Rent a Family hits Home on Issue of Commitment

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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
Stages Trilingual Theatre
1540 N McCadden Place,(213)465-1010
Through April 30.