A Pride and Prejudice to be Proud of

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Hartford Stage

The 60th anniversary season of Hartford Stage is off to a crowd-pleasing start. Playwright and actress Kate Hamill specializes in lively, contemporary adaptations of classic novels. Her bright and fun take on Jane Austen’s beloved Pride and Prejudice is given a fully frenetic realization by director Tatyana-Marie Carlo. The cast is having so much fun it all feels quite infectious.

Lydia (Zoë Kim), Mary (Madeleine Barker, back), Mrs. Bennet (Lana Young), Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The plot, as you may already know, is about those Bennet sisters (here four instead of Austen’s five) residing in Regency era England. Not badly off, the young ladies are doomed to penury whenever their aloof, paper-reading pater (Anne Scurria) kicks off. A cousin—the daffy curate Mr. Collins (Sergio Mauritz Ang)—will inherit. And so Mrs. Bennet, played to the hilt and then some by Lana Young, urges upon her daughters any suitor likely to remain smitten long enough to reach the altar. Besides Collins, there’s also the very well-to-do Bingley (also Ang), and the perhaps not all he should be Wickham (also Ang), a mere lieutenant with whom Mr. Darcy (Carman Lacivita) has had disagreeable dealings. Darcy himself, the only potential suitor not played by the versatile and quite comic Ang, is given all the priggish airs you might expect in Lacivita’s icy performance. Watching him thaw despite himself is much of the fun.

Lizzy (Renata Eastlick), Jane (María Gabriela González) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the sisters, María Gabriela González is a lovely Jane, the one deemed a catch due to her looks, and she’s also able to twerk on beat; as Lizzy, the main heroine, Renata Eastlick is sensible and likeable, her intelligence and ease of manner making her the best Lizzy I’ve seen (this is the third version of Hamill’s play I’ve reviewed); as Lydia, the youngest, Zoë Kim somehow manages to be a credible fourteen year old, crazily spirited with a feisty naivete that Lydia would like to think precocious; then there’s Mary, whom Madeleine Barker plays as a cross between the Addams family’s Morticia and that girl that crawls out of the TV set in The Ring—a kind of funny, frightening and striking character that has to be seen to be believed (and enjoyed).

Miss Bingley (Madeleine Barker), Mr. Darcy (Carman Lacivita) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Other characters played by this energetic cast include: Madeleine Barker’s supercilious turn as turbaned Miss Bingley, sister of Bingley—who tends to approach romance as would an affectionate pet; Anne Scurria scurrying between wearing Mr. Bennet’s pants and neighboring would-be bride Charlotte Lucas’s skirts; Zoë Kim, moving effortlessly between Lydia pouting and preening to the imperious mien of Lady Catherine de Bourgh (deep fanfare!); and last but not least, María Gabriela González’s hilariously unearthly sounds as Miss de Bourgh, a neurasthenic shambles swaddled like a mummy and, in Lady Catherine’s view, the perfect match for perfectly detached and unattached Mr. Darcy.

Miss de Bourgh (María Gabriela González, back), Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Zoë Kim) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The show opens with one of those mannered dances dear to the period, a signal that Carlo’s take is not going to foreground the gamesmanship that Hamill herself underscores via Lizzy’s comments on marriage as a contest with winners and losers; rather, the Hartford Stage production seems rather to concern itself with ritual and theatrics, seeing in the mating game the setting for so much of our ideas of how to act, look, dress, speak, move and so forth. Watching the varied displays of this busy staging is to glimpse what it’s like to live in a culture where someone is always watching, where public events—like balls (and how Mrs. Bennet loves balls!)—are occasions as deliberate as putting on a play. It’s all show-biz? Yes, and then some.

Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lizzy, famously, is having none of it, until . . .  As her doting dad says on two occasions, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” When Lizzy has to confront her own feelings she has to do so without the kinds of pretense that serve so well the game or ritual or manner of this comedy of manners. Did anyone ever get so great a reaction from setting a sheet of paper in front of a sodden suitor?

Mr. Darcy ( Carman Lacivita), Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Such are some of the many delights enacted here. Prepared to be tickled by things like Mr. Bennet brandishing a wig atop a stick draped with tatters of fabric to stand in for Mary (Barker then onstage as Miss Bingley), or the many times a little bell is rung to precede a visitor/suitor or other perhaps game-changing announcement, or the many times a cast member must react with surprise, shock or horror at the sudden appearance of Mary—as well as matters a bit more subtle, such as the way Lydia precipitates herself into wedlock not thinking that in “winning” (by being the first daughter married) she has lost something she might only begin to understand now; or the way Charlotte finds a way to live with Mr. Collins, as he crows offstage about his garden growths; or the way Mr. Bennet imagines it is just possible he may outlive his dutiful wife, who is always so concerned with how the family will manage without him.

The cast of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Such matters used to be called “the war between the sexes,” but Austen and Hamill know it’s not an outright war so much as an ongoing negotiation that both sides engage in for the thrill of it all. Otherwise, what is there to do?  That question can’t honestly be asked in a culture where women cannot inherit and must marry so as to survive, where work, as such, is beneath everyone at this level of society, and so ladies must hitch their star to a man who has property or who is likely to rise socially. Sinecures are nice as well. While Austen’s novels tread this terrain with a knowing wink or grimace at all the subterfuges needed to achieve secure ends, Hamill can let it all hang out, placing the skirmish front and center with a kind of “on your mark, get set, go” urgency.

The cast of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The matches made are the same but the spectacle they make is the fun. Ably supported by Hartford Stage’s large open playing space—making a drawing room or garden or ballroom very much a playground—decorated with Scenic Designer Sara Brown’s sense of how to create visual interest (early on, there aren’t enough chairs to go around so Lizzy must push a cushion to center stage), the show also benefits from Shura Baryshnikov’s varied Choreography, Aja M. Jackson’s subtle Lighting Design, original music and sound design by Daniel Baker & Co (there are also a few popular songs that anachronistically surface for comic effect), and, particularly, Haydee Zelideth’s fantasies of era Costumes, the colors tend to be rich—like Lizzy’s true blue Plain Jane gown—and patterns abundant, and where, as was true to the time, the flouncier your skirt the higher you stood in status so that Lady Catherine wears clothes that might well swallow a lesser being. Meanwhile, Sergio Mauritz Ang gets to appear as curate, soldier, and affable love-smitten coxcomb by turns, switching costumes and mannerisms as needed. It’s dizzying.

Mr. Bennet (Anne Scurria, back), Mary Bennet (Madeleine Barker) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Mary—ever ready to announce an apothegm scored from the manners on display around her—at one point points out the difference between pride and vanity. No one listens, but we hear her, and her comment serves well the entire production. To be vain is to be concerned with what others think of you; to be proud is to esteem yourself for your own virtues. Tatyana-Marie Carlo’s version of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice, from Jane Austen’s novel, at Hartford Stage through November 5, has much to be proud of.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Sara Brown; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Original Music & Sound Design: Daniel Baker & Co.; Wig Design: Earon Nealey; Vocal & Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Fight Director: Teniece Divya Johnson; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Anaïs Bustos; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Sergio Mauritz Ang, Madeline Barker, Renata Eastlick, Maria Gabriela González, Zoë Kim, Carman Lacivita, Anne Scurria, Lana Young

Hartford Stage
October 12-November 5, 2023

Lizzie, Get Your Axe

Review of Lizzie, TheaterWorks, Hartford

In Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, Lizzie Andrew Borden, 32, was accused of killing her father and stepmother, both brutally murdered, then acquitted. As the presumed murderer, Lizzie Borden became the stuff of legend and folksongs, of movies and novels and other dramatizations, such as Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks by Steven Cheslik-Demeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt, now playing at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Lainie Sakakura with musical direction by Erika R. Gamez.

