The Citrus Theatre Company’s “Dog Sees God” opening night on Oct. 9 had quite a turn out. The play is about the characters of the “Peanuts” comic strip if they were teenagers, CB being the main character. The following review contains spoilers.
The beginning makes it easy for the audience to connect with CB. Not only is the audience grieving with CB for the loss of his dog but CB goes on to ask the question humans simply don’t have the answer to: What happens after death?
We see classic characters act in a way we haven’t seen before, which allows for the audience to ponder what makes a character completely themselves. However, the characters are still the same in the sense of being very exaggerated, cartoony and high energy, just as they are in the comic strip. The show can still nostalgic in a way for any fans of the comic strip; a line will be thrown out, like the iconic “good grief”, and it’s like seeing an old friend again.
Characters’ anger and sadness is shown in the same exaggerated way. The use of dramatic displays of anger by shouting curses and slurs, mostly from the character Matt who is the play’s reimagined version of Pigpen, is very impactful and done well. His yelling, almost screaming, leaves his anger so hard to ignore. It is not only scary, but unnecessarily out of hand which is entirely the point.
The character being bullied is Beethoven, who is the play’s version of Schroeder from the comic strip. It’s hard not to connect with him because he’s constantly being bullied for absolutely no reason and it’s a good way of showing how people operate and how life can be unfair.
The play is very modern and meta, like when Marcy and Tricia, who are the reimagined versions of Marcie and Peppermint Patty, talk about their support for gay people, only for the play to show that they just said it to get credit for saying it. In this scene, the play is indirectly criticizing itself because it’s use of gay characters to create drama almost feels like it was scared of leaning into the whole existential ideas of life without using a conduit, in this case, CB and Beethoven’s dynamic. While I think it could have been done better, the play does a great job of showing how selfish people can be without realizing it.
The production was great and so was the mood of the whole play. All the actors seemed to be very committed. A performance that stood out was Evie Johnson’s performance of the egotistical character Trica. You would think seeing two popular girls be completely insufferable would get tiring, but it doesn’t in this case because Tricia and Marcy share it in common. It actually ends up becoming kind of cute.
Overall, I’d give “it”Dog Sees God” a 3.3/5 with a cookie on the side. Maybe a thumbs up or two at certain moments. I think it fell short in letting me fully care or believe for the romance aspect. Would the play have been better had it just focused on death rather than tease the idea of someone dying? Perhaps. But I think there’s something really interesting about seeing a villain like Matt not get in any real trouble and how CB’s question is never answered.
