Yellow Moon
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – We don’t lack for movies and TV shows and books about disaffected young people on the run. But the law of averages states that among all the lurid melodramas there will be a show or two that spins a fresh take on the genre, a show like “Yellow Moon” at the Writers’ Theatre.
The 2006 play was written by Scottish dramatist David Greig, who is also represented currently in Chicago by his adaptation of August Strindberg’s “Creditors” at the Remy Bumppo Theatre. On the evidence of both shows, Greig is a skilled hand at intense chamber dramas loaded with psychological, and sometimes physical, violence.
“Yellow Moon” runs 75 minutes in a single act. There are only four performers, two of whom play two characters. The intimate production fits perfectly in the tiny acting space in the back of a bookstore in downtown Glencoe. The audience sits in two rows on all four sides of the stage. The actors are frequently within touching distance of the viewers as they move about the stage and into the aisles. The actors sometimes talk directly to the audience to explain the thoughts and actions of their characters and sometimes they exchange dialogue as the characters themselves. The dramaturgy is tricky but thanks to Greig and a superior cast and insightful direction, “Yellow Moon” never turns talky or artificial. It creates its own theatrical and dramatic environment and the audience buys into it from its first moments.
The play is a straightforward story about a Scottish lad named Stag Lee Macalinden. He’s a sullen, belligerent young man emotionally scarred by the absence of a father who abandoned him and his mother when the son was five years old. Lee is now lumbered by a hopeless home life consisting of his alcoholic and mentally unstable mother and her domineering boyfriend, who cannot abide Lee.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
One night, Lee meets a withdrawn Muslim girl named Leila Suleiman at a store where the girl is reading celebrity magazines, her main link to the outside world. The odd couple immediately connects in their vulnerability and their need for positive contact with another human being. Leila only feels alive when she cuts her arm with a razor blade.
A sudden act of violence in Lee’s home sends him on the run, talking the girl in to accompanying him. Lee has a faded postcard sent by his father of a lodge in the north of Scotland and the young man decides to seek his father there, with the postcard as his only clue to the man’s whereabouts. After they make their way to the Scottish Highlands, the youngsters, lost and near to freezing to death, are discovered by a caretaker at the lodge who offers them a grudging hospitality. The plot then turns on a coincidence that seems that credible in the play, if unbelievable in real life.
Lee and Leila work for
their keep on at the lodge, under the thumb of the boozing caretaker. But the star-crossed
couple is marked for defeat like characters in a Greek tragedy.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The play’s main value lies not in its storyline but in the portraits of the two alienated young people, both captured to perfection by Josh Salt (Lee) and Ashleigh LaThrop (Leila). Salt beautifully conveys the truculence and bravado that masks Lee’s internal confusion. The young man has been dealt a bad hand by life but he lacks the strength of character to save himself. The youngster yearns for his father’s love but events overwhelm him. Salt manages to make Lee both thuggish and sympathetic, a nifty accomplishment.
LaThrop has a more difficult acting job, her character being silent for much of the show, withdrawn into her own murky world. When Leila verbally explodes at the end of the play, the spectator is startled to discover so much feeling and eloquence in the dreamy loner. LaThrop makes the girl’s unexpected shifting of emotional gears logical and maybe the play’s most powerful dramatic moment.
The veteran actors John Lister and Karen Janes Wooditsch take on the adult roles, Lister as the mother’s boy friend and the caretaker and Wooditsch as Lee’s mother and a TV celebrity who unexpectedly meets Leila at the lodge and enjoys an evening swim with her. When they aren’t in character Lister and Wooditsch do good work as the play’s narrators.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Stuart Carden guides the production with an unfailing sureness of touch as the action fluidly moves between narration and realistic exchanges. “Yellow Moon” can be an elusive, even boring play if the acting is slack and the play’s unconventional style seems affected. But Carden keeps the tension tight and still makes room for occasional humor.
Kevin Depinet designed the scenery, which mostly consists of four ordinary wooden chairs the actors move around the stage. The play’s visual impact largely relies on the dramatic lighting plan designed by Lee Fiskness and the costumes designed by Rachel Anne Healy. Christopher Kriz is responsible for the sound design and the original music. Special props go to dialect coach Eve Breneman who instilled the Scottish brogues into the ensemble that are flavorful but intelligible and obviously easy for the players to handle.
“Yellow Moon” runs through August 4 at the Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $60. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writewrstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.
Contact Dan at ZeffDaniel@yahoo.com. April 2013
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The Letters
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – “The Letters” at the Writers’ Theatre is a tense two-hander permeated with a sense of menace and violence that lurks just below its outwardly placid surface. In other words, playwright John Lowell takes us deep into Harold Pinter country with a touch of George Orwell, where truth is elusive and ordinary language assumes an ambiguous and chilling quality.
