Time Well Spent at Hartford Stage

Review of The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage

What better to do on William Shakespeare Day (April 23—date of the Bard’s death and, traditionally, date of his birth) than to see a Shakespeare play? Hartford Stage Artistic Director Melia Bensussen has mounted the first Shakespeare production at the theater since the shutdowns of 2020. It’s a welcome return and an interesting choice of play.

The Winter’s Tale presents a heady mix that incorporates tragic conflict, dramatic shifts and reversals, antic songs, stressed lovers, comic interactions and magical reconciliation. Bensussen’s direction is straightforward and aimed to help viewers focus on the action. There is little of the lengthy speechifying that is so key in many of Shakespeare’s plays; here, there is much more interaction than introspection. Nor is there much of the anachronism that directors often like to visit upon Shakespeare so as to “bring him up to date.” Bensussen’s approach suggests that the play is intriguing enough to be mounted in its unique spirit of theatrical variation.

Polixenes (Omar Robinson), Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero); background: Leontes (Nathan Darrow), Mamillius (Jotham Burrello) in The Winter’s Tale at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The story concerns Leontes, King of Sicilia (Nathan Darrow), and his friendship with, and sudden passionate jealousy of, Polixenes, King of Bohemia (Omar Robinson). They’ve been friends since boyhood, but, during Polixenes’ protracted visit to Sicilia, Leontes takes it into his head that Polixenes has been lover to Queen Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero), insisting that the child she is pregnant with was sired by Polixenes rather than himself. Leontes is even a little doubtful about his beloved son Mamillius (Jotham Burrello). Leontes is so far gone, he plots his friend’s death, the death of Hermione’s child, newborn, and scorns an oracle from Apollo that tells him he’s completely wrong about everything. His courtiers try to dissuade him, and Paulina (Lana Young), Hermione’s staunch defender, gets into a fierce argument with Leontes, to—seemingly—no avail.

Paulina (Lana Young) and Leontes (Nathan Darrow) in The Winter’s Tale, at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The jealousy plot occupies the first two Acts which move at considerable speed because what might have filled an entire tragedy is here simply the set-up for the second half of the play—most of which takes place in Bohemia, sixteen years later. The Sicilian segments are ably played by Nathan Darrow, as a truculent, tormented Leontes; Jamie Ann Romero as a winningly girlish Hermione who transforms into a figure of great dignity and stoicism; Omar Robinson as a benign friend who has to swerve into hasty self-preservation; Lana Young as a feisty Paulina who speaks with the most moral force in the play; and, in a role easy to overlook, Carmen Lacivita as Camillo, a “king’s man” who switches which king he serves and is a model of probity in one of those radical shifts otherwise known as a Shakespearean plot; only Jeremy Webb’s Antigonus seems a bit more colorless than required—but that may be due to a deliberate differentiation from Webb’s turn as the much more broadly played Shepherd in Bohemia who finds Perdita (Delfin Gökhan Meehan), the abandoned child of Leontes and Hermione.

The cast of The Winter’s Tale, in Bohemia, at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The Bohemia segments switch into a somewhat overstated comic tone to underline the fact that the mood of the play has changed drastically. It works for Webb’s Shepherd and son—called “Clown” in the list of characters—enacted by John Maddaloni with great energy and spirit. It works less well for our lovers, Perdita and Florizel (Daniel Davila Jr.), the latter trying to give too much contemporary swagger to his sound. The lovers are young, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are our youthful contemporaries. That element hovers about Perdita as well, so that her main scene feels pitched to score more mirth than it contains.

Clown/Shepherd’s Son (John Maddaloni), Autolycus (Pearl Rhein) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

No matter, the winning figure of the Bohemia segments is Pearl Rhein’s memorable Autolycus. Rhein has the full measure of this engaging, theatrical, slippery pick-pocket, so that the Bohemia segments have not only the requisite comic feel but also the welcome musicality—as Autolycus is a tuneful rogue (applause to Pornchanok Kanchanabanca’s music and sound design and music director Liam Bellman-Sharpe). The lightness of the stage business, including a song of rivals Mopsa (Ama Laura Santana) and Dorcas (Hannah Moore), shows as it should Shakespeare’s way with comic timing.

The play winds up in Sicilia, as it must, to come full circle and right as many wrongs as possible. But Shakespeare’s idea was to let some major moments of melodrama happen offstage, narrated by comic figures who keep saying “words fail to describe,” even as they try to. It works on the page and could work onstage with enough comic wit to bring it off. Bensussen instead uses a neat device wherein the characters whose actions are being narrated do the narrating—which helps greatly those viewers for whom some of the names and relations might otherwise prove slippery.

Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero), Leontes (Nathan Darrow) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The great reveal scene also comes off well, helped by staging that sets the statue of Hermione in a special space behind and above the main playing area. Otherwise, Cameron Anderson’s set design is sparse and open, with a tall leafless tree that later lowers and flowers. If quibble I must, I’ll direct my discontent at Whitney Locher’s costumes: there’s a handsome Edwardian cast to it all that makes these characters seem to belong in a Merchant-Ivory production, with Paulina looking a bit the schoolmarm; one might say that any play that gives credence to the ancient god Apollo might be best set a bit more pre-modern. And Autolycus in long underwear?

Perdita (Delfin Gökhan Meehan), Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Those visual disconnects (in my eyes anyway) aside, this is a vibrant, near textbook-perfect run at one of those plays that delights, dismays, confuses and convinces as only a playwright confident he can do as he likes would try to bring off. In the space between Act 2 and Act 3, Pearl Rhein, as Time, puts it succinctly: allow the liberties taken if you’ve ever spent time worse than this; if you never have, “he wishes earnestly you never may.” You could indeed spend your time much worse, and no doubt have. Shakespeare’s ghost need not worry: Hartford Stage’s production of The Winter’s Tale spends its time well.

The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreography: Misha Shields; Scenic Design: Cameron Anderson; Costume Design: Whitney Locher; Lighting Design: Evan Anderson; Original Music & Sound Design: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Music Director: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Wig Design: Carissa Thorlakso; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Voice & Text Coach: Julie Foh; Dramaturg: Victoria Abrash; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark

Cast: Andrew Black, Jotham Burrello, Nathan Darrow, Daniel Davila Jr., Carmen Lacivita, John Maddaloni, Delfin Gökhan Meehan, Hannah Moore, Pearl Rhein, Omar Robinson, Jamie Ann Romero, Ana Laura Santana, Carson Timmons, Jeremy Webb, Lana Young

Hartford Stage
April 13-May 7, 2023

A Joyful Noise

Review of Ain’t Misbehavin’, Westport Country Playhouse

“We’re about to make a joyful noise,” said Mark Lamos, Artistic Director of Westport Country Playhouse, kicking off the opening night performance of Ain’t Misbehavin’, a showcase of Fats Waller’s music conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horwitz. The production was slated to appear pre-pandemic and is now having its moment, in a co-production with Barrington Stage and Geva Theatre Center. And the joy of finally staging this production of energetic and vibrant versions of some of the best from legendary pianist / performer / composer Waller’s songbook is this show’s main strength.

The cast and the band of Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Jeffrey L. Page (photo by Ron Heerkens, Jr.)

In 2022, director and choreographer Jeffrey L. Page reconceived the musical, first produced in 1978, so that it engages with aspects of Black American identity as both performance and protest. While the musical artistry of Waller’s songs are never in question—and hearing a live band play them is a delight that increases as the night goes on—the role of the singer of a Waller song, particularly on a dramatic stage, is more open to debate. Musical it must be, but the performance also has to enact both the song’s lyrics and something of its context. While the performances are enthusiastic, the show’s dramatic artistry registers more strongly in the second act. The first act primarily acquaints us with the performers, but since there is no overarching story to convey, each song is more or less it’s own thing, bound together by the delights of Waller’s stride piano. The choreography impresses most on the big numbers, like “The Jitterbug Waltz,” a highpoint of Act 1, with its overlapping vocals and dancing couples. In the early going the show’s ambiance would’ve benefited from a bit more saloon, less Broadway revue. The aura of a  late night joint became more prevalent in the second half.

Judith Franklin, Paris Bennett, Miya Bass in Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Ron Heerkens, Jr.)

Throughout there are foot-tapping set pieces aplenty—from the big production numbers, like the opening title song, or “The Joint is Jumpin’,” where cast members imitate musical instruments, or, early in the second Act, the brightly arch “Lounging at the Waldorf,” where the cast sports a costume change that has them stepping out, dressed to the hilt.

The cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Jeffrey L. Page (photo by Ron Heerkens, Jr.)

Another Act I set piece involves staging as if for a performance during World War 2, so that the antiquated songs—"Yacht Club Swing,” “When the Nylons Bloom Again,” “Cash for Your Trash”—all register as timely songs in which Waller invigorates the era, adding swing to the straitened circumstances (Waller himself died of pneumonia while traveling during wartime). The spirit of Waller as a showman, with his tongue-in-cheek grasp of how to proclaim the special status of his own particular blues, is well served by some of his best numbers: “Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad,” “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” “Handful of Keys,” while others showcase the tit for tat of difficult relations: “Mean to Me,” “That Ain’t Right,” “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” or, one of Waller’s best, the joys of the playful torch song, “Honeysuckle Rose”—here a duet between Paris Bennett and Will Stone.

Jay Copeland and Will Stone in Ain’t Misbehavin’, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Ron Heerkens, Jr.)

In the second act, the skills of Will Stone and Jay Copeland come to the fore. Copeland slinks his way through a bravura “The Viper’s Drag/The Reefer Song” that goes a long way to both instantiate and interrogate the subtext that Waller’s music is always winking at: how to be a harmless Black for the White folks and how to be a canny showman to his Black audiences. Waller, with his incredibly mobile face and comic timing, tended to clown it up—a tradition to which Stone does full justice with his drunken lout in “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and, with Copeland, as a minstrel duo in “Fat and Greasy.” The fun of the number fades when the duo freeze as though caught in problematic roles. The next number, featuring the entire cast, is “Black and Blue,” a rare, direct confrontation of racial difference in Waller’s work. And with that, the show finally arrives at its fullest statement.

The cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Jeffrey L. Page (photo by Ron Heerkens, Jr.)

The final numbers take us back to Fats Waller as the kind of showman more apt to unite audiences than divide them, his talent, skill, love of performance and sheer musical genius keep these songs alive and end the evening with high spirits.

Ain’t Misbehavin’
The Fats Waller Musical Show
Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz
Directed and Choreographed by Jeffrey L. Page
A Co-production with Barrington Stage and Geva Theatre Center

Scenic Design: Raul Abrego; Costume Design: Oana Botez; Lighting Design: Philip Rosenberg; Sound Design: Leon Rosenberg; Music Director: Terry Bogart; Associate Director/Choreographer: Fritzlyn Hector; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Alexis Nalbandian; Assistant Stage Manager: Tré Wheeler

Cast: Miya Bass, Paris Bennett, Jay Copeland, Judith Franklin, Will Stone

Musicians: Terry Bogart, piano/music director; Donavan Austin, trombone; Jason Clotter, bass; Bernell Jones II, reed 2 clarinet/tenor saxophone; Kevin Oliver, reed 1 clarinet/alto saxophone; Ryan Sands, drums; John Williams II, trumpet

Westport Country Playhouse
April 11-April 29, 2023

The Bit About the Kid

Review of The Art of Burning, Hartford Stage

Now continuing its world premiere after a run in Boston, directed by Hartford Stage Artistic Director Melia Bensussen, Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning mines both the comedy and the drama of unsuccessful marriages, while giving a refreshing emphasis to a teenage daughter caught in the crossfire. Along the way the play explores what constitutes stability and sustainability—not only in relationships but in our inter-relations with others as a measure of how we choose to live in the world. At the heart of the play is the fraught question of how parents manage their priorities in life while beginning to see what’s owed the next generation. 

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Mark (Michael Kaye), Jason (Rom Barkhordar) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Poised on the New Brutalist stylings of Luciana Stecconi’s set of hard surfaces and sharp corners, with an effective lighting grid in the floor to signal scene shifts, the play opens with Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), an artist and mother, in prickly colloquy with Mark (Michael Kaye), a friend and attorney placed in the position of mediating her divorce from his friend Jason (Rom Barkhordar). Such a setup would generally bespeak a friendly dissolution of the marriage, and such may have once been expected, but things have taken a turn for the darker and more dramatic: Patricia has recently seen fit to set fire to Jason’s antique rolltop desk in the backyard, inviting their daughter Beth (Clio Contogenis) to join her in the conflagration and even to roast marshmallows in victory over Dad. Not something Jason, a very self-centered guy, is likely to take easily. The cause? Another woman, of course. 

Jason (Rom Barkhordar), Katya (Vivia Font), Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Of the six characters in The Art of Burning, three are given scenes of considerable manic intensity; the other three, while emotive—the “other woman” Katya (Vivia Font)—and blustery (the men), are mostly foils. That leaves Patricia and Beth and Mark’s wife Charlene (Laura Latreille) to up the ante, displaying Snodgrass’s gift for the escalating harangue. Contogenis’ angsty cri de coeur against the parental generation for not stewarding the world in a more forward-looking manner pushes buttons with timely panache. Charlene, when she finally gets let off the leash, is even funnier; confronted by her husband for her alleged animadversion to musicals, she asserts what we might call the carnal attraction of good plays.

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Charlene (Laura Latreille) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Then there’s Patricia. Her big turn-the-tables scene is more complex in terms of comic ingredients and doesn’t score quite as readily. In part that’s because using Medea even by way of reference (and Snodgrass likes references) creates a tension between the scene before us and something the playwright might be wanting us to understand that the characters don’t. The problem is that the possible misinterpretation (by both Mark and Jason) is improbable (guys, dried blood turns brown, red paint stays red!) and so not really funny, though Krstansky makes the most of Patricia’s exulting in their stupidity. A Pyrrhic victory, perhaps, as it’s hard to feel quite the same way about the play after that scene.

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Mark (Michael Kaye), Jason (Rom Barkhordar) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Indeed, the conflict between what works as characterization and what doesn’t nags at the play. It’s there when Beth, generally a sympathetic character, berates her well-intentioned mother for not grasping the devastating internet exposure the gaffes of her disastrous date will likely receive—but Beth’s worldly assumption of that likelihood (already knowing about such exposures) rather belies the naivete with which she approached her date. It’s as if she’s a child of the 1950s while at the movies with her date and an app-savvy child of the 2020s when reacting to her mom’s reaction. It’s not that she can’t be both, I suppose, but somehow the comedy gets skewed, in part because we can’t want to see the teen as the butt of the joke (can we?). And yet there is potential for a steely sort of comedy to work all through the play. 

