Review: SORDID LIVES at Connecticut Theatre Company

Absurdity, much like Satire and Farce, can be a useful tool for holding a mirror up to the past and exposing its evils; allowing modern audiences to experience conflicts in a blunt- oftentimes, visceral- way without crossing that line from advocation to cruelty. Without absurdity, putting marginalized characters in harmful situations for the sake of “realism” is nothing more than putting trauma on the stage and forcing the audience to experience it. While there may be a time and a place for such experiences, community theater is not such a space. When a play uses absurdity to balance out the traumatic, you create a weird space where an audience can laugh at the comedy, while still experiencing some truly sobering moments about how far we’ve come over the years, or in some cases, how little.

Sordid Lives by Del Shores is no exception. Set in 1998, Sordid Lives showcases a Southern family in disarray, struggling to maintain their reputation amid scandal, conflict, and death. Conflict in this play is multifaceted: Not only does this play tackle being queer in a time and place where it was historically not safe to be so, but it also tackles another big religious taboo of the time: infidelity. This variety of conflicts and the hyper-stylized character tropes employed is why Sordid Lives works as a comedy and, under the direction of Duane Campbell, the Connecticut Theatre Company’s production of Sordid Lives honored that and delivered a raucous evening at the theater.

The hardest thing about producing works that intentionally straddle that line between entertainment and discomfort is the contrast between the absurd with the serious, and a lot of that responsibility falls upon the cast: Both Ty Williamson, played by Max Dittmar, and Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram, played by David Nunner, are queer characters but are polar opposites in how they portray it. Dittmar’s level-headedness and calm demeanor contrasts Nunner’s flamboyance and gravitas, which is the vehicle that Sordid Lives uses to show how far we’d come in queer acceptance by the 90’s and yet how far we still had to go. Del Shores uses more character foils to similar effect and the cast held onto these concepts and ran with them: The sisters, Latrelle and La Vonda, played by Susan Smith and Erin Campbell, respectively, represent the traditional and the modern: Latrelle’s obsession with reputation and purity reflects the traditions she was raised in, while La Vonda was more expressive and cared more about happiness than status. Even when characters weren’t there to be foils of each other, their functions were just as important: Wardell “Bubba” Owens, played by Phillip Beard, showcased the capacity of how people can experience growth and learn from their mistakes.