The
75-minute play, receiving its Chicagoland premiere, takes place in Russia in
1931, when the country was immersed in the paranoia of the Josef Stalin
tyranny. A middle-aged bureaucrat known only as the Director has called in
Anna, one of his subordinates, for a friendly chat that leads up to offering
her a promotion. Both work in a government ministry that sanitizes facts, news,
letters, and diaries so they don’t embarrass the state.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The Director starts out all breezy informality but Anna is nervous and guarded. As she comments to her boss, employees are not invited into his office for a pat on the head. Anna remains uneasy, even after the Director offers her the unexpected promotion. And sure enough, the man has an agenda, announcing that Anna’s colleague and lover has been arrested for treason for making copies of sexually explicit letters written by a noted composer (unnamed but possibly Tchaikovsky). Those letters have disappeared and the Director wants them back, desperately.
Anna claims no knowledge of the whereabouts of the letters and in reaction the Director ratchets up his behavior from casual to threatening. The interview has been a cat and mouse game all along, with Anna the mouse. The Director is an uncouth bully beneath his conciliatory exterior, possibly with sexual hang-ups that stimulate his revulsion for the content of the missing letters. He also tries to intimidate Anna with close physical proximity, maybe to hit on her, but Anna grows in resolve as the play continues and will have none of it.
By the end of the play, the worm has turned. Anna gains the high ground in her verbal duel with the Director, who ends up facing possible ruin career wise or maybe worse. After all, this is Stalinist Russia, where important people regularly disappear for no announced reason.
The play may start serenely, but from the opening moments the audience sits in tense anticipation waiting dramatic fireworks. The smarmy good cheer of the director and Anna’s anxiety and wariness send signals that something explosive is waiting in the wings to startle the viewer. The tensions mount as the Director reveals his true cruel colors and Anna wavers between despair and confusion, and intelligent woman at the mercy of a psychological thug. The Director insists she has the letters or knows where they are. Anna denies the accusation. And that’s about all there is to the narrative, except for Anna turning the tables on the Director at the end of the evening.
“The Letters” is more manner than matter. The audience is caught up in the rising tensions of the play and it’s only after leaving the theater that the spectator may notice there is more heat than light in the narrative. Unless I missed something, there is no reason why the Director should seek the letters so desperately, and the story turns on that point. The dialogue suggests a conspiracy initiated by a department employee but if so, the Director has proven extraordinarily gullible in falling for it. This is a man who suspects everyone and trusts no one. He’s in survival mode like everyone else in the prison that was Russia in the 1930’s and unlike to make him vulnerable to in an in-house plot that could destroy him.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Possibly “The Letters” isn’t intended to withstand close scrutiny in its narrative. As an exercise in disquiet and suspense it works well enough to keep the viewer’s attention engaged for the play’s concise running time, especially when the play can draw on superb performances by Mark Montgomery and Kate Fry.
Montgomery is just right as Director, all affability and good humor for half the play until the man turns tormentor. Fry’s Anna is an engrossing portrait of an apprehensive and cautious woman trying to keep her footing on the slippery slope of the Director’s increasingly hostile questioning. Director Kimberly Senior deftly draws out the nuances of both personalities, keeping the characters moving from chair to chair or standing in too-close proximity to reinforce the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Director’s office as the emotional temperature of the action escalates. The acting and staging are in perfect equilibrium and it isn’t the fault of the performers or the director that questions may arise in the audience’s mind once their contact with the show is broken. Pinter and Orwell would be proud of the play’s sustained sinister atmosphere if not of its lack of substance
The production is being presented in the small back room of a bookstore in downtown Glencoe. The spectators sit on two sides of the theater facing each other, eavesdropping on the tense verbal chess match on stage. Jack Magaw’s set evokes the Director’s office with period authenticity, down to portraits of Lenin and Stalin that glower behind his desk. Costume designer Rachel Anne Healy is responsible for the dowdy clothing styles of the time. Christine Binder designed the lighting and Christopher Kriz the sound. Nick Heggestad, who seems to have a hand in every production in Chicagoland theater, is the properties designer.
“The Letters” runs through March 3 at Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Avenue. Performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $70. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 3½ stars. December 2012
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The Blonde, the Brunette,
and the Vengeful Redhead
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe– Like most one-actor plays, the new show at the Writers’ Theatre is more satisfying as a performing showcase than as a drama. The play carries the tantalizing title of “The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead,” identifying three of the seven characters impersonated by an exceptionally versatile actress named Deborah Staples.
The play was written by Australian dramatist Robert Hewett and worked its way from its 2004 premiere in Australia through Europe to Canada and now to regional theaters in the United States. Staples had done the show previously at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, with director Joseph Hanreddy, in a different staging.
