Neverwhere At
the Lifeline Theatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—For most
of “Neverwhere” at the Lifeline Theatre I didn’t have any idea what was
happening on stage. But I did know that I was enjoying one of the most
creative, complex, and entertaining productions in Lifeline’s history. “Neverwhere” comes from the mind of Neil Gaiman, one of the
hottest fantasy writers in the English-speaking world. Gaiman earned a
reputation in the graphic novels and comics industries in the 1990’s but since
has broken out into the mainstream, thanks to the success of his young adult
novel “Coraline” and winning the Newbery children’s literature award for “The
Graveyard Book” in 2009. “Neverwhere” originated as a six-part television series for
the BBC in England in 1996. Gaiman converted the television script into a novel
that year, which Robert Kauzlaric has resourcefully adapted into the Lifeline
play. The Gaiman story starts out like an Alfred Hitchcock chase
movie. In a Hitchcock film, an average man accidentally stumbles into a
situation that mysteriously spins out of control, forcing the man to flee from
dangers on all sides while he desperately tries to figure out why he is in such
peril. In “Neverwhere” Richard Mayhew, a Scotsman
working in London, is walking with his fiancé to dinner with her important
boss. He stops to assist a young woman who apparently has been the victim of a
vicious assault. Richard takes the woman home. He learns her name is Door and
not much else. But he is immediately plunged into a nightmare world that
includes a pair of sadistic assassins and a civilization called London Below
that exists parallel to the realistic London Above. Door tells Mayhew her
family has been murdered and begs him to help her locate her father’s journal,
which may hold the explanation to her family’s violent death. After
Richard signs on to help Door, all bets are off as to plot coherence. The
couple meets the Marquis de Carabas, one
of a menagerie of bizarre characters who inhabit London Below. They also run
into a pair of Dickensian assassins named Croup and Vandemar and attend a
“floating market” in Harrod’s department story. Richard battles the Great Beast
of London Below and he and Door encounter an angel named Islington. There is
also an implacable female hunter named Hunter and Rat-Speakers who perform jobs
for rats. Meanwhile, Richard discovers
when he returns to London Above that his identity has disappeared. Nobody
recognizes him, including his fiancé, and his apartment has been rented out. That’s the outline of the dense narrative. After the
introductory scenes, the play starts to resemble those movie serials of the
1930’s and 1940’s, which mostly consist of a sequence of improbable hairbreadth
escapes. Halfway through the show I’d lost track of Richard’s original goal and just took pleasure in watching him
and Door wiggle in and out of one unlikely death-defying scrape after another. At the end of the play the plot comes to a resolution, but
the explanation doesn’t live up to all the previous derring-do. How could it?
It’s the journey and not the destination that makes “Neverwhere” such a
dazzling experience for the audience. The Lifeline has earned a niche in Chicagoland theater for
its resourceful adaptations famous books like “The Mark of Zorro” and “Around
the World in 80 Days.” Those shows were impressive but “Neverwhere” raises the
bar to an astonishing level in its brilliant physical staging and in the
incredible versatility of its performers. Kauzlaric plays Richard Mayhew and
Katie McLean plays Door. The other seven members of the ensemble play dozens of
characters, from milling crowds above and below London to deliciously etched
exotic personalities. The costume changes backstage must have been controlled
anarchy to get everyone on stage and dressed properly on cue. The most glorious of the supporting characters are Mr. Croup
(Sean Sinitski) and Mr. Valdemar (Christopher M. Walsh). They make a marvelous
pair of villains--droll, funny and chilling. Chris Hainsworth is terrific as
the urbane and cynical Marquis. They take on multiple additional roles along
with Patrick Blashill, Elise Kauzlaric, Kyra Morris, and Phil Timberlake. It’s
a wondrous ensemble. The visuals in the show are boggling. Alan Donahue’s set is
dominated by tunnels and a balcony that allow for all manner of frantic exists
and entrances. Kevin Gawley’s lighting drenches the production in Gothic
atmosphere. The costumes by Elizabeth Powell Wislar are a feast of fantastical
designs. Mikhail Fiksal designed the ever-present and insistent background
sound and composed the original music. A
magnificent Great Beast is assembled on stage to fight the intrepid Richard
Mayhew. For extra visual garnish, there are puppets designed by Kimberly G.
