Greetings, Talented South Jersey!

 We Might Be Giants

I am very proud to be associated with South Jersey theatre. This is an extremely talented place with the potential to go where it wants with the art. South Jersey could become a national model for regional theatre arts from childhood to adult community and professional stages. There is certainly enough talent, and the beginnings of a model are already nicely in place.

  

That’s what I saw every time I reviewed a performance on a South Jersey stage or attended a meeting of SJTL: all the elements of greatness in a gentle disarray. I’ve been ill for a long time, and I knew I would never be sufficient to inspire South Jersey theatre all the way there. But that hopeful vision guided and still guides my choices. If South Jersey theatre becomes solidly self-aware, South Jersey theatre will be able to write its own ticket.

I leap insouciantly ahead. And that’s the most exercise I’m likely to get today. I’m not in terrific shape. Let me put that another way. I’m in terrible shape. I’ve passed through a ten-week period of harsh neurological attack on digestive and motor nerves. These kinds of bouts have been part of my disability for a long time.

This one was very bad. This one has left me unable to perform life tasks. And, while I can now correspond, I can’t resume any of my former activities. A twenty minute drive for a two-hour performance followed by a twenty minute drive home is beyond me now.

My review: This is a sharp, painfully good production with agonizingly, witheringly and persistently killer performances which made me weep with stabbing wonder. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who was in it or what they did and I think I left the program on the roof of the car. A must see. Wherever it was playing.

It’s funny until it’s your show. So, barring a miracle, I’m done with those gigs. It’s very sad to think I may have reviewed, if not watched, my last live play ever. Sighing and crying, raging and shaking, I may have to accept it., but I can’t imagine it ever feeling right.

Barring a miracle—which I may yet find—I will not have the ample elegance of time one can generally expect at my age in the 21^st Century. My thoughts are locked now almost exclusively on legacy. There are things I want to get done, and I’m not talking about sky diving or leaving some pile of money or bricks behind with my name on it.

I have two things made which can generate the legacy I want. One is a free market approach to poverty which I designed on purpose because my wife takes care of homeless, pregnant, poverty-class children who scramble for shelter on frigid winter nights with their born babies in tow. Right now, that pregnant child and her babies’ welfare is hostage to political posturing. I found that too nauseating to look away from, so I designed an answer. It’s a structure already up and running successfully elsewhere, but for a different purpose. It just needs to be tried in an “underserved” area. “Underserved”, I understand, is newspeak for “poor”. 

The other piece of legacy is a program I made by accident. Looking for a particular gift which I did not find, I made one. It was well received. When other people began asking me about it, I realized it could have a more general appeal. Research disclosed a potential subscription base of 344 million users world-wide. That’s what I am figuring out how to gift to South Jersey Theatre.

It was not my original intention to toss this on the table at this time. I wanted to work with folks a while longer first to see who did what particularly well. But as the likelihood of a later time dwindles, now seems appropriate.

I will keep this page up-to-date on developments. You folks rock!

At McCarter in Princeton

TRAVESTIES: Truth is Served in Princeton

“Why is this play titled as it is,” asked a good friend? “A travesty is a shameful injustice, a mockery. What are the injustices here?”

He was a bit mistaken. Where the word “travesty”, in its common use, is very often followed by the thought “of justice,” either spoken or implied, the art of travesty began as a genre of Victorian entertainment wherein a famous literary or musical work was parodied in the comic extreme. So, while a travesty may turn out to be a shameful injustice, with any luck at all, it won’t.

With luck it will be Orphic in its instruction and delight. At the McCarter Theatre on Friday, March 16, we were dealt aces.

Why is this play called “Travesties”?

It is a fictionalized reflection of real events in Zurich at the end of World War I mixed with the reflected invention of an event in Zurich, 1974. Story protagonist Henry Carr, filled and delivered by veteran actor James Urbaniak with intelligence, wit and most flexible craft, was historically attached to the British consulate in Zurich at war’s end. Coincidentally, also in Zurich at the time, were James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Dada standard bearer Tristan Tzara.

The world of the play is Carr’s Zurich apartment at two times: first in 1974 where he sits in doting recollection then flashing to Zurich circa 1917 as he recollects it.  Historically clear that Carr knew Joyce, it is not as clear that Carr interacted with all three notables to the degree which the play suggests. In the play, Carr remembers himself as their equal or better, engaging them with repartee lifted from Oscar Wilde. His world view, however, is not quite as broad as theirs.   

Mr. Urbaniak deftly gives us a Carr as passionate about the haberdash as Joyce was about structure in art, Lenin about class struggle and Tzara about the random universe. The turns are riveting: there he is, a young buck standing on a chair passionately declaiming about green pants when a door slams.

Within the time it takes the reverberation to reach the back wall of the house and echo in return to the proscenium, the lights have changed, the set has changed and there sits Mr. Uraniak, the codger, in 1974. It is perfect and seamless craft in service of a rock-solid vision from an inferno of an intellect intent on prying our stubborn minds from their safe purchase.

Why is this play called “Travesties”?

The play is structured like memories. Things repeat. It is exactly the process of reconstructing past events from a distance of great time with the intention of having everything make sense. The mind combs the husks of dead events looking for the piece that will make it all feel right, and, not quite finding it, things repeat.

The play owes a debt to Oscar Wilde. Events intermingle. Gwendolyn and Cecily enter the scene, gifted to us by accomplished performers Susannah Flood and, in her McCarter debut, Sara Topham. They step straight from a Wilde drawing room into the playground of Carr’s memory. Did they exist? Perhaps. Or, perhaps, they simply slipped sideways from a Zurich stage into the Zurich streets of Carr’s mind.

Their presence in the play is comic in a cosmic spot which nears pain. Was a pretentious, liberal, upper-crust ditzy British twit really key in producing the revolutionary vision of Communism at its most vital? Ow, that hurts. And the parody they enact of Vaudeville’s Gallagher and Sheen routine is like a bucket of clear, bright water in the face. Where’d that come from, you say? Then, hmmm. Very funny and curiously refreshing.

Why “Travesties”?.

Vladimir Lenin and his wife, Nadya Krupskaya are played with revolutionary passion in fervent Russian by Demosthenes Chrysan and Lusia Strus. They repeatedly stand in the Zurich library discovering the news that the revolution has begun and devising ways of returning to the Motherland.

Entering into the spirit of the thing, I might spend a paragraph praising their excellent diction with the unabashed admission that I know only three words of Russian and have been told by Russians that I pronounce them unintelligibly. As it stands, I will say that they were two most effective actors, completing clear transmission of intention and reflection without the unmitigated benefit of direct, linguistic communication. Nicely done.

Everybody stands on chairs and declaims. Christian Coulson, as Tristan Tzara, is perfect in his anti-ness. The syllable is “da”.  And he captures the disgusted rage of the movement at the effete institutions which produced gross waste and destruction from human genius, conveying the distaste in the explosive utterance of that syllable like the spatter of a machine gun. Dadadadada. . .

Fred Arsenault as James Joyce is infused with the egotistical passion and arrogant confidence for which Joyce is famous and without which no one would ever have heard of him. He stands on the chair opposite to Mr. Coulson’s, declaiming modernism with jolting passion.

A. Percy Bennet, the English Consul General of Zurich and Carr’s superior, is portrayed with gracious irony by Everett Quinton. In his memory, Carr places Bennett as his own butler. Mr. Quinton gives us smarmy elegance which transposes seamlessly into homiletic insertions not quite at peace with the role of the butler and back to quiescence in a single cross of the stage. Again, excellence of craft. Again, seamless insertions.