Hewett’s play consists of seven characters who deliver monologues directly to the audience. The story centers on a sudden and horrific act of violence that takes place in the food court in a suburban shopping mall, an act that sends shock waves through the lives of all the characters.
The first monologue belongs to Rhonda Russell, a middle-aged suburban wife and mother whose life is turned upside down when her husband, Graham, announces over the phone that he is moving out. Graham has found another woman, the blonde of the title (Rhonda is the redhead). Goaded by her busybody neighbor Lynette (the brunette), Rhonda confronts the woman she thinks is her rival. The encounter at the mall results in a violent, if perhaps unintended, death.
The
facts in the narrative are not in dispute. The interest comes from the various
points of view expressed by the different characters in the aftermath of the
violent act. Those characters include the three women of the title, a four-year
old boy, an English lesbian physician, Rhonda’s husband, and an elderly lady.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Staples shifts from character to character on stage, changing makeup, wigs, and costumes while the audience looks on. The character-changing interludes, supplemented by recorded musical, are fascinating glimpses into theatrical artifice. For the most part, Staples is so sure in her command of the physical, vocal, and emotional details of her characters that once her conversion is completed, the viewer immediately is absorbed in the monologue.
Unfortunately, not all the characters come off with equal success, through no fault of the performer. Could any mature woman convincingly portray a four-year old boy playing with his toys on the floor and crying for his mommy? And it’s asking too much for any actress to credibly portray a male character like Graham Russell. Staples does what she can but physically she doesn’t convince the viewers they are observing anything more than a woman impersonating a most unsympathetic man.
Some of Hewett’s writing is moving and dramatic and some of it wobbles. Graham is such a sleaze ball that it’s difficult to accept that even an accepting woman like Rhonda could put up with him for more than 17 years of marriage, much less dote on him. And the husband is portrayed as a beer swilling punk. We are told that Graham is actually a moderately successful middle class white-collar worker but he looks and sounds like he should be pumping gas for a living.
Rhonda ends the play with a triumph-of-the-human-spirit monologue I found confusing and unconvincing. By this time some of the holes in the writing were weighing on my enjoyment of the evening. Rhonda’s suddenly berserk behavior at the food court doesn’t jibe with her otherwise placid and plodding character. Lynette turns from a nosy and meddling neighbor into a full-fledged villain, at least in the eyes of other observers. We only see her once, early in the play where we learn of her role as instigator of the violence in the food court. Yet how was she to know that Rhonda would go crazy at the sight of the supposed home wrecker?
The play runs 2 hours and 15 minutes with an intermission, about 30 minutes too long. The monologue delivered by the blonde (recited in a thick Russian accent) doesn’t amount to much and little boy’s speech also could be profitably eliminated. It exists as a heart tugger but I felt a little embarrassed watching Staples on her hands and knees as a little boy. The monologue involving the elderly lady allows Staples to further extend her acting range but the character is tiresome. I’ll concede that old age can be a shipwreck without hearing about it for 20 petulant and bathos drenched minutes.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The production fits snugly in the intimate Writers’ Theatre space at the rear of a bookstore in downtown Glencoe. The stage is bare except for a few props. A series of small closets lining the rear of the stage contain the assorted wardrobe accouterments that enable Staples to shift characters so fluidly. Linda Buchanan designed the set, Keith Parham the effective lighting, Martha Hally the multiple costumes, Barry Funderberg the sound (ranging from rap music and country to Fats Waller), and Nick Heggestad the properties.
One leaves the Writers’ Theatre with nothing but admiration for Deborah Staples. Her acting skills and sheer stamina are wondrous. As a play, “The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead” has its difficulties, but Staples’s heroic performance is reason enough to see this production.
“The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead” runs through July 29 at the Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The
show gets a rating of three stars. May 2012
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The Caretaker
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – “The Caretaker” places a thuggish and volatile young man, his brain damaged older brother, and a scruffy old tramp in a rubbish-strewn room. From these unpromising materials Harold Pinter constructed a classic of modern drama.
“The Caretaker” has been drenched in interpretations—psychological, philosophical, religious, political—you name it. Critics may argue over Pinter’s intentions, but on one point there must be unanimous agreement. “The Caretaker” is a dazzling viewing experience that doesn’t relax its grip on an audience from opening moment to final blackout.
The plot of “The Caretaker” is simple on the surface and densely complex in its subtexts. A man named Aston brings an irascible and grungy derelict named Davies into his house in east London, specifically into that debris-filled room. Aston is a brain-damaged man who survived cruel electric shock therapy in a hospital intended to treat hallucinations. The man carries the mental aftereffects of the shock treatment in his vague and distant manner. Aston’s younger brother Mick eventually enters the room (the brothers are rarely on stage at the same time throughout the play). Mick is an erratic, menacing figure subject to extravagant mood swings.
