What price would you pay for a dream home?
For the characters in Phlip Ridley’s “Radiant Vermin,” on stage at Live Theatre Workshop, it’s their souls.
Oh, but the kitchen looks like it stepped out of Architectural Digest.
This dark morality tale, stuffed with humor and determined to make the audience culpable, centers on Jill and Ollie (Samantha Cormier and Steve Wood), young, expectant parents who live in a dump.
That’s when Miss Dee (a restrained Leslie J. Miller), a prissy government worker who knows way too much about them, makes them an offer they can’t refuse: A fixer-upper in a desirable neighborhood for free. It’s all part of the government’s new Social Regeneration Through the Creation of Dream Homes program.
Quite by accident, this gentle, law-abiding couple discover that the death of a homeless person means the transformation of a room in the house.
And they are ready to transform every room. And maybe transform a room several times.
Ridley uses satire to drive home the point that this material world we live in, our greed, needs to be examined.
This is all done without ever becoming didactic, and Maryann Green’s keen direction makes sure that the audience doesn’t really get that there’s a message there until the curtain’s come down and you’ve left the theater. That makes the impact even greater.
Cormier and Wood give full life to Jill and Ollie. They manage to make us like these once-good folks who do despicable things to get a house they love. That’s essential if you are going to keep the audience on board. And there is one scene where they are required to play every character at a party they throw; they whipped through it giving each distinction. That scene, what Ollie called “the garden party from hell,” is a tad too long and the playwright really indulged himself with it, but Cormier and Wood were a hoot.
“Radiant Vermin” is a fast 90 minutes, but we are betting the play will stay with you much longer than that.
