Making It Work

Review of Clyde’s, TheaterWorks Hartford

Lynn Nottage, two-time Pulitzer-winner for her plays, keeps it lighter than usual—and shorter!—in Clyde’s, more or less a sit-com with some serious overtones, now playing at TheaterWorks. The show, at 95 minutes, is more condensed than well-known Nottage plays like Sweat and Intimate Apparel, but, like them, explores a particular working world with great fidelity to the kind of lives lived there. In this case, it’s a greasy spoon called Clyde’s, a favorite with truckers, where Clyde (Latonia Phipps) lords it over a crack kitchen staff who have all served time in prison and who all dream of better things.

Directed by Mikael Burke with wonderful economy of movement on a small set, one of the show’s great attractions is how this deft ensemble maneuvers the very detailed and well-though-out kitchen area designed by Collette Pollard. It’s great theater and it’s a delight to experience the kitchen staff’s efforts to satisfy the churlish Clyde while also working through all their various issues.

Letitia (Ayanna Bria Bakari), Rafael (Samuel María Gómez), Jason (David T. Patterson) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford, directed by Mikael Burke (photo by Mike Marques)

There may be a romance blooming between romantic Rafael (Samuel María Gómez)—at least if he has his way—and more down-to-earth Letitia (Kashayna Johnson, filling in for Ayanna Bria Bakari the night I saw the show); new employee Jason (David T. Patterson), replete with White Supremacist tattoos apt to aggravate this non-white staff, has to find his footing and, though by his own admission prone to violence, becomes something of a placid devotee of Montrellous (Michael Chenevert). The eldest, Montrellous, a kind of guru of the sandwich board, is out to prove that freedom is a question of the right choices, which extends from how one lives to what one eats: the right bread, the right ingredients, the right condiments. Indeed, much of the dialogue will be enough to make any foodie’s mouth water (my advice, have at least a decent snack before you see the show). Montrellous’ philosophy is the basis for a kind of holistic approach to work and eating that may allow his fellow workers to rise above Clyde’s ongoing disparagement.

Rafael (Samuel Maria Gomez), Jason (David T. Patterson), Montrellous (Michael Chenevert) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Having said all that, there’s not a lot more to say, in terms of story. Which is why I mentioned “sit-com”: the predominant feeling is that we are spending time with these characters, getting to know them as they get to know each other and (as in your favorite workplace comedy) what we learn will be sometimes amusing—as for instance, Rafael’s BB gun bank hold-up—and sometimes wrenching, as for instance Montrellous’ tale of a bad decision followed by a real act of sacrifice. The main plot point, I’d say, is whether or not Clyde will relent and actually try one of Montrellous’s unique sandwich productions.

Clyde constantly puts down the crew—individually and collectively—and won’t entertain any notion that they are earning respect (not even after a newspaper write-up designates the kitchen’s productions as “sublime”) nor that any of them should have any feeling but a squalid sort of humble gratitude to her for giving them jobs and keeping them on. She’s a bully and an asshole and she loves it. Latonia Phipps luxuriates in the part but I have to say it got a bit one-note. It may be the point that Clyde doesn’t soften or sympathize (“I don’t do pity,” she boasts), but that only means we—like her employees—get sick of her that much quicker. In the words of that Nobel Laureate: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes: you’d know what a drag it is to see you.” (The only thing that makes us glad to see Clyde again? the costume changes! Alexis Carrie, Costumes.)

Clyde (Latonia Phipps) in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But aren’t bosses often a drag? I can attest it’s so, and so it is here. Do we like the other characters? Yes, and it’s fun seeing/hearing who gets feedback—as cheers, laughs, applause—from the live audience. That “you are there” element works to great effect in TheaterWorks’ small theater and small but very lively stage. I’ll say my favorite character the night I saw the show was Kashayna Johnson’s Letitia (wonderfully filing in as an understudy); she has the best vantage on her co-workers, seeming to have the insight to grasp who they really are and who they’re trying to become, even as she herself is working to be better. She’s the soul of the place even more than Montrellous. As the latter, Chenevert has the requisite thoughtfulness and measured movements of a man who could’ve been so much more and might yet be, but his detachment doesn’t make him as sympathetic. Gómez's Rafael is winning and outgoing, and his outbursts of feeling do a lot to drive up the drama. As Jason, Patterson broods well but also has a great sense of comic timing, making Jason’s arc of change the most fun to watch.

But don’t take my word for it: get into TheaterWorks and spend some time watching this crew for yourself—if you can tear yourself away from the latest from Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig. Anyway, those films will likely be here for weeks. Clyde’s has been extended but only has one more week left!

Clyde’s
By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Mikael Burke

Set Design: Collette Pollard; Costume Design: Alexis Carrie; Lighting Design: Eric Watkins; Sound Design: Christie Chiles Twillie; Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Associate Set Design: Delena Bradley; Intimacy Coordinator: Marie C. Percy; Casting Director: TBD Casting/ Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA

Cast: Ayanna Bria Bakari, Michael Chenevert, Samuel María Gómez, Kashayna Johnson, David T. Patterson, Latonia Phipps

TheaterWorks Hartford

July 7-30, 2023, extended run to August 5th

Murder Will Out

Review of Dial M for Murder, Westport Country Playhouse

Mark Lamos’s final production as Artistic Director at Westport Country Playhouse aims to be a crowd-pleaser. As such, it’s a rich example of what WCP has done well under his direction. Dial M for Murder is an old-fashioned play—as written by Frederick Knott and adapted famously into a 1954 film with Grace Kelly, directed by Alfred Hitchcock—that’s been recently revamped by Jeffrey Hatcher so that it’s alternately tense and entertaining and always smart. And “smart” is what Alexander Dodge’s set—a fifties Maida Vale setting—and Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s costumes are as well. So what we’re looking at—especially with Emma Deane’s choice lighting effects—is always a treat for the eyes. The dialogue, though it doesn’t always sparkle (and having to sound somewhat British tends to make some deliveries a trifle stilted), is full of little flourishes that let us revel in the fact that everyone in the play, at some point, is trying to take someone in. The levels of betrayal on view, with plenty of recriminations and incriminations, make for a lovely evening of seeing who’s worse than whom.

Margot (Kate Abbruzzese), Maxine (Krystel Lucas), Tony (Patrick Andrews), Inspector Hubbard (Kate Burton) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Which is to say that it’s not really a murder mystery—in the sense of a whodunit—but rather a “what happens next”? and “can they get away with it”? Plotted gracefully and unfolding like a classic game of cat and mouse, Dial M for Murder takes us back to theater that has no great ax to grind nor points to make. Like the "thriller genre” that author Maxine (Krystel Lucas) earns her bread writing and Tony Wendice (Patrick Andrews), husband of her friend Margot Wendice (Kate Abbruzzese), earns his promoting, the play insists that people killing other people is always interesting, at least, and may sometimes involve various motives (we’re told there are five key motives for murder), sundry complications, and who knows what sort of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant.

Someone has info about Margot that she’d rather Tony not know, but will she pay to get it back—it’s a letter that exposes facts about Margot and Maxine and so would topple the arranged world of the well-off Wendices (it’s Margot’s money), to say nothing of Tony and Maxine’s professional standing. Further complication arrives when a person from Tony’s past is enlisted to do away with Margot in an overly ingenious plan that could go wrong any number of ways. Of course it does but I won’t say just how and then the question becomes what happens next . . . and will they get away with it?

Margot Wendice (Kate Abbruzzese) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sprawling across two Acts (each under an hour), Hatcher’s Dial M works like a well-oiled machine, one that’s been remodeled in ways that should appeal to modern audiences. Indeed, it’s hard to overlook the switch in sexual politics: in the original, Margot is almost a “fall gal” and the ease with which she’s made out to be a villain is surprising, but for the fact that as a woman in the Fifties she has little voice or status when the males—Tony and the writer (male originally)—seem to team up against her along with the male inspector. In Hatcher’s version, only Tony and his former schoolmate, a ne’er-do-well now known as Lesgate (Denver Milord, grand as blandly malevolent and agreeably unpredictable) are male; the three women unite, sort of, in trying to snare the perpetrator in their complex web of timing and switched latch keys, and the way he tries to match their machinations is most of the fun.

Lesgate (Denver Milord), Tony Wendice (Patrick Andrews) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

As Tony, Patrick Andrews has a wonderful jauntiness and a coldly calculating air that is both winning and chilling. He has a practiced way of breaking the fourth wall ever so slightly, clueing us into his inner workings with a look or a gesture that is only for us to read. As Inspector Hubbard, Kate Burton follows suit, somewhat, pointing us to places where alibis and evidence don’t add up. Kate Abbruzzese’s Margot emotes high stress, puts up with a lot, and comes out looking great and ready to address the matter at hand with convincing aplomb—one senses Tony is no match for her at all but she mostly lies low so he won’t notice, until it’s too late? The one note in the cast I question is Krystel Lucas’ Maxine: twice Margot, no fool, suggests—even if only teasing—that she suspects Maxine might be the one trying to blackmail her or even trying to have her killed. If there’s to be any force behind the suggestion, Maxine should seem at least potentially malevolent or mercurial enough to make us believe anything. As played, Lucas’s Maxine seems very upright and the person most likely to save the day.

Maxine (Krystel Lucas), Margot (Kate Abbruzzese) in Dial M for Murder at Westport Country Playhouse, directed by Mark Lamos (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A minor point perhaps, and the only wrinkle I observed in this silky smooth production, full of murderous charm and an arch acceptance of that line that used to haunt us on the old “Inner Sanctum” film series: “Yes, even you could commit . . . MURDER!” All it takes is motive and opportunity, seemingly.

 And now you should have motive enough to take this opportunity to see long-serving and much admired theater artist Mark Lamos’ final production as Artistic Director of Westport Country Playhouse.

Dial M for Murder
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
From the Original by Frederick Knott
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Kate Marvin; Wig, Hair & Make-Up Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Director/Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Dialect Coach: Shane Ann Younts; Props Supervisor: Sean Sanford; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre; Assistant Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu

Cast: Kate Abbruzzese, Patrick Andrews, Kate Burton, Krystel Lucas, Denver Milord

 Westport Country Playhouse
July 11-30, 2023

A Troubling Trouble in Mind

Review of Trouble in Mind, Hartford Stage

The purpose of theater in both addressing a public and creating a viable theatrical space in which talent is showcased and convincing dramatic or comic roles are enacted is under scrutiny in Alice Childress’ complex, satiric, and politically motivated play from 1957, Trouble in Mind. Within this exploration of the rigors of a professional production—we’re supposedly watching the rehearsals for an upcoming Broadway show, Chaos in Belleville—there is plenty of room for Childress to examine the plight of theater in her day, which turns out to be not very different from the concerns of our day. The plight of trying to do truth while at the same time shackling a play’s messages and meanings to holdover clichés, stereotypes, or to whatever new theatrical mannerisms (in this case Method Acting) have arisen to christen a new era looms large. In our day, the question of diversity on all fronts has all but ended any notion of theatrical unity; in Childress’ time, the process of chipping away at the Great White Edifice on the Great White Way was just getting underway.

The cast of Trouble in Mind at Hartford Stage, directed by Christopher D. Betts (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Childress, who spent a long time as an actress herself, knew the lingo, knew the backstage chat and sparring, and had observed and experienced the little indignities and the overweening egoism of actors’ lives. What helps sustain our interest in this collection of actors--Wiletta Mayer (Heather Alicia Simms), Sheldon Forrester (Michael Rodgers), Bill O’Wray (James Joseph O’Neil), Judy Sears (Sarah Lyddan), Millie Davis (Chelsea Lee Williams), and John Nevins (Sideeq Heard)—is the way they play with the parts in the Belleville play and play their own roles in the process of creating theater. So, while Judy might seem at first a perky airhead, that’s partly because her ingenue role expects it of her; meanwhile, a practiced dissembler like Sheldon Forrester—the elder in the company—knows how to act “the darkie” in a way that puts white egos at ease, while also asserting himself—via voice and histrionic presence—as an actor in the grand manner. Bill O’Wray, a soap opera star, treats every role as a job he pretty much plays the same way, not interested in interacting with the cast or exploring method; Millie Davis shows off gaudy jewelry to convince her colleagues she doesn’t really need to act, so well-off is her husband, and so maintains a certain aloofness; John Nevins is the newbie, earnest and ingratiating but his ambition—to use the play as a vehicle to launch his career—is as real as anything. Then there’s Wiletta Mayer, who reluctantly emerges as the conscience of the cast, a role for which she hasn’t fully explored all the implications.

We first meet Wiletta as she arrives earliest to rehearsal. This gives her the opportunity to interact with Henry, an aging theater-hand who remembers a grand theatrical moment in her past career—for which he designed the lighting. With that exchange, Childress stresses her sense of theater: it’s ephemeral even at its best, and yet—as an experience—it can create a longstanding awareness shared by these two who achieved something together even if only meeting for the first time. The tension between who they are at their best—in the theater—and who they are otherwise (just folks) is clear from the start. That contrast inspires mostly comic deliveries, but Betts downplays Childress’ satire as though the target of playing at playing is too easy and too readily assessed. What does emerge is that “Tomming”—assuaging white egos by playing up to them, like an “Uncle Tom”—is key to success for black actors but that some version of such dissembling (kissing-ass) is an element generally present wherever hierarchies preside. So that Eddie (Adam Langdon), the white put-upon assistant to the white director Al Manners (John Bambery) is pretty much always “Tomming,” as is Henry.

In my view, the biggest problem with the Hartford Stage production of this intriguing play is John Bambery’s Al Manners. Having seen a very nuanced rendering of this character in another production, I have a hard time getting a read on why Manners is so incessantly tiresome. Bambery approaches his lines as if hacking away at blocks of ice, whereas the character—as a director who feels he’s actually progressive while having to deal with indignities on all sides (from an ex-wife, from his producers, from his cast, and his underlings)—has a trajectory to run: from seeming to know how this works to not having a definite conviction any longer. It’s worth mentioning the weak point of the production because it seems to me that the strength of the real director’s approach is Christopher Betts’ willingness to push this play until “not having a definite conviction” is a state of affairs that can’t really be improved and can only be endured.

Early on, Manners tries to lord it over Wiletta, after she sings a song in the play with the kind of subdued, spiritualist fervor she knows he wants. Not content, he eggs her on with “word association” and other Method techniques to make her question and “justify” her choices. The next rendition has a different register, much closer to “we shall overcome,” a rallying cry. Manners rejects the innovation at once and so the cast (and us) see that he’s all bluster, not really wanting to find new possibilities in trite material. It’s a fully present moment, convincingly played.

John Nevins (Sideeq Heard), Sheldon Forrester (Michael Rodgers), Al Manners (John Bambery), Eddie (Adam Langdon), Judy (Sarah Lyddan), Wiletta (Heather Alicia Simms) in the Hartford Stage production of Trouble in Mind (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

More questionable is a key moment in Act Two: the play—Chaos in Belleville—is an “anti-lynching” play in which a young black man gets lynched (though other outcomes might be possible). Someone says that none present have ever seen a lynching and that’s when Sheldon Forrester speaks up. He has, and proceeds to describe what he saw. In Rodgers’ delivery as Forrester, the tale takes on a rhapsodic feel, working against the excruciating detail of what he tells. It’s as if Betts has chosen to let Forrester—a thoroughly theatrical presence—turn actual oppression into aria (as theater will do again and again). The point is that Childress’s play, in openly questioning, through Wiletta Mayer, all the givens of a play like Chaos in Belleville, with its crowd-pleasing and guilt-assuaging BS, also questions how to render the theatrical reality of her own play, a question that Betts’ production worries to the end.

According to Arminda Thomas’ account in the show’s playbill, the play’s ending continued to be an issue. When the play was bound for Broadway, Childress baulked at the suggested ending (the actors all agree with Wiletta against Manners) and the play was not produced; as late as 1992, for a London production, Childress reworked the ending. The problem of the ending, we could say, is that the play can’t solve it. No actor, no director hired to put on a particular play can really change it to make it their own play. What is needed is a black female playwright able to write a better play than Chaos in Belleville, and—while she knows she is that playwright—Childress chooses to write a play that dramatizes that need rather than resolving it. At play’s end, it’s not Wiletta we have to believe in but in Childress, in Lorraine Hansberry, in Adrienne Kennedy, in Suzan-Lori Parks. We know they are coming, but they’re not there yet (in the play).

By restaging this early confrontational play, Betts lets us work through the problems that won’t go away: How to authentically enact what you never experienced when so many want to own a particular history? The cast becomes more and more convinced that they don’t know how the play should be rendered, as if in a proto “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation…” (which Betts directed while a graduate student), and Childress knows there is real drama in that realization. Or: How to put audiences on the hook and then let them off the hook so that they go away feeling vindicated for their sensitivity? That element—which we can say is still the earmark of the successful play able to enact uplift from suffering—is already questioned by Wiletta’s different renderings of a song, or by her choice at the end of making a speech where the principal of radical theater requires her not to do it “in character,” but however she happens to feel right now, as we conclude. And how we feel about that is all about whether or not we are with her as she grapples with the constraints and the freedoms her playwright and her director (Childress and Betts) put upon her.

The “trouble” of Trouble in Mind is that it’s purpose is to trouble the waters, not resolve the issues. Our task is to watch the agitation and think through its implications. To keep all that trouble in mind, until it does someone some good.

Trouble in Mind
By Alice Childress
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Scenic Design: Baron E. Pugh; Costume Design: Jahise LeBouef; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna; Wig Design: Carissa Thorlakson; Dramaturg: Arminda Thomas; Casting Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Avery James Evans; Assistant Stage Manager: Anaïs Bustos

Cast: John Bambery, Sideeq Heard, Richmond Hoxie, Adam Langdon, Sarah Lyddan, James Joseph O’Neil, Michael Rodgers, Heather Alicia Simms, Chelsea Lee Williams

Hartford Stage
May 25-June 18, 2023

Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me

Review of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, New Haven Theater Company

Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit isn’t a play so much as a theatrical event, one that requires a new actor each night who has not seen the script or read about the play. It also requires audience participation, and, with no director, the show is apt to be enacted quite differently each time it’s done. There’s suspense, laughs, and the kind of unexpected turns that only live theater can provide.

New Haven Theater Company has elected to put on the play for six performances this month. The first three—with Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, respectively—have already played. The remaining three—with Deena Nicol-Blifford, Trevor Williams, George Kulp, respectively—are next weekend. Note, the Thursday performance, on the 18th at 7:30, is sold out. For tickets for the 19th or 20th, go here.

Audiences can expect to be more interactive than is the norm, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, as the Actor has to just go with what the script asks, reading it aloud totally cold. Much of the interest comes from the quirkiness of Soleimanpour, who speaks in the script in his own voice, describing his situation (in 2010) when he could not leave Iran because he refused to perform military service. His play traveled the globe in his stead. What’s more, the problem of how to reach distant audiences is answered, sort of, by making them interact with his play. And so much of his play is about the theatrics themselves, making the space we inhabit during the play potentially very lively.

Themes do surface, such as: who’s in charge here? Is it incumbent upon the audience to do whatever the Actor voicing the script asks? Does the Actor have to do whatever the script says? Are participants allowed to ad lib? Soleimanpour gives out his email address during the play and wants the audience to keep their phones on (though not to take calls!) so that they can send him updates if they choose.

Much of what concerns the play has to do with the element of risk in theater, but also a further contextual risk that Soleimanpour feels as a citizen without full freedom of movement or speech. Soleimanpour spends a lot of time telling us about experiments in which white rabbits come to accept the convention of attacking, first, a rabbit who gets dyed red for climbing a ladder to get a carrot, and, later, any rabbit that climbs the ladder.

Soleimanpour, we see, spends a lot of time thinking about who gets singled out for attack.

He also spends time thinking about how a play can be like a gun, aimed to bring about a certain outcome, by coercion, by threat, but also a prop you can play Russian Roulette with. And that’s an important element in the play’s conclusion.

That much is safe to say, but to go into any more particulars about the play I’d have to put in a Spoiler Alert. Mind you, there’s no particular reason why you (as potential audience member) should know as little about the play as the Actor does, but it does make for a more interesting evening. I can say that because I saw a production of the play at Yale Cabaret over a decade ago, when the play was new, and seeing it again, with New Haven Theater Company, I didn’t feel the same uneasy “where is this going?” feeling that is perhaps key to what makes this such an interesting night of theater. If you know where it’s going and what questions it turns on, it’s much easier to just sit back and watch what happens.

But the play, with all its unpredictable audience participation, works to generate a feeling that what is happening is happening right now and might not happen again. At least not with the particular Actor (who might just die!) and the particular audience (which may or may not find that daring) of any particular performance.

Steve Scarpa, the night I saw the show, was a good-natured stand-in for us. That’s how I felt about it. Like we were all in this together: he had the task of reading the script to us and doing some daffy things, and also bringing members of the audience up and getting them to do some minimal or questionable things, and we had the task of cheering him on. And some of us were asked to do certain things on cue. (I liked the guy with a cane who seemed to be ready to just ad lib the thing away from Scarpa’s patient master of ceremonies.) I have to admit, too, that I took over the role of the final “red rabbit” who reads the script aloud after the Actor is told to relinquish it. That part, I should think, will play very differently each night, depending on how the Actor reacts to what’s asked of him or her at the end.

When I saw it before, in an atmosphere fostered by late night theater among a lot of students, the feeling was lighter, with the audience glad to have opportunities to intervene. At NHTC on Saturday night, that interventionist element was absent and there was a much more casual feeling, at least until  Scarpa’s very serious demeanor after he went “off book.” At that point the silence of the Actor is striking as he becomes what some audience members have been at times: someone asked to do something on cue. Each Actor will have to play the last scene in their own way.

What will it be like with the remaining three Actors? Head down to New Haven Theater Company and get in the act.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
By Nassim Soleimanpour
New Haven Theater Company
May 11-20, 2023

Troubled Waters

Review of the ripple, the wave that carried me home, Yale Repertory Theatre

Think of swimming pools, those oases of exclusion. Do you “belong” to the pool? That’s the question I remember from back there in my suburban Sixties. If you “belong,” you can swim. If not, not. And in segregated communities it was clear at once who belonged and who didn’t. That state of affairs—from her parents’ childhood and her own—is what has come back to haunt Janice (Jennean Farmer), an African American woman who left behind her father’s hometown of Beacon, KS, a long time ago. The agent of memory: Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (Adrienne S. Wells), a relentless voice—indeed, very chipper—leaving messages on her machine, in an effort to have Janice come back for a tribute to her dad, who fought for desegregated access and for pools for Blacks, and the dedication of a pool in his name.

Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells), Helen (Chalia La Tour), Edwin (Marcus Henderson), Janice (Jennean Farmer) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Christina Anderson’s evocative memory play, the ripple, the wave that carried me home is long on exposition, layering in a lots of details across a range of eras to give context and political implication to much of what Janice, who speaks directly to the audience a good deal of the time, wants to impart to us. Jennean Farmer presents Janice in a forthright, engaging way but we might sometimes wonder why she’s telling us all this; that question is effectively offset by the fact that Janice herself is not altogether sure. She’s navigating her past, looking for where the flow of memory snags, as it were. Farmer is particularly adept at rendering the very fluid ages in which we see Janice and their different contexts.

