EST presents a rooster, a hen, and some unpleasant not-quite-humans

Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of Year of the Rooster by Eric Dufault is dully pretentious, superficially acted (with two exceptions), and altogether disappointing.  The play, in its current incarnation, was last done at EST just a few months ago, receiving enough good press to influence the theatre company to present it again.  Having sat through its tedious two hours, I do not understand what all the fuss was about, and John Giampietro’s tepid direction did nothing to pull the overlong piece out of the mire.

The main character, a pathetic little guy named Gil whose McDonald’s name tag reads “Girl,” is played cartoonishly by Thomas Lyons.  He is put upon by the various bullies in his life.  This “protagonist” is the same at the play’s end as at its beginning, and his cyclical journey was not in the slightest bit interesting or surprising.

 

Lyons, Bess, and Moreno in Year of the Rooster.  Photo Credit:  Russ Kuhner

The play opens with Dickie Timble (played with oozing slime by Denny Dale Bess), as a master of ceremonies at a cockfight, comparing that habitual torture to “culture” handed down from the Golden Age of Greece.  Dickie is a vulgar bully and an ass-grabbing back-slapping good old boy.  He is not an individual human being with realistically human traits.  We follow him to meet Gil behind the counter at the McDonalds.  Gil is the epitome of ineffectual, easily intimidated by his mean-spirited mother, Dickie, and the young woman who has just made manager at McDonald’s, Philipa.

Megan Tusing does remarkably good work with Philipa, a character full of stereotypical anger issues, then continues to stand out as the overfed McDonald’s hen with whom Gil wants his rooster to mate.  Said rooster is the most interesting creature in the play, the very angry and drug-abused cock Odysseus Rex, extremely well played by Bobby Moreno with birdlike twitches and physical and verbal passion.  Cockfighting is offensive yet the scene portraying it had the best staging of the play, choreographed by fight director Qui Nguyen.

It is a bit disturbing that the best drawn and acted characters in the play are not human. Gil’s mother Lou is a liar and a cheat, but Delphi Harrington is wasted on an outline of a caricature.  Everyone in this play is foul-mouthed and full of hate for everyone and everything around them, except for the hen.  When Gil makes it to the top of the pile of his insular cockfighting circle for a short while, he’s just as vicious and ugly as everyone who was cruel to him.  Because he’s as stupid as he is dull, he of course is not on top for long.

 

Apparently roosters, like cats, will attack their reflections

If that is the point of the play, please someone beg playwright Eric Dufault to revise it as a one-act.  In its present stage of “development,” it is two hours of torture. Mr. Dufault must go back to school.  Tossing in some cockfighting sports history of the Greeks merely implies he read some Cliff Notes about ancient Greece.  What he needs to do is finish reading Aristotle’s Poetics in order to understand what constitutes a play.  Year of the Rooster does not make the grade. 

~ Molly Matera, recommending you go see some other play in NYC.