Entre Nous

Review of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, now playing at New Haven Theater Company for four more performances—tonight and next Thursday through Saturday—has an unusual remit: to present the story of the friendship between Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) and Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) using only excerpts from the published correspondence between the two famous poets as text to be spoken by the actors playing them. The sense of this restriction is that it lets us hear the voices of these two inestimable writers as pitched to one another, an ongoing verbal pas de deux that lasted thirty years. Indeed, the last letter Bishop wrote Lowell was en route to him in New York when he died of a heart-attack in a cab in 1977. Bishop died two years later.

The premiere production of Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 directed by Les Waters, had a wealth of interesting visual aids to hold our attention. At New Haven Theater Company, director J. Kevin Smith provides a much more intimate approach that has its own very choice theatricality. Set up with seating on all four sides, the play happens before us as an imagined space, one that Lowell and Bishop seemingly enter into readily. Their letters—usually written when considerable distance separates them in life—provide a particular intimacy that each strove to maintain, in different ways at different times. There are dramatized moments—such as their mimed meetings when we don’t get to hear them speak because what they said was not recorded—and moments of whimsy as when one or the other climbs a step latter as though to move above and beyond the quotidian bounds of life.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez), Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

Moving chronologically through this literary acquaintance that becomes a lifelong friendship, we see how the two began, early on, with belief in one another as readers of and commentators on each other’s work. An aspect that never flags, with each dedicating poems to one another, and, late in Lowell’s career, arguing good naturedly but pointedly over Lowell’s use of doctored versions of his former (second) wife’s correspondence in his long poem “The Dolphin.” The “mixing of fact and fiction” is what Bishop objects to, so we can imagine that she would not censure Ruhl’s use of the poets’ correspondence since—though the play does not show us all that was said—the playwright uses only what was actually written. (Though on the question of tampering with written materials—which Bishop also faulted Lowell for—I will offer one cavil: to quote at length from Lowell’s famous poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, without including the lines about the skunk not only truncates a powerful poem, but leaves those unfamiliar with the poem uncertain about what Lowell means when he said, in a letter, that he had become a skunk.)

Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

The notion of the correspondence as a drama is supported by the way the two seem to require one another as audience to lives that move along with much travel and, for Lowell, three wives and two children, and, for Bishop, much time alone and then a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, living together in Brazil, that ended tragically. The friendship between Lowell and Bishop had its more intense phase before Lowell met wife number two, Elizabeth Hardwick, author, critic and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, a powerful letter later in the play shows Lowell giving vent to reminiscence over the early possibility of a marriage to Bishop, whom he met before he met Hardwick. The possibility may have been only in his mind, but as depicted by the play, the earlier moment, when Lowell writes of meeting Hardwick and soon enough is enacting a marriage, finds Bishop sitting at her desk blowing bubbles and seeming to ignore his epistles. Was there ever a chance for these two to live as a settled couple? Doubtful, but, the play suggests, not unimaginable.

How we see this relationship owes much to how it’s staged. The strictures of the play make the audience seem to be reading the words of the poets over the shoulder of the playwright. Ruhl chooses what to include and what to exclude and provides terse statements of fact in a voice-over so that we will know things the letters don’t spell out. In addition, a silent factotum, called Brigit (Abby Klein, wonderfully focused) moves on and offstage, bringing in and removing props, aiding and abetting the dramatic business in a manner that seems to comment ironically on the fact that Lowell and Bishop have gone from living confidantes and career poets—each winning many important prizes—to figures in a play.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) in Dear Elizabeth, photo by New Haven Theater Company

As characters, Rodriguez’s Bishop is the more winning of the two. Rodriguez infuses Bishop with a vital circumspection, a way of approaching life as though it’s happening to someone else. So those moments when she breaks down are all the more powerful as we see at once with what strength of purpose she pursued her very individual life. As Lowell, Buonocore never quite gets across the manic quality in Lowell, which he references in his letters—having not only to take medications but sometimes being relegated to sanitariums. In Lowell’s words one detects a performative quality that does lend itself well to those passages where Buonocore’s Lowell comments drily on others.

The main strength of the play is that it makes us aware of how any attempt to present oneself in a verbal medium begs a certain indulgence from the audience. An audience of one—the person addressed—has now become “the ages,” leaving us to make of these lives what we will. There’s a very successful moment late in the play when Lowell and Bishop circle one another reciting the various salutations and closings they had used with one another in the course of thirty years of letters. The lines compose a poem with very specific referents and contexts, full of affection, self-aware humor and a very, very personal touch, such as only real friends can appreciate between each other.

Dear Elizabeth
A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith

Producer: Margaret Mann; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Designer: Adam Lobelson; Sound Effects: Tom Curley

Cast: Ralph Buonocore, Abby Klein, Sandra E. Rodriguez

New Haven Theater Company
November 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 2024

A Funny Thing Happened at the Theater

Review of The 39 Steps, Westport Country Playhouse

Westport Country Playhouse is back, under new Artistic Director Mark Shanahan, with a scheduled three-play season of comedies. The first, now playing through November 9, is the four-actor, multipart entertainment The 39 Steps, a slapstick rendering of a spy novel by John Buchan that reached the big screen in 1939, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. From that date, you can tell that a plot based on British secrets being leaked to crafty Germans was certainly timely. Nowadays, the espionage hijinks play out as a comically nostalgic recall of music hall comedy, chases on a train, and the clash of London panache with rural Scots oddity, among other things.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

As our often flappable and put-upon hero, Richard Hannay, Joe Delafield looks like he belongs in a film from the Thirties or Forties: lean, “with piercing blue-eyes,” and a rakish moustache, Hannay, bored in his London flat, seeks excitement by going to the theater. There an act called Mr. Memory (Evan Zes) is interrupted by a gunshot and soon Hannay is swept up into a spy plot by Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh), whose hilarious accent and truly comic mannerisms seem to captivate our hero; that is, until she suddenly turns up dead.

Now if you’re thinking that doesn’t sound exactly hilarious, how wrong you are. You have to see the trench-coated hitmen (Zes and Seth Andrew Bridges) waiting by a streetlamp that they carry dutifully onstage each time Hannay or Schmidt looks out the window, and Annabella’s death throes have to be seen to be believed.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield), Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

A major asset of this production is the casting: Delafield looks his part, certainly, and Sayegh conveys well the three different women that Hanny encounters and takes a more than casual interest in, especially plucky Pamela, a blonde who doesn’t buy his preposterous story, with good reason. Their “romantic interludes”—with lighting and sound that arrive on cue like a DeMille close-up—are almost as fun as what happens when two people handcuffed to each other have to navigate varied terrain, or remove stockings.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) with Clown 2 (Evan Zes) and Clown 1 (Seth Andrew Bridges) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Then there are the Clowns, Zes and Bridges. Zes, as Professor Jordan’s wife, looks like Groucho Marx in drag, and his extended effort to introduce Hannay, mistaken as a visiting candidate, at a political rally, is the kind of comedy that really must be done live to come off. We become the baffled rally crowd trying to discern if the speaker is saying anything intelligible at all. It’s a tour de force of silliness. And Bridges, as Professor Jordan, whom Hanny seeks out for help, creates a bizarre character who gets more and more unhinged. The return to the Mr. Memory act brings us full circle with the knowledge of the mysterious MacGuffin called “the 39 Steps” hanging in the balance.

Director Mark Shanahan handles all this with obvious love of the source material—not only Barlow’s adaptation but also the Hitchcock film universe that hovers as background, giving us jokes that play off a creepy but familiar world, as when a silhouette of the Bates Motel indicates Hannay’s and Pamela’s destination. Or when a tableaux of WWI fighter planes suddenly appears when Hannay goes on the run.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Westport’s The 39 Steps is inspired silliness handled with a great feel for the very visual humor of this enthusiastically charged romp.  Is there anything of substance in the story? As a hero, Hannay is typical of Hitchcock who likes his protagonists to be Everymen without any particular agenda. When Hannay is forced to improvise a stump speech in Scotland, he comes up with the kind of “a better world for everyone” rhetoric that sounds good without having any bite. Knowing nothing about the community he is addressing, he’s rather limited in what he can say, but it does somewhat fall on our ears as the sort of speech that, in 1939, would be rather weak and anodyne. But in the play there are real enemies and lives are really at stake. Just like in real life.