With such a famous story—even in its own day it made the papers in a sensationalist manner—it's hard to say exactly what the fascination is: one element is the unsolved crime aspect: if not Lizzie than whom and how? Another is the crime that goes unpunished: if Lizzie did it, she got away with it and lived—happily or not—until age 66, dying with a considerable fortune and no deathbed confession. Then there’s the angle that seems to appeal most over the years: she did it, and got away with it, but why and how? And those questions let us be sleuths, to devise “what really happened,” and pop psychologists of persons we never met, to find out motives “beneath the skin.” Irresistible, right?

Sydney Shepherd as Lizzie in Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Lainie Sakakura (photo by Mike Marques)

As Lainie Sakakura’s director statement puts it: “Lizzie delves into the mysterious mind of Lizzie Borden and speculates about her possible motivations: loss of inheritance, sexual oppression, abuse . . . madness.” Or: why stop with one motive when you can try ’em all? And yet motives have a way of not supporting one another. Caring about being cheated out of your inheritance isn’t madness, neither is retribution for sexual abuse; madness would be thinking such things were happening when they weren’t.

The show might make for a more macabre-fun Halloween evening if it threw out motives and simply made Lizzie a cold-blooded killer as might belong in an Alice Cooper song or a murder ballad. But the plot-driven lyrics tend to ask us to connect the dots and arrive at a reading of Lizzie (Sydney Shepherd) as a full-blooded and bloody heroine. The authors want her guilty but more sinned-against than sinning, her broken axe maybe even a righteous sword in the fight against oppression. Her parents are not characters in the show and so we only have inference about who they were.

Brigid (Nora Schell), Emma (Courtney Bassett), Lizzie (Sydney Shepherd), Alice (Kim Onah) in Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Not really a “rock concert,” then, which may have a structure but not usually a plot. The first part of Lizzie is enacted in period costume with a lot of projections on and flanking a wall of doors. Camilla Tassi’s projections have to convey mood and setting, as Brian Prather’s set is otherwise mostly bare stage with a riser, and the projections have a lot of presence that make for visually busy scenery, often having to do with birds, which are identified with Lizzie’s emotions. Settings include different parts of “The House of Borden,” and a loft in the barn where Lizzie bonds with pigeons her dad later kills, either because he’s disgusted by the birds or by what Lizzie and her lovestruck neighbor Alice Russell (Kim Onah) do up there. In the later going, when the band is revealed and Saawan Tawari’s costumes go for Goth-Noir, there is still a lot of story to get through, including the trial and its aftermath.

Emma (Courtney Bassett), Lizzie (Sydney Shepherd), Brigid (Nora Schell) in Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

The other two characters onstage in this four-woman show are Lizzie’s older sister Emma (Courtney Bassett) who mainly stirs the cauldron that is Lizzie’s seething nerves, and Brigid (Nora Schell), aka Maggie, the Irish tell-all servant who keeps an eye on everyone and has her own view of what’s really going on. She’s a bit of a Greek chorus but, as such, her role could be more developed as a consistent perspective on the events is what the show lacks. Brigid could be a welcome touch of realism to act as foil to the authors’ Lizzie fantasies.

As with most rock operas worthy of the name—such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy—there are songs that are plot devices and there are songs that can detach from the story and stand on their own, more or less. Here, standout instances of the former would be “Why Are All These Heads Off” or “What the Fuck, Lizzie?" while of the latter would be the rocker "Sweet Little Sister,” with Emma as lead, and Alice’s plaintive but lovely “Will You Stay?”. All four performers in the show are distinctive and entertaining and fun to listen to—as is that rocking band, with particular mention for drummer Molly Plaisted. Onah puts a lot of soul in her singing which helps considerably as do Schell’s upper range blasts. Shepherd brings the requisite rock star wail to her sound which—if you’re of a certain age—may have you reliving some of those Heart fantasies you had as a teen. Meanwhile, Bassett—in the show’s latter going—fully rocks her couture, looking the type of woman David Bowie may have wished he was on occasion.

An unexpected high point is the choral song “Watchmen for the Morning” which at least points to a higher common cause for the Borden sisters; the song lets us stand for a moment in that space where one’s legal guilt or innocence is a matter of what others determine, and where—maybe—one’s existential guilt or innocence can be left to the Lord’s plan.

All in all, it’s an entertaining show, though its details could be considered a bit harrowing and it’s not “all in fun.” Real people really died in the house of Borden, and Lizzie either had real grievances that drove her to murder, or else imagined ones, or else . . . she didn’t do it at all. But Lizzie’s Lizzie, who has grievances and a lover and a sister and motives and opportunity, is still claiming she didn’t do it—in the play—while asserting—rock concert-style—she sure did, fuck yeah. Uplifting? Maybe. Uplifted, at least—like an axe to grind.

Alice (Kim Onah), Lizzie (Sydney Shepherd) in Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Lizzie, A Rock Concert in 40 Whacks
Music by Steven Cheslik-Demeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt
Lyrics by Steven Cheslik-Demeyer and Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt
Book by Tim Maner
Directed by Lainie Sakakura
Music Director Erika R. Gamez

Set Design: Brian Prather; Costume Design: Saawan Tiwari; Lighting Design: Rob Denton; Sound Design: Megan Culley; Projection Design: Camilla Tassi; Hair & Make-up Design: Ashley Rae Callahan; Dialect Coach: Johann Morrison; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Conductor/Keyboard 1: Erika R. Gamez; Guitar 1: Billy Bivona; Guitar 2/Keyboard 2: Jeff Carlson; Bass: Christie Echols; Cello: Esther Benjamin; Drums: Molly Plaisted

Cast: Courtney Bassett; Kim Onah; Nora Schell; Sydney Shepherd

TheaterWorks, Hartford
October 6-29, 2023

SHOWTIMES:
Tuesdays – Thursdays  |  7:30pm
Fridays |  8:00pm
Saturdays |  2:30pm & 8:00pm
Sundays |  2:30pm

Making It Work

Review of Clyde’s, TheaterWorks Hartford

Lynn Nottage, two-time Pulitzer-winner for her plays, keeps it lighter than usual—and shorter!—in Clyde’s, more or less a sit-com with some serious overtones, now playing at TheaterWorks. The show, at 95 minutes, is more condensed than well-known Nottage plays like Sweat and Intimate Apparel, but, like them, explores a particular working world with great fidelity to the kind of lives lived there. In this case, it’s a greasy spoon called Clyde’s, a favorite with truckers, where Clyde (Latonia Phipps) lords it over a crack kitchen staff who have all served time in prison and who all dream of better things.

Directed by Mikael Burke with wonderful economy of movement on a small set, one of the show’s great attractions is how this deft ensemble maneuvers the very detailed and well-though-out kitchen area designed by Collette Pollard. It’s great theater and it’s a delight to experience the kitchen staff’s efforts to satisfy the churlish Clyde while also working through all their various issues.