Morris and videos and projections designed by Charlie Alves. And periodically a
great bank of fog envelops the theater, an unnerving atmospheric experience for
the front rows. Somehow director Paul S. Holmquist has orchestrated this
immensely complicated and dense production into a joyride of violent and comic action. It may not make sense
overall, but from moment to moment Indiana Jones at his wildest has come to the
Lifeline. One quibble. Some of the British accents were so thick I lost
some of the meaning, a problem exacerbated at times by overloud background
sound effects. Otherwise “Neverwhere” is one huge sensory rush and a brilliant
slice of stagecraft from opening moment to the final blackout. Don’t try to
make sense of the plot. Just let the play gloriously wash over you. “Neverwhere” runs through June 20 at the Lifeline Theatre,
6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m.,
Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773 761
4477 or visit www.lifelinetheatre.com May 2010 The show gets a rating of four stars. Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
or find him on on Facebook. At
the Lifeline Theatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—“Busman’s Honeymoon” brings Peter Greenberg back to
the Lifeline Theatre for the fourth time as aristocratic amateur detective Lord
Peter Wimsey, always a very good thing for Lifeline audiences. “Busman’s Honeymoon” was published in 1937 as an adaptation
of a play Sayers co-authored with Muriel St. Clair Burns. Instead of using the
Sayers play, Lifeline commissioned Frances Limoncelli to develop a new
adaptation. Limoncelli’s credentials for the job certainly are in order, having
adapted three previous Wimsey novels for the theater. “Busman’s Honeymoon” is the last of the Wimsey novels Dorothy
Sayers completed, and one of her lesser efforts in the series. The novel is a
sequel to “Gaudy Night,” a recent Lifeline success that established Wimsey’s
passion for detective story writer Harriet Vane. Between books, Lord Peter
pursued Harriet relentlessly for five years and “Busman’s Honeymoon” finally
gets them married. The novel’s action takes place during the couple’s honeymoon
at Talboys, an Elizabethan country house in the English provinces. Sayers
subtitled the work “A love story with detective interruptions” and the most
entertaining portions of the play explore the marital adjustment between Lord
Peter and Harriet. The audience sees the usually unflappable detective
unexpectedly vulnerable and we even get a glimpse of his sex life.
**********************************************************************
Busman’s Honeymoon
The story doesn’t get to the murder until we are well into
the first act. Mr. Nokes, the previous owner of Talboys, is discovered in the
house’s wine cellar, murdered. Suspicion falls upon a number of local
characters and Wimsey stumbles down one blind alley after another until he
solves the crime. This is one of those between-the-world-wars “Golden Age” mystery
stories which revolves around a laughably improbable murder scheme that makes
these tales so dated today. There is almost no tension in this very talky play
as far as the mystery component is concerned. After endless discussion and
interrogations conducted by Wimsey, Harriet and the local police inspector, the
killer is revealed, the identity surprising nobody. The play does have its pleasures. Sayers draws a few amusing
character studies of the local yokels. Wimsey’s perfect butler Bunter goes
ballistic when he discovers that a house servant had shaken every bottle in a
case of port treasured by his lordship, thereby rendering the wine undrinkable
for two weeks until the sediment resettles. The interaction between Wimsey and Harriet strikes plenty of
comic and dramatic sparks. The marriage reaches a crisis at the end of the play
with Wimsey in an agony of guilt over sending the killer to the gallows, even
though the murderer confessed and was unrepentant to the end. At the final
blackout Wimsey is saved by the love of a good woman, his wife. But one senses
that the Wimsey saga had run dry with Sayers and she did move on to devote
herself to religious writing. Peter Greenberg is stretched in this play, being called upon
to do more than utter droll remarks and be witty, scholarly, sophisticated, and
self consciously artificial. Greenberg
deftly shows the personal side of the man, creating a credible, realistic
portrait of a humanized Wimsey for the first time in the series. Jenifer Tyler is a fine match for Greenberg as Harriet, an
intelligent, compassionate woman who is her husband’s equal in intelligence,
but with a little more heart.
The remainder of the cast, several doubling in lesser roles,
includes Adam Breske, James E. Grote, Millicent Hurley (especially goods as an
officious local biddy), Robert Kauzlaric, Paul Meyers, David Skvarla, and
Christopher Walsh. Paul Holmquist directs skillfully and unobtrusively. Mary
Griswold designed a fine set that suggests the outside of the country house as
well as showing a second floor bedroom, a parlor on the first floor, and
assorted passageways. Joanna Melville designed the spot-on 1930’s costumes.