The crux of the plot is Davies’s attempts to create alliances separately with Aston and Mick against the remaining brother. The tramp, an outsider his entire life, sees an opportunity to establish a home for himself, especially after one brother offers him the job of caretaker for the house. But Davies’s power ploys only lead to his alienation from both Mick and Aston. The tramp has overplayed his hand and both men turn him away. Davies’s expression of desolation and despair and pleading in the final moment of the play is unforgettable.
“The Caretaker” displays the main ingredients of what has come to be known in modern drama as “Pinterian.” There is the indefinable sense of menace that lurks beneath the most matter-of-fact language. There is comedy that quickly dissipates into the sinister, and those Pinterian pauses--the use of silence to enhance the intensity and ambiguity of the moment. And we hear those mesmerizing verbal arias. In an extended and stumbling monologue, Aston speaks about his past, especially his horrifying experience in the hospital, a riveting speech that had the audience holding its breath. Yet Pinter tells us almost nothing about the brothers—how they make their living, where they come from, or even who really owns the house.
The
Writers’ Theatre production features William Norris as Davies in a career
performance. Davies rarely leaves the stage and handles the bulk of the play’s
dialogue. The role is a rich brew of wheedling, whining, fear, desperation, and
clumsy cunning. Norris shifts emotional gears beautifully as he tries to
insinuate himself with both Mick and Aston while hiding behind a façade of
bravado.
The Writers’ Theatre did some unconventional casting in employing a pair of south Asian actors for roles of the brothers, Kareem Bandealy as Mick and Anish Jethmalani as Aston. The ethnic casting is a little distracting early in the play when the bigoted Davies rails over and over against “blacks” (meaning Indians). The brothers impassively listen to the intolerance but there is no attempt to skew the play along racial lines. Bandealy and Jethmalani likely were hired as the two best actors for the parts.
Mick is the more incendiary of the brothers and Bandealy is terrific at skittering from casual to confrontational in a moment, unpredictable and scary. Jethmalani is the perfect counterbalance as the soft-spoken Aston, carrying a congenial, sometimes perplexed attitude throughout the play until he stuns Davies with his rejection at the end. Then the wound-tight Aston turns potentially just as explosive as his mercurial brother.
In addition to portraying the shifting power struggles, the play explores the necessity for illusion to sustain each character. Davies constantly refers to traveling to Sidcup to retrieve “his papers” that will enable him to sort out his life. It’s a trip he will never make, but the idea endows him with the shred of hope he needs to get through his dreary days. Ashton talks about building a shed outside the house and Mick rambles on about his plans to redecorate the house among other grandiose projects. That shed will never be built and those projects will never happen, but dreamers must dream.
Ron O.J Parson directs with the surest of hands, orchestrating the tonal swings for maximum dramatic effect and playing the pauses and silences to just the right length. A good “Caretaker” must come across as realistic and inevitable, no matter how improbable the action or how unlikely the characters. Parson doesn’t get in the way of the text and lets Pinter speak for himself, any small embellishments only enhancing the text.
The designers have joined together to create a fine visual and aural setting for the play. Jack McGaw’s junk-filled room, enclosed by the audience on all four sides, is virtually a fourth character in the play. Janice Pytel’s costumes, Heather Gilbert’s lighting, and Nick Heggestad’s properties all serve the production well. Michael Griggs designed the sound and presumably selected the dramatically effective jazz excerpts between scenes.
“The Caretaker” runs through March 25 at the Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $65. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Visit Dan on Facebook. November 2011
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The Detective’s Wife
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – “The Detective’s Wife” is the second play in Keith Huff’s proposed trilogy about the morally ambiguous world of Chicago policemen. “A Steady Rain” opened the trilogy in 2007 and became a local sensation that led to a smash hit run on Broadway starring Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman.
“A Steady Rain” consisted of two actors. “The Detective’s Wife” has one. But both dramas are presented largely as monologues, the narrative rising in intensity to the explosive final moments of revelation. Each play has its defects, but they both offer towering opportunities for intrepid performers to display their acting chops.
“The Detective’s Wife” finds the perfect
ambience in a tiny performing space at the rear of the Books on Vernon
bookstore in Glencoe. The intimacy reinforces the rapport between the performer
and the audience, sitting a few feet from the stage, or less.
I have always been awed by the bravery of an actor who takes on an entire play. There is no safety net of supporting players. It’s a test of stamina and concentration and nerve that boggles my mind. In “The Detective’s Wife,” the acting load falls on Barbara Robertson, a star in the area theater firmament for decades. In the Huff play, Robertson plays Alice Conroy, a 52-year old woman who suddenly finds herself as widow after her policeman husband is killed in a dark alley by an unknown assailant.
