Child's Play

Review of Make Believe, Hartford Stage

Bess Wohl and Jackson Gay, the author and director, respectively, of Make Believe, the opening play of the 2018-19 season at Hartford Stage, worked together early in their careers, collaborating at the Yale Cabaret while students in the Yale School of Drama. That fact seemed significant to me while watching Make Believe, which might work best as a one act (such as one sees at the Cabaret). Here, the play is in two parts without intermission, and it’s the second part, which has to make believe it depicts the present day of the kids we meet in the first part, that suffers from cuteness and an uncertain tone. The first part, played by actors under age 12, is dynamite.

Four kids, ranging from the eldest, Chris (Roman Malenda), to Kate (Sloane Wolfe) to Addie (Alexa Skye Swinton) to the youngest, Carl (RJ Vercellone), who is about five but doesn’t talk, occupy themselves in a huge playroom in a house where the adults are absent. Certainly, that’s meant to make the helicopter-parents among us feel freaked out, and it doesn’t help that we have to keep hearing Mom’s chipper voice on the answering machine (still a relatively novel device in the 1980s when the first part is set) as a series of callers leave messages about missed appointments and, from a distraught husband, a garble of bitterness. Mom’s MIA, in short, and the kids aren’t quite alright.

Kate (Sloane Wolfe), Carl (RJ Vercellone), Addie (Alexa Skye Swinton), background: Chris (Roman Malenda) (photos by T. Charles Erickson)

To amuse themselves, the kids—who, we expect, take care of themselves quite a lot—tend to play house, with Chris a funnily morbid pater who likes to let his family know that, eventually, we all get to either rot or get burnt up, we have no other choices. Kate, as the mom, is able to take a right to the jaw and get right back to work on whatever dinner might be. Addie, who has her own baby in the form of a Cabbage Patch doll, is apt to be off in her own world, and Carl is perfectly happy playing the dog, pantomimed pissing included.

The version of life the children get up to is darkly entertaining. We never forget (that damned phone won’t let us!) that they’re on their own for what starts to feel a distressing length of time. A letter Kate writes to the late Princess Grace (not knowing the celebrity has just died) lets us know not only that Kate may be the unknown offspring of the Princess of Monaco (compare the bone structure) but that the kids have eaten most of the food in the house, including the frozen stuff.

Chris (Roman Malenda)

Wohl’s dialogue is wonderfully sharp and zestfully foul-mouthed as only children—for whom each expletive is a gem—can be. As Chris, Roman Malenda gets several chances to shine: first in an under the sheet-tent tale about a boy he dislikes, then in a call to school—as a British nanny—to excuse the children from attending. At times he has an odd quirk of raising his voice mid-sentence for emphasis, as though a suppressed passion is ready to burst forth. As Kate, Sloane Wolfe is studiedly adult as precocious children often are, and she’s ready to defect. The younger kids are wonderfully physical in their ability to romp as if they aren’t in fact onstage. Playing a young girl at play is something Alexa Skye Swinton does remarkably well.

If the play ended when the child’s portion does, we would have to connect the dots and, who knows, might even have to allegorize a bit what the adults are doing to this insular world we’ve come to know and love. Instead, what a falling-off is there! Enter adult versions of the children, played with a kind of tense familiarity while speaking lines meant to connect things from then to now.

Addie (Molly Ward), Kate (Megan Byrne), Carl (Brad Heberlee)

As Kate, Megan Byrne is still trying to cope with everything that doesn’t add up. As Addie, Molly Ward is a mom herself (remember that Cabbage Patch doll?) and still trying to be a free spirit. Brad Heberlee’s Carl is at first MIA himself, then arrives to give a speech he was meant to deliver earlier. His extended crying jag that morphs into the howl he exulted in as family pet is a good example of the earnestness of the dot-connecting and underlining going on. Chris (a different one) played by the always presentable Chris Ghaffari is on hand to earn jokes about Millennials, be the object of MILF desire, and, yes, even a lover in mourning. Ghaffari handles it all by being sweet, as his namesake would never be. Thus we lose much of the acid that the irrepressible playacting master of the house interjected into the proceedings. Pity. Meanwhile, there are jokes at the expense of Scandinavians, a demographic (I guess) it’s still okay to otherize.

