Stella & Lou

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie- “Stella & Lou” is a hot ticket at the Northlight Theatre because Rhea Perlman is starring in the world premiere show. Spectators doubtless will be hoping for Perlman to reprise her wisecracking Carla from the hit TV television series “Cheers.” As it turns out, we don’t get Carla and her one-liners and insults but we do bask in Perlman’s understated and sensitive contribution to a warm and compassionate comedy drama that should be a staple of regional theaters for countless seasons ahead.

      Playwright Bruce Graham doesn’t break any new ground in narrative or stagecraft in “Stella & Lou.” It’s essentially a two-character play that runs for a single 75-minute act, bringing together two middle-aged people at a cross section in their lives. Stella is a divorcee, a nurse who needs to change her lonely life. Lou (Francis Guinan) is her long-standing friend, the owner of a neighborhood bar in urban New Jersey. Lou is still dealing, not very successfully, with the death of his wife two years ago.

        Much of the play consists of casual and often humorous chat between Stella and Lou, occasionally expanded by Lou’s young bartender employee Donnie. It’s obvious from the outset that “Stella & Lou” is a “will they or won’t they” story. Will these two characters, both dealing with the problems of loneliness and the need for companionship, discover the obvious answer is in each other? The audience certainly is rooting for them.

        

                                                                                              Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

        Stella is the aggressor. She is still bruised from her long and unsuccessful marriage and she want to develop a relationship with Lou beyond their casual friendship. Lou resists. He’s withdrawn into his mourning for his wife, and beginning a new relationship is beyond his emotional limits, or so he thinks. The play gradually builds in momentum as Stella virtually woos the reluctant Lou. The resolution doesn’t come until the play’s final moment, the audience holding its breath and hoping for the best for these two average and decent people who deserve some happiness as their lives start to wind down.

        There is a whiff of sitcom in “Stella & Lou,” which is an observation and not a criticism. “Cheers” was a sitcom and provided some of the greatest entertainment in TV history, thanks in large part to Rhea Perlman. Playwright Graham demonstrated in his recent Northlight hit “The Outward Tide” that he is a master of realistic dialogue spoken by convincing audience-high characters. Both plays (the earlier drama deals with the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on the victim and his family) should send waves of recognition through the middle-aged and senior citizen audience who are core supporters of the Northlight.

        Perlman may be the marquee star in the production but the production’s success resides equally with Francis Guinan, that Steppenwolf Theatre stalwart who plays every role like it was created just for him. His Lou gradually becomes the focal point of the story. We know that Stella wants to connect with him and she frankly lays her cards on the table. But Lou is tied up in psychological knots by the loss of his wife. He refuses to deal with a possible new romance, even one so clearly in his own emotional interests. He is surprised, confused, and even angry at his friend’s move on him. Lou believes he is best served by his current uncomplicated life, stunted and sterile as it will appear to outsiders.

        It’s a matter of opinion whether the play needs the third character in the person of Donnie. The young man opens the play delivering a halting eulogy to a veteran bar customer Donnie detested in real life. Donnie is also going through a tearful crisis as he faces marriage he’s not sure he needs or wants. Donnie (well played by Ed Flynn) may be a fifth wheel in the narrative but he provides some comfortable laughs and adds enough minutes to the playing time to qualify the play as a full-fledged evening in the theater.

      

                                                                                      Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

      The directing by BJ Jones is a marvel of gentle realism, allowing his two supremely talented co-stars to move naturally and inevitably to the final blackout. There isn’t a single false note struck during the performance, nothing patronizing about these two aging blue collar characters. Perlman and Guinan see to that. Stella and Lou may be average people of no intellectual distinction, but they make great company for 75 minutes through the honesty and authenticity of the perfect-pitch performances.

        Brian Sidney Bembridge has created the detailed interior of Lou’s bar that will surely seem familiar to lovers of “Cheers.” Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Andrew Hansen the sound.

        “Stella & Lou” is a quiet play (at least until its final minutes) that doesn’t overreach itself. It’s content with telling a story about two unexceptional people who need affection and friendship in their lives. But that doesn’t make the dramatic stakes insignificant. It proves that in the hands of a fine director and outstanding performers a small-scale but skillfully written and very human play can give much pleasure.

        “Stella & Lou” runs through June 9 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $72. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.

Contact Dan : ZeffDaniel@yahoo.com   May 2013

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Stones in His Pockets

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – “Stones in His Pockets” begins as a gimmicky broad comedy and steadily evolves into a serious, semi-tragic play without ever losing its humorous touch.

    The play originated in Ireland in 1999 and will connect most sensitively with Irish and Irish-American viewers, but it still offers considerable entertainment value to audiences at the Northlight Theatre who appreciate fine acting and sharp satire.

   The gimmick comes from the format—two actors who play 15 roles. The actors never leave the stage, shifting characters with a slight change of body language, vocal inflection, and sometimes by changing a bit of costume.

      

                                PHOTO CREDIT:     Karl Hugh

     The play was written by Marie Jones, one of that rare breed, a female Irish playwright. She sets her play in the late 1990’s near a village in County Kerry. Visiting Americans are filming a major motion picture using locals from the area as extras. These peasants are part of a rural Irish stereotype that extends on the stage back to the 1800’s.

   We see the story through the eyes of Jake Quinn and Charlie Conlon. Jake has recently returned from America where he has gone to make his fortune and returned, defeated. Both men are leading impoverished, dead end lives, their roles as extras in the American film providing the most excitement they’ve had in years, while earning them some much needed money. Charlie has even written a screenplay he hopes will lead to a Hollywood career.

   For Jake and Charlie and many other extras from the village, their menial participation in the film opens a window onto the American dream of fame and wealth as movie stars in Hollywood. The play also spoofs the pretentions and self importance and inflated egos of the American visitors, who treat the locals as a kind of cattle call to fill in the backdrops of their movie.

      

                                       PHOTO CREDIT:     Karl Hugh

   The play starts as light comedy, permitting the audience to adjust to the two actors slipping from role to role. As the action progresses, the narrative turns more serious. One of the local young men, a loser crushed by his rude treatment from the Americans, drowns himself by walking into the ocean weighted down by stones in his pockets. The death triggers anger and self appraisal among the villagers, especially Jake and Charlie. They rail at the filmmakers for making a mockery out of their rustic Irish lifestyle while they recognize the hollowness of their lives, brought into high relief by the glamour they envy in the visiting American movie stars.

   “Stones in His Pockets” is basically a humorous vehicle but the image it presents of rural Irish society is disturbing, maybe not so much to native Americans as spectators with close connections to Ireland. The play invites us to laugh at the exuberant, blarney filled stage Irishman while sympathizing with their existence in a bleak environment that offers no future, the promise of success in America tantalizingly out of reach.