Every actor in the cast deserves specific praise, mention and thanks. No one stands out. This may be as close to theatre heaven as it gets for anyone with an intellect.

From complex, coordinated cues to the gracious elegance of craft which allows actors and crew to illuminate the intellectual landscape of this play with clarity and ease, this performance is exactly what intelligent, professional theatre ought to be. This is no intellectual snack food. This is as thick and sweet as a New Orleans night in July. And we emerge hypnotized by the grandeur of it all. It is, in the end, very serious nonsense.

There should be a word for a production which fills the full intent of a play and then blooms to adorn it in great glory. Oh, right. The word is perfect. This is a perfect production.

You can quibble with the choices and emphases, but you cannot argue that the ones presented were anything but intellectually sound, imagined with satisfying artistry of vision and realized with a craft so developed and secure on all levels that even the stagiest of stage tricks were completely transparent and fully in service of the work.

This is not a play for everyone, although, to be fair, there seems a bit of something for all in it. I sat next to a 13-year-old patron who was rapt throughout. In the condescension of adultism, I assumed he hadn’t grasped the implications of the early 20th Century argument between traditional and abstract arts which had actually led to street brawls.

And perhaps he missed that. But he  told me the play had an “exciting flow.” This took me aback. It had had a most exciting flow, and he’d noticed it before I did.

“Travesties”?

Every political, economic, artistic, romantic and culinary viewpoint presented in the play parodies every other viewpoint in some way, often in grotesque mockery.

But the central parody, the greatest travesty of the play, is  the experience of being human itself . We have life, we have art, we have intellect, we have memory. And, at the end of a life, those assemblages roll and bump against each other so that the totality emerges as a triumphantly painful, well-defended and often grotesque reshuffled and mis-remembered parody of the real life lived.

Our lives may or may not be gross injustices. But by Stoppard’s standards, they will often end up as very funny travesties. See this play with someone who knows everything and watch her response afterward. Until then, I wish extremely pleasant mockeries to you all.

TRAVESTIES

by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Sam Buntrock

Matthews Theatre

McCarter Theate Center

91 University Place

Princeton, NJ

http://www.mccarter.org/ 

Through April 1, 2012 

Acting Lesson #1

Smart Acting I: What's acting? What's talent? Why don't I have it?

Do you know a very bad liar? Someone so bad at lying you might almost believe that they had never told a lie in their entire life? Is there anyone you know about whom you would find it possible to  believe that he or she never in his or her life told one single, even very tiny lie?

I don’t know anyone like that. In some way, whether it’s to gain a supposed advantage, save ourselves a little trouble or to soothe someone else’s way into a hard stretch of road, every human on the planet finds occasions and figures how to obscure the truth to different degrees for different purposes.

Perched prettily astride this pile of prevarications is. . .Us! Theatre. We are not only at the top of the hill of liars, we are the art form of lying. We train to be able to stand in front of total strangers and say things which are obviously untrue with all the heart and force of truth we can muster from within. It is as manipulative and even more brazen than any other lying. It’s simply agreeable. At least most of the time.

If you can lie, you can act. Since everyone can lie, everyone can act. Why does it seem to come more easily to some than others? That’s simple. It’s talent.

Talent? Is that something like The Force? Prevaricational midichlorians, strong in some but not with others? A microscopic blood particle found plentifully in the Jedi actors?  What in the name of Aunt Ida’s goiters is talent and of what use is it to anyone to stick the term onto good actors like a packing label?

I’m glad you asked.

Talent is the focused interest in doing a thing which makes it hard to stop doing. I have a talent for writing. How do I know? I can’t stop doing it and people who read what I write often tell me I’m good at it. By this time, I believe it.

My daughter has musical talent. How did I find out?

When she was 15 months old, she woke up in a great fright and cried out. “Aaaaiee! Aaaaiee. . !” I woke with a start, leapt from my bed and raced somewhere which turned out to be her room.

But by the time I got to her door, I was conscious. But, more significantly, she had stretched out the tones and was singing, “Ahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee, ahhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeeee” in the  pitches she’d been crying.

Then she varied the pitches. I was dumbfounded. Singing the syllables, she walked up and down a tri-tone scale. She’d taken terror and, in the little time it took an adrenaline-rushed dad to tear from his bed to her door, had turned it into song. She had made art from an excess of emotion. I felt gratefully humbled to have witnessed it and more so to have recognized it.

As she grew, I heard her sing hour after hour when she was alone or just sitting around. She listened to singers and copied them. It was one of the things she did like riding a bike and homework. She sang. She hummed. She sang with the radio. She sang when she washed her hands. She sang with TV theme songs.

When she was in her teen years, I often heard people remark about her talent as if her voice had sprung up full blown out of nowhere. I tell you now, anyone who’d spent the amount of time she did focused on this one thing would show an ‘inexplicable’ talent for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m prouder of my daughter than you can imagine. She is an astonishing performer. If I were strong enough to direct, I’d cast her in anything and dare anyone to point her out without a program. She is very, very talented.

The point is, so are you.

Talent has never been a matter of ability. We all have  ability in about equal measure. Talent is simply a matter of interest in and the decision to focus on a specific activity, usually a creative one. The young one with every blank surface of every notebook and school bag covered in doodles and designs has spent many hours in art training at no one’s behest but her own. That’s talent.

If you have the kind of interest which keeps your mind coming back to a creative task on its own, you have talent. If you do not think you have this kind of interest but would like to, I’m happy to report it is already yours. It is your free gift simply for taking this test drive in human form. It may be a bit gummed up and tarred over. But it can be cleaned and shined and work like new.

Your talent is the Golden Buddha.

A village was famous for it’s glorious, golden Buddha. But the land came upon hard times, and the people were terrified that thugs would steal it. So they covered it in thick plaster painted to look like an ordinary Buddha. And so the prized statue remained safe.

Years passed, and no one remained who remembered the gold under the plaster. The statue became valued as a sacred heirloom in its own right. When the plaster began to crack, expert restoration teams were called in. Only then was the treasure underneath discovered.

You had the kind of interest which focuses in that way. You had it about a lot of things. You brought it out naturally and easily. And you were heavily discouraged from following it in the most well-intentioned of ways by the most loving people. Also in some crappy ways by some jerks.

But the point is, the discouragement crossed relationship lines and infused them all from a very early age. Whatever anyone was telling you about anything else, they were probably also telling you that you were insignificant and without talent. The discouragement is carved into our culture as a set of social norms and appropriate behaviors, creating a dead current whose purpose is to trap and dampen creative energy. As a result of the dead weight of the negative message, you hid your talent, perhaps even from yourself.

I’m not supposed to burst into song in the mall parking lot. Why?  People will think I’m crazy. Why? Because I’m happy? Our culture routinely tells us it is inappropriate to be extremely happy in many places. If we’re too happy, we’re obviously high on an illegal. Or illegally high on a legal. Or off our rockers. Otherwise, nobody gets that happy in a mall parking lot.

But all the reasons expertise provides to explain why unmitigated joy is not appropriate in public eventually distill into some version of the thought because it’s going to make someone grumpy.

At no time is it ever seriously proposed that if we all sang in public there would be global catastrophe. All it would do is make some folks complain about the joys. At that point, a sane society would tell the grumps to lighten up. Instead, we tell the happy people, usually young ones, to get a little sadder.