Seth Reinick designed the lighting and Brett Masteller the sound. “Busman’s Honeymoon” runs through June 21 at the Lifeline
Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Thursday and Friday at
7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773 761 or visit www.lifeline.com. The show gets a rating of three stars. May 2009 Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
. ************************** Mariette in Ecstasy At
the Lifeline Theatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—Plays
about intense religious experience need to tread carefully, avoiding
sensationalism, preaching, or mockery. It’s a delicate subject, which makes the
Lifeline Theatre’s absorbing production of “Mariette in Ecstasy” all the more
rewarding. The Lifeline’s master adapter Christine Calvit has re-created
Ron Hansen’s 1991 novel for the intimate Lifeline stage, where it is receiving
its world premiere. It would be no surprise if this play found a healthy
afterlife in regional theaters across the country following its Lifeline run.
The show might even gain acceptance in the tough-minded New York theater scene
with the proper sensitive staging.
Hansen sets his story in a rural upstate New York religious
community for women called the Sisters of the Crucifixion. The year is 1906.
The community is isolated from the outside world, existing in its own world of
prayer, hard work, and daily routine. The tightly knit community has its share
of gossip and jealousies, and there is a hint of subliminal lesbianism that
channels itself into religious fervor. Fracturing the quiet and regulated community life is the
appearance of attractive 17-year old Mariette Baptiste. Mariette seeks to
become a nun. From the outset she shows a heightened love of Jesus Christ,
claiming that Jesus has often talked to her in the past. In the eyes of some of
the nuns, Mariette is a model of piety worthy of adoration. In the eyes of the
more skeptical and envious sisters, she is a transparent example of religious
hysteria or pride As Mariette divides the convent into opposing camps, the
internal conflict is intensified by the appearance of the stigmata on
Mariette’s hands and body. The play then
becomes a kind of mystery story. Are the stigmata genuine miracles or a hoax
perpetrated on the community by Mariette for unknown reasons? The girl seems
sincere and the wounds on her hands and body heal as spontaneously as they
appear. If Mariette is a fraud, she’s a remarkably ingenious fraud. The issue of the stigmata doesn’t arise until the second act.
Until then, the play is largely a collection of character portraits of the
religious community as the nuns go about their prayers and chores in an
unbroken lifestyle that may be tedious and arduous but provides comfort and
structure to the lives of the sisters. To its credit, the play and the novel offer no facile answers
to the questions it raises about Mariette’s stigmata and the authenticity of
her devotion. At the end, Mariette is sent away from the convent into the
everyday world not because she may be a deceiver but because she is a
disrupter. The girl departs with regret but not bitterness, the veracity of her
religious experience unresolved. The play introduces the audience to nine members of the
community, plus the community’s priest. The nine women each have sharply etched
distinctive personalities. The three novices, played by Sarah Goeden, Sadie
Rogers, and Elizabeth Olson, are young and girlish, almost like giggling members
of as college sorority instead of the rigorous Sisters of the Crucifixion. The
sisters cover the spectrum from hardheaded realists who harbor serious doubts
about Mariette and her “miracles” to women eager to believe in miracles and the
sanctity of Mariette’s belief. The Lifeline ensemble performs superbly under Elise
Kauzlaric’s sensitive but unobtrusive directing. Each actor locates the
individual personality of her character with spot-on accuracy, not an easy task
when the actresses blend together in their identical garb of black for the
novices and white for the sisters. The company casts Brenda Barrie in the central and difficult
role of Mariette. Barrie
plays the teen-ager with persuasive
understatement and modesty. It’s difficult to believe her Mariette is a
trickster or a hysteric but there is such subtlety and depth in her performance
that the matter remains open ended, and properly so.
In addition to the novices, the sisters are played by Patrice
Egleston as the current prioress and Mariette’s older sister, Morgan McCabe as
the former prioress, and Melinda Polus, Janice O’Neill, Kate McLean, and
Allison Cain as the other sisters. There is a fine humane performance by Brian
Perry as the community’s priest and Shole Milos plays Mariette’s doctor/father,
a worldly man who attempts to explode his daughter’s presumed “miracles.” Alan Donahue has created an effective multi-level set that
admirably establishes the various spaces within the convent. Branimira Ivanova
designed the authentic-looking religious costumes and Sarah Hughey the complex
lighting plan. Tim Hill is the sound designer and Joseph Burt is the musical
director responsible for the splendid Gregorian chant singing by the ensemble. “Mariette in Ecstasy” takes its place in the canon of other
twentieth century plays and films that explore supernatural religious
experience, like “Saint Joan,” “The Song of Bernadette,” and “Agnes of God.”