    The Northlight revival gets highest marks for the stellar performances by David Ivers (Jake and others) and Brian Vaughn (Charlie and others). The two are co-artistic directors of the Utah Shakespeare Festival (the production is presented in association with the festival). I don’t know how well the two run the festival but as actors they would honor any stage. The fluency of their role changes and the depth of their character interpretations draw the viewer deep into the play. After leaving the theater the spectator can marvel at the versatility and assurance of the acting. While the play is in motion, we accept the actors wholeheartedly as they appear in their many guises, accents firmly in place.

   The performance takes place on a bare wooden platform. The only props are a couple of chairs, a large steamer trunk, and an old fashioned coat tree that accommodates an assortment of garments the actors draw upon as they change characters. A cutout at the rear of the stage suggests the shoreline and ocean beyond. The play’s language suffices to create the assorted exteriors and interiors that contain the action.

    Many of the characters limned by Vaughn and Ivers are a joy. There is the swishy American assistant director overflowing with pretention, the palsied old Irish peasant who’s only claim to recognition is his self-proclaimed status as the only living extra from the John Wayne movie “The Quiet Man,” and the pathetic young man who drowns himself (all played beautifully by Ivers). Vaughn’s contributions include a bull’s eye portrait of the American film director well aware that the movies sell fantasy and pipedreams, and the female American star of the movie who decides to hit on the bedazzled Jake. Charlie and Jake finally rebel against the American cultural invaders and determine to turn around their own sterile lives by making a movie that will tell the true story of rural Ireland. Good luck to them and their hopeless goal.

    The Northlight has imported J. R. Sullivan from New York City to direct and he has done a masterful job of allowing “Stones in His Pockets” to unfold naturally, all the humor and pathos and drama delivered with nary a false note struck. The design team does its part—Scott Davis (scenery), David Kay Mickelson (costumes), Casey Diers (lighting), and Lindsay Jones (sound).

    “Stones in His Pockets” runs through April 14 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $72. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

  The show gets a rating of 3½  stars.  March 2013

             Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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The Whipping Man

At the Northlight Theatre

Dan Zeff

Skokie – We don’t see many plays about two black ex slaves conducting a Jewish Seder with their white former master in a ruined mansion at the end of the Civil War. That’s the unlikely cornerstone of “The Whipping Man,” a drama by an extremely promising young playwright named Mathew Lopez.

    “The Whipping Man” opened in New York in 2011 and has become a popular selection among prominent regional theaters, including the Northlight Theatre. Its attraction to theater producers is obvious. The play requires only three actors and a single (though elaborate) set. And it explores stimulating historical and social themes in a highly theatrical manner. The play has its glitches, but overall it provides a vigorous and thought provoking two hours. At the Northlight the viewer experience is garnished by a superb performance from Tim Edward Rhoze as one of the two former slaves.

          

                                                                                                                                        Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow           

    The story opens on a dark and stormy night. A solitary figure staggers into a ruined mansion and collapses on the floor, drenched from the rain. The man is Caleb DeLeon, a Confederate army officer who has managed to stumble back to his Virginia home, finding it partially destroyed and abandoned. Soon a former DeLeon slave named Simon enters to confront the intruder. Caleb’s father and the remainder of his family have fled the family home, awaiting some restoration of peace before they return. Simon has stayed behind as caretaker of the mansion, or what’s left of it. The third character enters, a young cocky black man named John who was one of the DeLeon slaves and now survives by scavenging the countryside for food, liquor, and valuables.

    Caleb carries a bullet in his leg that has developed into gangrene. Simon states that the leg must be amputated or Caleb will die. Caleb refuses to go to a hospital and Simon and John combine to take off the leg (in a grisly look-away scene that fortunately ends just as the operation begins). Caleb’s surgery is the last major action in the play. The remainder consists of dialogue among the three characters that leads to traumatic revelations about the past.

    The time is now in April, when the annual Jewish festival of Passover is celebrated, highlighted by the ceremonial Seder meal. The second act is devoted to makeshift Seder service. The DeLeon family was Jewish and raised Simon and John to be Jews. Ironically, Caleb has turned his back on his religious faith, bitter at the devastation and suffering he’s witnessed during his four years in the war. He rejects God but Simon remains devout, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap throughout the play. Even the bumptious John is knowledgeable and accepting about Judaism.

    Passover commemorates the Hebrew slaves, under the leadership of Moses, escaping from Egyptian bondage in Biblical times. Simon sees a clear correlation between the liberation of the ancient Hebrews and the emancipation of his own people. He sings verses of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” that make an emotional connection between the suffering endured by the Biblical Hebrews and the black slaves sold or born into slavery in America.

     

                                                                                                                                           Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

    The play’s title refers to the man who whips slaves upon request from their masters. The DeLeons, in spite of being outsiders as Jews in the Christian South, fully participated in the cruelty of the slavery institution. Caleb’s father delivered both Simon and John to the whipping man for repeated brutal floggings. The emotional climax of the play comes when Simon learns of a particularly callous betrayal by the father. Slavery corrupts even essentially decent people.

     The playwright knows how to write big scenes and crackling dialogue. But his play suffers from contrivance, starting with the premise of John and Simon being raised in the faith of their master. It may have happened in the South during slave times but it has the whiff of a plot gimmick. The big betrayal revealed in the second act comes across as stagey and improbable, a device the playwright harnesses to build the story to its emotional crescendo.

    If the plotting of “The Whipping Man” requires the viewer to suspend some disbelief, the writing remains dramatically involving and the performances are grabbers. As Caleb, Derek Gaspar is confined to a couch for most of the play as he recovers from his amputation, but he still conveys the character’s essential moral weakness. He may have deserted from the Confederate army. He was aware of the big betrayal and kept silent and he even participated in whipping John, an act even more cruel, as we learn from still another plot twist. Gaspar deftly evokes a broken man shattered by experiences in the war that leave him psychologically as well as physically crippled, facing an uncertain and almost certainly bleak future.

    Sean Parris brings some welcome humor to the play as the scheming John, a bright young man and a survivor, the type who always seems to prosper in times of widespread adversity. But the performance of the evening comes from Tim Edward Rhoze as Simon. Rhoze is a commanding physical presence with the aura of an Old Testament patriarch. His Simon is loyal, honorable and practical, a man to be respected and, at the end of the play, both pitied and feared. His rage at the end of the show is terrifying and pathetic. It’s a performance that should attract awards like a magnet.

