PLAYWRIGHT AND PLAYER KICK BEELZEBUB'S BUTT

By Joe Gallo

In a secular society, drive by greed and carnal desire, the religious impulse manifest itself in many a distorted fashion. The zeal with which folks once prayed to the Lord is now misplaced on soulless celebrities, the adoration of the masses has turned to worship in the sports arena, and the Bitch Goddess, Financia, has drive whole generations mad with the notion of gain.

The artist has been given too much credit for being the only living creature with enough chutzpah to kick the devil in the pants. However, playwright Michael Bettencourt and actor Kim Mansfield have conspired to tan the devil's posterior with Shrapnel, a quintet of plays written by Bettencourt and performed by Mansfield and company. The five plays being presented are tight little nuggets, polished off with intent, delivered with conviction.

"These are very witty plays," Mansfield says. "Michael doesn't write anything that doesn't have a message. The dialogue is intelligent and the message doesn't whack you upside the head. They're very contemporary very timely pieces."

Part of that timeliness has to do with the fact that Bettencourt is an inveterate reader of newspapers and an unrepentant hog when it comes to compiling the trinkets and gemstones of our national life.

"Culturally, I'm always going to deal with American ideas," Bettencourt says. "Kim talked about the message or the ideas behind these plays. Basically, they're about crossing borders, opening up horizons, taking responsibility for the freedom you really have. Getting rid of categories, erasing lines. You can say that's typically American, but they're also universal."

Although the plays share a certain quality, "they are not thematical," Mansfield says. "They're shrapnel."

And being shrapnel, "they go off in different directions," Bettencourt completes the thought.

But there is a thematic consistency. "I have a definite set of political, social, and moral values that I believe in very strongly," says the playwright. "They'll be found in everything I write. But because I write for the theatre, I do it in a way that is dramatically believable and it gives the actors a lot to do up there." As a playwright Bettencourt has "a voice," but not "the voice."

"As actors, we're always there to bring life to the writer's work," Mansfield says, "but with writers like Michael who give you more freedom, they end up getting something better than if he had all his ideas set. The more collaborative and looser it is, the more life energy you bring to the piece. And when you're dealing with three-dimensional characters, you can never contain them! They always supersede any limitation."

Mansfield's view on the characters superseding perceived "limitations" is similar to Bettencourt's desire to "erase lines" and "get rid of boundaries."

The "boundaries" may be construed as secular, but the approach is anything but. Using a lexicon of religious terms to describe his dedication, Bettencourt has referred to playwriting as "a calling" and as being "in the ascetic tradition of being a monk."

"Ah, so that's you in Glory Train!" Mansfield cites one of Bettencourt's plays, which features a preacher ranting on a subway car.

"That's drawn from both a character and myself," Bettencourt says, laughing, "so you're probably right about that. But my whole life purpose as a writer is to affect the people in the audience. That they should be somehow different when they leave the theatre than how they came in. I'm not sure any art form can do much more than that. All we can do is put it out there," Bettencourt says, "they can choose to feed at the trough or not."