“How many toenails will it take to get to South
Dakota?"
I
think that Vicki Caroline Cheatwood’s Manicures
and Monuments, put on by the local Blue Moon Productions, was intended to
be tragicomedy, but I cannot say that with any authority. It is very hard to
discern the intended effect from a play that seems almost schizophrenic in
tone, switching from comedy to cynicism and from engaging supporting characters
to stale supporting props in the time it took me to eat a slice of the
fantastic lemon cake served during intermission, which was by far the best part
of the entire experience. The audience, most of whom were quite a bit older
than myself, seemed to take it as a series of humorous ‘There but the Grace of
God’ vignettes, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that we were all
supposed to go home and be grateful for our human connections, no matter where
we find them. Either way, the quality of the play itself, combined with the
mediocre talent of Blue Moon Productions, was not what I would call an
enjoyable hour and a half.