Letitia (Ayanna Bria Bakari), Rafael (Samuel María Gómez), Jason (David T. Patterson) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford, directed by Mikael Burke (photo by Mike Marques)

There may be a romance blooming between romantic Rafael (Samuel María Gómez)—at least if he has his way—and more down-to-earth Letitia (Kashayna Johnson, filling in for Ayanna Bria Bakari the night I saw the show); new employee Jason (David T. Patterson), replete with White Supremacist tattoos apt to aggravate this non-white staff, has to find his footing and, though by his own admission prone to violence, becomes something of a placid devotee of Montrellous (Michael Chenevert). The eldest, Montrellous, a kind of guru of the sandwich board, is out to prove that freedom is a question of the right choices, which extends from how one lives to what one eats: the right bread, the right ingredients, the right condiments. Indeed, much of the dialogue will be enough to make any foodie’s mouth water (my advice, have at least a decent snack before you see the show). Montrellous’ philosophy is the basis for a kind of holistic approach to work and eating that may allow his fellow workers to rise above Clyde’s ongoing disparagement.

Rafael (Samuel Maria Gomez), Jason (David T. Patterson), Montrellous (Michael Chenevert) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Having said all that, there’s not a lot more to say, in terms of story. Which is why I mentioned “sit-com”: the predominant feeling is that we are spending time with these characters, getting to know them as they get to know each other and (as in your favorite workplace comedy) what we learn will be sometimes amusing—as for instance, Rafael’s BB gun bank hold-up—and sometimes wrenching, as for instance Montrellous’ tale of a bad decision followed by a real act of sacrifice. The main plot point, I’d say, is whether or not Clyde will relent and actually try one of Montrellous’s unique sandwich productions.

Clyde constantly puts down the crew—individually and collectively—and won’t entertain any notion that they are earning respect (not even after a newspaper write-up designates the kitchen’s productions as “sublime”) nor that any of them should have any feeling but a squalid sort of humble gratitude to her for giving them jobs and keeping them on. She’s a bully and an asshole and she loves it. Latonia Phipps luxuriates in the part but I have to say it got a bit one-note. It may be the point that Clyde doesn’t soften or sympathize (“I don’t do pity,” she boasts), but that only means we—like her employees—get sick of her that much quicker. In the words of that Nobel Laureate: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes: you’d know what a drag it is to see you.” (The only thing that makes us glad to see Clyde again? the costume changes! Alexis Carrie, Costumes.)

Clyde (Latonia Phipps) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But aren’t bosses often a drag? I can attest it’s so, and so it is here. Do we like the other characters? Yes, and it’s fun seeing/hearing who gets feedback—as cheers, laughs, applause—from the live audience. That “you are there” element works to great effect in TheaterWorks’ small theater and small but very lively stage. I’ll say my favorite character the night I saw the show was Kashayna Johnson’s Letitia (wonderfully filing in as an understudy); she has the best vantage on her co-workers, seeming to have the insight to grasp who they really are and who they’re trying to become, even as she herself is working to be better. She’s the soul of the place even more than Montrellous. As the latter, Chenevert has the requisite thoughtfulness and measured movements of a man who could’ve been so much more and might yet be, but his detachment doesn’t make him as sympathetic. Gómez's Rafael is winning and outgoing, and his outbursts of feeling do a lot to drive up the drama. As Jason, Patterson broods well but also has a great sense of comic timing, making Jason’s arc of change the most fun to watch.

But don’t take my word for it: get into TheaterWorks and spend some time watching this crew for yourself—if you can tear yourself away from the latest from Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig. Anyway, those films will likely be here for weeks. Clyde’s has been extended but only has one more week left!

Clyde’s
By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Mikael Burke

Set Design: Collette Pollard; Costume Design: Alexis Carrie; Lighting Design: Eric Watkins; Sound Design: Christie Chiles Twillie; Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Associate Set Design: Delena Bradley; Intimacy Coordinator: Marie C. Percy; Casting Director: TBD Casting/ Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA

Cast: Ayanna Bria Bakari, Michael Chenevert, Samuel María Gómez, Kashayna Johnson, David T. Patterson, Latonia Phipps

TheaterWorks Hartford

July 7-30, 2023, extended run to August 5th

Murder Will Out

Review of Dial M for Murder, Westport Country Playhouse

Mark Lamos’s final production as Artistic Director at Westport Country Playhouse aims to be a crowd-pleaser. As such, it’s a rich example of what WCP has done well under his direction. Dial M for Murder is an old-fashioned play—as written by Frederick Knott and adapted famously into a 1954 film with Grace Kelly, directed by Alfred Hitchcock—that’s been recently revamped by Jeffrey Hatcher so that it’s alternately tense and entertaining and always smart. And “smart” is what Alexander Dodge’s set—a fifties Maida Vale setting—and Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s costumes are as well. So what we’re looking at—especially with Emma Deane’s choice lighting effects—is always a treat for the eyes. The dialogue, though it doesn’t always sparkle (and having to sound somewhat British tends to make some deliveries a trifle stilted), is full of little flourishes that let us revel in the fact that everyone in the play, at some point, is trying to take someone in. The levels of betrayal on view, with plenty of recriminations and incriminations, make for a lovely evening of seeing who’s worse than whom.

Margot (Kate Abbruzzese), Maxine (Krystel Lucas), Tony (Patrick Andrews), Inspector Hubbard (Kate Burton) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Which is to say that it’s not really a murder mystery—in the sense of a whodunit—but rather a “what happens next”? and “can they get away with it”? Plotted gracefully and unfolding like a classic game of cat and mouse, Dial M for Murder takes us back to theater that has no great ax to grind nor points to make. Like the "thriller genre” that author Maxine (Krystel Lucas) earns her bread writing and Tony Wendice (Patrick Andrews), husband of her friend Margot Wendice (Kate Abbruzzese), earns his promoting, the play insists that people killing other people is always interesting, at least, and may sometimes involve various motives (we’re told there are five key motives for murder), sundry complications, and who knows what sort of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant.

Someone has info about Margot that she’d rather Tony not know, but will she pay to get it back—it’s a letter that exposes facts about Margot and Maxine and so would topple the arranged world of the well-off Wendices (it’s Margot’s money), to say nothing of Tony and Maxine’s professional standing. Further complication arrives when a person from Tony’s past is enlisted to do away with Margot in an overly ingenious plan that could go wrong any number of ways. Of course it does but I won’t say just how and then the question becomes what happens next . . . and will they get away with it?

Margot Wendice (Kate Abbruzzese) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sprawling across two Acts (each under an hour), Hatcher’s Dial M works like a well-oiled machine, one that’s been remodeled in ways that should appeal to modern audiences. Indeed, it’s hard to overlook the switch in sexual politics: in the original, Margot is almost a “fall gal” and the ease with which she’s made out to be a villain is surprising, but for the fact that as a woman in the Fifties she has little voice or status when the males—Tony and the writer (male originally)—seem to team up against her along with the male inspector. In Hatcher’s version, only Tony and his former schoolmate, a ne’er-do-well now known as Lesgate (Denver Milord, grand as blandly malevolent and agreeably unpredictable) are male; the three women unite, sort of, in trying to snare the perpetrator in their complex web of timing and switched latch keys, and the way he tries to match their machinations is most of the fun.

Lesgate (Denver Milord), Tony Wendice (Patrick Andrews) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

As Tony, Patrick Andrews has a wonderful jauntiness and a coldly calculating air that is both winning and chilling. He has a practiced way of breaking the fourth wall ever so slightly, clueing us into his inner workings with a look or a gesture that is only for us to read. As Inspector Hubbard, Kate Burton follows suit, somewhat, pointing us to places where alibis and evidence don’t add up. Kate Abbruzzese’s Margot emotes high stress, puts up with a lot, and comes out looking great and ready to address the matter at hand with convincing aplomb—one senses Tony is no match for her at all but she mostly lies low so he won’t notice, until it’s too late? The one note in the cast I question is Krystel Lucas’ Maxine: twice Margot, no fool, suggests—even if only teasing—that she suspects Maxine might be the one trying to blackmail her or even trying to have her killed. If there’s to be any force behind the suggestion, Maxine should seem at least potentially malevolent or mercurial enough to make us believe anything. As played, Lucas’s Maxine seems very upright and the person most likely to save the day.

