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They soon have three easy-to-differentiate daughters: earnest Gert, athletic Jenny June, and jazz-kitten Nelly. A fourth child’s stillbirth sends Marietta into a deep depression, from which she doesn’t recover until the family adopts John N, whom they find floating down the river in a basket, like Moses, but with a snake for company. Shy and sensitive, John N makes a pet of the snake, talks to it, and gets answers in clear (if heavily sibilant) English.
We’re warned at the start that Gert, Jenny June, and Nelly will all die in 1928—information that’s no doubt intended to impart a sense of urgency to the proceedings at the clock shop, but that comes across instead as an arbitrary—well—deadline, since there’s no particular significance to the date. In any case, the sisters are preceded into the void by their parents, who die cute in a car accident related to the 1915 Eastland disaster. I’ve got to admit it gave me a jolt to see an event that drowned over 800 people used as the setup for a comic bucket-kicking. I suppose, though, that it’s a calculated affront—Dawkins’s way of signaling us that we’re in a universe where even fairly large-scale extinctions are just part of the flow. I can’t wait to see his comedy about the Holocaust.
I don’t know. What I do know is that Dawkins and Bockley couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of actors to carry out their flawed, if not quite failed, conception. Guy Massey plays various roles with a journeyman’s grace, but utterly endears himself as a talking dog. Emjoy Gavino radiates spunk as Jenny June, and Baize Buzan sheer delight as Nelly. Often cast as regular guys, Michael Salinas aces the idiosyncrasy of John N. Similarly, Janet Ulrich Brooks goes brilliantly wild in her collection of roles—but nowhere more so than as John N’s snake. Charming.