The cast of The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow
From the Novel by John Buchan
From the Movie by Alfred Hitchcock
And an Original Concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon
Directed by Mark Shanahan

Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Jeni Schaefer; Lighting Designer: J. Dominic Chacon; Sound Designer: Ryan Rumery; Movement Coordinator: Steve Pacek; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary; Production Assistant: Chris Conte

Cast: Seth Andrews Bridges, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh, Evan Zes

Westport Country Playhouse
October 22-November 9, 2024

Bipolar Soul

Review of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage kicks off its 61st season with a classic, directed by Artistic Director Melia Bensussen. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has been adapted numerous times as plays, films, spoofs and even a musical. One notable film adaptation featured Fredric March in the title double-role, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar for 1931, and was then remade with two-time Oscar winner Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde in 1941. Of course, the notion of a “Jekyll-Hyde” is common parlance for a dual personality, and we might suppose a contemporary version of the play will be somewhat sportive with the theme.

Fortunately, the Hartford Stage production uses Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2009 adaptation, which is respectfully faithful to the plot and the delivery of Stevenson’s multi-perspective tale. Like the theater’s handsomely stylish staging of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a local tradition), Bensussen’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde brings literature to life.

Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Nathan Darrow, Jennifer Rae Bareilles, Peter Stray in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main curiosity, going in, may be: how are they going to handle the transformation scene? Hollywood likes to employ special effects to make the contemporary sense of filmed realism include the fantastic, but the stage is apt to find means a bit more theatrical. Indeed, the inspiration of having Hyde conveyed by multiple actors (Peter Stray, Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Jennifer Rae Bareilles), and several times in tandem or unison, delivers an eerie and intriguing effect. Instead of watching someone in makeup enact a monster, we see how the Hyde personality manifests itself across race and gender and in various spaces simultaneously. And the Hartford Stage, with its wide-open circular playing space surrounded by an amphitheater of seats, is perfect for the swift physicality of this production, which never remains static for long, thanks in part to Shura Baryshnikov’s choreography. The scenic design (Sara Brown) also plays well as the operating theater where Dr. Jekyll (Nathan Darrow) and Sir Danvers Carew (Nayib Felix) do an engaging little number we might call “dueling doctors.”

Nayib Felix, Peter Stray, Sarah Chalfie, Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The story, in Hatcher’s version, includes a woman—Elizabeth Jelkes (Sarah Chalfie)—who actually falls for Mr. Hyde, which gives a different wrinkle to the battle for ascendancy between Jekyll, a staid if somewhat peremptory gentleman who experiments upon himself, and Hyde, a bestial and immoral scoundrel who, the play suggests, might be an exciting person to know. You know how a certain kind of person is readily attracted to “bad boys”?

Nayib Felix, Sarah Chalfie in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

While there are many ways the story might be made more arch or ironic or campy in its presentation and implications, Bensussen’s production is notable for taking Stevenson’s creation and Hatcher’s text seriously. This production works so well not only because it is so well-played and well-staged, but also because the familiar theme seems to have finally escaped the “monster movie” circuit and gotten back to serious drama.

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Darrow’s Jekyll is a man who feels he can manipulate anyone and anything: his friends, the law, science, and even Hyde, his darker or less amenable side. His argument with Dr. Carew is over the question of “the soul” as a material element of the brain or a spiritual essence. The notion that exciting certain areas of the brain and suppressing others would cause complete personality change is credible, and Hatcher brings in elements from another Stevenson story (“The Body Snatcher”) in which the unethical use of cadavers is addressed. Jekyll, we see, is a man who, like Victor Frankenstein (with whom he is often compared), believes that scientific knowledge takes precedence over legal strictures, religious belief and sentimental attachment. His tragedy stems from not really knowing himself. The “evil” in him isn’t a scientific side-effect but an essential element of his psyche. As, indeed, it may be for us all.

Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Watching the story play out is to be implicated to some degree in the sentiments expressed by  a bystander and witness to a brutal murder: she knew she should call for help, but she wanted to watch. The lure of sensationalism and violence is so deeply woven into so much of our entertainment, it is no surprise to learn we have, collectively, a “bad side.” What we might be surprised to learn is how easily that bad side could get along in the world without a care for the missing censure of the “good side.”

Omar Robinson in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Hartford Stage’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fascinating and exciting theater.

 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Sara Brown; Costume Design: An-lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Design: Jodi Stone; Fight Choreographer: Omar Robinson; Voice & Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Julius Cruz; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Jennifer Rae Bareilles; Sarah Chalfie; Nathan Darrow; Nayib Felix; Omar Robinson; Peter Stray

Hartford Stage
October 10-November 3, 2024

Horsing Around

Review of falcon girls, Yale Repertory Theatre

Adolescence in all its earth-shaking, hormonal change is the setting of Hilary Bettis’s falcon girls, now playing in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by May Adrales. While such material may be all-too-familiar in popular films and TV shows, Bettis’ compassionate play benefits from the specificity of its context.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The action, set in the early ‘90s, comes to us through the main viewpoint of the new girl in eighth grade in a school in rural Colorado where ranches and horses abound. H (Gabrielle Policano)—always addressed as Hilary and sometimes “Hillary Clinton” in the play—strikes us at first as an early-teen enthusiast utterly entranced by animal life, particularly horses, and eager to share her love with the world (her mother breaks for animals, especially turtles). In the early going, it seems we’re going to be treated to an extended revamp of Mean Girls, as none of the girls on the FFA (Future Farmers of America) competitive team welcomes a new recruit. H gets to be an alternate to an alternate, and spends her time pining for more status and generally dumping on her single-parent mother, Beverlee (Liza Fernandez), a nurse, for always working.

The classroom stuff is all zippy and overwrought as only young teens can be, and the cast is uniformly excellent at bringing the earnest tones of these girls’ voices to life (though we might begin to wonder why anyone, having lived through middle-school, would want to revisit it). Diversity here takes the form of different levels of disfunction: there’s April (Alexa Lopez), a wide-eyed would-be starlet (she wants to go to Hollywood and marry Neal Patrick Harris, har har); Carly (Alyssa Marek), a troubled girl with abusive father; Mary (Anna Roman), a fully indoctrinated proselytizer for Jesus; Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), whose demanding mom is all about winning no matter what, and Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle, but on opening night played by understudy Gabriela Veciana), a girl who has begun surfing the perilous waters of online chats and phone sex. The girls are fond of stressing that they love each other like sisters and not “like a lesbian.” For a time we might imagine that H is the least burdened, but the second act does away with that view, and suddenly it’s all about the backstory.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle), April (Alexa Lopez), Carly (Alyssa Marek), Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), Mary (Anna Roman) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The best part in the early going is when H sassily takes on the role of “horse evaluator” with her teammates as examples. Terms like “pig-eyed” and “breeding hips” get thrown about as the girls strike postures somewhere between artist models, cover girls and science specimen. We get not only the way the features of humans and horses share certain tell-tale aspects, but also that, in her chosen field, H has what it takes. Which doesn’t mean she’s going to be popular. Also made clear is how important the FFA culture is for these teens, leading not only to status, but to enabling careers from veterinarians to ranchers and entrepreneurs.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The consoling rides back home from lost competitions with Mr. K (Teddy Cañez), the patient, dedicated, and virtuous coach, are charming set-pieces that let all the different agendas of this often catty young team play out. Indeed, Cañez’s warm and knowing performance is a welcome break from the various kinds of hyperventilating on view, which includes the crush of the only male teammate, Dan (Juan Sebastián Cruz), on H, which leads him to be a joke mainly for his sartorial choices and his assumption that posing with a gun is the way to a girl’s heart. Cruz is very agile in the dance numbers (Kimiye Corwin, choreographer) that show us what the kids like to step to and how they work off nervous energy.