Chris (Chris Ghaffari)

Wohl, not content with the dysfunction among the adults in this family, has to give us an explanatory moment that adds more distress, from other adults in the past. Kate objects to the way that bit of backstory gets dropped into the scene, and I have to agree with her.

If you ever needed, in the course of one evening, evidence about how sad it is we grow up, find it here. Jackson Gay is to be commended on how seamlessly this show runs, and for having the guts and heart to direct this play on the big stage, with great help from a set both spacious and cluttered by Antje Ellerman, effective but unobtrusive lighting cues by Paul Whitaker, with music by Broken Chord and, no doubt, very vital stage managing by Rob Chikar and Kelly Hardy.

There’s much to think about here in terms of how we portray children, protect and neglect children, and project ourselves onto (and back to) children, as well as how children grow into the world as they find it. A fascinating evening of theater.

Make Believe
By Bess Wohl
Directed by Jackson Gay

Scenic Design: Antje Ellerman; Costume Design: Junghyun Georgia Lee; Lighting Design: Paul Whitaker; Original Music & Sound Design: Broken Chord; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Production Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy

Cast: Megan Byrne, Chris Ghaffari, Brad Heberlee, Roman Malenda, Alexa Skye Swinton, RJ Vercellone, Molly Ward, Sloane Wolfe

Hartford Stage
September 6-30, 2018

No I in Team

Review of The Wolves, TheaterWorks

The great strength of The Wolves, the debut play by Sarah DeLappe now playing in an extended run at TheaterWorks, directed by Eric Ort, is the freshness and believable spontaneity of its cast, playing a group  of young women in their mid-teens. As an indoor-soccer team during a winter “somewhere in suburban America,” the nine actors, with great immediacy, present a loose collective that at times jells into a team and at times becomes a group at war within itself.

front row: Caitlin Zoz, Carolyn Cutillo, Claire Saunders, Dea Julien; back row: Karla Gallegos, Shannon Keegan, Emily Murphy, Rachel Caplan, Olivia Hoffman

The dialogue, often overlapping and sometimes overheard among themselves, is almost defiantly immature, as though speech is a condition of existence that must be exercised, no matter what is said. The girls joust with words and console with words and flatter and belittle with words, and their nervous energy—we see them most often during warm-ups before a game—is infectious. We lean in to catch the emphases, to find out who is up and who is down and who is admired and who is not accepted.

The idea that our social interactions take place on a “playing-field” is not new, but DeLappe’s play makes that metaphor feel more earned than it might be. As players of soccer, the team has its wins and losses, but as young women playing together, and growing up together, the team faces challenges that have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with personality. The old adage, “there is no ‘I’ in team” asserts that the individual should be subsumed by the collective purpose of the team. DeLappe’s play looks at how the tensions of individual identity shape any common experience.

One person is very smart, another is not so bright; one person comes from a traditional family but has little sense of the world beyond her town, another doesn’t know her father but as traveled all over the world and lives in a yurt; one is Armenian-American, another thought the latter girl was Mexican; one is dating a male college student, another is probably gay; one may have an eating disorder, another makes jokes about such things. The fact that the team is called the Wolves is indicative. They are a more-or-less loyal pack but there’s some ambiguity about what it takes to be alpha.

center: #7 (Olivia Hoffman), center rear: #25 (Emily Murphy); flanking, R to L: #14 (Rachel Kaplan), #13 (Dea Julien), #00 (Karla Gallegos), #11 (Shannon Keegan), #8 (Claire Saunders), #2 (Carolyn Cutillo)

Most of the action—the games, an injury, a seduction gone awry that might well be date-rape, a death—takes place offstage. Onstage, all we have to go on is what is said and not said, and how. The girls are usually forthright so it’s not too hard to follow what they’re thinking, but, even so, there are many causes of anxiety that surface now and then without ever being quite addressed. A dominant tension, for instance, is between #7 (Olivia Hoffman), the self-possessed “striker,” and #25 (Emily Murphy), the team captain. The tension is not resolved, merely tabled by events that occur. Other plot points, such as #2 (Carolyn Cutillo)’s tendency to concussions, may simply be a “red herring” for those who assume tragedy must befall in one way or another.