Which is a way of saying that The Art of Burning isn’t working on all its burners. Comedy requires a pacing that keeps us alert to the satiric possibilities in almost any speech or action, but there’s a sense of emotional baggage weighing down Snodgrass’s sallies, as played here. I couldn’t help feeling that there might be a funnier version of this play possible, if we were permitted to see how comically clueless the entire cast is. In this version, the play aims to vindicate Patricia, as artist and mother and wronged woman who overcomes the wrong to get on with her life, and that’s fine though it also requires us to side with her less attractive manipulations. The note struck, too often, is that criticizing one’s predicament obviates having to take any blame for getting into the predicament. A sentiment all too common in retrospects on failed marriages, no doubt, but not quite as sharp as one might hope. 

Beth (Clio Contogenis), Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The ending makes us wonder more than a little why we spent so much time dwelling on the disagreements of this mostly disagreeable quintet (sparing Beth, as one hopes to spare the child and spoil the rod).  There’s a kind of catharsis in airing such griefs, I guess, but not the kind “the Greeks” (who get more than one mention) had in mind: no one in this much aggrieved collective comes close to seeing their lives as “fate.” There’s always someone else to blame, thank gods. 

The Art of Burning
By Kate Snodgrass
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Scenic Design: Luciana Stecconi; Costume Design: Kara Harmon; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Assistant Stage Manager: Emily Pathman

Cast: Adrianne Krstansky, Michael Kaye, Rom Barkhordar, Vivia Font, Clio Contogenis, Laura Latreille

Hartford Stage
March 2-26, 2023

Someone's in the Kitchen with Julie

Review of The Queen of Basel, TheaterWorks Hartford

It’s Art-Basel in Miami Beach, Florida, and a party is surging in some high-rent, relentlessly bougie hotel. The incredibly well-appointed set, though (by Rodrigo Escalante), is a disused kitchen in the hotel. It’s a sink and a metal prep table, with shelves, boxes, bottles of disinfectant and cleaners, an old oven and other disject membra from staff (including a providential bottle of cooking wine). And that’s where sweetly apologetic Christine (Silvia Dionicio) leads Julie (Christine Sprang) to recover from the fact that Christine accidentally upended a tray with gin-based drinks on Julie’s terrific dress (Harry Nadal, costume design).

Julie (Christine Sprang) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford, directed by Christina Angelis (photo by Mike Marques)

We start with dialogue that shows the two women bridging the class chasm between them, for Julie, we learn, is the daughter of the hotel’s owner, a big playa, and his daughter—Vassar grad with MBA from Harvard and top in her class—is not the clueless heiress we might expect. Or is she? As things go on, we find that Julie, for all her big talk of backing entrepreneurs of color, lives and invests on daddy’s dime. (Mom, Julie lets us know later while presenting her badge of authentic non-whiteness, was Columbian, and, to know Julie has suffered, we must understand Mom died of breast cancer, also that she gave up her dream of being an OBY-GYN to marry Daddy Bigbucks. We can say that Bettis’ way with backstory is to make sure it always scores points for grievance.)

Christine (Silvia Dionicio) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But the real nitty gritty on Julie doesn’t fully start coming out until after Christine’s boyfriend, John (Kelvin Grullon), arrives at his girlfriend’s summons. He, an enterprising Uber driver, thinks he’s picking up a fare. Instead, he’s going to get involved in a lengthy heart-to-heart or head butt to head butt or verbal hand-to-hand combat or maybe even an erotic pas de deux with Julie, behind Christine’s hard-working back. She, in her heels, stockings, shorts, and low-cut blouse, has to be out there in party-hard land. John, for the run time of the show at least, has no particular place to go. Julie won’t leave until her fiancé comes to pick her up, but just now he’s involved in some kind of deal with daddy and can’t even bother to send her a text…

Julie (Christine Sprang) and John (Kelvin Grullon) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

The one place where plot development seemed to hint at coming alive was when Christine—while John was out finding out that, sure enough, his car got towed—admits that Julie’s daddy, her boss, gave her some serious cash to get Julie out of the place. Even more reason not to budge, we suppose, but what keeps John hanging on? Must be lust.

Fine, if that’s who this guy is, but he—part Cuban, part Haitian—is supposed to have a heart Christine trusts—like, with her five-year-old daughter and getting Mama out of Venezuela and into the U.S. So we might wonder why he’s acting this way. The reason is because the whole play is a riff on August Strindberg’s masterpiece from the 1880s, Miss Julie, wherein a landowner’s lackey, though supposedly going to marry the kitchen maid, tries to assert himself with the big man’s mid-twenties daughter during her father’s absence at Midsummer festival, a woman he has ogled since she was a child and he was a teen and who is now ready to play with fire to the full extent the stage will allow. Strindberg’s John has nowhere else to go; Bettis’ John should really go see about his car.

What keeps him there, we suppose we’re to suppose, is the alternatively winning, whining, high-handed, woe-is-me, and who-the-hell-are-you badinage from our new Ms. Julie. It’s fun to listen to, for the most part, and Christine Sprang as Julie is great to watch. She makes the most of all the self-satisfied primping our girl gets up to and she’s even better at delivering putdowns and pickup lines as though she’s heard and seen it all. She’s a force to be reckoned with and John, we reckon, is enthralled or just dying to prove something. Grullon’s John isn’t an easy read, though I’d be happier with him if he weren’t Christine’s boyfriend and was just an unsuspecting Uber driver finding himself face to face with a poor little rich girl ready to get wild. Still, “young men will do it if they come to it,” as Ophelia always says.

Without giving it all away let’s just say it doesn’t end as direly as Miss Julie does, though who among us knows how deadly are the thousand and one cuts of death by paparazzi? Strindberg’s play shows that, within the mores of his day, once an upper-class woman steps out of the societal boundaries, she either becomes an outcast/outlaw or dies—Bettis’ Julie lives to belt from the bottle again, we have no doubt.

John (Kelvin Grullon), Christine (Silvia Dionicio), Julie (Christine Sprang) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Meanwhile, what about John and Christine? Well, what’s love got to do with it? Christine, to ring real changes on Strindberg’s oblique view of the shocks that shake the subaltern’s heart, gets a heartfelt, stressful, tear-fueled aria—in Spanish, which John doggedly translates for those of us stuck with some version of the King’s English—that describes horrors aplenty in her lengthy backstory for Julie’s benefit (as in: that hotel worker you didn’t bother to tip—who knows what they endured to end up at this job?). This to inspire sorrowed sympathy before she delivers her coup de grace to that man-borrowing harpie.

Christine gets the last laugh and that should count for something. Silvia Dionicio seems most at home as the confrontational Christine at the end (in her downhome street duds) but the hoops the character leaps through to be all the play wants her to be feel more and more contrived with her every “just at the wrong moment” appearance. It might be better if Bettis struck the Strindberg scaffold entirely and tried to figure out who these characters really are.

So: the play, if you don’t overthink it, is a lively three-hander with gestures toward social justice. Not only that, it spins a theater-classic into our day so that it can be about “real people” (as in: people who didn’t live 140 years ago in a Scandinavian country) and can sketch out how all are victims of patriarchal white capitalism with its sexism, racism, and jobs below the poverty line.

It's theater. Why that harsh aftertaste? It’s good for you!

The Queen of Basel
By Hilary Bettis
Directed by Cristina Angelis

Set Design: Rodrigo Escalante; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Germán Martínez; Intimacy Director: Lauren Kiele Deleon

 Cast: Silvia Dionicio, Kelvin Grullon, Christine Spang

TheaterWorks Hartford
February 3-February 26, 2023 

The Joys of Theater

Review of Indecent, Playhouse on Park

The hero of Paula Vogel’s Indecent is a play we don’t get to see. Vogel’s complex retrospective reworking of the historical fortunes of the play The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch renders Asch’s play in a variety of registers. We see it as a melodramatic set piece, played for laughs when we witness the comic overacting by famed Yiddish actor Rudolph Schildkraut (Bart Shatto), and as a lyrical evocation of love between two women—both in Asch’s play and in Vogel’s—as well as a celebration of Jewish identity as championed by Lemmel (Dan Zimberg), an unassuming tailor turned intrepid stage manager. All of which makes Asch’s play seem rather amorphous, a factor increased by the many eras and places in which Vogel’s fast-moving and varied play situates Asch’s work. In the end, Asch’s play determines the scope of Vogel’s.

Bart Shatto (foreground) and the cast of Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

Indecent’s script is episodic and mostly chronological, with each new wrinkle in the fortunes of Asch’s play depicted by dramatizations of both onstage and offstage events. It’s a fascinating journey through thirty years of Jewish theater, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and from the Yiddish theater for which Asch wrote, and which thrives in many countries, to Broadway and a bowdlerized translation into English that lands the cast in jail, to the Lodz ghetto where incarcerated Jews enact the play under constant threat, and finally to a proposed U.S. revival during the Fifties while Asch was being investigated by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Asch’s play, it seems, has something to offend anyone, potentially—and even Vogel’s play is not immune. Recently, Indecent was dropped from the theater schedule at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, a magnet high school in Florida, for content deemed too mature, which may be just another way of saying “indecent.”

Helen Laser and Kirsten Peacock, foreground, and the cast of Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

Though called “indecent” by the men who first gather to read it in a salon at the home of I.L. Peretz (Shatto), Asch’s play becomes a success on the Yiddish theater circuit. It seems only English-speaking audiences—in the U.S. and the UK—have a problem with the play’s frank depiction of prostitution, as a business and as a culture, and with same-sex amours between the women, Rifkele (Helen Laser), daughter of the brothel owners, and Manke (Kirsten Peacock), a friendly prostitute. Underlying Asch’s play and Vogel’s is a theme of the threat to patriarchy implied in women choosing to live by their own mores. In addition, the English-speaking audiences of The God of Vengeance may be troubled by Jewishness as both an ethnic and religious identity and that “trouble”—in Vogel’s script—segues into Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews simply for being Jews. There’s also some frank discussion of how the more self-righteous authorities within Jewish culture feel called upon to suppress or persecute those elements they deem “indecent”—including actors in Broadway plays who depict a lesbian kiss onstage.

The cast of Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

What makes Indecent work so well in the Playhouse on Park production directed by Kelly O’Donnell is the way the staging foregrounds the theatrical troupe enacting the play. From the show’s start when the actors are all positioned around the center stage and then are introduced by Lemmel—the cast divided into Ingenues, Middles, and Elders—we are following a deliberately theatrical production that can feel at times almost improvised. The vivid staging, with wonderfully atmospheric musical interludes led by music director Alexander Sovronsky, draws us into Asch’s play in its different productions, its ongoing, fraught reception and, particularly, Vogel’s depiction of Asch’s play’s effect on the lives entwined with it.

Jack Theiling, foreground, and the cast of Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

Some of the key elements here are the wonderful rapport between Helen Laser, as two different actresses who play Rifkele, and Kirsten Peacock, as the actress playing Manke. Their scenes are always engaging. Dan Zimberg’s Lemml is an asset as well; his naivete is both touching and comic, but his passion for Asch’s play provides a sturdy foundation against the playwright’s fluctuating appraisals.

The staging at Playhouse on Park is impressively achieved. The poetic use of showers of sand and showers of rain creates striking visual effects, and the set backdrop, by Johann Fitzpatrick, provides a glimpse of a compressed urban environment. Costumes by Izzy Fields have wonderful verisimilitude, and Joe Beumer’s lighting design deserves special mention as a wonderfully evocative feature—particularly in some of the segments of the play-within-the-play and in the cabaret sequences, so well choreographed by Katie Stevinson-Nollet. The control of movement and blocking throughout this incredibly active play is superlative.

Helen Laser, Noa Graham and Bart Shatto, foreground, in Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

The show is a treat for the eyes, but also for the ears when we consider how the cast has to emulate at times the accents of the polyglot characters they play. Subtitles tell us what language characters are supposedly speaking—though we hear them mostly in English—but at times they break into English inflected by their countries of origin, letting us have a quick grasp of how European Asch’s work is. Indeed, Dan Krackhardt’s best scene as the playwright Asch comes when he confesses that he didn’t object more strenuously to the changes in the Broadway version of his play because he doesn’t read English very well. There are many such moments in Vogel’s play, designed to bring out the many conflicts and accommodations and compromises that are so much a part of the theater culture that the characters and the troupe of actors participate it.

Dan Krackhardt, center, with Jack Theiling (clarinet), Michelle Lemon (accordion), Alexander Sovronsky (violin) in Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (photo by Meredith Longo)

Indecent can be called a theater-lover’s play, at times wry, at times wrenching, but always in service to the trials and tribulations of trying to make art equal to the true range of human emotion and experience. Expect a fully engaging evening—much better than decent.

The cast of Playhouse on Park’s production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent, directed by Kelly O’Donnell (photo by Meredith Longo)

Indecent
By Paula Vogel
Directed by Kelly O’Donnell
Music Direction by Alexander Sovronsky
Choreography by Katie Stevinson-Nollet

Scenic Designer: Johann Fitzpatrick; Costume Designer: Izzy Fields; Lighting Designer: Joe Beumer; Sound Designer: Jeffrey Salerno; Props Manager: Erin Sagnelli; Stage Manager: Emily Todt

Cast: Noa Graham, Dan Krackhardt, Helen Laser, Michelle Lemon, Ben McLaughlin, Kirsten Peacock, Bart Shatto, Alexander Sovronsky, Jack Theiling, Sydney Weiser, Dan Zimberg

Playhouse on Park
January 25-February 26, 2023

To support Playhouse on Park, here are details of the SHOW YOUR LOVE campaign:

SHOW YOUR LOVE to Playhouse on Park this February

(WEST HARTFORD, CT) - This year marks Playhouse on Park’s 8th annual SHOW YOUR LOVE campaign. As we emerge from the pandemic, it is more important now than ever before to keep the arts alive! You can make an impact by donating to Playhouse on Park throughout the month of February.

Participate by making a donation of $5 or more, and your name will be added to the “Window of Love” at the theatre. Playhouse on Park's goal is to raise $30,000 from February 1 - 28 through this campaign. “Like" Playhouse on Park's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/PlayhouseOnParkTheatre/) and stay up to date on how you can donate to the Facebook Fundraising event.

