"Suburban Love Songs' by 1812 productions

The sexual revolution?
No, the Age of Tupperware

DAN ROTTENBERG

1968, as anyone my age well recalls, was the chaotic year of Vietnam, hippies, flower power, protest demonstrations, the police riot at the Chicago Democratic convention, and the King and Kennedy assassinations. The following year, Mad Magazine published an astute parody purporting to contrast a typical 1969 college yearbook with its counterpart of 20 years earlier. In the 1949 version, the uniformly smiling seniors were impeccably dressed and inoffensive to a fault, their vapid heads filled with ludicrously cautious ambitions (e.g., “to be an accountant,” “to be the best jitterbugger in Akron, Ohio,” “to marry an insurance agent and live in a two-family house with my mother”). The ’69 seniors, by contrast, fell into two groups— angry or stoned— and their ambitions were boundless (“Overthrow the system! Now!”).

However perceptive that spoof may have seemed, it paled in comparison to the readers' response. In its subsequent issue, Mad published several letters whose gist was, “We got a big kick out of your parody here at North Dakota State University, where our own Class of ’49 just graduated.” Tens of millions of Americans, you see, survived the political upheavals of the ’60s without realizing that anything unusual was transpiring.

Matadors at the stereo console

Karen Getz’s small gem of a dance-comedy, Suburban Love Songs, brilliantly tunes into this perception— especially so since neither Getz nor her seven fellow cast members can be old enough to have experienced the ‘60s themselves; instead they must rely on the memories of their parents and the evidence of music and movies. The ’60s according to Getz was a world virtually devoid of war, free love, drugs, anger or black people; instead it’s a bland place where suburban singles awkwardly pursue their hopes and dreams in a seemingly endless round of cocktail parties, Tupperware parties, party games (e.g., “Twister”) and scavenger hunts.

In one wonderful sequence, Dave Jadico, Mario Fabroni and Fred Siegel prance like matadors around the ultimate ‘60s consumer conquest— a hi-fi stereo console— to the tune of Herb Alpert’s The Lonely Bull; in another, the heady proximity of a game of “Pass the Orange” transforms Jadico and Getz into a latter-day Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in evening clothes, the presumed ultimate fantasy of the game’s promoters.

Reminiscent of Benny Hill

It’s Getz’s inspired notion to cast her dance not with professional dancers but with professional comic actors: Instead of watching their feet, you watch their faces. The earnest amateurishness of their movements merely reinforces the comedic effect of, say, Jadico as a deadpan bespectacled nerd who fancies himself the Casanova of Cherry Hill, or Jennifer Childs as a frigid matron who unleashes her libido when she removes her hat and liberates her flowing curls. (In this context, the only professional dancer among the cast— Amy Smith of Headlong Dance Theater— is the least compelling figure on stage: She’s a little too good a dancer to be funny.)

The show’s frenetic pace recalls the late Benny Hill’s madcap TV pantomimes— but Hill’s skits rarely lasted more than five minutes and relied on his own patented wacky soundtrack to drive the humor. Getz, by contrast, employs actual ‘60s songs (Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Zorba the Greek, etc.) and sustains the frantic pace for nearly an hour. It’s an exhausting exercise for the eight performers— who barely get a moment’s rest— but also for the audience: You don’t dare take your eyes off the stage for fear you’ll miss something. And you will miss something in any case. But such is the cumulative nuttiness of Suburban Love Songs that it keeps you smiling throughout, even when you’re not sure why, and even if you couldn’t care less about the ’60s.