Step aside, Lauren Conrad.
Eldon Phelps is the new face of reality television in Eric Coble's "The Dead Guy," now playing at the Hippodrome State Theatre through Feb. 3.
For small-town slacker Eldon (Tim Altmeyer), life is nothing more than a series of dead ends. He's jobless, girlfriendless and altogether hopeless with nothing to do but binge on PBR at the local Leadville bar.
Enter smooth-talking, ratings-obsessed TV producer Gina Yaweth (Jessica Ires Morris), who offers the dimwitted boozehound a chance at fame and redemption as a contestant on her new reality show. Eldon will be given a million dollars and seven days to spend it any way he wants, and his exploits will be filmed and broadcast nightly on national television.
The catch? Once the week is over, he must die during the live finale in a manner chosen by his faithful viewers.
Director Lauren Caldwell's stage production is an engaging match-up of theatrics and small-screen technology. As part of Coble's vision, cameraman Dougie (the endearing Michael T. Toth) actually follows and videotapes the onstage action, which is broadcast simultaneously on screens lining the theater's back wall.
Caldwell relies on Altmeyer's Jim Carrey-like knack for physical comedy to warm up the audience to the idea of the camera, sometimes too heavily.
Employing sight gags also seems like Caldwell's way of keeping things light, but it only makes for hokey and unconvincing on-camera behavior. Additonally, Morris is somewhat of a disappointment as Gina, wavering in her commitment to her character's evolving principles of detachment.
Once the characters settle into their reality-star status, however, they begin to relax, allowing the audience to do the same. The laughs come easily when, after failing to impress his mother, brother and estranged girlfriend with gifts, Eldon blows some serious cheese on a trip to Disneyland.
The vacation entails a memorable scene involving pot, hookers and two-thirds of the male leads gyrating in their skivvies.
It isn't until the second act that the audience begins to feel for Eldon. Just when things start looking up for America's newest leading man, Coble delivers a wickedly twisted ending that not even the finest reality-TV connoisseur (or most cynical reality-TV critic) could have seen coming.
"The Dead Guy" is almost more impressive as multimedia art than cultural commentary. Underneath the one-liners and pop culture references, Coble's script lacks the darkness necessary to constitute a clever and chilling satire of America's fixation on reality TV, especially for younger audiences who never knew life without "The Real World."
In light of previews for the upcoming film "Untraceable," however, the growing plausibility of Coble's dead-guy plot is perhaps the most unsettling idea of all.