You may also donate online at www.playhouseonpark.org, in person at the box office, or mail your donation to: Playhouse on Park 244 Park Road, West Hartford, CT 06119. Checks should be made payable to Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. All donations are 100% tax-deductible. Thank you for your support!

About Playhouse on Park: Managed under the direction of Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc., Playhouse on Park is Greater Hartford’s award-winning destination for the performing arts. Playhouse on Park offers a wide range of thought-provoking, inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable professional theatre productions that leave audiences often smiling, sometimes crying, and always talking about what they have just experienced.

The Play's the Thing

Review of The Mousetrap, Hartford Stage

Famed mystery writer Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is probably best known for being the longest-running play in British history. It ran continuously from 1952 until the pandemic of 2020 briefly closed it. It reopened in May 2021. Perhaps that significant blip in shows is reason enough to mount a local production. In any case, though I’ve heard of the show my whole life, I’ve never seen a production before the current one at Hartford Stage directed by Jackson Gay.

The other famous thing about the show is that everyone who sees it is exhorted by a note written by Christie herself, read at the final curtain, not to reveal whodunit. And, indeed, going in, I had no idea who the culprit would be. It may be that curiosity—learning the facts of the case—and secrecy—not sharing them—has done much to keep audiences attending. If there’s something very quaint about the play—and there is—it has to do with the fact that Dame Christie set the bar for the “gathered all in one place for a period of time” murder mystery and to attend the play is to be at once reminded of all the fun tropes of the genre.

Such as: a handsome space in which characters can enter and exit in various directions (kind of like all those doors in the Clue boardgame); Riw Rakkulchon’s set is simply fun to look at, with a huge picture window framing diagonal trees, a big fireplace, back stairs, various couches and settees, and plenty of antlers. It looks like a ski lodge or a sitting room at the Overlook Hotel (and, indeed, there’s a hell of a snowstorm happening outside); so: yes, another trope: the trapped until further notice visitors are left to their own devices, and part of each “device” is how each looks, as furnished by Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s apt and inventive costumes; then add the furtive qualities of the guests at this guesthouse, none of whom seem quite on the up-and-up.

The cast of The Mousetrap at Hartford Stage, directed by Jackson Gay; photo by T. Charles Erickson

And that’s the mainstay of the play and the quality this production plays with the most. We hear—from a radio—that there’s been a murder in London and that there is a suspect at large. The description of the suspect could fit almost any of the guests and even the host, Giles Ralston (Tobias Segal) who, with his wife Mollie (Sam Morales), are newbies to the hotel business and this is their first go-round. Key to the shenanigans here is that we don’t quite believe anyone is bona fide, but the question, then, is motive.

And here the story probably would work better in narrative prose than in scenic dialogue, because we have to learn about events that motivated the first murder, having to do with local child abuse and a malevolent judge and, perhaps, grown survivors of the original infractions who may be enacting revenge. Turned into a play, the murder mystery’s device of letting suspects “hold the floor” until we think we know whether they could’ve “done it” or not becomes the main driving force. We, as audience, simply kill a few hours watching these Brit types perambulate and asseverate—earning our laughs by being silly and flighty and odd.

We’re helped in our sleuthing by the presence of Detective Sargeant Trotter (Brendan Dalton, energetic and emphatic if a bit in over-his-head) who arrives on snow-skis and has the wherewithal to try to figure out who everyone is and what connection they may have to the murder. A second murder, in situ, heats things up because now a murderer is clearly among them and anyone connected to the deceased persons is likely next or the culprit.

Foreground: Christopher Geary as Christopher Wren and Sam Morales as Mollie Ralston; background: Tobias Segal as Giles Ralston in The Mousetrap, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As the suspects/guests, Christopher Geary as Christopher Wren is a comical study in nervous mannerisms that might betoken guilt or just a lot of sensitivity; even more ominous is Jason O’Connell’s creepy but amusing Mr. Paravicini, the only guest who didn’t book ahead but instead arrived because his car allegedly overturned in a snowdrift; Ali Skamangas, as Miss Casewell, seems to have issues stemming from darkly hinted-at early trauma (otherwise she seems to be pretty well-wrapped compared to the two just mentioned); as the constantly fault-finding Mrs. Boyle, Yvette Garnier doesn’t quite have the grasp of the diction the others have—which may or may not be a clue; as Major Metcalf, Greg Stuhr is sturdy and serviceable, and tends to be more observer than observed. The host couple are affable but don’t really come forward as take-charge types, and so seem to be in constant reaction mode.

Jason O’Connell as Mr. Paravicini in The Mousetrap at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The tone veers around a bit between farce and suspense but the main note director Gay achieves is a tongue-in-cheek rendering of all the aforementioned tropes. It’s all in fun, ultimately.

And so, all in all, it’s a diverting evening, as they say. The fun is in the feeling of revisiting a sense of theater that comes with its own requirement to settle in and watch it unfold at a pace that works against our current theater’s effort to score with every breath. There is no real subtext here other than the fact that persons aren’t always who they pretend to be and that playing at anything, occupationally, is a role. Even being a killer is a part that one only takes on by enacting it—one could otherwise be as bland as milk. That, I suppose, is the attraction of a mystery and, in this sprawling production at Hartford Stage, part of the mystery is how Christie’s play plays so well after all this time. 

Ali Skamangas as Miss Casewell (supine) and Sam Morales as Mollie Ralston in the Hartford Stage production of The Mousetrap; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The Mousetrap
By Agatha Christie
Directed by Jackson Gay

Scenic Design: Riw Rakkulchon; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Krista Smith; Original Music & Sound Design: Broken Chord; Wig & Hair Design: Carissa Thorlakson; Vocal & Dialect Coach: Thom Jones; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Assistant Stage Manager: Noam Lautman; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast:
Brendan Dalton, Yvette Ganier, Christopher Geary, Sam Morales, Jason O’Donnell, Tobias Segal, Ali Skamangas, Greg Stuhr

Hartford Stage
October 13-November 6, 2022 

The Story of Driving Herself Forward

Review of From the Mississippi Delta, Westport Country Playhouse

Adapting a memoir of a lifetime for the stage is a daunting task, even for a skilled playwright. Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, formerly a professor of theater and American studies, had quite a life (she died in 2006) and her memoir, From the Mississippi Delta, celebrated her accomplishments and an at-times harrowing story of pluck, hope, and luck for “one who drives herself forward”—as she advertised with her chosen name Endesha. Eventually she drove herself into a PhD program at the University of Minnesota, after an awakening to her own possibilities fostered by the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Riders who descended upon rural Mississippi in the early 1960s. Her first play, The Second Doctor Lady, about her mother, an unschooled midwife known as Ain’t Baby, won the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Play in 1981

As a play, Dr. Holland’s own story relies on much narrative, rather than scenes of dialogue. Fortunately, Dr. Holland is a skilled storyteller, able to fully and forcefully exploit the verbal mannerisms and locutions of the Deep South to create a theater-piece with plenty of local color and a bracing degree of verisimilitude in how her alter-ego Phelia tells her story.

Claudia Logan as Woman One, Erin Margaret Pettigrew as Woman Three, Tameishia Peterson as Woman Two in From the Mississippi Delta at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

On the wide and high Westport Country Playhouse stage, Jason Ardizzone-West’s set presents an imposing sense of the rural world where Phelia dwells. A staircase leads to an upper story; a cast-iron bed sits in the opposite corner; in front of the stairs is an area generally used as a porch. The fluidity of the space serves the daunting fluidity of the play as three women—Woman One (Claudia Logan), Woman Two (Tameishia Peterson), Woman Three (Erin Margaret Pettigrew), named by their order of appearance—play all the roles, at times delivering Phelia’s narration as if a Greek chorus, trading off lines and bringing to life the author’s differing voices and emotions.

In general, it works. And it works best when there is something happening on the stage for us to fix our attention on: as when Woman Three, as Ain’t Baby, mimes treatment of a difficult breech birth while the other two women alternate their amazed and breathless description of what Phelia sees, watching through the window. Other fully staged moments—with a similar indelible power—are underage Phelia’s rape at the white folks’ home where she babysits (Tameishia Peterson enacts convincingly the innocence, the outrage and the sadder but wiser outcome), and the scene, full of comic ribaldry, when Phelia, in Woman One’s account, decides to compete with a traveling salacious dancer at the fair who has all the menfolk’s attention.

Claudia Logan (Woman One), Tameishia Peterson (Woman Two) in From the Mississippi Delta, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

A sense of oppression is always present in Phelia’s life, but the general tone is of a kind of knowing indulgence furnished by the fact that ultimately Phelia triumphs over adversity. In fact, in the play’s more meandering second act—where Civil Rights workers, and the brutal death of Ain’t Baby, and the journey to Minneapolis and hanging out in the demimonde and earning degrees and dealing with real winter cold all skim by without much in the way of scenic clarity—the tone becomes so congratulatory that we’re just supposed to sit back and admire. The graduation scene is a feast of name-dropping and paying respects, but names aren’t characters. What’s more, Claudia Logan, in particular, maintains the down-home locutions and giddy intonation of the uneducated Phelia. We get very little of the transition to the doctoral Endesha until the powerful passages quoted from a letter to Alice Walker.

There are several vignettes that serve not much purpose other than entertainment and to show off Dr. Holland’s storytelling skills—as in the story of one old lady’s obsession with her water meter and the comeuppance of one who would mistreat her. Such scenes, and particularly the highlight of the hilarious slapstick solemnity of the chief mourner at Ain’t Baby’s funeral, owe their virtues to Claudia Logan’s considerable gift for physical humor. Meanwhile, the old water meter lady and a stereotypical Southern Baptist preacher show off Erin Margaret Pettigrew’s skills at caricature.

Claudia Logan, Woman One, and Erin Margaret Pettigrew, Woman Three in From the Mississippi Delta, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

In general, Logan enacts the comic and sassy segments, Peterson the more soulful or thoughtful segments, with Pettigrew the folksier and wiser elements, particularly stemming from Ain’t Baby’s adages and her distrust of certain changes that the Civil Rights workers bring about. Together the three women create a compelling contrapuntal effect that keeps the story moving and at its best gives the telling the feel of a collective event.

Sprawling, with a great sense of individual voice and of a lived-in time and place, what From the Mississippi Delta captures best is one woman’s own awe at the life she lived, with all its surprises and shocks and success. It is vividly and vibrantly recreated on the Westport Country Playhouse stage as directed by Goldie E. Patrick and her strong cast of performers, Claudia Logan, Tameishia Peterson, Erin Margaret Pettigrew.

Claudia Logan (Woman One), Erin Margaret Pettigrew (Woman Three) in From the Mississippi Delta at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

From the Mississippi Delta
By Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland
Directed by Goldie E. Patrick

Scenic Design: Jason Ardizzone-West; Costume Design: Heidi Hanson; Lighting Design: John D. Alexander; Composer/Music Director: Michael Keck; Dialect Coach: Dawn-Elin Fraser; Intimacy Coach: Ann C. James; Wig Design: Nikiya Mathis; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Melissa Sparks; Assistant Stage Manager: Tré Wheeler

Cast:
Claudia Logan, Tameishia Peterson, Erin Margaret Pettigrew

Westport Country Playhouse
October 18-30, 2022

Catching Up

Review of 4000 Miles, Westport Country Playhouse

4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s popular intergenerational play from the early 2010s, is up at Westport Country Playhouse in a handsome production with lead performances worth seeing, particularly the versatile Mia Dillon. It may be the least confrontational play I’ve seen David Kennedy direct, but that’s not to say the script is wholly benign, it’s just that strong issues and gut-wrenching dramatic turns are in short supply. It’s a family comedy-drama in which a young man, Leo (Clay Singer), 21, has biked cross-country from Seattle to Manhattan. He drops in unexpectedly on Vera, his 91-year-old maternal grandmother, after a rebuff from his girlfriend. The play meanders through the time Leo and Vera spend together as Leo tries to put his life back together after a series of events running from awkward to devastatingly traumatic has more or less derailed him. But not from keeping fit, keeping active, and trying to live his best life.

Clay Singer as Leo, Mia Dillon as Vera in Westport Country Playhouse’s production of 4000 Miles, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The charm of the play is in how it lets us see Leo through Vera’s eyes and Vera through Leo’s but also lets us make up our own minds about how we might relate to either. Which is a way of saying that whether you’re closer to your twenties or closer to your nineties or somewhere in the huge middle ground, you might find yourself veering from one side to the other. Not that the “sides” are that clearly demarcated. It’s more a question of how families imagine themselves and the places of the people within them. Leo is stepping away from whatever has been expected of him up till now, while Bec (Lea DiMarchi), his sometime girlfriend, is stepping away from him. And Vera, not all that cuddly, gets to relearn patience and compassion in dealing with the markedly younger generation.

The support Leo gets from Vera is prickly, most of the time, but that’s to be expected. She’s getting up there and sometimes “loses” her words and sometimes just gets irritated with all the things there are to be irritated about—like computers and her bossy daughter and the loss of the last of “the octogenarians” (a sort of old-age support group we could use a flashback scene with) and her phone-buddy/neighbor who is “a pain the ass” but one of the few dependable people in her life. It’s a life that hit its prime when it was cool and progressive to be a Communist, or “Lefty” (like, the 1940s), and now just looks on from a spacious rent-controlled apartment—with great bookshelves, a skylight, and lived-in clutter (Arnulfo Maldonado, scenic design) with a great view we don’t get to see. It’s a wonder she doesn’t have people staying over with her all the time. How could she refuse to share?

Clay Singer as Leo, Mia Dillon as Vera in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Early in the play, after an opening scene that feels really awkward and off-balance (as it’s meant to), Clay Singer floats a truly charming smile as he says “grandma” and for a second we see Leo as he might have been as a kid saying the word for the first time or at least remembering what it was like to be a kid who could charm the old girl. From that feeling comes most of the best stuff in the play, as when Vera simply beams at Leo for remembering what his deceased grand-dad’s voice sounded like. There are of course tensions and misunderstandings and jumping to conclusions but people who have been spouses, partners or roommates for years often have worse. Dillon and Singer create an odd couple—he’s very tall, she’s not; he speaks with a kind of surfer-stoner rhythm that is never in a hurry to get anywhere and he often smiles at his own words as though simply fond of his own voice; she’s a New Yorker and stringent, acerbic and energetic. The chemistry works and this production takes its time, letting the characters grope toward each other.

