talent

Saturday, June 16, 2012

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 21st 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!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

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
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. . .

Sunday, March 4, 2012

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.
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
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