Key West’s Fringe Theater Excels with reprise of Hate Mail

By Joanna Brady

You never know where Fringe Theater will turn up. On the heels of their big success with Agnes of God at the Studios, our Key West ‘gypsy’ troupe is reprising its summer production of Hate Mail at the Little Room Jazz Club, 821 Duval St. This witty and sardonic comedy is on for just four nights, so you should book now.

The musical venue is appropriate. Rebecca Tomlinson, Fringe’s artistic managing director and seasoned director, is fond of weaving music into the plays she directs to underline emotion and work with the script as musical punctuation. Musician Michael Robinson is on hand at the piano with a musical intro, and riffs at just the right times.

Hate Mail features two very disparate characters. Dahlia (Susannah Wells) is a New York City angst-ridden photographer, working as a manager’s assistant in a cheesy novelty store on Times Square while trying to make it big on the artistic scene with her work. Preston (Pony Charvet) is a wealthy midwesterner from Minnesota with a huge sense of entitlement and a bundle of neuroses.

These two unlikely people meet and collide the old-fashioned way, by snail mail. Preston writes a consumer complaint concerning a defective snow globe he bought at her shop and she answers it. They get off to a rocky start when she says there are no refunds. This accelerates into a venomous correspondence of threats and insults.

Their relationship eventually evolves, and continues to morph throughout the play, as they themselves change. Dahlia, who was leaning towards Marxism, discovers Ayn Rand and drifts toward free enterprise as she embraces capitalism. Around this time Preston questions materialism, spending time in an ashram where he meditates and plants lima beans. Still they remain in touch.

Eventually, they move in together and the correspondence continues when Dahlia ventures off to photograph the wonderful world of the Southwest.

Preston and Dahlia go at each other in every possible way throughout this surprising comedy. Pony Charvet manages to maintain the unique exaggerated Minnesota accent made famous by the Prairie Home Companion and late night comedians, throughout the 90 minutes of the play. With apologies to Minnesotans, it does make the play all the funnier. Susannah Wells does a great job in maintaining a calm nastiness toward her adversary, never needing to raise her voice.

While epistolary novels are common enough, a popular form of writing in Victorian days, there are few epistolary plays, making Hate Mail stand out from the ordinary. Reading aloud the letters they send each other, the two actors allow playwrights Bill Corbett and Kira Obolensky an opportunity to develop the characters with rich, funny dialogue.

The play never drags. There is no intermission, so it moves right along at a good clip. We can only watch with fascination the way the relationship of these two people continues to evolve, even as they move into an Internet chat room and renew their acquaintance much later.

Hate Mail begins at 7:00 p.m. each night, so as not to interfere with the jazz club’s live music schedule. Four days only, Feb. 2-5. Tickets are $25 and available online, or call 305 731-0581.

(Joanna Brady is a Key West writer, author of The Woman at the Light, a historical novel of Key West published by St. Martin’s Press)

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