We can't say that we saw a star being born on Opening Night, because Melissa Quine is already well known throughout the Bay Area. Thrust into a starring role in Lynn Rosen's "Washed Up on the Potomac" only three days earlier, due to a casting emergency, Quine plays Sherri, the complex, ultra-neurotic head of proofreading at a low-rent ad agency. We fall in love with her. She steals every scene she is in, delivering a delightfully nuanced performance even when being forced to read her lines from a notebook. Sherri has such a permanent scowl that when she smiles we have no choice but to smile along with her.
The office is staffed with a pair of woulda-beens and wannabes. We get irritating Kate, an over-the-hill woulda-been rocker, and lap-dog Mark, a young wannabe poet, both doing dead-end jobs in the proofreading department along with Sherri. Jessica Bates plays Kate as if she is trying to get herself slapped in the face, while Vincent Randazzo's Mark is so in love with Kate he would be happy for her to simply acknowledge he is alive. Perhaps Director José Zayas has these two play their roles a little too stereotypically. Neither feels quite real.
Their boss, Cole Alexander Smith, is terrific as a middle-level executive with a stunning combover. He is trying to be sympathetic to his staff, but an error has been made and someone's head is going to have to roll.
The last character has an office behind a glass window in what appears to be a stairwell. Played sympathetically by Max Forman-Mullin, he and Sherri might have had a chance together -- if only.
We loved lots of staging details -- the drastic way they changed sets, for example, and the way the proofreaders went about the the boredom of their jobs to the unwavering tone of a metronome. There is a lot to like here.
RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG
"Washed Up on the Potomac"
San Francisco Playhouse Playground Series
Custom Made Theater: 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Through September 1
$30
