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For first show back, con-con tackles poorly received ‘Oliver Parker!’

Founded in 2000, Cleveland’s convergence-continuum boasts a core mission to “produce contemporary, cutting-edge plays that examine our current culture in innovative, environmental settings.”

Mission accomplished with the staging of Elizabeth Meriwether’s jet-black comedy “Oliver Parker!” This will be the Tremont company’s first live production since the start of the pandemic.

The play is about hurting the ones you love and loving the ones that hurt. It takes place in the filthy apartment belonging to Jasper (Clyde Simon), an aging and bitter alcoholic with anger issues. The space is frequented by Oliver (Emileo Fernandez), a moneyed 17-year-old with raging hormones and what appears to be a severe case of ADHD. Their attempt to reconcile their abusive past and Oliver’s attempt to seduce middle-aged Willa Cross (Val Young), whom he picks up at a costume benefit ball hosted by his mother, results in often disturbing, occasionally touching and preposterously funny situations.

As is the case with many of the unconventional plays staged by convergence-continuum, “Oliver Parker!” did not receive commercial or critical success when it premiered Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2010. In fact, it closed three weeks after it opened and

“It is perfect for convergence. … Laughter is an emotional coping mechanism for the disturbing aspects of this play.” — Tom Kondilas, the director of “Oliver Parker!”

has not been regularly produced elsewhere.

The New York Times had this to say: “The new play ‘Oliver Parker!’ might qualify as offensive — certainly it strives mightily for that dubious laurel — if it were not so patently artificial…. comedy combines the crass vulgarity that passes for wit in teen-aimed Hollywood movies with a wellworn stage cliché, the scabrously dark story of family dysfunction.”

The review goes on to note that “watching it is like drinking a tumbler of cherry Kool-Aid mixed with paint-peeling cheap vodka.”

Says Backstage, on a more positive note, the playwright “has crafted a swift, lacerating comedy about grief, coping, and, yes, child molestation…. Laughter and shudders exist side by side, often in the same moment.”

“It is perfect for convergence,” says Tom Kondilas, the show’s director. “Laughter is an emotional coping mechanism for the disturbing aspects of this play. But the script is also cleverly written, and there’s a fourth character — Agnes (Amanda RoweVan Allen), who is Willa’s aide — who is built for hilarity.”

But what surprised Kondilas most about ‘Oliver Parker!’ is that the play “is filled with beautiful language that has meter like a classic work, which almost belies the darkness in the story.”

Almost.

SUBMITTED convergence-continuum’s is presenting “Oliver Parker!” in its Liminis Theatre in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood.