Catching Up

Review of 4000 Miles, Westport Country Playhouse

4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s popular intergenerational play from the early 2010s, is up at Westport Country Playhouse in a handsome production with lead performances worth seeing, particularly the versatile Mia Dillon. It may be the least confrontational play I’ve seen David Kennedy direct, but that’s not to say the script is wholly benign, it’s just that strong issues and gut-wrenching dramatic turns are in short supply. It’s a family comedy-drama in which a young man, Leo (Clay Singer), 21, has biked cross-country from Seattle to Manhattan. He drops in unexpectedly on Vera, his 91-year-old maternal grandmother, after a rebuff from his girlfriend. The play meanders through the time Leo and Vera spend together as Leo tries to put his life back together after a series of events running from awkward to devastatingly traumatic has more or less derailed him. But not from keeping fit, keeping active, and trying to live his best life.

Clay Singer as Leo, Mia Dillon as Vera in Westport Country Playhouse’s production of 4000 Miles, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The charm of the play is in how it lets us see Leo through Vera’s eyes and Vera through Leo’s but also lets us make up our own minds about how we might relate to either. Which is a way of saying that whether you’re closer to your twenties or closer to your nineties or somewhere in the huge middle ground, you might find yourself veering from one side to the other. Not that the “sides” are that clearly demarcated. It’s more a question of how families imagine themselves and the places of the people within them. Leo is stepping away from whatever has been expected of him up till now, while Bec (Lea DiMarchi), his sometime girlfriend, is stepping away from him. And Vera, not all that cuddly, gets to relearn patience and compassion in dealing with the markedly younger generation.

The support Leo gets from Vera is prickly, most of the time, but that’s to be expected. She’s getting up there and sometimes “loses” her words and sometimes just gets irritated with all the things there are to be irritated about—like computers and her bossy daughter and the loss of the last of “the octogenarians” (a sort of old-age support group we could use a flashback scene with) and her phone-buddy/neighbor who is “a pain the ass” but one of the few dependable people in her life. It’s a life that hit its prime when it was cool and progressive to be a Communist, or “Lefty” (like, the 1940s), and now just looks on from a spacious rent-controlled apartment—with great bookshelves, a skylight, and lived-in clutter (Arnulfo Maldonado, scenic design) with a great view we don’t get to see. It’s a wonder she doesn’t have people staying over with her all the time. How could she refuse to share?

Clay Singer as Leo, Mia Dillon as Vera in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Early in the play, after an opening scene that feels really awkward and off-balance (as it’s meant to), Clay Singer floats a truly charming smile as he says “grandma” and for a second we see Leo as he might have been as a kid saying the word for the first time or at least remembering what it was like to be a kid who could charm the old girl. From that feeling comes most of the best stuff in the play, as when Vera simply beams at Leo for remembering what his deceased grand-dad’s voice sounded like. There are of course tensions and misunderstandings and jumping to conclusions but people who have been spouses, partners or roommates for years often have worse. Dillon and Singer create an odd couple—he’s very tall, she’s not; he speaks with a kind of surfer-stoner rhythm that is never in a hurry to get anywhere and he often smiles at his own words as though simply fond of his own voice; she’s a New Yorker and stringent, acerbic and energetic. The chemistry works and this production takes its time, letting the characters grope toward each other.

Lea DMarchi as Bec, Mia Dillon as Vera in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

There are two roles for young actresses, and neither role is as good as it might be. The scene in which Bec seems to drop from the sky onto the couch with Vera doesn’t do much to make the character useful. Her scene much later, mostly with Leo, is better because it comes as an important culmination for this couple who have been through some hard things. It’s to Lea DiMarchi’s great credit that she is able to develop her character believably in the space of two scenes very different in mood and placement within the play. The other supporting role features Phoebe Holden as a quick pickup named Amanda, a Parsons student aiming to be an arts celebrity. The scene tries to interject some comical sexy moments and maybe even a look askance at the dating styles of the newish century, but finally collapses into odd quirks—and makes us wonder why Leo would think it’s OK to start up the sexual machinery on his grandma’s couch when she’s just down the hall. Not that we’re really surprised by anything Leo does or doesn’t do.

Clay Singer as Leo, Phoebe Holden as Amanda in 4000 Miles, at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

In any case, Amanda has cool clothes (Maiko Matsushima, Costumes) and ties into a very undeveloped subplot concerning Leo’s feelings for his adopted—of Chinese descent—sister. And that bit of characterization—if that’s what it is—is a good example of how some choices in the play feel a bit questionable. As if the mark of a “good play” is the unexpected detail, the odd, juicy tidbit dropped into conversations for the sake of “interest.” Such details feel a bit scattershot when what we might really benefit from is Leo and Vera hashing out what’s like to be starting out in and coming to the end in a particular family with all its particular baggage. When they do hit moments that matter, Dillon and Singer deliver, as when Leo tells what happened to his friend and his gutsy reaction, or when Vera finally says something nice about her neighbor.

It's good that the play ends as it does, otherwise we might want to show up next week to see what else Leo learns about Vera’s past and what else Vera finds out about Leo’s relationships. As it is, 4000 Miles is only playing through next weekend so get the goods while you can.

Mia Dillon as Vera Connell in 4000 Miles, Westport Country Playhouse, directed by David Kennedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
Featuring Mia Dillon

Scenic Design: Arnulfo Maldonado; Lighting Design: Carolina Ortiz Herrara; Costume Design: Maiko Matsushima; Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzler

Cast: Mia Dillon, Lea DiMarchi, Phoebe Holden, Clay Singer

Westport Country Playhouse
August 23-September 4, 2022

The Family Business

Review of Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse

The set is an incredibly lifelike convenience store by scenic designer You-Shin Chen. Before the action began I sat admiring the three vents that run across the heating/a-c duct above the store. Those vents didn’t look fake or new; they looked the way the vents would look: worn, serviceable. Into the store walks Appa (David Shih) and his manner isn’t of someone trapped in a place he’d like to get out of. It’s his domain. He pours himself a coffee and settles into whatever the day brings on. This is a story about how things look to this man, a character study of a working man the playwright knows well.

Heart-warming and amusing, Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience, playing at Westport Country Playhouse through July 17, is like a friendly local spot you’re happy to visit. The play, which spawned a CBC sitcom in 2016 that ran for five seasons and is available on Netflix, has features you’ll immediately recognize from other popular shows: the work-place—here, the store—that unites most of the action, the family dynamic of intergenerational dysfunction, and the immigrant experience—in this case of Koreans to Canada (the convenience store is located in Toronto)—as mixing both ethnic specificity and the collective features of how strangers become neighbors. It’s familiar, but with a difference.

Chuja Seo as Umma, David Shih as Appa in Kim’s Convenience, directed by Nelson T. Eusebio III, at Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Indeed, you could easily reduce the story to its types: the bossy patriarch and his flustered wife (known only as Appa and Umma (Chuja Seo), to underscore that this is a Mom and Pop store), the potentially slacker daughter now turning thirty, still at home, unattached and vaguely a photographer (Janet, played by Cindy Im), the miscreant son (Jung, played by Hyunmin Rhee) who ran off after a physical altercation with Appa and whose whereabouts only Umma knows. Add a number of small “community figure” roles and Alex, a possible love interest from the neighborhood—all played by Eric R. Williams—and you’ve got the potential for any number of vignettes about how these folks get by and what sort of problems they meet with.

At the center of it all is the man who keeps the store, a figure who exemplifies the very notion of upwardly mobile merchant. Early in the play, a local wheeler-dealer (Mr. Lee—known approvingly as “the black man with the Korean name”) makes a big offer to buy the store, but it’s not about moving on up for Appa. It’s about his need to have “a story,” or, as we might say, “an identity.” Without the store, which he needs to hand on intact, there’s no public role for his life.

The key, for entertainment value, is how this character comes across. If too sentimental, we’ll get bored; if too silly, we’ll not take him seriously. The laughter is not only at Appa—the way we laugh at misguided dads from Archie Bunker to Homer Simpson—but with him as we notice how much he notices. And the sentiment is earned by the way we gradually become aware of how heartfelt his world is.

David Shih as Appa, Cindy Im as Janet in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

And of course there are life lessons along the way: the main one being that everyone in this play (and in the world the play wants to mirror) have stories just as heartfelt. All the characters want to get along with the others, but they also want something—mostly we could call it “respect,” or “appreciation,” or just the sense of fellow feeling that means someone else understands. And that’s what you’re mainly investing in watching such a play: your understanding. The showdown between Appa and Janet over who owes whom what is one of those universal parent-child situations even if it doesn’t always come to such deliberate expression. As a scene, it’s a well-done dramatic crux. Matched at the close by Appa’s test of his repentant son.

Hyunmin Rhee as Jung, Chuja Seo as Umma in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Director Nelson T. Eusebio III has his cast use this space extremely well. It never feels stagey or trapped in a fake space. The two scenes outside the store have a different feel as they should. In one Umma visits with Jung in a church and it’s striking how worldly this woman, who speaks mostly Korean to her husband in his domain, suddenly seems. She’s part of a church and so of a different community, one not defined by family or trade. The other is a flashback to when Appa and pregnant Umma, newcomers to Canada, are trying to name the store. There are joke names—7-12—that show not only how Appa views success but how much he wants his brand to be recognizable. “Kim’s Convenience” says it all.

Most of the best scenes involve Appa and Janet. First of all, kudos to costume designer Lux Haac: her wardrobe makes Janet look cool and that helps us enter Appa’s world too. His daughter is nothing like her mother, nor like him, and yet he wants to help her make a life for herself, without really understanding what that might entail. The scenes when he “helps” negotiate the halting date relations between Janet and Alex are funny as physical comedy and blossoming romance together (Michael Rossmy, fight director and intimacy coach earns his keep) and play on the old tropes of the “shotgun wedding” in a way that lets us feel the force of family as an aspect of marriage.

Eric R. Williams as Alex, Cindy Im as Janet in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Everyone puts in a good performance here: Chuja Seo’s cautiously supportive Umma, Hyunmin Rhee’s sympathetically put-upon Jung, Cindy Im’s mostly patient Janet, and Eric R. Williams’ slick businessman, flustered Islander, and shy but persistent Alex. Meanwhile, David Shih is a marvel. Choi’s dialogue calls for the heavily accented pronunciation and truncated syntax of the non-native speaker of English, particularly one converting from Korean, and Shih gets it all across with a nuanced command of how someone who speaks with conviction finds the means to make his meaning felt. It’s wonderful and often inadvertently (from Appa’s perspective) funny.

And the show’s comedy works because it’s broad enough, but with the recognition that all of us at times look or sound ridiculous and, when we do, we become cartoon characters in much the same way. And we also know—”this my serious face,” as Appa says—when our deepest values are at stake. Kim’s Convenience gets all that out into the open—for our convenience.

Hyunmin Rhee as Jung, David Shih as Appa in Kim’s Convenience, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Kim’s Convenience
By Ins Choi
Directed by Nelson T. Eusebio III

Scenic Design: You-Shin Chen; Costume Design: Lux Haac; Lighting Design: Marie Yokoyama; Sound Design: Twi McCallum; Dialect Coaches: Zoë Kim, Bibi Mama; Fight Director/ Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager/Fight Captain: Kevin Jinghong Zhu

Cast: Cindy Im, Hyunmin Rhee, Chuja Seo, David Shih, Eric R. Williams

Westport Country Playhouse
June 5-17, 2022

May the Farce Be With You

Review of Kiss My Aztec, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage ends its 2021-22 season with Kiss My Aztec, a raucous celebration of comedic theatricality. John Leguizamo has adapted his screenplay co-written with Stephen Chbosky into a spoof-fueled musical. The book is by Leguizamo and Tony Taccone, who directs the show; the music is by Benjamin Velez with lyrics by David Kamp, Velez and Leguizamo. Leguizamo, a Columbian-American comedian, film actor, and Tony-winning Broadway performer/playwright, is known for exploring his ethnicity in his plays, while also being familiar for his flamboyant characterizations in films (two of my favorite Leguizamo roles were directed by Baz Luhrmann, and Luhrmann’s work seems to have inspired some of the frenetic staging of Aztec). Thanks to the skills and stage brio of its fifteen-person cast, the show’s energy never flags and its aural and visual inventiveness makes Kiss My Aztec, even at two-and-a-half hours, feel freewheeling and fun.

The Spanish ensemble cast of Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage, directed by Tony Taccone (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Aztec is Leguizamo’s effort to apply the irreverent vibe that made Broadway hits of The Book of Mormon (2011) and Spamalot (2004) to the colonization of the Americas by the Spanish and the resistance by the Aztecs. While it shares in the zaniness of those earlier shows, aided by the rap energies unleashed on Broadway by Hamilton (2015), Aztec suffers a bit, in comparison, from the lack of cohesion of its target. Whatever their degree of historical validity, topics like the Arthurian legends, the founding of the Mormon religion, and the struggles of the founding fathers in the U.S. lend a definite gravitas for a satirist to dismantle.

Lacking such a sturdy scaffold for his spoofs, Leguizamo draws on older vibes—I was reminded at times of musical-comedy epics of inspired silliness such as The Court Jester (1955), starring Danny Kaye. Which is to say that an easy target is costume drama in general, marked by the “thees” and “thous” and “eths” of mock-Shakespearean lingo. Aztec also features fast-paced verbal sparring and songs that move the plot along while also mocking the familiar tropes of expository songs. The music is bright with the brio that comes from throwing every relevant style into the mix, so that every number almost speaks a different idiom. The Latinx aesthetic of the show is palpable in its percussive music—Roberto Sinha, music director, and Wilson R. Torres, additional percussion arrangements—and amazingly vibrant costumes and set (Clint Ramos, both). As has been a hallmark of several successful Hartford Stage productions, it’s simply fun to watch the show happen.

Maria-Christina Olivera as Tolima in Kiss My Aztec, Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The story? We open with a look at how “White People on Boats” are always bad news for indigenous populations, then focus upon a group of Aztec caricatures who are intending to stave off an invasion by Spanish caricatures—including the Inquisition, and the imposition of all things Spanish, like tapas, by Rodrigo (played for all its worth by Matt Saldivar), viceroy in the New Land, who resides in the citadel with his oft-belittled son Fernando (Z Infante, a master of the slow burn). The witch-savant of the Aztecs, Tolima (Maria-Christina Oliveras, perfect for the part) gives a prophecy to El Jaguar Negro (Eddie Cooper, a sturdy leader) and his followers about a “great brown hope” that may rise up and expel the invaders under a blood red moon. To that end, Colombina (Krystina Alabado, very lively), a warrior who rebels against traditional female roles, and Pepe (Joel Perez, like a cross between Elliot Gould and Will Farrell), a sock-puppet-wielding clown (or “Punk-ass Geek-A”) who dotes on her, seek entrance to the citadel to assassinate Rodrigo.

Columbina (Krystina Alabado) confronts Rodrigo (Matt Saldivar) as Pepe (Joel Perez) looks on, and guards interfere in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Their task will involve disguises, of course, and the introduction of a host of gags, from a phallic codpiece brandished by “the fixer” Pierre (Richard Ruiz Henry, priceless), to hypnotized-slap routines, to rap-throwdowns. And dances and sacrifices and skirmishes. Along the way there is also time for all kinds of romantic entanglements—whether its Cooper wildly inappropriate as a lovestruck Inquisitor dallying with Fernando in “Tango in the Closet,” or Spanish princess Pilar (Desireé Rodriguez, hilarious) refusing Sebastian (Z Infante), while pining for revelatory “dark meat”; likewise, Sebastian, tired of incestuous couplings for the sake of bloodlines, pines, complete with back-up singers, for a new girl from the new world;  meanwhile Rodrigo confesses to Columbina his desire to be spooned. And don’t forget the big showstopping romantic longings of “Chained Melody” where the yearnings of Columbina and Pepe find a literal and lyrical expression.

Krystina Alabado as Columbina and Joel Perez as Pepe during their big romantic number in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Kiss My Aztec not only has the makings of a Broadway show, it feels like it already is one. It may be true that it’s nothing new—except for its choice of which formerly marginalized population to appropriate and give a heroic-ironic treatment to—but the show is fully at home in our moment when the complex histories of immigrant and indigenous populations continue to strive for a hearing on various fronts. As a comedy, Aztec keeps its eye on ways to mock stereotypes and wring laughs out of unexpected mashups, while perhaps chuckling up its sleeve at the audience’s willingness to be so easily entertained, still.

Z Infante as Sebastian with KC Dela Cruz, Angelica Beliard, and Geena Quintos in Kiss my Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

One could say that the irreverence of plays like Aztec has attained a certain reverence on Broadway, their frames of reference capable of  mocking any piety. Though there may come a point at which a new tonality will arrive, for now It’s still a treat to see cultural associations, historical footnotes, ideological appropriations and a host of progressive and regressive social attitudes given the bawdy, slangy 21st century-treatment, with song. The main target here is people with no sense of  humor.

Columbina (Krystina Alabado) and Rodrigo (Matt Saldivar) in Kiss My Aztec at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Kiss My Aztec
Book by John Leguizamo and Tony Taccone
Music by Benjamin Velez
Lyrics by David Kamp, Benjamin Velez and John Leguizamo
Based on a screenplay by John Leguizamo and Stephen Chbosky
Directed by Tony Taccone
Choreography by Mayte Natalio

Scenic and Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: Alexander V. Nichols; Sound Design: Jessica Paz & Beth Lake; Wig & Hair Design: Charles G. LaPointe; Puppet Design: James Ortiz; Music Supervision & Co-Incidental Music Arrangements: David Gardos; Dance, Vocal & Co-Incidental Music Arrangements: Benjamin Velez; Orchestrator: Simon Hale; Music Director: Roberto Sinha; Additional Percussion Arrangements: Wilson R Torres; Production Stage Manager: Jeffrey Rodriguez; Stage Manager: Amanda Michaels; Assistant Stage Manager: Hannah Woodward

Orchestra: Roberto Sinha, conductor/keyboard; David Kidwell, keyboard; Oscar Bautista, guitars; Amanda Ruzza, bass/synthesizer; Rosa Avila, drums; Wilson Torres, percussion; John Mastroianni, woodwinds; Don Clough, trumpet/flugelhorn; Scott Cranston, trombone

Cast: Krystina Alabado, Angelica Beliard, Chad Carstarphen, Nicholas Caycedo, Eddie Cooper, KC Dela Cruz, Richard Ruiz Henry, Z Infante, Jesús E. Martinez, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Joel Perez, Geena Quintos, Desireé Rodriguez, Matt Saldivar, Brittany Nichole Williams

Hartford Stage
June 1-26, 2022

Celebrate Good Times!

Review of Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks

Fairly early in Matthew López’s Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, now playing at TheaterWorks in Hartford directed by Rob Ruggiero, Rachel, a drunken wedding planner who was not hired to plan—nor asked to be a bridesmaid at—the wedding of Zoey, a “best friend” from college, sounds off on a live mic. She wants us to know that elaborate weddings, no matter how well planned and “perfect,” do not equate with a happy marriage. She insists that more effort should be put into marriages, not weddings. It’s a tirade that is aimed, we don’t doubt, at the state of her own marriage, but it also might make us wonder: if weddings do indeed get too much attention, why play out the all-too-familiar tropes of big wedding receptions in a new play?

The answer, I suppose, is that we’re all ready to be amused by what can go wrong. Will we be embarrassed, titillated, angered, made to cringe or squirm, forced to laugh or cry or to drink heavily? Certainly that and more happens to all the characters we meet. More—who we don’t see—are potentially even more put out.

Blair Lewin as Rachel in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding by Matthew López, at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Rob Ruggiero (photo by Mike Marques)

We meet six people at this 200-person reception: Zoey’s friend Rachel (Blair Lewin); Rachel’s husband Charlie (Daniel José Molina, but on the night I saw it played by understudy Stephen Stocking); Sammy (Hunter Ryan Hedlicka), their gay friend from college, all seated at and grousing about their table far from the main table, though—as they come to appreciate—near a neglected bar presided over by a bartender Sam thinks is hot. Then there’s the DJ (Esteban Carmona), surly about the fact that his musical tastes and the bride’s don’t match; the first-time wedding planner, Missy (Hallie Eliza Friedman), a cousin of the bride who is very much out of her depth, and eventually the bride herself, Zoey (Rachel B. Joyce).

López keeps the funny lines flowing in the early going, with wisecracks that land well from an able cast. I was so taken with the repartee I was beginning to suspect we’d meet a table full of mixed couples who would be outing and dissing each other and catching up on sequels to their lives in the 1980s. It’s like we’re eavesdroppers at the table and that’s appealing, hearing the dirt and the gripes and the envy and the drinking challenges and so on.

Esteban Carmona as DJ, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka as Sammy, Blair Lewin as Rachel, Daniel José Molina as Charlie in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

It’s 2008 now and this age group is having to adjust to being grownups. Sammy’s partner has been invited to DC to serve in the Obama administration, so we get table chat that includes references to Sarah Palin and W. and the economic crash. Not enough to make a strong point about the generation we’re viewing, though the music on the soundtrack will treat many audience members to nostalgic twinges, I’m sure.

Lopez writes gay characters well and Sammy is the one with the more interesting things to say, as when he upbraids Charlie for not having sex with Rachel for six months. Sammy’s disquisition on same-sex coupling’s greater difficulties compared to hetero-sex makes a point and Herdlicka’s manner makes it comical. And that’s where López’s script is at its best, trying to account for how lust, love, desire and romance and their lack surface in different ways in different people.

Hallie Eliza Friedman as Missy, Esteban Carmona as DJ in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

The parts of the play that worked less well for me were all about the wedding itself, most having to do with predicaments referred to more than witnessed. The hapless party planner isn’t that great a gag; the DJ, who is at first fractious, actually becomes, thanks to Carmona’s casual cool, a welcome perspective; Sam fades, but for his heroic credit card, and Charlie goes from possibly a foil to one of those guys who thinks he and his alienated wife can “fuck it out.” At times, we might feel the use of sturdy cliché is beneath López and beneath at least some of the audience: straight couples not having sex after a few years of marriage; gay couples having sex as much as is humanly possible; straight-laced women eager to get high with a bad boy, etc.

Rachel B. Joyce as Zoey (foreground), Blair Lewin as Rachel, Hallie Eliza Friedman as Missy (background) in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

And then there’s Zoey: I believe that Rachel B. Joyce incarnates the character perfectly, a woman who really did fantasize a perfect wedding from an early age, never mind a perfect marriage. She’s silly, preening, and the sort of person you’d rather not be trapped near at an event. Her best bit—and probably the play’s most memorable theatrical moment—finds her and Rachel sitting on the floor of the ladies room licking chocolate cake off her gorgeous wedding gown.

The best role is Rachel’s, more or less, and in the end she’s the one who seems to have the furthest to go to find some notion of happiness. Seeing Rachel become a saving grace—after the belligerent salvos in her toast—is one of those turn-arounds that doesn’t make much difference. The night I saw the show, at least a few in the audience seemed to feel an implied potential seduction of Charlie by Sammy, in the hotel room Charlie rented intending a sexy frolic with Rachel. Now that might have made Zoey’s wedding an affair to remember!

Daniel José Molina as Charlie, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka as Sammy in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

We all know wedding receptions can be awkward, corny, nostalgic, romantic, silly, maybe even sublime—if you’re easily impressed. But mainly they tend to show that, when it comes to showbiz, we’re all amateurs. Generally, everyone tries to put a good face on whatever is happening so as not to ruin someone else’s big day. That’s not the case here, as a “good face” rarely shows itself. And so audiences will have to decide how much fun it is to be witness to the fiasco, from bad playlists to delayed (and too few) dinner servings, to mishaps with “cake shoving,” smartphone mix-ups, thrown food, tequila belted from the bottle, and true-confession moments about both same-sex and mixed-sex couplings, and, hanging over it all, what it means to pair up and to make a public celebration of it.

I suppose you could say that Zoey’s Perfect Wedding is a bit like any party—if you don’t have high expectations, you won’t be as disappointed, and if you can look on the bright side—the laughs, the chat, maybe the music—you might even enjoy it more than you don’t.

Esteban Carmona as DJ in Zoey’s Perfect Wedding, TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Zoey’s Perfect Wedding
By Matthew López
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set and Lighting Design: Brian Sidney Bembridge; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Sound Design: Melanie Chen Cole; Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert

Cast: Esteban Carmona, Hallie Eliza Friedman, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, Rachel B. Joyce, Blair Lewin, Daniel José Molina

TheaterWorks
April 30-June 5, 2022

Making It In America

Review of Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage

What do stand-up comics do when they’re off the circuit? Some become Hollywood movie stars or join seasons of sitcoms on one platform or another. But what about the minority comic whose ethnicity, in white-dominated popular culture, seems to suit him only for bad guys or guys whose comic range is to be a walking cliché? Maybe they create a theatrical monologue that lets them tell their story while entertaining audiences with a view of Show Biz a bit more multicultural than the norm.

In Dishwasher Dreams, now playing at Hartford Stage through March 20, Alaudin Ullah (aka, Aladdin) tells us about his family, his childhood, his career. It’s not so much a story of slings and arrows—though there are slurs and sorrows—as it is a fond journey with moments of grief and glee along the way, much as anyone’s life is. The difference is in the details, but that too is part of what makes America American: immigrant stories—no matter the immigrants’ origins—play out in the pop culture grab-bag that we all live in and with. As a second-generation son of South Asian immigrants living in Spanish Harlem, Ullah has a beguiling grasp of street energies and the kind of “melting pot” mix that spices many an urban environment. But he’s also an entertainer who rose up through the ranks in comedy clubs—beginning with Don’t Tell Mamas, with a largely gay and drag clientele—and onto cable programs on Comedy Central (Ullah’s reminiscence about cable TV coming to the projects will strike a chord with anyone who remembers TV before and after cable). So he’s also uniquely poised to tell us something about America and what it means to find a niche in which to be successfully entertaining.

Alaudin Ullah, foreground, and Avirodh Sharma in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

Ullah’s manner finds humor in most situations, such as the identity issues that come with being Muslim in the U.S. As a faith that is sometimes mistaken for an ethnicity, Ullah can insist he’s “about as Muslim as Pee Wee Herman,” but that doesn’t mean he won’t be asked to “do a Muslim accent.” His family are Bengalis, from the part of India that won independence and became Bangladesh when Ullah was not yet a teen. Important to the story is how Ullah characterizes his background, such as how his father chose to leave his village because of a belief in America as a land of opportunity where a job as a dishwasher and a mice and roach-ridden apartment in Spanish Harlem equal a dream come true. So when Ullah finds himself living rough while trying to break into Show Biz, he’s got a model to follow.

Ullah’s acculturation lets him mock such staples as the familiar glitzy dance moments—in place of depicting sex—in the Bollywood films his family goes on outings to see, and to find great admiration in the stark beauty of Satyajit Ray’s Apu films, which happen to be set near the village Alaudin’s father emigrated from. Moments of name-checking Indian culture are more than matched by young Alaudin’s greatest U.S. enthusiasm: The New York Yankees. The scenes depicting—early and late—Ullah’s part in the collective euphoria surrounding Reggie Jackson are highpoints as the comedian is able to channel his inner twelve-year-old and lights up the stage with his love.

Tenser matters are provided by the comedian’s mother’s illness and darker themes emerge from a family visit to Bangladesh where Ullah encounters a cousin whose fate weighs heavily. At such moments the aural presence of Avirodh Sharma, playing hand-drums on stage throughout the show, is greatly effective, punctuating Ullah’s monologue and creating atmosphere, a language of percussion that supports and comments.

Avirodh Sharma in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

And that’s to the good because Alaudin Ullah’s monologue can at times feel rather static. Director Chay Yew has Ullah move about the stage to signal changes in locale and mood, and Ullah sometimes stands on a chair or crouches to give variety to his presence, all of which, including the tasteful lighting by Anshuman Bhatia and the handsome wooden stage by Yu Shibagaki, helps to keep us focused and responsive. But if you’re used to comedians who flaunt fluid movements in the midst of fast-paced commentary and asides, you might find Ullah’s routine to be a bit over-rehearsed and even a bit too earnest.

Alaudin Ullah in Dishwasher Dreams, Hartford Stage; photo by Michael Brosilow

Ullah wisely keeps to the end his most comic bit, where he gooses the stereotypical image of the Southern Asian immigrant while at the same time wryly asserting the special privileges that come with assimilation via Show Biz. It works, because Ullah is willing to see that the laugh is on him as well.

Dishwasher Dreams
Written & performed by Alaudin Ullah
Directed by Chay Yew
Music by Avirodh Sharma

Scenic Design: Yu Shibagaki; Costume Design: Izumi Imaba; Lighting Design: Anshuman Bhatia; Composer/Arranger: Avirodh Sharma; Assistant Director: Christopher Rowe; Assistant Lighting Design: Daniel Friedman; Production Stage Manager: David Castellanos; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Artistic Producer: Rachel Alderman; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scot

Hartford Stage
February 24-March 20, 2022

Passing a Reignited Torch

Review of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage has a stable tradition of offering literate plays handsomely mounted, and the current production, Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous by Atlanta-based playwright Pearl Cleage, directed by Susan V. Booth, lives up to that expectation. What’s more, as a plus for theater fans, the play’s story centers on feminine—and feminist—expression and generational rivalry in the theater. It opens with a deliberate quotation of a Bette Davis movie line (previously lifted by Edward Albee) and then kind of reverses the situation of All About Eve (one of Davis’ landmark roles) so that, here, the up-and-comer proves more sympathetic than the great actress. And the cast of four engaging African American women bring it—with laughs to spare.

Seated: Anna (Terry Burrell), “Pete” (Shakirah Demesier); standing: Betty (Marva Hicks), Kate (Cynthia D. Barker) in Hartford Stage’s production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The basic situation: Anna Campbell (Terry Burrell) has become a grand dame of classic theater, noted for roles like Medea and Hedda Gabler, but she’s been living in Europe due to the outraged reception of her notorious one-woman show back in the ‘90s. Dubbed “Naked Wilson,” the show featured Campbell, in the nude, reciting famous speeches from August Wilson plays, speeches all written for African American male characters. The implied criticism: Wilson, for all his greatness, downplayed the importance of women in his dramas and in Af Am cultural life in general. Now, a theater festival in Atlanta, organized by Kate Hughes (Cynthia D. Barker), an energetic young producer, wants to revive “Naked Wilson” and give Campbell an honorary award.

All well and good—except Campbell assumes this is her chance to give a farewell performance of her signature play, while at the same time claiming nudity as something that doesn’t only encompass younger women. Hughes, however, has hired a young “performance artist” (actually more of a stripper and pornographic movie actress) “Pete” Watson (Shakirah Demesier) to perform “Naked Wilson” nude, though Watson isn’t exactly versed in dramatic monologues nor Wilson’s plays. A further key role in Cleage’s play, that of Betty Sampson, Campbell’s assistant and companion, is provided by Marva Hicks who is able to hang fire and comment, both verbally and silently, to great effect.

Marva Hicks as Betty Sampson in the Hartford Stage production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The plot of Cleage’s play, then, is essentially a sit-com: how to disabuse Campbell of her mistake without alienating her, and how to finesse what is bound to be a culture-clash between a diva of the theater and a demoiselle of the skin trade. Cleage beefs up the basic comic premise with some very tangible issues, most having to do with how one generation copes with the next.

At the heart of the play is the question: “must we eat our young?” It’s a way of depicting the tendency of those now able to rest on their laurels to undermine the tastes, talents and prestige of those still trying to make a name. That situation, we might say, is perennial; no matter how much the up-and-coming generation resents the suppressions foisted on them by their elders, they will almost certainly behave similarly once they become elders.

By taking on the plays and reputation of August Wilson, even if with admiration tinged with a certain comic deflation, Cleage adds a further dimension to the play’s intergenerational struggle. Wilson was the dominant African American playwright of the 1990s and in some ways still is. In the past decade (during which I’ve reviewed theater in Connecticut), his plays have been on offer most seasons and I’ve seen them at Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, and of course, Yale Repertory Theatre, where a number of them had their debuts. He is a grand old man of American theater and yet—unlike some others, such as Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill—his female roles tend to be much slighter. Thus Campbell’s protest play is a point well-taken, for not only do female actors get short-changed in Wilson’s plays, arguably, but—with strict gender distinctions in casting—female actors never get to deliver the speeches Campbell performed in her piece.

In choosing a performer such as “Pete” (her given name, Precious, already sounded like a stripper name, to her, so she went for something apposite), Hughes opens the door to performance beyond the bounds of classic theater. Certainly, such was implied in Campbell’s use of nudity as an avant-garde gesture intended to break through certain stodgy assumptions about theater, but, Campbell claims, the real point was hearing a very capable actress deliver Wilson’s lines. Hughes could’ve gotten a worshipful stage-actress understudy-type to take on “Naked Wilson” but chose instead a woman with some of the same “stop-at-nothing” fire Campbell once had. As Campbell, Burrell makes us believe in both the greatness of her skills and the wearying anxieties of having to carry on past her “day.” And Demesier’s Watson has the nonchalance of whatever is “now.”

Terry Burrell as Anna Campbell and Shakirah Demesier as Precious “Pete” Watson in The Hartford Stage production of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The best parts of the play come when Campbell and Watson are finally face-to-face. In fact, there’s a bit of a lull after the initial setup of the situation that could be mitigated by quicker pacing (but, given that the play comes in at about 100 minutes, it’s not as if it drags). Watson is the kind of performer who baulks at nothing and has the confidence that comes from “clicks” (or internet attention) rather than the traditional gatekeepers of artistic success. Campbell, increasingly insecure in this new world, still knows what she knows: great theater isn’t made by amateurs. A resolution, if it’s to come, will have to allow both sides of the generational divide to respect and appreciate the other. And the terms of that rapprochement are what make this play signify. What’s more, Hicks—as the true elder here—gets to steal the show with a concluding song and comment that’s “just showing off” very gamely indeed.

Warmly entertaining with some jabs and bristles, Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous is funny, not mawkish, and happily gorgeous: the $500-per-night suite where Campbell and Sampson hang out is quite a spread, in Collette Pollard’s design, and Kara Harmon’s costumes are all very becoming, especially the knock-out red number “Pete” sports during a believably “gone viral” moment late in the play. If, in the end, Cleage’s play plays to our classic theater preferences over the grittier, more showy aspects of today’s entertainment culture, well, that’s what Hartford Stage audiences are there for. 

The cast of Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous
By Pearl Cleage
Directed by Susan V. Booth

Scenic Design: Collette Pollard; Costume Design: Kara Harmon; Lighting Design: Michelle Habeck; Sound Design: Clay Benning; Wig Design: Lindsey Ewing; Production Stage Manager: Anna Baranski; Assistant Stage Manager: Samantha Honeycutt

Cast: Cynthia D. Barker, Terry Burrell, Shakirah Demesier, Marva Hicks

Hartford Stage
January 13-February 6, 2022

Auld Acquaintance

Review of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, at Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage’s holiday offering this year takes a break from the annual staging of A Christmas Carol—a Ghost Story in favor of a more streamlined, less effects-laden show. Instead of flying ghosts and bedecked sleighs and the full trappings of a Dickensian Christmas, we have Joe Landry’s adaptation of an American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Frank Capra film from 1946 that centered on how a potential business catastrophe at Christmas cemented the values of the postwar community of Bedford Falls, NY. The film, which is generally playing somewhere on television at Christmastime, showcases James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and a host of beloved actors who have become indelible figures of a bygone small-town America. Landry’s adaptation is actually set in a radio studio as a live broadcast, so that a town’s worth of characters can be played by five skilled voice actors: Jake Laurents (Gerardo Rodriguez), Freddy Filmore (Michael Preston), Sally Applewhite (Shirine Babb), Lana Sherwood (Jennifer Bareilles) and Harry “Jazzbo” Heywood (Evan Zes), with an onstage Foley—or sound effects—artist (Leer Leary) providing crucial backup. 

The cast of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Directed by Melia Bensussen and Rachel Alderman, the joys of the play take place on several levels. First, there’s the show-biz aspect: we’re watching ostensible radio actors ham it up for a live audience, complete with an applause sign so that the listeners at home will know we’re there and loving it. Thus, we, the audience, are playing an audience and responding accordingly. Related to that is the fact that the actors—invisible to those fictional listeners—are visible to us, even when they almost miss cues or carry on sotto voce chats in the background or one-up each other with glares and snickers or flirt with body language. And on that score, keep an eye on Lear Leery—he’s not only a one-man sound-board, he’s also an onlooker who knows the show frontwards and backwards and reacts accordingly. Then there’s the story itself, which is heartwarming and corny and quaint and magical, all at once. The radio actors know all that and also that it’s a lot of fun to do. It helps to know the story as well as the actors do (I do) but even if you don’t, you can get caught up in trying to imagine the different characters these quick-change voices bring to life. They’re all there: George and Mary Bailey, Uncle Billy, Ma Bailey, brother Harry Bailey, Old Man Potter, Mr. Gower, Mr. Martini, Violet Bick, the Bailey kids, and of course Ernie and Bert as well as a host of background voices.

Jennifer Bareilles, Shirine Babb, Michael Preston, Evan Zes and Gerardo Rodriguez in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

George Bailey, chief exec at a struggling Building and Loan he inherited from his dad, is suddenly vulnerable to take over and even extortion because his daft Uncle Billy mislaid a sizable deposit that has fallen into the hands of the grasping and covetous town big wig Old Man Potter. George’s night of despair on Christmas eve earns him the intercession of “angel second class” Clarence Oddbody. The two main roles of George and Clarence are enacted by Gerardo Rodriguez as Laurents and Evan Zes as Heywood. The chemistry is good and Rodriguez brings a bit more gravitas to George than is sometimes the case. He’s a take-charge guy who we expect will battle his way out of any difficulty. Zes’s Clarence is less flighty than the original and is more like someone who has entered a movie he was watching and wants to see if his intervention will work or not. And it’s a great treat to see Michael Preston (recently Hartford Stage’s Scrooge) do the hat and voice-switching necessary to enact a heated exchange between Potter and Uncle Billy.

Leer Leary in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The first two thirds of the play provide the backstory and that’s when the radio show elements are foregrounded. It’s all got a nostalgic tinge—including ads with jingles set to Christmas tunes—and provides a spirited evocation of the effects of radio, the spectacle of live performance, and the fun of mixing both at once. What’s particularly lively in this production are how the personalities of the radio actors inflect the roles they play with their voices so that interesting frictions occur with the actors letting viewers in on their own responses to the roles (especially effective there are Bareilles and Babbs whose Applewhite and Sherwood clearly have some issues).

Evan Zes (Clarence) and Gerardo Rodriguez (George Bailey, back) in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Director Bensussen and Alderman shift the play’s mise en scene when Clarence enters the story. Trap doors and an upper platform come into use and suddenly we’re aware that we’re watching a play on the Hartford Stage, and that the show’s spatial concept extends beyond the borders of the radio studio. It’s a very effective way to register the difference of a world without George Bailey. The play has moved from being a comic evocation of familiar types and the kind of dramatized moments radio highlights with sound and music to an actual play that borders on a tragedy of lost opportunity. The world with no George in it—fighting the good fight for his community, his family and friends—is a darker, more dangerous place. Unlike the Scrooge story, where the fear of leading a selfish, wasted life shocks an old miser into generosity, the crux of It’s a Wonderful Life is that commitments and obligations are the stuff of life and anyone who has lived has affected other lives in indelible ways. The emotional tone of the play is served well by the closing sing-along of Auld Lang Syne, a tribute to the townfolks’ old acquaintance with one another and ours with them.

Jennifer Bareilles, Gerardo Rodriguez and Evan Zes in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

In 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life first played in movie theaters, there had been a loss of nearly 300,000 U.S. citizens who didn’t return from the war. As of today, the casualties from Covid-19, in the States alone, is over 800,000. The commemoration that closes the play isn’t just “sentimental hogwash,” as Mr. Potter would claim, but rather a way of saying we’re lucky to be here and we’d like to remember those who aren’t, thanking them all for their wonderful lives.

Shirine Babb in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Adapted by Joe Landry
Based on the story, The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern
From the screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling
Directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Dramaturg: Zoë Golub-Sass; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy

Cast: Shirine Babb, Jennifer Bareilles, Leer Leary, Michael Preston, Gerardo Rodriguez, Evan Zes

Hartford Stage
November 26-December 26, 2021

Another Miracle

Review of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut

Falsettoland, now playing at Music Theatre of Connecticut through November 21, directed by Kevin J. Connors is a quirky, sappy, funny, tear-jerker of a musical. And how many shows can you say that about?

The cast of the Music Theatre of Connecticut production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

What’s it about? Well, really it’s about love, but the context for the vicissitudes of love involves gays and straights, Jews and a few non-Jews. The show’s humor is decidedly arch—as for instance in both versions of “the Miracle of Judaism” or in “Baseball Game” or “Everyone Hates Their Parents”—and its play upon our sympathies stems from our acceptance that—to vary Tolstoy—“all dysfunctional relationships are unique in their dysfunction.” For Marvin (Dan Sklar) the dysfunction is starting to double-down. In the first part of Falsettos—Falsettoland is the second half of the longer musical—he left his wife, Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), for his lover Whizzer (Max Meyers). As Falsettoland opens, Marvin and Whizzer have split up and Trina has taken up with Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Marvin’s former psychiatrist. Then there’s the looming Bar Mitzvah for Jason (Ari Sklar), the son of Marvin and Trina who misses Whizzer and invites him to his baseball game, to the awkwardness of all. For Marvin, some kind of reckoning must be coming, but—as the song “Something Bad is Happening” late in Act One implies—he hasn’t yet seen the worst of it.

The cast of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut, left to right: Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), Mendel (Jeff Gurner), front, Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), back, Marvin (Dan Sklar), front, Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards), back; photo by Alex Mogillo

The cleverness of the show’s book—by James Lapine and William Finn—lies in how its mundane situations spark asides and reflections and confrontations, all of which are sung as dialogue. The music and lyrics by William Finn have a savvy, wry reflectiveness and bounce along with an agreeable forthrightness that seem in-keeping with the “tell it to a psychiatrist” tone. The shrink—played with crusty affability by MTC regular Gurner—is almost like a stand-in for the audience, a bit off to the side and yet emotionally involved. And that would also seem to be the point of the lesbian couple—Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards) and her partner Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), a non-Jew obsessed with Jewish cuisine; they might be the “zany neighbors,” but in fact, like us, they are drawn-in and play audience to the family dysfunction that, at first, seems only to hang on the question of how Marvin will navigate the emotional ties that bind him, and, more crucially, how Jason will manage to have a Bar Mitzvah he can tolerate or maybe even be proud of. But as “Unlikely Lovers,” a highlight of Act Two, makes clear, the scope of the foursome comprised by Dr. Charlotte, Cordelia, Marvin and Whizzer is key to the play’s vision of how new loves form in the space once dominated by family ties.

Whizzer (Max Meyers) and Marvin (Dan Sklar) in the MTC production of Falsettoland; photo by Alex Mogillo

But that’s not to say that more traditional family ties are given short shrift. Key to the tone the play strikes is the role of Trina. She might be more freaked out than she is, she might also be way more resentful of her former husband’s love for a man and her son’s friendship with that man, and she could whine a lot more. The great thing about Corinne C. Broadbent’s rendering of Trina is that she’s not melodramatic nor particularly long-suffering. Her big number in the second act, “Holding to the Ground” (sung while doing her aerobic exercises) lays out her emotional parameters and it’s one of the strongest numbers, matched—or even topped—by Max Meyer’s strong delivery of Whizzer’s “You Gotta Die Sometime.” What these two sung speeches give is not only insight into the difficult terrain these characters are navigating but also show them coping and revealing strengths that take us beyond the play’s tendency to use quirks for laughs.

the cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

At the heart of it all is Sklar’s Marvin, a likeable guy dealing with a lot; you might even say he’s a bit of a schlemihl trying to be a mensch. His genuine affection for Whizzer wins us over in “What More Can I Say,” and the real nature of the problem facing the couple ratches up the drama and takes us back to very stressful times that the musical aims to revisit as a coping exercise. And so, in good uplifting-ending fashion, the fate of that Bar Mitzvah is to reinforce the growth all the characters have undergone. Amongst all the good work done here—including Lindsay Fuori’s subway car set that adds the right note of urban landscape—special mention should be made of Ari Sklar’s Jason who is such a natural for this part it’s as if it’s a slice of his life. That illusion is helped by the fact that Jason’s father, Marvin, is played by Ari real life dad. Family ties, after all.

Marvin (Dan Sklar), Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), background; Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Jason (Ari Sklar), foreground; photo by Alex Mogillo

In revisiting those days of something awful in Falsettoland, the MTC production might be said to sound a note of nostalgia. Bad as things got, there was a sense that that they could only get better—in part through visions like Finn and Lapine’s of the everydayness of same-sex couples as part of the same old traditions grown so familiar. One of those miracles of humanitarianism.

The cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

Falsettoland
Book by William Finn and James Lapine
Music and Lyrics by William Finn
Directed by Kevin J. Connors

Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling; Choreography: Chris McNiff; Musical Direction: David John Madore

Cast: Corinne C. Broadbent, Elissa DeMaria, Jeff Gurner, Max Meyers, Jessie Janet Richards, Ari Sklar, Dan Sklar

Musicians: Piano/Musical Director: David John Madore; Drums: Steve Musitano, Chris McWilliams

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 5-21, 2021

The Power of Doubt

Review of Doubt: A Parable, Westport Country Playhouse

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, the second offering of Westport Country Playhouse’s two-show mini-season runs in-person until November 20, with a streaming version of the play available online from November 11 to November 21. This is the first live production at the venerable venue since the COVID shutdowns and the last until the playhouse’s next full season opens in April 2022 (for information on the latter, see below).

Directed by David Kennedy, WCP’s associate artistic director, the current production of Doubt—which won a Pulitzer and the Tony for Best Play 2005—provides an interesting example of how context can affect a play. Back in 2005, the play was a timely fictionalization of issues that arose out of the Boston Globe’s celebrated 2002 exposure of child-abuse among Catholic priests. The investigations did indeed reveal abuse and cover-ups dating back decades, and yet Shanley’s play, set in 1964, can still feel anachronistic in the way it portrays characters who seem to live with an open secret.

Now, almost twenty years later, Shanley’s “parable” gains by not riding the coattails of a major news story. The questions the play aims to raise—about doubt and certainty—move into a more parabolic realm less concerned with the times and more readily timeless. And that helps to foreground what has always been the play’s greatest strength: that it can be staged to have very different effects without changing a single word. The notion that the play’s final act takes place offstage—in the conversations of its audience members—still holds true. I’ve seen the play staged once before and can say that the take-aways from the two productions were markedly different.

Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) and Father Flynn (Erik Bryant) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

The story concerns the efforts of Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem), principal at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to remove Father Flynn (Eric Bryant) from his position in the parish due to her belief that he has seduced or is attempting to seduce a young boy, Donald Muller, the first and only African American child at the school. To this end, Sister Aloysius enlists the aid of Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) to help make a case to be taken to their superiors. Father Flynn, ambushed in a meeting with the two nuns, later turns to Sister James to give his view of the situation. But a surprising interview between Sister Aloysius and the boy’s mother (Sharina Martin) seems to strengthen the principal’s resolve.

Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

Sister Aloysius is portrayed as rigidly old guard—down on secular songs in Christmas pageants, on ballpoint pens, on teachers as “friends” to their students, and certainly on the touchy-feely version of mentoring that Father Flynn prefers. There’s not a lot that can be done with her character as she’s not meant to be sympathetic even if we might grant her a certain steely charm. Betsy Aidem’s portrayal captures well the kind of personal authority that those with rigid parameters for what’s allowed and what’s not can steep themselves in. And Kerstin Anderson establishes well the conflicts in Sister James: by temperament, she is sympathetic to Father Flynn; by the hierarchy of her order, she should support Sister Aloysius. Particularly if the elder nun is correct in her assumptions. But if she’s wrong? That doubt makes Sister James somewhat our stand-in, trying to decide between these two opponents, both practiced at getting others to do what they want them to do. For their own good.

It’s in the character of Father Flynn that the play offers the most potential for varied interpretations. He could be more openly arrogant, feeling that he’s above any criticism, he could be genuinely aghast at the suspicions in Sister A’s mind, or he could be a serial abuser trying to cover his tracks. Bryant’s Flynn downplays the arrogance, trying hard for a bid for sympathy from his opponent. How much sympathy he earns from the viewer is for each to decide.

Aloysius is open about her dislike of Flynn and there’s little point in considering ulterior motives: she sees him and his tendencies as pastor—even if he is innocent of abuse—as inimical to her view of how the Church should present itself. But if she’s wrong about Flynn’s infractions, then she’s simply using suspicion to taint his reputation and to drive him out. The power-play aspects of Shanley’s script strike me as its most enduring element. The fact that we can’t really know is the core of what the play offers as its insight into human relations. How do we assess someone else’s character? By what they do, by what they say, but what about what they don’t openly say or do? The value of doubt is that it reminds us human behavior is mostly lacking in absolutes. There’s always a little wiggle room.

At Westport, Kennedy’s production highlights the emotions, with the two central characters breaking down and collapsing to the floor at different moments. While her outburst may make Sister Aloysius more sympathetic in the end, Father Flynn’s outburst has the opposite effect. Arguably, his attempt to play on emotions makes him seem more guilty, or at least seems to indicate he may be culpable even if only for his thoughts or intentions.

Mrs. Muller (Sharina Martin) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in The Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

A key scene is the discussion of Donald’s situation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. In a way, Mrs. Muller’s view—which Sharina Martin registers as a hard truth arrived at through experience—serves best to put the priest’s interest in the boy in a context not as dark as the one Sister Aloysius assumes; in any case, Flynn may help the boy, but, in Sister Aloysius’ view, only at great risk.

Once again director David Kennedy delivers a play in which complex issues and implications are presented through well-orchestrated dialogues. While not having quite the drama of others he’s directed—like The Invisible Hand or Appropriate—or the comedy of The Understudy, Doubt acquires great power from its perfect pacing and by demonstrating that doubt and certainty can be equally unnerving.

Doubt: A Parable
By John Patrick Shanley
Directed by David Kennedy 

Scenic Designer: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Designer: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Fred Kennedy; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzer

Cast: Betsy Aidem; Kerstin Anderson; Erik Bryant; Sharina Martin

Westport Country Playhouse
In person: November 2-20, 2021
Streaming: November 11-21, 2021

On sale now are ticket packages for the 2022 season:

Next to Normal
Music by Tom Kitt
Book and Lyrics by Brian Yorkey
Directed and choreographed by Marcos Santana
The 2009 Tony-winning musical and winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama: musical theater that looks at a family in crisis with introspective songs.
April 5-23, 2002

Straight White Men
By Young Jean Lee
Directed by Mark Lamos
A father and two grown sons “forced to face their own identities” in inventive playwright Young Jean Lee’s 2014 play.
May 24-June 11, 2022

Ain’t Misbehavin’
Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz
Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown
The 1978 Tony winner—“a dance-filled and reimagined celebration of jazz great Fats Waller,” from Camille A. Brown, recently awarded and nominated for her work on for colored girls.
July 5-23, 2022

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
An intergenerational comedy from Amy Herzog—in which a 21-year-old visits his 91-year-old grandmother; a wry and wise Pulitzer finalist from 2013.
August 23-September 10, 2022

From the Mississippi Delta
By Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland
An autobiographical play using story, song and memories to dramatize a harrowing and inspiring journey from a childhood in poverty in Mississippi to the civil rights movement and the life of a professor.
October 18-November 5, 2022 

Paradise Enough

Review of Ah, Wilderness!, Hartford Stage

The Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, a rare Eugene O’Neill comedy, directed by the theater’s new artistic director Melia Benussen, was initially scheduled for Bensussen’s first season, back in 2019-20. It would’ve been the season’s finale. The COVID pandemic tabled those plans, causing Bensussen’s debut to be pushed back to the 2020-21 season that never was. Now, the production opens the 2021-22 season, a symbol of theater’s endurance and a return to a kind of normality. In any case, it’s a welcome experience: sitting again in the Hartford Stage theater and experiencing a handsomely mounted production of a classic play somewhat revised for our times.

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

The play itself may seem a somewhat odd choice. But for the references to Yale, New Haven, Waterbury and other Connecticut places that situate the play squarely in our vicinity, we might wonder why this play now. That local aspect—the homefield advantage?—is reassuring in its way. We know how much the recent distress over the pandemic came down to how well discrete municipalities handled the challenge. Connecticut didn’t do as badly as some. Why not a look back at one of the state’s local heroes? The O’Neill family spent summers in New London and their Monte Cristo cottage is the presumed setting for Ah, Wilderness!, set on a Fourth of July weekend early in the twentieth century. The play itself dates from the 1930s, and so the very notion of “dated” is built into its thematics, so to speak.

And that’s because, first of all, this is O’Neill’s somewhat light-hearted and ironic look back at his early years when he felt himself schooled by the likes of such literary luminaries as Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg. Richard Miller, his alter ego here, is played by Jaevon Williams as somewhat prissy and comically self-important. It’s necessary to the play’s tone that we find his pretentions laughable, even if we might find acclimation to the stodgy standards of the time a let-down in any hero. What saves the play, and what might come as a surprise given the way intergenerational conflict is generally dramatized in O’Neill and others, is how Richard’s parents are depicted. Suffice to say, we’re in the realm of situation comedy of the “father knows best” variety.

The task of representing a sympathetic, generous, patient and amused elder generation is ably handled by Michael Boatman as Nat Miller, the family’s patriarch. In a time when “patriarchal” is not only a dated concept but one roundly denounced, Boatman reminds us of how ably the position could be inhabited. Nat sticks up for his errant son when required—against the censorious father (Joseph Adams) of Richard’s love interest—and knows well enough that youth is a period of trial and error where the errors are part of the project of growing up. It’s a benign play that ends on just the right note of long-standing love, tolerance, and belief in a shared life together: the sort of things we like to think we mean when we talk about “family values.”

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

Other elements in the play are apt to be problematic, but then they no doubt always were. Key on that score is Sid (McCaleb Burnett), the familiar figure of the drunken Irishman, here bringing in some necessary verbal humor and a personality that doesn’t fit with the respectable face the family wears for social status—Burnett shines in the big “family at the table” set-piece. The sentimental interest in this character—who woos relentlessly Lily (Natascia Diaz), the sister of Mrs. Miller, to earn a by-now inevitable rebuff—likely has shifted. Where the sympathy may once have been with the erring bachelor in need of a good woman to save him, it’s likely we find ourselves sympathizing all the more with a good woman who can’t find any other suitor than this ne’er-do-well and who can’t have any life outside a domestic setting. Such are the times of the play and such are the social strait-jackets that O’Neill delineates while trying—for romantic comedy purposes—to offer a view where “meant for each other” doesn’t equate with “lacking any other options.”

The youngest generation is well-served by Katerina McCrimmon as younger sister Mildred; she squirms about on the couch at one point with the kind of eager-to-break-out-of-it-all energy that makes us wonder what a play focused on her might become. As it is, the play’s tour of the naughty “house of ill repute,” where Richard nearly gets seduced by Belle (Brittany Annika Liu), and then gets into a fight trying to protect her honor, which she finds ridiculous, is never particularly comic or dramatic. Likewise the scene between Richard and his love interest Muriel doesn’t quite connect either. Both Belle and Muriel are played by Liu and she is not really convincing as either the Virgin or the Whore, those two poles by which female behavior was judged at the time. It’s not O’Neill’s intention to lampoon these clichés outright and so we have to accept them in the light of the naturalism he inherited from his literary heroes. And yet . . . it seems that one way to breathe new life into the play is to find a way to make Richard’s scenes with the women riskier or funnier or, indeed, more romantic. Much of the problem lies with Williams’ over-earnest Richard, who even when drunk is so far from dissolute that it all seems little ado over less.

Richard Miller (Jaevon Williams) and Muriel Macomber (Brittany Annika Liu) in the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The lack of strong focus in the young persons’ scenes makes all the more important the older couple’s coping with their errant son. As the matriarch Essie Miller, Antoinette LaVecchia is lively in her fussiness and sense of rightness, and in the play’s close her seconding of her husband shines with a wisdom gained from a lifetime of intimacy. Ah, Wilderness! may be rom-com, but the romance is with family and the enduring couple at its heart, and with the feints and fits and starts by which that desiderata can be achieved. Quaint? Yes, but then, like the play’s fulminations about socialism spreading in the U.S, some attitudes are perennials. Ah, Wilderness! takes its title from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, beloved of Richard, in those famous lines about a book of verses, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou—that close with “Wilderness were paradise enough.” The upshot is that every successful couple finds paradise in the wilderness, and the wilderness can best be enjoyed together.

Essie Miller (Antoinetta LaVecchia) and Nat Miller (Michael Boatman) in the Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The play, which is a treat to watch on James Noone’s open, vertical, many-layered set, reminds us forcefully that some things just don’t fit on screens: live, multi-character theater on a grand stage notably. It’s great to be back at Hartford Stage, and it is time well-spent to revisit the past as shaded by the present. With its perfect tech—lighting by Wen-Ling Liao and costumes by Olivera Gajic, with hair, wigs and make-up by J. Jared Janis, and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen—Melia Bensussen brings a neglected O’Neill comedy to life, featuring the very welcome addition of period songs sung by the cast, with live piano provided onstage by Yan Li. The songs keep the times alive but also indicate the commonality that the play—with its multi-ethnic cast—achieves without foregrounding any specific American ethnicity. From each according to ability? Paradise enough.

Ah, Wilderness!
By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Joseph Adams, Michael Boatman, Annie Jean Buckley, McCaleb Burnett, Natascia Diaz, Antonio Jose Jeffries, Tanner Jones, Antoinette LaVecchia, Brittany Annika Liu, Myles Low, Katerina McCrimmon, Stuart Rider, Jaevon Williams

Scenic Design: Jim Noone; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Wen-Ling Liao; Sound Design: Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen; Music Director/Pianist: Yan Li; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Choreographer: Ted Hewlett

Hartford Stage
October 14-November 7, 2021

Policed to Death

Review of KILL MOVE PARADISE, Playhouse on Park

The play for the Playhouse on Park debut of director Dexter J. Singleton, known in New Haven for his work as Founding Executive Artistic Director at Collective Consciousness Theatre, is well-chosen. At CCT, plays by authors of color are the norm, and dramas that confront issues of social justice even as they entertain and enlighten have been staged with great success. CCT is a black box theater which is why it’s quite a change to see Singleton’s work on an outdoors stage in Bushnell Park, Hartford. The open space and wide stage create an unusual atmosphere for what might otherwise be a somewhat claustrophobic play. James Ijames’ powerful KILL MOVE PARADISE is set in a fantasy afterlife, a “no exit” space seemingly reserved for black men who have died at the hands of police. The play ran live in person for three dates in late June and is available for streaming over the internet through August 1. Go here.

There’s something of a “Waiting for Godot” feel about the piece as the four characters, each arriving separately and at intervals, have to cope with determining their whereabouts and what is going on: Isa (Trevele Morgan), Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), and Tiny (Quan Chambers), an adolescent. What’s more, this afterlife includes the audience. The idea of “fourth wall” doesn’t really apply as the space the men inhabit is not entirely clear even to them. The back wall is on a slant (a bit like a skateboard ramp) and occasionally one will try to climb it. At one point Daz  goes behind it to retrieve a lawn chair. It’s the only prop in the play other than a printer that emits a constantly increasing list of the wrongfully slain.

The lawn chair is a fitting prop because the audience—visible in shots taken from its viewpoint—is sitting on lawn chairs. The outdoors aspect of the event makes for an interesting friction with the play’s mood. Even as the young men express their discomfort and anxiety, knowing that the “they” watching them is predominantly white (Isa calls it “America”), the audience seems relaxed and nonjudgmental. Admittedly, watching the play streamed on the computer adds a buffer for the viewer. One is able to feel that the audience there on the grass is the “they” the young men refer to, while “we” watch from some more remote location. That’s just one of those things about the presence and non-presence of online theater. Here, it adds a further implication since the “they” that has victimized these men and a host of other black U.S. citizens is always present but rarely acknowledged. It’s all of us, collectively, and none of us, individually as viewers. Determining how much one feels “called out” by what the men say about the audience is part of the play’s work.

The cast of James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park, directed by Dexter J. Singleton (Photo by Meredith Longo)

The portions of the play in which the men struggle with this sense of how they should react to their situation are its most probing. Isa worries about profiling, Grif sees beauty in the crowd, Daz feels affronted by attitudes that tell him what he should be, and Tiny, the youth, finally confronts the crowd, fake pistol in hand, insisting “it’s not real. I’m real.” Such confrontational moments are almost haphazard, which is another way of saying that one never knows when they will arise.

The dramatic situation of being fatalities together but also still conscious and interacting makes for vivid give-and-take between the characters, though the tone tends to veer about a bit, making it hard to keep a read on who these four are, even to themselves. Add to that Ijames’ technique of keeping the play bouncing along by working in a pastiche format, including sitcoms, a soul-music song and dance, computer-game tagging, and a recital of stuff Daz noted backstage—some of it highly symbolic, some quite random, some a bit too heavily marked as racial baggage. We’re never in one reality for too long as if the sad fact of the four’s current status would be overwhelming, to us and to them, without some theatrical razzamatazz.

Isa (Trevele Morgan), foreground, Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (Photo by Meredith Longo)

Isa arrives first and is the most easily accommodating, both to his own situation and to dealing with the others. He’s practically a host, apt to read instructions aloud. Grif is more truculent and the one most likely to disrupt the easygoing mood Isa tries to maintain. Daz is the most “street” of the three, with a nickname “Dazzle,” and a “code name,” Daz, and a fondness for the phrase “my n---a.” His litany of what else is backstage where he found the chair seems oddly unfocused as if Daz refuses to endorse most of what he’s saying. At times, the three seem to accept each other, at other times they seem at odds even with the personalities they present.

At one point Isa reads out a list of black citizens who became fatal victims of police actions. The reading becomes a dramatic act of mourning and an overwhelming moment bordering on despair. Though that’s not the main mood of the piece, it’s important that it be registered, otherwise the theatrical aspects of the four’s situation could easily morph into a world where someone’s suffering is someone else’s entertainment.

Tiny (Quan Chambers), foreground, Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), Isa (Trevele Morgan) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

The arrival of Tiny, still gripping the toy gun that occasioned his death, is an affront to the others as the most outrageous killing. The boy’s attitude makes for a nice contrast with theirs as he’s smart, sharp, and not easily intimidated. He inspires a certain compassion in the others if only because they enjoyed more life and experience than he did, and their effort to bring him along makes for a dramatic focus in the play’s second half. One could say that the point of the play’s action is for each of the four to understand his own death, to see it in the light of martyrdom or sacrifice or simply a bad break or a result of the systemic racism that each has had to deal with while denying its lethality, until now. An ironically charged moment in the play—acted as a sitcom complete with laugh-track—highlights the unreality of the characters’ situation, as if the enormity of Tiny’s death can only come home to him within a normative, albeit silly, frame.

The tonal shifts in the play can sometimes arrest its flow when it seems that it’s building to more extended considerations. It’s as if Ijames is worried that if he doesn’t keep things lively, he’ll lose our attention. The problem is that the dialogue is very elliptical and requires a lot of physical and verbal shifts, not all of which seem natural to the actors. Singleton makes the most of the wide stage, and the sound effects are very effective even in an outdoor setting The camera work and editing of the video version is excellent, making home-viewers feel they have the best seat in the house while also giving us a bit of a detached view.

In the end, KILL MOVE PARADISE is a nimble play that plays with our sense of dramatic conventions even as it makes us feel the force of its take on the dire situation of race relations in contemporary America.

KILL MOVE PARADISE
By James Ijames
Directed by Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Quan Chambers, Christopher Alexander Chukwueke, Oliver Sai Lester, Trevele Morgan

Playhouse on Park
July 7-August 1, 2021

A Play For The Moment

Tiny House, at Westport County Playhouse

Happy 4th of July, that testament to the foundational myth of the United States of America. During this year’s Independence Day, Westport County Playhouse returns to active theater with Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, a dramedy set on a 4th of July lived “off the grid.” It’s a nice bit of irony. The show is streaming theater that takes us to the remote mountainous home of a couple—Sam & Nick—who purport to have withdrawn from corporate America and the distractions of internet culture. Which means they wouldn’t be likely to access theater like this.

The play takes its cue from our contemporary moment of crisis in which catastrophe looms and methods of coping have become the order of the day. And that’s apropos, as streaming theater, in which the remote audience attends theatrical content prepared digitally, was a part of many people’s quarantine experience. The fact that as of this week most theatrical restrictions of the pandemic have been lifted (for fully vaccinated companies) by Actors Equity, such as bans on actors occupying the same theater space, makes the Westport production already feel dated, part of last summer’s situational awareness.

And, on that note, just to get it out of the way: the digital green-screen version of this play is an oddly hybrid experience. The actors are all in different spaces trying to keep each other in believable eyelines, and efforts to create the illusion that they are in contact are oddly intrusive, like trying to hide the strings on puppets. Otherwise, there’s a detailed backdrop of a tiny house (you know, those cramped, small-footprint, ingenious boxes in which bourgeois accoutrements are reduced to the dimensions of a cruise ship’s cabin for a life free of excess, clutter, and waste), and very ripe nature shots, like a mountain/valley view aimed to induce vertigo and a forest verdantly ancient as only digital imagery can be. The Westport show is better than Zoom theater but not as satisfying as actors on stage together relayed by video, as at TheaterWorks this season. Even so, there’s considerable interest in contemplating how director Mark Lamos and his team pulled off this virtual theater-space which has its own odd charm. (And cheers to Westport Country Playhouse for continuing on; Tiny Houses opened on June 29, exactly 90 years since WCP first opened its doors, on June 29, 1931, so it certainly has been around for some trying times.)

Sam (Sara Bues) and Nick (Denver Milord) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The play itself is a hodgepodge of the edgy, the erratic and the aiming-at-entertaining. Nick (Denver Milord) and Sam (Sara Bues), the well-intentioned male-female couple hosting, have, of course, their issues, notably with Sam’s recovery from a miscarriage. She’s feeling vulnerable and not up to what is bound to be an abrasive visit from her mother, Billie (Elizabeth Heflin), a divorcee now living with her former brother-in-law, Larry (Lee E. Ernst). Sam’s father has been jailed for perpetrating “the biggest Ponzi scheme since Jesus walked the earth” (it’s a neat line and gets trotted out three times), and there’s lots of bad feelings and traumatic scarring about that.

Larry (Lee E. Ernst) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The “zany neighbor” role is given a switch in presenting the grim and mysterious Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), an armed hunter of marmots who may have been CIA and is concerned with the approaching “zero hour” of some indefinite apocalypse. We might assume this is just gun-nut fantasy, but he’s listening to “chatter” and everyone but Billie voices anxiety over the state of the world—whether climate change or anxiety-inducing news bulletins in general. Bernard helps keep alive the notion that this play is about more than awkward company on a holiday weekend but mainly he just sets up the punch that is the ending note of the play.

Bernard (Hassan El-Amin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The family sparring gets its most intense when Billie, in youth a bunny at Hef’s Playboy mansion, gets into an escalating aria of jabbering grievance with Nick that is the aural equivalent of speed-scrolling leftist 30something (Nick) and rightist Baby Boomer (Billie) flashpoints simultaneously. Like much in this play, it’s overwrought to little purpose. Early on, Nick has lines that make him a fun take-off of the intensely concerned and focused man-child of our times, so keen to offset the mess elder generations have made of the world. But the elder generation here, but for Billie, are little more than wan comic relief sporting hippier-than-thou wiftiness. Larry, in Ernst’s energetic performance, might add a loose cannon’s surprises but he collapses into the abyss of truly zany neighbors Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) who play on the laughs automatically conjured by Renaissance festivals, Tolkienesque elf-folk and hallucinogen-laced vegan tortes. Sigh.

Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

When the transmission’s sixty-second intermission arrived I was already wondering if—as with a game’s halftime—there would be a turn-around or if it was already over. In the second part, we get to the payoff of Gotch’s best idea: that the unsustainable civilization bequeathed us by twentieth-century capitalism is the equivalent of a giant Ponzi scheme that has suckered us all. That, to me, was the ideological upshot of Sam’s harangue to her mother about how bad it is to grow up as the besmirched daughter of a con-man and national disgrace. Bues gives the speech her all but it’s not her fault that the lines don’t give her much awareness beyond poor-pitiful-me whining and a self-satisfied jab at Mom (whose own woe-is-me depiction of life after Shamalot we’ve already heard). Both Bues and Heflin almost convince us we’re seeing the kind of self-exposure with consequences that drama sometimes achieves, but the ploy of having Nick overhear a certain statement by Sam feels utterly contrived—and nothing comes of it anyway.

Sam (Sara Bues), Nick (Denver Milord), Billie (Elizabeth Heflin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

And that’s the nature of this particular gathering: some good ideas, agreeable performances, digital sleight-of-hand (some of which works well), in service to the baleful thought that we’re basically fiddling while Rome burns. Maybe so, but more fiddling with the script would not be out of order. As it is, Tiny House aims to be a play of its moment that only manages to be a play for the moment.

Tiny House
By Michael Gotch
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Hugh Landwehr; Digital Scenic Design: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Design: Tricia Barsamian; Original Music and Sound Design: Rob Milburn, Michael Bodeen; Sound Edit, Mix and Additional Sound Design: M. Florian Staab; Editor: Dan Scully; Director of Photography: Lacey Erb; Wig Design: Christal Schanes; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Marholin; Assistant Stage Manager: Ellen Beltramo

Cast: Sara Bues; Hassan El-Amin; Lee E. Ernst; Elizabeth Heflin; Denver Milord; Stephen Pelinski; Kathleen Pirkl-Tague

Westport Country Playhouse
June 29-July 18, 2021
Streaming On Demand

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About

Review of Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut

In 1975, Truman Capote was a celebrity, someone—as he says in the play Tru now playing both live before audiences and on live streaming at Music Theatre of Connecticut in Norwalk, directed by Kevin Connors—“famous for being famous.” The basis for that fame began with Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, but really went mega with his groundbreaking study of a multiple homicide in 1959 Kansas in the best-selling “true crime novel” In Cold Blood (1966), subsequently made into a successful film. An earlier success was the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), made into a popular film by Blake Edwards.

His fame allowed Capote to maintain a jet-set lifestyle among the glitterati—aristocrats, celebrities, and the immensely rich. The immediate setting for Tru is Christmas of 1975, just after the publication in Esquire of excerpts from Answered Prayers, the unfinished manuscript intended to be his magnum opus. In the form now called autofiction, the stories were thinly veiled “fictional” and unflattering treatments of the high-rollers among whom Capote had been passing much of his time. The outrage was great, and Capote, as the play goes along, is still largely in denial of how bad the fallout will be.

All of which is just by way of background, as Capote, who died in 1984, is not quite the household name he used to be, back when his frequent appearance on talk shows, not least Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, kept him in the living rooms and bedrooms of America. The play, while it certainly goes over best for those with some prior awareness of Capote and some of the big names he drops, comes across regardless, due largely to Capote’s considerable charm and way with words (most of which are adapted from Capote’s interviews and writings). Actually, those with no previous opinion of Capote might find the play more entertaining than those for whom the sad fact of Capote’s deterioration as a writer and then as a social butterfly has more sting.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Capote cut a singular figure, with an immediately recognizable voice, wispy, reedy. He was “out” before that was a generally recognized status, with long-term male partners and no effort to appear heterosexual. Capote’s affable and unflappable manner is rendered well by Jeff Gurner, who sounds like him, without parodying the manner, and, at a distance as dressed by Diane Vanderkroef, looks enough like the diminutive author to give us a facsimile of the man. The entire play takes place in Capote’s very tasteful living room in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan (overlooking United Nations Plaza) as designed by Lindsay Fuori with prop design by Sean Sanford. Lighting design by RJ Romeo adds significant aura to moments of dramatic recollection.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play opens with Capote offended by the anonymous gift of a poinsettia and concludes when Capote, in his characteristic chapeau, dark shades, and overcoat, exits grandly for a holiday dinner with Ava Gardner and others who haven’t dropped him. Along the way, Gurner treats us to the pathos of a figure still giddy about his success and insecure about his reputation, so he must keep us enthralled by mannerism and self-quotation. At times, we feel like we’ve been summoned to an interview where we don’t get to pose the questions but must simply record the bon mots as they rain upon us.

The monologue to which Capote subjects us includes moments such as his sending telegrams and engaging in telephone conversations. In these moments we sense the public Capote and that lets the tone he directs to the audience—whom he sometimes addresses as though all-too-aware that he is observed at all times—seem more private and off-the-cuff. It’s a nice distinction as Capote comes across as someone for whom life is only significant when it is shared—whether with readers, viewers, friends, hangers-on, reporters, lovers, family, enemies. The key point is that someone attends, and so, if Tru (as he’s generally known) gets bored talking to us, he can pick up a phone and let us overhear him talking to someone else.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 ( photo by Alex Mongillo)

Which of course means that Capote is a good subject for a one-person play as his manner is essentially theatrical. In the second half of the play he even does a dance routine—just to take us by surprise—and is constantly insistent on the fact that, even if he himself is not always appreciated as a performer, he has been in the presence of great performers all his life, including dancing as a child while Louis Armstrong performed and, of course, complimented him.

The point isn’t the truth, for Tru, it’s carrying off his version of things. And now he’s in hot water for not carrying off his portraits of socialites—a classic case of biting the hand that, if it doesn’t exactly feed one, at least feeds one’s vanity. And yet, for the moment, that’s all to the good because it means everyone is talking about those pieces in Esquire. And as Oscar Wilde might well remind him, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” There may be something worse, though, as Capote will learn: not being spoken to. The silence that meets his efforts to reach out will drive him to more drink and drugs and more self-parodic stagings of his public persona.

Is there a moral? It’s hard to say, given that any sense of tragedy occurs, as it were, off-stage. In the play’s time-setting, Tru hasn’t yet declined. We might guess that such private theatricality, while tonic for anonymous onlookers, can be costly to the man forever in the spotlight. And yet—the play may convince us—that is Capote’s victory. He has become a character, forever larger than life and more interesting as fiction than as fact. Robert Morse earned a Tony for playing Capote in Tru on Broadway in 1990 and an Emmy for the same role in a televised version in 1992; Phillip Seymour Hoffman earned an Oscar for playing Capote in the film Capote (2005). Capote’s books have become classics and his persona a celebrated role. Perhaps nothing could be truer to Tru.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Tru
Jay Presson Allen
Adapted from the works of Truman Capote
Directed by Kevin Connors

Starring Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote

Sound Design: Will Atkin; Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
April 23-May 9, 2021

Lockdown Lives

We’re approaching the first anniversary of the pandemic lockdown that prematurely ended the theater season of 2019-20 and spawned a variety of coping mechanisms in the form of online theater approximations into 2021. The “watch-when-you-will by following a link” style of online event is the more prevalent and Playhouse on Park in West Hartford is currently offering a zoom playlet in that format. Elyot and Amanda: All Alone could be called a pandemic adaptation of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s popular comedy of mannered, sparring couples, from 1930 (last seen locally at Hartford Stage, directed by Darko Tresnjak, in 2015). Directed by Sean Harris, what Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox, as Elyot and Amanda, respectively, have devised is a glimpse of a couple walking their wits as they have nothing but one another’s company to sustain them. A situation familiar to so many of us who abide by the restrictions on socializing beyond the most immediate.

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone features only the second act of Coward’s three act—it’s the part where E and A, formerly married to each other, have ditched their respective newer spouses and hole up together in Amanda’s Paris flat to see if they can let the world go by and just abide together. Turns out they can, if by that is meant that they can both stimulate and aggravate each other by turns. All reference to their most recent marriages has been omitted from the current script (with the Coward estate’s appreciated OK) and so we can imagine the couple are in the midst of their original marriage’s long durée. Their dialogue is best as the kind of repartee that many a stressed couple might indulge in: part fond reminisce, part fulsome recrimination, part provocation, part appeasement, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, sometimes not at all sure what it’s getting at beyond simply keeping open the possibility of chat. The allure of such exchanges, among the locked-down, is that they are live and in person, as so little else is.

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Key to the success of this experiment in repurposed Coward is the way the show is relayed. It’s by camera, but not in a single static perspective. There’s enough movement—from a  high fish-eye shot that takes in almost the entire room to more partial views to a shot very nicely framed in the doorway late in the play—to keep the viewer’s interest. And Barnes and Cox move about as if fully at home in the space (and why not, it’s Barnes’ apartment). Clad in very becoming silk pajamas (Amanda) and a somewhat nebbishy dressing-gown (Elyot), the couple at times seem like people we’re watching surreptitiously because they’ve left their laptop’s camera on. The show feels much more like the invasion of privacy that perhaps Coward intended than any onstage version could likely manage.

There are a number of high points but the one that probably best says it all is when Elyot, feeling amorous, tries to move to second base with Amanda only to be repulsed because “it’s too soon after dinner.” He’s irked, and it’s a good scene showing them as both agreeable and at odds, but what places the exchange in a new age of comedy is the way Barnes immediately grabs the hand sanitizer on the coffee table and sets to cleansing his hands—an automatic act—that is also washing his hands of the failed forward pass. A similar high-spirited moment is when Amanda puts on a record that annoys Elyot and proceeds to step lightly to it, underscoring a blithe spirit lacking in her spouse. When she later breaks the record on his head—after he scratches it—it seems less like violent pique and more like an echo of passionate slapstick. Something we suspect this couple knows a lot about.

Amanda ( Veanne Cox) and Elyot (Ezra Barnes) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Ezra Barnes’ Elyot is blustery when he needs to be, but not really truculent. He seems thoroughly domesticated, even though there are hints of plenty of past exploits. Veanne Cox makes Amanda his easygoing match—she’s more likely to goad for amusement than to draw blood or discomfit. The show has the even tone of the long haul, where even the outbursts can only go so far. And when the couple gets into the same act, as when affecting posh Brit accents, there’s obvious life-of-the-party sparkle left in the old ceremony.

A few songs at the piano create an agreeable musical intermission of sorts and shows how the couple can do it if they want to duet. In the end, after Amanda storms out—not without her mask—and then storms back, the act’s actual denouement (the arrival of those pesky spouses) is dropped in favor of a bit of hanky-panky patty-cake that provides a suitably upbeat sendoff. Elyot and Amanda—like their audience, one hopes—is weathering the storm, outlasting the lockdown, and generally keeping their spirits up in “glorious oblivion.” What more is there?

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone
From Noël Coward’s Private Lives
Starring Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox
Directed by Sean Harris
Playhouse on Park
February 10-28, 2021

NOTE:
Streaming of Elyot and Amanda: All Alone has been extended to March 7.

Seasonal Cheer

Christmas on the Rocks, TheaterWorks

 Merry Covid Christmas! The best meme I’ve seen on the current mood is “Don we now our plague apparel” above masks hung like stockings. Still, it is the holiday season and that means certain tried and true Christmas favorites are available in the online streaming environment.

One such is Rob Ruggiero’s durable Christmas on the Rocks at TheaterWorks. The show works because it assumes that much of the cultural glue of Yuletide, among the TV generations anyway, was provided by the Christmas perennials: the programming that the networks foist upon viewers every year when December rolls around. These are the kind of shows often called ‘beloved,’ but they can also cloy as time goes by, except, maybe, with children still experiencing their buoyant wonder for the first time.

Which is a way of saying that the tone of Christmas on the Rocks—the whole thing takes place in a bar—is for adults, particularly adults who may have soured on ersatz Christmas cheer somewhere around the turn of the millennium. So be prepared for nuttiness, desperation, depression, laughs and, through it all, the kind of warm, fuzzy values that Christmas shows foster to raise the spirits of us fellow humans.

This year, Love Boat regular Ted Lange is back as the bartender just trying to get through his Christmas eve shift, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but … Ralphie (from The Christmas Story), Zuzu (from It’s a Wonderful Life), Herbie the elf/dentist (from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), Karen (from Frosty the Snowman), Tiny Tim (from A Christmas Carol), Clara (from The Nutcracker), and Charlie Brown (from A Charlie Brown Christmas), who is joined by a special someone. This year Jen Harris again plays all the female guests, Randy Harrison returns as Ralphie and Tiny Tim, Matthew Wilkas plays Herbie, and Harry Bouvy plays Charlie Brown.

The innovation in our distanced days is that this time Lange, who is in California, provides the voice of the Bartender while the camera gives us the latter’s POV on the evening. It’s more static than watching the play onstage, and of course we miss Lange’s non-verbal reactions, but it does make for an even stricter intimacy. We see what the camera shows us and all the visitors are perforce addressing us directly. It’s another example of TheaterWorks’ grasp of the necessary artistry of taping theater for streaming purposes.

The seven cleverly scripted scenes are written by seven playwrights, with Harris and Wilkas teaming up on Scene Four, “My Name is KAREN!”, and Jacques Lamarre authoring two: Scene Two, “It’s a Miserable Life,” and Scene Seven, “Merry Christmas, Blockhead.” The best scenes are those in which Lange has more to do verbally, so that he is actually interacting rather than just passively viewing. It’s best when he’s trying to understand the plight of his customer, as in Scene One—“All Grown Up,” by John Cariani—and Scene Two. Both of those are entertaining because Ralphie and Zuzu are seen as suffering, as grownups, from the long shadow of the heart-warming anecdotes of their childhood. It’s good stuff, in the early going, and it pulls us in.

In Scene Four, the Bartender is gagged and bound as Harris’s Karen interacts with her online fanbase. The streaming POV this year lets us be at times the online audience and at times the Bartender, seamlessly. It’s a wild and over-the-top performance, so manic that we welcome the more modulated and touching Scene Five—“God Bless Us Every One”—in which Lange comes on strong in taking Scrooge’s part against Tiny Tim’s flippant dismissal.

Watching this year, I felt that Harrison’s departure out that door, as a re-inspired Tim giving his trademark sign-off (too bad the kid didn’t copyright that saying!) would be a satisfying and resonant ending. The last two episodes—Harris’s nutty Clara and Bouvy’s dullsville Charlie Brown—tended to dampen my spirits rather than raise them. One might reflect that there’s a reason Charlie Brown never had a solo show—he’s just not funny! Granted, On the Rocks wants to end with its one romantic moment, and it’s never wrong, I guess, to aim for the “date” tie-in (not something that’s going to be a factor for me, frankly). To my mind, it might be time to shake up the formula with a different sequence of scenes. Even some versions of A Christmas Carol, after all, alter the sequence of ghosts.

In any case, ‘tis the season to seek out distractions from the sad state of affairs in our poor beleaguered country, and maybe from the same-o, same-o replays of the too-often viewed and overly familiar paeans of our snuggly past and other reassuring panaceas. In becoming a seasonal staple, Christmas on the Rocks has it both ways, drawing us in by reactivating braincells that have stored these stories for decades, and then giving us something a bit different, like when someone spikes the cookies instead of the eggnog. In the end, it wants us to believe that, even if all those folks in those fairytales didn’t live happily ever after, they can still have a good time. And give us one too, with just enough ho-ho-ho’s to make the season bright . . . or at least less dim.

Christmas on the Rocks
Conceived and Directed by Rob Ruggiero|
Written by: John Cariani, Jenn Harris & Matthew Wilkas, Jeffrey Hatcher, Jacques Lamarre, Theresa Rebeck, Edwin Sánchez

Set Design: Michael Schweikardt; Costume Design: Alejo Vietti; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design: Michael Miceli; Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Harry Bouvy, Jenn Harris, Randy Harrison, Matthew Wilkas, And Ted Lange

TheaterWorks
Streaming December 1-31, 2020

Life With Father

The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

Ayad Akhtar writes plays in which dialogue has a way of being emotional, at times amusing, and often freighted with the weight of ideological themes. His plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand both had powerful stagings in Connecticut, the latter at Westport Country Playhouse and at TheaterWorks in Hartford. Now TheaterWorks brings us The Who and the What, which dates from 2014.

Before discussing the play, a word about how the production is brought to its audience. Staged at TheaterWorks, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, the four-person play has been taped for online viewing with considerable skill. Which means credit for camera director Dan Garee and cinematographers Evan Olson and Ally Lenihan, S.R.’s sound design and the video production of Miceli Productions. If you’ve ever watched plays videotaped for television—which used to be a fairly common event—you’ll find the TheaterWorks production as capable and professional as most you may have seen. Except, instead of a soundstage in a studio, the play uses TheaterWorks’ stage, with set design by Brian Prather (adapted from Michael Schweikardt’s design), costumes by Mika Eubanks, and lighting by Amith Chandrashaker. It looks and sounds like a TheaterWorks show, viewed in one’s own home.

Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi) in The Who and the What, by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The play takes place in a few key locations, mostly domestic interiors and park benches, as Akhtar’s script covers several years in a succinct presentation of what could be called scenic highlights. The details of these characters’ lives could sustain much further explication but Akhtar is a playwright able to make exposition and backstory come out in the course of dialogue. It’s a method that lets each scene portray what is dramatically relevant to the story at hand. And the story has several dramatic cruxes.