It wasn’t easy to convince you there was no talent in your genes. Even the most severely locked down amongst us occasionally looks at something hanging in a museum and grumbles, I don’t know what all the damn fuss is about. I could do better than that. . .Talent can be smothered but it can never be killed. As long as you draw breath, you have talent, and it wants to surface.

If you have an interest in acting, you probably have a role you’d like to play very much. Admit it. You can see it in your head. You can feel it. You can hear it. You just can’t make it come alive through your body the way it’s supposed to.

That’s talent. You have the vision. You can see what wants to be done. Don’t worry about the roles you can’t see yet. That is simply a matter of practice. In fact, all the rest is practice, practice, practice. And practice, like love, ladies and gentlemen, is a matter of constantly making and remaking the decision to have it in your life.  

There’s the path to your talent. Put in the hours. Make faces in a mirror. Record yourself moving and change what you see. Your talent will project clearly even to the most cynical of others once you have put in the time.  You may use this information with great confidence. And if it feels like you can’t, don’t worry.

There’s a lot more. . .

Upon hearing of grumblings from the South Jersey Theatre Group

I am investing a lot of time organizing the South Jersey Theatre Group online on Facebook and in monthly face-to-face meetings. The goal I expressed for the group was to fill every seat in every house of every production on every stage of every company in South Jersey. Some were inspired by the goal. Others amused. Others tolerant. And others in disagreement. I'd been wanting to write a response for a week or so now. Last night I encountered news of more grumbling, so I wrote this. So far, nobody's left the group.
 

Please Leave This Group



"If he thinks we're going to cooperate on marketing, he's nuts."

There are a million reasons why taking a different direction is idiotic.

"This is never going to work. I'm not wasting my time. If it works, I'll jump on it."

There are 2 million reasons not to get involved.

"What's his angle? Does anyone know him?"

There are 3 million reasons not to trust.

Are you satisfied with the way things are? Are there enough people seeing your shows? Are your production values so high that nothing needs hep or improvement? Then please leave this group. In this group we need malcontents trying to make things better for every theatre talent and company.

Are you scared of success? Are you addicted to the struggle? If hopelessness is a comfortably tepid bath you'd rather not get out of, please leave this group. In this group we need people who can charge past the common hopelessness and break new, growthful ground.

"This flies in the face of every expert opinion. It's preposterous."

Of course it's stupid to think of filling every seat in every house of every theatre. It's childish. It's naive. It's self-destructive. All the experts say it can't be done. Except for this:

Do you expect experts to give you advice that's going to overturn the hill upon which their expertise is built? That sounds a little naive to me. Somewhat childish. Listen to the experts and you'll be back at the place the experts are expert in, which is exactly the place you were trying to get out of. A life soldered to the experts is a life written by Joseph Heller.

If you live and die by the experts, please leave this group. In this group we need hard-nosed dreamers willing to stand up to the impossible and do it anyway. Once it's done, it's no longer impossible. In this group we need people who can look a bit down the road and conceive of a better way.

With the price of public entertainments rising, our prices are now competitive. If we believe in ourselves, our talent and our product, there is an opportunity for live theatre to revive after a century of stagnation and defeat as a popular entertainment. If you can think clearly enough to recognize an opportunity and flexibly enough to realize the future does not have to be a dead mirror of the past, then please join and stay in this group. We need you.

39 STEPS at STAGES

THE 39 STEPS: Rollicking Razzle-Dazzle Farce at its Most Farciously Farceful.

Before we start the review, we need a rehearsal. I must teach you this. It goes:

  dum

                  DUM

                                     DUM!

Don’t confused! It’s not dumb, DUMB , DUMB,  it’s

  dum

        

                DUM

                                      DUM!

It is the 3-tone, brass movie-music fanfare which indicates something mysterious and dangerous is associated with the name just spoken by a character. Sidney Greenstreet turns to Humphrey Bogart and says, “You know very well, sir, what it is we’re after. It is, to be blunt sir, The Mall Tease Fall Comb!” dum DUM DUM!

We need this fanfare in order to proceed with the review. Get it. Got it? Good.

So let’s start where no review ought to start and bow deeply to technical director/set designer/audio engineer Donald Swenson for an astonishing transformation of the space and coordination of the effects. For Mr. Swenson, this play is less 39 Steps and more 3900 Cues. Thank you first of all, Mr. Swenson, for a brilliantly fluid yet redwood sturdy staging space and then for the fifth performer in this four-actor send-up of everything Hitchcock, the audio effects.

THE 39 STEPS is the Danny Devito twin to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 The 39 Steps, an adaptation of a torrid spy novel of the same name written in 1915 by John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish born novelist and politician. This man’s supercilious, post-Victorian confidence is understood at once by a simple glance at his photograph (take a look, we’ll wait) and forms the comic heart at which the lampoon of this play is aimed. Ah, the innocent seriousness of it all!

The play's concept calls for the entirety of Hitchcock’s adventure film, which has 13 principle roles and countless extras, to be wholly  performed by a cast of four. Let the high jinks commence.

How do four performers become scads? By having four very crafted performers, three of whom are able to be in several places at once. They’re teaching that now at the finer acting schools.

Let’s take the one who stays put. Well, he doesn’t stay put. Everybody is constantly running everywhere and getting nowhere while set pieces whiz by on wheels. This is particularly true of John D. Smitherman as the story’s hero, Richard Hannay. Mr. Smitherman, an Equity guest artist with a strong, local resume, is the solid anchor of  what passes for sanity in the whizbang world of the play.

With athleticism, timing, poise and irony, he is spot on in this role. Could it be more fully realized? Only by Mr. Smitherman himself by the end of a six-month run. You do not want to miss the night he spends in a box, a brilliant comic sequence. But only one of many. It warrants notice at this point because it is one which he accomplishes alone.

The others have their full, ensemble comic thrust set on turbo afterburner fuel injection mode as Mr. Smitherman’s solid anchor is growled, shot and yanked at by three decathlon actors of exquisite craft and skill who, as mentioned before, have been trained in the actors’ art of being in two places at once. Go see if you don’t believe me.

Carrie Share, Tim Rinehart and James Collins are all gifted, crafted and practiced performers whose skills include changing dialects and characters the way some of us change hats. The three of them provide an up-spinning whirlwind of comic flourish and flash which leaves the abdominal wall burning and the cheek muscles insensate. Eat lightly before you see this show.

Ms. Share plays all the female principles. Just to see her kick the bucket as Annabella Schmidt midway through the first act is worth the ticket price. Did you know corpses come with control levers? It turns out to be much more convenient that way. If you don’t know what I mean, buy a ticket.

Mr. Rinehart and Mr. Collins are a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of comic delivery and commitment. Which one is which? It doesn’t matter in this play. They’re both everybody. The invention they spin off like paint spilled on an industrial fan and the sheer, galloping pace of the antics delivers theatre at its fullest extension and grace.

I thank Mr. Rinehart, Mr. Collins, Ms. Share and Mr. Smitherman very deeply for fine performances with the bar raised to its extreme limit, delivered in  seamlessly matched energy, intent and skill.  

It is not a perfect production, but the flaw is quite minor. A repeated, audio joke becomes tiresome to everyone. That ought to have included the characters on stage. Mr. Smitherman was the only performer who communicated his growing annoyance with the intrusion clearly to me. To the rest of you, get sick of it, too. It is, after all, bloody annoying after a while. And the audience will be cheering for you with every pained face we see.

The complexity of the presentation and the technical deftness with which it was performed created a display of art and craft as joyous as watching a team of Olympic gymnasts on spring break. It is a testament to the assertion that theatre is the most human art of all. Theatre takes found objects and common, every day actions and turns them into high art. It takes a chair and a box and makes a modest apartment. It takes a ladder and makes a moving train.