Alice is a mild mannered woman who runs a barely successful picture frame shop, a franchise given to her by her husband as a financial hedge against the future. Alice has spent much of her marriage reading mystery stories and by her count owns 14,098 mystery books. But Alice is so traumatized by her husband’s murder that she loses the power to speak and remains dumb for months, though otherwise she is at least outwardly normal.
Soon after her husband’s death Alice kicks into action, determined to expose the killer and the motive. Her obsession alarms Alice’s two adult, and offstage, children who fear their mother is collapsing into paranoia or worse. But Alice won’t be deterred. She learns that her husband had been working on the unsolved murder of three boys more than 20 years earlier, a crime that eventually attracted seven other policemen over the years, all of whom died violently or mysteriously disappeared. Could there be a connection between their deaths and the triple murder?
Alice’s fixation may be undermining her mental health, or she may really be nearing a solution to the death. There is a whiff of the supernatural, or at least the paranormal, in her quest. Finally the mystery is resolved in a long confession that seems to make sense as the audience takes it in, but is a little shaky upon closer examination once the spectator leaves the theater. Flaws in the narrative can’t really be examined in a review out of consideration for prospective patrons, but the flaws are there.
Alice gradually pieces together clues that may lead in a disturbing direction. The resolution comes more or less voluntarily from the perpetrator, though with some prodding from Alice, who does follow up on information her husband left behind in his computerized records of the triple-murder.
“The Detective’s Wife” isn’t as good a play as “A Steady Rain.” The second play lacks the tensions that emerge from the alternating monologues between the two policemen. There is more narrative stuff in the earlier play while “The Detective’s Wife” too often drifts into pseudo-mystical purple prose. In spite pf the horrific crime that propels the plot, “The Detective’s Wife” is a small play emotionally and meanders a bit until the confession floods the narrative at the end.
Robertson delivers a heroic performance as Alice, self-deprecating as well as obsessive. She projects a resourceful woman who will not be sidetracked from learning the truth about her husband’s death, in spite of resistance from her children and friends among the police who urge her to leave his killing and the triple-murder cold case alone.
Robertson always remains audience high in her characterization, grounding Alice in a reality that makes the spectators her confidantes. The actress and director Gary Griffin obviously worked hard to establish Alice as a normal woman (whatever characters around her may think) enmeshed in highly abnormal circumstances. For much of the play the spectator isn’t sure whether Alice is a mental loose canon or a determined woman who may solve a case that’s gone unsolved for two decades as well as her husband’s recent death.
Kevin Depinet’s set is dominated by stacks of books hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor like architectural columns. The dominance of the books suggests that Alice lives in a world of mystery stories that may color her outlook on her life, but the script doesn’t explore that intriguing suggestion. Mike Tutaj’s projections add visual variety to an otherwise physically static play. Janice Pytel designed the costumes, Heather Gilbert the lighting, and Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen the sound (as well as composing the original music).
“The Detective’s Wife” is a thin play, but it does allow Barbara Robertson the opportunity to provide a virtuoso performance, a challenge she seizes triumphantly. Huff is lucky to have her.
“The Detective’s Wife” runs through July 31 at Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $50 to $60. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. June 2011
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Travels with My Aunt
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Glencoe – “Travels With My Aunt” at the Writers’ Theatre is a triumph of manner over matter. The production is so imaginatively staged and brilliantly acted that the audience is likely to cut the fragmentary, meandering storyline lots of slack.
“Travels With My Aunt” started out as a 1969 novel by British author Graham Greene. It was adapted into a play in 1989 by Giles Havergal and made it to Broadway in the mid 1990’s. The central character is one of those madcap free-spirit old ladies, like Auntie Mame, who can be either irresistible or tiresome.
The lady in Greene’s tale is named Augusta and we first meet her when she attends the funeral, uninvited, of her sister. There she meets Henry Pulling, the deceased woman’s son, a bland 55-year old retired bank clerk who raises dahlias as a hobby and otherwise doesn’t have much of a life. Aunt Augusta takes Henry in charge, and they are soon traveling throughout Europe, the Near East, and South America. Along the way they encounter assorted offbeat characters in episodes that run from the comical to the tedious.
In the Havergal adaptation, the characters (27 in all) are played by four actors, each dressed in identical conservative suits and bowler hats. The actors continually switch from character to character, with all four men taking turns playing Henry Pulling. The actors impersonate the males and females of assorted ages with the shift of vocal inflection and body language. There are no costume changes, but the audience accepts the rapidly shifting identities after the first few minutes. Thus John Hoogenakker is thoroughly persuasive as a teen-age female hippie, her CIA father, and a pathetic woman living in South Africa who would be happy to marry Henry, the confirmed bachelor.
