Envision the town of Sanctimony as perhaps a modern-day Pleasantville, where superficiality is one's savior, everyone feigns composure to avoid the town's scrutiny and nobody has a damn clue where life is going. Written by Thomas Allen Smith and directed by Jaidy Schweers, Hypocrisy is like a synergy of Rent and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, where a bunch of twentysomethings constantly grapple with identity, religion, sex, loyalty, fantasy and reality.
Sanctity-bred Claire Worthington (Jessica Roazzi), a highly successful therapist, returns to her hometown at her sick father's beckon, where she meets Nathan Miller (Kelan Thomas), a smug and detached aspiring poet. As a black writer in a white man's world, Nathan is pitted between his roots and his avenue to escape them. At the same time, devout Christian Lacey (Penn Dance choreographer Rachel Kantra) tries to hold on to her virginity by reconciling her faith with her unchanneled libidinal energy; in one scene she blurts out to Claire in a therapy session that she's feeling "pull your pants down and smoke comes out" horny. The strong performances unravel such complex characters to effectively convey the universality of their problems, and that deep down we're all a little fucked up.
Hypocrisy classifies itself as a "spoken-word opera," not a musical, since the performers don't sing live and all sound is prerecorded. But the lyrics flow seamlessly and rhythmically into the dialogue to change the tempo of action while drawing greater attention to the language. Act II is still "a work in progress," according to Smith who doubles as the head of Twenty/20 Productions, but will be ready for audiences in just over a month; the San Diego-based group began performing this script in 2003 in their home city and worked its way up California before migrating to the East coast.
Hypocrisy is currently set to perform in Baltimore and travel to Philadelphia from May 20 to May 29 at The Painted Bride. And if that's not enough to satiate one's hunger for cynicism, idealism and a nasty coke kick, Smith's script has been sold to a Wilmington-based production company to bring it to the silver screen. Shooting will start this May in Philly, overlapping its theater dates, and hopefully premiere in theaters September 2005. The film will feature all the play's stage actors, making this spring a rather hectic time for Smith. "I'll sleep when I'm dead," he said. "Just not before June"