The scenic elements of the play—most involving her parents Edwin (Marcus Henderson) and Helen (Chalia La Tour) and Aunt Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells)—play as enacted recollections which lends them a kind of detachment that, as the play goes on, even begins to supply a certain element of wish fulfillment. Janice is trying to figure out the past, to find a relation to her father and mother that lives up to the truth but which also lets her find meaning she can value. And that’s the throughline that holds us: because there are some rough patches Janice has to cope with and how they register will say much about their ultimate status in her sense of herself. The way “who we were when” tends to.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Edwin (Marcus Henderson) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Early on, Edwin tells his young daughter a funny story of how he and some friends crashed a segregated pool—the story, in Henderson’s spirited delivery, is told for laughs, to hear how audacious the boys were and how appalled all the white folks were. The trespassers were never identified and so got away with it. Then comes the punchline and it’s a punch in the gut: the pool was closed so that it could be fully drained and refilled, as if it had been “infected.”

Helen (Chalia La Tour), Janice (Jennean Farmer) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

So, while Janice is proud of her parents and their activism, there are a lot of sore points that resurface in those waves of memory. Another, much more harrowing, involves her mother and escalating humiliations and affronts that ultimately have Janice rethinking which of her parents should be getting the tribute. That question—while never overstated—remains present throughout. While Henderson’s Edward is mostly a likeable figure (check out that dance!), there’s a sense in which the ethos of the dominant male requires more than interrogation: it must be supplemented if not supplanted entirely. In a wonderfully modulated performance, Chalia La Tour’s Helen captures a particular woman at very particular moments in her life, with a dignity that is unshakeable. She’s a woman with a “life plan” who has so many hopes checked by strategies of bigotry and exclusion, and yet her strength is unyielding. The look on her face in the final pool exercise routine is priceless, such measured joy barely contained.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Likewise Adrienne S. Wells’ Aunt Gayle at times made me want to watch an alternative play: the Aunt Gayle Story. For Janice is one of those over-earnest narrators for whom each incident must be milked for all possible trauma or joy, whereas Gayle is someone with a much more even sense of life; her reactions to the trial of the LA policemen who beat Rodney King help create a context of low expectations and ongoing outrage. Wells says so much with how she holds her head or moves, she’s a great asset to this production.

Woodward’s cast moves in and out of times and scenes seamlessly, able to signal the emphases that Janice finds while reliving these stories for us. While the production’s efforts to enact the particulars of this particular past are laudable, it’s not a play that ignites into great passions the way a less mediated presentation might. All along we’re aware that Janice is fine, and narrating, and that the harrowing past—with its confrontations, triumphs, setbacks, joys and sorrows—is only there if she wants to revisit, to find again what lessons can be learned. The King repercussions create a moment when even Janice—apt to feel superior to Chipper—can hug her “like strangers, like family, like sisters, like aliens traumatized by our time on this dysfunctional planet.”

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ultimately, we gain a sense of how fraught is the business of dramatizing the past, a factor that a searching playwright like Christina Anderson is willing to make thematic to the task of playwriting itself. The characters and their presentation are motivated by the need to tell stories that have both communal and personal resonance. If the ripple, the wave that carried me home may be a bit too overt in its effort to present the confluence of the personal and political, it also is unafraid to attest that, as Edwin says, “this country is built on selective memory.”

If so, a different selection might build a different country.

Janice (Jennean Farmer), Helen (Chalia La Tour), Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells) in the ripple, the wave that carried me home at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

the ripple, the wave that carried me home
by Christina Anderson
directed by Tamilla Woodward

Scenic Designer: Emmie Finckel; Costume Designer: Aidan Griffiths; Lighting Designer: Alan C. Edwards; Projection Designer: Henry Rodriguez; Sound Designer: Evdoxia Ragkou; Hair and Makeup Designers: Hannah Fennell Gellman, Eric M. Glover; Technical Director: Nate Angrick; Vocal Coach: Julie Foh; Intimacy and Fight Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Andrew Petrick

Cast: Jennean Farmer, Marcus Henderson, Chalia La Tour, Adrienne S. Wells

Yale Repertory Theatre
April 28-May 20, 2023

Touch and Go

Review of The Rembrandt, TheaterWorks Hartford

The question of how one reacts to a work of art concerns Jessica Dickey’s The Rembrandt, now playing at TheaterWorks Hartford. It’s a play that also addresses themes of mortality and care, and questions of philosophy and poetry and what we leave behind. It may sound awfully heavy, but Dickey’s play, directed by Maria Mileaf with an excellent cast, strives to put such matters in the everyday environments of work and domesticity, to make art and all it entails a part of life.

It's a goal only partly achieved because something gets in the way, more than a little. And that’s the art of theater as a way of staging incidents and events so that we believe them or question them, go with it or work against it. Dickey, we could say, courts a certain amount of resistance to how she navigates her four slightly heterogeneous segments. But we can also say that the disjunctions sometimes seem more like dysfunctions.

We begin in a nicely appointed museum space (Neil Patel, Set Design) where Henry (Michael Chenevert), a slightly pretentious but likeable guard interacts with Jonny (Brandon Espinoz), a less educated and more forthright armed guard. The patter illuminates certain things about Henry: his male partner has a terminal illness, and he hasn’t been maybe the caliber of caregiver that Jonny expects; also, that Henry finds being on the job—he arrives early so he can be in the dark with the art—a kind of satori or special space that Jonny, for whom this is just a job primarily, doesn’t quite share.

Enter a “copyist” named Madeline (Amber Reauchean Williams) who is there to try to render a copy of Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” (which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and who has recently experienced the loss of her grandmother, the kind of “patron of the arts” that Henry has evoked, in a comical but on-the-money commentary very apropos to the dwindling “Old School” resources of theaters and museums and other arts institutions.