Maxine (Krystel Lucas), Margot (Kate Abbruzzese) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A minor point perhaps, and the only wrinkle I observed in this silky smooth production, full of murderous charm and an arch acceptance of that line that used to haunt us on the old “Inner Sanctum” film series: “Yes, even you could commit . . . MURDER!” All it takes is motive and opportunity, seemingly.

 And now you should have motive enough to take this opportunity to see long-serving and much admired theater artist Mark Lamos’ final production as Artistic Director of Westport Country Playhouse.

Dial M for Murder
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
From the Original by Frederick Knott
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Kate Marvin; Wig, Hair & Make-Up Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Director/Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Dialect Coach: Shane Ann Younts; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre; Assistant Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu

Cast: Kate Abbruzzese, Patrick Andrews, Kate Burton, Krystel Lucas, Denver Milord

 Westport Country Playhouse
July 11-30, 2023

A Troubling Trouble in Mind

Review of Trouble in Mind, Hartford Stage

The purpose of theater in both addressing a public and creating a viable theatrical space in which talent is showcased and convincing dramatic or comic roles are enacted is under scrutiny in Alice Childress’ complex, satiric, and politically motivated play from 1957, Trouble in Mind. Within this exploration of the rigors of a professional production—we’re supposedly watching the rehearsals for an upcoming Broadway show, Chaos in Belleville—there is plenty of room for Childress to examine the plight of theater in her day, which turns out to be not very different from the concerns of our day. The plight of trying to do truth while at the same time shackling a play’s messages and meanings to holdover clichés, stereotypes, or to whatever new theatrical mannerisms (in this case Method Acting) have arisen to christen a new era looms large. In our day, the question of diversity on all fronts has all but ended any notion of theatrical unity; in Childress’ time, the process of chipping away at the Great White Edifice on the Great White Way was just getting underway.

The cast of Trouble in Mind at Hartford Stage, directed by Christopher D. Betts (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Childress, who spent a long time as an actress herself, knew the lingo, knew the backstage chat and sparring, and had observed and experienced the little indignities and the overweening egoism of actors’ lives. What helps sustain our interest in this collection of actors--Wiletta Mayer (Heather Alicia Simms), Sheldon Forrester (Michael Rodgers), Bill O’Wray (James Joseph O’Neil), Judy Sears (Sarah Lyddan), Millie Davis (Chelsea Lee Williams), and John Nevins (Sideeq Heard)—is the way they play with the parts in the Belleville play and play their own roles in the process of creating theater. So, while Judy might seem at first a perky airhead, that’s partly because her ingenue role expects it of her; meanwhile, a practiced dissembler like Sheldon Forrester—the elder in the company—knows how to act “the darkie” in a way that puts white egos at ease, while also asserting himself—via voice and histrionic presence—as an actor in the grand manner. Bill O’Wray, a soap opera star, treats every role as a job he pretty much plays the same way, not interested in interacting with the cast or exploring method; Millie Davis shows off gaudy jewelry to convince her colleagues she doesn’t really need to act, so well-off is her husband, and so maintains a certain aloofness; John Nevins is the newbie, earnest and ingratiating but his ambition—to use the play as a vehicle to launch his career—is as real as anything. Then there’s Wiletta Mayer, who reluctantly emerges as the conscience of the cast, a role for which she hasn’t fully explored all the implications.

We first meet Wiletta as she arrives earliest to rehearsal. This gives her the opportunity to interact with Henry, an aging theater-hand who remembers a grand theatrical moment in her past career—for which he designed the lighting. With that exchange, Childress stresses her sense of theater: it’s ephemeral even at its best, and yet—as an experience—it can create a longstanding awareness shared by these two who achieved something together even if only meeting for the first time. The tension between who they are at their best—in the theater—and who they are otherwise (just folks) is clear from the start. That contrast inspires mostly comic deliveries, but Betts downplays Childress’ satire as though the target of playing at playing is too easy and too readily assessed. What does emerge is that “Tomming”—assuaging white egos by playing up to them, like an “Uncle Tom”—is key to success for black actors but that some version of such dissembling (kissing-ass) is an element generally present wherever hierarchies preside. So that Eddie (Adam Langdon), the white put-upon assistant to the white director Al Manners (John Bambery) is pretty much always “Tomming,” as is Henry.

In my view, the biggest problem with the Hartford Stage production of this intriguing play is John Bambery’s Al Manners. Having seen a very nuanced rendering of this character in another production, I have a hard time getting a read on why Manners is so incessantly tiresome. Bambery approaches his lines as if hacking away at blocks of ice, whereas the character—as a director who feels he’s actually progressive while having to deal with indignities on all sides (from an ex-wife, from his producers, from his cast, and his underlings)—has a trajectory to run: from seeming to know how this works to not having a definite conviction any longer. It’s worth mentioning the weak point of the production because it seems to me that the strength of the real director’s approach is Christopher Betts’ willingness to push this play until “not having a definite conviction” is a state of affairs that can’t really be improved and can only be endured.

Early on, Manners tries to lord it over Wiletta, after she sings a song in the play with the kind of subdued, spiritualist fervor she knows he wants. Not content, he eggs her on with “word association” and other Method techniques to make her question and “justify” her choices. The next rendition has a different register, much closer to “we shall overcome,” a rallying cry. Manners rejects the innovation at once and so the cast (and us) see that he’s all bluster, not really wanting to find new possibilities in trite material. It’s a fully present moment, convincingly played.

John Nevins (Sideeq Heard), Sheldon Forrester (Michael Rodgers), Al Manners (John Bambery), Eddie (Adam Langdon), Judy (Sarah Lyddan), Wiletta (Heather Alicia Simms) in the Hartford Stage production of Trouble in Mind (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

More questionable is a key moment in Act Two: the play—Chaos in Belleville—is an “anti-lynching” play in which a young black man gets lynched (though other outcomes might be possible). Someone says that none present have ever seen a lynching and that’s when Sheldon Forrester speaks up. He has, and proceeds to describe what he saw. In Rodgers’ delivery as Forrester, the tale takes on a rhapsodic feel, working against the excruciating detail of what he tells. It’s as if Betts has chosen to let Forrester—a thoroughly theatrical presence—turn actual oppression into aria (as theater will do again and again). The point is that Childress’s play, in openly questioning, through Wiletta Mayer, all the givens of a play like Chaos in Belleville, with its crowd-pleasing and guilt-assuaging BS, also questions how to render the theatrical reality of her own play, a question that Betts’ production worries to the end.

According to Arminda Thomas’ account in the show’s playbill, the play’s ending continued to be an issue. When the play was bound for Broadway, Childress baulked at the suggested ending (the actors all agree with Wiletta against Manners) and the play was not produced; as late as 1992, for a London production, Childress reworked the ending. The problem of the ending, we could say, is that the play can’t solve it. No actor, no director hired to put on a particular play can really change it to make it their own play. What is needed is a black female playwright able to write a better play than Chaos in Belleville, and—while she knows she is that playwright—Childress chooses to write a play that dramatizes that need rather than resolving it. At play’s end, it’s not Wiletta we have to believe in but in Childress, in Lorraine Hansberry, in Adrienne Kennedy, in Suzan-Lori Parks. We know they are coming, but they’re not there yet (in the play).