Lea DMarchi as Bec, Mia Dillon as Vera in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

There are two roles for young actresses, and neither role is as good as it might be. The scene in which Bec seems to drop from the sky onto the couch with Vera doesn’t do much to make the character useful. Her scene much later, mostly with Leo, is better because it comes as an important culmination for this couple who have been through some hard things. It’s to Lea DiMarchi’s great credit that she is able to develop her character believably in the space of two scenes very different in mood and placement within the play. The other supporting role features Phoebe Holden as a quick pickup named Amanda, a Parsons student aiming to be an arts celebrity. The scene tries to interject some comical sexy moments and maybe even a look askance at the dating styles of the newish century, but finally collapses into odd quirks—and makes us wonder why Leo would think it’s OK to start up the sexual machinery on his grandma’s couch when she’s just down the hall. Not that we’re really surprised by anything Leo does or doesn’t do.

Clay Singer as Leo, Phoebe Holden as Amanda in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

In any case, Amanda has cool clothes (Maiko Matsushima, Costumes) and ties into a very undeveloped subplot concerning Leo’s feelings for his adopted—of Chinese descent—sister. And that bit of characterization—if that’s what it is—is a good example of how some choices in the play feel a bit questionable. As if the mark of a “good play” is the unexpected detail, the odd, juicy tidbit dropped into conversations for the sake of “interest.” Such details feel a bit scattershot when what we might really benefit from is Leo and Vera hashing out what’s like to be starting out in and coming to the end in a particular family with all its particular baggage. When they do hit moments that matter, Dillon and Singer deliver, as when Leo tells what happened to his friend and his gutsy reaction, or when Vera finally says something nice about her neighbor.

It's good that the play ends as it does, otherwise we might want to show up next week to see what else Leo learns about Vera’s past and what else Vera finds out about Leo’s relationships. As it is, 4000 Miles is only playing through next weekend so get the goods while you can.

Mia Dillon as Vera Connell in 4000 Miles, Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
Featuring Mia Dillon

Scenic Design: Arnulfo Maldonado; Lighting Design: Carolina Ortiz Herrara; Costume Design: Maiko Matsushima; Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzler

Cast: Mia Dillon, Lea DiMarchi, Phoebe Holden, Clay Singer

Westport Country Playhouse
August 23-September 4, 2022

The Family Business

Review of Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse

The set is an incredibly lifelike convenience store by scenic designer You-Shin Chen. Before the action began I sat admiring the three vents that run across the heating/a-c duct above the store. Those vents didn’t look fake or new; they looked the way the vents would look: worn, serviceable. Into the store walks Appa (David Shih) and his manner isn’t of someone trapped in a place he’d like to get out of. It’s his domain. He pours himself a coffee and settles into whatever the day brings on. This is a story about how things look to this man, a character study of a working man the playwright knows well.

Heart-warming and amusing, Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience, playing at Westport Country Playhouse through July 17, is like a friendly local spot you’re happy to visit. The play, which spawned a CBC sitcom in 2016 that ran for five seasons and is available on Netflix, has features you’ll immediately recognize from other popular shows: the work-place—here, the store—that unites most of the action, the family dynamic of intergenerational dysfunction, and the immigrant experience—in this case of Koreans to Canada (the convenience store is located in Toronto)—as mixing both ethnic specificity and the collective features of how strangers become neighbors. It’s familiar, but with a difference.

Chuja Seo as Umma, David Shih as Appa in Kim’s Convenience, directed by Nelson T. Eusebio III, at Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Indeed, you could easily reduce the story to its types: the bossy patriarch and his flustered wife (known only as Appa and Umma (Chuja Seo), to underscore that this is a Mom and Pop store), the potentially slacker daughter now turning thirty, still at home, unattached and vaguely a photographer (Janet, played by Cindy Im), the miscreant son (Jung, played by Hyunmin Rhee) who ran off after a physical altercation with Appa and whose whereabouts only Umma knows. Add a number of small “community figure” roles and Alex, a possible love interest from the neighborhood—all played by Eric R. Williams—and you’ve got the potential for any number of vignettes about how these folks get by and what sort of problems they meet with.

At the center of it all is the man who keeps the store, a figure who exemplifies the very notion of upwardly mobile merchant. Early in the play, a local wheeler-dealer (Mr. Lee—known approvingly as “the black man with the Korean name”) makes a big offer to buy the store, but it’s not about moving on up for Appa. It’s about his need to have “a story,” or, as we might say, “an identity.” Without the store, which he needs to hand on intact, there’s no public role for his life.

The key, for entertainment value, is how this character comes across. If too sentimental, we’ll get bored; if too silly, we’ll not take him seriously. The laughter is not only at Appa—the way we laugh at misguided dads from Archie Bunker to Homer Simpson—but with him as we notice how much he notices. And the sentiment is earned by the way we gradually become aware of how heartfelt his world is.

David Shih as Appa, Cindy Im as Janet in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

And of course there are life lessons along the way: the main one being that everyone in this play (and in the world the play wants to mirror) have stories just as heartfelt. All the characters want to get along with the others, but they also want something—mostly we could call it “respect,” or “appreciation,” or just the sense of fellow feeling that means someone else understands. And that’s what you’re mainly investing in watching such a play: your understanding. The showdown between Appa and Janet over who owes whom what is one of those universal parent-child situations even if it doesn’t always come to such deliberate expression. As a scene, it’s a well-done dramatic crux. Matched at the close by Appa’s test of his repentant son.

Hyunmin Rhee as Jung, Chuja Seo as Umma in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Director Nelson T. Eusebio III has his cast use this space extremely well. It never feels stagey or trapped in a fake space. The two scenes outside the store have a different feel as they should. In one Umma visits with Jung in a church and it’s striking how worldly this woman, who speaks mostly Korean to her husband in his domain, suddenly seems. She’s part of a church and so of a different community, one not defined by family or trade. The other is a flashback to when Appa and pregnant Umma, newcomers to Canada, are trying to name the store. There are joke names—7-12—that show not only how Appa views success but how much he wants his brand to be recognizable. “Kim’s Convenience” says it all.

Most of the best scenes involve Appa and Janet. First of all, kudos to costume designer Lux Haac: her wardrobe makes Janet look cool and that helps us enter Appa’s world too. His daughter is nothing like her mother, nor like him, and yet he wants to help her make a life for herself, without really understanding what that might entail. The scenes when he “helps” negotiate the halting date relations between Janet and Alex are funny as physical comedy and blossoming romance together (Michael Rossmy, fight director and intimacy coach earns his keep) and play on the old tropes of the “shotgun wedding” in a way that lets us feel the force of family as an aspect of marriage.

Eric R. Williams as Alex, Cindy Im as Janet in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Everyone puts in a good performance here: Chuja Seo’s cautiously supportive Umma, Hyunmin Rhee’s sympathetically put-upon Jung, Cindy Im’s mostly patient Janet, and Eric R. Williams’ slick businessman, flustered Islander, and shy but persistent Alex. Meanwhile, David Shih is a marvel. Choi’s dialogue calls for the heavily accented pronunciation and truncated syntax of the non-native speaker of English, particularly one converting from Korean, and Shih gets it all across with a nuanced command of how someone who speaks with conviction finds the means to make his meaning felt. It’s wonderful and often inadvertently (from Appa’s perspective) funny.

And the show’s comedy works because it’s broad enough, but with the recognition that all of us at times look or sound ridiculous and, when we do, we become cartoon characters in much the same way. And we also know—”this my serious face,” as Appa says—when our deepest values are at stake. Kim’s Convenience gets all that out into the open—for our convenience.

Hyunmin Rhee as Jung, David Shih as Appa in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Kim’s Convenience
By Ins Choi
Directed by Nelson T. Eusebio III

Scenic Design: You-Shin Chen; Costume Design: Lux Haac; Lighting Design: Marie Yokoyama; Sound Design: Twi McCallum; Dialect Coaches: Zoë Kim, Bibi Mama; Fight Director/ Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager/Fight Captain: Kevin Jinghong Zhu

Cast: Cindy Im, Hyunmin Rhee, Chuja Seo, David Shih, Eric R. Williams

Westport Country Playhouse
June 5-17, 2022

May the Farce Be With You

Review of Kiss My Aztec, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage ends its 2021-22 season with Kiss My Aztec, a raucous celebration of comedic theatricality. John Leguizamo has adapted his screenplay co-written with Stephen Chbosky into a spoof-fueled musical. The book is by Leguizamo and Tony Taccone, who directs the show; the music is by Benjamin Velez with lyrics by David Kamp, Velez and Leguizamo. Leguizamo, a Columbian-American comedian, film actor, and Tony-winning Broadway performer/playwright, is known for exploring his ethnicity in his plays, while also being familiar for his flamboyant characterizations in films (two of my favorite Leguizamo roles were directed by Baz Luhrmann, and Luhrmann’s work seems to have inspired some of the frenetic staging of Aztec). Thanks to the skills and stage brio of its fifteen-person cast, the show’s energy never flags and its aural and visual inventiveness makes Kiss My Aztec, even at two-and-a-half hours, feel freewheeling and fun.

The Spanish ensemble cast of Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage, directed by Tony Taccone (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Aztec is Leguizamo’s effort to apply the irreverent vibe that made Broadway hits of The Book of Mormon (2011) and Spamalot (2004) to the colonization of the Americas by the Spanish and the resistance by the Aztecs. While it shares in the zaniness of those earlier shows, aided by the rap energies unleashed on Broadway by Hamilton (2015), Aztec suffers a bit, in comparison, from the lack of cohesion of its target. Whatever their degree of historical validity, topics like the Arthurian legends, the founding of the Mormon religion, and the struggles of the founding fathers in the U.S. lend a definite gravitas for a satirist to dismantle.

Lacking such a sturdy scaffold for his spoofs, Leguizamo draws on older vibes—I was reminded at times of musical-comedy epics of inspired silliness such as The Court Jester (1955), starring Danny Kaye. Which is to say that an easy target is costume drama in general, marked by the “thees” and “thous” and “eths” of mock-Shakespearean lingo. Aztec also features fast-paced verbal sparring and songs that move the plot along while also mocking the familiar tropes of expository songs. The music is bright with the brio that comes from throwing every relevant style into the mix, so that every number almost speaks a different idiom. The Latinx aesthetic of the show is palpable in its percussive music—Roberto Sinha, music director, and Wilson R. Torres, additional percussion arrangements—and amazingly vibrant costumes and set (Clint Ramos, both). As has been a hallmark of several successful Hartford Stage productions, it’s simply fun to watch the show happen.

Maria-Christina Olivera as Tolima in Kiss My Aztec, Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The story? We open with a look at how “White People on Boats” are always bad news for indigenous populations, then focus upon a group of Aztec caricatures who are intending to stave off an invasion by Spanish caricatures—including the Inquisition, and the imposition of all things Spanish, like tapas, by Rodrigo (played for all its worth by Matt Saldivar), viceroy in the New Land, who resides in the citadel with his oft-belittled son Fernando (Z Infante, a master of the slow burn). The witch-savant of the Aztecs, Tolima (Maria-Christina Oliveras, perfect for the part) gives a prophecy to El Jaguar Negro (Eddie Cooper, a sturdy leader) and his followers about a “great brown hope” that may rise up and expel the invaders under a blood red moon. To that end, Colombina (Krystina Alabado, very lively), a warrior who rebels against traditional female roles, and Pepe (Joel Perez, like a cross between Elliot Gould and Will Farrell), a sock-puppet-wielding clown (or “Punk-ass Geek-A”) who dotes on her, seek entrance to the citadel to assassinate Rodrigo.

Columbina (Krystina Alabado) confronts Rodrigo (Matt Saldivar) as Pepe (Joel Perez) looks on, and guards interfere in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Their task will involve disguises, of course, and the introduction of a host of gags, from a phallic codpiece brandished by “the fixer” Pierre (Richard Ruiz Henry, priceless), to hypnotized-slap routines, to rap-throwdowns. And dances and sacrifices and skirmishes. Along the way there is also time for all kinds of romantic entanglements—whether its Cooper wildly inappropriate as a lovestruck Inquisitor dallying with Fernando in “Tango in the Closet,” or Spanish princess Pilar (Desireé Rodriguez, hilarious) refusing Sebastian (Z Infante), while pining for revelatory “dark meat”; likewise, Sebastian, tired of incestuous couplings for the sake of bloodlines, pines, complete with back-up singers, for a new girl from the new world;  meanwhile Rodrigo confesses to Columbina his desire to be spooned. And don’t forget the big showstopping romantic longings of “Chained Melody” where the yearnings of Columbina and Pepe find a literal and lyrical expression.

Krystina Alabado as Columbina and Joel Perez as Pepe during their big romantic number in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Kiss My Aztec not only has the makings of a Broadway show, it feels like it already is one. It may be true that it’s nothing new—except for its choice of which formerly marginalized population to appropriate and give a heroic-ironic treatment to—but the show is fully at home in our moment when the complex histories of immigrant and indigenous populations continue to strive for a hearing on various fronts. As a comedy, Aztec keeps its eye on ways to mock stereotypes and wring laughs out of unexpected mashups, while perhaps chuckling up its sleeve at the audience’s willingness to be so easily entertained, still.

Z Infante as Sebastian with KC Dela Cruz, Angelica Beliard, and Geena Quintos in Kiss my Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

One could say that the irreverence of plays like Aztec has attained a certain reverence on Broadway, their frames of reference capable of  mocking any piety. Though there may come a point at which a new tonality will arrive, for now It’s still a treat to see cultural associations, historical footnotes, ideological appropriations and a host of progressive and regressive social attitudes given the bawdy, slangy 21st century-treatment, with song. The main target here is people with no sense of  humor.

Columbina (Krystina Alabado) and Rodrigo (Matt Saldivar) in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Kiss My Aztec
Book by John Leguizamo and Tony Taccone
Music by Benjamin Velez
Lyrics by David Kamp, Benjamin Velez and John Leguizamo
Based on a screenplay by John Leguizamo and Stephen Chbosky
Directed by Tony Taccone
Choreography by Mayte Natalio

Scenic and Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: Alexander V. Nichols; Sound Design: Jessica Paz & Beth Lake; Wig & Hair Design: Charles G. LaPointe; Puppet Design: James Ortiz; Music Supervision & Co-Incidental Music Arrangements: David Gardos; Dance, Vocal & Co-Incidental Music Arrangements: Benjamin Velez; Orchestrator: Simon Hale; Music Director: Roberto Sinha; Additional Percussion Arrangements: Wilson R Torres; Production Stage Manager: Jeffrey Rodriguez; Stage Manager: Amanda Michaels; Assistant Stage Manager: Hannah Woodward

Orchestra: Roberto Sinha, conductor/keyboard; David Kidwell, keyboard; Oscar Bautista, guitars; Amanda Ruzza, bass/synthesizer; Rosa Avila, drums; Wilson Torres, percussion; John Mastroianni, woodwinds; Don Clough, trumpet/flugelhorn; Scott Cranston, trombone

Cast: Krystina Alabado, Angelica Beliard, Chad Carstarphen, Nicholas Caycedo, Eddie Cooper, KC Dela Cruz, Richard Ruiz Henry, Z Infante, Jesús E. Martinez, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Joel Perez, Geena Quintos, Desireé Rodriguez, Matt Saldivar, Brittany Nichole Williams

Hartford Stage
June 1-26, 2022

Celebrate Good Times!