And this production is once again proof that quality which folks routinely cross a bridge or migrate north to find is available in South Jersey at half the price and with free parking. Many thanks to Artistic Director, as well as director of the play, Marjorie Sokoloff for her talent and perseverance in bringing this level of art to South Jersey stages at STAGES in South Jersey.

See this show, and bring someone who thinks local theatre is bush league. Pay for the tickets. He’ll be buying yours in thanks soon enough.

Oh, right, why did we need to learn the dum DUM DUM?

Ah, yes, quite. I cannot tell you everything, but I can tell you this: you will find the answer to the mystery you seek in Blackwood at STAGES in the 39 STEPS. dum DUM DUM!

THE 39 STEPS 

Adapted by Patrick Barlow

From an original concept by

Simon Corble and Nobby Diamon

Derived from the Alfred Hitchcock film

Based on the novel by John Buchan

Directed by Marjorie Sokoloff

At STAGES

The Little Theatre

Camden County College

Blackwood, NJ.

http://www.stagesccc.com/reservations-online.html

856-227-7200 x4737

Enchanting at the Village Playbox of Haddon Heights

Enchanted April: Warming a February Evening in Haddon Heights NJ

Enchanted April is a tale which begins in England about four years after the end of The Great War, World War I. They called it the war to end all wars back then. As a culture, we’d shocked ourselves with the astonishing volume of cruelty we were able to unleash on each other.

The world was reeling from the punch, not just physically but also psychically. Long held, rock solid cultural beliefs in the nobility and honor of war were cracking badly in the public consciousness. There were, as the play reminds us in a phrase which falls with sorrowful ease from the mouths of nearly every character, so many widows about.

This play is one of the least funny comedies you’ll ever hold dear. The world is out of joint at curtain’s rise. High jinks—or, in this case, muted, moderate jinks—and innocent scheming bring the world to its rightful place by play’s end. It is pure comic structure, which begs the question, why am I crying?

Worry not. These are tears of joy. More accurately, they are tears of relief. Even the worst hurts can heal again. That’s the message of  this intriguing staging of the 2003 adaptation of Elizabeth von Armin’s 1922 novel.

The key to the jinks is Lottie Wilton, played powerfully by Ashely Reimer. This moppet of a British housewife has quirky insights and a desperate passion to escape the shallows of an empty life which moves the action of the tale throughout. Ms. Reimer gives us a Lottie with a most interesting, modern edge. Lottie is often styled as ditzy and child-like, and Ms. Reimer shows a bit of that.

But she gives us a Lottie with a bunch more grit and spine, and that’s an intriguing flavor in the mix. The original Lottie is mired in hopelessness due to her woman’s role in the culture. Impish and saucy, Ms.  Reimer’s Lottie is more the way you’d expect a gifted person who’d dealt all her life with duller minds to be. I admire the choice and thank her for her performance.

Lotty is off on the adventure of her life. Accompanying her on the journey is Rose Arnott, played with spot on turns by Kathy Kanagowski-Schreib. Ms. Kanagowski-Schreib gives us stiff-upper-lip reserve melting into a human heart like the dreary English winter giving way to the glistening Italian spring. Her reserve cracks gently as she decides to take the bold step then melts precipitously into a deluge of terror as the reality of what she’s done smacks her in the face.

You do not want to miss the scene on the train where Ms. Reimer and Ms. Kanagowski-Schreib devolve from proper housewives primly perched in their seats to  panicked, pleading children huddling on the floor in fear, which, interestingly, providews the biggest laugh in the play

Being practical as well as proper housewives, Lottie and Rose  find two other women to join in the impetuous undertaking so that bold adventure expenses might be kept at a reasonable level. And thus it is that we meet Lady Caroline Bramble and Mrs. Graves to complete one of the most unlikely foursomes ever to find redemption in each other’s company.

Amanda Pasquini is a beautiful Lady Caroline, languorous and bored. Always the center of attention, she accompanies the group in order to be away from everyone she knows, to escape the role foist upon her by birth and class. Particularly, she wants to escape the attentions of men.

Ms. Pasquini gives us a Caroline who feels this way deeply right up to the time when she doesn’t get the attention she so loathes. When portrait artist Antony Wilder, given to us by Bill Binder with gentlemanly passion and a very clear emotional life beneath the reserve required by the play, ignores Lady Caroline opting to spend his attentions on Rose instead, Ms. Pasquini is very funny in her confused, privileged pique. 

Susan Filtrante, as Mrs. Graves, takes the stage like a fiery image of the great aunt we were all afraid to kiss as children but only after the world has been dry of milk of magnesia for six weeks. And she leaves the stage as everybody’s favorite fairy godmother, hair down and dancing. She makes a wonderful transition. It warms the heart, and I thank her for her performance.

The relationship between married couples is a dominant theme in the play.  Elizabeth Armin was herself married to a fellow to whom she referred as the "Man of Wrath".   Enchanted April presents us with two surprise husbands. Why surprise? Because so many characters think they died in the war when they encounter their wives on their owns. There are simply so many widows about, one naturally assumes. . .

The role of the men is to melt. It is to come around to the beauties of the world and the restoration offered by their wives offering them places we can see as heaven on earth. That is exactly what James Eckstien and Ron Brining accomplish playing Mellersh Wilton and Frederick Arnott , Lottie’s and Rose’s husbands respectively. At first distant and wrapped in their own worlds, each makes the turn with fine craft

Particularly moving are the scenes where Ms. Kanagowski-Schreib  and Mr. Brining then Mr. Eckstein and Ms. Reimer face each other as married people and are finally able to express the love that’s been lying dormant for so long.  These relationships, often staged and developed in tandem, form the beating heart of the play and generate many beautiful stage pictures throughout the show.

The last mention is to a very funny character, a cook who presents two appropriately butchered English words. Other than that, I did not understand a thing she said and didn’t need to. Paula Brining as Costanza is the perfect embodiment of kindly working-class incredulity at the strangeness of her employers. She could recite the phone book and we’d get it. As it is, she speaks in Italian. Thank you for that nice, tasty dash of spice to the show, Ms. Brining.

It is not a perfect production. There are a number of things wrong, but all of them can be traced back to a single one: costume changes. The costume changes kept the stage dead and made the scene changes last much too long. Time after time the show would begin picking up great pace and rhythm only to be leveled by 2.5 minutes of dead time as we all waited for costume changes. That sucked the life right out of it. I vote they wear the same darned clothes, just for heaven’s sake, let them cook.

Because heaven is what they have to offer us. When the ensemble is clicking, there is magic. When the scene changes are relatively quick, the show moves in a very satisfying way. Hope will return to the defeated, love to the isolate, joy to the mourners. We need, the play tells us, to be engaged in the beauty around us. As the audience departed, everyone I heard was talking about something moving and impressive in the show. That, I thought, was a good start.

Enchanted April

Directed by Steve Allen

Adapted to the stage by Matthew Barber

From The Enchanted April, a novel by Elizabeth Armin

 The Village Playbox of Haddon Height

28 Seventh Avenue

Haddon Heights, NJ 08035

856-906-7657

http://www.villageplaybox.org/

through Feb. 25, 2012

Bridge Players of Burlingtn LOST IN YONKERS

Lost in Yonkers: Found with great heart and wit in Burlington

Neil Simon is the only living playwright with a theatre named after him, and for good reason. Styled a great comic writer, Simon’s straight plays almost never follow standard, comic structure. Even though his works reflect standard moral reference, his use of structure is anything but standard. He plays in the teeth and up the wazoo of the structure he’s chosen. We are grateful for it. Without this, we would not have his rib-busting tragedies, or, in this case, his severely funny, intractable and dangerous melodramas.

