Review: 'Alias Ellis MacKenzie' mystifies
Layer upon layer upon layer: Thaddeus Phillips, who directed and conceived Alias Ellis MacKenzie, also stars in this show, playing Thaddeus Phillips, an American actor who is starring in a Colombian telenovela as Barry Seal, a real person, a pilot, who ran drugs for Latin American drug lords while informing for the CIA and the DEA. A dangerous game, on all levels.
Layer upon layer upon layer: Thaddeus Phillips, who directed and conceived Alias Ellis MacKenzie, also stars in this show, playing Thaddeus Phillips, an American actor who is starring in a Colombian telenovela as Barry Seal, a real person, a pilot, who ran drugs for Latin American drug lords while informing for the CIA and the DEA. A dangerous game, on all levels.
Another layer: This Fringe Arts performance piece is a longer version of a far more engaging and intelligible show, presented in the spring, called The Incredibly Dangerous Astonishing Lucrative and Potentially Completely TRUE Adventures of Barry Seal. There, Barry Seal was irresistibly charming, full of daredeviltry and outrageous confidence, with an interesting relationship with his wife and children as well as his Salvation Army roommate. But this new Barry Seal, whose alias was really Ellis MacKenzie (thus the show's title), is hardly a developed character. We learn very little about him or the character he is disguised as or the actor playing him.
Another layer: A stage play that uses a TV shoot as a framing device should have something to say about either medium, but I couldn't find any such comment. Here, the meta gets out of hand, and the TV paraphernalia - the cameras on dollies, the boom mics - are at first pointlessly intrusive and then abandoned halfway through the show.
Yet, another layer: Much of the show is in Spanish, only partially translated, and by an actor who is frequently inaudible or unintelligible. There are the usual cute misunderstandings - beach pronounced bitch - but these jokes go nowhere.
The point seems to be that both sides - the ridiculously rich Latino drug lords and the ridiculously obsessed American agents - are all crazy people who have guns and planes and seem incapable of rational thought. The cocaine empires and spy empires look similarly chaotic.
Apparently, this chaos was echoed in the telenovela world; Phillips says in his program note that he "dove into an absolutely insane, surreal, and illogical world of Latin American TV production," which must have been a bizarre adventure for him, but provides little excitement for the rest of us.
THEATER REVIEW
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Alias Ellis MacKenzie
Through Saturday at the Prince Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
Tickets: $29. Information: 215-413-1318 or www.FringeArts.com.
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