Review of Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks

Fairly early in Matthew López’s Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, now playing at TheaterWorks in Hartford directed by Rob Ruggiero, Rachel, a drunken wedding planner who was not hired to plan—nor asked to be a bridesmaid at—the wedding of Zoey, a “best friend” from college, sounds off on a live mic. She wants us to know that elaborate weddings, no matter how well planned and “perfect,” do not equate with a happy marriage. She insists that more effort should be put into marriages, not weddings. It’s a tirade that is aimed, we don’t doubt, at the state of her own marriage, but it also might make us wonder: if weddings do indeed get too much attention, why play out the all-too-familiar tropes of big wedding receptions in a new play?

The answer, I suppose, is that we’re all ready to be amused by what can go wrong. Will we be embarrassed, titillated, angered, made to cringe or squirm, forced to laugh or cry or to drink heavily? Certainly that and more happens to all the characters we meet. More—who we don’t see—are potentially even more put out.

Blair Lewin as Rachel in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding by Matthew López, at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Rob Ruggiero (photo by Mike Marques)

We meet six people at this 200-person reception: Zoey’s friend Rachel (Blair Lewin); Rachel’s husband Charlie (Daniel José Molina, but on the night I saw it played by understudy Stephen Stocking); Sammy (Hunter Ryan Hedlicka), their gay friend from college, all seated at and grousing about their table far from the main table, though—as they come to appreciate—near a neglected bar presided over by a bartender Sam thinks is hot. Then there’s the DJ (Esteban Carmona), surly about the fact that his musical tastes and the bride’s don’t match; the first-time wedding planner, Missy (Hallie Eliza Friedman), a cousin of the bride who is very much out of her depth, and eventually the bride herself, Zoey (Rachel B. Joyce).

López keeps the funny lines flowing in the early going, with wisecracks that land well from an able cast. I was so taken with the repartee I was beginning to suspect we’d meet a table full of mixed couples who would be outing and dissing each other and catching up on sequels to their lives in the 1980s. It’s like we’re eavesdroppers at the table and that’s appealing, hearing the dirt and the gripes and the envy and the drinking challenges and so on.

Esteban Carmona as DJ, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka as Sammy, Blair Lewin as Rachel, Daniel José Molina as Charlie in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

It’s 2008 now and this age group is having to adjust to being grownups. Sammy’s partner has been invited to DC to serve in the Obama administration, so we get table chat that includes references to Sarah Palin and W. and the economic crash. Not enough to make a strong point about the generation we’re viewing, though the music on the soundtrack will treat many audience members to nostalgic twinges, I’m sure.

Lopez writes gay characters well and Sammy is the one with the more interesting things to say, as when he upbraids Charlie for not having sex with Rachel for six months. Sammy’s disquisition on same-sex coupling’s greater difficulties compared to hetero-sex makes a point and Herdlicka’s manner makes it comical. And that’s where López’s script is at its best, trying to account for how lust, love, desire and romance and their lack surface in different ways in different people.

Hallie Eliza Friedman as Missy, Esteban Carmona as DJ in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

The parts of the play that worked less well for me were all about the wedding itself, most having to do with predicaments referred to more than witnessed. The hapless party planner isn’t that great a gag; the DJ, who is at first fractious, actually becomes, thanks to Carmona’s casual cool, a welcome perspective; Sam fades, but for his heroic credit card, and Charlie goes from possibly a foil to one of those guys who thinks he and his alienated wife can “fuck it out.” At times, we might feel the use of sturdy cliché is beneath López and beneath at least some of the audience: straight couples not having sex after a few years of marriage; gay couples having sex as much as is humanly possible; straight-laced women eager to get high with a bad boy, etc.

Rachel B. Joyce as Zoey (foreground), Blair Lewin as Rachel, Hallie Eliza Friedman as Missy (background) in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

And then there’s Zoey: I believe that Rachel B. Joyce incarnates the character perfectly, a woman who really did fantasize a perfect wedding from an early age, never mind a perfect marriage. She’s silly, preening, and the sort of person you’d rather not be trapped near at an event. Her best bit—and probably the play’s most memorable theatrical moment—finds her and Rachel sitting on the floor of the ladies room licking chocolate cake off her gorgeous wedding gown.

The best role is Rachel’s, more or less, and in the end she’s the one who seems to have the furthest to go to find some notion of happiness. Seeing Rachel become a saving grace—after the belligerent salvos in her toast—is one of those turn-arounds that doesn’t make much difference. The night I saw the show, at least a few in the audience seemed to feel an implied potential seduction of Charlie by Sammy, in the hotel room Charlie rented intending a sexy frolic with Rachel. Now that might have made Zoey’s wedding an affair to remember!

Daniel José Molina as Charlie, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka as Sammy in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

We all know wedding receptions can be awkward, corny, nostalgic, romantic, silly, maybe even sublime—if you’re easily impressed. But mainly they tend to show that, when it comes to showbiz, we’re all amateurs. Generally, everyone tries to put a good face on whatever is happening so as not to ruin someone else’s big day. That’s not the case here, as a “good face” rarely shows itself. And so audiences will have to decide how much fun it is to be witness to the fiasco, from bad playlists to delayed (and too few) dinner servings, to mishaps with “cake shoving,” smartphone mix-ups, thrown food, tequila belted from the bottle, and true-confession moments about both same-sex and mixed-sex couplings, and, hanging over it all, what it means to pair up and to make a public celebration of it.

I suppose you could say that Zoey’s Perfect Wedding is a bit like any party—if you don’t have high expectations, you won’t be as disappointed, and if you can look on the bright side—the laughs, the chat, maybe the music—you might even enjoy it more than you don’t.

Esteban Carmona as DJ in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Zoey’s Perfect Wedding
By Matthew López
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set and Lighting Design: Brian Sidney Bembridge; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Sound Design: Melanie Chen Cole; Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert

Cast: Esteban Carmona, Hallie Eliza Friedman, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, Rachel B. Joyce, Blair Lewin, Daniel José Molina

TheaterWorks
April 30-June 5, 2022

Making It In America

Review of Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage

What do stand-up comics do when they’re off the circuit? Some become Hollywood movie stars or join seasons of sitcoms on one platform or another. But what about the minority comic whose ethnicity, in white-dominated popular culture, seems to suit him only for bad guys or guys whose comic range is to be a walking cliché? Maybe they create a theatrical monologue that lets them tell their story while entertaining audiences with a view of Show Biz a bit more multicultural than the norm.

In Dishwasher Dreams, now playing at Hartford Stage through March 20, Alaudin Ullah (aka, Aladdin) tells us about his family, his childhood, his career. It’s not so much a story of slings and arrows—though there are slurs and sorrows—as it is a fond journey with moments of grief and glee along the way, much as anyone’s life is. The difference is in the details, but that too is part of what makes America American: immigrant stories—no matter the immigrants’ origins—play out in the pop culture grab-bag that we all live in and with. As a second-generation son of South Asian immigrants living in Spanish Harlem, Ullah has a beguiling grasp of street energies and the kind of “melting pot” mix that spices many an urban environment. But he’s also an entertainer who rose up through the ranks in comedy clubs—beginning with Don’t Tell Mamas, with a largely gay and drag clientele—and onto cable programs on Comedy Central (Ullah’s reminiscence about cable TV coming to the projects will strike a chord with anyone who remembers TV before and after cable). So he’s also uniquely poised to tell us something about America and what it means to find a niche in which to be successfully entertaining.

Alaudin Ullah, foreground, and Avirodh Sharma in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

Ullah’s manner finds humor in most situations, such as the identity issues that come with being Muslim in the U.S. As a faith that is sometimes mistaken for an ethnicity, Ullah can insist he’s “about as Muslim as Pee Wee Herman,” but that doesn’t mean he won’t be asked to “do a Muslim accent.” His family are Bengalis, from the part of India that won independence and became Bangladesh when Ullah was not yet a teen. Important to the story is how Ullah characterizes his background, such as how his father chose to leave his village because of a belief in America as a land of opportunity where a job as a dishwasher and a mice and roach-ridden apartment in Spanish Harlem equal a dream come true. So when Ullah finds himself living rough while trying to break into Show Biz, he’s got a model to follow.

Ullah’s acculturation lets him mock such staples as the familiar glitzy dance moments—in place of depicting sex—in the Bollywood films his family goes on outings to see, and to find great admiration in the stark beauty of Satyajit Ray’s Apu films, which happen to be set near the village Alaudin’s father emigrated from. Moments of name-checking Indian culture are more than matched by young Alaudin’s greatest U.S. enthusiasm: The New York Yankees. The scenes depicting—early and late—Ullah’s part in the collective euphoria surrounding Reggie Jackson are highpoints as the comedian is able to channel his inner twelve-year-old and lights up the stage with his love.

Tenser matters are provided by the comedian’s mother’s illness and darker themes emerge from a family visit to Bangladesh where Ullah encounters a cousin whose fate weighs heavily. At such moments the aural presence of Avirodh Sharma, playing hand-drums on stage throughout the show, is greatly effective, punctuating Ullah’s monologue and creating atmosphere, a language of percussion that supports and comments.

Avirodh Sharma in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

And that’s to the good because Alaudin Ullah’s monologue can at times feel rather static. Director Chay Yew has Ullah move about the stage to signal changes in locale and mood, and Ullah sometimes stands on a chair or crouches to give variety to his presence, all of which, including the tasteful lighting by Anshuman Bhatia and the handsome wooden stage by Yu Shibagaki, helps to keep us focused and responsive. But if you’re used to comedians who flaunt fluid movements in the midst of fast-paced commentary and asides, you might find Ullah’s routine to be a bit over-rehearsed and even a bit too earnest.

Alaudin Ullah in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

Ullah wisely keeps to the end his most comic bit, where he gooses the stereotypical image of the Southern Asian immigrant while at the same time wryly asserting the special privileges that come with assimilation via Show Biz. It works, because Ullah is willing to see that the laugh is on him as well.

Dishwasher Dreams
Written & performed by Alaudin Ullah
Directed by Chay Yew
Music by Avirodh Sharma

Scenic Design: Yu Shibagaki; Costume Design: Izumi Imaba; Lighting Design: Anshuman Bhatia; Composer/Arranger: Avirodh Sharma; Assistant Director: Christopher Rowe; Assistant Lighting Design: Daniel Friedman; Production Stage Manager: David Castellanos; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Artistic Producer: Rachel Alderman; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scot

Hartford Stage
February 24-March 20, 2022

Passing a Reignited Torch

Review of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage has a stable tradition of offering literate plays handsomely mounted, and the current production, Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous by Atlanta-based playwright Pearl Cleage, directed by Susan V. Booth, lives up to that expectation. What’s more, as a plus for theater fans, the play’s story centers on feminine—and feminist—expression and generational rivalry in the theater. It opens with a deliberate quotation of a Bette Davis movie line (previously lifted by Edward Albee) and then kind of reverses the situation of All About Eve (one of Davis’ landmark roles) so that, here, the up-and-comer proves more sympathetic than the great actress. And the cast of four engaging African American women bring it—with laughs to spare.

Seated: Anna (Terry Burrell), “Pete” (Shakirah Demesier); standing: Betty (Marva Hicks), Kate (Cynthia D. Barker) in Hartford Stage’s production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The basic situation: Anna Campbell (Terry Burrell) has become a grand dame of classic theater, noted for roles like Medea and Hedda Gabler, but she’s been living in Europe due to the outraged reception of her notorious one-woman show back in the ‘90s. Dubbed “Naked Wilson,” the show featured Campbell, in the nude, reciting famous speeches from August Wilson plays, speeches all written for African American male characters. The implied criticism: Wilson, for all his greatness, downplayed the importance of women in his dramas and in Af Am cultural life in general. Now, a theater festival in Atlanta, organized by Kate Hughes (Cynthia D. Barker), an energetic young producer, wants to revive “Naked Wilson” and give Campbell an honorary award.

All well and good—except Campbell assumes this is her chance to give a farewell performance of her signature play, while at the same time claiming nudity as something that doesn’t only encompass younger women. Hughes, however, has hired a young “performance artist” (actually more of a stripper and pornographic movie actress) “Pete” Watson (Shakirah Demesier) to perform “Naked Wilson” nude, though Watson isn’t exactly versed in dramatic monologues nor Wilson’s plays. A further key role in Cleage’s play, that of Betty Sampson, Campbell’s assistant and companion, is provided by Marva Hicks who is able to hang fire and comment, both verbally and silently, to great effect.

Marva Hicks as Betty Sampson in the Hartford Stage production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The plot of Cleage’s play, then, is essentially a sit-com: how to disabuse Campbell of her mistake without alienating her, and how to finesse what is bound to be a culture-clash between a diva of the theater and a demoiselle of the skin trade. Cleage beefs up the basic comic premise with some very tangible issues, most having to do with how one generation copes with the next.

At the heart of the play is the question: “must we eat our young?” It’s a way of depicting the tendency of those now able to rest on their laurels to undermine the tastes, talents and prestige of those still trying to make a name. That situation, we might say, is perennial; no matter how much the up-and-coming generation resents the suppressions foisted on them by their elders, they will almost certainly behave similarly once they become elders.

By taking on the plays and reputation of August Wilson, even if with admiration tinged with a certain comic deflation, Cleage adds a further dimension to the play’s intergenerational struggle. Wilson was the dominant African American playwright of the 1990s and in some ways still is. In the past decade (during which I’ve reviewed theater in Connecticut), his plays have been on offer most seasons and I’ve seen them at Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, and of course, Yale Repertory Theatre, where a number of them had their debuts. He is a grand old man of American theater and yet—unlike some others, such as Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill—his female roles tend to be much slighter. Thus Campbell’s protest play is a point well-taken, for not only do female actors get short-changed in Wilson’s plays, arguably, but—with strict gender distinctions in casting—female actors never get to deliver the speeches Campbell performed in her piece.