      Director Kimberly Senior orchestrates the theatrical ebb and flow of the action with a sharp, unobtrusive eye. Jack Magaw’s set is a masterful recreation of the crumbling mansion that becomes a fourth character in the story. Rachel Laritz designed the authentic period costumes and Christine Binder designed the atmospheric and dramatic lighting. Christopher Kriz is the sound designer and composed the original music, which I thought was an unnecessary intrusion into the realism of the narrative.

“The Whipping Man” portrays the vile influence of slavery on otherwise civilized people, brutalizing the slave and morally corrupting the owner. Lopez can be excused for injecting soap opera-ish twists and turns into his play. They are a small price the audience pays for what otherwise is a potent viewing experience.

      “The Whipping Man” runs through February 24 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $72. Call 847 6y73 6300 or visiting www.northlight.org.

                                The show gets a rating of 3½  stars. “

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com    January 2013

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The Odd Couple

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Skokie--Northlight audiences should cut the theater’s revival of “The Odd Couple” some slack. The production took a major hit when co-star George Wendt was forced to drop out of the show only a few days before the scheduled opening for medical reasons. So the production pulled Marc Grapey out of the supporting cast to take on the key role of Oscar Madison, replacing Grapey with a new actor.

         “The Odd Couple” opened on schedule Friday night after what must have been a week of very intense rehearsals. On the positive side, Grapey holds his own admirably as Oscar Madison, the genial slob. And co-star Tim Kazurinsky does his job as the neurotic Felix Unger. As the duo gets performances under their belt, they should get even better. On the negative side, there are problems with the production’s supporting male actors that reflect wobbly casting might not improve with time.

         “The Odd Couple” ranks with “The Man Who Came to Dinner” as the funniest play in American theater. Neil Simon took a simple premise and expanded it into an evening-long feast of one liners and deliciously comic situations. The distraught Felix moves in with Oscar after his wife suddenly ends their marriage. But Oscar and Felix are truly an odd couple, Oscar the lovable and sarcastic slob and Felix the compulsive neat freak and hypochondriac. Their clash of temperaments ignites the evening’s comic fireworks.

         The play opens with a poker game in Oscar’s New York City apartment. The five players toss barbed banter around, casually insulting each other and Oscar’s messy ways as the game’s host. The scene should be a rapid-fire cascade of laughs but at the Northlight the exchanges lack sizzle and comic timing. A few of the lines stimulated laughs from the opening night audience because the dialogue is so funny it can survive a flat delivery. But the first minutes of the play remain uneasy.

                                   

                                                                                                Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

         Things pick up upon the entrance of Felix, one of the regular poker players and a man in an emotional tailspin, suddenly on his own because his wife couldn’t stand his neurotic ways any more. Oscar insists Felix remain in the apartment as his roommate, setting up the comic tensions that fuel the rest of the play.

         Wendt and Kazurinsky are roughly the same age (at 64 and 62 years old respectively). Grapey is 48, and the age gap between him and Kazurinsky is noticeable. But the pair still play off each other nicely, especially in the terrific comic dinner party scene involving a pair of saucy English sisters who live in Oscar’s building and seem open to a little action. Oscar envisions a sexual bonanza from the young ladies but the starchy Felix wants no part of any erotic pursuits. Much hilarity ensures as Felix reduces the females to tears with his self pity over his failed marriage.

         The Northlight production comes in at a tight two hours, partly because the production compresses the three acts into two, eliminating an intermission. Also, I think a few lines were deleted from the original script, for no recognizable reason. But in general the glories of Simon’s comic dialogue remain intact.

         Grapey does a nice Jack Klugman turn as the gruff and cynical Oscar and Kazurinsky gives the skittish Felix some depth, turning a potential cartoon character into a figure of recognizable humanity. Felix may be silly but the man is still in pain and Kazurinsky neatly balances the farcical with the realistic. Both get considerable assistance from Katherine Keberlein and Molly Glynn as the giggly English girls. It’s only when the play reverts to the poker game scenes that the comic momentum descends drastically.

    

                                                                                               Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

         Director B. J. Jones deserves much credit for whipping the production into decent shape after Wendt’s late departure. I suspect that nobody involved with the show got much sleep in the week before the opening night. Regrettably Jones is unable to build a comic fire under the poker scenes. Jack Magaw designed the credible apartment interior that fits functionally on the Northlight thrust stage. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes which credibly reflect the mid 1960’s ambience of the show. JR Lederle designed the lighting and Andrew Hansen the sound, which presumably included selecting the 1960’s pop music hits that form the production’s aural background.

         “The Odd Couple” runs through December 9 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $72. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlighj.org.

      The show gets a rating of three stars.   Nov. 2012

                           Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Woody Sez

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie –American folksinger/composer/political activist Woody Guthrie lived during the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the turbulent wartime and postwar years of the 1940’s. In his music Guthrie became the voice of the common man and woman and child in America, especially the oppressed, the exploited, and the dispossessed. “Woody Sez” celebrates the man, and a wonderful tribute it is.

         “Woody Sez” originated, oddly enough, in Scotland at the 2007 Fringe Festival. It’s now playing at the Northlight Theatre, performed by an exceptional quartet of singers and musicians, three of whom were part of the 2007 production. The four combine to play a whole orchestra of folk music instruments with a versatility and virtuosity that could go unappreciated because they perform with absolutely no affectation. The show runs about 100 minutes without and intermission and the songs and biographical inserts flow with a low keyed (but high spirited) naturalism that effortlessly draws the audience into Woody’s world and spirit.

                       

                                                                                             Photos courtesy Northlight Theatre

         Guthrie saw himself as the voice for people who had no voice, especially the farmers victimized by the Great Depression of the 1930’s in the Midwest and Southwest. Woody attacked the American Establishment—the bankers, the government, the corporations, and the thugs they employed. His weapons were his songs, some satirical, some angry. Guthrie wrote hundreds of songs and adapted many more. His signature song is “This Land Is Your Land,” maybe the most patriotic anthem in American music. That one is performed in “Woody Sez,” along with the familiar “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” and “This Train Is Bound for Glory.”

         But the less familiar songs will be revelations to most viewers. Guthrie wrote about the devastating effects of poverty in the poignant and bitter “I Ain’t Got No Home.” The spritely “Jolly Banker” attacks the capitalists who smoothly and callously rip off the unprotected common people. Whatever the audience’s attitude towards labor unions today, they have got to be stirred by the rousing “Union Maid.” The horrors of a dust storm in Oklahoma in 1935 are portrayed in the vivid and dramatic “Dust Bowl Disaster.”

