Kyle Cameron stars in 'Cranked.'
A New Victory Presentation of a solo show in one act by Michael P. Northey, with music and beats by Kyprios and Stylust, lyrics by Kyprios and Northey. Directed by Patrick McDonald.
With: Kyle Cameron.
If you must make a show about drugs, and you have to market it to teenagers, "Cranked" is the way to do it. Green Thumb Theater's brief one-man play exhumes the horrors of meth addiction without pandering or moralizing, and its star, Kyle Cameron, is wonderfully convincing as a good kid with problems who becomes a sad-sack tweaker. The show's most interesting assets, however, are hip-hop artists Kyprios and Stylust, who flesh out Michael P. Northey's script with weirdly catchy songs about addiction and death. "Mary Poppins" it ain't, but it sure keeps your attention.
"The difference between the old zombie movies and the new ones is the speed at which the zombies move," observes Stan (Cameron) by way of introduction. Stan favors the new movies, reasoning that if cannibal zombies are that crazy about the taste of long pork, they'll definitely hurry to get to it. And Stan can relate, it turns out -- he's having a "Dawn of the Dead" of his very own, but instead of brains, he's hungry for crystal meth.
It's hard to create a show like "Cranked" without having a "Reefer Madness" moment or two (the original scare film, not the musical). But because of their drug of choice, Green Thumb rarely steps over the line in terms of what kinds of crazy things people in thrall to meth will do. Parts of the story are depressingly familiar, in fact: a kid starts doing drugs so he can stop worrying about his divorced parents and then becomes so heavily addicted he steals, begs and ends up homeless -- all in the service of fueling his addiction.
What keeps the play interesting is Stan's might-be career: just before he starts sliding into the abyss, our hero wins a recording contract at a freestyle battle, earning a little respect and a lot of money and maybe a way out of his dead-end life. Whenever the show starts to sag into familiar territory, Stan takes on his hip-hop alter ego, Definition, and out comes a clever rhyme by Kyprios and a great-sounding mix by DJ Jason Pouliot, who works the turntables.
"I'm the truth, and you a bad impression/I'm a statement, you wack suggestion/I'm Definition, the definitive answer to the question," he snarls. And with the nicely introspective Cameron playing the part, you can see the good this kind of bravado does for a damaged teenager.
Happy endings are an almost inevitable downside of youth theater, and "Cranked" succumbs to the temptation to make everything turn out all right. It's probably just as well, since nobody wants to see Stan die, but the climactic moment in which his inattentive dad redeems himself is a little much.
Still, "Cranked" has more to say than "this is your brain on drugs," especially since it seems to be part of a vanguard of boundary-breaking acts (like Danny Hoch's "Taking Over") moving hip-hop theater into the mainstream in recent months. It's heartening to see poetry, theater, and mass culture keeping such close company.
Set, Justus Hayes; lighting; Martin Conboy; sound, Joel Etkin; DJ, Jason Pouliot; production stage manager, Rachel King. Opened Jan. 9, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 11. Running time: 50 MIN.
Contact Sam Thielman at
sam.thielman@variety.com
Date in print: Tue., Jan. 13, 2009