The Passion of a Pet

Review of Sylvia, Music Theatre of Connecticut

It’s Valentine’s Day and if your sense of romance may have stalled somewhat over the years, maybe Sylvia, A.R. Gurney’s romantic comedy now playing at MTC, Norwalk, has the answer: get a dog!

Directed by Kevin Connors, Gurney’s play is affable and light. There may be a sense in which the midlife crisis faced by Greg (Dennis Holland) is symptomatic of something darker, but, in general, the play assumes that long-married couples may find themselves confronted by new tastes or long-suppressed desires or dissatisfactions that could manifest in many ways. Greg and Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) have been together twenty years and the crisis comes in the form of an affectionate stray that Greg encountered in a park and brings home, expecting Kate to just lie down and roll over, so to speak.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The dog wears a collar with its name, Sylvia, and she is a bundle of energy and, thanks to the miracle of theater, we are privy to her thoughts. That aspect of the play—the verbalized reactions of a frisky dog—is a crowd-pleaser, however obvious. As played by Bethany Fitzgerald, Sylvia is indeed a charming pet and anyone who might look askance at a woman playing a dog shouldn’t judge until they see it done. She looks upon Greg as “God,” aims to please, gets excited by each new arrival at the apartment, wants nothing more than to stretch out upon furniture, and speaks with an intense immediacy, suitable to an animal that lives in the moment. She’s also funny and lovable and makes the play work. Yes, the dog does indeed wag the tale.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Less obvious and somewhat less successful is how to stretch such a slight premise into a two hour play, with intermission. This is not easy to do as Gurney hasn’t given Greg’s wife much of a role. Dell’Aquila manages to seem sensible rather than a wet blanket, mostly. But whether or not she has your sympathy may have something to do with how you feel about dogs, and middle-aged men, and the possibilities in life afforded to post-menopausal women. Early on, it seems we might find fun in her occupation as a high school teacher of Shakespeare, so that when she offers “thus bad begins and worse remains behind,” we might catch ourselves hoping that more Shakespearean lines or tropes will percolate through the play. Not so much; Greg never even manages to play on his wife’s sympathies by intoning “What joy is joy if Silvia be not by?” And yet that is where he’s at, you might say.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia, in her unquestioning affection, helps her master deal with his current malaise: a job that has passed him by for younger colleagues with younger ambitions, an empty nest; and a wife who is done with the “the dog phase” of her life, much as she is with the children-raising part, and, almost, the stand-by-your-man part. For her, it’s a time to get on with things she wants to do—like research; for Greg, it’s a time in which companionship of some kind is needed. While we might expect that his new-found infatuation might be a younger woman, the play cleverly assumes that a dog can be more appealing than a new paramour. If there’s a bit of winking at the notion of bestiality in Act Two, it certainly isn’t played up in this production.

Tom (Jim Schilling), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Connors draws upon the comic abilities of MTC regular Jim Schilling to create three different characters who intervene in the hi-jinx. One—Phyllis—is a tony lady friend of Kate’s, played for laughs as a not so surreptitious tippler; another—Leslie—is a counselor of fluid gender who seems to suspect the worst of Greg’s urges for Sylvia and recommends that Kate work up the full revenge-fury of a wronged wife. As Tom, he’s a buddy-buddy bench-warmer at Dog Hill (a park where city-folk can let their canines cavort) with a male dog of his own, and the eventual coupling of Sylvia and Bowser, off-stage, might illicit a variety of comic reactions. Schilling and Holland play it mild, at every point letting us off the hook of having to view Sylvia sexually. And that’s helped by Fitzgerald’s refusal to play Sylvia as, well, kittenish. Sylvia, even when in heat, is matter-of-fact and forthright. When she curses out a cat, she’s foul-mouthed but only then, and it’s hilarious.

And that’s important because Greg is a rather buttoned-up guy and so Sylvia may well be his perfect pet. Eventually, Kate seems to see this and grudgingly allows him to have some quality time with the dog she wants him to give away. In Act Two she devises a plan that should spell the end of the spell, and we face an effectively emotional farewell. At this point, Sylvia does sound like a young woman led on by a philandering married man’s promises of a permanent relationship, but that easy identification doesn’t undermine the feeling of actual regret, which Holland depicts well.

Greg (Dennis Holland), Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Taking place in a tasteful living-room, with, on a raised space behind, some benches with an attractive 3-D city skyline as backdrop, MTC’s Sylvia is—like the word of praise for many a mutt—companionable. If it stirs thoughts about the mystery of attachment, all the better. A dog, after all, can never be accused of ulterior motives. She might say, with the author George Sand, “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” And that two random, interspecies strangers should meet and find that is the joy and sorrow of Sylvia. Don’t be afraid to love.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia
By A.R. Gurney
Directed by Kevin Connors

Scenic Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Merrie Deitch; Fight Staging: Dan O’Driscoll; Stage Manager: Gary Betsworth

Cast: Carole Dell’Aquila, Bethany Fitzgerald, Dennis Holland, Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
February 7-23, 2020

To Each According to Their Needs

Review of Love & Money at The Pershing Square Signature Center, New York

A. R. Gurney’s new play Love & Money, now playing at The Pershing Square Signature Center in New York after previews at Westport Playhouse, seems the kind of light comedy of manners that Gurney, now in his eighties, can probably write in his sleep. The usual Gurney elements are present: upper-class WASPs, Cole Porter songs, Buffalo, Irish housekeepers, a breezy grasp of the current idiom—with “whatever” and “google” wielded by an elderly woman—and, here, a moral center that seems earnest though not earned.