In choosing a performer such as “Pete” (her given name, Precious, already sounded like a stripper name, to her, so she went for something apposite), Hughes opens the door to performance beyond the bounds of classic theater. Certainly, such was implied in Campbell’s use of nudity as an avant-garde gesture intended to break through certain stodgy assumptions about theater, but, Campbell claims, the real point was hearing a very capable actress deliver Wilson’s lines. Hughes could’ve gotten a worshipful stage-actress understudy-type to take on “Naked Wilson” but chose instead a woman with some of the same “stop-at-nothing” fire Campbell once had. As Campbell, Burrell makes us believe in both the greatness of her skills and the wearying anxieties of having to carry on past her “day.” And Demesier’s Watson has the nonchalance of whatever is “now.”

Terry Burrell as Anna Campbell and Shakirah Demesier as Precious “Pete” Watson in The Hartford Stage production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The best parts of the play come when Campbell and Watson are finally face-to-face. In fact, there’s a bit of a lull after the initial setup of the situation that could be mitigated by quicker pacing (but, given that the play comes in at about 100 minutes, it’s not as if it drags). Watson is the kind of performer who baulks at nothing and has the confidence that comes from “clicks” (or internet attention) rather than the traditional gatekeepers of artistic success. Campbell, increasingly insecure in this new world, still knows what she knows: great theater isn’t made by amateurs. A resolution, if it’s to come, will have to allow both sides of the generational divide to respect and appreciate the other. And the terms of that rapprochement are what make this play signify. What’s more, Hicks—as the true elder here—gets to steal the show with a concluding song and comment that’s “just showing off” very gamely indeed.

Warmly entertaining with some jabs and bristles, Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous is funny, not mawkish, and happily gorgeous: the $500-per-night suite where Campbell and Sampson hang out is quite a spread, in Collette Pollard’s design, and Kara Harmon’s costumes are all very becoming, especially the knock-out red number “Pete” sports during a believably “gone viral” moment late in the play. If, in the end, Cleage’s play plays to our classic theater preferences over the grittier, more showy aspects of today’s entertainment culture, well, that’s what Hartford Stage audiences are there for. 

The cast of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous
By Pearl Cleage
Directed by Susan V. Booth

Scenic Design: Collette Pollard; Costume Design: Kara Harmon; Lighting Design: Michelle Habeck; Sound Design: Clay Benning; Wig Design: Lindsey Ewing; Production Stage Manager: Anna Baranski; Assistant Stage Manager: Samantha Honeycutt

Cast: Cynthia D. Barker, Terry Burrell, Shakirah Demesier, Marva Hicks

Hartford Stage
January 13-February 6, 2022

Auld Acquaintance

Review of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, at Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage’s holiday offering this year takes a break from the annual staging of A Christmas Carol—a Ghost Story in favor of a more streamlined, less effects-laden show. Instead of flying ghosts and bedecked sleighs and the full trappings of a Dickensian Christmas, we have Joe Landry’s adaptation of an American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Frank Capra film from 1946 that centered on how a potential business catastrophe at Christmas cemented the values of the postwar community of Bedford Falls, NY. The film, which is generally playing somewhere on television at Christmastime, showcases James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and a host of beloved actors who have become indelible figures of a bygone small-town America. Landry’s adaptation is actually set in a radio studio as a live broadcast, so that a town’s worth of characters can be played by five skilled voice actors: Jake Laurents (Gerardo Rodriguez), Freddy Filmore (Michael Preston), Sally Applewhite (Shirine Babb), Lana Sherwood (Jennifer Bareilles) and Harry “Jazzbo” Heywood (Evan Zes), with an onstage Foley—or sound effects—artist (Leer Leary) providing crucial backup. 

The cast of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Directed by Melia Bensussen and Rachel Alderman, the joys of the play take place on several levels. First, there’s the show-biz aspect: we’re watching ostensible radio actors ham it up for a live audience, complete with an applause sign so that the listeners at home will know we’re there and loving it. Thus, we, the audience, are playing an audience and responding accordingly. Related to that is the fact that the actors—invisible to those fictional listeners—are visible to us, even when they almost miss cues or carry on sotto voce chats in the background or one-up each other with glares and snickers or flirt with body language. And on that score, keep an eye on Lear Leery—he’s not only a one-man sound-board, he’s also an onlooker who knows the show frontwards and backwards and reacts accordingly. Then there’s the story itself, which is heartwarming and corny and quaint and magical, all at once. The radio actors know all that and also that it’s a lot of fun to do. It helps to know the story as well as the actors do (I do) but even if you don’t, you can get caught up in trying to imagine the different characters these quick-change voices bring to life. They’re all there: George and Mary Bailey, Uncle Billy, Ma Bailey, brother Harry Bailey, Old Man Potter, Mr. Gower, Mr. Martini, Violet Bick, the Bailey kids, and of course Ernie and Bert as well as a host of background voices.

Jennifer Bareilles, Shirine Babb, Michael Preston, Evan Zes and Gerardo Rodriguez in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

George Bailey, chief exec at a struggling Building and Loan he inherited from his dad, is suddenly vulnerable to take over and even extortion because his daft Uncle Billy mislaid a sizable deposit that has fallen into the hands of the grasping and covetous town big wig Old Man Potter. George’s night of despair on Christmas eve earns him the intercession of “angel second class” Clarence Oddbody. The two main roles of George and Clarence are enacted by Gerardo Rodriguez as Laurents and Evan Zes as Heywood. The chemistry is good and Rodriguez brings a bit more gravitas to George than is sometimes the case. He’s a take-charge guy who we expect will battle his way out of any difficulty. Zes’s Clarence is less flighty than the original and is more like someone who has entered a movie he was watching and wants to see if his intervention will work or not. And it’s a great treat to see Michael Preston (recently Hartford Stage’s Scrooge) do the hat and voice-switching necessary to enact a heated exchange between Potter and Uncle Billy.

Leer Leary in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The first two thirds of the play provide the backstory and that’s when the radio show elements are foregrounded. It’s all got a nostalgic tinge—including ads with jingles set to Christmas tunes—and provides a spirited evocation of the effects of radio, the spectacle of live performance, and the fun of mixing both at once. What’s particularly lively in this production are how the personalities of the radio actors inflect the roles they play with their voices so that interesting frictions occur with the actors letting viewers in on their own responses to the roles (especially effective there are Bareilles and Babbs whose Applewhite and Sherwood clearly have some issues).

Evan Zes (Clarence) and Gerardo Rodriguez (George Bailey, back) in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Director Bensussen and Alderman shift the play’s mise en scene when Clarence enters the story. Trap doors and an upper platform come into use and suddenly we’re aware that we’re watching a play on the Hartford Stage, and that the show’s spatial concept extends beyond the borders of the radio studio. It’s a very effective way to register the difference of a world without George Bailey. The play has moved from being a comic evocation of familiar types and the kind of dramatized moments radio highlights with sound and music to an actual play that borders on a tragedy of lost opportunity. The world with no George in it—fighting the good fight for his community, his family and friends—is a darker, more dangerous place. Unlike the Scrooge story, where the fear of leading a selfish, wasted life shocks an old miser into generosity, the crux of It’s a Wonderful Life is that commitments and obligations are the stuff of life and anyone who has lived has affected other lives in indelible ways. The emotional tone of the play is served well by the closing sing-along of Auld Lang Syne, a tribute to the townfolks’ old acquaintance with one another and ours with them.

Jennifer Bareilles, Gerardo Rodriguez and Evan Zes in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

In 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life first played in movie theaters, there had been a loss of nearly 300,000 U.S. citizens who didn’t return from the war. As of today, the casualties from Covid-19, in the States alone, is over 800,000. The commemoration that closes the play isn’t just “sentimental hogwash,” as Mr. Potter would claim, but rather a way of saying we’re lucky to be here and we’d like to remember those who aren’t, thanking them all for their wonderful lives.

Shirine Babb in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Adapted by Joe Landry
Based on the story, The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern
From the screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling
Directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Dramaturg: Zoë Golub-Sass; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy

Cast: Shirine Babb, Jennifer Bareilles, Leer Leary, Michael Preston, Gerardo Rodriguez, Evan Zes

Hartford Stage
November 26-December 26, 2021

Another Miracle

Review of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut

Falsettoland, now playing at Music Theatre of Connecticut through November 21, directed by Kevin J. Connors is a quirky, sappy, funny, tear-jerker of a musical. And how many shows can you say that about?

The cast of the Music Theatre of Connecticut production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

What’s it about? Well, really it’s about love, but the context for the vicissitudes of love involves gays and straights, Jews and a few non-Jews. The show’s humor is decidedly arch—as for instance in both versions of “the Miracle of Judaism” or in “Baseball Game” or “Everyone Hates Their Parents”—and its play upon our sympathies stems from our acceptance that—to vary Tolstoy—“all dysfunctional relationships are unique in their dysfunction.” For Marvin (Dan Sklar) the dysfunction is starting to double-down. In the first part of Falsettos—Falsettoland is the second half of the longer musical—he left his wife, Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), for his lover Whizzer (Max Meyers). As Falsettoland opens, Marvin and Whizzer have split up and Trina has taken up with Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Marvin’s former psychiatrist. Then there’s the looming Bar Mitzvah for Jason (Ari Sklar), the son of Marvin and Trina who misses Whizzer and invites him to his baseball game, to the awkwardness of all. For Marvin, some kind of reckoning must be coming, but—as the song “Something Bad is Happening” late in Act One implies—he hasn’t yet seen the worst of it.

The cast of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut, left to right: Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), Mendel (Jeff Gurner), front, Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), back, Marvin (Dan Sklar), front, Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards), back; photo by Alex Mogillo

The cleverness of the show’s book—by James Lapine and William Finn—lies in how its mundane situations spark asides and reflections and confrontations, all of which are sung as dialogue. The music and lyrics by William Finn have a savvy, wry reflectiveness and bounce along with an agreeable forthrightness that seem in-keeping with the “tell it to a psychiatrist” tone. The shrink—played with crusty affability by MTC regular Gurner—is almost like a stand-in for the audience, a bit off to the side and yet emotionally involved. And that would also seem to be the point of the lesbian couple—Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards) and her partner Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), a non-Jew obsessed with Jewish cuisine; they might be the “zany neighbors,” but in fact, like us, they are drawn-in and play audience to the family dysfunction that, at first, seems only to hang on the question of how Marvin will navigate the emotional ties that bind him, and, more crucially, how Jason will manage to have a Bar Mitzvah he can tolerate or maybe even be proud of. But as “Unlikely Lovers,” a highlight of Act Two, makes clear, the scope of the foursome comprised by Dr. Charlotte, Cordelia, Marvin and Whizzer is key to the play’s vision of how new loves form in the space once dominated by family ties.

Whizzer (Max Meyers) and Marvin (Dan Sklar) in the MTC production of Falsettoland; photo by Alex Mogillo

But that’s not to say that more traditional family ties are given short shrift. Key to the tone the play strikes is the role of Trina. She might be more freaked out than she is, she might also be way more resentful of her former husband’s love for a man and her son’s friendship with that man, and she could whine a lot more. The great thing about Corinne C. Broadbent’s rendering of Trina is that she’s not melodramatic nor particularly long-suffering. Her big number in the second act, “Holding to the Ground” (sung while doing her aerobic exercises) lays out her emotional parameters and it’s one of the strongest numbers, matched—or even topped—by Max Meyer’s strong delivery of Whizzer’s “You Gotta Die Sometime.” What these two sung speeches give is not only insight into the difficult terrain these characters are navigating but also show them coping and revealing strengths that take us beyond the play’s tendency to use quirks for laughs.

the cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

At the heart of it all is Sklar’s Marvin, a likeable guy dealing with a lot; you might even say he’s a bit of a schlemihl trying to be a mensch. His genuine affection for Whizzer wins us over in “What More Can I Say,” and the real nature of the problem facing the couple ratches up the drama and takes us back to very stressful times that the musical aims to revisit as a coping exercise. And so, in good uplifting-ending fashion, the fate of that Bar Mitzvah is to reinforce the growth all the characters have undergone. Amongst all the good work done here—including Lindsay Fuori’s subway car set that adds the right note of urban landscape—special mention should be made of Ari Sklar’s Jason who is such a natural for this part it’s as if it’s a slice of his life. That illusion is helped by the fact that Jason’s father, Marvin, is played by Ari real life dad. Family ties, after all.

Marvin (Dan Sklar), Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), background; Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Jason (Ari Sklar), foreground; photo by Alex Mogillo

In revisiting those days of something awful in Falsettoland, the MTC production might be said to sound a note of nostalgia. Bad as things got, there was a sense that that they could only get better—in part through visions like Finn and Lapine’s of the everydayness of same-sex couples as part of the same old traditions grown so familiar. One of those miracles of humanitarianism.

The cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

Falsettoland
Book by William Finn and James Lapine
Music and Lyrics by William Finn
Directed by Kevin J. Connors

Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling; Choreography: Chris McNiff; Musical Direction: David John Madore

Cast: Corinne C. Broadbent, Elissa DeMaria, Jeff Gurner, Max Meyers, Jessie Janet Richards, Ari Sklar, Dan Sklar

Musicians: Piano/Musical Director: David John Madore; Drums: Steve Musitano, Chris McWilliams

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 5-21, 2021

The Power of Doubt

Review of Doubt: A Parable, Westport Country Playhouse

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, the second offering of Westport Country Playhouse’s two-show mini-season runs in-person until November 20, with a streaming version of the play available online from November 11 to November 21. This is the first live production at the venerable venue since the COVID shutdowns and the last until the playhouse’s next full season opens in April 2022 (for information on the latter, see below).

Directed by David Kennedy, WCP’s associate artistic director, the current production of Doubt—which won a Pulitzer and the Tony for Best Play 2005—provides an interesting example of how context can affect a play. Back in 2005, the play was a timely fictionalization of issues that arose out of the Boston Globe’s celebrated 2002 exposure of child-abuse among Catholic priests. The investigations did indeed reveal abuse and cover-ups dating back decades, and yet Shanley’s play, set in 1964, can still feel anachronistic in the way it portrays characters who seem to live with an open secret.