Lost in Yonkers is the story of teenage brothers Jay and Artie Kurnitz, presented to us fully realized and with solid craft by Joe Vaccaro and Bryce Powell respectively. Their interplay was spot-on. They are teenagers in a world whose possibilities include loveless mothers, violent deaths, orphaning and insanity.

And they are very funny. Not for a moment did I believe that they were anything other than teenage boys because, well, they are. But not for a moment did I think them anything but teenage boys in 1943 in the pressure pot of the play’s world. I thank them both for fine performances.

Grandma Kernitz is gifted us in stolid, Germanic precision by  Celeste Bonfanti, an actress showing herself to be most versatile and solid on the Bridge Players’ stage. Ms. Bonfanti’s Grandma has a codger’s cold heart. She is, at times, shockingly cruel to her children. But as the play unfolds, Ms. Bonfanti reveals the heart  beneath the crust to be just as Simon wrote it to be. . .cold steel.

We hear the pain behind the tempering of the mettle of her heart, but the tale leads to no catharsis for her or us. But, while we don’t see it displayed openly, Ms. Bonfanti allows us the smallest glimpse of the mother’s heart beating beneath the steel, the perfect dash of humanity allowing the character to settle in our souls.

There are four others in the dysfunctional Kernitz family album—the sibling offspring of Grandma and Grandpa Kernitz. This first generation of American immigrant children has been so spiritually and emotionally scarred by their mother’s harsh experiences and lethal terrors that they are four flowers of injury, each a unique blossom.

Aunt Gert, the sister who escaped the apartment, refuses to take it in. Literally. She can’t breathe deeply enough to finish a sentence. Midway through she runs out of air and has to finish the thought while drawing breath in through the words. It is painfully hilarious. Nervously, lovingly and breathlessly played by Gabrielle Affleck, Gert embodies the good heart helpless to influence a thing.

Uncle Louie is a thug. He wears an expensive suit, flashes a big bank roll and insouciantly carries a gun in a shoulder holster. Damian Muziani is such a perfect Louie that I was shocked after the show to hear him speak in eloquent, mid-Atlantic standard. He had me thugged and Yonkered all the way. A broadcaster and business-owner, Mr. Muziani has been less able to commit to live performances than he’d like. I would encourage him to return speedily and often.

A most remarkable piece of this presentation is the truth of the relationships drawn between the boys and the adults. Both totally believable, Jay and Arty’s relationship with Uncle Louie is utterly different from their relationships with Eddie Kernitz, Jay and Arty’s father.

Eddie, played with urgent, nervous physicality tempered in real love by John Colona, is in impossible straits. Newly widowered, he is in over his head in debt to shady characters. Mr. Colona gives us a finely realized Eddie, the weak one. He’s the one who cried even while being scolded by his mother that big boys do not carry on so shamefully.

Mr. Colona’s Eddie explains how such a family produced two boys who credit him so much that one wrote a play with him as a most admirable character in it. Eddie retained his humanity the most of all the siblings, and, therefore, has children who stand more firmly, more solidly and more assuredly on their own feet than their father, aunts and uncle do.

But the heart of the play comes from Aunt Bella. Aunt Bella is mentally challenged. 35, she lives with her mother in the Yonkers apartment where the story takes place. She gets easily excited, easily flustered, easily enraged. And she is full of love.

Lily K. Doyle gives us Bella on the Bridge Players’ stage. She’s had this part on her bucket-list for a while, and I am grateful to her for that. Her performance is moving.

Innocent though not untouched, child-like though middle-aged, finding any reason and taking every opportunity for bits and scratches of happiness, she is also given the wisest and most compassionate lines in the play. Hankies appeared, though some of us, in honor of the comedy, used our sleeves.  I thank Ms. Doyle as I do the entire cast for excellent work and solid craft.

But I’ve left out a character. The final character in this solidly inventive staging of the play is not listed in the program. It is not a single person. It is a radio which, covering scene changes, plays old-time radio commercials which drew surprise and delight from the audience, many of whom sang along with the jingles. It was a delightful addition and coverage of a normally deadly time in a play.

The dialects across the board were perfect. Operating totally in support of every character, this often uneven piece of the craft gets the highest marks here. But it was not a perfect production.

Twice it seemed the boys stumbled over staging and the same number of times the staging seemed to squash arbitrarily into a corner. And the radio commercials, while charming, seemed at times to go on a bit too long.

But the mark of good craft is the recovery. There’s not a performer who hasn’t tripped. It’s part of the fun of live performance. And these small gaffs stopped no one on this stage nor drained any enthusiasm for the action from the audience. 

The house, fully three-quarters full, was with the action all the way, laughing, tearing, cheering, even calling out audible warnings at tense moments. We were theirs.

Tastily, this is a dessert theatre. We are seated at table with coffee and tea available at will and desserts elegantly served on trays by volunteer company members during intermission. So we have body and soul both fed on this day.

Neil Simon’s singular gift is identifying the gaping injuries extant in nearly all human psyches and building all the possible humor inherent in the situation in relief over the pain. There is nothing simple or easy about staging his plays. The concept, the choices, the craft and the just and tasty desserts make this production at Bridge Players an elegant investment of money and time. You’ll exit with the knowledge that comedy is not a form or a plot. It is a state of mind.

Lost in Yonkers

By Neil Simon

Directed by Susan Jami Paschkes

Bridge Players Theatre Company

36 E. Broad Street

Burlington, N.J.

856-303-7620

http://www.bridgeplayerstheatre.com/

First Public Exposure for Larry McKenna's Work In Progress

 

 

 

 

Strictly Platonic: You're Going to Love It

 

 

 

The working process of the creative mind is often a mystery. There have been volumes dedicated to revealing the secrets of it. On February 20 in Ambler, a chosen group of us got to see inside the creative process of Larry McKenna, local actor, teacher and playwright. Mr. McKenna  is known for his very successful comedy, BURT AND ME, which ran recently at the Society Hill Playhouse and is having its Equity debut in Mt. Gretna, Pa. this summer. I hope to be reviewing that for Stage.

 

Mr. McKenna treated us to the first public exposure of his work in progress, STRICTLY PLATONIC, a play, as the title implies, dealing with relationships. It does so by presenting us with the development of one relationship in particular. We start with the man we all love to hate these days: the male chauvinist. Sympathetically portrayed, this ex-jock is 15 years out of high school. We watch him, through eyes glazed with tears of laughter sparked by the sheer weight of wit of this play, trot along as his complacent, clichéd self until he is blind-sided by love in a fashion more literal than you will understand until you see the play.

 

Not blocked out on stage, the four actors needed for this tight, fast-paced piece sat on tall chairs arrayed across the set of Act II Playhouse’s current show, TIME STANDS STILL. The performers moved instinctively to indicate the overall motion of a scene but had nothing set in advance. Had I not spoken with one performer after the show I’d never have known they’d only read through the script twice before the event, the second time just shortly before the reading.

 

The actors were talented to say the least. But it was the strong, clear writing which permitted such well-timed and effective recital on such short preparation. This is the funniest play I’ve heard in a long, long. . .ever. It is a bracing deluge of comedy. Brilliant concept humor, gallant word play, one line poppers, the deep, effervescent intelligence of the comedy does not stop.

