Subtract Ada Lovelace from the play and we have a mildly humorous romantic comedy in which a pair of sisters pair off with a pair of local men after the customary misunderstandings and bickering.

        The analytical engine of the title is a large contraption built by Hippolyta Powell, a brainy and scatterbrained young woman who lives with her feisty sister Marigold and her widowed mother Virginia in the family home in Chester, Conn. The year is 1850. Virginia Powell hovers over her two willful daughters, outwardly a dithering loose canon but really crazy like a fox.

        Hippolyta built her engine specifically to identify a suitable mate, gathering information on the eligible men of the town and feeding the facts into the engine with punch cards. The results dismay Hippolyta by fingering a man she cares nothing for. But the engine’s feedback is scientific and thus must be obeyed. Lady Ada, having heard about the computer, travels from England to see this marvel for herself.

        The males in the play consist of a mild mannered middle-aged lawyer named Eppa Morton and a more dashing and younger man named Nathaniel Swade. For most of the play Eppa and Nathaniel fuss with Hippolyta and Marigold until they sort out the proper pairings, concluding with a set of happy endings that the audience could have been predicted a quarter of the way through the evening.

        A handful of witty lines aside, “The Analytical Engine” is a comedy of modest accomplishments. But the Circle production does profit from a set of agreeable performances, led by the aforementioned Denita Linnertz, who really does belong in another classic British comedy, if not at the Circle then somewhere in Chicagoland.

        Mary Redmon is funny as the mother who’s a savvy and shrewd woman for all her flakey exterior. Catherine Ferraro is a fetching Marigold and Patricia Austin, a short stocky young woman physically untypical of a romantic heroine, is an exuberant Hippolyta.

        Steinhagen takes the role of Eppa Morton and proves a more affecting comic actor than comic playwright. Eric Lindahl rounds out the cast as Nathaniel, a confusing character who may be a womanizer, a fortune hunter, and/or a proper husband for one of the Powell sisters. The playwright isn’t quite clear on the matter.

        Possibly “The Analytical Engine” is intended as a spoof of modern computer dating services, a fairly small and obvious target for lampooning. In any case, the play (which won the 2009 Julie Harris Playwright Award) may not score very highly as satire, but it does allow us to rejoice in Denita Linnertz’s performance as well as the antics of a gaggle of silly but generally endearing lovebirds and a crafty, dotty mother.

        Director Bob Knuth keeps this bauble appropriately light. The production profits from a historically detailed and convincing 1850 parlor set designed by Knuth (who is also the lighting designer). Elizabeth Wislar designed the costumes, including a bizarre fabric-heavy wardrobe for Marigold Powell. Peter J. Storms composed the original music and sound design.

        “The Analytical Engine” runs through March 28 at the Circle Theatre, 7300 West Madison Street. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20. Call 708 771 0700 or visit www.circle-theater.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.    February 2010

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

        “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” takes us deep into Tennessee Williams country, geographically and psychologically. The setting is the Mississippi plantation of Big Daddy Pollitt, the millionaire owner of 28,000 acres of prime farming land and a few million dollars in stocks and bonds. He presides over a dysfunctional family that consists of his wife Big Mamma, his older son Brick, Brick’s wife Maggie, younger son Gooper, and Gooper’s perennially pregnant wife Mae.

        Tensions are running high in the Pollitt household. Big Daddy is dying of cancer but doesn’t know it yet. Brick is a self-destructive alcoholic who tries to find oblivion in the liquor bottle to obliterate memories of his complicity in the death of his best friend Skipper years ago. Maggie ferociously tries to rescue her marriage from Brick’s alcoholic hostility and sexual indifference. Meanwhile, Gooper and Mae (and their hateful passel of children) circle around Big Daddy, trying to position themselves for a big chunk of the old man’s inheritance after he dies.

        The first act belongs to Maggie, who performs a virtual monologue directed at her husband as he quietly tosses down one drink after another, seeking the “click” that releases him from the spiritual pain going back to Skipper’s death. She loves Brick and she loves her status as the member of a wealthy family after suffering as a poor relation all her life. She won’t give up husband or the family money without a fight. Maggie calls herself Maggie the Cat for a reason.

        The second act is a dialogue between Brick and the volcanic Big Daddy. During a long and increasingly volatile exchange, Brick finally reveals the root of his search for alcoholic oblivion. Skipper had a homosexual attachment for Brick that came to a head when Skipper tried to make love to Maggie to prove his manhood and failed, later confessing his attachment to Brick in a drunken phone call. Brick hung up on him, leading to Skipper’s descent into the drugs and booze that killed him. Brick has been on a guilt trip of self loathing and disgust ever since.

