A Rocky Path for Lovers

Review of Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage

Scenic design is an integral part of the theater-viewing experience. It can be transformative; it can be unobtrusive; it can be a distinctively theatrical environment; it can seem like an actual place you could inhabit. The choices made to convey a play to us take on concrete shape with the set’s design and orientation.

Director Darko Tresnjak’s scenic design for the Hartford Stage’s production of Romeo & Juliet chooses to place “Shakespeare’s most popular play” (as the press packet reads) in a post-war Italy influenced by Neorealist filmmakers, such as Pasolini and de Sica, a decision that gives us a very austere setting, with a backdrop of vertical graves as in a mausoleum, with small vases tended now and then by attendants (one great virtue of this R&J is that it has a cast large enough to have extras). Gone is any sense of Italy's sensuality; in its place is a sterile, barren presence that never lets up.

Kaliswa Brewster (Juliet)

Worse, center stage is a pit of gravel. The first time boots tread across the space, accompanied by speech, we become aware of why this wasn’t such a good idea. Do we want our Shakespeare accompanied by noisy rocks and stones and worse than senseless things? After all, these characters aren’t speaking Italian with subtitles, nor are they speaking Fifties-ish lingo. They are speaking Elizabethan poetry, which, generally speaking, we like to hear as clearly as possible, unmarred by unnecessary sound effects. At one point, the pit seems intended as a swimming pool, with Mercutio (Wyatt Fenner) in flippers and bathing suit, and that does add a touch more color, incongruous as it might seem, to the drabness.

Wyatt Fenner (Mercutio), Alex Hanna (Benvolio), Chris Ghaffari (Romeo) and Ensemble

I could say more about the moving slab that becomes a balcony and the rising and lowering slab that becomes a marital bed for the lovers, but let’s just leave it at: unprepossessing. For some viewers these matters might mean less than nothing as they are transported to another world by their wonder at Shakespeare’s language and control of this very deft plot; I’m not of their number.

Kandis Chappell (Nurse), Chris Ghaffari (Romeo), Charles Janasz (Friar Laurence)

And that’s not due to the fact that this is an overly familiar play. Watching it, as with most Shakespeare plays, one is surprised that there’s always more to learn. Here, we learn how very important Friar Laurence (Charles Janasz) and Juliet’s Nurse (Kandis Chappell) are, because they are the two best performances in the show. Indeed, Janasz’s tongue-lashing to Romeo is only bettered by his woeful, at-wit’s-end explanation of what went wrong, addressed to a stern Escalus (Bill Christ) at the play’s close. And Chappell’s reactions, even when silent, speak volumes. Her face when she finally realizes Juliet is mourning more for Romeo than for Tybalt registers an almost frightened acknowledgement of youthful passion. The scene when she counsels giving up on Romeo and marrying Paris (Julien Seredowych) as Capulet (Timothy D. Stickney) commands is also fraught with a dissembling that speaks volumes about her underling status.

The principal roles are spottier. As Romeo, Chris Ghaffari is boyish and energetic, able to climb up to and down from the balcony slab with impressive ease, but any sense of Romeo as morose or lovesick—as he should be when we meet him—never materializes. And he’s much better at banter and challenge than he is at the passionate declarations required in the denouement. Kaliswa Brewster fares better as Juliet, swaying her Nurse with the passion of her love for Romeo and finding depth and tears in the “banished” speech, but she also has a tendency to proclaim earnestly more often than find a register that can carry her from pertness to pathos and back. Together they don’t really ignite, and their best scene has them lying on their sides, their body language expressing the yearning that’s stirring them.

Chris Ghaffari (Romeo), Kaliswa Brewster (Juliet)

And Mercutio? This time he’s more a nerd—with his pedal-pusher braces and bicycle—than a fop (the typical rendition), and Fenner knows how to deliver the poetry of his speech about Queen Mab, and that makes him a welcome addition here. The Montagues don’t have all that much to do, and, as Juliet’s parents, Thomas D. Stickney enacts fed-up anger well and Celeste Ciulla seems the most at home in the Neorealist trappings, looking like a Rosselini heroine, cigarette and all. Robert Hannon Davis, who plays Romeo’s stiff of a dad, makes more of an impression as a truly scary Apothecary, and Alex Hanna’s Benvolio is apt.