 

This play is also an example of why theatre is the most fully human art. As exemplified by this raucously engaging evening, the only ingredient necessary to create brilliant theatre is human beings. And, when in full array, theatre combines and orchestrates all other arts to accomplish its deliveries. It is all arts in one and yet the simplest to create.

 

In glimpsing Mr. McKenna’s working process, we see he is artist and craftsman. Secure in his talent and practical in his approach, a number of us were invited to the reading with an eye toward providing feedback Mr. McKenna desires in order to polish the play. The audience received five questions, and I hope he received responses from all of us. I know he got one from me. I liked the play so much I had the questions answered before I got them. My hope is he will find them useful and that some day I will find out how.

 

This is the kind of play live theatre needs now. Chokingly entertaining, it is the sort of play I’d recommend to attract the patronage of folks who’ve never considered setting foot in a live theatre venue before. It is not yet published, but watch for it. If you find it playing near you, see it. If you are a theatre company, perform it. It’s what we need.

 

 

 

 

 

My reviews are written for STAGE Magazine, The Delaware Valley's longest-running resource for every level of theatre.

 

 

 

 

At Maiinstage Center for the Arts in Blackwood:

To Kill a Mockingbird : A Path Through the Darkness

Nelle Harper Lee published this story in 1960, pre-dating the main force of the Civil Rights Movement by three or four years.  It became an immediate success and within a year was translated into ten languages, a task much more daunting at the time than it is now.

It has been cited as the most widely read book on American racial injustice in the world. The British Librarians Society named it a book more significant to read than The Bible. And Atticus Finch, given to us like a Mont Blanc of humanity by Tim Rinehart, quickly became the 20^th Century’s most recognized icon of American racial self-awareness world-wide.

On Friday, February 3, Mr. Rinehart not only led a troupe through the racial darkness of the mid-20^th Century American south, he led it through the literal darkness which descended upon the stage about 15 minutes into the performance.

Without so much as a groan or a pop indicating something amiss, the lights were gone. One moment they were giving us gorgeous fulfillment of the stage pictures behind partially finished, framed suggestions of houses and the next they were gone. We sat in total darkness for a tenth of a stunned moment before Mr. Rinehart went right on with the dialogue. The company followed in fine fashion.

He incorporated a reference to the sudden darkness into his lines, putting the audience at ease and suggesting that this was somehow done on purpose: perhaps a new staging concept for the show.  An oddity, certainly, but we were game.

However, if the crisis is real, as it was at the time, there’s only so far pretending all’s well can go. When the cast began referring to actions they could not possibly have taken or seen if someone else took them, the audience stirred. Then the announcement infused the room from above like the voice of the universe come to put things right, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are having technical difficulties. . .”

The voice from above put it mildly. The main box feeding all power to the stage lights had burned out. Not only was there no possibility of repair for the show to continue, there was no possibility of saving the following night’s performance. There was even danger to the coming week’s presentations.

The miracle of that evening was that Atticus Finch, the attorney whose sense of fairness is so deep that he easily brushes aside the darkness of prejudice to see what is true, also had the presence of craft to lead us through the literal darkness back into the light of performance. Because neither the cast nor the audience would give up. Everyone wanted a play.

In the end, the house lights were lit, the work lights on stage went on, and there were two follow-spots in the booth on outside circuits cranked wide and lighting the entire stage front. After a bit of technical finagling, the cast played on. So let me review this piece which continued by its own grace and in its own light.

The show opens with the angelic voice of Toni Roberts, playing the Finch family’s housekeeper Calpurnia, taking us out of our present world and gently sweeping us back to a time of greater sorrow with a soft, glorious rendition of the spiritual “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord”. You do not have to be Christian in any sense for this to prepare your heart for what is to follow.

Ms. Roberts does with Calpurnia what every member of this cast does with the role they play: makes it fully beautiful in type. There has been criticism of the work in general on the grounds that some characters are pure stereotype, which is almost true. All the characters are stereotypes.  

The story is a parable: righteousness, justice and sobriety vs. prejudice, expedience and drunkenness. It is a wonderful parable. But all the characters are iconic.

Bob Ewell, given to us in drunken glory by Thomas Guzzi, is the drunkiest town drunk that ever drank. His daughter, Mayella, played with the teeth and claws of a cornered badger by Samantha Morrone, is the sluttiest town slut who ever. . .slutted.

Together, dripping racial slurs and malice towards all, they perpetrate a great injustice on kindly, open-hearted Tom Robinson, played with gentility and conviction by Steven Bryan. They put Tom in jeopardy of his life.

Tom is certainly a stereotype. Shuffling and with a lame left hand, he is trammeled innocence trying to get through a barbarous life intact. We see one moment of explosive passion in him, and Mr. Bryan delivers this most effectively. But in the end, his innocence cannot sustain in the face of the grand lie.

Atticus Finch is most certainly a stereotype. The father of six-year-old Scout and pre-teen Jem, he never gets angry except justly. This is a stereotype. A beautiful stereotype which Mr. Rinehart presents with such craft and strength as to elicit a cosmic sigh and the thought, ah, humanity!  when the curtain rings down.

To say that Mr. Rinehart evokes Gregory Peck is a fine compliment in that he is not playing Gregory Peck. His choice of dialect and intention are fully his, and he owns them.

But his build and the depth of his voice combined with the standard gray fedora and those familiar sentiments he delivers with such centered depth and clarity could not help but evoke the iconic rendition of the iconic character in a most satisfying way. Thank you, Mr. Rinehart, for another fine performance.

The full impact of the story is brought home to us by the three, principal young characters whose awakening to the raw realities of racism embody the sad but hopeful lost-innocence message presented in the tale.

6-year-old Scout Finch, fully delivered by 11-year-old Emily Moore, while not the center of the play that she is to the novel, is the embodiment of the struggle of righteous innocence to comprehend the existence of cruelty.

Older brother Jem Finch, realized with heroic energy by 13-year-old Aidan Meagher, is childhood struggling with maturity. He takes his lumps learning the lessons of the world.

And marooned outcast Dill, given by 6^th grader Michael Schaffer flashing like a pistol whip, is rescued innocence. He wisely gloms himself onto the island of sanity which is the Finch household in the sea of confusion which is the world of the play. They, in turn, welcome him.

The interactions amongst the three are excellent—energetic, committed and true, they are the hammer which drives the message home.

I don’t like paying attention to the age of the actor. It should not be a mitigating factor in judging the worth of a performance. And it is condescending to point it out arbitrarily. In this case, I say it to indicate that if these fine, young actors erred, it was by making excellent, young mistakes.

The three of you chose strong, committed intentions which were totally clear in your bodies and vocal tone but sometimes just beyond the level of your diction to deliver with complete clarity. Good for you! Reach for it and let the craft grow to fill the artistic image you see in your head. An excellent error. And it impinged fully only twice in the course of the play: at the top when we had to get used to the pace of your speech, and when you sneak upstairs to watch the trial.

And the only reason I mention it at all is that this lovely shortfall was the only  significant one the whole evening after the lights went out. It was a marvelous actualization of the parable.

Throughout the performance, punctuating thematic climaxes and indicating passage of time, Ms. Roberts continues the hymn to sooth us from one point to the next and give our hearts a chance to sigh. It is a most wondrous touch. Ms. Roberts deserves double thanks for this soulful addition and the purity of the voice behind it.