         The four performers look and sound as authentic as Guthrie’s music. Darcie Deaville and Helen Jean Russell wear the shapeless dresses of the Depression years. David Lutken and David Finch wear the work shirts and plain trousers of the common man (costume design by Jeffrey Meek). The foursome all move between the words and music of “Woody Sez” with an ease and a spontaneity that reflects long hours of rehearsal, and the deft and invisible directorial hand of Nick Corley. Of course, the performers have been doing this show for years and they are obviously comfortable with the material, and their respect and affection for Guthrie resonates throughout the evening.

         Guthrie’s life was filled with personal tragedy, with the loss of a sibling and a child in house fires and a mother who eventually died in an insane asylum. Woody contracted a hereditary nerve disease that left him virtually helpless his final years until his death at the age of 55 in 1967. But all the personal misfortunes never dulled his fighting spirit. He was always a man of the people, and at a time when left wing social protest could mean jail or physical danger. He wasn’t a dilettante dabbling in sympathy for the downtrodden. In his writings and his music he put himself on the front lines. He was a stubborn man and maybe not always easy to get along with, but he never wavered in his support for the common people and his hostility toward the forces that humiliated them, brutalized them, and denied them their rights.

                

                                                                               Photos courtesy Northlight Theatre

         The Northlight production takes place within a rough hewn wooden set designed by Luke Hegel-Cantarella that reflects the hard scrabble backdrop of the words and music. The sound design by Rick Sims and the lighting by Chris Binder are unobtrusive. The performers speak directly to the audience, with Lutken with his Texas drawl taking on the persona of Guthrie. Lutken happily avoids the temptations of folksiness. There is no faux homespun quality to pander to the spectator’s emotions, though by the final moments of the show the viewer is entitled to get a little misty-eyed.

         “Woody Sez” is not a high concept show, which may be its greatest virtue. The staging is a straightforward portrait of a great American created by four terrific entertainers who believe in their subject with a conviction that carries the audience along with them.

         “Woody Sez” runs through October 21 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $75. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Contact Dan: ZeffDaniel@yahoo.com   Sept. 2012

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Ten Chimneys

At the NorthlightTheatre

by Dan Zeff

Skokie – Ten Chimneys is the name of the estate near Madison, Wisconsin, where the famous American husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne retreated annually to prepare for their season on the American stage. The estate is now a major tourist attraction, a monument to the lives and careers of the Lunts.

        Now another monument exists to celebrate the Lunts, a literate, funny, poignant, and even educational play by Jeffrey Hatcher called “Ten Chimneys.” The show is receiving its local premiere at the Northlight Theatre in what may be the most stylish production of the season in Chicagoland theater. 

                     

The play takes place during the late 1930’s, when the Lunts stood atop the American theatrical pyramid . They knew everyone in trans- Atlantic theater and Ten Chimneys was a standard destination for Beautiful People, stars like Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, and Katharine Hepburn.

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher hasn’t simply written an exercise in nostalgia by crowding his play with impersonations of famous personalities from the theater world. There are only seven characters-- the Lunts, Alfred’s mother Hattie, his half sister Louise and half brother Carl, and actors Sidney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen. The play takes place inside and outside the main estate house where the Lunts are rehearsing their revival of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” that’s headed for Broadway and then a national tour. A kind of epilogue ends the play after the end of World War II in 1945.

The first act introduces the audience to the complex personalities and tensions among the Lunt family. Hattie resents Lynn because the wife encroaches on the mother’s smothering love for her son. Lynn naturally resents the mother and they go back and forth in volleys of scintillating bitchy dialogue. When Lynn goes off to get the mail, Hattie comments “Look at her run. You’d think someone had sent her a mirror.”

But the play extends way beyond verbal cleverness for its own sake. “Ten Chimneys” is about the theater. Much of the play takes us inside a rehearsal of “The Seagull,” providing fascinating insights into scene and character development, how intonation and gesture illuminate a character or a moment. The Lunts were famous for their obsessive rehearsing and one of the play’s best scenes shows the couple going through a half dozen interpretations of a passage from “The Seagull” in a matter of a few minutes, allowing the audience a prismatic view of how many different ways a few lines of dialogue can be performed.

The Lunts are portrayed as two strong personalities who do not separate the theater from real life. As Lynn remarks, “We are always on stage.” They trade in larger than life emotions and seem to be performing even during their most intense personal moments. For them the theater is a miracle cure for all ailments, and dedication to the stage sweeps all of life’s other considerations aside.

  Carl and Louise are satellite figures who revolve around the Lunts’ sun. Carl is a lost soul who tries to make a living as a pool shark He grudgingly lives at Ten Chimneys year around with his difficult, high maintenance mother. Louise is something of a family servant at Ten Chimneys and doesn’t bother to conceal her resentment, but her status remains lowly.

                                                                 Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

Into this domestic hotbed come Uta Hagen and Sidney Greenstreet. Hagen is a young actress hired to play a leading role in “The Seagull” and she is immediately attracted to the charismatic Alfred Lunt, injecting some sexual frisson into the household that Lynne notes with unconcealed disapproval. Greenstreet is an outwardly hearty friend of the family, a moderately successful stage actor before becoming a star in Hollywood after World War II. He lives with the agony of a mentally ill wife permanently institutionalized a short distance from Ten Chimneys.

After the high comedy of the first act, the second act turns much darker. The high strung temperaments are unleashed into actions calculated to wound. Lynn wants Uta Hagen out of the show and Hattie plots against Lynn by raising the buried issue of whether Alfred had a homosexual relationship with an old friend now teaching at the University of Michigan. The jolly Greenstreet collapses under the weight of his blighted marriage and his own poor health, breaking into tears alone on the stage in one of the most moving bits I’ve seen in a play in a long time. By the end of the evening, everyone is pretty much as before, except that Hattie is slipping into senility. But the passion for the stage and for each other remain an unbreakable bond between Alfred and Lynn. So along with its other merits, “Ten Chimney’s” is a convincing love story.

The performances at the Northlight are as scintillating as the dialogue. V Craig Heidenreich is memorable as Alfred, his acting enhanced by his strong resemblance to the real Lunt. Lia Mortensen, English accent deftly in place, is splendid as Lynn Fontanne, a woman who can take no prisoners in a domestic or theatrical battle, but a woman with a bottomless love for the theater and for her husband. Fontanne was once asked if she had ever contemplated divorcing Lunt. She answered, “Murder, yes. Divorce, never.”