To begin with, it’s the story of Afzal, a doting but also domineering Muslim father, played by Rajesh Bose with a wonderfully compelling sense of how bullying is often a matter of both sweetness and implied threat. He has two daughters, Zarina (Jessica Jain), the elder, and Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi). Mahwish already has a fiancé approved by Afzal, so now his task is to find a mate for Zarina so she can marry before her younger sibling does. We later learn that Zarina did have a beau interested in marrying her but he was rejected by Afzal because he was a Christian.

Right there, of course, we’re in a conservative “old world” way of doing things, which we imagine will not sit well with daughters raised in America. Yet what interests Akhtar is how the twin engines of “modern” and “traditional” drive the contemporary Muslim family. The play opens with Afzal meeting with Eli (Stephen Elrod), a blind date for Zarina that Afzal has arranged by pretending to be Zarina in an online dating service! The fact that Eli, who sees this meeting as awkward if not grotesque, manages to deal with this romantic vetting in a way that doesn’t antagonize Afzal means that maybe he’s got son-in-law potential. And Afzal is at his charming best in his man-to-man chats with Eli. The tenor of such talks—after Eli does indeed become his son-in-law—never preclude Afzal’s sense of what is right for the couple and how his daughter needs to be handled so that her willfulness, as a modern woman, is properly “broken.”

Afzal is a widower who has become a success managing a fleet of cabs in Atlanta, and his great ambition is that his daughters start families of their own. His machinations to achieve that end, we might guess, will be the subject of the play as he offends against his daughters’ progressive views. To further that plot line, we hear that Zarina—Harvard educated with an MFA—is working on a book on gender politics. The scene where she has a first date with Eli, as a subservient gesture to her father, runs a potential minefield as Eli is white, a convert to Islam, and possibly more enthusiastic about the faith than Zarina herself. Which leads us to the main plot point: Zarina’s book isn’t simply critical of such practices as arranged marriages and wearing the hijab. It’s a novel in which the prophet Mohammad is viewed as a man with a man’s many imperfections and at times hurtful attitudes toward women.

Eli (Stephen Elrod) and Zarina (Jessica Jain) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The possible tensions between Eli and Zarina increase once he reads her manuscript, and their arguments about the portrayal of the prophet constitute another of the play’s interests: how sacred materials become profane within a secular form like the novel. The contentious nature of this couple is evident from the start and Jain and Elrod are fun to watch as they try to score points off one another. Zarina knows she’s writing fiction but sometimes speaks as though her version of Mohammad is truer than the one received from the traditional and pious anecdotes shared by the faithful. Eli shows himself to be able to reason within a dialectics in which fiction can feel true and received truth may not be fact. Not so Afzal who sees the book as a blasphemous affront, and the play—in Bose’s strong performance—does not shortchange his visceral outrage. That the denigration of the prophet (as he sees it) is also a denigration of the father is the obvious subtext to his rage.

Zarina (Jessica Jain), Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi), Afzal (Rajesh Bose) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

What holds our attention (admittedly, a deliberately secular “our”) in the play is less the question of how or whether holy figures can be portrayed in speculative ways, and more the question of how these two women navigate the fraught terrain of life with father. The play’s situation certainly feels genuine, keeping in mind clashes of Islamic fundamentalism and Western satire as for instance the much publicized fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 for depictions of the prophet Mohammad in The Satanic Verses or the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015. Afzal’s fear that Zarina will suffer persecution or assault for her novel, if published, certainly are justified. But the play, whose title is the same as Zarina’s book, doesn’t take on the task of showing us media response and cultural backlash, other than in passing reference. Instead, it remains focused on the seismic disturbances in the family unit. Which might make us wonder whether the book itself is something of a McGuffin. It doesn’t really matter except that it brings Zarina’s questions to light for her husband and her father to read and react to. The arguments would likely have come about even without such an overt questioning.

Well-staged, well-played, well-taped, The Who and the What is also well-written in giving us “the who” of these characters and “the what” of the differences in viewpoint, orientation, and expectation that make for family drama across generations and between cultures. The who and the what of the book Zarina writes may carry huge impact or seem much ado about nothing, depending on one’s view of Mohammad and the Muslim faith, but it’s importance could be made more of as something beyond a family matter. What’s more, the episodic nature of the play creates an effect a bit like watching “season highlights” of an ongoing TV serial or sitcom. We get the scenes wherein something major happens, but not the scenes that help to create genuine interest in these characters. The play ends with a punchline, a “joke’s on Afzal” jab that might be easily followed by “tune in next week.”

The Who and the What
By Ayad Akhtar
Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar

Set Design: Brian Prather (adapted from a design for the stage by Michael Sweikardt); Costume Design: Mika Eubanks; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Sound Design: S.R.; Video Production: Miceli Productions; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

 Cast: Rajesh Bose, Stephen Elrod, Sanam Laila Hashemi, Jessica Jain

TheaterWorks
November 15-28, 2020

A Life in Interesting Times

RFK, Music Theatre of Connecticut

It’s interesting that this election season has featured two very similar plays at area theaters. First, Playhouse on Park in West Hartford offered Bobby’s Last Crusade; now, Music Theatre of Connecticut is staging Jack Holmes’ RFK, directed by Kevin Connors. Both plays heroize and humanize the one-term New York senator, former U.S. attorney general, and assassinated Democratic presidential contestant Robert Francis Kennedy, the seventh of nine children and the third of four sons in the celebrated Kennedy clan. RFK was a charismatic, thoughtful and youthful politician—he died at age 42—who fathered eleven children, served in the administration of his elder brother President John Fitzgerald Kennedy where he took on organized crime, in the person of Jimmy Hoffa, and clashed with the F.B.I.’s domineering head, J. Edgar Hoover, and became, for a brief period in 1968, a figure for the hope for change in the Democratic Party which, at that point, had controlled the presidency for seven years and the U.S. Congress for thirteen and was embroiled in an undeclared war in Vietnam.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The dramatic core of RFK is only indirectly the legacy of Kennedy’s brother and former boss, President Kennedy. It’s a play about how Robert Kennedy found himself more and more convinced that he might be the man of the hour, and that the hour was getting late. His break with the policies of Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president and presumed candidate for reelection, was gradual and his decision to run against Johnson for the nomination came late in the election season. (One can’t help wondering if the return to 1968 in staging these two Kennedy plays is a way to remind us of how, once upon a time, members of the party in power took it upon themselves to run against sitting presidents when events warranted it.) At the end of March, Johnson announced his refusal to run for re-election and a surge of popularity for Kennedy indicated that perhaps a candidate other than one with “his pecker in [Johnson’s] pocket”—as the president put it—might carry the day. Then Kennedy was murdered early in June after winning the California primary.

As Kennedy, Chris Manuel—who has graced the stage in two previous excellent productions at MTC—is better at the more personable side of Kennedy, as when he talks about his reputation for making enemies as his brother’s campaign manager and then attorney general, or when he speaks of his relations with his family, including quips about “Teddy” (Senator Edward Kennedy who went on to serve over 45 years as a Massachusetts senator). The more rousing, public-speaking bits seemed to me lesser, but that may be only in comparison with the focus on the latter in Bobby’s Last Crusade and the way the candidate’s stump speeches were dramatized and contextualized in that play. At certain moments Manuel’s physical manner does recall the Kennedys—he most resembles RFK’s eldest son, Joseph, as a young man.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

In any case, the strength of RFK is not the public Kennedy so much as the man behind the scenes. And here we get some well-chosen vignettes that go a long way to making us feel ourselves Kennedy’s confidantes. The play is staged on a nicely divided set by Jessie Lizotte: on the one side a desk, on the other a comfy chair. Holmes wants to register both the public and private man, but a scene of Kennedy in the armchair while being interviewed and interrupting himself to upbraid and beseech his obstreperous children makes the clash of the two sides more abrasive than amusing.

Most of the first part deals with Kennedy’s political career from 1964—when he found that Johnson would not offer him the VP spot in his bid for election as president—to 1966 and Kennedy’s inspired speech as a U.S. Senator visiting a South African university to give the Day of Affirmation Address. The speech, which closes Part 1, achieves the play’s rhetorical high-point, with its “ripples of hope” line, and with Kennedy saying:

“There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged—will ultimately judge himself—on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.”

Challenging words to hear at this point in American political history, as they were then. And the second part of the play finds Kennedy trying to live up to the burden of that speech’s incentive.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

In Part 2, Holmes chooses to juxtapose Kennedy’s imagined outbursts at “Johnny” (JFK) with Robert’s decision to run, making the announcement on the heels of a reflective recollection of his brother’s death and funeral. The words attributed to RFK have a groping quality, as if the situation—certainly unique to Kennedy—were being played simply for dramatic effect. The first half of the play, in its focus on Kennedy trying to decide what to do when no longer his brother’s attorney general, let us see Kennedy as a pragmatic political figure, and Bobby’s Last Crusade covers better the turn to becoming a presidential candidate. What RFK tries to give us, in Part Two, is the emotional underpinnings of that decision: we get a powerful story of Kennedy’s growing horror at the realities of poverty in the U.S. of the late 1960s, and stagey outbursts at JFK.

The details of Robert Kennedy’s death are narrated by Kennedy himself, though without directly addressing the fact of the assassination, much as he makes no comment about the cause of his brother’s death. In life, RFK spoke publicly about his belief in the findings of the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s assassination, but some who knew him denied that he accepted it or its methods. Holmes imagines RFK’s reaction to his brother’s death as a wail that it was he and not Jack who was the one “everyone hated.” Such comments, whatever their merit as off-the-cuff suggestions of character, downplay and undermine the drama of contested perspectives on the deaths of both men. There’s a huge area of uncertainty about those murders and it’s hard to say what the play RFK wants them to mean, offering us the drama of tragic loss rather than the drama that leads to tragic loss. The latter—as most great plays in the form show—is more telling.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

What we have instead of a play about the Kennedys that might put their lives and deaths into perspective is a play ostensibly from Robert Kennedy’s perspective that speaks with immediacy of his decisions, his reactions, his losses and victories, and ultimately shapes the major loss—his death—as ours.

RFK
By Jack Holmes
Directed by Kevin Connors

Scenic/Prop Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Production Assistant: Jack Parrotta; Stage Managing: Jim Schilling

Cast: Chris Manuel

Music Theatre of Connecticut
October 23-November 8, 2020

Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 2pm & 8pm, Sundays at 2pm.
In person performances at MUSIC THEATRE OF CONNECTICUT 
Live streamed performances will be shown online through a link provided to ticket holders an hour before their show time

Adrift

Men on Boats, Connecticut Repertory Theatre

At this point in the pandemic that has altered so greatly the protocols of our daily activities, the idea of theater is in flux. The possibility of permitting audiences to sit in theaters with live actors on the stage is unlikely in the near future (with Broadway in New York projecting re-openings, possibly, some time in 2021). And yet, some kind of theater must go on, particularly for programs in theater, such as that offered at the University of Connecticut, where young talent has to take on the changed circumstances as part of what it means to do theater in 2020.

That challenge is something to bear in mind as one views “Zoom theater.” It’s not what anyone really means by “theater,” and it’s not really what those whose preferred medium is video mean by video. What we get is an odd hybrid. It’s live, in the sense that all the performers, in their individual screens, are doing their parts synchronously with the viewing. And yet it’s also remote. (The alternative is theater that has been taped to watch later, which does away with the synchronous element that is at least one of the traditional aspects of theater that many don’t wish to lose. We can’t be in the same place, but we can be at the same time. Which is appropriate, as this is a time we can’t choose but to inhabit.)

The Connecticut Repertory Theatre production of Men on Boats runs for nine performances October 8-18, each streamed live on a dedicated Zoom platform complete with a handsome background set by David Calamari (which we see in an image of the stage at UConn) and appropriate costuming by Xurui Wang. Directed by Beth Gardiner, the cast consists of two Equity actors, Margaret Ivey and Anaseini Katoa, and eight actors who are a mix of New York-based actors, recent MFA acting alum, and current students at UConn. The play reimagines the true-life adventure story of John Wesley Powell and his commissioned exploration, with four boats, of the Colorado River in 1869. The all-male expedition is recast by playwright Jaclyn Backhaus as women-as-men or as individuals of non-binary gender.

The experience of the play, then, is hybrid in several ways, all potentially interesting, but also potentially frustrating: live/onscreen; male/female; historical/contemporary.

The cast of Men on Boats at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, directed by Beth Gardiner; streamed via Zoom platform, October 8-18, 2020

First, the technical aspects. No doubt, on stage, there would be the fascination of seeing how four boats on rough waters are staged—there are plenty of spills and tense moments of navigation. On screen, such effects are largely a matter of one’s imagination. We see numerous squares with faces in them, mostly (monotonously) in medium shot. The Zoom feature whereby a speaker’s square lights when they speak is helpful for otherwise it would not be easy to see, at any distance from the screen, who is speaking. It can also be hard to keep focused on who is in which boat (initially, there are two boats with three, and two boats with two, and there is some switching about). This makes much of the physical business of the play glide by without much dramatic effect. Though it should be said that the uses of scenery and lighting (Alex Glynn) and sound (Daniel Landry) help, as do creative configurations of the screens onscreen. At one point, late in the play, Powell (Alex Campbell) appears in what amounts to a close-up. It helps wonderfully to bring dramatic focus, so that one wonders if more could have been done with the Zoom feature that lets a speaker fill the screen.

The purpose of the male/female aspects of the play elude me—other than giving male adventurer roles to female actors (which may be reason enough). The notion that masculinity is itself a performative role might be implied, but none of the actors made much effort to create the illusion of masculine characters. Which brings me to what disappointed most about the play—the hybridity of historical/contemporary: whatever the nature of these individuals were—since they are based on actual people—gets lost in favor of a contemporary gloss that does little to make the story exciting or amusing. It all seems to transpire as if communicated by texts between phones.

For some, that may be a strength, as converting the historical record to the terms of our times is a playwright’s purview. For me, it’s a fault that the script favors a contemporary idiom that does little to illuminate or entertain. The prospect of being among the first English-speakers of European descent to behold the Grand Canyon is conveyed by reiterations of “holy shit!” Even if I try to put myself into the mindset of someone for whom the lingua franca onstage is a refreshing level of diction, I can’t say I would be compelled (were I not a reviewer) to follow these explorers to their ultimate destination.