The play flies by. This represents more than a brisk pace. Director Chris Melohn admits that he was not afraid make cuts to the original script. But he says when people question the artistic integrity of cutting a literary property, he simply asks, “Did you miss anything?”

No, Mr. Melohn, we did not. You’ve achieved every bit of the spirit and imbued it to the cast.

The Dennis Flyer Memorial Theatre has 600 seats. For our own benefits, we should fill them this weekend. A play of this quality done in this measure at this price deserves an audience and then some. But more so, we, the audience, need to bring our non-theatrical friends to plays like this.

The latest word is that the technical difficulties will be accounted for and the performances this weekend will go on as scheduled. See To Kill a Mockingbird  this weekend with someone from the office you’ve been meaning to get to know. They’ll thank you for it, and you’ll both grow.

To Kill A Mockingbird

By Nelle Harper Lee

Adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel

Directed by Chris Melohn

Mainstage Center for the Arts

At The Dennis Flyer Memorial Theatre

College Drive

Blackwood, New Jersey

856-227-3091

Tickets for 2/10/2012:

Tickets for 2/11/2012

My reviews are written exclusively for STAGE Magazine online.

For more of my work on STAGE, click here and here.

At Bridge Players of Burlington

 

 

 

Lost in Yonkers: Found with great heart and wit in Burlington

 

 

 

Neil Simon is the only living playwright with a theatre named after him, and for good reason. Styled a great comic writer, Simon’s straight plays almost never follow standard, comic structure. Even though his works reflect standard moral reference, his use of structure is anything but standard. He plays in the teeth and up the wazoo of the structure he’s chosen. We are grateful for it. Without this, we would not have his rib-busting tragedies, or, in this case, his severely funny, dangerous and touching melodramas.

 

Lost in Yonkers is the story of teenage brothers Jay and Arty Kurnitz, presented to us fully realized and with solid craft by Joe Vaccaro and Bryce Powell respectively. Their interplay was spot-on. They are teenagers in a world whose possibilities include loveless mothers, violent deaths, orphaning and insanity.

 

And they are very funny. Not for a moment did I believe that they were anything other than teenage boys because, well, they are. But not for a moment did I think them anything but teenage boys in 1943 in the pressure pot of the play’s world. I thank them both for fine performances.

 

Grandma Kurnitz is gifted us in stolid, Germanic precision by  Celeste Bonfanti, an actress showing herself to be most versatile and solid on the Bridge Players’ stage. Ms. Bonfanti’s Grandma has a codger’s cold heart. She is, at times, shockingly cruel to her children. But as the play unfolds, Ms. Bonfanti reveals the heart  beneath the crust to be just as Simon wrote it to be. . .cold steel.

 

We hear the pain behind the tempering of the mettle of her heart, but the tale leads to no catharsis for her or us. But, while we don’t see it displayed openly, Ms. Bonfanti allows us the smallest glimpse of the mother’s heart beating beneath the steel, the perfect dash of humanity allowing the character to settle in our souls.

 

There are four others in the dysfunctional Kurnitz family album—the sibling offspring of Grandma and Grandpa Kurnitz. This first generation of American immigrant children has been so spiritually and emotionally scarred by their mother’s harsh experiences and lethal terrors that they are four flowers of injury, each a unique blossom.

 

Aunt Gert, the sister who escaped the apartment, refuses to take it in. Literally. She can’t breathe deeply enough to finish a sentence. Midway through she runs out of air and has to finish the thought while drawing breath in through the words. It is painfully hilarious. Nervously, lovingly and breathlessly played by Gabrielle Affleck, Gert embodies the good heart helpless to influence a thing.

 

Uncle Louie is a thug. He wears an expensive suit, flashes a big bank roll and insouciantly carries a gun in a shoulder holster. Damian Muziani is such a perfect Louie that I was shocked after the show to hear him speak in eloquent, mid-Atlantic standard. He had me thugged and Yonkered all the way. A broadcaster and business-owner, Mr. Muziani has been less able to commit to live performances than he’d like. I would encourage him to return speedily and often.

 

A most remarkable piece of this presentation is the truth of the relationships drawn between the boys and the adults. Both totally believable, Jay and Arty’s relationship with Uncle Louie is utterly different from their relationships with Eddie Kurnitz, Jay and Arty’s father.

 

Eddie, played with urgent, nervous physicality tempered in real love by John Colona, is in impossible straits. Newly widowered, he is in over his head in debt to shady characters. Mr. Colona gives us a finely realized Eddie, the weak one. He’s the one who cried even while being scolded by his mother that big boys do not carry on so shamefully.

 

Mr. Colona’s Eddie explains how such a family produced two boys who credit him so much that one wrote a play with him as a most admirable character in it. Eddie retained his humanity the most of all the siblings, and, therefore, has children who stand more firmly, more solidly and more assuredly on their own feet than their father, aunts and uncle do.

 

But the heart of the play comes from Aunt Bella. Aunt Bella is mentally challenged. 35, she lives with her mother in the Yonkers apartment where the story takes place. She gets easily excited, easily flustered, easily enraged. And she is full of love.

 

Lily K. Doyle gives us Bella on the Bridge Players’ stage. She’s had this part on her bucket-list for a while, and I am grateful to her for that. Her performance is moving.

 

Innocent though not untouched, child-like though middle-aged, finding any reason and taking every opportunity for bits and scratches of happiness, she is also given the wisest and most compassionate lines in the play. Hankies appeared, though some of us, in honor of the comedy, used our sleeves.  I thank Ms. Doyle as I do the entire cast for excellent work and solid craft.

 

But I’ve left out a character. The final character in this solidly inventive staging of the play is not listed in the program. It is not a single person. It is a radio which, covering scene changes, plays old-time radio commercials which drew surprise and delight from the audience, many of whom sang along with the jingles. It was a delightful addition and coverage of a normally deadly time in a play.

 

The dialects across the board were perfect. Operating totally in support of every character, this often uneven piece of the craft gets the highest marks here. But it was not a perfect production.

 

Twice it seemed the boys stumbled over staging and the same number of times the staging seemed to squash arbitrarily into a corner. And the radio commercials, while charming, seemed at times to go on a bit too long.

 

But the mark of good craft is the recovery. There’s not a performer who hasn’t tripped. It’s part of the fun of live performance. And these small gaffes stopped no one on this stage nor drained any enthusiasm for the action from the audience. 

 

The house, fully three-quarters full, was with the action all the way, laughing, tearing, cheering, even calling out audible warnings at tense moments. We were theirs.

 

Tastily, this is a dessert theatre. We are seated at table with coffee and tea available at will and desserts elegantly served on trays by volunteer company members during intermission. So we have body and soul both fed on this day.

 

Neil Simon’s singular gift is identifying the gaping injuries extant in nearly all human psyches and building all the possible humor inherent in the situation in relief over the pain. There is nothing simple or easy about staging his plays. The concept, the choices, the craft and the just and tasty desserts make this production at Bridge Players an elegant investment of money and time. You’ll exit with the knowledge that comedy is not a form or a plot. It is a state of mind.

 

 

Lost in Yonkers

By Neil Simon

Directed by Susan Jami Paschkes

Bridge Players Theatre Company

36 E. Broad Street

Burlington, N.J.

856-303-7620

http://www.bridgeplayerstheatre.com/

 

 

 

My reviews are written for STAGE Magazine 

At Mainstage Center for the Arts, Blackwood NJ

To Kill a Mockingbird : A Path Through the Darkness

I saw amazing commitment to the craft at the Mainstage Center for the Performing Arts on the premier night of this short run.  Seventeen minutes into the play the lights went out. Actors, stage manager, audience, plunged into the pitch, just like the beginning of Black Comedy. And, as in Black Comedy, the actors didn’t blink.

