Last year's news-story darling Audrey Seiler managed to bring out the best in Madison only to whitewash it with all the rage the city had to offer. While she was a missing person, and we assumed our worst fears were true, the city banded together in a fit of compassion to search and pray and walk each other home lest the worst possible scenario happen to our friends, too.
After Seiler's abduction was exposed as a hoax, she became the city's greatest villain (and punchline). When the network news cameras left town, even following her plea bargain and public apology, there never was any real closure to it, never any reasonable explanation as to why the attractive, all-American girl would stoop that low.
So when the Broom Street Theatre, 1119 Williamson St., announced first-time playright John Sable was authoring a play about the Seiler fiasco, it seemed that one person, perhaps only the second, had some grasp on Seiler's psyche.
Alas, \Audrey Seiler, Where Are You?"" doesn't have any answers, at least, no satisfying ones. It's a farce and not the satire the city really needed. One part ""Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,"" and one part ""Saturday Night Live,"" the play is a double entendre-filled reimagining of the story keeping the major real-life plot points but concentrating on the all-out fiction that fills in the gaps. In Sable's world, Seiler dupes Madison only after Drew (Brian Belz) and Parker (Kyle Wilson) dupe her into it. Hardly men in much control of the city themselves, the two masterminds concoct the abduction in a harebrained scheme to make themselves popular. Everyone is using everyone else, and Seiler is stripped of much of the culpability. Drew and Parker dominate the show, leaving little time for Jaime Marie Waelchli's Audrey Seiler to expand much beyond being the pandering remnants of waning high-school cool girl. It's a shame too-Waelchli always gives the impression that her character has much more depth, and that the audience is but a subplot from finding it.
A character who could parallel her namesake's behavior never shows up; ""Audrey Seiler, Where Are You?"" is miles away from helping anyone grasp the end of March last year. And it revels in it.
The play goes out of its way to show itself as a non-source in the issue. Amidst the thick accented Indian convenience clerk and the girls converted to lesbians by attending a liberal university, Drew tells Parker not to draw too many conclusions about people based on the slight facts they know about them. The self satirizing ranges from abrasive to surprisingly clever. Waerlchli commendably places herself on the same block as her character. It generates a goofball momentum that moves so quickly that it's hard to notice that an event that caused a city to follow five days of fear with five months of outrage might not be funny.
Still, it would have been nice to see a play that could shed light, even dimly, on a dark situation. Not just on the heroine or notorious starlet or monster or whatever Seiler has become, but on ourselves as well. ""Audrey Selier, Where Are You?"" targets everyone a demanding public viscerally wants to see targeted. Audrey Seiler takes ample blows, as does the news media.
But no bite was taken out of the public, those who came to see the play, a response to the public's outcry was left out entirely. And that's the great untold joke in ""Audrey Seiler, Where Are You?""-that this play is what became of all the compassion we showed once we found it was in vain.
But judged on what it is, and not what it could have been, ""Audrey Seiler, Where Are You?"" would make a great ""I Love Lucy"" episode. In between rare missed jokes and an oddly misplaced critique of the Bush administration, there is a laudible first effort here.
But most of all, it's a play with just enough venom for Ms. Seiler to pacify an audience still eager to dish it out, although most of them would be just as happy to see ""Audrey Seiler vs. Predator.""
""Audrey Seiler, Where Are You"" is playing at the Broom Street Theatre, located at 1119 Williamson St.