It’s a play of warmth, sympathy, humor, suspense, and humanity. Well done all
around. “Mariette in Ecstasy” runs through April 5 at the Lifeline
Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Friday at 7:30 p.m.,
Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773 761
4477 or visit www.lifelinetheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of four stars. February 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.******************** The Picture of Dorian Gray At
the Lifeline Theatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—The
Lifeline Theatre production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is superb theater
and first-rate Oscar Wilde. The drama ranks among the best shows this theater
has ever done, high but well-earned praise for a company justly celebrated for
its stage adaptations of literary works. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was published in book form in
1891 and immediately caused a scandal in Victorian England. The novel helped
convict Wilde of “gross indecency” four years later.
The
title character is a handsome young man who falls under the pernicious
influence of Lord Henry Wotton. Wotton
is an aesthete who lives for pleasure and beauty, a Wilde stand-in. He
initiates Dorian Gray into a life of sensuality and vice, turning the younger
man from an innocent into a model of depravity.
There is a supernatural element to the story. Gray’s portrait is painted
by Basil Hallward. Gray contrives a satanic bargain by which he retains his
precious youth while the portrait, locked away in an attic, reflects the
physical horrors of Gray’s descent into dissipation and cruelty. By the end of the play, Gray has
murdered one man and been responsible for the suicides of two other characters,
including his fiancée, Sibyl Vane, an actress who dotes on Gray and poisons
herself after he rejects her as a bad artist. At the end of the narrative, Gray
tries to destroy the painting and in the act, destroys himself. The painting
returns to the beauty of its subject and the real Gray dies in physical
corruption. Robert Kauzlaric masterfully adapts and
condenses the novel, preserving Wilde’s aphorisms and wit, mostly spoken by the
cynical Wotton, as well as much of Wilde’s philosophy of art and beauty. The
adaptation takes most of its language from the novel and what aren’t Wilde’s
words certainly sound like them. Kauzlaric
uses the effective device of presenting the four major supporting characters in
both their youthful and older persons. Thus we get the younger and older Wotton
and Hallward, as well as a scientist named Alan Campbell and the brother of
Sibyl Vane, a man dedicated to tracking down Gray to avenge the death of his
sister. The
older manifestations of the characters stand on a balcony above the stage,
commenting on the action below. They also enter the action directly, even as
ghosts who haunt Gray as his guilty conscience erodes his mental stability. The big finish in the novel, and in the two motion picture
versions, comes in the attic when Gray finally confronts his painted image, the
mirror of all his sins for the last 18 years of his life. The 1945 film version
reaches its climax with Ivan Albright’s stunning portrait of the corrupt Gray.
In the Lifeline treatment, the painting plays its part in Gray’s death, and so
do the characters violated by Gray’s descent into evil. It’s a brilliant coup
de theatre, concluding with an original flourish, Wotton being handed a knife
to end his own dissipated life. The novel is supremely literate and the Lifeline cast is well
up to the mark in delivering that literacy with both wry humor and dramatic
intensity. The key performance, of course, must come from the actor playing
Dorian Gray. Nick Vidal does a splendid job of rendering the shadings that turn
Gray from a handsome innocent into a moral degenerate. Paul Holmquist triumphs in tossing off all those juicy
Wildean lines as the younger Henry Wotton, the jaded sophisticate irresistible
to an impressionable Dorian Gray, a youth open to tasting the delights of
forbidden lusts. Sean Sinitski smoothly picks up the Wotton character in later
life, still the urbane rogue.
The other major characters are all well played by Aaron Snook
and Don Bender (the younger and elder Basil Hallward), Kyle A. Gibson and John
Ferrick (the younger and elder Alan Campbell), and Adam Breske and David
Skvarla (the younger and older avenging brother). Special commendation goes to Melissa Nedell, the only female
in the ensemble, for a superb job as the lovesick Sibyl Vane who becomes a
sinister presence in Gray’s mind after her death. Kevin Theis has done a masterful job of directing the
demanding script with a perfect eye for its verbal richness, building up the
suspense nicely to the stunning final scene. Tom Burch’s bi-level set credibly
represents a Victorian drawing room and that menacing attic. Branimira Ivanova
designed the authentic looking Victorian costumes. Kevin D. Gawley designed the
lighting and Andrew Hansen the original music and sound. The credit for “violence
design,” a label new to me, goes to Richard Gilbert and David Gregory who
created the production’s intense final moments. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” runs through November 2 at the
Lifeline Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Friday at 7:30
p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773
761 4477 or visit www.lifelinetheatre.com. The
show gets a rating of four stars.
