Word: willum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opening scene, the gentility of Willum Cubbert's (Colin Stokes) life is established. He runs with a geriatric set, Axl (Michael Schur) and Tansy (Marit Haahr), who jokingly refer to their crustiness between cocktails. So perfect are Axl and Tansy's sentences that they practically speak in rhyming couplets. Their straightlaced and ordinary lives need shaking up; on this day, Willum's birthday, they get what they need...
From the moment Willum walks in the door, his only concerns are figuring out how to get in Tansy's pants and how to design a building for a client. But after he settles down, the arriving guests quicken the pace. While the first act seems to flow from quip to quip, the second act is hurried: the clipped delivery leads the characters to overcompensate by projecting their voices rather than their wits. Had the characters been edgier, The Nerd could have suggested the macabre tones of "Neighbors" or an episode of "The Twilight Zone," but the play is strictly...
...First, Willum's client, Tiki (Ed Upton) appears with his wife, Clelia (Kate deLima) and son, Thor (Doug Miller). Together, they comprise a paradigm for a dysfunctional family. As a couple, Tiki and Clelia are meticulously clad in brown clothes to emphasize that the are the curmudgeon's curmudgeons. Upton's Tiki speaks with a stiff upper lip and in a controlled baritone. His impressive range allows him to play convincingly a much older character...
Finally, the real Nerd shows up in the form of one Rick Steadman (Daren Firestone). Willum invites him to his house because Steadman saved his life in Vietnam (shades of goody-goody Forrest Gump). Steadman's entrance is suspenseful because he wears a costume to conceal his identity. Tripping from one faux paux to the next and yet utterly naive about it, Steadman is the stereotypical nerd, but more abrasive, more annoying and goonier. He's a nerd's wet dream. Firestone sounds like Pee-Wee Herman with emphysema...
Throughout all of this chaos, it is Willum's playhouse that is invaded. As a set designed like an Intimist painting, it's an apt pressure cooker--a fine place to have a nervous breakdown. Stokes shows two sides of Willum: one is calm, as in the scene where he delivers a story laying on the floor and looking dreamy; the other one is much more neurotic, shoulders heavy with burden, sweating, panting, and turning more and more pale with each new conundrum. Throughout most of the play, Stokes leans towards the latter disposition, letting on that while...
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