Preview: Valley Players round out record season with ‘Women in Jeopardy’
Napa Valley Register Review by John Henry Martin Oct 2, 2019
Valley Players will premiere their fourth play this year, a record for them, on Friday. “Women in Jeopardy” is a comedy about three older women who, when faced with the challenge of dating after divorce and the kids moving out, find themselves in, well, jeopardy.
Richard Pallaziol not only stars in the play both as Jackson, the creepy boyfriend, and the police officer, but he also directs the show. “An actor is not supposed to give another actor notes, so when I have to stop and do that, it’s a bit awkward,” he said.
However, Pallaziol is up to the challenge. He said, sarcastically, that he is a relative newcomer with this group of players, having joined in 1990. So, with nearly 30 years of experience working together, they have cultivated an intimacy and understanding with each other that helps them to work through what seems awkward, and produce a show.
The play is by Wendy MacLeod and is billed on her website as a “fun and flirtatious comedy.” “Thelma and Louise” meets “First Wives Club.” The Chicago Tribune said that the plot was “occasionally woolly,” but with capable female actors its a murder mystery mashup with a comedy of manners that is “purely delightful.”
The play is about Liz, played by Christina Julian, a middle- aged divorcée who becomes interested in a creepy dentist named Scull, played by Pallaziol. Liz’s two friends, Jo, played by Loretta Long, and Mary, played by June Alane Reif, become convinced that the dentist is actually a serial killer.
To protect their friend, they enlist the aid of Liz’s daughter Amanda, played by Cassandra Anderson, local snowboarder Trenner, played by Miles Ainley, and a police sergeant, played by Pallaziol, again, on triple duty.
The question becomes: Can they save Liz, without getting killed themselves?
“We’re playing it like a sitcom from the 1960s,” Pallaziol said. “Like LaVerne and Shirley or I Love Lucy.” Sitcoms are a staple of mainstream American network TV. Pallaziol said that they differ starkly from a drama in that with the drama, the characters learn something through the action of the play. They change and grow. But in doing so, the play ends. Whereas, in a sitcom, the characters don’t learn anything and remain the same day after day. And we love them because of their predictability.
Lucy will always be Lucy, thinking she has to eat the candies coming down the conveyor belt or going nuts stomping grapes to make wine. She’ll never get wise. And Ricky will always come exasperatedly to bail her out.
So, it is with that inspiration that Pallaziol is framing Women in Jeopardy. Liz, Jo and Mary are not going to learn their lesson from this encounter with a murderer. In fact, it seems that Liz ignores many bad signs. But that is part of the zany, hysterical fun.
It’s a relief, Pallaziol said, to be doing a comedy. After the spring’s “I’d Kill for a Parking Place” a play commenting on racism in the San Francisco court system, and this summer’s acerbic, vitriolic cat fight that was “Hardball,” a play about a conservative talk show pundit, Pallziol welcomes the breezy, lightness of a sitcom. “Its so nice in these trying times,” he said, “that the audience can at least laugh at something.”
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”