Killer comedy Popcorn is a snack for thought BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Popcorn By Ben Elton. Directed by David J. Miller. Set by Miller. Costumes by Tracy Campbell. Lighting by Jeff Adelberg. Sound by Walter Eduardo. With George Saulnier III, Stephen Epstein, Caryn Andrea Lindsey, Jennifer Huth, Jesse Soursourian, Susan Gross, Naeemah A. White-Peppers, Chris Chanyasulkit, and Richard Arum. Presented by Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 5.

There’s more exploding than popcorn in Ben Elton’s caustic comedy of the same name. Guns are as common props as pocketbooks or telephones in British comedian/writer Ben Elton’s Olivier Award-winning 1997 send-up of violence in American movies and American life, and they pop off with the casual, rat-a-tat frequency of Orville Redenbacher in the microwave.

Popcorn, which is in its area premiere courtesy of Zeitgeist Stage Company, was first a 1996 novel inspired by the banning in Britain of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, which was blamed for a killing spree by a couple of French Bonnie-and-Clyde wanna-bes. Elton, who wrote for the Blackadder series and penned the book for the long-running Queen musical We Will Rock You, upped the ante. In his black-comic scenario, a hornily deranged redneck killer couple, their homicidal hormones pumped by repeated viewings of a violent film by an artistically pretentious director, have laid waste the anonymous denizens of malls in four states. Now they show up in Hollywood to take the filmmaker hostage the morning after he wins an Oscar for his latest Tarantino-esque cinematic amalgam of wit and carnage.

Bruce Delamitri has returned home at 7 a.m. following his Oscar win with more in tow than the sexless statuette. With the soon-to-be-divorced director is Playboy-centerfold-with-aspirations-toward-acting Brooke Daniels, who among her provocations for a part has a gun of her own. Unfortunately, the revelers have been preceded on their return to Delamitri’s womb of luxury by macho psycho killer Wayne Hudson and his twangy moll Scout, a duo dubbed the "Mall Murderers" by the press. Wayne is a fan of Delamitri’s controversial œuvre but has a plan to use his idol as a means to avoid the chair: cast Delamitri as the devil who made him do it and have the filmmaker acknowledge responsibility on national TV. Inadvertently drawn into the fray are the director’s producer and his family: alcoholic soon-to-be-ex Farrah and the pair’s tarty, spoiled Tori Spelling of an offspring, Velvet.

A broadsided satire that wields its cudgel against Hollywood callowness and vacuity, pornography’s pretensions toward art, trailer-park tackiness, and the voyeuristic maw of television that must be fed, Popcorn means to raise serious questions about cinematic glorification of violence, the culture’s complicity in the crimes of the impressionable, and the way in which culpability has become the buck that stops nowhere in American society. The play is too busy being outrageous to fire off answers to its queries, but it does pack a double barrel of merriment and discomfort. And it’s not an easy work to pull off, mixing as it does edginess with brittle satire. For example, Farrah (described by Wayne, in one of Elton’s many pithy bits of alliteration, as a "Gucci-wrapped sad sack of silicone and Scotch") is primarily concerned, even at knife or gun point, with acquiring her husband’s assets and making sure that her daughter doesn’t slouch while being threatened in her skivvies on live-hook-up TV.

An ideal production might, I imagine, achieve the calibrated cartoonishness of Nicholas Martin’s staging of Betty’s Summer Vacation, with which Popcorn shares some themes. Director David J. Miller, who also designed the convincing if minimalist luxury digs with glass wall opening on the famous "Hollywood" sign, takes a more realistic approach that keeps spectators on edge more often than it doubles them over. This doesn’t exactly mesh with Elton’s manic if brutal lampoon, whose characters are less consistent than their witticisms, though it does allow the best of the non-Equity cast to make you jump.

Sleepy-eyed, blood-spattered Jesse Soursourian wins an Eric Bogosian star as Wayne, aptly capturing the disconnect between natural intelligence and conscience. "I never know what I’m going to do next, I’m a maniac — it’s my job," he says, and you believe him. Susan Gross is right on as the star-struck, love-cowed, yet spiky Scout, standing by her murderer man. Caryn Andrea Lindsey and Jennifer Huth even put some terrified flesh on the petulant bones of Velvet and Farrah. Gutsy Zeitgeist regular Naeemah A. White-Peppers seems oddly cast as the wimpering sex bunny. As for Stephen Epstein’s Bruce, arguing for "creative integrity" in the midst of a ratings-garnering bloodbath he didn’t orchestrate and trying to mix a bit of nobility into a self-serving persona, he’s pretty slick. Just don’t close your eyes; he sounds less like Tarantino than like Woody Allen.