Sept.2008 Contact
Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
***********************
The Mark of Zorro
at the Lifeline Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The Lifeline staging of “The Mark of Zorro” is a triumph, no surprise for a company that has carved an essential niche for itself in area theater with its adaptations of literary works. What is notable is how the production triumphs on so many levels.
“The Mark of Zorro” is a novel written by a forgotten
American author named Johnston McCulley. He first published the story as a
magazine serial in 1919 under the name “The Curse of Capistrano.” It didn’t
take its more familiar name until Douglas Fairbanks Sr. made a classic silent
movie out of the film in 1920.
McCulley’s original is a takeoff on the hero who avenges the poor and oppressed. The gimmick is that the hero wears a disguise to cover his true identity, usually as a humdrum real life figure nobody would suspect of being a dashing figure who swoops around to defeat the forces of evil. Consider the Scarlet Pimpernel, Superman, and Spider-Man, all champions of the common man and woman in their fight against the tyranny of the powerful while masquerading as ineffectual civilians.
In “The Mark of Zorro,” the hero is a flamboyant swordsman named Zorro, the protector of the defenseless in colonial Spanish California during the early 1800’s. In real life Zorro (a Spanish word for fox) is Don Diego Vega, who presents himself as an effete, cowardly young aristocrat. As Zorro he is transformed, masked and wearing black with sword flashing, to rescue damsels in distress and other victims of the cruel Spanish governor and his chief henchman, Captain Ramon.
The audience at the Lifeline Theatre would expect lots of swashbuckling action, some romance, and some spoofing comedy, all of which Katie McLean’s adaptation supplies in abundance. But customers might not anticipate a show that provides real dramatic tension and full-blooded characters. The audience likely will enter the theater anticipating a cartoon, but they will leave the theater thrilled they have seen a genuine play, beautifully acted and miraculously staged in the tiny Lifeline playing area.
The heart of the production is James Elly in a breakout
performance as Don Diego/Zorro. Elly is a delight as the bland and faintly
swishy Don Diego. The don’s reluctant courtship scenes with the spunky Lolita
Pulido are a comic hoot, but when Elly dons his mask and morphs into Zorro,
he’s every inch the dashing and courageous hero with flashing sword and
swirling cape. Zorro’s swordfights with the bad guys, notably Captain Ramon,
are high-risk adventures with no margin for error, either for the performers or
spectators sitting in the first row.
Elly is handsomely supported by a talented supporting cast, notably Don Bender as Don Diego’s demanding father, Robert Kauzlaric as the insolent Captain Ramon, Rose de Guindos as the strong-minded Lolita, Manny Tamayo as the blowhard Sergeant Gonzales, Hanlon Smith-Dorsey as the nasty governor and a good guy friar, and Allison Cain and Larry Baldacci as Lolita’s parents desperate to have their daughter accept the waffling proposal of the wealthy but uninspiring Don Diego.
The versatile ensemble consists of B. Diego Colon, Eduardo Garcia, Jonathan Helvey, Brian Kilborn, and Jennifer Munoz. They switch from the governor’s soldiers to peasants to caballeros who eventually ride with Zorro against the forces of injustice. The group changes in and out of costumes backstage in nanoseconds and the gusto they bring to their brawling and singing and dancing is terrific.
Katie McLean’s adaptation crams an impressive amount of story into the two hours of performing time, respecting the material where a lesser dramatist would have patronized the material as a nudge-nudge wink-wink comedy. Even the villains in the narrative are three-dimensional, Captain Ramon’s fault being more one of arrogance than comic strip evil. At the end of the story, the governor and the captain are not killed, just humiliated by the newly empowered downtrodden. What could have been a B western turns out to be an exciting and absorbing story, leavened by comedy.
The backstage kudos start with Dorothy Milne’s amazing direction, squeezing a remarkable amount of action and crowd scenes fluently onto that small Lifeline stage. Alan Donohue’s set is dominated by a replica of an adobe mission building exterior that allows Zorro plenty of sudden derring-do entrances from atop the pile, supplying the production with vertical as well as horizontal energy. Branimira Ivanova’s costumes look just right for their period. John Sanchez’s lighting and the sound design by Victoria Delorio are a big help. And a standing ovation goes to Geoff Coates for his fight choreography.
A most entertaining evening.
“The Mark of Zorro” runs through June 22 at the Lifeline Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Friday at 7:3e0 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 761 4477.
