‘Deer’ @ Theatre Three’s ‘Theatre Too’
Photos by Jeffrey Schmidt
—Ryan Maffei
Not to keep going all meta on you, but the critic’s job is basically to ask two questions:
1) what did this thing achieve—what did it say, what did it mean, what happened—and 2) was it worth it in terms of time, money, effort, risk of misconception. Deer, performed underground in the claustrophobic Theatre Too space of Theatre Three to an appreciative but puzzled audience last Friday night (it runs through February 22), challenged my ability to cleanly answer these questions.
The show (Stage West produced the play’s world premiere in 2017, btw) is smartly and efficiently executed by the two leads, their director and the attendant crew. It is pleasurable where it seeks to be (mostly) but seems largely to want to shock and puzzle us, which it does. I would love to know if that is what playwright Aaron Mark hoped for it.
Mark claims he was inspired by a real-life deer hit, and the cumbersome conundrum this poses for any (lucky-to-survive) drivers. But he doesn’t play things out realistically in the script. The action begins with the central couple’s car facing us head on, inventively rendered. The front seat section (so central to the disaster with the deer) is fronted by a pair of cute little headlights that in following scenes represent a low windowed wall in front of a couch in a cabin.
The show looks great: the inescapable Jeffrey Schmidt’s scenic design and voice-over intro are state-of-the-art, and Jenny Barrett’s lighting design is moody, complex and highly impactful. Dylan Hearn’s sound design is wonderful too, and all the between-action ‘80s pop lets us know these dark proceedings can be silly whenever we need them to be.
My partner declined attendance because she is one with the deer, and, yes, the vehicular slaughter of a fine specimen is the plot point this play turns on. But the deer, though big, is mostly cuddly and hardly photorealistic, more of a gift-shop plush with high ambitions. So even its dismemberment—the “splash zone” folks were bracing themselves beyond what was necessary—feels funny more than it feels gross. The twisted stuff is mostly emotional, rising from the games this central couple play with one another, the kind where you really cringe and feel it in the pit of your stomach.
Our characters are NYC novelist Ken (ugh) and counselor Cynthia, Upper West Siders and recent empty nesters: their daughter and a live-in boyfriend have gone, a grandma has recently passed away after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s—and there’s a fugitive cat who matters more to the plot than we’re led to believe.
We immediately know Ken is a pip, and Chad Cline has a great gift for being charming and annoying at the same time. Meanwhile, Shannon J. McGrann as Cynthia does great work on multiple levels, tender and sad and aggressive and hysterical—and icy with bullshit-puncturing logic. These people hate each other at random intervals; they’re the kind of couple who keep on keeping on out of stubbornness and fear of the unknown, and are too deep in it to admit defeat without feeling it’s a shitty, life-altering Big Deal.
A lot is explored here that really resonates, the wrenching stuff about loss of a parent above all, and both actors are terrific at quieting down and burbling with complex feelings. But Deer director Christie Vela, plus AD Shatorey Watson, are after high camp, and this is achieved, with perhaps more of a perplexing effect than a delicious one.
I think McGrann and Cline mostly sell it. Even when they’re being so shrill with each other we want to bury them both in the backyard (and just watch the deer exist in Jeanne Dielman slice-of-life style) you also, sort of, want to give them credit for the fun you’re not quite having, the bits that aren’t quite landing. Anyway, Deer isn’t exactly a comedy, and what I think I’m hung up on is a premise the show doesn’t quite realize: What would actually happen if this deer/car thing happened?—and if Vela really followed through on her interpretation in the program notes of the Ken and Cynthia as “seemingly normal people.”
Because we realize pretty fast that they’re not normal at all—Ken’s lack of self-awareness is cartoonish, and Cynthia is clearly mid-nervous breakdown, at first catatonic and then suddenly treating the deer as if it’s a child to nurse back to health. McGrann and Vela make this more funny than uncomfortable, but it is uncomfortable—as is Ken’s very believable male-ego bullshittery in Act 2.
Vela costumed them too, in convincing Pocono getaway wear, and invited queen of the night Isa Flores to create light gore. I appreciate the exaggerated comic-bleak tone Vela achieves here, like Tim Burton but worthy of the snootier art form. (I think theatre and film are neck and neck, but you know what I mean.) David Saldivar did fight choreography – and no intimacy director is indicated, so hopefully he did that too, in the handful of moments that might have needed one. Saldivar’s work is good, suiting a frantic and fluid tone sustained by the two principals and the director that is elevated by the less realistic elements.
Still, and I hate to keep saying this, I do wish I knew what this show was trying to tell us. Avoiding spoilers, my theory is that it’s a comment on how women’s rawest and most uncontained emotions are marginalized and trivialized and minimized by men—and they are, whoever meant to insert that idea into the play. But it’s also one of those no-hero (and no heroine?) situations.
I liked Deer and a lot of people would like Deer more. I think if you enjoy the Coen Brothers films, or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Misery (all you folks in the center of that Venn Diagram, we salute you while averting our gaze) you’ll like this play. And I think it’s such an interesting conversation piece it’s worth a look anyway, though sometimes it feels a bit like being slapped repeatedly: I’m not sure the show, as written or presented, is here to make friends. And to be honest, that’s the question I have about a fair amount of Vela and Schmidt’s work, as entertaining as the T3/T2 multiverse so often proves.
WHEN: January 29-February 22, 2026
WHERE: Theatre Too (downstairs @ T3), 2688 Laclede St., Dallas
WEB: theatre3dallas.com