Now, almost twenty years later, Shanley’s “parable” gains by not riding the coattails of a major news story. The questions the play aims to raise—about doubt and certainty—move into a more parabolic realm less concerned with the times and more readily timeless. And that helps to foreground what has always been the play’s greatest strength: that it can be staged to have very different effects without changing a single word. The notion that the play’s final act takes place offstage—in the conversations of its audience members—still holds true. I’ve seen the play staged once before and can say that the take-aways from the two productions were markedly different.

Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) and Father Flynn (Erik Bryant) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

The story concerns the efforts of Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem), principal at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to remove Father Flynn (Eric Bryant) from his position in the parish due to her belief that he has seduced or is attempting to seduce a young boy, Donald Muller, the first and only African American child at the school. To this end, Sister Aloysius enlists the aid of Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) to help make a case to be taken to their superiors. Father Flynn, ambushed in a meeting with the two nuns, later turns to Sister James to give his view of the situation. But a surprising interview between Sister Aloysius and the boy’s mother (Sharina Martin) seems to strengthen the principal’s resolve.

Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

Sister Aloysius is portrayed as rigidly old guard—down on secular songs in Christmas pageants, on ballpoint pens, on teachers as “friends” to their students, and certainly on the touchy-feely version of mentoring that Father Flynn prefers. There’s not a lot that can be done with her character as she’s not meant to be sympathetic even if we might grant her a certain steely charm. Betsy Aidem’s portrayal captures well the kind of personal authority that those with rigid parameters for what’s allowed and what’s not can steep themselves in. And Kerstin Anderson establishes well the conflicts in Sister James: by temperament, she is sympathetic to Father Flynn; by the hierarchy of her order, she should support Sister Aloysius. Particularly if the elder nun is correct in her assumptions. But if she’s wrong? That doubt makes Sister James somewhat our stand-in, trying to decide between these two opponents, both practiced at getting others to do what they want them to do. For their own good.

It’s in the character of Father Flynn that the play offers the most potential for varied interpretations. He could be more openly arrogant, feeling that he’s above any criticism, he could be genuinely aghast at the suspicions in Sister A’s mind, or he could be a serial abuser trying to cover his tracks. Bryant’s Flynn downplays the arrogance, trying hard for a bid for sympathy from his opponent. How much sympathy he earns from the viewer is for each to decide.

Aloysius is open about her dislike of Flynn and there’s little point in considering ulterior motives: she sees him and his tendencies as pastor—even if he is innocent of abuse—as inimical to her view of how the Church should present itself. But if she’s wrong about Flynn’s infractions, then she’s simply using suspicion to taint his reputation and to drive him out. The power-play aspects of Shanley’s script strike me as its most enduring element. The fact that we can’t really know is the core of what the play offers as its insight into human relations. How do we assess someone else’s character? By what they do, by what they say, but what about what they don’t openly say or do? The value of doubt is that it reminds us human behavior is mostly lacking in absolutes. There’s always a little wiggle room.

At Westport, Kennedy’s production highlights the emotions, with the two central characters breaking down and collapsing to the floor at different moments. While her outburst may make Sister Aloysius more sympathetic in the end, Father Flynn’s outburst has the opposite effect. Arguably, his attempt to play on emotions makes him seem more guilty, or at least seems to indicate he may be culpable even if only for his thoughts or intentions.

Mrs. Muller (Sharina Martin) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in The Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

A key scene is the discussion of Donald’s situation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. In a way, Mrs. Muller’s view—which Sharina Martin registers as a hard truth arrived at through experience—serves best to put the priest’s interest in the boy in a context not as dark as the one Sister Aloysius assumes; in any case, Flynn may help the boy, but, in Sister Aloysius’ view, only at great risk.

Once again director David Kennedy delivers a play in which complex issues and implications are presented through well-orchestrated dialogues. While not having quite the drama of others he’s directed—like The Invisible Hand or Appropriate—or the comedy of The Understudy, Doubt acquires great power from its perfect pacing and by demonstrating that doubt and certainty can be equally unnerving.

Doubt: A Parable
By John Patrick Shanley
Directed by David Kennedy 

Scenic Designer: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Designer: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Fred Kennedy; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzer

Cast: Betsy Aidem; Kerstin Anderson; Erik Bryant; Sharina Martin

Westport Country Playhouse
In person: November 2-20, 2021
Streaming: November 11-21, 2021

On sale now are ticket packages for the 2022 season:

Next to Normal
Music by Tom Kitt
Book and Lyrics by Brian Yorkey
Directed and choreographed by Marcos Santana
The 2009 Tony-winning musical and winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama: musical theater that looks at a family in crisis with introspective songs.
April 5-23, 2002

Straight White Men
By Young Jean Lee
Directed by Mark Lamos
A father and two grown sons “forced to face their own identities” in inventive playwright Young Jean Lee’s 2014 play.
May 24-June 11, 2022

Ain’t Misbehavin’
Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz
Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown
The 1978 Tony winner—“a dance-filled and reimagined celebration of jazz great Fats Waller,” from Camille A. Brown, recently awarded and nominated for her work on for colored girls.
July 5-23, 2022

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
An intergenerational comedy from Amy Herzog—in which a 21-year-old visits his 91-year-old grandmother; a wry and wise Pulitzer finalist from 2013.
August 23-September 10, 2022

From the Mississippi Delta
By Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland
An autobiographical play using story, song and memories to dramatize a harrowing and inspiring journey from a childhood in poverty in Mississippi to the civil rights movement and the life of a professor.
October 18-November 5, 2022 

Paradise Enough

Review of Ah, Wilderness!, Hartford Stage

The Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, a rare Eugene O’Neill comedy, directed by the theater’s new artistic director Melia Benussen, was initially scheduled for Bensussen’s first season, back in 2019-20. It would’ve been the season’s finale. The COVID pandemic tabled those plans, causing Bensussen’s debut to be pushed back to the 2020-21 season that never was. Now, the production opens the 2021-22 season, a symbol of theater’s endurance and a return to a kind of normality. In any case, it’s a welcome experience: sitting again in the Hartford Stage theater and experiencing a handsomely mounted production of a classic play somewhat revised for our times.

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

The play itself may seem a somewhat odd choice. But for the references to Yale, New Haven, Waterbury and other Connecticut places that situate the play squarely in our vicinity, we might wonder why this play now. That local aspect—the homefield advantage?—is reassuring in its way. We know how much the recent distress over the pandemic came down to how well discrete municipalities handled the challenge. Connecticut didn’t do as badly as some. Why not a look back at one of the state’s local heroes? The O’Neill family spent summers in New London and their Monte Cristo cottage is the presumed setting for Ah, Wilderness!, set on a Fourth of July weekend early in the twentieth century. The play itself dates from the 1930s, and so the very notion of “dated” is built into its thematics, so to speak.

And that’s because, first of all, this is O’Neill’s somewhat light-hearted and ironic look back at his early years when he felt himself schooled by the likes of such literary luminaries as Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg. Richard Miller, his alter ego here, is played by Jaevon Williams as somewhat prissy and comically self-important. It’s necessary to the play’s tone that we find his pretentions laughable, even if we might find acclimation to the stodgy standards of the time a let-down in any hero. What saves the play, and what might come as a surprise given the way intergenerational conflict is generally dramatized in O’Neill and others, is how Richard’s parents are depicted. Suffice to say, we’re in the realm of situation comedy of the “father knows best” variety.

The task of representing a sympathetic, generous, patient and amused elder generation is ably handled by Michael Boatman as Nat Miller, the family’s patriarch. In a time when “patriarchal” is not only a dated concept but one roundly denounced, Boatman reminds us of how ably the position could be inhabited. Nat sticks up for his errant son when required—against the censorious father (Joseph Adams) of Richard’s love interest—and knows well enough that youth is a period of trial and error where the errors are part of the project of growing up. It’s a benign play that ends on just the right note of long-standing love, tolerance, and belief in a shared life together: the sort of things we like to think we mean when we talk about “family values.”

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

Other elements in the play are apt to be problematic, but then they no doubt always were. Key on that score is Sid (McCaleb Burnett), the familiar figure of the drunken Irishman, here bringing in some necessary verbal humor and a personality that doesn’t fit with the respectable face the family wears for social status—Burnett shines in the big “family at the table” set-piece. The sentimental interest in this character—who woos relentlessly Lily (Natascia Diaz), the sister of Mrs. Miller, to earn a by-now inevitable rebuff—likely has shifted. Where the sympathy may once have been with the erring bachelor in need of a good woman to save him, it’s likely we find ourselves sympathizing all the more with a good woman who can’t find any other suitor than this ne’er-do-well and who can’t have any life outside a domestic setting. Such are the times of the play and such are the social strait-jackets that O’Neill delineates while trying—for romantic comedy purposes—to offer a view where “meant for each other” doesn’t equate with “lacking any other options.”

The youngest generation is well-served by Katerina McCrimmon as younger sister Mildred; she squirms about on the couch at one point with the kind of eager-to-break-out-of-it-all energy that makes us wonder what a play focused on her might become. As it is, the play’s tour of the naughty “house of ill repute,” where Richard nearly gets seduced by Belle (Brittany Annika Liu), and then gets into a fight trying to protect her honor, which she finds ridiculous, is never particularly comic or dramatic. Likewise the scene between Richard and his love interest Muriel doesn’t quite connect either. Both Belle and Muriel are played by Liu and she is not really convincing as either the Virgin or the Whore, those two poles by which female behavior was judged at the time. It’s not O’Neill’s intention to lampoon these clichés outright and so we have to accept them in the light of the naturalism he inherited from his literary heroes. And yet . . . it seems that one way to breathe new life into the play is to find a way to make Richard’s scenes with the women riskier or funnier or, indeed, more romantic. Much of the problem lies with Williams’ over-earnest Richard, who even when drunk is so far from dissolute that it all seems little ado over less.

Richard Miller (Jaevon Williams) and Muriel Macomber (Brittany Annika Liu) in the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The lack of strong focus in the young persons’ scenes makes all the more important the older couple’s coping with their errant son. As the matriarch Essie Miller, Antoinette LaVecchia is lively in her fussiness and sense of rightness, and in the play’s close her seconding of her husband shines with a wisdom gained from a lifetime of intimacy. Ah, Wilderness! may be rom-com, but the romance is with family and the enduring couple at its heart, and with the feints and fits and starts by which that desiderata can be achieved. Quaint? Yes, but then, like the play’s fulminations about socialism spreading in the U.S, some attitudes are perennials. Ah, Wilderness! takes its title from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, beloved of Richard, in those famous lines about a book of verses, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou—that close with “Wilderness were paradise enough.” The upshot is that every successful couple finds paradise in the wilderness, and the wilderness can best be enjoyed together.

Essie Miller (Antoinetta LaVecchia) and Nat Miller (Michael Boatman) in the Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The play, which is a treat to watch on James Noone’s open, vertical, many-layered set, reminds us forcefully that some things just don’t fit on screens: live, multi-character theater on a grand stage notably. It’s great to be back at Hartford Stage, and it is time well-spent to revisit the past as shaded by the present. With its perfect tech—lighting by Wen-Ling Liao and costumes by Olivera Gajic, with hair, wigs and make-up by J. Jared Janis, and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen—Melia Bensussen brings a neglected O’Neill comedy to life, featuring the very welcome addition of period songs sung by the cast, with live piano provided onstage by Yan Li. The songs keep the times alive but also indicate the commonality that the play—with its multi-ethnic cast—achieves without foregrounding any specific American ethnicity. From each according to ability? Paradise enough.

Ah, Wilderness!
By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Joseph Adams, Michael Boatman, Annie Jean Buckley, McCaleb Burnett, Natascia Diaz, Antonio Jose Jeffries, Tanner Jones, Antoinette LaVecchia, Brittany Annika Liu, Myles Low, Katerina McCrimmon, Stuart Rider, Jaevon Williams

Scenic Design: Jim Noone; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Wen-Ling Liao; Sound Design: Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen; Music Director/Pianist: Yan Li; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Choreographer: Ted Hewlett

Hartford Stage
October 14-November 7, 2021

Policed to Death

Review of KILL MOVE PARADISE, Playhouse on Park

The play for the Playhouse on Park debut of director Dexter J. Singleton, known in New Haven for his work as Founding Executive Artistic Director at Collective Consciousness Theatre, is well-chosen. At CCT, plays by authors of color are the norm, and dramas that confront issues of social justice even as they entertain and enlighten have been staged with great success. CCT is a black box theater which is why it’s quite a change to see Singleton’s work on an outdoors stage in Bushnell Park, Hartford. The open space and wide stage create an unusual atmosphere for what might otherwise be a somewhat claustrophobic play. James Ijames’ powerful KILL MOVE PARADISE is set in a fantasy afterlife, a “no exit” space seemingly reserved for black men who have died at the hands of police. The play ran live in person for three dates in late June and is available for streaming over the internet through August 1. Go here.

There’s something of a “Waiting for Godot” feel about the piece as the four characters, each arriving separately and at intervals, have to cope with determining their whereabouts and what is going on: Isa (Trevele Morgan), Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), and Tiny (Quan Chambers), an adolescent. What’s more, this afterlife includes the audience. The idea of “fourth wall” doesn’t really apply as the space the men inhabit is not entirely clear even to them. The back wall is on a slant (a bit like a skateboard ramp) and occasionally one will try to climb it. At one point Daz  goes behind it to retrieve a lawn chair. It’s the only prop in the play other than a printer that emits a constantly increasing list of the wrongfully slain.

The lawn chair is a fitting prop because the audience—visible in shots taken from its viewpoint—is sitting on lawn chairs. The outdoors aspect of the event makes for an interesting friction with the play’s mood. Even as the young men express their discomfort and anxiety, knowing that the “they” watching them is predominantly white (Isa calls it “America”), the audience seems relaxed and nonjudgmental. Admittedly, watching the play streamed on the computer adds a buffer for the viewer. One is able to feel that the audience there on the grass is the “they” the young men refer to, while “we” watch from some more remote location. That’s just one of those things about the presence and non-presence of online theater. Here, it adds a further implication since the “they” that has victimized these men and a host of other black U.S. citizens is always present but rarely acknowledged. It’s all of us, collectively, and none of us, individually as viewers. Determining how much one feels “called out” by what the men say about the audience is part of the play’s work.

The cast of James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park, directed by Dexter J. Singleton (Photo by Meredith Longo)

The portions of the play in which the men struggle with this sense of how they should react to their situation are its most probing. Isa worries about profiling, Grif sees beauty in the crowd, Daz feels affronted by attitudes that tell him what he should be, and Tiny, the youth, finally confronts the crowd, fake pistol in hand, insisting “it’s not real. I’m real.” Such confrontational moments are almost haphazard, which is another way of saying that one never knows when they will arise.

