Review of Atlanta Theatrical Outfit / A Confederacy of Dunces

Warning this is a really old review

Thursday night, September 2nd 2010, we went to see A Confederacy of Dunces at the Balzer Theater. I was a huge fan of the book back in high school. I rarely go to the theater but really wanted to see this show, since I liked the book so much.

I didn’t like how the play began with some guy coming down to the front of the audience and basically begging for sponsorship, then reading off a list of sponsors. I paid $25 a ticket to see the play. I didn’t really expect it to begin like the beginning of a damn PBS show. It kind of started off the evening on the wrong foot for me.

It was a so/so adaptation of the book, I thought. Then again, some books aren’t really meant to be adapted to stage. The entire content of the book was obviously difficult to translate into live action. Atlanta Theatrical Outfit really kind of focused on the slapstick aspect, rather than the cerebral part (the book itself is not slapstick at all).

The lead actor didn’t really bring across how disgusting I imagined Ignatius to be. Also I thought the playwriter put too much focus on Ignatius’ mother-son relationship. The character of Myrna Minkoff is marginalized.

An interesting part of the book that the characters/actors could have had fun with was the dialects. Unfortunately, the actors or director chose to do “dialect lite” – For instance the character of Santa Battaglia sounded an old jewish lady (not the way her dialogue is written in the book).

The play was billed as a comedy and people were straining hard to find stuff to laugh at. Unfortunately, the book itself isn’t really that funny at all. The role of the narrator obviously is to try and fill the plot holes that occur due to heavy editing of the original source material (the novel). It was kind of awkward when people in the audience laughed at inappropriate scenes, that for all intents weren’t really meant to be funny but just further the story.

The people sitting next to us left at the intermission. I guess they didn’t like it very much.

The actors / director / screenwriter managed to turn several larger than life characters into 1d – not as interesting as the book. I’d probably give the entire play a B grade. All the reviews I’ve read on various websites are complete crap, by people that obviously have never read the book.

It certainly didn’t endear me to the Atlanta Theatrical Outfit, and I definitely won’t be buying season tickets for any of their other shows. Kind of an amateurish production, all in all. I may return if they ever have any other interesting stories to adapt, but otherwise I’ll just plan on staying away.