Bettis’ main theme is the vulnerability of these girls who are restlessly and self-consciously located somewhere on the continuum between children and adults, while trying to navigate their growing awareness that praying to Jesus and trusting in his love may be more panacea than problem-solver. A plot point about a real local girl—Heather Dawn Church—who was kidnapped and killed by a local man (not identified and arrested until four years later) adds a certain element of foreboding, as the darker side of life might find anyone, and Carly is living in the house formerly occupied by the Church family.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Beverlee (Liza Fernandez) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The story concerns us with the difficulties faced by teens at all times, and perhaps more so with each passing generation, though I do wonder about the audience for this particular version of teendom. Those who, like Bettis, were teens in the ‘90s (my daughter fits the bill) might run screaming at having to revisit those years, and current teens may be only dimly interested in a time when you had to use call-waiting on landlines to communicate with your friends. As for genial old folks like me, “our withers are unwrung,” so to speak, but, even so, I hear the voice of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (1995) saying “Tell me that part about Kenny G. again…”

But, unlike Clueless with its lively satire of the Valley and the kids who once upon a time inhabited it, falcon girls doesn’t mock outright the lives of these enterprising kids, trying instead to illuminate aspects of their world for those of us not to the ranches born. Though the biggest lesson we might receive is that the democratic reach of capitalism and its reigning patriarchal discourse means that, in the U.S., life is often a version of “same shit, different State.” Playing at Yale, the play does agreeably promote the value of education, though with the cautionary notion that you might know all there is to know about animal life and nothing at all about yourself.

falcon girls
by Hilary Bettis
Directed by May Adrales 

Scenic Designer: Beowulf Boritt; Costume Designer: Micah Ohno; Lighting Designer: Kyle Stamm; Sound Design and Original Music: Joyce Ciesil; Projection Designer: Christian Killada; Hair, Wig, and Makeup Designers: Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari; Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Lara Priya Sachdeva; Technical Director: Tom Minucci; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Vocal Coach: Julie Foh; Choreographer: Kimiye Corwin; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Josie Cooper

 Cast: Annie Abramczyk, Teddy Cañez, Juan Sebastián Cruz, Liza Fernandez, Alexa Lopez, Sophia Marcelle, Alyssa Marek, Gabrielle Policano, Anna Roman; understudies: Ruth Aguilar, Caroline Campos, Dylan Scarlett Foster, Francisco Morandi Zerpa, Brendan Titley, Gabriela Veciana, Rosie Victoria

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 10-November 2, 2024

Family Snapshots

Review of 2.5 Minute Ride, Hartford Stage

A 75-minute play delivered in the form, for the most part, of a slideshow lecture about her family, Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride closes out Hartford Stage’s 60th anniversary season as a unique show wherein amusement parks meet Nazi deathcamps. In the play’s original formulation, back in 1999, Kron played herself, giving glimpses of her family as they visit annually Cedar Point Park in Ohio, noted for its amazingly fast, tall, and breathtaking roller-coasters, or prepare for her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn, or—checking off a list of things to do with Dad before he’s gone—visit Auschwitz in Poland where his parents and other relatives died after he was placed in a Kindertransport that brought him to the U.S.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As Lisa, Lena Kaminsky takes charge of the material with great aplomb. We can easily believe these are her experiences she’s recounting, and her way of working the material—Lisa is a somewhat captious host quite often—redounds to the success of this production, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass. The pacing snaps as Lisa confides and mocks and reveals. The main dramatic crux is that, in the midst of her straight-forward recounting of events, Lisa may come to weigh her experiences differently, as she does when she has to admit to a surprising flood of emotion at her brother’s wedding, or may even come to question why she’s trying to tell us what she’s telling us, as when she finds her descriptive powers tested by having to recreate the visit to Auschwitz. At that point, we could say she isn’t simply recreating, she’s reliving, and her distress becomes palpable.

But that’s also when we may become acutely aware that Kaminsky isn’t Kron, so that a scripted breakdown doesn’t quite play the same as one that could be coming directly from the author. That’s not likely to bother most viewers, but it did give the play, for me, an odd double-focus. First, on the question of how well Kron’s script conveys what she wants to say; second, how well Kaminsky plays Lisa. A theatrical monologue can be by an entirely fictional character, of course (see David Cale’s Sandra, now playing a few blocks away at TheaterWorks, Hartford, for instance), and so we know the actor onstage has adopted the role of the narrator/character. But when the monologue must render some aspects of the speaker’s relations with actual family members we might find ourselves thinking how fixed and undeviating this little slice of life has become. And we might become more aware of how structured the monologue is, especially as Kron likes to jump back and forth between Cedar Point and Auschwitz as though they should have some relation other than that furnished by visiting both with her aging father. Or so as to make one visit’s comic elements offset the creeping horror of the other visit, which becomes a bit of a crutch.

Lisa’s relation to her father is really what’s at issue here, but she keeps distracting us with other aperçus, as for instance the vapidity of a superstore in Michigan, or the lack of real pizza in Poland, or—more interesting—her mother’s refusal to be photographed from the time her children ceased to be infants, or the different roller-coasters and how it feels to ride them with an elderly man who might suffer a physical problem during their oh-so-fast flight. We might wish she’d concentrate more on this old man, though she makes it clear she finds it hard to do so. She began by trying to make a video documentary in which he could speak his memories, but the format didn’t work and that caused her a bit of soul-searching.

And that attempt is a telling failure because it lets us know that 2.5 Minute Ride is another attempt, in a very different medium, to tackle the problem. It’s up to viewers if it works, but I’d say the real takeaway, with regard to her father, is his comment about his time as a youth in Germany where he wonders if, had he not been a Jew, he could’ve resisted becoming a Hitler Youth, the way one German boy he knew did. Later, as an interrogator with the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, Kron’s dad gets a man to admit he was actually with the Gestapo, though he had lived in denial of that fact. The admission comes freighted, we might say, with the man’s grievance against history. Had the Nazis won, his actions as a Gestapo officer would’ve been praised. Instead, he’s a criminal. Kron’s dad sympathizes.

The poignancy and pointedness of Mr. Kron’s statements simply bubble up and subside within the busy texture of Lisa Kron’s need to dramatize her relation to this man. I found myself trying to imagine what a monologue in her father’s voice might have sounded like. But that would’ve meant Kron stepping outside her own experience to attempt to recreate someone else’s. At one point, she admits the limits of her method: ''When I try to tell his stories, I begin to hyperventilate, and I don't know why. I can feel the myth, the awe creep into my voice, and it makes me feel sick because what does that have to do with him?'' The fact that the question is rhetorical doesn’t mean Kron needn’t try to answer it.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Late in the play, Lisa, placing her hand on a chair, says that she learned in drama school that if there is a piece of furniture onstage you should put your hand on it so as to appear bigger. In the play’s concluding line, she says, “I’m putting my hand on my father’s life.” We may infer she did so to feel bigger, but we might also wonder if she succeeded.

2.5 Minute Ride
By Lisa Kron
Directed by Zoë Golub-Sass

Scenic Design: Judy Gailen; Costume Design: April Hickman; Lighting Design: Daisy Long; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Production Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Lena Kaminsky

Hartford Stage
May 30-June 23, 2024

Gone Missing

Review of Sandra, TheaterWorks, Hartford

Playwright David Cale specializes in monologues, and in Sandra, now playing at TheaterWorks directed by Jared Mezzocchi, with music by Matthew David Marsh and creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi, he takes this theatrical genre into the realm of what might be the ultimate film genre: the thriller. If you think that a thriller—in which there is generally mystery and murder and various physical threats as well as psychological tension—might be hard to convey with a solo, narrating speaker, you’d be right. And you’re welcome to see how well the TheaterWorks production, which features state-of-the-art projections on walls and ceiling, pulls that off. The play’s run has been extended through June 27, so you now have more chances.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Sandra, played with unwavering, forthright earnestness by Felicia Curry, is in her forties, separated from a husband who seems through with a marriage she might try to salvage, and runs a Brooklyn café called Sandra’s. She also seems to be the most isolated café owner one could ever imagine. Apart from that estranged husband whom we meet briefly in the later going (Curry enacts all Sandra’s interlocutors), Sandra has a co-worker/employee who hazards opinions, and knows a couple glimpsed briefly as a fleeting plot-point. Her entire life, it seems, is focused on Ethan, a younger, gay pianist/composer who gifts her a CD of his music before departing for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, whilst remarking, “I feel like disappearing from my life.”

