a tendency to go overboard ("The Salvation Army is not an army"), and Dom responds matter-of-factly, "Tell that to the devil, sir." But aside from the depth and humanity Hobbs brings to Otto, the show is all script, no subtext.

There are just too many narrative threads left at loose ends. Is Dom's religiosity entirely a joke, and if so, why? What's really the significance of Alma's recruitment of Phyllis for this illegal exercise? Who is Phyllis anyway, and why should we care? Most important, if Panych is truly concerned about economic justice and injustice, he might have served those concerns better by making more happen than this increasingly similar series of conversations that never seem to reveal enough information about anyone or anything.