The fact that tragedy does befall will be deemed by some viewers a necessary element of these girls’ lives, by others an event imposed by the playwright for the sake of gravitas. The way in which the event is handled puts the viewer in the position of trying to piece together what happened. All becomes clear, yet the device seems an excessively motivated way to extract more importance from the conversations that occur late in the play. It’s as if, rather than let the disparities among the teammates create drama in some fashion that would be more organic to the nature of their activity—at one point, for instance, we see how talent scouts show interest in only a few—a kind of negative deus ex machina determines that one of the players must be sacrificed for the sake of greater cohesion. Don’t all differences seem less glaring in the light of loss?

Megan Byrne as “a soccer mom” is the only adult in the play and she appears very late, in a scene that she handles quite well but that seems more than a little de trop. The effect is to underline, again and again, that the world outside the bubble of the team is fraught with peril—a callous boy, a bad driver, a hungover coach, a hard-to-please talent scout, and a mother all alone in her trauma. Against such things the team is no sure buffer, but it’s better than nothing. Seeing these young women learn that is the main game in The Wolves.

The Wolves
By Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Eric Ort

Set Design: Mariana Sanchez; Costume Design: Blair Gulledge; Lighting Design: Rob Denton; Sound Design: Karin Graybash; Wig Design: Leah Loukas; Casting: Erica Jensen (CSA)/Calleri Casting; Assistant Director: Taneisha Duggan; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Megan Byrne, Rachel Caplan, Carolyn Cutillo, Karla Gallegos, Olivia Hoffman, Déa Julien, Shannon Keegan, Emily Murphy, Claire Saunders, Caitlin Zoz

TheaterWorks
October 5-November 5, 2017; extended to November 10

A Play with Class

Review of Good People at TheaterWorks, Hartford

David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, superbly directed by Rob Ruggiero at TheaterWorks, opens with Margie (Erika Rolfsrud), a Dollar Store employee, losing her job. She has been late one too many times over the past eight years. As she tries, first humorously and then with rising rage and desperation, to negotiate with her boss, the young Stevie (Buddy Haardt), we come to understand quite a bit about Margie and about Lindsay-Abaire’s aims in writing this play.

Set before gentrification comes to the Irish-American working class neighborhood of South Boston (“Southie”), the playwright’s hometown, Good People explores the complicated role that luck plays in a person’s ability to escape impoverished circumstances. America’s increasingly shaky belief in a classless society is based on the notion that hard work and determination are all one needs for success. Margie is here to tell us otherwise.

Audrie Neenan, Erika Rolfsrud, Megan Byrne

In the following scene, set in Margie’s kitchen, we meet her brassy friend Jean (Megan Byrne) and her landlady, aptly named Dottie (Audrie Neenan). The talk centers on jobs: who has one, who hasn’t got a chance of finding one, how Margie can get herself another one, fast. Here we learn why Margie has lost numerous minimum-wage positions: her adult daughter, severely disabled due to a premature birth, requires constant supervision. When Jean remembers that at a catering gig she met one of their high school friends, Mikey Dillon (R. Ward Duffy), who got out of Southie and became a doctor, she’s certain that he’s Margie’s ticket to solvency: after all, Margie and Mike were an item for awhile in high school, and surely he’ll help someone from the neighborhood.