Disappear he does, and Sandra, an emergency contact person for Ethan, gets a call asking if she knows his whereabouts three weeks later. And there are authorities questioning her too. Her solution: head to Puerto Vallarta and try to find his trail.

I have to confess I did not attend Sandra thinking I was going to watch “a thriller.” The fact that Curry delivers the voices of all the other characters in a jokey way and plays Sandra as the type we’re most familiar with from clueless romantic comedies, made me imagine I was watching a play in which Sandra, sleuthing after the perhaps deliberately vanished Ethan, would learn way more about him (and perhaps herself) than she bargained for, and that her search in Mexico would include a wealth of odd-ball characters—like Beauford (a seventy-ish Tennessee Williams wanna-be who seems to base his life on Suddenly Last Summer) whom she meets briefly, or Luca, the quintessential sleazy/sexy Latin lover, by way of Sicily (his seduction of Sandra while Curry plays both parts definitely indicated rom-com). That play would all be in the interests of romance the way most trips to faraway places are.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But no, tensions mount when Sandra finds evidence, such as Ethan’s handwriting on a note launched in a bottle by a long-haired blonde dude who had accompanied Beauford to the bar where she met him, but who departed when the elderly gent had to take his insulin shot. And so now Sandra isn’t looking for Ethan as much as for this long-haired, nameless dude. And if she finds him?

Thrillers, of course, tend to be the movies you love to shout at because their protagonists so often do the wrong thing or have motives and/or knowledge that are only gradually revealed or which have to surface just to make something implausible slightly less so. And it may be that Cale and company had in mind a send-up of the genre that would have audiences laughing over wild coincidence met by the steady can-do positivity that fuels many an amateur sleuth’s success. But long before Sandra recounts arrests, testimony, witness protection programs and the like you may find yourself wishing she’d take a moment and reflect or philosophize or give us tips on airflight (she goes back and forth between Mexico and Brooklyn a lot), or anything we might want an engaging narrator to do. Instead, it’s all plot all the time, underscored by the fact that—as she’s left alone to tell the tale to us on a stage—we know Sandra won’t meet with an untimely end. And so we might well ask: why are you telling us this?

And what does seeing the play do that simply reading it wouldn’t? Well, there is the immediacy of having Felicia Curry, an Emmy-nominated actor, speak things for us as though just realizing them, which is somewhat harder for a narrator to do in writing, and there is Camilla Tassi’s atmospheric projections, many of Puerto Vallarta itself, which include the ebb and flow of surf seen from above, the text of computer searches, and, in the play’s most dramatic moment, a looming shadow. All visuals are aided by the intricacy of the lighting design by co-lighting designers Amith Chandrashaker and Alex Fetchko. And there are Ethan’s lovely, stately piano compositions (by Matthew David Marsh) which might make you wish a friend more concerned with who Ethan is than where he is had been given a voice to recall him.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Theatrical monologue is, certainly, a respected and capable genre, and creating suspense via the monologue’s blend of the speaker’s stasis with the kinesis of recalled action that moves through space and time is a hit-and-miss affair. Here, a hallucinating walk at one point is particularly well-rendered by Curry with Tassi’s projections. But when the main action taking place on stage is an actor consulting a laptop, something—other than Ethan—has gone missing.

Sandra
By David Cale
Directed by Jared Mezzocchi

Music by Matthew David Marsh
Creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi

Set Design: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Design: Sarita Fellows; Co-Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Co-Lighting Design: Alex Fetchko; Sound Design: Evdoxia Ragkou; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Hair Design: Tinkia Sadiku; Dialect Coach: Josh FS Moser

Cast: Felicia Curry

TheaterWorks, Hartford
May 30-June 27, 2024

All in the Family

Review of All My Sons, Hartford Stage

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Thinking of Arthur Miller’s second play All My Sons, now in a powerful revival at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen and starring Marsha Mason and Michael Gaston, we may wish to alter the adage, replacing “patriotism” with “family.”

Joe Keller (Michael Gaston), Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Meet the Kellers: Joe (Michael Gaston) is a friendly, neighborhood patriarch relaxing in his backyard; he welcomes the neighborhood doctor, Jim Bayliss (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), sharing his pipe tobacco; he entertains a local boy, Bert (Malachy Glanovsky), with plots to police the neighborhood and slap any malefactors, who might, for instance, say a dirty word, into the jail he claims to harbor in his basement. And Joe has a son, Chris (Ben Katz), who has served responsibly in the recent war (the setting is 1946 Ohio), and seems a chip off the old block. While we’ve no grounds to think we may be trespassing into O’Neill territory, we might reasonably suspect that the trouble in this affable collective will have something to do with Mom—Kate Keller (Marsha Mason).

Even before we meet her, we hear Joe worrying over how she will respond to the loss of a tree that split and fell over during the previous night’s storm. The tree was planted in honor of Larry, the younger son who went to war and has been MIA for over three years. Kate believes he will still turn up.

Kate Keller (Marsha Mason), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Marsha Mason’s Kate Keller is the worried heart of this play, a woman who, it seems, has endless faith, and who navigates through the affronts the family has suffered with her dignity intact. A major factor is how she stood by Joe when he went to prison briefly. As a military supplier, Joe’s company sent substandard parts to the U.S. Airforce during the war. Twenty-one U.S. planes and pilots were lost as a result. Joe was cleared; Steve Deever, his partner, is still serving time. But if we think Kate is the staunch supportive type, watch how rigid she becomes when she realizes Chris wants to marry Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson), the gal Larry left behind and Steve’s daughter.

Later revelations will expose Kate as not only deluded in her hopes but also complicit in the shirking of responsibility that marks the elder generation in this play. It’s a complex role that has been played by Joan Plowright, Dianne Wiest, Sally Fields, Annette Bening, and others. Mason, a four-time Oscar nominee for Best Actress, has down the matronly tone that makes Kate seem a hostess to the world, but also the tough streak that makes us think no one could ever put one over on her. Her ultimate vulnerability comes with her own realization of how firmly she believed one lie so as to not have to face a harsher truth. It’s a riveting dramatic moment.

Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Melia Besnussen’s firm hand on Miller’s play lets the script yield up its plot points with a steady pace, so that we get to take the measure of each character as, first, at their best and most outgoing and then, gradually, as the deniers and shirkers who have been covering up their guilty knowledge. The key exception is Ann’s brother George (Reece Dos Santos) who visits in Act II straight from his father’s jail cell with an ax to grind. The Deever kids had abandoned their father, it seems, in his disgrace, but now George has a new take on things. He comes on as the one who will finally make Joe confess he played Steve false, and, like Kate, he feels that a marriage between Ann and Chris would be a further outrage.

George Deever (Reece Dos Santos), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

But watch how easily Kate is able to smooth over George’s ire, getting him to suddenly admit that he’s only really felt at home at the Kellers’. It’s a telling moment because the course of the play will turn on a dime and go the other way—into all the reasons we can’t trust our fondness for the Kellers. And once the full weight of the past asserts itself, we may find ourselves questioning the fantasy of home and of belonging that the play wants us to get beyond. For Miller’s play has its eye on war profiteers and all those who use “serving their country” as an excuse for all kinds of malfeasance. But the play also candidly confronts the comfortable lies that people use to defend themselves against inconvenient or even catastrophic truths. Joe’s excuse for his behavior comes down to the sorts of things we’ve heard from serial killers like Tony Soprano or from wheeling-and-dealing vipers like Logan Roy: I did it for my kids, I did it for my family. How can we deny the strength of the plea?

Joe Keller (Michael Gaston), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Wartime demands that one stick it to one’s enemies in the name of survival and victory, but when one is sticking it to one’s partners and to one’s customers and, mortally, to one’s own country can one still tout survival above all? Any such victory feels horribly hollow. And that’s where Miller’s play takes us, as any sense of just deserts is apt to make us wonder what really could be fair or just for the people in this play.