        Two separate third acts exist for the play. The first is Williams’ preferred final act and the other is the one inspired by input from director Elia Kazan that became the one used in the 1955 Broadway production (which won the Pulitzer Prize). The Circle staging uses the Williams original and it works wonderfully. It provides no false happy ending but there is an intensely erotic final moment that suggests better days may be ahead for Maggie and Brick.

        The Circle revival heightens the play’s language with four letter words that add edge to the dialogue but were defanged with clumsy synonyms in the original script, probably out of regard for audience sensibilities in the mid 1950’s.

        Five minutes into the first act, I knew something special was happening on the Circle stage. It was clear that Kimberley Logan was going to be magnificent as Maggie, exploring and exploiting the character ‘s passion, calculation, desperation, and sexual hunger. Michael Borgmann’s Brick evokes a chilling portrait of a man eager to cut himself off from all human feeling, often with nothing more than blank stares and still body language.

        Jim Farrell takes over the stage in the second act as the coarse but street smart Big Daddy, relentlessly interrogating Brick for the source of the young man’s self hatred. And there is exceptional work from Deanna Norman as the comic and pathetic Big Mamma, refusing to accept that her 40-year marriage to Big Daddy has been a sham, no matter how much the man bullies and shames her.

        There are fine complementary performances by Justin Cagney as Gooper, a grasping and venal man bitter over a lifetime of second-class treatment from his Brick-loving parents. K. D.  O’Hair nicely plays the bitchy Mae who shares her husband’s scorn and resentment of the drunken Brick and the sexually abandoned Maggie. There are good cameos by Peter Esposito as a preacher seeking gifts from Big Daddy and Brad Davidson as the doctor who brings the family the bad news about Big Daddy’s cancer.

        The hero of the production may be director Jim Schneider, who orchestrates the production for maximum emotional, psychological, and occasionally comic impact. I have never seen the key characters in this drama so sharply and insightfully etched. His choice of the original third act cements the evening’s triumph.

        The show profits from Bob Knuth’s detailed bedroom and balcony set that fits snugly onto the small Circle stage. Knuth is also responsible for the atmospheric lighting. Suzanne Mann designed the period costumes and Peter J. Storms designed the sound.

        “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is a great play but it isn’t foolproof. The first two acts can bog down in talk in performances by lesser actors guided by a lesser director. But the Circle production maintains perfect dramatic pitch throughout the evening. The revival sets a very high bar for straight plays yet to come in Chicagoland this season.

        “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” runs through October 4 at the Circle Theatre, 7300 West Madison Street. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., with additional Thursday performances beginning in September. Tickets are $20 and $24. Call 708 771 0700 or visit www.circle-theatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.      August 2009

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

At the Circle Theatre

By Dan Zeff

          FOREST PARK—Talk about a challenging play! Charles Mee’s “A Perfect Wedding” requires a cast of 20, all playing significant roles. A mud fight on stage concludes the first act and there is a long Bollywood dance number near the end of the second act that involves the entire ensemble. By the end of the play, Mee has sliced and diced attitudes toward love and marriage, ending up with three weddings, man-woman, man-man, and woman-woman.

          Mee is one of American drama’s most personal dramatists. From time to time, one of his plays pops up in a Chicagoland production, always idiosyncratic and always theatrical. But they all make considerable demands on a theater’s resources, technically and dramatically. If the production works, the audience is treated to an evening of fresh, stimulating, often humorous verbal and visual theater.

          The Circle Theatre is presenting “A Perfect Wedding,” and the production works. Does it ever!

          “A Perfect Wedding” contains echoes of all sorts of literary sources, notably Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” There is also an extended portion involving two gravediggers that echoes “Hamlet.”

          The action takes place in a forest, the location otherwise unspecified. Family and friends gather to witness the wedding of Amadou and Meridee. But their nuptials are only a launching pad for a series of mini debates and monologues exploring the positives and negatives of marriage, with the nay sayers initially getting the upper hand, especially in the outspoken contributions by Meridee’s sister Tessa, who considers marriage an instrument of oppression and a vehicle for hypocrisy. The characters also detour into pro and con exchanges about nature versus civilization.

          As the play progresses, the audience meets a Catholic priest come to attend the festivities as a guest, four gay wedding planners, the mother and father of the groom (apparently African and Caribbean respectively) and those gravediggers. The mother of the bride is living openly with a French lover named Francois while her husband Frank enjoys an openly gay relationship with Edmund, all in the same house. Multi-culturalism is the password in this show.

