Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
By Bert V. Royal
Directed by Keith Alan Baker
Studio Theatre's 2nd Stage
Through Aug. 6, 2006
James Manno as CB
By Alexander C. Kafka
Hard times have fallen on Charlie Brown's old gang. His pen pal hasn't written back in years. Sally's gone goth—Wiccan, to be more precise. Linus, traumatized when CB and Lucy burned his blanket, has turned into a stoner. Pigpen's cleaned up his act, but at the expense of becoming an obsessive-compulsive, glue-sniffing, homophobic jock. Schroeder's a terrified, bullied recluse who, it seems, was abused by his now-jailed dad. Lucy is in the loony bin because of an unfortunate incident involving fire and the Little Redheaded Girl. Peppermint Patty and Marcie spike their lunch milk cartons with booze, and there are bitchy insinuations that Frieda is a bulimic Jesus freak.
Good grief, Charlie Brown! We’re in high school.
That’s the hideous and hilarious premise of Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God. But, alas, despite an appealing cast, it works better as a campy thought experiment than it does as theater.
The obscure title refers to a line from Schroeder, who like all the characters, has had his name tweaked (in his case, to Beethoven), no doubt for legal reasons. “They say a dog sees God in his master,” Schroeder tells CB while attempting to console him about the recent death of his beloved beagle. Yes, that’s right. Snoopy’s been put to sleep after contracting rabies and eating Woodstock. And CB, understandably, is in a pretty morbid state of mind.
Linus (or Van, in this show), tries to console CB with his rambling Buddhist-inspired explanation of why nothingness is preferable to reincarnation. That might explain, too, why he recently smoked his burnt blanket. “We all handle grief in different ways,” he muses.
Pigpen, now called Matt, sees the expression of grief primarily as a way to trick girls into having sex with him.
Sally (CB’s Sister) thinks CB’s embarrassing—the way he invited all their friends to Snoopy’s burial. (None of them came, needless to say.) She might miss the pooch, but she’s got other things on her mind, like her one-woman performance-art show (which she’s worked up in her one-woman drama club). It’s called Cocooning Into Platypus.
Fruitlessly taking his friends’ readings on the meaning of death, and in passing recalling the simpler, if not easier, days of their youth, CB makes other key adolescent discoveries too. At some point around the hot-tubbing during an ecstasy party at Marcie’s house, that shakes the whole gang’s world.
James Manno is a sympathetic CB. He looks constantly a little bewildered and terrified—as if A.J. Soprano wandered into A Charlie Brown Christmas. James Gardiner, as Schroeder a.k.a. Beethoven, is wonderful in his sinewy, palpable fright and suppressed eagerness to connect. You suspect he’ll either go on a headline-making rampage or become David Byrne. Lauren Williams stands out as the Sally figure, her cocooning both in and out of drama club palpable in her every hormone-pumped, excitable, neck-craning syllable. Evan Casey makes Linus—er, Van—a sort of philosopher in early-90s Matthew McConaughey mode. (His buzzed rant on the illogic of cafeterias’ Mexican pizza is a hoot.) And Regina Aquino is memorable in her brief appearance as Lucy all grown—and grown psycho—still playing major head games with her pal CB when he goes to visit her in the institution.
But the drama’s pacing is scraggly, and its multi-rectangled Stage 4 set, while geometrically apt for a neo-comic book tale, is too sprawling to give us a sense of intimacy with these troubled folk.
The real problem, though, is a mediocre script that doesn’t live up to its clever initial concept. It takes some gawky, polemical turns. But worse, it doesn’t persuasively connect these characters with the Peanuts gang they were, nor does it flesh them out enough to be interesting personalities in themselves. Adolescence may be a kind of limbo—but not that kind.
Nonetheless, there’s a real emotional spark now and then, particularly toward the end. “I never wanted to feel this much,” CB and his sis intone in unison. But then Charlie Brown always was the sensitive type.
Maybe he thought if he could just be normal enough, he’d outgrow that sensitivity. For all its faults, Dog Sees God makes you glad he hasn’t, and gives the rest of us hope that we too might buck against our story frames and someday reach each other with our sad, lonely little speech bubbles.
Photo by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Studio Theatre