The dramatic situation of being fatalities together but also still conscious and interacting makes for vivid give-and-take between the characters, though the tone tends to veer about a bit, making it hard to keep a read on who these four are, even to themselves. Add to that Ijames’ technique of keeping the play bouncing along by working in a pastiche format, including sitcoms, a soul-music song and dance, computer-game tagging, and a recital of stuff Daz noted backstage—some of it highly symbolic, some quite random, some a bit too heavily marked as racial baggage. We’re never in one reality for too long as if the sad fact of the four’s current status would be overwhelming, to us and to them, without some theatrical razzamatazz.

Isa (Trevele Morgan), foreground, Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (Photo by Meredith Longo)

Isa arrives first and is the most easily accommodating, both to his own situation and to dealing with the others. He’s practically a host, apt to read instructions aloud. Grif is more truculent and the one most likely to disrupt the easygoing mood Isa tries to maintain. Daz is the most “street” of the three, with a nickname “Dazzle,” and a “code name,” Daz, and a fondness for the phrase “my n---a.” His litany of what else is backstage where he found the chair seems oddly unfocused as if Daz refuses to endorse most of what he’s saying. At times, the three seem to accept each other, at other times they seem at odds even with the personalities they present.

At one point Isa reads out a list of black citizens who became fatal victims of police actions. The reading becomes a dramatic act of mourning and an overwhelming moment bordering on despair. Though that’s not the main mood of the piece, it’s important that it be registered, otherwise the theatrical aspects of the four’s situation could easily morph into a world where someone’s suffering is someone else’s entertainment.

Tiny (Quan Chambers), foreground, Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), Isa (Trevele Morgan) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

The arrival of Tiny, still gripping the toy gun that occasioned his death, is an affront to the others as the most outrageous killing. The boy’s attitude makes for a nice contrast with theirs as he’s smart, sharp, and not easily intimidated. He inspires a certain compassion in the others if only because they enjoyed more life and experience than he did, and their effort to bring him along makes for a dramatic focus in the play’s second half. One could say that the point of the play’s action is for each of the four to understand his own death, to see it in the light of martyrdom or sacrifice or simply a bad break or a result of the systemic racism that each has had to deal with while denying its lethality, until now. An ironically charged moment in the play—acted as a sitcom complete with laugh-track—highlights the unreality of the characters’ situation, as if the enormity of Tiny’s death can only come home to him within a normative, albeit silly, frame.

The tonal shifts in the play can sometimes arrest its flow when it seems that it’s building to more extended considerations. It’s as if Ijames is worried that if he doesn’t keep things lively, he’ll lose our attention. The problem is that the dialogue is very elliptical and requires a lot of physical and verbal shifts, not all of which seem natural to the actors. Singleton makes the most of the wide stage, and the sound effects are very effective even in an outdoor setting The camera work and editing of the video version is excellent, making home-viewers feel they have the best seat in the house while also giving us a bit of a detached view.

In the end, KILL MOVE PARADISE is a nimble play that plays with our sense of dramatic conventions even as it makes us feel the force of its take on the dire situation of race relations in contemporary America.

KILL MOVE PARADISE
By James Ijames
Directed by Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Quan Chambers, Christopher Alexander Chukwueke, Oliver Sai Lester, Trevele Morgan

Playhouse on Park
July 7-August 1, 2021

A Play For The Moment

Tiny House, at Westport County Playhouse

Happy 4th of July, that testament to the foundational myth of the United States of America. During this year’s Independence Day, Westport County Playhouse returns to active theater with Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, a dramedy set on a 4th of July lived “off the grid.” It’s a nice bit of irony. The show is streaming theater that takes us to the remote mountainous home of a couple—Sam & Nick—who purport to have withdrawn from corporate America and the distractions of internet culture. Which means they wouldn’t be likely to access theater like this.

The play takes its cue from our contemporary moment of crisis in which catastrophe looms and methods of coping have become the order of the day. And that’s apropos, as streaming theater, in which the remote audience attends theatrical content prepared digitally, was a part of many people’s quarantine experience. The fact that as of this week most theatrical restrictions of the pandemic have been lifted (for fully vaccinated companies) by Actors Equity, such as bans on actors occupying the same theater space, makes the Westport production already feel dated, part of last summer’s situational awareness.

And, on that note, just to get it out of the way: the digital green-screen version of this play is an oddly hybrid experience. The actors are all in different spaces trying to keep each other in believable eyelines, and efforts to create the illusion that they are in contact are oddly intrusive, like trying to hide the strings on puppets. Otherwise, there’s a detailed backdrop of a tiny house (you know, those cramped, small-footprint, ingenious boxes in which bourgeois accoutrements are reduced to the dimensions of a cruise ship’s cabin for a life free of excess, clutter, and waste), and very ripe nature shots, like a mountain/valley view aimed to induce vertigo and a forest verdantly ancient as only digital imagery can be. The Westport show is better than Zoom theater but not as satisfying as actors on stage together relayed by video, as at TheaterWorks this season. Even so, there’s considerable interest in contemplating how director Mark Lamos and his team pulled off this virtual theater-space which has its own odd charm. (And cheers to Westport Country Playhouse for continuing on; Tiny Houses opened on June 29, exactly 90 years since WCP first opened its doors, on June 29, 1931, so it certainly has been around for some trying times.)

Sam (Sara Bues) and Nick (Denver Milord) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The play itself is a hodgepodge of the edgy, the erratic and the aiming-at-entertaining. Nick (Denver Milord) and Sam (Sara Bues), the well-intentioned male-female couple hosting, have, of course, their issues, notably with Sam’s recovery from a miscarriage. She’s feeling vulnerable and not up to what is bound to be an abrasive visit from her mother, Billie (Elizabeth Heflin), a divorcee now living with her former brother-in-law, Larry (Lee E. Ernst). Sam’s father has been jailed for perpetrating “the biggest Ponzi scheme since Jesus walked the earth” (it’s a neat line and gets trotted out three times), and there’s lots of bad feelings and traumatic scarring about that.

Larry (Lee E. Ernst) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The “zany neighbor” role is given a switch in presenting the grim and mysterious Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), an armed hunter of marmots who may have been CIA and is concerned with the approaching “zero hour” of some indefinite apocalypse. We might assume this is just gun-nut fantasy, but he’s listening to “chatter” and everyone but Billie voices anxiety over the state of the world—whether climate change or anxiety-inducing news bulletins in general. Bernard helps keep alive the notion that this play is about more than awkward company on a holiday weekend but mainly he just sets up the punch that is the ending note of the play.

Bernard (Hassan El-Amin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The family sparring gets its most intense when Billie, in youth a bunny at Hef’s Playboy mansion, gets into an escalating aria of jabbering grievance with Nick that is the aural equivalent of speed-scrolling leftist 30something (Nick) and rightist Baby Boomer (Billie) flashpoints simultaneously. Like much in this play, it’s overwrought to little purpose. Early on, Nick has lines that make him a fun take-off of the intensely concerned and focused man-child of our times, so keen to offset the mess elder generations have made of the world. But the elder generation here, but for Billie, are little more than wan comic relief sporting hippier-than-thou wiftiness. Larry, in Ernst’s energetic performance, might add a loose cannon’s surprises but he collapses into the abyss of truly zany neighbors Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) who play on the laughs automatically conjured by Renaissance festivals, Tolkienesque elf-folk and hallucinogen-laced vegan tortes. Sigh.

Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

When the transmission’s sixty-second intermission arrived I was already wondering if—as with a game’s halftime—there would be a turn-around or if it was already over. In the second part, we get to the payoff of Gotch’s best idea: that the unsustainable civilization bequeathed us by twentieth-century capitalism is the equivalent of a giant Ponzi scheme that has suckered us all. That, to me, was the ideological upshot of Sam’s harangue to her mother about how bad it is to grow up as the besmirched daughter of a con-man and national disgrace. Bues gives the speech her all but it’s not her fault that the lines don’t give her much awareness beyond poor-pitiful-me whining and a self-satisfied jab at Mom (whose own woe-is-me depiction of life after Shamalot we’ve already heard). Both Bues and Heflin almost convince us we’re seeing the kind of self-exposure with consequences that drama sometimes achieves, but the ploy of having Nick overhear a certain statement by Sam feels utterly contrived—and nothing comes of it anyway.

Sam (Sara Bues), Nick (Denver Milord), Billie (Elizabeth Heflin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

And that’s the nature of this particular gathering: some good ideas, agreeable performances, digital sleight-of-hand (some of which works well), in service to the baleful thought that we’re basically fiddling while Rome burns. Maybe so, but more fiddling with the script would not be out of order. As it is, Tiny House aims to be a play of its moment that only manages to be a play for the moment.

Tiny House
By Michael Gotch
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Hugh Landwehr; Digital Scenic Design: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Design: Tricia Barsamian; Original Music and Sound Design: Rob Milburn, Michael Bodeen; Sound Edit, Mix and Additional Sound Design: M. Florian Staab; Editor: Dan Scully; Director of Photography: Lacey Erb; Wig Design: Christal Schanes; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Marholin; Assistant Stage Manager: Ellen Beltramo

Cast: Sara Bues; Hassan El-Amin; Lee E. Ernst; Elizabeth Heflin; Denver Milord; Stephen Pelinski; Kathleen Pirkl-Tague

Westport Country Playhouse
June 29-July 18, 2021
Streaming On Demand

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About

Review of Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut

In 1975, Truman Capote was a celebrity, someone—as he says in the play Tru now playing both live before audiences and on live streaming at Music Theatre of Connecticut in Norwalk, directed by Kevin Connors—“famous for being famous.” The basis for that fame began with Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, but really went mega with his groundbreaking study of a multiple homicide in 1959 Kansas in the best-selling “true crime novel” In Cold Blood (1966), subsequently made into a successful film. An earlier success was the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), made into a popular film by Blake Edwards.

His fame allowed Capote to maintain a jet-set lifestyle among the glitterati—aristocrats, celebrities, and the immensely rich. The immediate setting for Tru is Christmas of 1975, just after the publication in Esquire of excerpts from Answered Prayers, the unfinished manuscript intended to be his magnum opus. In the form now called autofiction, the stories were thinly veiled “fictional” and unflattering treatments of the high-rollers among whom Capote had been passing much of his time. The outrage was great, and Capote, as the play goes along, is still largely in denial of how bad the fallout will be.

All of which is just by way of background, as Capote, who died in 1984, is not quite the household name he used to be, back when his frequent appearance on talk shows, not least Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, kept him in the living rooms and bedrooms of America. The play, while it certainly goes over best for those with some prior awareness of Capote and some of the big names he drops, comes across regardless, due largely to Capote’s considerable charm and way with words (most of which are adapted from Capote’s interviews and writings). Actually, those with no previous opinion of Capote might find the play more entertaining than those for whom the sad fact of Capote’s deterioration as a writer and then as a social butterfly has more sting.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Capote cut a singular figure, with an immediately recognizable voice, wispy, reedy. He was “out” before that was a generally recognized status, with long-term male partners and no effort to appear heterosexual. Capote’s affable and unflappable manner is rendered well by Jeff Gurner, who sounds like him, without parodying the manner, and, at a distance as dressed by Diane Vanderkroef, looks enough like the diminutive author to give us a facsimile of the man. The entire play takes place in Capote’s very tasteful living room in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan (overlooking United Nations Plaza) as designed by Lindsay Fuori with prop design by Sean Sanford. Lighting design by RJ Romeo adds significant aura to moments of dramatic recollection.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play opens with Capote offended by the anonymous gift of a poinsettia and concludes when Capote, in his characteristic chapeau, dark shades, and overcoat, exits grandly for a holiday dinner with Ava Gardner and others who haven’t dropped him. Along the way, Gurner treats us to the pathos of a figure still giddy about his success and insecure about his reputation, so he must keep us enthralled by mannerism and self-quotation. At times, we feel like we’ve been summoned to an interview where we don’t get to pose the questions but must simply record the bon mots as they rain upon us.

The monologue to which Capote subjects us includes moments such as his sending telegrams and engaging in telephone conversations. In these moments we sense the public Capote and that lets the tone he directs to the audience—whom he sometimes addresses as though all-too-aware that he is observed at all times—seem more private and off-the-cuff. It’s a nice distinction as Capote comes across as someone for whom life is only significant when it is shared—whether with readers, viewers, friends, hangers-on, reporters, lovers, family, enemies. The key point is that someone attends, and so, if Tru (as he’s generally known) gets bored talking to us, he can pick up a phone and let us overhear him talking to someone else.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 ( photo by Alex Mongillo)

Which of course means that Capote is a good subject for a one-person play as his manner is essentially theatrical. In the second half of the play he even does a dance routine—just to take us by surprise—and is constantly insistent on the fact that, even if he himself is not always appreciated as a performer, he has been in the presence of great performers all his life, including dancing as a child while Louis Armstrong performed and, of course, complimented him.

The point isn’t the truth, for Tru, it’s carrying off his version of things. And now he’s in hot water for not carrying off his portraits of socialites—a classic case of biting the hand that, if it doesn’t exactly feed one, at least feeds one’s vanity. And yet, for the moment, that’s all to the good because it means everyone is talking about those pieces in Esquire. And as Oscar Wilde might well remind him, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” There may be something worse, though, as Capote will learn: not being spoken to. The silence that meets his efforts to reach out will drive him to more drink and drugs and more self-parodic stagings of his public persona.

Is there a moral? It’s hard to say, given that any sense of tragedy occurs, as it were, off-stage. In the play’s time-setting, Tru hasn’t yet declined. We might guess that such private theatricality, while tonic for anonymous onlookers, can be costly to the man forever in the spotlight. And yet—the play may convince us—that is Capote’s victory. He has become a character, forever larger than life and more interesting as fiction than as fact. Robert Morse earned a Tony for playing Capote in Tru on Broadway in 1990 and an Emmy for the same role in a televised version in 1992; Phillip Seymour Hoffman earned an Oscar for playing Capote in the film Capote (2005). Capote’s books have become classics and his persona a celebrated role. Perhaps nothing could be truer to Tru.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Tru
Jay Presson Allen
Adapted from the works of Truman Capote
Directed by Kevin Connors

Starring Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote

Sound Design: Will Atkin; Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
April 23-May 9, 2021