There are some elements that help to keep us onboard. Mostly, a kind of earnest engagement with the material that we expect from capable student actors. The best in that regard is Alex Campbell as John Wesley Powell who comes across as a figure of patience and courage by no means overbearing. Others in the cast provide some cross purposes to the main forward thrust of getting down river, including GraceAnn Brooks as Goodman, a somewhat daffy Brit who does not see the journey through. There is also a meet-up with indigenous inhabitants of the area, played by Margaret Ivey and Anaseini Katoa as smugly superior if reticently agreeable to their white visitors. Whatever the actual encounter might have been, it’s dressed in contemporary irony so as to show an awareness that whatever the whites thought was happening probably wasn’t.

At the end of the play things get a bit interesting but then mysterious with the fact that “fake news” of the expedition’s failure and the explorers’ death stole some of the glory of their accomplishment. Rather than ride that particular bugbear of our moment—media distortion as a way of life—the play ends with a look askance at the historical record itself. Leaving me, at least, wondering what was gained by dramatizing these events in this way.

Men on Boats
By Jaclyn Backhaus
Directed by Beth Gardiner

Scenic Designer: David Calamari; Lighting Designer: Alex Glynn; Costume Designer: Xurui Wang; Sound Designer: Daniel Landry; Technical Director/OBS Consultant: Audrey Ellis; Voice and Text: Julie Foh; Production Stage Manager/OBS Programmer: Tom Kosis; Dramaturgs: Eddie Vitcavage, Ellis Garcia

Cast: Anaseini Kotoa, Margaret Ivey, GraceAnn Brooks, Alex Campbell, Camille Fortin, Emma Joy Hill, April Lichtman, Lily Ling, Pearl Matteson, Jasmine Smith

Connecticut Repertory Theatre
University of Connecticut
October 8-18, 2020

Up Next:
November 12-21, Connecticut Repertory Theatre will produce, for the first time, a radio play. It’s A Wonderful Life, the 1946 film directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart in one of his best-known roles, became a Christmas classic on cable television in the 1990s. Adapted by Philip Grecian and directed by UConn Professor of Vocal Training, Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, “this production will be a pre-recorded performance, with eight opportunities to tune in via zoom. In this production, Director Scapetis-Tycer reimagines (through sound) this heart-warming story featuring a huge cast of characters complete with ‘commercials’ and a Foley sound artist.”

Asking What If and Why Not?

Review of Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade, Playhouse on Park

This election season, fraught as it is with peril—in the form of a pandemic the U.S. has handled badly—chaos—in the form of showdowns between heavily armed squads and protesters enraged by unconscionable and racialized acts of police violence—and a do-or-die aura for our beleaguered electoral system, why not return to a period just as anxious and portentous? Well, except there was no internet then.

In 1968, the Democratic party had a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who was becoming increasingly unpopular with many of his constituents, particularly those who wanted the undeclared war in Vietnam to end. That led to divisions within the party that, to a certain extent, never got completely healed. Senator Eugene McCarthy was running against the president on a ticket mainly aimed at young voters who had the most to lose by the war dragging on and who were becoming increasingly vocal. 1968 was the year student unrest closed many campuses during spring session, and May ’68 is well known as the fulcrum moment when protests by French students and workers shut down Paris. It was also the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.

Goaded into running by a sense that history was passing him by, Robert Francis Kennedy, brother of assassinated and much mourned president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and former attorney general in his brother’s administration, entered the race for the Democratic nomination in March. In June, two months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy was assassinated, having just won the California primary.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade by David Arrow, who plays Kennedy, directed by Eric Nightengale, tours the series of stump speeches Kennedy made in those heady times. Much of the power of the play comes from hearing literate, compassionate speeches that don’t sound like mere rhetoric or designed merely to score points off opponents. We see Kennedy is fond of quoting “his favorite poet” Aeschylus (well, a Kennedy probably should have a tragic view of life), and that he has taken up the war on poverty that was one of the better aspects of the Johnson administration. We hear some of his candid asides on his own performance, see his personable sense of his developing public persona, and live through some touching and, now and then, light-hearted moments. The play documents how in the course of those three months Kennedy, an inheritor of incredible privilege thanks to his father’s wealth and power, transformed himself into a man of the people. It wasn’t an act, and that, if nothing else, is why people still get misty when they talk about “Bobby.”

And that’s mostly the tone of the play, a kind of tempered hagiography, with each successive speech, most in the Midwest, a stop on a kind of Via Crucis. Whatever you may think about the Kennedys, the fact of their brutal and untimely deaths—for political reasons, no matter which account of guilt you believe—makes them at once more sinned-against than sinning. We don’t hear much about what made Kennedy a man with so many enemies, nor do we get much of a sense of Kennedy as the tough and shrewd politician he was. By which I mean to say that he was under no illusions about how nasty it all could get, yet the feeling of the man the play gives us is a bit of a naïf. I don’t doubt he was overwhelmed by the Sinatra-like (or Beatles-like) hysteria he was often greeted with—remarking on how often someone in the crowd stole his shoe—but any chance he had for election meant stirring and feeding and riding just such a reaction. The five years of shock, mourning and disquiet since the death of his brother made the mere presence of a Kennedy an oracular and revelatory moment to his followers. The Kennedy phenomenon was in full swing.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The two immediate targets of the excerpts we hear from Kennedy’s speeches—McCarthy and Johnson—are men Kennedy respects, though, having been in the JFK administration with Johnson, he has no illusions about the kind of hardball political animal he’s dealing with. Then, in a speech on the eve of April Fool’s Day, just days before King’s assassination, Johnson announced he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination. The ostensible reason (no, not to spend more time with his family) was to put all his efforts into ending the war. Thereby quenching, potentially, the fire of much of the McCarthy and now Kennedy campaigns. If you believed him. Eventually Vice President Hubert Humphrey would take up the mantel of running as the preferred DNC front-runner. And what we witness in the play, as history shows, is that Kennedy, in just three months, was mounting a formidable challenge. Thus engendering one of the great “what-ifs” of party politics for that generation.

And that’s the main effect of the play: inspiring—besides admiration for the articulate, thoughtful, driven Kennedy, who never loses his sense of humor—thoughts of “what if.” And maybe, “what now?” Or “why not?,” recalling the famous tagline, stolen from George Bernard Shaw, with which Kennedy ended many of his speeches during the campaign: “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?”

As Kennedy, David Arrow does a remarkable job. He has the Kennedy quaver at times, and he can drawl out certain Boston inflections well enough to bring back those familiar voices. More keenly, his Kennedy takes us into his confidence, giving a chummy backstage access to the events as he lives them. There’s an immediacy that no documentary portrayal could achieve and that makes the play riveting—which is amazing, considering that most of the time we’re listening to campaign speeches (generally one of the lowest forms of theater). There are videos to show us newspaper headlines, views of crowds, and some of the faces of key figures of the time. The set has the look of the shambles of campaign headquarters after a grueling night.

For those who remember RFK (I was eight when he died, and can still recall getting up for school on June fifth, my brother’s second birthday, with the television proclaiming the news from California of the shooting; Kennedy died in the morning of the sixth), the play helps jog the memory—like the very real unease with the length of Kennedy’s hair in those days when such things were emblems of embracing the dangerous youth culture. For those who didn’t live through those times, the play is bound to feel a bit remote—Kennedy was dead before current presidential candidate Joe Biden was elected to his first term as senator—but it may be just the thing to stir youthful belief in the power of change.

The play is apropos in the way that some of Kennedy’s characterizations of current events describe our own times, but more importantly it reminds us that political leaders can sometimes galvanize the best and brightest hopes. As Kennedy said in his early campaign speech at the University of Kansas: “…hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks - so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust and again, I don't believe that we have to accept that.  I don't believe that it's necessary in the United States of America.  I think that we can work together - I don't think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.  And that is why I run for President of the United States.”

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The heartbreak of the story—which wouldn’t surprise Aeschylus—is that the gods are cruel.

Notes from Playhouse on Park:

This is a film of the play. This play was originally scheduled to be produced by Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. live at Playhouse on Park. As a result of guidelines put forth by both Governor Ned Lamont and Actors Equity Association, the play could not be produced in front of a live audience, nor could it be filmed in CT. The play was filmed for Playhouse on Park audiences at the Theatre of St. Clements in NYC. This is the same place it had its world premiere in 2018. The film is available to stream at home between September 16 - October 4 for $20; NOW EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 11.

On Saturday, October 10, Playhouse on Park is bringing the filmed play KENNEDY: BOBBY’S LAST CRUSADE to Edmond Town Hall for The Ingersoll Auto Pop-Up Drive-In. The film will start at 7:30pm (gates open at 7pm). $20 per car. Playwright/Actor David Arrow and Director Eric Nightengale will be in attendance. We are working on a creative way to conduct a Question and Answer Session! Please plan on joining us. For tickets: here

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade
By David Arrow
Directed by Eric Nightengale
Starring David Arrow as Bobby Kennedy
Filmed for Playhouse on Park
Available for streaming: September 16-October 11, 202

Remote Post

Fully Committed, Music Theatre of Connecticut

When Becky Mode’s comedy Fully Committed was playing on Broadway in 2016, critic Charles Isherwood of the New York Times quibbled about the changed attitude toward the kind of conspicuous consumption displayed at the ultra-exclusive restaurant featured in the play at the time as compared to 1999, when the play first ran at Vineyard Theater. It was a canny reference to how context can change what we laugh at or not in a play that gently ribs a certain stratum of society.

Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic that closed theaters last spring, the antics of Sam, an actor between roles who works on the reservation desk in the basement of a “world-renowned, ridiculously red-hot Manhattan restaurant,” comes freighted with not a little nostalgia. Once upon a time people gathered in theaters and in restaurants, and you could pack both to capacity. Not so now. Music Theatre of Connecticut is one of very few theaters given the go-ahead by the state of CT and by Actor’s Equity to reopen, and MTC’s in-person seating has been shrunk to 25. Others may view the show live online. Which is how I saw it on opening night.

Matt Densky as Sam in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play is a one-person show. Sam, played by Matt Densky, arrives for work in the de rigueur mask of our times, then is able to get on with his job unmasked. The play’s action, without any face-to-face contacts, seems only too apropos. In his post, a sort of remote frontlines, Sam must man all alone multiple phones spread across the space where calls overlap and interrupt. Densky acts out a tour de force of the voices and mannerisms of all the callers, while Sam deals with ricocheting situations and considerable comic crosstalk, and comes out of the whirlwind “with his soul untouched” (as The Boss might say). It’s all enacted by Densky in split-second changes that are likely to make you a bit punchy, and, while more wit in the lines would be welcome, Densky is a versatile comic actor able to score delighted laughs with shifts in voice and attitude.

Matt Denksy in Fully Committed at Music Theatre in Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

There’s the fussy French Maître D, the louche head chef—who sounds suspiciously at times like a certain overbearing political figure of our day—a co-worker calling in with MIA excuses, a wise guy, a big name actress’ manager, and a dizzying array of would-be clientele, some the height of pretentiousness, others the height of cluelessness. And all of it is handled by Sam like a candle burning both ends while he also deals with a few matters on the home-front: his disarmingly sweet dad wants him home for Christmas, his acting friend is having a big break, and Sam is sweating out the wait for a potential callback at Lincoln Center. All within the realm of reality in Manhattan.

And that’s the fun of the play but also—now—its poignancy. We took all this for granted, now look. What’s more, the fact that restaurants are re-opening with much more limited seating makes vying for that one table by the window (or what have you) more anxious than ever. The play, formerly a kind of high energy lark on the madness of multitasking (in the days before ubiquitous cellphones), has been updated a bit, so that Sam’s personal calls are on cell while the landlines are all for work. We see before us a kind of wonderfully choreographed chaos. It’s still high energy, it’s still a lark, but now we’re apt to be more than a bit apprehensive about that man on the flying trapeze, so to speak. Won’t someone give Sam a break—from the calls and in his career? Won’t someone drop a food pellet to the poor creature on his dreadful treadmill?

Matt Densky in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Our attitude toward the action might take its cue from what we take Sam to be. Is he an actor who has to work a desk, or a worker who wants to be an actor? Unlike on Broadway with a name actor like Jesse Tyler Ferguson giving the show some celebrity box office, here Matt Densky is a native of CT who has done comic wonders at MTC in The SantaLand Diaries and The 39 Steps (and is on pandemic hiatus from the Broadway tour of WICKED) and he makes Sam’s situation feel that much more earned. Directed by Kevin Connors on a wonderfully detailed set by Jessie Lizotte, Densky’s Sam is beleaguered but never quite beside himself. He’s got great turn-on-a-dime timing and plenty of panache. We believe he could become as good an actor as Densky is. In other words, there’s hope for the performer of even the most thankless task—at least in Manhattan. Back then.

Seeing the show online provides its own sense of paradox. What makes a theater like MTC a treat is its intimacy; every seat is close to the action. Online, the show is viewed at a distance that’s a bit like having a Broadway mezzanine seat (which critics are never given!), though the broadcast sound leaves a bit to be desired, as the surrounding space creates more distortion than the direct-feed of computer-to-computer hook-up does on Zoom streams. Perhaps that can be improved, but in any case Fully Committed—which is the catch-phrase for a restaurant totally booked—is a good choice for those of us not yet fully committed to sharing public spaces with our fellow sufferers in the current state of affairs. It’s a play rather light on plot but strong on presence, and that serves to remind us of why live theater helps make life worthwhile. And it’s therapeutic to see someone onstage again! The make-believe of theater can’t always keep chaos at bay, but theater as make-believe chaos can be an apt diversion.

Only commit.

Matt Densky in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Fully Committed
by Becky Mode
Directed by Kevin Connors
With Matt Densky

Scenic/Prop Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Stage Managing: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
September 11-27, 2020

From the press release:

MTC is thrilled to be reopening its doors as one of three professional theatres in the country to be given permission to host indoor events via the approval of the state of CT and Actor’s Equity Association. Alongside this reopening comes health & safety protocols to assure the safety of the audience, crew, and actors. Some of these protocols include staggered arrival based on seating, no more than 25 audience members in the theatre, and masks required at all times. Until further notice, all performances will not only be presented in person, but through live stream as well, so that the shows may be watched live from the comfort of your home. Both in person and live stream tickets are available. For more information on MTC’s reopening protocols you can go here.