Sean Fortunato plays Augusta most of the evening in an understated performance that mutes the old lady’s eccentricities as well as her more sinister side. Jeremy Sher’s characters extend to a charming dog as well as human beings. Sher also contributes some delightful sound effects from a corner of the stage, notably the sound of a moving railroad engine created by the rhythmic opening and closing of an umbrella. LaShawn Banks draws the most theatrical characters, especially a slightly menacing black man who is Augusta’s handyman and lover.
The storyline is mostly a string of individual episodes connected by the changes in geographical location. By the end of the show, Augusta has paired off with a Nazi war criminal named Mr. Visconti and settled in Paraguay. Henry throws in his lot with the old lady and is rewarded with the promise of marrying a 16-year old daughter of the local police chief. Augusta certainly has brought Henry out of his shell, though their connection with the Nazi and Henry’s marriage to a girl one-third his age makes for a faintly unsavory conclusion to the narrative.
But it’s the acting rather than the storytelling that provides most of the evening’s pleasures. The four actors transform themselves from character to character with a swiftness and precision that suggest painstaking hours of rehearsal. There are parts of the play that are basically choral readings and some of the ensemble movements have a choreographed grace.
The actors perform within a small area in the back room of a downtown Glencoe bookstore. The audience sits on two sides of the stage. At both ends are shelves stacked with suitcases that symbolize the travels of the main characters and also hold props, like telephones. It’s a perfect intimate environment for the story. Indeed, the play would probably be un-doable in an adaptation calling for more than two dozen performers and multiple scenery changes. Havergal rightly trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in the visual and dramatic spaces left open by the minimalist staging.
The production designs establish the sights and sounds of the story to perfection, led by Brian Sidney Bembridge’s all-purpose set. The only props are wooden chairs the actors move about the stage to suit the needs of a particular scene. Jacqueline Firkins designed the spot-on conservative costumes. Jesse Klug designed the lighting and Mikhail Fiksel the sound. It’s all orchestrated by director Stuart Carden, who keeps his quartet of actors in constant, subtle motion. There isn’t much physical action in the play but, thanks to Carden and his cast, the show never turns static.
I left the theater filled with admiration for the production but rather less enthusiasm for the story. There isn’t much dramatic arc to the disconnected narrative and the show, at 2 hours and 20 minutes, could be reduced by several minutes to advantage. But the skills of the performers keep the story buoyant. Possibly Aunt Augusta could be presented with a stronger personality, and Henry’s emergence from wishy-washy middle aged Englishman to a new existence with his aunt and the sinister Mr. Visconti might have been explored with more depth. But maybe not. “Travels With My Aunt” is essentially a shallow story, but the Writers’ Theatre revival is clever, amusing, lively, and this above all—superbly acted.
“Travels With My Aunt” runs through March 27 at the Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $60. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. December 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Oh Coward!
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
GLENCOE—For its revival of the Noel Coward revue “Oh Coward!” the Writers’ Theatre has converted the performing space at the rear of the Books on Vernon bookstore into an intimate supper club. Front row spectators sit around small silver-clothed tables while Kate Fry, John Sanders, and Rob Lindley (posh English accents in place) perform samples of the Noel Coward songbook, interspersed with brief selections from the great man’s prose.
“Oh Coward!” was devised by Roderick Cook and premiered in 1972 in New York City, the same year another Coward revue called “Cowardly Custard” opened in London. In roughly 90 minutes, including an intermission, the three performers take the audience on a tour of Noel Coward’s words and music—variously sophisticated, urbane, witty, wry, rueful, droll, nostalgic, patriotic, and romantic.
Coward tagged himself, with unnecessary modesty, as a man
“with a talent to amuse.” Once pigeon holed as a writer of light comedies that
were charming but bordered on the trivial, Coward is now firmly enrolled among
the masters of twentieth century theater. Regrettably, Coward’s legacy as a
great playwright is only briefly touched upon in “Oh Coward!” The evening is
mostly spent listening to his clever lyrics and catchy melodies.
At his best, and he’s often at his best in this revue, Coward was a brilliant wordsmith, with ingenious rhymes, frequently aimed at satirizing the foibles of his fellow Englishmen and Englishwomen. That talent to amuse permeates the show but does give it an insubstantial feeling. Those stylish, upper class people gliding through life make entertaining company, but after a while their breezy, insouciant attitudes grow, if not tiresome, at least a bit brittle.
The classic Coward set pieces are all represented, jaunty numbers like “I Went to a Marvelous Party,” “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and “The Stately Homes of England.” We also get insufficient snatches of his memorable love songs, like “Someday I’ll Find You” and “Zigeuner” (but where was “I’ll See You Again”?)