The best things about the look of the show are Ilona Somogyi’s costumes—Juliet’s go-to-be-shrived outfit is quite fetching—and Matthew Richards’ lighting design, which makes for some interesting effects against that somber, tomblike backdrop. The notion that Italy’s war dead serve as those fallen to Capulet vs. Montague intrigues is more suggestive than satisfactory, but the set’s sense of gloom does serve to underline all the misgivings and the willingness to die expressed often enough. This is a Romeo & Juliet where the couple’s brief flame of love seems a stray moment in an enduring culture of mourning. Doom’s the word.

William Shakespeare’s
Romeo & Juliet
Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Scenic Design: Darko Tresnjak; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Associate Scenic Deisgner: Colin McGurk; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Fight Choreographer: Steve Rankin; Vocal & Text Coach: Claudia Hill-Sparks; Casting: Binder Casting; Productioin Stage Manager: Robyn M. Zalewski; Assistant Stage Manager: Brae Singleton; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Callie Beaulieu; Kaliswa Brewster; Michael Buckhout; Kandis Chappell; Bill Christ; Celeste Ciulla; Robert Hannon Davis; Jonathan Louis Dent; Wyatt Fenner; Chris Ghaffari; Alex Hanna; Olivia Hoffman; Charles Janasz; Raphael Massie; Stephen Mir; Ella Mora; Stephen James Potter; Jenna Rapisdara; Alex Schneps; Mac Schonher; Julien Seredowych; Timothy D. Stickney

Hartford Stage
February 11-March 20, 2016

The Art of Lying

Review of The Liar at Westport Country Playhouse

The name David Ives conjures memories of his first huge hit, All in the Timing, which was, but for Shakespeare’s plays, the most produced play in the country in 1995-96. Likewise, in the 2013-14 season, productions of Ives’ Venus in Fur also came second only to productions of Shakespeare. And speaking of Shakespeare, Ives has created much of his remarkably successful career by translating, adapting, rescuing, re-tooling, or—and he says this himself—respectfully ripping off the tales and ideas of other authors (duly cited, of course).

So it should come as no surprise that Ives’ play The Liar is an adaptation of a classic comedy from 1643 by Pierre Corneille (itself based on a Spanish play of apparently deserved obscurity). For the most part, we come to Ives seeking hilarity. The Liar, a French farce beautifully directed by Penny Metropulos and performed by a stellar cast, does not disappoint. Ives retains Corneille’s verse form and provides laughter in every line. Far from becoming tedious, the verse only augments the fun—especially when Ives twists syllables to rhyme, or adds in enough anachronisms to keep the language zany and surprising. The cast, for its part, enables one to forget about the verse within minutes, except when the playwright wants us to notice it.

Rusty Ross (Cliton), Aaron Krohn (Dorante)

Of course, The Liar concerns, well, a liar. Its main character, Dorante (the skilled and unexpectedly sweet Aaron Krohn) spins lie after lie as his very mode of being. Whenever he’s in a tight spot, or when simply making conversation, the most elaborate, overblown fictions spring from his imagination. For instance, when wishing to impress a friend, Alcippe (the very funny Philippe Bowgen), with his amorous triumphs, Dorante describes his night with a certain lady with outrageous and delightful double entendres. Amidst the verbal riches we all—except Alcippe—may forget that the latter is engaged to the lady.

Indeed one beauty of The Liar is that Dorante’s extravagant stories keep us from growing weary with the plot of unmasking a truth we already know. Another beauty is that the women, far from being ornamental objects of the men’s desire, are, if anything, wittier, cleverer, and more determined in their goals than are the men.

Kate MacCluggage (Clarice), Monique Barbee (Lucrece)

As Lucrece, the initially quiet friend of the more garrulous and showy beauty Clarice, Monique Barbee has arguably the more difficult role and plays Lucrece with sensitivity and grace. As Clarice, Kate MacCluggage’s charisma derives from her palpable joy in acting and her expert fun with the language (MacCluggage was marvelous as a witch in the Long Wharf/Hartford Stage production of Bell, Book, and Candle in 2012).