At best we might say the play, directed by Westport Artistic Director Mark Lamos, tries to imagine, without taxing its audience too much, how to redistribute all that wealth stored by storied families on the upper East side. It also pays homage to other literary inspirations, dropping references to Hamlet, “Richard Corey,” The Dining Room (perhaps Gurney’s best-known play), and a tip of the hat to John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, which it recalls via a very affable African-American character who may be a con-man.

Maureen Anderman as Cornelia Cunningham; photo by Joan Marcus

We enter upon Michael Yeargan’s sumptuous set representing the sumptuous in-home office of Cornelia Cunningham (Maureen Anderman), "a woman of a certain age." It might take us a moment to realize that everything in the room—the leather-bound books, the art, the Empire desk and chairs and tables—bears a tag as for a White Elephant sale. Mrs. Cunningham, at long last, in the wake of the death of her stern, money-making, Big Game-hunting husband, is selling off everything to benefit charities and any project that aids underprivileged people or endangered species. As played by Anderman, Cornelia is a perky presence, firing ripostes at her skeptical new lawyer, Harvey Abel (Joe Paulik) who tries to intervene with judicious caution. He’s playing a weak hand because Cunningham’s progeny—a son and a daughter—have both been outlived by their indomitable mom, and her unloved grand-kids have been bought off comfortably enough, so who is there to resist the liquidation?

Enter our plot complication: a letter from a man named Walker Williams (Gabriel Brown) who presents himself as the unknown, illegitimate offspring of Cornelia’s daughter. Raised in Buffalo by his black father and mother, he carries as introduction a letter ostensibly written by his biological, well-to-do mother exhorting him to seek his fortune from his grandmother when “he’s ready.” What he wants is to be set up on Wall Street with the family funds. Harvey, of course, doesn’t buy any of it (he blames Williams’ scheme on a recent newspaper story about Cornelia’s intentions), but Cornelia, after the charming young man makes his way into her study, is willing to entertain the possibility of kin if only for a certain emotional frisson lacking in her life. That, one supposes, is where “love” comes into it. Cornelia has no reason to love Walker—who goes by “Scott” as in Fitzgerald and speaks accordingly—but he is certainly willing to be loved. And stranger things have happened.

Joe Paulik (Harvey Abel), Gabriel Brown (Walker Williams), Maureen Anderman (Cornelia Cunningham); photo by Joan Marcus

Walker’s ingratiating willingness to be appreciated comes up in a more unflattering light when he comes on to Jessica Worth (Kahyun Kim), a self-possessed Julliard student on hand to audition a player-piano Cornelia is donating to the school. That piano becomes the key prop in the play, helping to pan out its running time, inspiring graceful dance moves as “Scott” tries to sweep Cornelia off her feet, as well as conjuring a brisk rendition of Porter’s “Make It Another Old Fashioned, Please,” by Kim, and a funny blast of Porter scorn from Harvey. But, despite class and racial differences, despite shadowy pasts and allusions to painful back story, not much gets sorted out here. Cornelia and her faithful maid Agnes (Pamela Dunlap) give us and Williams the condensed tale of the Cunningham children—a drunken son, a gad-about daughter—whose respective demises their mother blames on the riches that kept them above the fray.

Gurney lets everyone keep it light, and the patter—Cornelia calls it “badinage”—aims to entertain. Lamos, if there might be awkwardness or awareness to bring to light, doesn’t delve. We end with the sense that everything unpleasant in life can be handled by a check in the right amount in the right hands (such as at a certain local drama school). Certainly no one in the play doubts this, though Cornelia, with easy conscience, inveighs against money as “a curse” that caused suffering in her family. No doubt it did, and her expiation via eradication feels justified; it’s just that her solution seems to play into a fairy-tale sense of how things might be if only the privileged would divest their privileges, smugly loving all those needy people out there. The rich need the needy, you see, in order to feel richly rewarded by gratitude.

Breezy, friendly, and short, Love & Money feels like a TV installment and makes us wonder what would be happening if we "tuned in next week."

Signature Theatre and Westport Country Playhouse present
Love & Money
By A.R. Gurney
Directed by Mark Lamos

Cast: Maureen Anderman, Gabriel Brown, Pamela Dunlap, Kahyun Kim, Joe Paulik

Scenic Design: Michael Yeargan; Costume Design: Jess Goldstein; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: John Gromada; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre; Associate Artistic Director: Beth Whitaker

The Pershing Square Signature Center, New York