The supporting cast is impeccable. The find of the ensemble is Sara Griffin as Uta Hagen , a young woman who enters wide eyed and naive in the high stakes emotional gamesplaying that often afflicted the Lunt household. The only possible blemish in Griffin’s performance is her age. At the time of the play, Hagen would be a teenager, reinforcing the character’s innocence in dealing with an experienced cut and thrust character like Lynn Fontanne. Griffin seems in her mid 20’s, but age aside, she is outstanding. The same problem exists with Linda Kimbrough’s Hattie. She looks far too young to be the middle-aged Alfred’s mother, but Kimbrough still holds the stage beautifully with her waspish dialogue.

Steve Pringle delivers a wonderfully well-rounded performance, physically as well as emotionally, as Sidney Greenstreet. Lance Baker, who is having a superior season in local theater, portrays the disappointed and embittered Carl with a layer of sardonic humor that adds a dimension to this minor figure. And Janet Ulrich Brooks is very fine as the much put upon and aggrieved Louise, trying to hold her own in the psychological thicket that frequently dominates the Lunt’s domestic life.

BJ Jones does a marvelous job of directing the play in its many moods, including the rehearsal scenes of “The Seagull,” a master class in dramatic interpretation. Tom Burch designed the effective rural set that makes good use of the Northlight turntable stage. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Joe Cerqua the sound plus original music.

“Ten Chimneys” runs through April 15 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

            The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.     March 2012

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Black Pearl Sings!

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – “Black Pearl Sings!” is a two-hander that explores the odd couple relationship between a white female academic and a black woman in prison for murder in Texas during the depths of the Great Depression. The play touches on lots of chewy issues, like racism, sexism, and most provocatively, what constitutes authentic national heritage and who owns it.

     The play, written by Frank Higgins, is receiving a strong production at the Northlight Theatre, thanks to a pair of superior performances by E. Faye Butler as the black inmate and Susie McMonagle as the academic.

        The first act takes place on a women’s prison farm in southeast Texas in the summer of 1933. Susannah (McMonagle) is a folklore scholar traveling the hinterlands recording authentic folk songs. She stops at the prison because she knows that some of the best folk songs are embedded among prisoners in the South, especially black prisoners.

   

Photo Credit: Starbelly Studio

        Susannah singles out Alexandra Johnson, known as Pearl, as a likely reservoir of genuine black folk songs. Pearl (Butler) grew up in the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina, a fertile source of folk music as yet untouched, and thus unblemished, by contact with the outside world. Pearl makes a stirring entrance, trudging slowly on stage with her legs in chains and carrying an iron ball. She’s been in prison for 10 years for murder and has nothing to live for beyond trying to locate her daughter, a child of 12 when Pearl went to jail.

        The first act is mostly a cat and mouse game between Susannah and Pearl. The black woman is suspicious of this white woman who comes to her seeking folk songs. Her relations with whites have not been happy throughout her life and she is wary of what Susannah really wants from her. Susannah has a genuine passion for preserving the nation’s folk heritage in its pristine form, but she also has an agenda, using her folk music expeditions to earn grant money and build a resume in the academic community, aiming as high as a teaching position at Harvard. Each woman sees the other as a meal ticket, Pearl to find her daughter, and Susannah to make a reputation as a folk music conservator.

        The second act moves to a Greenwich Village apartment in New York City in early 1934. Susannah has managed to get Pearl paroled in her custody as a national treasure of folklore. Susannah sets up a series of performances before liberal white academic organizations, showcasing Pearl’s folk singing. The liberal organizations eat up Pearl’s personality and her music, so long as her music doesn’t get controversial, like songs that praise unions.

   

Photo credit:Starbelly Studios

        The second act supplies the intellectual meat of the evening. Pearl agrees to perform before white audiences to earn money to finance the search for her daughter. She remains wary of the white interest in black folk culture, a culture totally foreign to white society but she is willing to play the game, even encouraging the audience to sing along in a call and response mode. Susannah isn’t above promoting Pearl’s violent past and her primitivism for publicity, actually proposing Pearl wear her prison stripes uniform in the concerts to lend “authenticity” to her presentations.

        For Susannah, the personal holy grail is being the first to record a black folk song that dates back to slave days, an achievement that would make her reputation in academia. Pearl knows such a song but withholds it from the white woman. That song will belong to her people and she won’t barter it away for the pleasure of uncomprehending white listeners. Pearl’s performance of that song brings the show comes to its emotional conclusion.

        “Black Pearl Sings!” probes the question of who owns the rights to a national heritage, the creators of that heritage or society at large. Higgins could have delved into the issue more deeply but at least he has raised the point for audience consideration. It’s an ongoing controversy. The Greek government still wants England to return the Elgin marble sculptures back to their birthplace in Athens, while the English claim the masterpieces serve the world better preserved in the British Museum in London. So the ownership of fragments of a heritage will always remain a touchy question, colored by volatile national and ethnic feelings.

        Higgins’s play doesn’t solve the issues it raises but it does provide sumptuous roles for its two actresses. The show includes numerous folk songs, mostly performed without instrumental accompaniment, but “Black Pearl Sings!” isn’t a musical, it’s a drama with music. The play is a special showcase for the actress playing Pearl, and E. Faye Butler seizes the opportunity with a brilliant performance that is variously belligerent, humorous, and yearning. Pearl isn’t supposed to be a professional singer, but Butler is one of Chicagoland’s leading divas and the power of her voice can’t be suppressed. Plus the woman does a terrific job of portraying a woman beaten down by racism and hard knocks her entire life but a woman who still retains a strength of character and a certain dignity, even when trying to survive in an alien white world.

        McMonagle has the more difficult of the two roles. Pearl will naturally get the attention, and sympathy, of the audience. Susannah is a more problematical figure, a woman of good intentions who is still on the make in building a career, with Pearl as her chief tool. In addition, the play scores comic points off the white character (Higgins is white), mocking white stereotypes about blacks and its patronizing attitudes. At times the play seems like a white apology to the black world for misunderstanding and mistreating African American life so blatantly. White liberal audiences should eat it up. But on balance “Black Pearl Sings!” is a solid, sometimes provocative work built on a pair of luminous characters. Viewed solely as an E. Faye Butler concert the play is worth the price of admission. Fortunately, there is enough dramatic substance underpinning the music to offer patrons two hours of stimulating, if not perfect, entertainment.

        Credit Steve Scott’s directing for sustaining the play’s dramatic and musical momentum. Jack Magaw designed the settings, Emily McConnell the spot-on Depression era costumes, Sarah Hughey the lighting, and Christopher Kriz the sound.

        “Black Pearl Sings! runs through February 19 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

     The show gets a rating of 3 stars.   January 21, 2012

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Season’s Greetings

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Skokie—Alan Ayckbourn’s “Season’s Greetings” is an anti-holiday cheer comedy appropriate for audiences ready for an excursion into the dark side of the Christmas season. There’s drunkenness, attempted adultery, endless family bickering, a shooting, and a preposterous marionette show. For anyone who has endured a dysfunctional family holiday gathering, this show may provide an agreeable shock of recognition, and some chuckles to boot.