Also expert is Rebekah Brockman, who gave us such a poignant Thomasina in the Yale Repertory Theatre's Arcadia this past fall. Brockman plays identical twin ladies’ maids: Isabelle, sensual, and Sabine, sanctimonious (and especially quick with a hard slap). The object of Isabelle’s desire and Sabine’s scorn is Cliton, Dorante’s hapless servant (Rusty Ross), as compulsively honest as Dorante is compulsively mendacious. Completing the cast is Brian Reddy, very funny as Dorante’s father, and Jay Russell as Philiste, friend and advisor to the hotheaded Alcippe.

Jay Russell (Philiste), Philippe Bowgen (Alcippe)

Matching the wit of the script and the sparkle of the cast is a set design by Kristen Robinson that is at once very French, very modern, and delicious to look at: the light green trees put one in mind of pistachio sorbet. The furnishings—black and white, spare and elegant—make for precisely choreographed set changes performed by the cast to French music (designed by David Budries) that sounds like a mix of hip-hop and 1980’s electronic dance tunes. The lighting design (Matthew Richards) heightens our sense of a disco-inflected present. And Jessica Ford’s costumes—as crazily beautiful for the men as they are for the women—complete our transportation to a colorfully unreal world.

On several occasions, characters break the fourth wall to address the audience, making us complicit in their acts of lying. In one of these memorable addresses, Dorante even dips into the subject of existential despair, dodging out of it with a comforting lightness of touch. Certainly, The Liar can be enjoyed as simple, silly farce, but the philosophical questions the play elicits make it a comedic and ironic meditation on the truth, and so very French.

Dorante (read Ives via Corneille) deeply understands not only the necessity of lies as we construct the facets of our social selves, but also the more profound ways in which lies make life not only pleasurable, but bearable.

The Liar
By David Ives
Adapted from Le menteur by Pierre Corneille
Directed by Penny Metropulos

Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Voice & Text Consultant: Elizabeth Smith; Set Design: Kristen Robinson; Sound Design: David Budries; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Costume Design: Jessica Ford; Props Master: Karin White; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting, Laura Schutzel, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith

Westport Country Playhouse
Westport, May 5-23, 2015

Strangers in the Night

Review of Reverberation at Hartford Stage

Reverberation, the new play by Matthew Lopez now playing at Hartford Stage, directed by Maxwell Williams, presents a story of coping with trauma. It’s been a year since a terrible thing happened in the life of Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane), an illustrator of condolence cards, who has been living in the same apartment building in Astoria for 15 years. In fact, he lived for all but the last year with his partner Gabriel in the apartment above his current domicile. The change in apartments was his first act in trying to cope.

Claire (Aya Cash),  Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

We learn this before the end of the Act I, but when we first meet him, Jonathan seems merely a withdrawn loner. He hates leaving his apartment after dark and his only contact with others comes via down-and-dirty hook-ups via Grindr (an app for males prowling for other males). The play opens in medias res—in the midst of intense coupling between Jonathan and a younger man, Wes (Carl Lundstedt). Wes is more or less blown away by the sex and actually tries to be sincere about it afterwards. Jonathan just wants him out of there.

Wes (Carl Lundstedt) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

Next, Jonathan similarly blows off his upstairs neighbor, Claire (Aya Cash), a female gadabout in her late twenties. Claire, who rightly claims she’s “barely domesticated,” leads what seems a party-girl lifestyle. About the only things she owns are an inflatable mattress, a tube TV, a camp chair and, most importantly, a clothes-rack full of designer stuff—and when she really needs something high end, she “borrows” it from the department store where she works. A need for help with a zipper on one such to-die-for dress is what first sends her to Jonathan’s apartment where she doesn’t attempt to seduce him so much as attempt to induce sex. It gets awkward fast and soon she’s out the door and Jonathan is onto his next anonymous coupling.

Of course, this is going to be about how getting to know the girl next door turns things around for this guy, at least for that lonely time of year, from pre-Thanksgiving to just before Christmas, that occupies the play. By the end of Act I, after he spills to her the horrible hate-crime killing of his lover Gabriel, Jonathan and Claire are actually sleeping together—just sleeping. It’s sweet, and that’s what Claire thinks Jonathan is. He knows better, and tries to warn her. The question hanging in the air at the end of Act I is: is this a play about redemption through connection, as a gay man learns to overcome a traumatic event that cost him the love of his life, or is it about how the dark side can destroy even the best of provisional buddies?