There is much to note here that is first rate. Riw Rakkulchon’s set is a stunning use of the space, with clearly delineated segments while also fully naturalistic, as a comfortable yard behind a house that can be entered (some interesting effects are achieved by letting us see actors inside the house), with a wide expanse of water fading into sky behind. In addition to the house, actors can enter or leave the scene in three directions, making for very lively coming and going as neighbors drop in or depart, or when tensions provoke a character to storm off. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting gives both the broad strokes of time of day and also the more subtle lightings that enhance particular scenes, and the lighting within the house has the feel of coziness that seems just right. An-lin Dauber’s costumes are period without seeming unduly dated, and have an earnest Sears Roebuck style, but for dressier moments—as when Kate gets set for a night out.

Dr. Jim Bayliss (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the other star of the show, Michael Gaston’s Joe is impeccably presented, his gruff bonhomie quite likeable, his efforts to defend himself from any soul-searching full of a maudlin conviction that sentiment should be on his side. His final realization of the effects of his duplicity make for a staggering tearful moment. In the film made of the play, Edward G. Robinson, as Joe, can’t help but seem sinister and the soundtrack adds to the effect. Gaston’s Joe is much more credible as a living instance, perhaps, of Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil.” 

Chris Keller (Ben Katz), Joe Keller (Michael Gaston) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

More than able support comes from Ben Katz as Chris, whose outburst at his father is an emotional highpoint, full of rage, frustration and the kind of hurt love that hopes a failure can be made better; Fiona Robberson is quite memorable as Ann; though her role is often subdued, the times when she seems ready to fly off the handle have great snap and drive. As George Deever, Reece Dos Santos gets to sway our sympathies toward the Deevers while also letting us feel George’s ambivalence, now that he finds himself welcomed in the place he left behind. Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., is also notable as Dr. Jim Bayliss, who gives us the tone Miller likes to sound, of a depressed Chorus whose sense of how dark fate will ultimately will out fills out the play. And Malachy Glanovsky hits perfectly the childish enthusiasm of Bert, giving us, early on, a reason to like Joe Keller.

Bert (Malachy Glanovsky), Joe Keller (Michael Gaston) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Vibrant, gripping, relevant to the anxieties that should make any community or family question its unexamined truths, All My Sons is for everyone.

All My Sons
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Scenic Design: Riw Rakkulchon; Costume Design: An-lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Mary Louise Geiger; Original Music & Sound Design: Lucas Clopton; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Design: J. Jared Jonas; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Voice & Dialect Coach: Julie Foh; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Youth Coordinator: Shelby Demke; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Sage Manager: Theresa Stark; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Marsha Mason, Michael Gaston, Yadira Correa, Reece Dos Santos, Ben Katz, Fiona Robberson, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., Dan Whelton, Caitlin Zoz, Malachy Glanovsky

Hartford Stage
April 11-May 5, 2024

Lives at Risk

Review of Sanctuary City, TheaterWorks, Hartford

The fragility and vulnerability of teenagers, as well as their resilient toughness and hopefulness and humor, enlivens the first half of Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, now playing at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Jacob Padrón and Pedro Bermúdez. Set from 2001 to days before 2007, the play begins as an engaging treatment of two young lives—B (for Boy) and G (for Girl)—under much stress. Living in Newark, New Jersey, while attending a local high school, both B (Grant Kennedy Lewis) and G (Sara Gutierrez) are at risk because neither is a citizen of the United States. What’s more, G and her mother are often battered by the man they live with. It’s the violence at home that sends G scurrying up the fire escape and through B’s bedroom window, and we may think we’re watching a story of young love burgeoning under fraught circumstances.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis) and G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

Much of the first half lends itself to that reading because the story is scripted as a palimpsest of distinct moments that become almost like “routines”—such as what excuse bruised G will use to not attend school (she’s pretty much agreeable to anything but “lice”). The two kids, at greater risk of deportation in the upsurge in surveillance and prosecution (and persecution) of aliens after 9/11, are navigating not just their place in the social fabric, but their relation to each other. Always platonic, at times sibling-like, their interactions also have touches of flirtation and a wide range of intimacy. The set and reset and re-reset rhythm of their interchanges is swift and pointed, though the device of lights and sounds to separate scenes comes across almost as a sci-fi effect (unintentionally, I assume). It all culminates in a wonderfully enacted visit to a prom, that goes from skepticism to enthusiasm in almost strobe-like glimpses.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

B and G are mostly in the same boat until G’s fortunes change. Her resourceful mother not only walks out on the abusive guy but also attains naturalized citizen status and, by doing so before G turns eighteen, automatically makes G a U.S. citizen. We see that B is not entirely elated by G’s good fortune, nor by his mother’s return to the unnamed country she hails from, nor by further good fortune that comes G’s way (acceptance and scholarship at an unnamed school in Boston—we do learn that it has “books and trees”).  B, who has offered asylum to G when she needs it, and has helped her anyway he could, has plenty of concerns of his own not easily solved.

Henry (Mishka Yarovoy), G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

And what of G? Her plan to help B results in the play’s most repeated routine: answering prodding and sometimes loaded questions about their alleged relations as a married couple. G, it seems, is willing to marry B to make him a citizen, but when she leaves for college, everything still hangs in the balance.

The second half takes up when G returns, three and a half years later, in response to a distressed phone call from B a month previous. The facts behind the call upset G and made her send B a letter that broke off their marriage plan; meanwhile, B spiraled into depression. G is seemingly back to make good the original plan, but B may have moved on.

In the extended scene that is the second half, the tensions that have intruded into that early rapport get the main emphasis. And that involves B’s boyfriend Henry (Mishka Yarovoy) who is hostile to G, while G can be rather callous herself. Mainly what the second half exposes is B’s weakness and self-serving willingness to make others defer to his needs. It’s a character study, ultimately, and Grant Kennedy Lewis’ B is played so neutrally and behaves so passively most of the time, we may find it hard to make a clear assessment of his nature.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), Henry (Mishka Yarovoy) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

Plot has been called the revelation of character and the plot of Sanctuary City seems aimed to bring the true desires of these characters to light. At the same time, while the play makes its setting in time and its characters’ status as not enjoying the full rights of straight, white citizens key to what occurs, there’s more to the story. Think of how the lovers in Romeo and Juliet can fall in love and even marry but, within the political and familial context of their lives, can’t make that marriage public. Here, B and G can marry, publicly and for reasons that are politically beneficial, but aren’t in love and won’t ever be. But that doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. And what Majok’s play very subtly lets us witness is how hard it can be to let go of whom you love and to live up to what love demands.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), G (Sara Gutierrez in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

These lives at risk are faced with how much they are willing to risk emotionally. Sanctuary City is full of glimpses of not only what these lives are like, but also of what they might be like. The frustrations, the dreams, the hopes, the hard realities all circle in and out of these resonant interactions. Gutierrez, in particular, adds great fascination as she lets us see all kinds of shades and sides of G’s character, a character who, we are well aware by play’s end, is still a long way from fully mature. The male characters are less varied, but Yarovoy’s Henry seems perfectly cast as the somewhat fussy law-student he is; his little gasp when he sees the label of the wine G brought is so spot on it’s quite a laugh in a tense scene.

Padrón and Bermúdez have created a much busier production than the script calls for: there are hanging curtains to screen the at-times relevant, at-times distracting videos meant to give us a sense of the urban surround. The decision to have B and G sit on the floor during one scene adds a further distraction as sightlines become a problem. You may suddenly find yourself with an obstructed view. Perhaps this staging’s finest touch is the video of an open window, which has meant so much in both these young lives, that suddenly gets closer to us and seems to beckon as a way out.

Sanctuary City
By Martyna Majok
Directed by Jacob G. Padrón and Pedro Bermúdez

Set Design: Emmie Finckel; Costume Design: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Design: Paul Whitaker; Sound Design: Fabian Obispo; Projection & Video Design: Pedro Bermúdez; Casting Director: Stephanie Yankwitt/TBD Casting; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Intimacy Coach: Marie Percy; Assistant Set Design: Juhee Kim

Cast: Sara Gutierrez, Grant Kennedy Lewis, Mishka Yarovoy

TheaterWorks, Hartford
March 29-April 25, 2024

Come Into the Garden

Review of Escaped Alone, Yale Repertory Theatre

Much like Samuel Beckett before her, Caryl Churchill’s plays are anything but naturalistic dramas. Their theatricality is generally provocative, compelling, and oftentimes comical or at least quizzical. Such is the case with Escaped Alone, directed by Liz Diamond at Yale Repertory Theatre through March 30.

Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), Sally (Sandra Shipley), Lena (Rita Wolf), Mrs, Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The cast consists of four women who have attained senior citizen status; Sally (Sandra Shipley), Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), and Lena (Rita Wolf) are visiting together in Sally’s garden when Mrs. Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay), a local women whom the others recognize but don’t really know, happens by. Mrs. Jarrett opens the play by addressing the audience and will close it the same way; her abrupt departure seeming to illustrate the play’s title phrase (a quotation from the Bible’s Book of Job that Herman Melville famously pressed into service in Moby-Dick): “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

In Job, the statement is made four times by four different messengers who tell Job of great calamities that have befallen his family and his livestock and his servants. In Churchill’s play, Mrs. Jarrett, suddenly separate from the rest, at regular intervals proclaims a litany of crisis and devastation that the playbill calls “graphic descriptions of human and environmental apocalypse." They are that, but they are also grotesque and carnivalesque and absurdist descriptions: “The hunger began when eighty percent of food was diverted to TV programmes” [. . .] “Only when cooking shows were overtaken by sex with football teams did ingredients trickle back to the shops and rice was airlifted again.” What we hear is a welter of emergency scenarios that, it may well be, we are poised more readily to take seriously than when Churchill’s play first debuted in 2016.

Mrs. Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Each time we step out of that quiet, very English garden into Mrs. Jarrett’s flights (whether of fantasy or witness or prophecy we are never altogether sure) we are met first with a booming sound and blinding lights illuminating the audience. The device certainly creates tension, but undermines what I feel certain are meant to be comical elements in Mrs. Jarrett’s speeches. In Diamond’s production, LaTonya Borsay’s delivery has an almost unvarying pitch of barely suppressed panic. But even panic can become monotonous, and that may well be why the paucity of our imaginations is nowhere more pertinent than in the previsioning of apocalyptic scenarios. Churchill’s are richer than the norm but you’ll really have to concentrate to perceive her throughlines.

Within the garden, conversation moves agreeably amidst a range of topics, mostly small talk that serves to orient Mrs. Jarrett within the longstanding rapport of the other three, which allows them to speak in half-phrases and asides and addendums. The orchestration of the dialogue is brilliantly handled throughout. The play runs for under an hour, but you may find you would like to visit with these amiable women for much longer.

There are comments about grandchildren, former occupations, getting out of the house (or not), and acute observations (such as how neighboring countries are more likely to be antagonistic). The interplay of topics can sometimes put one or another on the spot, as when Sally talks about her testimony on behalf of Vi, when the latter was accused of murdering her husband. Such matters crop up with a comical matter-of-factness that is also speculative, as if the settled nature of these routine lives can be quite easily disrupted by a word or two too wide or too pointed.

And that of course is how these cursory topics relate to Mrs. Jarrett’s speeches, Churchill providing a verbal barrage that shows how we chatter upon a precipice and how hard it is to make speech work for us as more than directed sounds, as Lena puts it: “why move your mouth and do talking?”

Sally (Sandra Shipley) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Each character gets a telling spotlit moment, seated in her chair and letting us into her inner thought. For Lena, it’s how she easily withdraws from social expectations; for Vi, how she can’t bear a kitchen since that’s where her husband died; for Sally, a phobia about cats that mounts into a panicked need for someone who can make the fear go away; for Mrs. Jarrett, the single phrase “terrible rage” that—with Mrs. Jarrett played by a Black actress in this production—lands with more force than perhaps Churchill envisioned.

The resiliency of the quartet is nowhere better expressed than when they sing and dance together through a rendition of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack,” a familiar, catchy tune that expresses an exuberance, not of escape but of assertion, as an “old woman” is addressed who is throwing a man out. It’s the most together these neighbors get and the musical number brings with it a sense of joyous renewal, as if their lives are still their own despite everything.

Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), Sally (Sandra Shipley), Lena (Rita Wolf), Mrs, Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lia Tubiana’s set suggests a placid world of green things bathed in Stephen Strawbridge’s day-bright lighting. Behind this garden scene stretch two huge screens that swirl and pulse with Shawn Lovell-Boyle’s projections—fire, lava, crepuscular life—during Mrs. Jarrett’s solo speeches, and depict clouds as if a time-lapse film later in the play. Costumes by Yu-Jung Shen are relaxed and colorful, with sneakers or sandals and cardigans. If at first we feel we’re calling with Mrs. Jarrett on a group of homebodies passing time, by the end we might feel we’ve stumbled on the Three Fates, speaking of “what’s past or passing or to come.”

Escaped Alone
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Liz Diamond

Scenic Designer: Lia Tubiana; Costume Designer: Yu-Jung Shen; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Designer: Sinan Refik Zafar; Projection Designer: Shawn Lovell-Boyle; Music Director: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Production Dramaturgs: Catherine Sheehy, Karoline Vielemeyer; Technical Director: Keira Jacobs; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Julie Foh; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Charlie Lovejoy

Cast: LaTonya Borsay, Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, Rita Wolf

Yale Repertory Theatre
March 8-30, 2024  

If You Can't Stand the Heat. . .

Review of The Hot Wing King, Hartford Stage

Cooking is a lot like theater: you need the right mix of the right ingredients. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-winning play The Hot Wing King offers light, sassy dialogue among a joshing group of gay men, a splash of impromptu musical numbers, a deep soak of caring and confrontational talk, and an infusion of spicey issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Directed by Christopher D. Betts, the play is a study in how friendship and erotic relations and family obligations can all simmer together, involving us all in the way they play out. It’s a heady mix that drew enthusiastic responses from the matinee crowd Sunday at Hartford Stage where it plays through March 24.

Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) has left behind a wife and sons in St. Louis to move in with his lover Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson) in Memphis. Dwayne is a hotel manager with a nice house where Cordell, as yet unemployed, feels his second-class status. Cordell’s chief way of asserting himself as the action opens is in concocting recipes for hot chicken wings and entering his creations in a local contest. To that end, Dwayne and two of their friends, Isom (Israel Erron Ford) and Big Charles (Postell Pringle) are pressed into service to help—whether it’s dismembering chickens or stirring a huge vat of sauce counter-clockwise for five hours or soaking wood chips. Cordell is a man with a mission and much of the first half hour or so is mostly the gossiping, joking, preening and one-upping of this colorful group of friends and lovers.

Big Charles (Postell Pringle), Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson), EJ (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), Isom (Israel Erron Ford, seated), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Plot points begin to surface when we learn that Dwayne has guilty feelings for having called the police to help his distraught sister, who had mental troubles and addiction problems, and was killed in the confrontation. His sister’s son, “EJ” (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), eventually shows up seeking asylum from a makeshift household with his father TJ (Alphonso Walker Jr.), a hustler viewed as “a thug” by the genteel types in Dwayne’s home.

TJ (Alphonso Walker Jr) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Tensions percolate aplenty: besides Cordell’s feeling that Dwayne makes all his own decisions as though they are not in a relationship, there’s also Cordell’s feeling that he can’t take on helping out Dwayne’s nephew when his own sons won’t even speak to him for abandoning their mother. Meanwhile whatever Big Charles and Isom have going has its own prickly edges, and EJ, who has been known to pilfer in the past, has possible behavioral issues. TJ has his own issues with his son spending so much time around gay men.

Isom (Israel Erron Ford), Big Charles (Postell Pringle), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty), Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The verbal hectoring and ribbing can sometimes run a bit thick, and I suspect that Dialect and Voice Coach Cynthis Santos DeCure had quite a job keeping everyone on point for the local accent which, coupled with the slang and street phrases, can make one wish for subtitles at times. Then too this is a physically busy play, with well-orchestrated use of space and body language, and lots of movement throughout Emmie Finckel’s well-appointed two-level set, including a side basketball patio where some of the more intense dialogues take place. Jahise LeBouef’s costumes sport vibrant colors, and there are interludes at a piano and jokey song performances with cooking implements as microphones. Shortly before the break there’s an “oh no” moment that earns gasps, setting up comic repercussions in the second half.