        “Season’s Greetings” has become something of a holiday tradition in English since it premiered in 1980. It’s being revived at the Northlight Theatre in a production that is occasionally hilarious but mostly just amusing. For some reason, Ayckbourn, the most successful British comic playwright of the last half century, doesn’t play as funny in the USA as he does in the UK.

        The play takes place from Christmas Eve through the English observance called Boxing Day, the day after Christmas when people exchange presents. The location is the suburban residence of the Bunker family. Nine adults gather to celebrate the season and to get on each other’s nerves. Cumulatively they have 12 children, all off stage. But the kiddies  aren’t missed. In this comedy, the grownups are more childish than their offspring.

        There is no real plot to “Season’s Greetings,” just a series of mishaps, misunderstandings, and confrontations. The funniest character is Bernard, an inept middle-aged physician who inflicts a hopeless marionette play annually on the children. Next funniest is Harvey, a curmudgeonly old gaffer who enjoys sitting in front of the television set watching people destroyed in action movies. Phyllis is Bernard’s boozing wife, a mistress of making a spectacle of herself. Eddie is a genial and shiftless loser married to the pregnant Pattie, who can’t seem to get anyone’s attention. Belinda and Neville are enduring a marriage that has gone stale, leaving the lady ripe for a quickie seduction by Clive, a semi-successful author and a Bunker houseguest. Then there is poor Rachel, Belinda’s unmarried sister with a hopeful but futile romantic eye on Clive.

   

        These characters mix and match abrasively. The most comical encounters involve the mutual disdain between bullying arch conservative Harvey and stuffy Bernard with his liberal politics and interminable and incompetent marionette show. Then there are Belinda and Clive rolling erotically on the living floor in the wee hours of the evening, discovered in flagrante by the rest of the household gathered in various attitudes of amusement and distaste on an overlooking staircase.

   The Northlight has assembled a strong ensemble, led by those old pros Guinan and Riley. Heidi Kettenring (Belinda), Matt Schwader (Neville), Amy Carle (Phyllis, with a thick foreign accent for some reason), Steve Haggard (a bit youthful for Clive), and John Byrnes all give stylish performances. Maggie Kettenring is especially winning as the hapless Amy. But my favorite performance after Guinan and Riley came from Ginger Lee McDermott as Rachel. McDermott gives us the least cartoonish character on stage, a 38-year old trying to put a brave face of indifference on a life urgently in need of some romance.

        I sat in the Northlight admiring this fine cast and wondering why I didn’t start laughing out loud until Bernard’s ludicrous marionette show of The Three Little Pigs. Otherwise. it was all pleasant enough but not thigh slapping.

        Director B. J. Jones puts the cast briskly through their paces, everyone’s British accents strongly in place. Keith Pitts designed the two-level set, dealing as best he can with the challenges of a play more suited to a proscenium stage than the Northlight thrust stage. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Andre Pluess the sound.

        The bottom line is that “Season’s Greetings” is a diverting alternative to the endless supply of “The Nutcracker,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” flooding Chicagoland through the end of the year. But the show is probably best seen in a London theater in front of a British audience.

        “Season’s Greetings” runs through December 18 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

              Visit Dan on Facebook.   November 2011

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Snapshots

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie - We don’t lack for songwriter revues this theater season. The Porchlight Theatre is doing a Stephen Sondheim revue, while David Shire and Richard Maltby are being served at Theo Ubique and a Rodgers and Hart retrospective is upcoming at the Light Opera Works. The Northlight Theatre is getting into the mix with “Snapshots,” a revue of the music by Stephen Schwartz, but with a difference.

        The typical composer/lyricist revue strings along a sequence of tunes in “And then they wrote” fashion, usually with no dialogue and only a hint of a storyline. “Snapshots” resembles a more traditional musical, with a full book by David Stern to provide a superstructure for Schwartz’s music. And rather than pluck selections from the Schwartz canon as originally written, some lyrics in “Snapshots” have been revised to better fit the storyline.

        Today, Schwartz is famous as the composer of a money machine called “Wicked,” but his Broadway resume also includes  such hits as “Godspell,” “Pippin,” and the “The Baker’s Wife,” along with selections from lesser known scores. There are few hit songs in the almost 30 numbers in “Snapshots.” I’ve seen Schwartz’s major musicals but the only song I recognized was “Popular” from “Wicked.” So, for audiences who aren’t Schwartz zealots, nearly all the songs will  be fresh, which makes “Snapshots” a voyage of discovery for lovers of literate, often moving music for the stage.

      “Snapshots” is set in the attic of a home occupied by Sue and Dan, a middle aged couple with 20 years of marriage and one child behind them. Sue decides her marriage has gone flat and plans to move out. Indeed she has her suitcase packed and prepares to depart when Dan comes up to the attic to see what she’s doing up there. Sue gets cold feet about giving her unsuspecting husband the news that she is walking out of their marriage. As a distraction  she starts going over family snapshots and other memorabilia moldering in the attic. That launches a nostalgia trip through their relationship that occupies the rest of the show.

        To sing the songs and tell the story, the show introduces two pairs of young people (called Susie and Danny and Susan and Daniel) who represent Dan and Sue in their younger days. The two couples start out as part of the biographical flashback but eventually become living characters who interact with Sue and Dan like living people as the narrative shifts between realism and fantasy.

        The show tracks Sue and Dan from their childhood through adolescence and their college years and into their twenties. After numerous romantic and sexual dalliances with third parties, the two finally marry after Sue becomes pregnant. Eventually we learn why Sue has become disenchanted with her marriage. Dan is more wedded to his job than to his wife (at least in Sue’s eyes) and she wants out while they both still have enough good years to make something more rewarding of their lives.

     Most of the songs fit their dramatic situations well enough and those that don’t are still well worth hearing. My favorite was a haunting ballad called “Meadowlark” from “The Baker’s Wife.” A number called “Moving in with Susan” involves the entire ensemble in a rollicking and comical roundelay that’s the best production number of the evening.

        There are two problems with the show as it now stands (it’s apparently still a work in progress). At the end of the first act, Sue finally hands the stunned Dan a note announcing that she is leaving him. It’s a stirring dramatic moment and a powerful first act blackout. But the start of the second act totally dissipates the drama with a string of frivolous comic songs that trivialize the confrontation between Sue and the suddenly desperate Dan. The show has to rebuild its emotional thrust from scratch.

