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With five strong seasons behind it, Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre kicked off season six with Lanford Wilson’s 1973 free-for-all “HOT L Baltimore.” Director Karen Paisley masterfully tackles another big casting challenge with fourteen actors playing fifteen characters (the second largest I have reviewed, after last season’s “The Time of Your Life” with twenty-three actors in twenty-six roles). As if that weren’t enough to keep her busy, she also lays claim to costume design, delivering—literally—the fabric of life in the early 1970s: bell-bottoms, thick leather belts, big-knotted ties, psychedelic muumuus, mini-skirts, knee-high boots, head-bands, the original hip-huggers…basically recreating to a “T” the coolest ugly clothes ever.

Set in the year it was written (1973, Memorial Day), the play takes place entirely within the lobby of the maybe-or-maybe-not-soon-to-be-demolished Hotel Baltimore. Even as the lights come up, it is in the midst of such hard times it can afford only 13 bulbs for the 14 letters in its sign; thus, “HOT L Baltimore.” But as if telegraphing early its own resilience, and similarly that of the hotel’s inhabitants whom we are about to meet, the “E” flickers intermittently throughout—visually begging the question embedded within the lines of the play itself: “will it or will it not avoid the wrecking ball?”

Zooming out from the “E,” the set (by Evan Hill) is a visual masterwork, a justifiable sixteenth character. Dilapidated and drab, its old, musty, haphazard, cluttered presence is as bland and depressing as Paisley’s costumes are loud and energetic. Superimposed against each other, costuming and set create a living palette.

Enter the motley crew of three hookers (including Rachael Nelson’s "Girl,” the red-headed energizer bunny with a set of lungs that quite possibly may have belonged to the late, great Sam Kinison); a down-on-their luck sibling duo (including Jessica Franz, as “Jackie,” portraying a sympathetically-neurotic, albeit naïve, optimist); two wayward retirees (including intermittently-psychic “Millie” played with reserved grace by Marilyn Lynch); a distraught “Mrs. Belotti”—mother of an apparently-psychotic former tenant (with subdued physical humor delivered by Nancy Marcy); the three hotel staff (including love-struck-but-shy “Bill Lewis” played convincingly by Jess Akin, and mistress-of-snarkiness scene-stealer “Mrs. Oxenham” played by Shelley Wyche), and a broodingly intense performance by Dan Hillaker as “Paul Granger III,” who is desperately seeking his missing grandfather. Throw in a john, a cabbie, and a pizza guy and, as the saying goes, you’ve got yourself a party…

The play’s setting over a holiday weekend gives a sensation of time suspension that adds another palpable dimension to the story. Most businesses are closed (back when just about everything really did shut down over holidays) and there is no mail delivery. The characters, as a result, seem to occupy this nether-world that is present on several levels: Memorial Day being a traditionally transitory date between (especially on the East Coast) sometimes long, chilly springs and the promise of the summer season; the uncertain plight of the “HOT L” itself always looming in the background; and the historical context of life teetering between the tail-end of Vietnam, in the midst of Watergate, with not a clue to the ever-more-depressing things that are yet to come (Nixon’s resignation, the oil crisis, Iran hostages—not to mention even more cool ugly fashion).

The HOT L Baltimore is, in many ways, purgatory, summed up in one telling line spoken by Marilyn Lynch’s “Millie;” she is (they all are) “outside, with no particular interest in looking in.” These are people who are outside the mainstream of society (an insider society with, paradoxically, no particular interest in looking outside at these forlorn castaways). They are a group for whom Memorial Day is only a frustration of closed businesses and no mail, rather than the promise of another vacation season bringing the perennial opportunity to wear white. Hoping for a better life, some end up repeating the same actions that got them where they are in the first place, like Mary Donaldson’s “Suzy” jumping from the frying pan of one pimp to the fire of another. Others, like siblings Jackie and Jamie, pin their paper-thin hopes to a property deal that holds all the promise of the infamous Brooklyn Bridge scam. Some are trying to rescue the lives of others: Nancy Marcy’s “Mrs. Belotti” trying to save a mentally-ill son (a non-character nonetheless created whimsically merely by the contents she hauls from his vacated room—among them a pitchfork, a portrait of the Mona Lisa and a Teddy bear); and Dan Hillaker’s “Paul Granger III” still hoping to find and provide a home for his missing grandfather. Optimism manages to shine through, though, in the always-positive nature of Rachael Nelson’s “Girl” – she comes as close as anyone to helping Granger III find Granger I—and in the love-struck nuance of Jess Akin’s “Bill Lewis” as we watch him not-so-secretly pine for Nelson’s “Girl” before he embraces her philosophy to confront the “convictions of your passions” by bounding up the stairs after her as the play closes.

Of course, the main character—the Hotel—is in the same purgatory as everyone else. Towards the end we learn that the original 30-day eviction orders may not be in compliance with the law (which may require three months), and there is a movement aimed at saving the hotel outright. We are left to ponder not only the plight of every human character—there is little, if any, closure—but whether the “little engine that could” flicker of the HOT L’s “E” might turn out to be a prescient expression of its eventual revitalization, or merely the last gasp of an unusually-tenacious filament – the thinness of which being not dissimilar to the fragile tendrils that hold its inhabitants one step from either salvation or disaster.

For the remainder of its run, through October 3^rd, this is one local hotel you should definitely check into. It’s a groovy blast.

REVIEW:
Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre
HOT L Baltimore
by Lanford Wilson
Directed by Karen Paisley
Runs September 9 – October 3 (Reviewed Friday, September 17)
MET Space
3614 Main Street, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-569-3226 or online at http://www.metkc.org  

By Christopher Guerin

Traditional and New Classical music, and Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Christopher Guerin holds degrees in Music Education, Music Business, and Music Theory & Composition, the latter from the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) College of Music where he co-founded the college's Composers' Guild, and, in 1985, won the Artin Arslanian Composition Award. During college, he also obtained some musical theatre experience as a member of pit orchestras for Threepenny Opera and My Fair Lady. Since 1989, Christopher has been in the very non-artistic corporate sector, where his creative energies have been put to more mundane endeavors 

Christopher credits his musical motivations to his late father, who was concertmaster of the Springfield (MA) Community (pre-cursor to the city's current Symphony) Orchestra and performed popular music on radio in the 1930s. Christopher began his classical training in 1972 at age 10, began teaching at 16 (continuing to take private students throughout college), and traveled extensively with a youth orchestra - including to New Zealand in 1980. After college, and until 1989, Christopher focused on the business end of music as a successful sales manager for one of New England's largest music chains.

Over the past 20 years, Christopher's expertise has focused on medicine as a life risk underwriting officer for a large Midwest insurance group. His past duties included responsibility for risk underwriting in Pacific Rim markets where he traveled extensively to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma. Time permitting, he has continued to compose intermittently throughout this period. Christopher is married to Paula, a fellow musician he met during college, and together they have "composed" their magnum opera in three very creative children - an architecture student (go K-State!), an aspiring classical pianist, and a budding writer/journalist. He and his wife relocated from Massachusetts to the Kansas City area in 1997.