Claire (Aya Cash) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

When Act II opens we feel like we’re in some zippy rom-com where Jonathan becomes more or less a mothering “girlfriend” to mostly friendless Claire—her only contacts apart from Jonathan, despite her age, appearance, and keen fashion sense, are married men who take her out and then expect to bed her. Life for these urban anyones is all about quid pro quo sex acts until Claire and Jonathan begin to care for each other because they get to know each other—and a dreamy Christmas in a cabin in Vermont is, no lie, what they have in mind for a getaway. And we may be hoping that’s where Lopez wants to take us, showing how “two lonely people, strangers in the night” can share a dance and a kiss and flirt with the notion that they can be in love with each other and not be lovers. Sure.

Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane) and Claire (Aya Cash)

Off-stage is a “Real Real Boy” who seems the kind of Gentleman Caller our Claire has been awaiting all this time, though we might suspect she’s also been dodging such in her knocking about with dealers—cards in Vegas, drugs in L.A.—as well as time in Paris and London, to say nothing of “way too long” in Orlando. In other words, Claire keeps on the move, and when she stands up Real Real Boy, it echoes the story Wes, who returns to Jonathan, fatefully, to try once more, tells about the reason he was on Grindr in the first place: he got stood up by friends on his birthday. Lopez’s characters are the people romantic comedies are never about. They’re the people who know that relationships don’t work out or that, when they do, someone comes along and bashes it.

Luke Macfarlane as Jonathan in Reverberation

I’ve stressed the importance of trauma in the character of Jonathan because it’s easy to be fooled by his coping mechanisms. And everything he does is a coping mechanism. Somewhere underneath it all—the hiding and the warmth—is a very, very raw nerve ready to snap. Macfarlane plays Jonathan quite believably as the sort of guy who is wrapped so tightly he’s a mystery even to himself. Early on, a clichéd phonecall from Mom and Dad, anxious about whether he’s coming home for Thanksgiving, could have been used to give us something more than irked refusals to share, but, even so, Macfarlane lets body language and very neutral tones tell us a lot more than his words do, as we spy upon this man.

And looking on as voyeurs is key to the theatrical experience here. Andromache Chalfant’s amazingly detailed set creates two completely different spaces: the Spartan look of Claire’s contrasts the lived-in clutter—complete with huge paintings by the late Gabriel on every available wall—of Jonathan’s space. And Matthew Richards’ lighting acts almost like another character or at least a narrator. We see how eerie the dark spaces can be at night, as Jonathan’s nightmares make him call into uncertain shadows in his own apartment and the darkness above in Claire’s, while morning light makes everything feel homey and communal. The stairs outside the apartments' doors also plays its part, not simply as connection between two floors and, initially, two worlds, but also as a space of impromptu encounters. Williams’ direction and the set design make great use of open and closed doors.

Claire (Aya Cash) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

As Claire, Aya Cash doesn’t play to the Holly Golightly or Sally Bowles comparisons one might be tempted to make; she’s not a loveable kook nor a sly charmer. She’s just an average youngish woman who considers herself too ordinary to expect anything extraordinary from life. Lopez wisely keeps her from ever becoming a succoring figure in the relationship, a fact that’s important to the play’s ending. And as Wes, Carl Lundstedt plays with perfect pitch the hardest scene of all: a smitten lover trying to be real rather than charming or clever or sexy.

Wes (Carl Lundstedt), Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

Reverberation is a sensitive and provocative play, often entertaining in its speech rhythms and interactions, fun to watch in its use of movement and space and light, and full of the cadences of people dropping their façades and picking them up again. Even the lines that don’t quite work—there’s a particularly egregious use of the “sympathy card” idea at a key point—are within the realm of what these characters might attempt for a laugh or a stab at depth or as avoidance. Elements such as the right song at the wrong time may seem heavy as “triggers,” and the play’s dramatic outcome too sudden, but the final tableau takes us and Jonathan back to where he’s been all along.

Reverberation
By Matthew Lopez
Directed by Maxwell Williams

Set Design: Andromache Chalfont; Costume Design: Linda Cho; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Tei Blow; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Stage Manager: Marisa Levy; Assistant Stage Manager: Arielle Goldstein; Assistant Director: Sarah Hartman; Production Assistant: Chandalae Nyswonger

Hartford Stage, February 19-March 15, 2015