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