So, two characters enthralled by art; another less so but a conscientious worker. Enter a new employee: Dodger (Ephraim Birney), whose mohawk is supposed to suggest, perhaps, a kind of non-conformity that might be meaningful. It is, but how successful and motivated his challenge is is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The unexpected element then intrudes: after a well-played scene that acts as something of a coup de théâtre, we travel through time to the world of Rembrandt (Chenevert), his former servant now mistress Henny (Williams), and Titus (Birney, playing a child without really making that clear), son of the artist and his deceased wife, Saskia.  Why we’re there, but for an impressive set change, feels whimsical at best, though the idea seems to be that treating art objects as cult items undermines human access. That may have something to do with it, arguably.

Even less clear is why Titus’s contact with the bust of Homer brings in a soliloquy from Homer (Michael Bryan French) wherein philosophy and poetry are pondered as human artifacts that may have personal meaning but that aspire to something more universal. And that seems to be the note that draws us back to Henry’s story as he finally chooses to spend what time is left with the dying Simon (French), also a poet and the one character who actually has some comical things to say—the bit about the pistachio pudding is a high point.

While Dickey’s throughlines can be a bit oblique, the good news is that the play keeps us guessing and maybe wondering along with it. Give it credit for not being predictable even if unpredictability in itself is no great aesthetic achievement. Also give credit to the cast. One reason I might be so dissatisfied with the Rembrandt portion is that I was so impressed by how well Chenevert and Williams enacted Henry and Madeline as characters with some common ground and maybe things to learn about one another. Instead: an earthy patriarch and his doting familiars, some rambling by an alleged “father of poetry,” and, finally, more of Henry, now abetted by his spirited lover, nearing the grave.

Through it all, what emerges best is probably Dickey’s main concern: how do we say we care—about other humans, about art, about the things that we collectively and sometimes personally value? Art is important here because it plays different roles for different people for different reasons, and yet it is something we can participate in collectively—like theater.

The Rembrandt
By Jessica Dickey
Directed by Maria Mileaf

Set Design: Neil Patel; Costume Design: Katherine Roth; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Bart Fasbender; Projection Design: Camilla Tassi; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Cast: Ephriam Birney; Michael Chenevert; Michael Bryan French; Brandon Espinoza; Amber Reauchean Williams

TheaterWorks, Hartford
April 21-May 14, 2023

Time Well Spent at Hartford Stage

Review of The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage

What better to do on William Shakespeare Day (April 23—date of the Bard’s death and, traditionally, date of his birth) than to see a Shakespeare play? Hartford Stage Artistic Director Melia Bensussen has mounted the first Shakespeare production at the theater since the shutdowns of 2020. It’s a welcome return and an interesting choice of play.

The Winter’s Tale presents a heady mix that incorporates tragic conflict, dramatic shifts and reversals, antic songs, stressed lovers, comic interactions and magical reconciliation. Bensussen’s direction is straightforward and aimed to help viewers focus on the action. There is little of the lengthy speechifying that is so key in many of Shakespeare’s plays; here, there is much more interaction than introspection. Nor is there much of the anachronism that directors often like to visit upon Shakespeare so as to “bring him up to date.” Bensussen’s approach suggests that the play is intriguing enough to be mounted in its unique spirit of theatrical variation.

Polixenes (Omar Robinson), Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero); background: Leontes (Nathan Darrow), Mamillius (Jotham Burrello) in The Winter’s Tale at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The story concerns Leontes, King of Sicilia (Nathan Darrow), and his friendship with, and sudden passionate jealousy of, Polixenes, King of Bohemia (Omar Robinson). They’ve been friends since boyhood, but, during Polixenes’ protracted visit to Sicilia, Leontes takes it into his head that Polixenes has been lover to Queen Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero), insisting that the child she is pregnant with was sired by Polixenes rather than himself. Leontes is even a little doubtful about his beloved son Mamillius (Jotham Burrello). Leontes is so far gone, he plots his friend’s death, the death of Hermione’s child, newborn, and scorns an oracle from Apollo that tells him he’s completely wrong about everything. His courtiers try to dissuade him, and Paulina (Lana Young), Hermione’s staunch defender, gets into a fierce argument with Leontes, to—seemingly—no avail.

Paulina (Lana Young) and Leontes (Nathan Darrow) in The Winter’s Tale, at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The jealousy plot occupies the first two Acts which move at considerable speed because what might have filled an entire tragedy is here simply the set-up for the second half of the play—most of which takes place in Bohemia, sixteen years later. The Sicilian segments are ably played by Nathan Darrow, as a truculent, tormented Leontes; Jamie Ann Romero as a winningly girlish Hermione who transforms into a figure of great dignity and stoicism; Omar Robinson as a benign friend who has to swerve into hasty self-preservation; Lana Young as a feisty Paulina who speaks with the most moral force in the play; and, in a role easy to overlook, Carmen Lacivita as Camillo, a “king’s man” who switches which king he serves and is a model of probity in one of those radical shifts otherwise known as a Shakespearean plot; only Jeremy Webb’s Antigonus seems a bit more colorless than required—but that may be due to a deliberate differentiation from Webb’s turn as the much more broadly played Shepherd in Bohemia who finds Perdita (Delfin Gökhan Meehan), the abandoned child of Leontes and Hermione.

The cast of The Winter’s Tale, in Bohemia, at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The Bohemia segments switch into a somewhat overstated comic tone to underline the fact that the mood of the play has changed drastically. It works for Webb’s Shepherd and son—called “Clown” in the list of characters—enacted by John Maddaloni with great energy and spirit. It works less well for our lovers, Perdita and Florizel (Daniel Davila Jr.), the latter trying to give too much contemporary swagger to his sound. The lovers are young, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are our youthful contemporaries. That element hovers about Perdita as well, so that her main scene feels pitched to score more mirth than it contains.

Clown/Shepherd’s Son (John Maddaloni), Autolycus (Pearl Rhein) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

No matter, the winning figure of the Bohemia segments is Pearl Rhein’s memorable Autolycus. Rhein has the full measure of this engaging, theatrical, slippery pick-pocket, so that the Bohemia segments have not only the requisite comic feel but also the welcome musicality—as Autolycus is a tuneful rogue (applause to Pornchanok Kanchanabanca’s music and sound design and music director Liam Bellman-Sharpe). The lightness of the stage business, including a song of rivals Mopsa (Ama Laura Santana) and Dorcas (Hannah Moore), shows as it should Shakespeare’s way with comic timing.

