Everybody wins at this racetrack. Produced in its world premiere by Moxie Theatre at the Lyceum, Mary Fengar Gail’s delicious comedy, “Devil Dog Six,” provides a gently comic evening in the theater.
Ostensibly the script concerns a young female jockey, Devon Tremore (Jo Anne Glover), who takes a suspicious tumble at a thoroughbred racetrack in Louisiana, where women are even today expected to bake cookies instead of mucking out stalls, actually riding and winning races. Devon had a good role model. Her mother, Josselin (Terri Park), is a very successful trainer.
Devon’s fall leaves her brain-injured and delusional: she takes out-of-body flights in which she becomes even more horselike and actually talks to the animals. For instance, she discovers that the horses decide among themselves beforehand who wins the race. She also falls in love with her mother’s new training charge, a black stallion named Devil Dog Six.
Devon is visited in hospital by an off-the-wall mystic healer, most likely from the Caribbean (also Park), the doctor (Tim Parker), her father (Mark C. Petrich), an inspector investigating the possibility that the race was fixed (Bill Dunnam) and her secret lover, an African-American groom named Fonner (Laurence Brown). Brown also portrays Devil Dog Six. He’s just the right height for Glover to reach the sweet spot between his ears at the start of each caress; that is, when he’s a horse and she’s a girl. He nickers and prances beautifully, carrying over some of his male animal-ness to his human role.
The unalloyed joy of the play, however ” aside from its exploration of the fascination young women have for horses and the difficulty of making it in a male world where too much ambition in a woman is unseemly ” are those moments when humans become horses and thunder down the track (the audience sits at either side, separated from the action by a rail). Each of these remarkable actors has developed an equine personality, and although they are hysterically funny, their roles, both human and otherwise, are played with a dead seriousness that enhances the comedy.
How does it end? Can a young woman go on being a jockey who talks to horses and sleeps in the stable? The denouement is the funniest scene of all. It’s a case of the Moxie hype ” “Laugh so hard you snort” ” being true.
Directed by Esther Emery and Jennifer Eve Thorn, this gem of a play continues through June 30 only at the Lyceum Theatre, Horton Plaza. For tickets and information, visit www.moxietheatre.com or call (619) 544-1000.
