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From the 'Los Angeles Reader', 1989 March 24

Rent a Family hits Home on Issue of Commitment

By Tom Stringer


Many thanks to Stages Trilingual Center for bringing Joe
Frank's brilliant radio drama Rent a Family (Part One) to the stage.
Particularly rewarding is Grace Zabriskie's well-modulated portrayal
of Eleanor, a middle-aged divorcee who, out of personal and financial
desperation, rents herself and her two children to a lonely publishing
executive.

Eleanor addresses the audience directly, telling her story in
a serious, conversational tone.  At the story's beginning, she has
just lost her job and, searching the want ads, finds an advertisement
for a rental service that is looking for mothers with little children.
Doubtful and nervous, but intrigued by the idea, Eleanor goes to the
agency and fills out an extensive application form.

Eleanor's story is interweaved with excerpts from a panel
discussion in which a trio of sociological experts debates Rent a
Family's virtues with the company founder, Joe Barrington.  Rent a
Family, we learn, provides a video match-making service for executives
who want the benefits of a spouse and children without the burden of a
long-term commitment.  Clients are encouraged to try a broad range of
families - a "sampling" of the vast "inventory" - as either an
experiment to help the executive learn what type and size of family
suits him, or for the mere enjoyment of variety.  It's a matter of
freshness, Joe Barrington tells us.  "People who bring to a
relationship very little history are free to exist happily in that
moment."

In the meantime, Eleanor makes a video tape with her two
daughters, all the while assuring herself that everyone connected with
this agency is extremely nice and "above board."  Even her first date
is the epitome of the well-credentialed, nice-looking man.  Only when
it's too late, in the terrifying conclusion of Eleanor's date, does
she discover the evil that can exist beneath such pleasant surfaces.

The notion of renting a family brings into focus not only the
obsessive tendencies of a consumer society - the convenient, quick-fix
solutions we seek for deep and abiding needs - but also the alienation
of single adults in a culture that heavily promotes the virtues of
family living.  That a successful business venture could be built
around such a need - or at least made to sound plausible - suggests
great numbers of lonely people that intentionally forego the
experience of long-term commitment.  In this vein, Joe Barrington's
arguments in favor of Rent a Family are so audacious we have to
wonder, at least for a moment, which institution will eventually
crumble - Rent a Family or the family?  Might Rent a Family be a good
idea?  Or should the family remain entirely apart from mercantile
considerations?  In what ways is the institution of the family so
sacred that suggesting a price for one is taboo?

On opening night, during a post-performance discussion, one
man in the audience defended the idea of renting families as not only
workable but desirable.  While others laughed at such a literal
reading, it is this reading that reveals the play's grounding in human
desires and fantasies.  The play inspires uneasiness no more than when
we hear, during a prerecorded taped segment, a woman's cheerful voice
greeting a stranger at her door, then calling to her child, "It's your
new father from the agency!"

Paul Verdier's stylized direction of the panelists underscores
the comic absurdity of the play's central premise.  With dour
expressions, the men move at times in unison, making clear the
otherwise oblique distinction between fantasy and reality.  One could
argue that the panelists are unnecessarily reduced to fools, but this
drives home the point that their well-considered, if drily academic
analyses present a less-than-formidable opponent to the charming
demeanor of the handsome entrepreneur.

Verdier's handling of Eleanor retains the simple, intimate
delivery of the radio broadcast.  Eleanor's voice on the radio,
disembodied and intensely private, was haunting - the inner voice of a
desperate woman, the kind of dramatic monologue one might imagine in
one's own mind but never deliver out loud.  In the stage version,
Grace Zabriskie's Eleanor, comfortably barefoot and seated in a
rectangle of gold light, entrances the audience with her subtle,
authentic tone.  Zabriskie conveys Eleanor's profound disturbance by
staring, as if into a void, each time the light on her dims.  In the
role of the sleazeball Joe Barrington, Tom Fuccello is irresistible, a
glib corporate hype-artist with a million-dollar smile.  Kenneth
Danziger, Charles Parks and Tony Pandolfo play the cartoonish,
intellectual panelists.

The ultimate significance of Frank's play lies not so much in
the possibilities it suggests as in the present-day realities it
exposes and satirizes.  We are a culture that allows a great amount of
freedom and power to rest in the hands of corporate opportunists.
Sucking us in gradually, they prey on our needs and allay our fears
with niceness.  In Frank's dark vision of human and corporate
relations, we discover too late the evil that exists beneath pleasant
facades.  The vision is dangerous and true, a tragic view of the state
of things today.

We eagerly await the stage versions of Parts Two and Three.

Rent a Family, Part One
<br>Stages Trilingual Theatre
<br>1540 N McCadden Place,(213)465-1010
<br>Through April 30.