By restaging this early confrontational play, Betts lets us work through the problems that won’t go away: How to authentically enact what you never experienced when so many want to own a particular history? The cast becomes more and more convinced that they don’t know how the play should be rendered, as if in a proto “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation…” (which Betts directed while a graduate student), and Childress knows there is real drama in that realization. Or: How to put audiences on the hook and then let them off the hook so that they go away feeling vindicated for their sensitivity? That element—which we can say is still the earmark of the successful play able to enact uplift from suffering—is already questioned by Wiletta’s different renderings of a song, or by her choice at the end of making a speech where the principal of radical theater requires her not to do it “in character,” but however she happens to feel right now, as we conclude. And how we feel about that is all about whether or not we are with her as she grapples with the constraints and the freedoms her playwright and her director (Childress and Betts) put upon her.

The “trouble” of Trouble in Mind is that it’s purpose is to trouble the waters, not resolve the issues. Our task is to watch the agitation and think through its implications. To keep all that trouble in mind, until it does someone some good.

Trouble in Mind
By Alice Childress
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Scenic Design: Baron E. Pugh; Costume Design: Jahise LeBouef; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna; Wig Design: Carissa Thorlakson; Dramaturg: Arminda Thomas; Casting Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Avery James Evans; Assistant Stage Manager: Anaïs Bustos

Cast: John Bambery, Sideeq Heard, Richmond Hoxie, Adam Langdon, Sarah Lyddan, James Joseph O’Neil, Michael Rodgers, Heather Alicia Simms, Chelsea Lee Williams

Hartford Stage
May 25-June 18, 2023

Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me

Review of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, New Haven Theater Company

Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit isn’t a play so much as a theatrical event, one that requires a new actor each night who has not seen the script or read about the play. It also requires audience participation, and, with no director, the show is apt to be enacted quite differently each time it’s done. There’s suspense, laughs, and the kind of unexpected turns that only live theater can provide.

New Haven Theater Company has elected to put on the play for six performances this month. The first three—with Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, respectively—have already played. The remaining three—with Deena Nicol-Blifford, Trevor Williams, George Kulp, respectively—are next weekend. Note, the Thursday performance, on the 18th at 7:30, is sold out. For tickets for the 19th or 20th, go here.

Audiences can expect to be more interactive than is the norm, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, as the Actor has to just go with what the script asks, reading it aloud totally cold. Much of the interest comes from the quirkiness of Soleimanpour, who speaks in the script in his own voice, describing his situation (in 2010) when he could not leave Iran because he refused to perform military service. His play traveled the globe in his stead. What’s more, the problem of how to reach distant audiences is answered, sort of, by making them interact with his play. And so much of his play is about the theatrics themselves, making the space we inhabit during the play potentially very lively.

Themes do surface, such as: who’s in charge here? Is it incumbent upon the audience to do whatever the Actor voicing the script asks? Does the Actor have to do whatever the script says? Are participants allowed to ad lib? Soleimanpour gives out his email address during the play and wants the audience to keep their phones on (though not to take calls!) so that they can send him updates if they choose.

Much of what concerns the play has to do with the element of risk in theater, but also a further contextual risk that Soleimanpour feels as a citizen without full freedom of movement or speech. Soleimanpour spends a lot of time telling us about experiments in which white rabbits come to accept the convention of attacking, first, a rabbit who gets dyed red for climbing a ladder to get a carrot, and, later, any rabbit that climbs the ladder.

Soleimanpour, we see, spends a lot of time thinking about who gets singled out for attack.

He also spends time thinking about how a play can be like a gun, aimed to bring about a certain outcome, by coercion, by threat, but also a prop you can play Russian Roulette with. And that’s an important element in the play’s conclusion.

That much is safe to say, but to go into any more particulars about the play I’d have to put in a Spoiler Alert. Mind you, there’s no particular reason why you (as potential audience member) should know as little about the play as the Actor does, but it does make for a more interesting evening. I can say that because I saw a production of the play at Yale Cabaret over a decade ago, when the play was new, and seeing it again, with New Haven Theater Company, I didn’t feel the same uneasy “where is this going?” feeling that is perhaps key to what makes this such an interesting night of theater. If you know where it’s going and what questions it turns on, it’s much easier to just sit back and watch what happens.

But the play, with all its unpredictable audience participation, works to generate a feeling that what is happening is happening right now and might not happen again. At least not with the particular Actor (who might just die!) and the particular audience (which may or may not find that daring) of any particular performance.

Steve Scarpa, the night I saw the show, was a good-natured stand-in for us. That’s how I felt about it. Like we were all in this together: he had the task of reading the script to us and doing some daffy things, and also bringing members of the audience up and getting them to do some minimal or questionable things, and we had the task of cheering him on. And some of us were asked to do certain things on cue. (I liked the guy with a cane who seemed to be ready to just ad lib the thing away from Scarpa’s patient master of ceremonies.) I have to admit, too, that I took over the role of the final “red rabbit” who reads the script aloud after the Actor is told to relinquish it. That part, I should think, will play very differently each night, depending on how the Actor reacts to what’s asked of him or her at the end.

When I saw it before, in an atmosphere fostered by late night theater among a lot of students, the feeling was lighter, with the audience glad to have opportunities to intervene. At NHTC on Saturday night, that interventionist element was absent and there was a much more casual feeling, at least until  Scarpa’s very serious demeanor after he went “off book.” At that point the silence of the Actor is striking as he becomes what some audience members have been at times: someone asked to do something on cue. Each Actor will have to play the last scene in their own way.

What will it be like with the remaining three Actors? Head down to New Haven Theater Company and get in the act.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
By Nassim Soleimanpour
New Haven Theater Company
May 11-20, 2023

Troubled Waters

Review of the ripple, the wave that carried me home, Yale Repertory Theatre

Think of swimming pools, those oases of exclusion. Do you “belong” to the pool? That’s the question I remember from back there in my suburban Sixties. If you “belong,” you can swim. If not, not. And in segregated communities it was clear at once who belonged and who didn’t. That state of affairs—from her parents’ childhood and her own—is what has come back to haunt Janice (Jennean Farmer), an African American woman who left behind her father’s hometown of Beacon, KS, a long time ago. The agent of memory: Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (Adrienne S. Wells), a relentless voice—indeed, very chipper—leaving messages on her machine, in an effort to have Janice come back for a tribute to her dad, who fought for desegregated access and for pools for Blacks, and the dedication of a pool in his name.

Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells), Helen (Chalia La Tour), Edwin (Marcus Henderson), Janice (Jennean Farmer) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Christina Anderson’s evocative memory play, the ripple, the wave that carried me home is long on exposition, layering in a lots of details across a range of eras to give context and political implication to much of what Janice, who speaks directly to the audience a good deal of the time, wants to impart to us. Jennean Farmer presents Janice in a forthright, engaging way but we might sometimes wonder why she’s telling us all this; that question is effectively offset by the fact that Janice herself is not altogether sure. She’s navigating her past, looking for where the flow of memory snags, as it were. Farmer is particularly adept at rendering the very fluid ages in which we see Janice and their different contexts.

