A few minutes before the lights go down for Kitchen Dog Theater’s “Love & Vinyl,” the staff will set up the chairs for 35 people. Until then, the show’s audience members will browse the shelves of LPs at Good Records, the award-winning music shop in East Dallas that also serves as the theater for this play. It is currently entering its final weekend of a sold-out run.
When the lights go up again, Bogart (Jamal Sterling) enters the shop and begins browsing the records, just like the customers do during the shop’s normal business hours. The stage manager, Ruth Stephenson, told me before the play began that sometimes potential, non-fictional customers attempt to follow the actors through the same doors, only to be turned away due to the strict fire code. The trappings of this play, after all, are site-specific; the location doubles as the set.
The plot continues when, a few minutes later, Bogart is joined by his friend Zane (Max Hartman), who stands just a few feet from him and rifles through the stacks himself. We quickly learn this is a weekly ritual for these old friends, but tonight Zane has shown up after being dumped and he “doesn’t want to talk about it.” But when the shop’s heartbroken hellcat of an owner, played with feist by Karen Parrish, descends the shop’s staircase, relationships, heartbreak, and, of course, music, are the only topics the characters talk about.
These veteran Kitchen Dog actors make the most of Bob Bartlett’s script, which reads like a bad first draft of a play someone might have written after watching High Fidelity and thinking “I can do that.” Parrish, in particular, has the most heavy lifting, given that the playwright has reimagined the manic pixie dream girl for the middle aged woman with all its flatness, male fantasy, and unbelievably nonsensical monologues. Under the typically sharp direction of Christopher Carlos, Parrish tries her damnedest, but even her Platinum Album-level acting can’t overcome hackneyed writing. Hartman and Sterling, on the other hand, say less (although they talk about recreating Say Anything at one point), which allows their enthusiastic antics to add boosts of energy to the production.
If the curtain speech is to be believed, this is the third, and final, production Kitchen Dog Theater will do during its itinerant season before moving into its permanent home in the northernmost Design District. After 25 years in Uptown relying on real estate from benefactors, the company was homeless for a year and then, after an impressive capital campaign, purchased its own space in 2016. Since then, though, the company has faced obstacle after obstacle to move in. Theater, if you haven’t heard, is still struggling after the pandemic. Audiences, which had already diminished before the world shut down, just aren’t what they used to be – at least, for any of the art forms that require our in-person attention.
This season started at a Triple A ballpark, moved to a CrossFit Gym, and ended in a record store.
If everything goes according to plan—and fundraising—when the lights go up on the season’s 34th season in the fall, I imagine audiences will miss the adventure of this year. But let’s hope we’re all tucked into more permanent seating, watching the same first-rate actors, but maybe they’ll be performing a script that’s a little bit easier to listen to.
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