Somebody Get a Lawnmower

Inside Out Theatre’s Tall Grass needs trimming

By Mary Damiano

Stacy Schwartz and Jim Ballard in The Business Proposal, one of the plays in Tall Grass.

My husband and I watch what we call the 17-minute Jeopardy. We watch it on TiVo, fast-forward through the opening, the chitchat, the commercials and the credits, and we’re done in 17 minutes. 

I thought a lot about the 17-minute Jeopardy while I was watching Fort Lauderdale’s Inside Out Theatre Company’s production of Tall Grass. See, the good news is that Inside Out is presenting three cunning 10-minute plays. The bad news is that they take 95 minutes to watch.

Playwright Brian Harris has a dark sense of humor. He has clever ideas, but he needs a great big strong pair of scissors — no, gardening shears, or a lawnmower, perhaps — to cut each of the plays in Tall Grass down to size. They’re so overwritten and drawn out that I kept wishing for a fast-forward button so I could skip all the superfluous stuff and enjoy the meat of the story. 

The first play is The Business Proposal, about a couple whose professional lives put them at odds in their romantic relationship. The middle play is The Gerbil, about a burglar who gets caught up in a couple’s disturbing domesticity. The closer is the titular Tall Grass, about a self-sufficient elderly couple who gets a visit from a con man. Each play has its share of twists and turns — no one and nothing is quite what you think. 

As clever as the plots are, they’re doomed by their length and the production’s lack of pacing. The direction by Kim St. Leon feels phoned in, because a brisk pace could have helped the overlong plays become more of an extended rollicking ride.

You’ve got to hand it to the trio of actors, Stacy Schwartz, Jim Ballard and Reiss Gaspard, who do all they can with what they have to work with. Each has his or her best moment in a different play: Schwartz is funny as an old woman who loves macramé in Tall Grass, Ballard shines as a nerdy romantic with a secret in The Business Proposal and Gaspard is terrific as a burglar with a penchant for fine silver in The Gerbil. 

But decent performances can’t save this show. If you’re looking for satisfying entertainment, try the 17-minute Jeopardy. You could even save up a week’s worth of Jeopardy and have a marathon — that’s about 300 answers and questions, two and a half hours of programming, and you could watch it all in 85 minutes — 10 minutes less than it would take to wade through Tall Grass. And you’re bound to be more entertained. 

Tall Grass runs through Feb. 17 at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 East Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call 954-385-3060 or visit www.insideouttheatre.org.

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