The scenic elements of the play—most involving her parents Edwin (Marcus Henderson) and Helen (Chalia La Tour) and Aunt Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells)—play as enacted recollections which lends them a kind of detachment that, as the play goes on, even begins to supply a certain element of wish fulfillment. Janice is trying to figure out the past, to find a relation to her father and mother that lives up to the truth but which also lets her find meaning she can value. And that’s the throughline that holds us: because there are some rough patches Janice has to cope with and how they register will say much about their ultimate status in her sense of herself. The way “who we were when” tends to.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Edwin (Marcus Henderson) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Early on, Edwin tells his young daughter a funny story of how he and some friends crashed a segregated pool—the story, in Henderson’s spirited delivery, is told for laughs, to hear how audacious the boys were and how appalled all the white folks were. The trespassers were never identified and so got away with it. Then comes the punchline and it’s a punch in the gut: the pool was closed so that it could be fully drained and refilled, as if it had been “infected.”

Helen (Chalia La Tour), Janice (Jennean Farmer) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

So, while Janice is proud of her parents and their activism, there are a lot of sore points that resurface in those waves of memory. Another, much more harrowing, involves her mother and escalating humiliations and affronts that ultimately have Janice rethinking which of her parents should be getting the tribute. That question—while never overstated—remains present throughout. While Henderson’s Edward is mostly a likeable figure (check out that dance!), there’s a sense in which the ethos of the dominant male requires more than interrogation: it must be supplemented if not supplanted entirely. In a wonderfully modulated performance, Chalia La Tour’s Helen captures a particular woman at very particular moments in her life, with a dignity that is unshakeable. She’s a woman with a “life plan” who has so many hopes checked by strategies of bigotry and exclusion, and yet her strength is unyielding. The look on her face in the final pool exercise routine is priceless, such measured joy barely contained.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Likewise Adrienne S. Wells’ Aunt Gayle at times made me want to watch an alternative play: the Aunt Gayle Story. For Janice is one of those over-earnest narrators for whom each incident must be milked for all possible trauma or joy, whereas Gayle is someone with a much more even sense of life; her reactions to the trial of the LA policemen who beat Rodney King help create a context of low expectations and ongoing outrage. Wells says so much with how she holds her head or moves, she’s a great asset to this production.

Woodward’s cast moves in and out of times and scenes seamlessly, able to signal the emphases that Janice finds while reliving these stories for us. While the production’s efforts to enact the particulars of this particular past are laudable, it’s not a play that ignites into great passions the way a less mediated presentation might. All along we’re aware that Janice is fine, and narrating, and that the harrowing past—with its confrontations, triumphs, setbacks, joys and sorrows—is only there if she wants to revisit, to find again what lessons can be learned. The King repercussions create a moment when even Janice—apt to feel superior to Chipper—can hug her “like strangers, like family, like sisters, like aliens traumatized by our time on this dysfunctional planet.”

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ultimately, we gain a sense of how fraught is the business of dramatizing the past, a factor that a searching playwright like Christina Anderson is willing to make thematic to the task of playwriting itself. The characters and their presentation are motivated by the need to tell stories that have both communal and personal resonance. If the ripple, the wave that carried me home may be a bit too overt in its effort to present the confluence of the personal and political, it also is unafraid to attest that, as Edwin says, “this country is built on selective memory.”

If so, a different selection might build a different country.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Helen (Chalia La Tour), Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

the ripple, the wave that carried me home
by Christina Anderson
directed by Tamilla Woodward

Scenic Designer: Emmie Finckel; Costume Designer: Aidan Griffiths; Lighting Designer: Alan C. Edwards; Projection Designer: Henry Rodriguez; Sound Designer: Evdoxia Ragkou; Hair and Makeup Designers: Hannah Fennell Gellman, Eric M. Glover; Technical Director: Nate Angrick; Vocal Coach: Julie Foh; Intimacy and Fight Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Andrew Petrick

Cast: Jennean Farmer, Marcus Henderson, Chalia La Tour, Adrienne S. Wells

Yale Repertory Theatre
April 28-May 20, 2023

Touch and Go

Review of The Rembrandt, TheaterWorks Hartford

The question of how one reacts to a work of art concerns Jessica Dickey’s The Rembrandt, now playing at TheaterWorks Hartford. It’s a play that also addresses themes of mortality and care, and questions of philosophy and poetry and what we leave behind. It may sound awfully heavy, but Dickey’s play, directed by Maria Mileaf with an excellent cast, strives to put such matters in the everyday environments of work and domesticity, to make art and all it entails a part of life.

It's a goal only partly achieved because something gets in the way, more than a little. And that’s the art of theater as a way of staging incidents and events so that we believe them or question them, go with it or work against it. Dickey, we could say, courts a certain amount of resistance to how she navigates her four slightly heterogeneous segments. But we can also say that the disjunctions sometimes seem more like dysfunctions.

We begin in a nicely appointed museum space (Neil Patel, Set Design) where Henry (Michael Chenevert), a slightly pretentious but likeable guard interacts with Jonny (Brandon Espinoz), a less educated and more forthright armed guard. The patter illuminates certain things about Henry: his male partner has a terminal illness, and he hasn’t been maybe the caliber of caregiver that Jonny expects; also, that Henry finds being on the job—he arrives early so he can be in the dark with the art—a kind of satori or special space that Jonny, for whom this is just a job primarily, doesn’t quite share.

Enter a “copyist” named Madeline (Amber Reauchean Williams) who is there to try to render a copy of Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” (which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and who has recently experienced the loss of her grandmother, the kind of “patron of the arts” that Henry has evoked, in a comical but on-the-money commentary very apropos to the dwindling “Old School” resources of theaters and museums and other arts institutions.

So, two characters enthralled by art; another less so but a conscientious worker. Enter a new employee: Dodger (Ephraim Birney), whose mohawk is supposed to suggest, perhaps, a kind of non-conformity that might be meaningful. It is, but how successful and motivated his challenge is is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The unexpected element then intrudes: after a well-played scene that acts as something of a coup de théâtre, we travel through time to the world of Rembrandt (Chenevert), his former servant now mistress Henny (Williams), and Titus (Birney, playing a child without really making that clear), son of the artist and his deceased wife, Saskia.  Why we’re there, but for an impressive set change, feels whimsical at best, though the idea seems to be that treating art objects as cult items undermines human access. That may have something to do with it, arguably.

Even less clear is why Titus’s contact with the bust of Homer brings in a soliloquy from Homer (Michael Bryan French) wherein philosophy and poetry are pondered as human artifacts that may have personal meaning but that aspire to something more universal. And that seems to be the note that draws us back to Henry’s story as he finally chooses to spend what time is left with the dying Simon (French), also a poet and the one character who actually has some comical things to say—the bit about the pistachio pudding is a high point.

While Dickey’s throughlines can be a bit oblique, the good news is that the play keeps us guessing and maybe wondering along with it. Give it credit for not being predictable even if unpredictability in itself is no great aesthetic achievement. Also give credit to the cast. One reason I might be so dissatisfied with the Rembrandt portion is that I was so impressed by how well Chenevert and Williams enacted Henry and Madeline as characters with some common ground and maybe things to learn about one another. Instead: an earthy patriarch and his doting familiars, some rambling by an alleged “father of poetry,” and, finally, more of Henry, now abetted by his spirited lover, nearing the grave.

Through it all, what emerges best is probably Dickey’s main concern: how do we say we care—about other humans, about art, about the things that we collectively and sometimes personally value? Art is important here because it plays different roles for different people for different reasons, and yet it is something we can participate in collectively—like theater.