        The other problem, and a fixable one, lies with the imbalance between Sue and Dan. Susie McMonagle endows Sue with an intelligence and depth that swamps Gene Weygandt’s nerdy and clueless Dan. The audience is entitled to wonder, not why Sue is leaving Dan now but what took her so long.

At the end of the show Dan has acquired some dramatic heft but it’s very late in coming. Dan needs to be more of an equal to Sue from the outset, and Weygandt is a good enough actor to make the readjustment. The final scene of examination and reconciliation between Sue and Dan is genuinely poignant. Audience members of a certain age may look back on their own marriages and find personal points of emotional reference with the show.

        The supporting roles are played by Megan Long (Susie), Nick Cosgrove (Danny), Jess Godwin (Susan), and Tony Clarno (Daniel). They are all appealing and versatile performers with the perky Long perhaps first among equals with her vocal chops.

     Director Ken Sawyer and Karl Christian (credited as “musical stager”) do a fine job of keeping the physical action fluent, with nice dramatic and comic accents. Jack Magaw’s giant attic set provides a vivid visual framework for the action, enhanced by Elizabeth Flauto’s costumes, Jesse Klug’s lighting, and Lindsay Jones’s sound. Mike Tutaj, who must have a hand in half the shows in Chicagoland, contributes some nicely atmospheric projections.

A handful of composers and lyricists are credited with providing additional material but “Snapshots” is Schwartz’s showcase. For patrons being introduced to his work, the show will be a revelation. Schwartz fans will happily bask in the pleasures of songs they know and love.

        “Snapshots” runs through October 23 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $65. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

     The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.    September 2011

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Outgoing Tide

At The Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – Bruce Graham has achieved something special in his drama “The Outgoing Tide” at the Northlight Theatre. Graham takes a topic many viewers will find painful, disturbing, and even distasteful and delivers a play of compassion, intelligence, realism, and even some humor.

        “The Outgoing Tide” is about Alzheimer’s disease and its impact on the victim and the victim’s family. Not a happy topic and one loaded with the potential for sentimentality, preaching, emotional manipulation, and facile answers. The subject will touch many people in the audience, from the elderly facing the possibility of sinking into the Alzheimer’s morass to the appalling problems the disease inflicts on the victim’s family. Graham’s triumph is facing the subject honestly, without minimizing the seeming impossible choices before all parties.

 

        Graham sets the story in on the outdoor deck of the Concannon home on Chesapeake Bay. Gunner and his wife Meg have been married for more than 50 years. Now Gunnar has contracted Alzheimer’s, eroding his memory and his sense of reality. That’s in his bad times. In his good times Gunnar realizes he is slipping away mentally and it is an agony for him.

        Gunnar refuses to face a future of continuing deterioration until he ends up a vegetable in an assisted living facility. It offends his self respect and his sense of fiscal prudence. He doesn’t want to be kept alive in a downward spiral while doctors and medical facilities drain his financial resources. So he conceives of a solution, suicide that would put him and his family out of their collective misery and set up his wife with a fat, and legal, insurance settlement.

        The suicide plan is the hook for an ongoing debate on whether Gunnar should end his life. There are moral considerations (Meg is a devout Catholic). Meg not only resists suicide on religious grounds, she fears living alone. She is a vulnerable and insecure woman willing to care for her husband to his end. Nurturing is all she knows how to do and she insists she does it well. Her Gunnar wants her OK before ending his life. She can only react with outrage and panic.

        There is a third character in the play, a son named Jack who is caught in the crosshairs of the battle between his parents while dealing with his own psychological baggage. He’s going through a painful divorce and carries the psychic scars of being raised in a dysfunctional household dominated by his disapproving father. Jack agonizes over his father’s present condition while nursing resentments rooted in a miserable childhood.

        What makes “The Outgoing Tide” is the playwright’s skill at making a logical and eloquent case for all sides. Some viewers will leave the theater grateful they haven’t been dealt the insoluble dilemma facing the Concannons. Other viewers will feel the force of the narrative because they have been there themselves.                                   

There was much snuffling in the audience at my performance as the play wound down to its painful, legitimate conclusion. Graham could have ended the story in other ways with as much legitimacy. There is no single right answer to Gunnar’s suffering, but the one proposed in this play holds up as well as any.

        John Mahoney plays Gunnar and it’s the best stage performance I’ve seen from him, going back decades. Mahoney forces us to share Gunnar’s pain and frustration, and his recognition that he has not led a model life. His only way to make amends is to depart this life with some dignity and provide his family with financial security. It may not balance out a flawed life but it’s the best he can do, for Meg and Jack and for himself.

        Rondi Reed is magnificent in the self effacing role of Meg, looking at the loss of a mate, either now or in the definite future,  who is the center of her universe. It comes down to an insupportable choice, her desire to keep Gunnar alive and his conviction that he should die while he still maintains some control of his life. His fate is in her hands and the play’s most powerful and poignant moment comes with her decision.

        The character of Jack is an add-on of sorts, the third and lesser side of the family triangle useful to flesh out Gunnar’s crisis with another voice. Thomas J. Cox renders the man’s conflicting emotions with credibility that avoids slippage into confrontational melodrama.

        The entire play, only about 100 minutes long including an intermission, is sensitive and unflinching, beautifully written and beautifully acted under the quietly insightful direction of BJ Jones. Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the realistic woodsy set. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Andrew Hansen the sound.

        No amount of praise will convince some prospective patrons that  “The Outgoing Tide” is a downer. It’s not a happy story, but it’s honest, engrossing, and entertaining. It deserves to be seen as a fine play and a superior production. You may enter the theater with trepidation but you should leave feeling rewarded.

        “The Outgoing Tide” runs through June 19 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

                      The show gets a rating of four stars.  May 2011

                             Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Sense and Sensibility

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – “Sense and Sensibility” was Jane Austen’s first completed novel and it set the narrative theme for her classic fiction to follow. A woman meets and marries a man, but only after overcoming difficulties, usually comic.

Austen’s novels are populated by husband-hunting mothers and daughters trying to land an eligible clergyman or landowner, eligibility partly based on the size of the income one partner brought to the match. Love or at least compatibility counted for something, but not as much as an income of 30,000 pound a year.

Austen creates marvels of irony, shrewd social observation, and humor out of her closed world, including some of the most delighting heroines in English literature. The Northlight Theatre recreates that world in an entertaining dramatization of “Sense and Sensibility” as adapted  by John Jory, who also directs. If the show doesn’t reach the heights of the Northlight’s earlier staging of “Pride and Prejudice,” it’s only because “Sense and Sensibility” isn’t quite as good a novel.