As we settle in after intermission it’s easy to feel at home with these folks, and we want to see how their ad hoc household is going to work out its snags. To that end, there are great moments from both Marcus Gladney, Jr., as EJ, who finally has to dump on his uncle for not respecting him; and from Alphonso Walker Jr. who gives TJ a deeply thoughtful portrayal, quite welcome for its gravitas. Anything but grave, Israel Erron Ford’s Isom is the live-wire, life-of-the-party type with the accessories and attitudes to match; he’s also got moves and a voice that convince us he might be more than all show. Postell Pringle’s Big Charles is the kind of guy who is generally taxed with “keeping it real,” a sports-watching couch potato who gives a regular Joe feel to the group.

Everett “EJ” (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty, foreground) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the sparring couple trying to make things work, Cordell and Dwayne can both feel a bit immature, but also familiar enough in their uncertainty about to how to cope with what they feel. There’s an intimate moment between them at one point that goes a long way to help us see that their bond is real, even if their day-to-day situation has them doubting it. And both Bjorn DuPaty and Calvin M. Thompson walk well the throughlines of high comedy and the deep dives of feeling that their roles require.

Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lively and colorful like a party you were glad you got invited to, The Hot Wing Kings also feels at times like an insular gathering where you’ve got to bring a certain spirit—and not just an enthusiasm for wings—in order to gain admittance. Even at its most carefree, the tone seems aimed to prove something, such as the way these lives matter and the way they have to find—even within a certain amount of sit-com trappings—a valid way to represent truth.

The Hot Wing King
By Katori Hall
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Scenic Design: Emmie Finckel; Costume Design: Jahise LeBouef; Lighting Design: Adam Honoré; Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna; Dialect and Voice Coach: Cynthis Santos DeCure; Casting: Aliane Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Bernita Robinson; Assistant Stage Manager: Makayla Beckles; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Bjorn DuPaty, Israel Erron Ford, Marcus Gladney Jr., Postell Pringle, Calvin M. Thompson, Alphonso Walker Jr.

Hartford Stage
February 29-March 24, 2024

The Treasures in Trash

Review of The Garbologists, TheaterWorks, Hartford

Collecting garbage, or, to use the more dignified name, sanitation, may be the quintessential thankless task. Not only do many people not respect it as a livelihood, but many more don’t really want to think about it. They just want trash, garbage, waste, to disappear, no questions asked.

Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologists, playing this month at TheaterWorks directed by Artistic Director Rob Ruggiero, gives us a bit of a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of trash hauling. Even more, it asks us to consider the complexities of workers’ collaboration and of the empathy and enmity that can happen on the job. And when it’s a manifestly dirty job, the stakes are more fraught. The play centers on the relation between two sanitation workers or, as they jokingly refer to themselves at one point, “garbologists”: Danny (Jeff Brooks), a talky, mansplaining white guy who is an outgoing, knowledgeable veteran of the route, and Marlowe (Bebe Nicole Simpson), a somewhat withdrawn woman of color who is a newbie to the job. The two actors are perfectly cast and bring rewarding personality to the roles.

Marlowe (Bebe Nichole Simpson), Danny (Jeff Brooks) in The Garbologists at TheaterWorks, Hartford

Staged with great ingenuity by Ruggiero and his team—Marcelo Martínez García, Set Design; Joseph Shrope, Costume Design; John Lasiter, Lighting Design; Germán Martínez, Sound Design—The Garbologists gives us realism and a certain rugged romanticism. The truck’s cab, where much of the interaction takes place, provides an arena for fluctuating communications; the hopper of the trash truck figures prominently in a few scenes, as do the bags of trash to be collected, along with, at times, more surprising finds; a cozy bar is conjured up quickly for that afterwork drink that will either bring Danny and Marlowe closer or give them ample reason to resent one another more. And in the midst of what Marlowe (and we) learn about trash collecting, there is plenty they learn about each other.

As a series of vignettes driven by dialogue, The Garbologists is a welcome and entertaining reminder that, as fiction-writer Elizabeth Bowen once said, “dialogue is what characters do to each other.” There is action in the play, but most of what happens acts as an occasion for response, for discussion, for argument, and for reminiscence. Both can be snarky and temperamental, both have back stories that contribute to their day-to-day whys and wherefores, and there are certain mysteries to be understood, such as why Marlowe, with double degrees from Columbia and parents who are professors, is working on a trash truck. And why has she been assigned to Danny? And what happened to Danny’s former partner?

Marlowe (Bebe Nicole Simpson), Danny (Jeff Brooks) in The Garbologists at TheaterWorks, Hartford

The main flaw with the play comes from one of those big reveals that is meant to make it all make sense but that actually impairs the play’s sense of reality, much as all those abounding coincidences in novels of earlier eras can make readers of today feel themselves dupes of the author’s need to tie-up all loose ends. Here, it’s more like desire for a heart-tug moment defeats the steady verisimilitude the play had been building up. It’s one thing for characters to veer about emotionally, making us catch up with what is really going on with them. It’s another to feel that a key point is not acknowledged by the characters until the plot requires it.

But that’s simply to say that the play wants to make a dramatic connection between these two unlikely companions that it hasn’t really earned. What these fine character-turns by Jeff Brooks and Bebe Nichole Simpson do earn is our attention and affection and thanks for making visible workers who, as playwright Lindsay Joelle comments in the playbill, are often treated as invisible.

As is said at one point, “there’s treasure in trash”—which does seem to come true—but there’s also treasure in observing the quirks and compassion and compromises of people dedicated to doing their jobs as best they can, in anything but optimum conditions. For its 90 minutes with no intermission, The Garbologists makes the business of garbage a pleasure to behold.

The Garbologists
By Lindsay Joelle
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set Design: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Design: Joseph Shrope; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design: Germán Martínez; Casting Director: JZ Casting: Geoff Josselson, CSA, Katja Zarolinski, CSA; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Cast: Jeff Brooks, Bebe Nicole Simpson

TheaterWorks, Hartford
February 1-25, 2024

The Woes of the Father

Review of Simona’s Search, Hartford Stage

There’s a Biblical saying (from Deuteronomy) about the sins or iniquities of the fathers being visited upon the sons unto the third or fourth generation. In Simona’s Search, a world premiere play at Hartford Stage directed by Melia Bensussen, playwright Martin Zimmerman considers the possibility of a genetic link whereby the trauma of the parent is visited upon (or inherited by) a subsequent generation. It’s an intriguing idea, and might satisfy, one suspects, the longing for a genetic explanation for melancholy, depression, and states of anxiety and discontent that must have come from somewhere.

The play presents us with a trauma event of sorts—but it’s Simona’s, not her father’s. Having been warned not to come into her father’s room while he’s asleep, Simona (Alejandra Escalante), nine, not only does that, but brings in her friends who are visiting for a birthday celebration, and if that’s not violation enough, she hops on unsuspecting pop and puts her hand over his nose and mouth. Papi’s reflex reaction is to whack her across the room. Only someone who had experienced unspeakable horrors would behave that way, apparently. At least that’s Simona’s conclusion.

Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

The father, played well with sympathetic indulgence and weary wariness by Al Rodrigo, is reticent about his past, so much so that it could be he’s covering up something terrible. Or it could be he just doesn’t like talking about life in his unnamed birth country. Because of what she reads as a teen, Simona diagnoses his problem as post-traumatic stress disorder and sees herself as a victim of transgenerational trauma. Though Papi would like her to study physics and seems to consider the questions it poses as the most significant in the world, she’s having none of it. Only what goes on in the psyche is worth her time. Their clash, though, isn’t portrayed as simply a difference in temperament or desire; instead, Simona takes the attitude that what her father seems to care about is only a smokescreen for what he won’t admit.

Corroboration comes from an experiment she reads about because Papi seemingly plants an article on genetic experiments among other clippings he saves for her about research in physics. Simona learns that second-generation lab rats were born with a fear of the smell of a certain flower blossom inculcated in their parental generation through the administering of electric shock. If that’s possible, then why not a daughter who inherits the dread of traumatic events her father experienced but never told her about?

