When it came time to perform “Bundle of Trouble,” the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley did one of the smartest things you can do with a Ruth and Nathan Hale script: they rewrote it.
Eric Jensen, a Salt Lake City-based actor, writer and improvisationalist, plays sloppy quasi-divorcee Jeff Baker in the broad family comedy. He is also credited with having “revised” the 1980 script.
Some of the changes were to update it (now there are computers), but the more important ones were in the dialogue. I haven’t read the original, but I know enough of Jensen’s and the Hales’ styles to guess which parts belong to whom. Loosely speaking, the clever and fast-paced dialogue is Jensen’s handiwork, while the corny, homespun material is all Hale.
Jeff speaks to the audience and even interacts with them; in fact, an on-stage row of chairs has been added to put audience members within striking range of Jensen’s quick, good-natured rapport. (Tuesday night, he commissioned a man to give him an occasional “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” as a barometer of how the jokes were going.)
He tells us (warns us?) from the outset that the play will resemble a sitcom, which it does. Jeff, a semi-employed scientist, has his life turned upside-down when his wife Annette (Kristina Barrus; double-cast with Cindy Christensen), from whom he’s been separated for four years, drops their daughter off to stay with him while she goes away on business.
Jeff hasn’t seen 6-year-old LeeLee (Tabitha Barrus; double-cast with Caitlin Meyer) since she was a toddler, and she’s turned into quite a precocious little terror. He has no idea how to raise a child, and doesn’t even seem interested in trying (it doesn’t take a degree in Family Science to know not to let your child pour Coke on her breakfast cereal).
A social services woman named Merced Mason (Jenn B. Porter; double-cast with Stephanie Rider) gets involved. She’s a one-dimensional sketch-comedy ice queen with a sour, Church Lady look on her face, but as a character, she’s nowhere near as annoying as LuAnn Appleby (Michelle Linn Hall), a horrific, man-hungry cow who pursues Jeff in a manner too relentless and desperate to be funny.
The dialogue is mostly very breezy, full of wordplay and other verbal shenanigans. (In response to someone criticizing his cereal-heavy diet, Jeff says, “It’s my Life, so stay out of it!”) A few missteps remain — such as the characters, all Californians, referring to soda as “pop” — but they are few. At times, Jensen’s antics do seem out-of-place in a play that is mostly grounded in reality; in real life, you can’t hop around and act clownish without people looking at you funny, but no one bats at eye at Jeff’s ridiculous behavior. But honest or not, it gets the laughs, and that was, I believe, the point.