The play winds up in Sicilia, as it must, to come full circle and right as many wrongs as possible. But Shakespeare’s idea was to let some major moments of melodrama happen offstage, narrated by comic figures who keep saying “words fail to describe,” even as they try to. It works on the page and could work onstage with enough comic wit to bring it off. Bensussen instead uses a neat device wherein the characters whose actions are being narrated do the narrating—which helps greatly those viewers for whom some of the names and relations might otherwise prove slippery.

Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero), Leontes (Nathan Darrow) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The great reveal scene also comes off well, helped by staging that sets the statue of Hermione in a special space behind and above the main playing area. Otherwise, Cameron Anderson’s set design is sparse and open, with a tall leafless tree that later lowers and flowers. If quibble I must, I’ll direct my discontent at Whitney Locher’s costumes: there’s a handsome Edwardian cast to it all that makes these characters seem to belong in a Merchant-Ivory production, with Paulina looking a bit the schoolmarm; one might say that any play that gives credence to the ancient god Apollo might be best set a bit more pre-modern. And Autolycus in long underwear?

Perdita (Delfin Gökhan Meehan), Hermione (Jamie Ann Romero) in The Winter’s Tale, Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Those visual disconnects (in my eyes anyway) aside, this is a vibrant, near textbook-perfect run at one of those plays that delights, dismays, confuses and convinces as only a playwright confident he can do as he likes would try to bring off. In the space between Act 2 and Act 3, Pearl Rhein, as Time, puts it succinctly: allow the liberties taken if you’ve ever spent time worse than this; if you never have, “he wishes earnestly you never may.” You could indeed spend your time much worse, and no doubt have. Shakespeare’s ghost need not worry: Hartford Stage’s production of The Winter’s Tale spends its time well.

The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreography: Misha Shields; Scenic Design: Cameron Anderson; Costume Design: Whitney Locher; Lighting Design: Evan Anderson; Original Music & Sound Design: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Music Director: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Wig Design: Carissa Thorlakso; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Voice & Text Coach: Julie Foh; Dramaturg: Victoria Abrash; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark

Cast: Andrew Black, Jotham Burrello, Nathan Darrow, Daniel Davila Jr., Carmen Lacivita, John Maddaloni, Delfin Gökhan Meehan, Hannah Moore, Pearl Rhein, Omar Robinson, Jamie Ann Romero, Ana Laura Santana, Carson Timmons, Jeremy Webb, Lana Young

Hartford Stage
April 13-May 7, 2023

The Bit About the Kid

Review of The Art of Burning, Hartford Stage

Now continuing its world premiere after a run in Boston, directed by Hartford Stage Artistic Director Melia Bensussen, Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning mines both the comedy and the drama of unsuccessful marriages, while giving a refreshing emphasis to a teenage daughter caught in the crossfire. Along the way the play explores what constitutes stability and sustainability—not only in relationships but in our inter-relations with others as a measure of how we choose to live in the world. At the heart of the play is the fraught question of how parents manage their priorities in life while beginning to see what’s owed the next generation. 

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Mark (Michael Kaye), Jason (Rom Barkhordar) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Poised on the New Brutalist stylings of Luciana Stecconi’s set of hard surfaces and sharp corners, with an effective lighting grid in the floor to signal scene shifts, the play opens with Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), an artist and mother, in prickly colloquy with Mark (Michael Kaye), a friend and attorney placed in the position of mediating her divorce from his friend Jason (Rom Barkhordar). Such a setup would generally bespeak a friendly dissolution of the marriage, and such may have once been expected, but things have taken a turn for the darker and more dramatic: Patricia has recently seen fit to set fire to Jason’s antique rolltop desk in the backyard, inviting their daughter Beth (Clio Contogenis) to join her in the conflagration and even to roast marshmallows in victory over Dad. Not something Jason, a very self-centered guy, is likely to take easily. The cause? Another woman, of course. 

Jason (Rom Barkhordar), Katya (Vivia Font), Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Of the six characters in The Art of Burning, three are given scenes of considerable manic intensity; the other three, while emotive—the “other woman” Katya (Vivia Font)—and blustery (the men), are mostly foils. That leaves Patricia and Beth and Mark’s wife Charlene (Laura Latreille) to up the ante, displaying Snodgrass’s gift for the escalating harangue. Contogenis’ angsty cri de coeur against the parental generation for not stewarding the world in a more forward-looking manner pushes buttons with timely panache. Charlene, when she finally gets let off the leash, is even funnier; confronted by her husband for her alleged animadversion to musicals, she asserts what we might call the carnal attraction of good plays.

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Charlene (Laura Latreille) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Then there’s Patricia. Her big turn-the-tables scene is more complex in terms of comic ingredients and doesn’t score quite as readily. In part that’s because using Medea even by way of reference (and Snodgrass likes references) creates a tension between the scene before us and something the playwright might be wanting us to understand that the characters don’t. The problem is that the possible misinterpretation (by both Mark and Jason) is improbable (guys, dried blood turns brown, red paint stays red!) and so not really funny, though Krstansky makes the most of Patricia’s exulting in their stupidity. A Pyrrhic victory, perhaps, as it’s hard to feel quite the same way about the play after that scene.

Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky), Mark (Michael Kaye), Jason (Rom Barkhordar) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Indeed, the conflict between what works as characterization and what doesn’t nags at the play. It’s there when Beth, generally a sympathetic character, berates her well-intentioned mother for not grasping the devastating internet exposure the gaffes of her disastrous date will likely receive—but Beth’s worldly assumption of that likelihood (already knowing about such exposures) rather belies the naivete with which she approached her date. It’s as if she’s a child of the 1950s while at the movies with her date and an app-savvy child of the 2020s when reacting to her mom’s reaction. It’s not that she can’t be both, I suppose, but somehow the comedy gets skewed, in part because we can’t want to see the teen as the butt of the joke (can we?). And yet there is potential for a steely sort of comedy to work all through the play. 

