Invasion of the Minnesota Normals
Buzzworks Theatre Company
The Lounge Theatre
What is “normal” anyway? According to the program notes for Invasion of the Minnesota Normals, Jen Ellison’s dramedy now playing at the Lounge Theatre, a test known as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was created back in the 1950s for employers to use in order to identify employees’ integrity and trustworthiness. The control group used to establish this ‘normalcy” were mostly rural, marginally educated white Protestants, “middle Americans.” In a time when people were suspicious of any eccentricities that might define a person as “un-American,” a test that could rate a person as not “normal” could have shattering effects. That is the underlying premise that one must keep in mind as one watches this play.
Ruth (Deborah F. Reed) is having a few friends over for the evening. She is a Donna Reed prototype, all swirling skirts and efficiency. But she smokes too much and has a certain brittleness, as if her outer cool manner is about to snap. Her first guest, Walter (Rich Hutchman), is an old friend who seems like more than a friend. Ruth is concerned that her husband seems to not have come home (she doesn’t see him enter and the audience does, but that’s a clue for later). But her concern has to be put on hold as she welcomes guests Stan and Helen Beechum (Peter Breitmayer and for this performance, Anne von Herrmann), and new arrivals in the neighborhood Robert and Mary Jones, (Brad David Reed and Judy Heneghan).
Stan and Helen are a couple of those awful loud drunks whom you wish would not come to a party. In fact, they are reminiscent of Albee’s George and Martha with their drinking, bickering, and Helen’s tendency to belittle her husband in front of others. With those two in the room, one knows that there will be trouble before long.
But newcomers Robert and Mary are a couple of walking Norman Rockwell figures. In fact, they are two of the aforementioned “Minnesota Normals,” used by psychology professionals to establish “normalcy” in the U.S. And it just so happens that Ruth has a set of cards with the Minnesota test “questions,” actually statements such as “I sometimes cry for no reason,” and “I am able to control my temper.” Ruth has these cards because her husband has been asked to take the test. The assembled revelers use the cards as a “game,” with results that are inevitable, given the consumption of alcohol and the underlying tensions of the participants.
The ending may not come as a surprise to anyone who has been alert enough to notice the actual whereabouts of Ruth’s husband, not to mention a foreshadowing, courtesy of a macabre joke that Ruth tells.
Invasion of the Minnesota Normals doesn’t rise to the level of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? although it evokes memories of that play. It does work well however, as a dark comedy, with enough laughs to divert the audience from the obviousness of the conclusion. Melissa Denton directs with a briskness suitable to the brassy characterizations and the play’s one-act, one-night, one-set structure.
The strongest performances come from the portrayers of the obnoxious Beechums. Anne von Hermann makes Helen a loud, overbearing virago, but it seems okay to go over the top in portraying her (and besides, she does provide laughs). Breitmayer gives a somewhat more subtle performance as the tired, embittered, alcoholic that Stan has become. Heneghan has some good moments as the naïve, too-perky Mary Jones, who along with her husband, seems almost too goody-goody at times. Deborah F. Reed, as Ruth, and Hutchman, as Walter, seem a bit slow to get started in their early duo scene, but eventually deliver in their respective roles.