Image provided by: Clackamas Community College; Oregon City, OR
About The Clackamas print. (Oregon City, Oregon) 1989-2019 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 18, 2015)
‘Sylvia’ opens at Clackamas STORY AND PHOTOS BY MATT ROWNING A dog humps, shits, eats trash, licks where you don’t want it to and bites. Despite the lack of prefrontal cortex in these four legged hairballs, we hum ans can ’t seem to get enough o f them . Perhaps we keep them because dogs love so unequivocally and ungrudgingly. In Clackamas Community College’ s production of Sylvia, Sam Levi’ s character Greg, a middle aged stock trader, finds this dog brand of love to be more fulfilling than his wife’s. The play explores the relationships between man and dog, man and wife and man and world by making great use of an anthropomorphic, English speaking dog, Sylvia. Sylvia the dog was played by Molly Bowman, who took loving care to her 8 Clackamas Print N OVEM BER 18,2015 theclackamasprint.com role. Reminiscent of FXX’ s W ilfred, Bowman carries on conversation w ith both Greg and his wife Katie throughout the play. As Greg’s dog, her stupidity incites of all the play’s man vs. wife tension. Later on , Sylvia becom es an imparter of wisdom to Greg and Katie, offering sagely advice to both. Having opposing personality traits written into a character is a difficult challenge for an actor or actress, but Bowman did it well. C o u p le d w ith th e p h y sic a l ch allen ges o f the role (craw ling, ju m p in g , ru n n in g and hu m p in g houseguests vigorously), Sylvia was perfectly played by Bowman. The entire gim m ick o f the play is this speaking dog, and if not for a sturdy actress cast in this role, the work flip. Gurney doesn’t shy away from would fall apart. the gross out jokes. Sylvia jokes about The roles of Tim, Phyllis and Leslie her anal gland being squeezed and were all played by one actor, Colin “ fucking the shit out o f” Tim ’s dog Stewart. Tim is a stoner biker of sorts: Bowser, just to name two out of a vast a macho dog owner in the park. Phyllis pool of on-the-edge humor. I always is an uptight middle aged alcoholic enjoy a few toilet jokes, but be aware and Katie’ s best friend. Leslie is Greg that this play may not be for your six- and Katie’ s androgynous therapist year-old daughter. with an anger issue. He did a good job The four actors and their director Jim switching between the three distinct Eikrem did a great job staging Sylvia. roles. Though each of the characters The technical aspects o f the play he played were rather one dimensional, were also well run, so kudos to Chris Stewart played to his own strengths: Whitten and the technical crew. As I enjoying and reveling in his characters’ said in my review of Ain’t Misbehavin’ , own shallow mindedness. if I don’t think about the technical If Sylvia had issues, they m ostly aspects of a show, I believe they were fell to A .R Gurney’ s script. I’ m not done well. squeamish, however, some parts of Sylvia runs in Niem eyer Center the show might make one’s stomach Theater through Nov. 22.