The Writers’ Theatre production injects a more pronounced gay sensibility into the show, notably when the melancholy love song “Mad About the Boy” is transferred from the female in the ensemble to Rob Lindley. The interaction among the two males and female suggests that there may be some light-hearted sexual dalliance among the trio in various combinations, or maybe I was reading too much into the companionable behavior of three very close friends.
Fry, Sanders, and Lindley are all first rate as singers and as denizens of Noel Coward’s rarefied high society world. The men look to the manor born in their tuxedos and Fry is very glamorous in her backless second act evening gown.
Jim Corti’s direction sustains the atmosphere of nonchalant urbanity, sometimes blended with a rather studied world weariness (one of the numbers in the show is called “World Weary”). The production profits immeasurably from Doug Peck’s on-stage piano accompaniment. Peck also provides an agreeably mini concert of light music as the audience enters the theater.
Kevin Depinet (set) and Rachel Anne Healy (costumes) are responsible for the show’s period elegance, circa 1930. Ray Nardelli is the sound designer and Jesse Klug the lighting designer.
“Oh Coward!” is a bauble, though a shimmering bauble with its effervescent wit. It certainly provides ample entertainment nourishment for Noel Coward zealots. Others may find the revue a bit too lightweight. The company will sell champagne and other beverages that can be consumed at the tables in the spirit of the occasion.
“Oh Coward!” runs through March 21 at the Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $60. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. December 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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The Maids
At the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
GLENCOE—We don’t hear much about the Theater of the Absurd these days, though back in the 1950’s and 1960’s it was all the rage as the new cutting edge of modern drama. Of the many European playwrights who emerged as Absurdists, only Samuel Beckett and perhaps Eugene Ionesco are performed widely today.
One of the leading playwrights of the Absurd era now off the
theater radar is Jean Genet. A writer known almost as much for his colorful
life as for his writings, Genet had several hit plays during the 1950’s,
primarily dealing with the ambiguity of identity and the perverse relationship
between good and evil.
Genet’s first produced drama was a chamber play called “The Maids,” now being revived by the Writers’ Theatre. Viewers familiar with Genet’s work and the ideology of the Theater of the Absurd should find the production rewarding. Spectators coming to Genet and the play cold likely will be perplexed and restless at what unfolds before them on the intimate Writers’ Theatre stage.
“The Maids” runs about 100 minutes in a single act. The setting is an elegant bedroom in a French city in the late 1940’s. The two main characters are Claire and Solange, a pair of sisters employed as servants by an upper class woman known as the Mistress. For the first minutes of the play, the sisters act out a fantasy with Claire portraying the Mistress and Solange the servant. Then the real Mistress appears and a semblance of a plot emerges.
Claire had sent anonymous letters to the local police leading to the arrest of the Mistress’s lover. The lover, who never appears on stage, is released on bail and the Mistress, learning of his freedom inadvertently from the maids, rushes out to meet him. The sisters had tried unsuccessfully to poison their employer before she left and at the end of the play Claire drinks the poison herself as a fatal gesture of the servant ascending to the level of the Mistress.
There are wheels within wheels in “The Maids.” The sisters display lesbian tendencies embellished with sadomasochistic flourishes. They have developed a love-hate relationship with each other and toward their Mistress. They are members of the underclass, with no social status and no economic power. They are society’s outsiders, living empty lives made endurable with their role reversal play-acting.
There are several versions of “The Maids.” The Writers’
Theatre uses the 1999 translation by Martin Crimp. It’s fluid and colloquial
enough but the dialogue and soliloquies are still dominated by Genet’s flowery
language that sometimes tends to wash over the audience’s ears like beautiful
noise.
Motivation is not a long suit in the play. Unless I missed something, we don’t know why Claire wrote those letters that led to the arrest of the Mistress’s lover. Fear of their part in the lover’s arrest presumably led the sisters to attempt the murder of their employer, but it’s hard to see how the death of the Mistress would improve their situation. Symbolic undercurrents abound, but they are difficult for the spectator to grasp, and the endless flow of hothouse language tends to muddy as much as it illuminates.
Helen Sadler as Claire and Elizabeth Laidlaw as Solange deliver heroic performances as the blighted sisters, and if the audience is insecure about what is going on during the play, the two performers seem in complete control of their characters. At the outset I had a little trouble adjusting to Sadler’s artless style but her performance grew on me as the play’s intensity increased.
Niki Lindgren enters halfway through the evening as the Mistress, providing a fine portrait of a casually arrogant upper class woman, though we learn almost nothing about her, not even her real name.