The Rembrandt
By Jessica Dickey
Directed by Maria Mileaf

Set Design: Neil Patel; Costume Design: Katherine Roth; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Bart Fasbender; Projection Design: Camilla Tassi; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Cast: Ephriam Birney; Michael Chenevert; Michael Bryan French; Brandon Espinoza; Amber Reauchean Williams

TheaterWorks, Hartford
April 21-May 14, 2023

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

Tribal Values

Review of Mojada, A Medea in Los Angeles, Yale Repertory Theatre

The impressive housefront onstage recalls both a temple and a mausoleum (Marcelo Martínez García, set design). The action of the play takes place before it as though in a symbolic space where what will be manifest is the tragedy of a people who do not belong anywhere, least of all in that house owned by the play’s nemesis. Indeed, the tableaux that open and close Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery at Yale Repertory Theatre, are two of the most powerful moments in the play.  

Tita (Alma Martinez) in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)

At the start, we witness Tita (Alma Martinez), an aged woman, handling two giant feathers. When clapped together, they conjure up sounds of the past, giving us a quick aural history of the storied family we’re about to meet; and at the close, a vision of a bird—the guaco, with whom Medea (Camila Moreno) has been strongly identified—rises above the house like an avenging angel. Those paired moments provide compelling theatrics to a production—adapted from the tragedy by Euripides that dramatizes the ancient Greek myth of Medea and Jason—that too often suffers from static presentation and stereotyped characters in this contemporary tale of immigrant tragedy in a scrappy barrio of Los Angeles. 

Medea (Camila Moreno) in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwright Luis Alfaro lulls us into what might seem a comic fable of a family of newcomers from Zamora, Mexico—Medea, her husband Hason (Alejandro Hernández), their son Acan (Romar Fernandez) and the family servant Tita—gradually adapting with both sorrows and joys to the new world in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles (some 1120 miles north) where they now live. The happy family segments show us how eager Hason is to assimilate—urging his son to wear U.S. soccer colors rather than Mexico’s—and how ambitiously he tries to please his female boss, Armida (Mónica Sánchez), a big mover in local real estate who owns the house they rent. On the more traditional side—or “tribal,” as a neighbor Josefina, or “Josey,” (Nancy Rodríguez) likes to say—we hear of Medea’s great skills as a seamstress and, in addition to a folkloric tale in which Hason first met her while seeking the guaco she was imitating, Medea is also identified with Mexico itself. We learn she’s too fearful to leave the house even for a daytrip to the pier. Only gradually do we hear not only the story of the family’s harrowing journey to the US but of the conditions that precipitated the family’s flight. 

The cast of the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)

Which is a way of saying there’s a lot of backstory here. Much of the past is recounted in hypnotic speeches that reference acts of violence and outrage that seem to intrude from a different play. The disjuncture comes from trying to wed the character of Medea, as received from Euripides, with Camila Moreno’s much more benign and afflicted character in Alfaro’s play. Here we feel that Medea is meant to be the sympathetic heroine of the play, so that her eventual vengeance has moral force. Maybe in myth, but in realistic terms—and the play likes its naturalism—the harms Medea suffers from her husband, while vexing, are not exactly the stuff of Greek drama. The suspension of disbelief is not so easily afforded. 

The Medea of Euripides is a wronged woman from another city, transplanted by her husband, whom she has helped with sorcery, and now abandoned by him (the fate of their children is still being decided as the play takes place). She has her griefs and is willing to transform herself into an implacable Fury to achieve her revenge. Alfaro doesn’t give his Medea the space to enact such a transformation. One minute she’s listening to the fulsome blandishments of the tiresomely buoyant Josefina while making her a dress to inspire passion in a dull husband, and the next she’s sewing a witchy gown to destroy Armida, Hason’s soon-to-be new US bride (Medea and Hason were never actually married, apparently).  

Hason (Alejandro Hernandez), Medea (Camila Moreno), Armida (Monica Sanchez) in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)

There’s a sense that Alfaro wants characters like Josefina and Armida to play as broad caricatures, but, if so, their part in the story works against outright comedy. An evil queen in a Disney movie Armida may be and her fate may be received as one of those magic realism moments that are so popular, but, even so, such touches make us wonder whose story Mojada is trying to dramatize. Medea’s act has to do, vaguely, with a blow against patriarchy. How better to undermine Hason’s machismo then attacking him through his progeny (a word that finds a joking relevance from one of Josefina’s stories)? Or might we say that Acan’s fate was sealed the minute he changed his team colors? 

Acan (Romar Fernandez) in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, directed by Laurie Woolery (photo by Joan Marcus)

In the Rep production, the play’s best feature—besides that opening and close—is Alma Martinez’s Tita. She has to be both Greek chorus and Mexican housekeeper, as well as a figure who seems, like a bit of a Tiresias, to see what it all might amount to in some big book of myth. She’s a wonderful grounding presence throughout, full of reactions, and even the tendency to make her a figure of stereotypical peasant grit is worn with a requisite irony, as in her great speech about “smiling, though I hate you.” 

About hubris the ancient Greeks were never wrong. The missteps of humanity could always be put into perspective by a tragic fate, a decree of the gods. Adapting the Greeks’ fatalistic outlook to contemporary settings commonly presents a tempting challenge for contemporary playwrights, though such attempts at times may seem acts of hubris in themselves.

Mojada, A Medea in Los Angeles
By Luis Alfaro
Directed by Laurie Woolery

Scenic Designer: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Designer: Kitty Cassetti; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Projection Designer: Shawn Lovell-Boyle; Sound Designer: Bryn Scharenberg; Wig Designer: Krystal Balleza/Wig Associates; Production Dramaturgs: Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas, Nicholas Orvis; Technical Director: Andrew Riedermann; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Aisling Galvin

Cast: Romar Fernandez, Alejandro Hernández, Alma Martinez, Camilla Moreno, Nancy Rodriguez, Mónica Sánchez

Yale Repertory Theatre
March 10-April 1, 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

New Haven Theater Company Presents Goldfish

On Chapel Street, in the New Haven Theater Company’s black box theater behind the English Market store, John Watson is at work bringing to life the local troupe’s first full production since Annapurna, which Watson also directed. For both shows, he also designed the complicated sets. 

The new play is Goldfish by Jonathan Kolvenbach, and it opens tonight, playing Thursday through Saturday this weekend and next, March 2-11. 

“If you’d asked me five years ago,” Watson reflected, “I wouldn’t’ve said I prefer directing to acting. But I’ve begun to.” To some extent that’s because, past a certain age, it’s hard to find roles that are worth doing, but it also must have something to do with the ability to chose plays that play to the strengths of the long-lived company. And those strengths are considerable; Watson, who has long experience in theater, stresses “the high IQ of the Company, the best I’ve ever worked with.” Annapurna showcased longtime Company members Susan Kulp and J. Kevin Smith in a provocative, gripping play about exes. Now Watson directs a cast of four, all relatively new to the Company or to working with Watson, in a “terrific take on young love” finding itself in the midst of parental misguiding. 

As Watson points out, this is the second play by Kolvenbach that NHTC has assayed. Love Song, which featured the couple Susan and George Kulp and their daughter Jo, along with Company regular Christian Shaboo, was co-directed by Watson and NHTC regular Margaret Mann in 2018. It was a play of interesting characters fueled by good dialogue. And those are some of the key ingredients NHTC—where agreement on a play chosen to be produced must be unanimous—look for. When Watson and Mann began searching for plays to suggest to the Company, they naturally turned to scripts by authors whose plays had worked in the past. Goldfish—a four hander—had, Watson said, “the right energy, and we felt it would be good to do coming out of hiatus.” It’s also a chance for NHTC to “find new legs with new members.” 