                   The second act switches gears from the lively verbal exchanges of the first act. An off stage character arrives in a coffin, the recent victim of a heart attack. She was Frank’s mother, who is prostrate with misery at the news of the woman’s death. The delivery of the deceased triggers an extended ceremony of mourning, starting with a communal recognition of death and loss, escalating into mass hysteria, and ending with Amadou’s mother quietly singing a spiritual. Then the play returns to the business of sorting out the lovers and their various gender preferences.

          Mee’s dialogue has the sheen of a comedy of manners. Much of the conversation is pungent, and some of it is mostly lyrical noise that washes over the audience’s ears. Everyone has an opinion about love and marriage and many of the characters love at cross-purposes. Three couples end up happily at the altar while one disappointed lover slumps grief stricken at the side of the stage, excluded from the general good cheer.

          As the play winds down, the Bollywood dance number takes over, with the characters all wearing bits of colorful Asian apparel. As choreographed by Kevin Bellie, the dance is a total joy to watch and provides about 10 of the most pleasurable minutes currently available on any Chicagoland stage.

          “A Perfect Wedding” isn’t perfect. It runs on a little too long and its disquisitions on love and marriage occasionally get a little opaque, not to say pretentious. One gets the feeling that Mee sometimes falls in love with his own writing and can’t bear to take a blue pencil to a few of his more purple passages. Still, better to have too much verbal richness than too little.

          The hero of the evening is director Joanie Schultz, who has done an astounding job of shaping each of the 20 characters into a distinct individual and keeping the elaborate threads of the meandering narrative clear and entertaining from the opening scene to the final blackout. Even the curtain call is affecting and creative.

        The plot is based on the 1925 Anita Loos novel about a pair of flappers named Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw during the Roaring Twenties.  The original musical retained the flavor of the 1920’s and also the inanity of the musicals of that decade. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” opened the same year as “South Pacific” and comparisons between the two would be like comparing a dinosaur to a Mercedes Benz.

        Jule Styne and Leo Robin composed a score that is always serviceable and contributes two numbers to the musical comedy pantheon—“Bye Bye Baby” and, of course, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Numbers like “A Little Girl from Little Rock” and “When Love Goes Wrong” also still hold the stage nicely.

        The book by Loos and Joseph Fields will be tolerable primarily for those spectators with a large tolerance for unapologetic silliness. The action takes place variously on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, in Paris, and in New York City. The core characters, Lorelei Lee and her friend Dorothy Shaw, are on the make for rich husbands. Their beaus end up being a pair of cartoon swains named Gus Esmond (who Lorelei keeps calling Daddy) and Henry Spofford.

        Esmond is associated with a button-making empire and Spofford is into a new invention called zippers. The conflict between the two passes for storyline tension, along with a hassle over a diamond tiara. There is a dithering English aristocrat, Frenchmen who speak with horrific French accents in Paris, and sundry other cornball and two-dimensional characters.

        The Circle Theatre revival, under Kevin Bellie’s enterprising directing, goes to the max on energy and enthusiasm. No fewer than 20 performers make up the ensemble and most of them are on stage for the big dance numbers, an impressive logistical accomplishment achieved by Bellie as choreographer within the intimate Circle playing area.

        The dancing is the production’s strength from first to last. The show isn’t very well sung, except for Jeremy Myers as the aw shucks Henry Spofford, the lad who wins the man hungry Dorothy Shaw as a bride. Whether Henry is macho enough to hold Dorothy in lawful wedlock could be the subject of another show, either a farce or a tragedy.

        Fortunately, there are those all-out dance numbers, a couple of them set in Paris, that win the audience’s heart with the high spirits of the performers and Bellie’s Roaring Twenties-flavored dance steps.  The production also benefits from a deep pockets costume budget, allowing costume designer Jesus Perez to outfit the cast in an enormous wardrobe of 1920’s outfits. The tiny orchestra of a trumpet, reed player, two percussionists, and a bass player manage to produce a remarkably full sound under Allison Kane’s direction. Bob Knuth designed the minimal set and witty graphics and John Horan designed the lighting.

        It is difficult to assess the success of the cast because their characters are silly cardboard cutouts. Rachel Quinn certainly looks the part of Lorelei, a platinum blonde with a Betty Boop personality. Quinn also designed the makeup and hair, no mean feat in a show that wallows in flapper style wigs.

        A production with better vocalizing would display the “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” merits more fully, but the Circle revival still displays the show’s positives to an impressive degree. If there are fans of the musical out there, they better hustle down to the Circle Theatre. No other company in Chicagoland appears interested.

     The show gets a rating of three stars.        November 2008

                Contact Dan at zefffaniel@yahoo.com.