The show gets a rating of four stars. May 2008
For more information contact www.lifelinetheatre.com.
Contact
Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
**************************
Talking It Over
at the Lifeline Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The modern theater does not lack for plays about romantic triangles, Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” and Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” being two examples among many. Although they differ in tone, both explore the shifting relationships among two men and a woman. Now the Lifeline Theatre has added its modest contribution to the genre with its world premiere adaptation of the 1991 Julian Barnes novel “Talking It Over.”
Barnes is one of England’s leading literary figures, known for his sophistication, urbane prose, and personal style. The Lifeline’s Peter Greenberg has converted the Barnes tale for the stage, retaining much of the novel’s language and storytelling manner.
Barnes’s novel explores the turbulent love triangle that consists of Stuart, Oliver, and Gillian. Stuart and Oliver have been friends since their school days, in spite of their vastly contrasting personalities. Stuart is a plodder, a safe type with a career in banking. Oliver is charismatic, articulate, and feckless. Early in the play, Stuart meets Gillian, a laid back young woman who restores art for a living. They quickly fall in love and marry. Then Oliver discovers he loves Gillian and pursues the woman for himself. From that point on, an originally lighthearted story turns progressively more intense and complicated.
In the novel, Barnes has his characters speak directly to the reader. Greenberg preserves the device, at least for the first act. Each character talks directly to the audience, asking that the viewers side with him or her as the plot unfolds. In a rapid set of quick speeches, the characters describe their take on personal events, past and present. As they speak, they are framed in an isolating spotlight (the lighting design by Maggie Fullilove-Nugent must include hundreds of lighting cues, each requiring split second timing).
The narrative assumes a “Rashomon“-like atmosphere of ambiguity. The characters all have their own spin on what happens as relationships alter and people get hurt. The audience can pick and choose among the versions, but the schematics of the plot are clear—Stuart gets Gillian, Stuart loses Gillian, Oliver gets Gillian, leading to a conclusion that may perplex and irritate some spectators while others will welcome it as legitimately open ended.
If there is a message in the play, it might be that love can be messy and bruising. The major difficulty with the narrative resides in the temperaments of the three main characters. None of the three is particularly sympathetic, and when they all go over the emotional cliff at the end I didn’t much care.
Stuart and Oliver are so different in psychological makeup that it’s difficult to accept that they ever became best friends. Gillian’s shift from one man to the other reflects a callousness that undercuts the low-keyed intelligence of the character. Oliver has most of the clever lines, but he’s still a home wrecker, no matter how sincerely he professes that he adores Gillian. The bottom line is that Oliver broke up the marriage of his best friend and Gillian let it happen. As for Stuart, cuckolds are never attractive figures.
The play runs about 15 minutes too long, especially in the final act. The first act is mostly those spotlighted rapid-fire monologues. The second act presents a more conventional dramatic structure, with the characters interacting. A few minor characters are brought into the story in the second act to further muddy the narrative waters about who we should believe among the three lovers.
The Lifeline casting for Stuart, Oliver, and Gillian is spot on. John Ferrick has the fleshy, slightly nebbish quality that perfectly suits Stuart. Chris Hainsworth likewise is just right as the handsome, well spoken, manipulating Oliver. Elise Kauzlaric, doing her best work at Lifeline as Gillian, is superb as the slightly self-effacing young woman who messes up three lives when she shifts from Stuart to Oliver.
Two supporting actresses appear in the second act. Katie McLean plays a sluttish friend of both men who offers her own tart commentary on the veracity of past events in the story. Ann Wakefield plays three characters, including Gillian’s French mother and a Frenchwoman who delivers the play’s crucial final lines. Unfortunately, Wakefield’s impenetrable French accent rendered most of her lines unintelligible.
A group of scenic designers led by Andre LaSalle is responsible for the production’s look, dominated by a series of large Picasso-esque paintings on canvas that are periodically changed by the characters, each set of paintings progressively darker in subject to reflect the increasingly troubled downward spiral of the story.
Branimira Ivanova designed the costumes and Mikhail Fiksel the sound. Phil Timberlake is the dialect coach, He does well with the English accents but the French accents are killers. Dorothy Milne directs the physically tricky production, with all those lighting cues and rapid entrances and exists and costume changes.
“Talking It Over” runs through March 23 at the Lifeline Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood Avenue. Performances are Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 761 4477.
The show gets a rating of three stars. March 2008
For more information contact: www.lifelinetheatre.comContact us at: Zeffdaniel@yahoo.com