The 'Ugly' side of life

Scarlet, Andreas, Red, Dowd and Penny Pewsy are just another incestuous American family living out in the American desert. Their interrelationships are impossibly tangled and distorted, and yet somehow the family does not disintegrate into the sand.

Opening Wednesday at the River Campus, the play "Coyote Ugly" has nothing in common with the 2000 movie of the same name. No beautiful young women dance atop a bar. This "Coyote Ugly" has more than titillation in mind.

It explores how families can survive the most catastrophic scenarios and does so through a tragicomic production unlike any this young cast has ever experienced. That might be true for those in the seats as well.

Audiences should be forewarned that if "Coyote Ugly" were a movie, it would be rated R for physical violence, profanity and adult subject matter and scenes. The actions of 12-year-old wild child Scarlet, played by Chelsea Serocke, are sure to provoke squeamishness.

People on stage smoke. They also exude warmth and provoke laughter.

"Coyote Ugly" will be the first performance in the Wendy Kurka Rust Flexible Theatre at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus. Performances will be at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Dec. 1 and at 2 p.m. Dec. 1 and 2. Due to the high demand for tickets, the university added a Dec. 1 matinee and opened Tuesday's performance for students to the general public. Earlier this week, 20 tickets remained for the Tuesday night performance, three tickets remained for the Saturday evening performance and 150 for the Saturday matinee. The Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday performances are sold out.

Besides Serocke, the cast includes Audrey Stanfield as Scarlet's mother Andreas, Adam McGee as Andreas' husband Red, Cody Heuer as their son Dowd and Alix Reilly as Dowd's new bride Penny. Dr. Rob Dillon is directing.

Incestuous relationships are a disturbing fact of life that serve playwright Lynn Seifert's attempt to go beyond those facts, Dillon said. "What happens if you stick a relatively normal group of people in some sort of isolation and subtract relatively normal sources of acceptance and love from them. How do they deal with that?"

In rehearsal the cast has been finding out. "In the play it's just everyday life," Heuer said. "In the world of the play it fits."

Everybody in the play is trying to figure out who they are and where they belong, the cast says. "Sometimes people go to other family members to find love and acceptance," said Serocke.

It can be difficult to track the couplings without a scorecard. Sometimes during rehearsals McGee asks himself, "Should I laugh at that?" He describes Red, his character, as "harmlessly horny."

Reilly's Penny is the Philadelphia-bred voice of normality in the play. Reilly looks beyond the abnormality to the pathos. "We do have a little bit of wild crazy animal in us, a little bit of dumb in us, a little bit of sarcasm, naiveness," she said.

They are deeply flawed but not irredeemable. "Even at the end of the story, you can almost see they're going to keep going," Reilly said.

Damaged characters are the most interesting for any actor to play, Dillon said. "If you're the Elephant Man, how do you find out how to live? How do you find love, how do you find forgiveness?"

Said Stanfield, "I think doing things that make you uncomfortable or that scare you is kind of the point of doing theater. I think if you don't you really are not believing in what you do."

At that, its humor and cleverness primarily drew Dillon to the play. For instance, Penny and Dowd are "bound and gagged in marriage." Dillon hopes the audience is "tickled until they've got the hiccups."

He points out that making people uncomfortable was one of Shakespeare's dramatic methods. In "Hamlet," eight people are killed at the end. "The real point is to expand horizons in some way," the director said.