Erika Rolfsrud, R. Ward Duffy, Chandra Thomas

What unfolds between Margie and Mike—when she visits his office to test the limits of his loyalty to old friends; when Jean and Dottie react to this meeting during one of two funny and telling scenes set in a bingo hall; and during a searing scene in Act Two—dramatizes the play’s themes and provides an evening of thought-provoking, high-tension, nearly brilliant theater. I say “nearly” only because some of Lindsay-Abaire’s scenes go on a bit too long. While one could listen all night to these uniformly terrific actors speak his sharp, gritty, and at times hilarious dialogue, the plot, to its credit, creates a momentum that can’t afford to sag.

Erika Rolfsrud (Margie)

Lindsay-Abaire couldn’t hope for a better rendering of Good People than Rob Ruggiero’s terrific production. As Margie, Erika Rolfsrud gives a stunningly strong and nuanced performance. Margie is tough, but she must also convey anxiety without coming across as a victim (an epithet she would despise). She is brilliant and at the same time unapologetically uneducated. She has a mean streak and knows how to use it: watch her deploy the phrase “lace-curtain Irish” when talking about Mike’s rise in the world, and see her satisfaction when her words hit their target. Yet if the actress doesn’t also display warmth and humor, she loses the audience and the production falls apart. Rolfsrud nails every note.

The rest of the cast is no less remarkable. As Mike, R. Ward Duffy is coiled as tightly as a camouflaged snake. Mike knows how Margie can needle, shame, and possibly destroy him. He’s plenty arrogant, but he is also persuasive in his belief that hard work leads to success and, conversely, that the lack of success proves inadequacy. Mike is Margie’s natural enemy, yet Duffy and Rolfsrud’s arguments have a sexual spark that makes us believe in their intense youthful affair, and in Mike’s uneasy kinship with his background.

Megan Byrne (Jean), Audrie Neenan (Dottie)

As Dottie, Audrie Neenan provides more than comic relief: her character’s comments on the surrounding events bring to mind one of Shakespeare’s fools. Her foolishness is real enough, and a riot, but her wacky utterances unwittingly convey the resignation of a life defined by Southie. Megan Byrne, as Jean, carries some of Lindsay-Abaire’s sharpest and most humorous dialogue, and her timing is perfection: she can deliver a zinger with one raise of an eyebrow or dart of an eye.

Buddy Haardt, as Stevie, who quietly endures Jean’s scornful certainty that he is gay because he plays bingo, gives us an understated, gentle performance that adds moments of rest amidst the women’s sharp repartee. And Chandra Thomas, as Mike’s wife—the least well-written role in the script—finds moments of subtle humor and genuine pain without overplaying.

Of special note in this production is the use of film-like, photographed projections (by Scenic Designer Luke Hegel-Cantarella) to create distinctively different neighborhoods, and to simulate, also, the movement between them: our movement along with Margie’s. We watch the Dollar Store and run-down strip malls roll by, and later the appearance of trees and large houses tell us we are in another world.

Buddy Haardt, Erika Rolfsrud, Megan Byrne, Audrie Neenan

Beautifully rendered, too, is the sound design by Mike Miceli, especially in the bingo scenes. Of course, much of the credit goes to Lindsay-Abaire for writing these scenes as he has, but Ruggiero and Miceli—along with these terrific actors—have brought out the script’s sharp music. As the characters talk about Margie’s mounting difficulties, the marking of cards echoes the characters’ larger hopes, and the bingo caller’s voice drives the tension.

Ruggiero’s Good People is one of the most gripping, layered, and provocative productions seen at TheaterWorks in the past eight years, which is a high compliment indeed. The performances invigorate and inspire, and the play’s complex ideas resonate long after the evening ends.

Good People
By David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Scenic Design: Luke Hegel-Cantarella; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design: Mike Miceli; Casting: McCorkle Casting LTD.; Production Manager: C. Nikki Mills; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth; Dialect Consultant: Gillian Lane-Plescia

TheaterWorks
May 22-June 28, 2015