Let me amend. The actors didn’t hesitate. I have no idea if they blinked. But, led by Tim Rinehart, they went right on with the show, Mr. Rinehart tossing in  a reference to the sudden darkness into the dialogue. This put the audience at ease for a moment. Perhaps this was a new staging concept for the story. Perhaps it will prove an interesting metaphor.

A half-minute played on in blackness it was becoming less interesting. Then characters began referring to movements which they obviously couldn’t be making or seeing if they were made. The audience stirred. Something was amiss.

Sure enough, the VoG--or the artistic director, but they are almost the same thing, aren't they?—descended from above, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are having technical difficulties. . ."

It turns out the main junction box feeding power to all the stage lights had burned out. Further, it could not be repaired. It needed replacing, a process which could not be effected until the coming week at the earliest. It may, in fact, not be replaced by next week’s performance times. We were stuck. The company valiantly offered us refunds and replacement tickets, but we were having none of it. And neither were the actors.

They suggested turning on the house lights and stage work lights as well as using two follow spots operating from a different circuit in the booth. And that’s what they did and that’s how they played. And they were marvelous.

I’m not going to submit my review of the performance yet, save to say that it was worth more than the price of admission without the lights. And the lighting was gorgeous for the first 17 minutes. Next week’s audiences are in for a treat. Either the lights will be fixed, or the company has vowed to bring in portable stage lights. The show will go on.

But they had to cancel the Saturday, February 4 show, a true tragedy. On February 3, the 600-seat house was a sixth full soaking wet. I am keeping my full review until Wednesday, February 8 so that it will be freshly in front of eyes looking for something cool to do on the weekend of February 10. This show deserves an audience. More than that, audiences need this show.

This story has survived translation, adoration and disdain. On February 3, led by Addicus Finch, the purest icon of the American sense of justice and fair play produced by the 20^th Century, it survived the darkness, as it will next week, by using its own lights.

To Kill A Mockingbird

By Nelle Harper Lee

Adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel

Directed by Chris Melohn

Mainstage Center for the Arts

Blackwood, New Jersey

Tickets for 2/10/2012:

Tickets for 2/11/2012

 

Guffaws in the Mezzenine At the Kelsey

Laughter on the 23^rd Floor: The funniest tragedy you’ll ever choke on with laughter

This play provides a sparkling dilemma. Comedy has a very clear structure. The world of the play begins out of joint: the jealous husband suspects the faithful wife, the stubborn father has come under the influence of a charlatan trickster. Something is wrong with the way things are. This leads to chicanery which leads to everything coming out right in the end. That’s a comedy.

That’s were Laughter on the 23^rd Floor challenges us. It’s by Neil Simon. It’s based on his stint as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour in the 1950s. The word “laughter” is in the title. And it is not a comedy.

I mention this at the top because about five minutes into the play, a small, unhappy voice behind us whispered, “Mommy, I’m bored.” Ten minutes later, a mother and two children under 12 left.

There are many, many fine, raucously funny moments in the play which are realized to full effect by the strong cast of this complex offering. The play, however, is a classical tragedy. A heroic figure with a tragic flaw makes a mistake of hubris and is humbled, evoking our pity and terror. That is the structure of this play. It just happens to be about comedy.

And, like all good classical art, it offers us instruction and delight. In fact, the delight is the instruction. We laugh until our dorsals beg for kindness or at least liniment. Joseph Perignat, as Max Prince, the character loosely based on Sid Caesar, gives us a saw-voiced, larger-than-life, nobly bewildered god of a man who turns every scrap of pain and confusion he feels into chokingly funny stuff. His pain is our delight. That is the lesson.

Mr. Perignat and Mark Swift, as Lucas Brickman, the first-person voice of the play, give new meaning to the word “awkward” as they face each other, established star and neophyte writer, alone for the first time together in the writers’ room. Their embarrassed chuckling equals the audience’s paroxysms of mirth so intense as to be chiropractic at times .

Brett Molotsky as Brian Doyle and John Pinto as Ira Stone burn up the stage individually. Mr. Molotsky’s revelation of the exact nature and location of the script he’s just sold to Hollywood leaves us gasping. And Mr. Pinto’s entrances with a growing series of dire illnesses from which he suffers puts us on the floor.

But together they create a bonfire of the insanities. When the scene is between the two of them, they are at each other like roosters in rut, which leaves us guffawed breathless and amazed. The two actors are showing us animus in character as real as any tragedy could ever hope for, and we’re laughing so loudly we almost can’t hear them. The whole play is built of sweetly ironic moments like that.

Each character has a distinct style, and each character has a deep pain covered by using that style to evoke the laughter of others before the pain becomes too real. Carol Wyman, given to us with fabulous physicality by Alana Caraccio, is a ground-breaking feminist before the concept was born. Her demon is the need to prove herself by standing as an equal in a room full of raunchy men.

Ms. Caraccioith plays with wonderfully physical comic invention. You don’t want to miss her painful, pregnant waddle or her attempt to help prevent Max Prince from strangling Ira Stone. That stage picture in itself is worth the price of admission.

In fact, that moment gives us the entire metaphor of the play in a single picture. Stone is sprawled across the ottoman squawking. But he’s not really in distress. Prince is on top of him with hands around Stone’s neck. But he’s not really throttling. The rest of the writers have arrayed themselves around in a perfect stage dispersal, taking positions of intervention. But they’re not really intervening. There’s nothing dangerous going on.

These are people who are constantly playing to an imaginary audience. When something occurs, they don’t respond directly to it as much as quickly figure what the comic potential of the moment is and what their character ought to be doing in it and where. Then they take their places in the constant skit of their lives.

Prince isn’t choking Stone. He’s presenting a comic representation of the rage he feels for the audience all the characters on stage imagine is watching them constantly. The writers are completing the stage picture for that audience. And we, the actual audience, are the irony. We are watching them. There’s a shimmering, precious quality to moments like those. And this production has an elegant sufficiency of them.

It is not a perfect production. It runs 25 minutes too long. The first act drags until Stone enters.

And I need to tell Mr. Swift a thing which I hope he takes in the spirit of kindness with which it is offered. Your intentions are clear. Your physicality is fine. Your comic timing is there. But I only understood every second or third word you spoke. Your diction is awful. If you did not have the talent to be on that stage, I would not trouble to point this out. Practice your speech and you will tear up the stage with this role.

The play presents the story of a family which has made function of dysfunction. Carping, jibing, wrestling, fighting, and loving like any dysfunctional family, they turn their pain into award-winning, top-rated comic entertainment.

And as we leave the theatre, we realize that we’ve just had rollicking, if muscularly difficult, fun at the expense of a man of genius who destroys himself on the horns of his own talent and the roomful of injured misfits powerless to help him to salvation. That is the point of the play. It is an exploration of the relationship between comedy and pain. It is an instruction devoutly to be wished. See it at the Kelsey. Don’t bring your children.

Laughter on the 23^rd Floor

By Neil Simon

Directed by John M. Maurer

Onstage Productions

At the Kelsey Theatre

1200 Old Trenton Rd

West Windsor, NJ 08550

609-570-3333

http://www.kelseyatmccc.org/  

Through February 5, 2012

All my reviews are written for Stage Magazine, the Delaware Valley’s longest operating full resource for people wanting to know about theatre at all levels, novice patron to seasoned professional.

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