Later, of course, we realized Schultz's genius and could appreciate him anew in the current millennium. As our friend, the filmmaker and novelist Brian Pera wrote us in October 2001, weeks after 9/11:
I've been reading a lot of Charles Schulz lately. Maybe that explains the nagging despair. Read a book of interviews with him and a wonderful collection of his strips just put out. I hadn't realized how wonderful they are, I'm ashamed to say. What an amazing man. So simple and touching, and really deep for it all.
The director modulates the action so that the actors, in particular the perfectly-cast Diondre Price as the endearingly stolid, questioning (in more than one sense of the word), frustrated linchpin of a group of teenagers dealing with more "issues" than in a zillion After School Specials, effectively conquer the script's most nagging problem: how to reconcile the highly funny, vulgar and knowing pop social satire with the topical gruesome melodrama (prefiguring Tyler Clementi) and search for meaning engendered by the death of a beloved object, be it boy or dog. This tightrope can be a real difficulty in staging Royal's play, so baseball caps off to director James Rio.
The best our generation could do to defile the once-ubiquitous Peanuts-inspired slogan "Happiness is a warm puppy" was change the two P's in puppy to double-S (and there's a lot, and we mean a lot, of hilarious talk -- and even singing -- about pussy in this show). But as Dog Meets God opens, the dog's no longer even lukewarm: C.B.'s beloved beagle has expired of rabies, having dismembered and killed his little yellow bird companion in his crazed death throes. So much for peace, love, Woodstock, flowers.
As someone who worked as a staff attorney at a think tank researching tons of intellectual property issues, we admire how deftly the playwright and his initial producers' high-powered lawyers managed to avoid litigation by United Features Syndicate and the Schultz estate by advising the oblique but still-obvious references to characters who will be copyrighted and probably trademarked for decades to come.
So Charlie Brown is C.B.; Linus (Van Pelt) is Van; Sally Brown and Lucy are C.B.'s Sister and Van's Sister; Peppermint Patty and Marcie are Tricia and Marcy; Schroeder is Beethoven; and the high school's sex-crazed, homophobic and mysophobic jock gets enraged when anyone makes reference to his former filth-encrusted past (C.B.'s Sister taunts him with an allusion to the comic strip character's name: "Where swine live!) is an ex-Pigpen now called Matt.
In the various workshop, festival and off-Broadway productions, the actors were often fairly well-known young character actors from TV and film: both Patrick Fugit and Eddie Kaye Thomas played C.B., and other cast members included Anna Paquin, America Ferrera, Logan Marshall Green, and Eliza Dushku.
We'd bet anything the MCC cast tonight was as good or better than most of them. The choices they made (particularly in regard to line readings), their comic timing, the seamless and slippery interaction nearly always seemed to work. It may be in some sense C.B.'s story that begins with his existential quest to determine the ultimate fate of his dead dog, but like Peanuts itself, it's the ensemble that makes it work in this world where kids -- yes, they're still kids -- deal with alcoholism, endless varieties of drug abuse, child molestation, gay-bashing, group sex, obsessive-compulsive behavior, anorexia and bulimia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, boy-on-boy kissing, and heartbreak.
In addition to Diondre Price, who's onstage for all but two of the 22 scenes in two acts and carries much of the play's forward movement on his broad, if shrugging, shoulders, the other actors also create memorable characters. As C.B.'s Sister, the spunky Goth/Wiccan girl, Brittany Woodbury is hilariously touching. Her Drama Club rehearsal -- she's the club's sole member -- for her one-woman show depicting her transformation from caterpillar to platypus (or something) gets the biggest laughs of the night and makes us recall too many evenings on the Lower East Side watching pretentious performance artists playing the same kind of thing straight. But nobody's too straight in this play.
In her one scene ("Fire is Bad") as Van's Sister, Taissa Zveiter gives a bravura performance as a jailed pyromaniac, the sympathetic psychotic ("I love lithium!") C.B. visits in prison for advice. And yes, even in the joint (not the kind her brother smokes), the doctor is in. Incredibly vulgar, intensely angry, Van's Sister moves blithely from sarcasm to pathos (her secret abortion), and Zveiter and Price work so well in that one extended scene that you really believe in the depth of their longtime friendship (and mutual wariness).
Sean Ryan McBride is superb as Beethoven, the artistic outcast, the sweet tormented kid who's taken more abuse than Charles Schultz's mind could have dreamed of (or perhaps not, if you read a recent biography). As they circle each other suspiciously, McBride and Price as the two former friends -- one now liked by everyone, the other a pariah -- make beautiful music together (not a metaphor) even as their renewed relationship confuses and ultimately undoes them.
The play's best riffs belong to the mean girls Tricia and Marcy as portrayed by Bianca Mihalcesu and Tobie Rash. Whether they're in the high school cafeteria dishing dirt on fat-ass Freida (one of many references to comic strip characters not portrayed in Dog Meets God), drunkenly extolling the virtues of the spork, giving a novel explanation of the meaning of WWJD? or competing at coming on to boys at a teen house party with Fellini Satyricon-like debauchery, the pair have the most consistently funny lines in the script.
Ultimately, however, Dog Sees God proves to a moving study of the effects of isolation and ostracism on human beings and the loss of adolescent innocence. The efficient and deceptively simple set (designed by Lindsey Halfhill, with the assistance of Aaron Dilley, with set dressing by Jessi Watson) functioned flawlessly as a variety of venues for the characters. Costume designers Kenzie Woods and Ben Papia must have had fun with some of the outfits, like C.B.'s Sister's pretentious Goth gear and Van's slightly out-of-date stoner garb, but their choices were excellent and interestingly and subtly color-coordinated. Kudos also to Aaron Dilley (lighting design), Travis Williams (sound design), Cameron Blickensdorf (prop design), Glenn Star (assistant technical director, and Tammy Gilbert (stage manager).
From August 2000 to May 2001 we were on the MCC campus every Tuesday and Thursday morning for our 7:30 a.m. English 101 (fall) and English 102 (spring) classes. We lived just the other side of the Superstition Freeway (U.S. 60), in a little studio (half-underground) at the apartment complex then called Quail Creek. We fondly remember teaching at MCC on those mornings -- the shortest walk to work we had in 37 years of teaching at over 20 colleges -- and we're grateful for the chance to have been on campus tonight to see Dog Sees God.
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