Simona (Alejandro Escalante), Papi (Al Rodrigo) in Simona’s Search, Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Regardless of the merits of this explanation in real world terms—and the playbill provides supporting evidence—it’s a bit of dead letter, dramatically. Simona speaks and acts from a foregone conclusion, and since she narrates most of the play, we have only her version of events. Escalante gives Simona a very earnest, measured tone that makes her vulnerable moments seem like approximations for the sake of effect. Little action is directly depicted, except Simona’s reticence with a sympathetic boyfriend, Jake (Christopher Bannow). Father and daughter are mostly at loggerheads and just when you think maybe they will have a scene together that amounts to something, it dissipates into more narration.

Jake (Christopher Bannow), Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Simona remains isolated by her trauma; her attempt to seek help is handled by a very facile and uninterested doctor (Rodrigo) who views her on-again, off-again haunting by a shadowy figure in her imagination as an hallucination. For Simona, it can only be a residual image of an interrogator who brutalized her father during an inferred incarceration. In a sense, Simona’s unwavering interpretation of what is causing her suffering becomes a form of obsession. The play starts to feel like listening to a recounting of personal and familial grief at an AA meeting, without being able to intervene or ask questions or even offer solace.

Bensussen does all she can to interject visual and theatrical interest into such a heavily verbal play: Hartford Stage’s space is put to good use with lively choreography by Shura Baryshnikov and projections by Yana Biryukov that can be both lovely—the blossoms—and eerie—that shadowy figure; Yu Shibagaki’s scenic design makes the shows few props seem to have metamorphic properties, while the lighting design by Aja M. Jackson and the sound design by Aubrey Dube are superb.

The show’s best theatrical moment is an interlude with a romantically inclined, French-accented, human-sized lab rat (Olivera Gajic, costume design) who steals the show. As the rat, Christopher Bannow shows yet again what a versatile actor he is, always a major asset to any production he’s in (as for instance last year’s Wolf Play at MCC in New York). The scene works because of the careful choreography and because of a sense of absurdity, fun, and weirdness—the flipside, I suppose, of a traumatic visitation.

Whatever we make of such an interlude is up to us as viewers, which is a lot better than having someone onstage telling us what everything must mean. I left the play not so much impressed by Simona’s search for the truth as cautioned by her certainty.

Papi (Al Rodrigo), Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Simona’s Search
By Martin Zimmerman
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Yu Shibagaki; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Sound Design: Aubrey Dube; Projection Design: Yana Biryukova; Casting: Alaine Alidaffer; Dramaturgy: Kristin Leahey; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Julius Cruz; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Christopher Bannow, Alejandra Escalante, Al Rodrigo

Hartford Stage
January 18-February 11, 2024 

Slings and Arrows in Chicago

Review of The Salvagers, Yale Repertory Theatre

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s winter in Chicago and Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) is back home after taking a degree in theater in North Carolina and then trying his luck in New York. We’re introduced to him as he shovels snow while snow still falls on a striking set (B Entsminger, Set Design) that conjures up the beauty of winter as well as the sheer weight of tons of snow. And Boseman dances, full of energy that needs an outlet. He’s not finding it in theater—as a dreadful audition we get to witness shows us—and he mainly works in a restaurant, smokes on break with Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), a chatty co-worker, and gets into grudge matches with his dad, Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez), a well-meaning but overbearing locksmith, and visits with his ooey-gooey mom Nedra (Toni Martin), a postal worker who feeds him pie and plays a little ritual of “so good” hugs. The Salvages are separated because—among other things—Nedra realized she’s a lesbian.

Nedra Salvage (Toni Martin), Boseman Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez), Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

In short, the main attraction of Harrison David Rivers’ The Salvagers, directed in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre by Mikael Burke, is that we feel for Junior but realize—at 23—he’s got to grow up out of this, now, and the question is: will he, and, if so, how will he? And, if not, how bad will it be?

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

There are lots of plot points circling around that might land as a way of giving Boseman Junior direction. Maybe he will get a part in a play. Maybe he’ll get serious about Paulina—when the co-workers start to click, Junior’s mom catches on right away because her son’s mood is so improved. Maybe he’ll finally have it out with dad in some way more mature than the sullen sniping he generally indulges—and maybe Elinor Witt (McKenzie Chinn), that woman dad’s now seeing (after a cute meet when Boseman Senior opens her lock for her), will be some kind of catalyst, for bad or good. Rivers, whose intense, focused play This Bitter Earth played at TheaterWorks, Hartford, in 2022, is good at letting characters reveal themselves to us by how they pitch themselves to other characters, which works great for the two women trying to get to know Boseman Senior and Junior, respectively, but is harder for the Salvage family itself. Key to their problems is that Junior thinks he already knows all about his parents, but does he?

Nedra Salvage (Toni Martin), Boseman Salvage Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

I do wish that the answer to that question took a slightly different direction than it does, as the “big reveal” is just a bit too dramatically fraught. It does the work it has to do, plotwise, as a big “hello!” to Junior, but opens up questions the story we’re given never addresses. There’s a sense at times that the plot may veer toward soap opera catastrophe, a world in which trauma is a badge of authenticity even if it feels a bit piled on.

Boseman Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

What keeps us in the story is the fine work by this ensemble of actors. As Boseman Senior, Julian Elijah Martinez fully inhabits a part that can be a bit underwritten. He doesn’t get major speeches, but works the small, intense moments of interaction, like mocking and helping his son while the latter has trouble with his bootlaces. A great scene later in the play has Senior and Junior one-upping each other on chin-ups: it’s wonderfully indicative of how they do and don’t get along, and how much they are cut from the same cloth. As Nedra, Toni Martin has to walk a fine line: she’s encouragement itself to her son but at the same time has to be believable as a woman who is living a lie. It’s a tough sell, and we could use a few scenes that let us see her as she really is. In supporting roles as the women trying to get to know the somewhat taciturn Boseman Salvages, Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew keeps us guessing about Paulina: she likes dumping on brunchers, regales Junior with lines from King Lear at will, and is able to get through Senior’s wall when necessary (and so seems like she was simply written to inhabit this play with no other purpose in life); McKenzie Chinn, as Elinor, is more upfront: she meets Senior, likes what she sees, goes for it, and then must confront the suppressed story that hangs over the family. She’s the one who, ultimately, must be won over if any good is going to be salvaged from the situation the Salvages are in.

Elinor (McKenzie Chinn), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Special mention goes to Taylor A. Blackman who makes Junior a memorable example of untapped talent, depressed ambition, callous immaturity, and—to cite his man Hamlet—“that within which passeth show.” Hamlet mourns for a dead father and a mother unfaithful to her deceased husband’s memory; Junior mourns for—maybe—some time long past when he believed in his parents as a couple, or when he thought he might actually get along nicely without them. Now, back in Chicago and at dad’s, like a certain depressed prince returned to Denmark, the best he can hope for, seemingly, is discovering how rotten things really are. Blackman makes Junior a problem to himself that we ache to see solved.

Paulina Kenton (Mikayla LaShae Batholomew), Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Director Mikael Burke, who did a great job this year with the fast-food kitchen dynamics of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks, Hartford, works the action and movement of this play to telling effect, including overlapping scenes in different locations that serve well the play’s steady forward pace. The kinetic qualities that Blackman displays so well are echoed by stage techniques—including mini-films by John Horzen and a sliding chair to simulate a subway ride—that show the kind of largess Yale Rep can bring to family drama. Kudos as well to Lighting Designer Nic Vincent for snowfalls that are poetic though not unduly sentimental. It’s not a winter wonderland feel here, but the play does make us appreciate how much we need humane warmth in a cold world.

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Salvagers
By Harrison David Rivers
Directed by Mikael Burke

Choreographer: Tislarm Bouie; Scenic Designer: B Entsminger; Costume Designer: Risa Ando; Lighting Designer: Nic Vincent; Sound Designer: Stan Mathabane; Projection Designer: John Horzen; Production Dramaturg: Eric M. Glover; Technical Director: Luke Tarnow-Bulatowicz

Cast: Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew, Taylor A. Blackman, McKenzie Chinn, Toni Martin, Julian Elijah Martinez

Yale Repertory Theatre
November 24-December 16, 2023

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

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