The production operates within Brian Sidney Bembridge’s elegant and intimate bedroom set. Rachel Anne Healy designed the 1940’s clothing, including a closet full of upscale gowns and furs. Pete Dully designed the lighting and Josh Schmidt the sound and original music.
Jimmy McDermott’s directing is confident and draws committed performances from his three-handed ensemble. His staging gives the show every chance to succeed. It’s in the eye of the beholder whether the play is engrossing and disturbing, a very long flood of purposeless verbiage, or something in between.
“The Maids” runs through April 5 at the Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. December 2008
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Nixon’s Nixon
at the Writers’ Theatre
By Dan Zeff
GLENCOE—“Nixon’s Nixon” is a very hot ticket at the Writers’ Theatre, a company that has had its share of sold out performances during its illustrious history. People want to see this historical comedy/drama about Richard Nixon and the show has been extended three weeks already. And this is the second production of the play by the Writers’ Theatre.
The popularity of “Nixon’s Nixon” isn’t restricted to the successful Writers’ Theatre productions. The show has captivated audiences wherever it’s been staged since its off off Broadway premiere in 1995. Part of the attraction is the play itself, a wonderfully funny and entertaining recreation by dramatist Russell Lees of Richard Nixon’s final night in office before resigning the presidency.
But the play is really a testament to the hold Richard Milhous Nixon has on the American imagination. He may be one of the great villains in American politics but he was also one of the most fascinating figures in American history and audiences who lived through those turbulent Watergate years are still entranced by the man’s career and mind--his paranoia, his feral intelligence, his vulgarity, his baffling sense of denial as his world collapses around him.
“Nixon’s Nixon’ takes place in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House. It’s late in the evening of August 7, 1974. In the room are Nixon and Henry Kissinger. They have both had a lot to drink as they try to get a handle on Nixon’s deteriorating position as disgraced president. His resignation seems the only way out and Kissinger is on hand to grease the skids on the president’s departure from office, mostly for his own self-aggrandizing motives.
Nobody knows what went on in that room the night before Nixon resigned, but Russell Lees assumes the role of fly on the wall as he fantasizes what might have taken place between the two men. The play runs about 100 minutes without an intermission. Most of the action takes place in real time but there are flashbacks as Nixon recreates encounters he had with Leonid Brezhnev, Mao Zedong, John F. Kennedy, and Golda Meir.
Nixon and Kissinger go round and round about how best to extricate the president from his political ruin. Late in the play, they concoct an international incident that would force the country to keep Nixon on as president, a plan so bizarre that the audience is dazzled by how far Nixon and Kissinger could detach themselves from reality in this time of crisis.
Kissinger takes a drubbing in the play. Lees portrays him as manipulative and sinister, interested only in preserving his power as Secretary of State and his legacy in history. Kissinger panics when he learns he has been caught in compromising conversations on tapes Nixon possesses. For this Kissinger, loyalty is the first man down. For him, it’s all about saving his reputation and keeping his political power.
Nixon is a more mercurial personality, foul mouthed and bitter, seeing himself as a man of the people who can point to great achievements in foreign policy. Armed in his own sense of destiny, he still sees himself surrounded by cowards and traitors trying to bring him down. The mighty have indeed fallen and Nixon rails at the injustice of it all.
Larry Yando and William Brown repeat their performances as Nixon and Kissinger and astonishing performances they are. Everyone in the audience will be familiar with both real-life characters so Yando and Brown don’t push the impersonation too far. But Yando does beautifully catch Nixon’s vocal cadences, his body language, and his wired personality. Brown nails Kissinger’s jowly look and deep rumbling German accent. Both actors don’t play their roles so much as inhabit them.
“Nixon’s Nixon” doesn’t elevate the president to a figure out of Greek tragedy, an outsized figure destroyed by his own flaws. But the play does humanize him. We may detest Nixon and the harm he did to the country as president, but Lees brings him alive as engrossing and often amusing company for an evening. And Yando’s performance really is indelible.
Jack Magaw’s realistic set fits snugly and functionally into the tiny acting space at the rear of the Books on Vernon bookstore in downtown Glencoe. Josh Schmidt designed the sound, Keith Parham the tricky lighting effects, and Sarah Heberlein the costumes.
Michael Halberstam’s directing deftly shifts the play’s tone from comedy to drama to satire to almost dreamlike fantasy. The production may be a little long (other productions have run 80 to 85 minutes) but I couldn’t suggest anything that could be cut with profit. In the end, no spectator could complain of the 100-minute theatrical roller coaster ride Russell Lees, Larry Yando, and William Brown take us on. Absolutely essential playgoing.
“Nixon’s Nixon” runs through October 19 at the Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Avenue. Performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m. Tickets are $60 to $75. Call 847 242 6000 or visit www.writerstheatre.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars. August 2008
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .