Power play Making the best of Slam BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Big Slam By Bill Corbett. Directed by C.J. Racinski. With Mark Carter, Chris Perrotti, Jen Swain, and Abby Saunders. Presented by the Rhode Island Theatre Ensemble at the First Universalist Church, 250 Washington St., Providence, on November 20.

Bill Corbett’s The Big Slam may not quite know what sort of comedy it wants to be, but the production by Rhode Island Theatre Ensemble does have its moments. The troupe certainly has done a better job than the playwright.

As with beating a fly to death, a little swatting goes a long way. The pesky nuisance under attack here is a wide-eyed, jargon-spouting business seminar and its loser prey. The play spends most of its first half making fun of a hodge-podge of self-help get-rich-quick indoctrination called Strategies for Power. Only after the playwright tires of cranking that laff-generator does he turn to the more interesting task, slipping beneath the surface and trying to make this assembly of social misfits worth our attention.

Stepping out of the story to comment on events and motivations for us — a creaky but effective device when narrative skills fail — is Orrin (Mark Carter). He’s a passive nice guy who hasn’t learned to assert himself, a trait that his pushy former college friend Russell (Chris Perrotti) takes full advantage of.

At a bar, Russell sends Orrin off for some fruit-flavored mineral water, then splits with a pick-up who is even more of a shark than he is. Stephanie (Jen Swain) is a lawyer so aggressive that she had to quit her law firm before she could be fired for stealing clients. She says she’s looking for esthetic meaning in her life and he says he’s on a vision quest. Even the avaricious are hopeful, so they swallow each other’s lines. When Stephanie and Russell emerge from her bedroom seven months later, they are thoroughly indoctrinated with the business-school-on-the-cheap principles of Strategies for Power. Poor Orrin, finally asked over to resume the "friendship," doesn’t have a chance.

And neither does his life savings. They don’t yet have a product to sell, but he signs on as a partner and sole investor in the business they insist on calling an enterprise. Through some bouts of free-association that their seminar calls "imagination slamming," the three attack the question of what it is that people want. Although playwright Corbett doesn’t have the imagination or wit to tie this all into what these characters really want — no sub-text here, just more text — the process is entertaining.

I won’t tell you what product they come up with except to say that it involves embodying niceness, amiably packaged to sell. It also involves Gail (Abby Saunders), a UPS delivery person who keeps bringing them their seminar books and tapes. She ends up joining their creative cabal, accidentally devising what they eventually decide to market. With Gail as a passive catalyst, the mixed-up relationships gel, and everyone becomes their own particular style of fool or — relative term here — sage. The lying and womanizing Russell self-destructs. The super-charged Stephanie blows her stack. The hyper-agreeable Orrin stands up for himself. Even the goody-goody Gail shows her dark side.

It’s hard to inhabit stereotypes, but under the direction of C.J. Racinski these actors have. As the utterly unredeemable Russell, we might want Perrotti to drop the jerk’s mask of bravado now and then, but he puffs up convincingly. Carter loosens into a genial nebbish, one we end up rooting for instead of dismissing. Swain similarly seduces us by building some vulnerability in Stephanie, who is not quite Russell’s solipsistic match for selfishness, yet who remains abrasive enough to shred flesh. Saunders may have the easiest task with the friendly Gail, but she doesn’t cheat and red-line on the perky-meter for the sake of ironic contrast when this character too fails as a decent person.

One little lagniappe comes from Orrin being an unemployed history teacher, although he’s had a hard time learning from his own immediate past. From him we pick up a few interesting tid-bits about the Athenian statesman Solon, such as his decree that men must have sex with their wives three times a month. More to the thematic point here is Solon’s apocryphal statement to the wealthy Croesus that before death no one can be called happy, only lucky.

Unfortunately, this play is sit-com-superficial. Considering that, the troupe did nicely, but they could do better with better. If some of the Strategies for Power motivational inspiration sank in, we could get work from them as ambitious as the witty adaptation Cyrano 20/20, which RITE did five years ago. Comedies like The Big Slam, which are one long lie, are more like playing Pinocchio.