The heroines of “Sense and “Sensibility” are Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters living with their widowed mother in the English provinces and facing lives of genteel poverty unless the sisters can land suitable mates. Elinor is the level-headed one, the “sense” half of the title. Marianne is passionate, the “sensibility” half.

During the play, Elinor and Marianne are both abandoned by men who had been expected to offer marriage, but both end up with suitable attachments. There are only happy marital endings in Jane Austen’s novels. But the path of true love for both sisters is bumpy indeed. In fact, the audience needs to concentrate on the storyline to keep track of all the romantic ups and downs inflicted on the sisters.

Before the story ends on its upbeat note, Elinor and Marianne turbulently cross paths with the brothers Edward and Philip Ferrars, John Willoughby, and Colonel Brandon. The sisters are in competition with Lucy Steele as well as off stage females, all plunged fully into the marriage market for the best men.

The race for an eligible husband also involves the Elinor and Marianne’s mother, their bitchy sister in law, and a benevolent London lady named Mrs. Jennings. It all sorts itself out by the final heartwarming scene, but not before many feelings have been wounded, misunderstandings, endured, and tears shed.

Elinor and Marianne are engaging figures, but they seldom rise to the heights of eloquence we enjoy from Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse in later Austen novels. Still, Elinor Dashwood is one of the author’s most admirable females, with her intelligence blended with compassion and a clear sense of reality, especially in comparison with her tempestuous sister.

The Northlight production starts slowly but up picks up in narrative interest as crisis after crisis afflicts the Dashwood sisters. Heidi Kettenring is the rock of the narrative as Elinor, trying to deal with her own romantic tribulations while serving as the moral support of her skittish sister and excitable mother. Helen Sadler’s Marianne is a strong emotional opposite to her sister, down to enduring a near fatal nervous collapse as her anticipated future mate abandons her.

The brigade of supporting female characters is led by Penny Slusher as Mrs. Dashwood, dedicated above all to seeing her girls settled. Wendy Robie is fine as the benevolent matchmaking Mrs. Jennings. Franette Liebow as the sister in law and Diane Mair as Lucy Steele admirably round out the feminine half of the marriage-seeking equation.

The suitors on the male side are played by Greg Matthews Anderson (the devious Willoughby), Geoff Rice (the awkward but lovable Edward Ferrars), Jordan Brown (a late entry in the action as Robert Ferrars), and Jay Whittaker (the outwardly dour but inwardly passionate Colonel Brandon). Si Osborne plays Elinor and Marianne’s brother. It’s a minor role but still a welcome but too rare appearance on local stages by Osborne, one of our drollest and most accomplished actors. The remainder of the fine ensemble consists of V. Craig Heidenreich as a blustery but amiable country squire and Ginger Lee McDermott as his wife,  

Jory stages the play in a series of short scenes, the flow facilitated by Tom Burch’s scenic design, a mostly empty stage dominated by a stand-alone doorway that accommodates the narrative’s many entrances and exists. Rachel Laritz’s costumes nicely evoke the historic period of the early nineteenth century. Todd Hensley’s lighting and Joe Cerqua’s sound design and original music complete the excellent physical production.

“Sense and Sensibility” runs through April 17 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30, Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.

    

  Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

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Eclipsed

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Skokie – War is hell and there weren’t many grimmer hells than the civil wars that tore apart the west African country of Liberia from 1989 to 1996 and against from 1999 to 2003.

Playwright Danai Gurira sets “Eclipsed” toward the end of the second Liberian civil war. Given the subject matter, the play has got to be somber, but Gurira also injects bits of humor into the story as well as scenes of potent drama. Audiences may enter the Northlight theater expecting to be depressed, but they will leave, if not exactly uplifted, at least stirred, and most important, entertained. Give co-credit to Gurira’s powerful writing and the Northlight’s spot-on acting and staging.

        “Eclipsed” is set in a grungy shanty somewhere in Liberia. Its occupants are four women living together as the “wives” of the local warlord, women on continual call to provide sexual favors. The women have had their individuality erased by their situation to the point they call themselves by number, with Number 1 the status leader, and Numbers 2, 3, and 4 following in the pecking order.

        The women don’t understand what the fighting is all about. It’s a fact of life, to be endured. “Eclipsed” is not a political play about the terrors of the wars in Liberia, though those terrors are implicit in the action. The women seem to accept their slave status. Only Number 2 has rebelled, departing to fight against the forces of president Charles Taylor. She has been transformed into a fierce warrior with a machine gun and lots of attitude. Number 3 is perpetually pregnant, a passive young woman who accepts the hand that life has dealt her. Number 4 is the youngest of the quartet, eventually converted by Number 2 into a gun-toting soldier (females actually provided a large percentage of the combatants in the civil wars).

        The final character in the play is a woman from the city, a peacemaker trying to bring the war to an end. Number 2 treats her with disdain, as a fuzzy-thinking do-gooder from the city with no idea of the life and death struggles women face in the countryside.

       In the second act, the action and interest heat up. The storyline transcends the local problems of the women and examines the impact on war on diverse personalities. The warrior Number 2 refuses to accept that the second civil war has ended. Battle is all she has known in recent years and it’s given her an identity and a sense of empowerment. The pregnant young woman chooses to follow her man. Peace is foreign to her so she takes the path of least resistance. Number 1 sees the end of the war as an opportunity to create a new life for herself, by going to school and learning an occupation.

The most tragic figure is the young girl. Having tasted the power of being a warrior, she doesn’t know which way to turn—adopt a peacetime existence or follow Number 2 to continue a personal war. The play ends with the image of the girl, torn and fearful, a machine gun at her feet.

        The Northlight production is blessed by five outstanding performances under Hallie Gordon’s insightful directing—Alana Arenas as Number 1, Leslie Ann Sheppard as the pregnant young woman, Paige Collins as the girl, Tamberla Perry as the belligerent Number 2, and Penelope Walker as the peacemaker from the city. They form a seamless ensemble that lifts the play’s tone beyond the grim to the absorbing.

        Jack Magaw’s ramshackle set establishes the atmosphere of deprivation and oppression that dominate the lives of the characters. The physical production also profits from Charles Cooper’s dramatic lighting and Myron Elliott’s tattered costumes.

        “Eclipsed” isn’t just another celebration of the triumph of the human spirit. The play is more complex. At least one character emerges from the horrors of wartime sexual servitude determined to build a better life for herself. But her colleagues in the shanty have been scarred by the war in different ways and may never achieve normalcy in their lives.  War indeed is hell, and for some of the women in “Eclipsed” that hell will be with them for the rest of their lives.

        “Eclipsed” runs through February 20 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m. Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 6 or 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com