With all the action going on in The Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts, it would have been easy to overlook the student-directed play that held three performances in the Collis Common Ground Friday through Sunday.
But "Coyote Ugly," written by Lynn Siefert and directed by Pavol Liska '95, rewarded the inquisitive and out-going audience with an extremely powerful production.
The story involves an Arizonan family, whose incestuous tendencies interfere with almost all of their relationships. Red, the patriarch of the family, played by Zachary Oberzan '96, is a good-natured, pseudo-womanizer whose concerns for his new Buick outweigh those for his family.
Oberzan's confident portrayal emphasized the uncouth, physical and distant aspects of his character. His characterization was consistent throughout the play, occasionally to the detriment of greater dimension. The scene where he describes the destruction of his beloved car was delivered perfectly.
Amanda Jones '97 played Andreas, the bitter, dominating wife who always tries to add tension to the already uneasy situation. Her performance was convincingly nasty and mean-spirited, even if her frequent shouting sometimes detracted from the effect it was meant to convey.
She never let the audience relax, especially in the scene with her son, where the incestuous tension was almost unbearable.
Above all, Christina Costalas '94 gave most of the performance its jolt. Playing Scarlet, the daughter of Red and Andreas (in reality she was the daughter of Andreas and Andreas' son Dowd), Costalas was able to imbue the character with a kind of frenetic beauty.
Scarlet antagonizes her mother and tries to come to terms with her confused and "forbidden" feelings. Her transformation from villain to victim was both believable and careful. She was at once vivacious and loud, then sullen and elegiac.
Dowd, (Ben Brainard '96) and Penny (Karen Koontz '96) portrayed the "normal" couple from Philadelphia, who return home to see Dowd's parents. However, it quickly became evident that the environment is setting the past in motion.
Brainard's stock and boring performance slowly metamorphoses as the repercussions of the family history begin to take effect. Penny, a school teacher, does not handle the family dynamic as well and Koontz' eventual transition into a dog is taken.
Liska's direction was seamless and forceful. The claustrophobic environment of the setting was palpable. The play was always alive with a clear integration of words and actions and at no times were there dead spots that halted the progress of the drama.
Though it might have been better to make the revelation of Scarlet's relationship with Dowd more pronounced, the plot, which had the potential to become hazy and unclear, unfolded pointedly and provided quite a promising enterprise for Dartmouth drama.
