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In their production of Lynn Siefert's play, the Rice Players tone down the humorous elements and focus on the dramatic side of the story. Although the actors are excellent and succeed at what they are trying to do, I could not help wondering how much better the play would have been if performed as a satire.

Perhaps the satire would have hit a little too close to home if it were treated as a comedy. Just as Fargo portrayed the residents of Minnesota as bumbling idiots with abnormally cheery personalities, Coyote Ugly shows Southerners in the dimmest of lights. The characters in the play are poor, ignorant and inbred.

The five actors who bring the play together do a marvelous job. The Pewsy family is as dysfunctional as they come. Rachael Gilg is wonderful as Andreas Pewsy, the overbearing mother who is a little too affectionate with her son Dowd (Aaron Pierce) and too heartless with her mysteriously deformed daughter Scarlet (Tara Morris). Andreas' husband Red (David Chang) has lost all interest in his wife's "turkey arms" and now hopelessly seeks excitement from the waitresses at the nearby pancake restaurant. Catherine Moreno plays Dowd's wife Penny, a naive outsider who finds herself caught in the middle of a nightmarish family reunion. Together the five actors create characters so different that you expect them to tear each other apart in an instant.

For the Pewsy family, life is a miserable existence. Wasting away in a lonely house, Andreas resents her husband's butt-pinching antics and loathes her daughter for her own reasons. She has lost all faith in herself, her family and her religion. After all, as she puts it, "God is a butt-pincher, too." The only thing she or any of the characters can do is "stick around all day like Goodwill underpants." They stagnate in a world where skeletons are left lying in the open rather than hidden in closets.

The set is perfect for the play, complete with old appliances and rickety furniture. Their house is isolated -- it is intentionally left unclear where the desert ends and the living room begins. A front yard so strewn with auto parts that it looks like a wrecking yard completes the picture. An embarrased Dowd tries to explain the mess to his wife: "See, he couldn't afford a car of his own, so he brought home parts of cars. Figured someday they'd all add up." The only thing that seems to be missing from the play is the hum of a ceiling fan and the buffeting of hot air against the faces of the audience.

Under the oversight of 33-year Rice Players veteran Neil "Sandy" Havens and direction of Sid Richardson College senior Courtney Kneupper, Coyote Ugly is an effective drama that deals with over-stereotyped characters intended for laughs.

It is amazing how well the play crosses the genre barrier and succeeds as the serious story of a disturbed family. Despite its approach, the play still provides a few situations that are impossible to ignore as comic. In one scene, Andreas Pewsy tenderly pours milk on her daughter-in-law as a home remedy for a severe sunburn.

The story's main drawback is a tendency to move horizontally when it should be building up to a climactic punch. Unfortunately, clues that lead to the play's startling conclusion are seen too often by the time the mystery is actually solved. It is something of a disappointment to have been expecting the worst outcome only to discover that, indeed, the worst is true.

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the March 14, 1997 issue.