The entire cast of Goldfish are relative newcomers to New Haven Theater Company, which has existed since the late 2000s with a core group dating back many years, and now has nine new members. That in itself is a good sign. For the current show, three new members—Sara Courtemanche, Sandra Rodriguez, John Strano—are in the cast, joined by guest player Nick Fetherston, and three others are working in the show’s tech. It’s a busy show of twelve scenes played without intermission over 80-90 minutes on a set with two distinct sides and a black flat in the middle. 

The conflict in the show is intergenerational and that means it’s a good play for both younger and more mature roles. The main question of the play, Watson says, is “whether the trauma of the parents (who are both now single) messes up” the college-aged lovers. The pleasure in the script, for Watson, is that these are “all smart people, the dialogue is enjoyable, funny, witty, and that all the characters have a way with words.”

There’s also what Watson sees as the meaning of the play, or what makes it all hang together. As the show’s director, Watson says, he’s read the play 50-60 times. He continues to see new things in how well the play is crafted, in drawing its parallels between characters and in how it shows that “love, although it can be disastrous, is the only thing that makes life work." 

Loving theater is a requisite of making it work as well, and the latest production to be offered by the New Haven Theater Company has the promise of fitting in well with its history of showcasing well-written plays with engaging characters in complex situations. In attending the show, let’s say, you won’t just be fishing for gold.

Goldfish
By Jonathan Kolvenbach
Directed by John Watson

New Haven Theater Company
English Building Market
839 Chapel Street
New Haven

March 2, 3, 4, 10, 11: 8 pm
March 9: 7:30 pm

new haven theater company

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

Home is Where

Review of Fun Home, TheaterWorks Hartford

Rob Ruggiero, artistic director of TheaterWorks, knows what works in the intimate Hartford theater space and as director of the Tony-winning musical Fun Home, he delivers. The closeness to the action makes the show seem all the more magical as—with a cast of ten, including three children—Ruggiero pulls out a range of moods, situations, and production numbers, all emerging from a memory space in the mind of cartoonist Alison as she tries to come to terms with her own life and the huge, potentially traumatizing shadow her demanding father flung over it.

Julia Nightingale as Medium Alison, Sarah Beth Pfeifer as Alison, Skylar Lynn Matthews as Small Alison in the TheaterWorks Hartford production of Fun Home; photo by Mike Marques

As adapted from Alison Bechdel’s celebrated graphic novel by Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music), Fun Home is a fully engaged and engaging twenty-first century musical. Its story parallels Alison’s story of her coming out as a lesbian—to herself, to the Gay Student Union, to her first girlfriend Joan, and, via letter, to her parents, Bruce (Aaron Lazar) and Helen (Christiane Noll)—during her freshman year in college with her discovery, in a fraught phone call with her mother, that her father has had many same-sex liaisons, some illegal and predatory because of underage partners.

Bruce’s early death means the possibility of any deeper understanding of his story can only come via Alison’s adult perspective on her memories (though it does seem odd that no insights from her brothers, one older, one younger, are ever referenced). Alison’s memories are rendered by Alison as adult (Sarah Beth Pfeifer), Medium Alison, as college student (Julia Nightingale), and Small Alison, as a child (Skylar Lynn Matthews). The age-appropriate casting creates a wonderfully balanced trio whose movements about the stage, in and out of each other’s vantages, amount to fascinating and motivated choreography.

Skylar Lynn Matthews as Small Alison, foreground, Aaron Lazar as Bruce, background, in Fun Home; photo by Mike Marques

As part of the story, the show’s songs are given many dramatic purposes: as soliloquy—the show-stealing “Changing My Major (to Joan)” is all it should be as performed by Julia Nightingale, a perfect Medium Alison; as family fun—when Small Alison (Skylar Lynn Matthews) and her brothers Christian (Myles Low) and John (Jasper Burger) enact their infectious musical ad for “fun home,” the family’s pet name for the funeral home their father runs out of their house; as flashback—when Alison recalls the first outwardly “butch” woman she ever saw, Skylar Lynn Matthews sings “Ring of Keys” with great stage presence, capturing the giddy innocence of the song’s essence remarkably well; as group fantasy—as when the entire cast does a Partridge Family-style rendering of “Raincoat of Love,” that’s catchy, endearing, and cheesy, giving us instant insight into the provenance of Alison’s fondest pop associations.

Christiane Noll as Helen, foreground, Ali Louis Bourzguiz and Aaron Lazar, background, in Fun Home; photo by Mike Marques

The show’s more harrowing songs come mostly in the final third, as the darker elements that keep coming up—Bruce’s seduction ploys, his “do what you want but risk shameful embarrassment” directives to Small Alison, and other potentially harmful moments, including Small Alison’s first sight of a dead body—finally begin to overwhelm the fuzzier, feel-good elements. Christiane Noll’s Helen, who has been a kind of fleeting presence for most of the show, steps fully to center-stage to deliver “Days and Days.” It's the strongest fully mature song in the show and Noll’s rendition, full of pathos and a command of life lessons that, arguably, Alison still hasn’t grasped, is definitive.

In rendering Bruce’s “Edges of the World,” Lazar almost lets us into the emotional crux of this complicated man, but the sense seems to be that he—unlike his wife—doesn’t have a satisfying narrative to hang his heartbreak on. In general, Lazar, best known for his role in FOX’s Filthy Rich, does an estimable job with a role that requires a very episodic treatment: we see Bruce as he’s seen by his daughter at various times in her life and the effort to depict scenes she didn’t see only underscores how little she knows of his true feelings.

Sarah Beth Pfeifer as Alison Aaron Lazar as Bruce in Fun Home; photo by Mike Marques

This comes out in the fraught number “Telephone Wire,” where adult Alison fills in for Medium Alison—who actually took that last drive with dad—and can only maunder over his inability to connect while Bruce keeps up his usual deadpan bonhomie. Whatever we’re meant to feel about this missed opportunity for a possible rencontre, the song keeps us at a distance because neither character’s full interiority is available, Alison—at the time—too young, and Bruce, as ever, too remote.

Of the three CT productions of Fun Home I’ve seen, the current production at TheaterWorks is best. The elements of the show that I’ve found wanting—particularly in Alison’s overview of the past—here seem better managed. I felt more emphatically that Alison, onstage, is dramatizing an effort to make a tellable story from fragments—of memory, of fantasy, of history—and not always sure of the result. This effect was nicely underscored by the sketches and scrawls that, as projections, decorate the stage and at times write over the actors. Key to what works here is how well the space is enlisted to make us inhabit a mind at work with its misery, mysteries, and memorable joys.

Sarah Beth Pfeifer as Alison, Aaron Lazar as Bruce in Fun Home at TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

The show has been extended through November 6.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Rob Ruggiero
Music Direction by Jeff Cox

Set Design: Luke Cantarella; Costume Design: Herin Kaputkin; Lighting Design: Rob Denton; Sound Design: Joanna Lynne Staub; Projection Design: Camilla Tassi; Director of Production: Mike Lenaghan; Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Theresa Stark; Casting: Hardt Casting, LLC

Musicians:
Jeff Cox, conductor/keyboard; Morgan Brown, guitars; Kevin Huhn, bass; Harry Kliewe, reeds; Celeste Cumming, cello; Elliot Wallace, drums/percussion; Selah Kwak, violin/viola

Cast:
Jasper Burger, Ali Louis Bourzgui, Sam Duncan, Aaron Lazar, Myles Low, Skylar Lynn Matthews, Julia Nightingale, Christiane Noll, Sarah Beth Pfiefer, Cameron Silliman

TheaterWorks Hartford
October 8-October 30, 2022; extended through November 6

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