My overall impression
Most of us had invisible friends when growing up. Some we conjured as furry giant bunnies, others cuddly teddy bears, or, in the case of a certain future actor-theater writer, perhaps even a well-spoken talking version of the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms who followed him around everywhere, knocking down imaginary brick walls onto sour-faced unsuspecting passersby. For our heroine Cookie (a marvelously deadpanning Jaime Andrews), however, her own personal id-incarnate is really a monster, shouting orders at the side of her pigtailed head like a drill sergeant on crack and slyly coercing the poor impressionable child into one disastrous situation after another.
While Cookie is still an impressionable suburban child living at home with her parents (Perry Daniel and Curt Bonnem), listening to Linda Ronstadt, Chicago, and the Time-Life Christmas Album, her dastardly Monster (Scott Leggett, who plays the role as though he were Oliver Hardy doing a Louis Black impression) begins his lifelong quest to lead her astray with the usual kid stuff, like talking back to her mother’s friends or scaring off potential Barbie Doll-obsessed playmates. But after puberty hits Cookie, Monster’s bad advice becomes infinitely more dangerous: suggesting she hang out with black-lipsticked Goth girls, experiment with a tempting variety of street and psychedelic drugs, and give her high school’s most popular football jocks blowjobs behind the bleachers after the game.
As written by first-time playwright Andrews in what she calls a “fucked-up fact-based fairytale” (there’s even an acknowledgement in the program’s special thanks section to the “actual Scott Pederson,” the name she also gives her horny football hero), COOKIE AND THE MONSTER, with its untouchable reminiscences of terminal teenaged angst and one wonderful, arrestingly cheery original song about teenage cutting (“Make a little slice / Doesn’t that feel nice?”), is a quick-witted, delightfully off-centered comedy so black it’s in danger of leaving bruises.
As embodied by Andrews, Leggett, and a super-uninhibited cast of some of LA’s funniest performers (including, aside from others mentioned, Sunah Bilsted, Peter Fluet, and K.J. Middlebrooks), Cookie’s life becomes an endearing and surprisingly hilarious journey. The Molly Shannon-esque Erin Parks is a special standout in a series of wildly disparate characters, including one of the stone-faced Goth girls and Cookie’s eye-rolling elder sibling who softens her feelings for her younger sister when faced with her own catastrophic illness.
Guy Picot sits in the booth, delivering “once upon a times” as the disembodied offstage voice of the narrator, Sky Guy (get the sense, judging from the name, that maybe the character was written for him?). But as fun as Picot is to watch, it would be great if his Sky Guy could instead perhaps be Downstage-Left Guy, placed at the side of the stage in a big cushy red leather easy chair with the bound script in his lap and a nice glass of merlot beside him on an end table.
Through all the raucous, wonderfully inappropriate laughs afforded by COOKIE AND THE MONSTER, if this was indeed, as Andrews suggests, something akin to what she experienced as she traveled that rocky road from childhood precocity to therapy-inducing post-adolescence to what appears to be moderately well-adjusted adulthood, it’s a wonder she got here at all. It’s impressive how willing and able she is, surely encouraged by the obviously compatible collaboration of director JJ Mayes egging her on, to eagerly and honestly cough up the pain of her early years and turn the sputum into a rich, thick foam of nonstop laughter.