Which is a way of saying that The Art of Burning isn’t working on all its burners. Comedy requires a pacing that keeps us alert to the satiric possibilities in almost any speech or action, but there’s a sense of emotional baggage weighing down Snodgrass’s sallies, as played here. I couldn’t help feeling that there might be a funnier version of this play possible, if we were permitted to see how comically clueless the entire cast is. In this version, the play aims to vindicate Patricia, as artist and mother and wronged woman who overcomes the wrong to get on with her life, and that’s fine though it also requires us to side with her less attractive manipulations. The note struck, too often, is that criticizing one’s predicament obviates having to take any blame for getting into the predicament. A sentiment all too common in retrospects on failed marriages, no doubt, but not quite as sharp as one might hope. 

Beth (Clio Contogenis), Patricia (Adrianne Krstansky) in Kate Snodgrass’s The Art of Burning at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The ending makes us wonder more than a little why we spent so much time dwelling on the disagreements of this mostly disagreeable quintet (sparing Beth, as one hopes to spare the child and spoil the rod).  There’s a kind of catharsis in airing such griefs, I guess, but not the kind “the Greeks” (who get more than one mention) had in mind: no one in this much aggrieved collective comes close to seeing their lives as “fate.” There’s always someone else to blame, thank gods. 

The Art of Burning
By Kate Snodgrass
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Scenic Design: Luciana Stecconi; Costume Design: Kara Harmon; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Assistant Stage Manager: Emily Pathman

Cast: Adrianne Krstansky, Michael Kaye, Rom Barkhordar, Vivia Font, Clio Contogenis, Laura Latreille

Hartford Stage
March 2-26, 2023

Someone's in the Kitchen with Julie

Review of The Queen of Basel, TheaterWorks Hartford

It’s Art-Basel in Miami Beach, Florida, and a party is surging in some high-rent, relentlessly bougie hotel. The incredibly well-appointed set, though (by Rodrigo Escalante), is a disused kitchen in the hotel. It’s a sink and a metal prep table, with shelves, boxes, bottles of disinfectant and cleaners, an old oven and other disject membra from staff (including a providential bottle of cooking wine). And that’s where sweetly apologetic Christine (Silvia Dionicio) leads Julie (Christine Sprang) to recover from the fact that Christine accidentally upended a tray with gin-based drinks on Julie’s terrific dress (Harry Nadal, costume design).

Julie (Christine Sprang) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford, directed by Christina Angelis (photo by Mike Marques)

We start with dialogue that shows the two women bridging the class chasm between them, for Julie, we learn, is the daughter of the hotel’s owner, a big playa, and his daughter—Vassar grad with MBA from Harvard and top in her class—is not the clueless heiress we might expect. Or is she? As things go on, we find that Julie, for all her big talk of backing entrepreneurs of color, lives and invests on daddy’s dime. (Mom, Julie lets us know later while presenting her badge of authentic non-whiteness, was Columbian, and, to know Julie has suffered, we must understand Mom died of breast cancer, also that she gave up her dream of being an OBY-GYN to marry Daddy Bigbucks. We can say that Bettis’ way with backstory is to make sure it always scores points for grievance.)

Christine (Silvia Dionicio) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But the real nitty gritty on Julie doesn’t fully start coming out until after Christine’s boyfriend, John (Kelvin Grullon), arrives at his girlfriend’s summons. He, an enterprising Uber driver, thinks he’s picking up a fare. Instead, he’s going to get involved in a lengthy heart-to-heart or head butt to head butt or verbal hand-to-hand combat or maybe even an erotic pas de deux with Julie, behind Christine’s hard-working back. She, in her heels, stockings, shorts, and low-cut blouse, has to be out there in party-hard land. John, for the run time of the show at least, has no particular place to go. Julie won’t leave until her fiancé comes to pick her up, but just now he’s involved in some kind of deal with daddy and can’t even bother to send her a text…

Julie (Christine Sprang) and John (Kelvin Grullon) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

The one place where plot development seemed to hint at coming alive was when Christine—while John was out finding out that, sure enough, his car got towed—admits that Julie’s daddy, her boss, gave her some serious cash to get Julie out of the place. Even more reason not to budge, we suppose, but what keeps John hanging on? Must be lust.

Fine, if that’s who this guy is, but he—part Cuban, part Haitian—is supposed to have a heart Christine trusts—like, with her five-year-old daughter and getting Mama out of Venezuela and into the U.S. So we might wonder why he’s acting this way. The reason is because the whole play is a riff on August Strindberg’s masterpiece from the 1880s, Miss Julie, wherein a landowner’s lackey, though supposedly going to marry the kitchen maid, tries to assert himself with the big man’s mid-twenties daughter during her father’s absence at Midsummer festival, a woman he has ogled since she was a child and he was a teen and who is now ready to play with fire to the full extent the stage will allow. Strindberg’s John has nowhere else to go; Bettis’ John should really go see about his car.

What keeps him there, we suppose we’re to suppose, is the alternatively winning, whining, high-handed, woe-is-me, and who-the-hell-are-you badinage from our new Ms. Julie. It’s fun to listen to, for the most part, and Christine Sprang as Julie is great to watch. She makes the most of all the self-satisfied primping our girl gets up to and she’s even better at delivering putdowns and pickup lines as though she’s heard and seen it all. She’s a force to be reckoned with and John, we reckon, is enthralled or just dying to prove something. Grullon’s John isn’t an easy read, though I’d be happier with him if he weren’t Christine’s boyfriend and was just an unsuspecting Uber driver finding himself face to face with a poor little rich girl ready to get wild. Still, “young men will do it if they come to it,” as Ophelia always says.

Without giving it all away let’s just say it doesn’t end as direly as Miss Julie does, though who among us knows how deadly are the thousand and one cuts of death by paparazzi? Strindberg’s play shows that, within the mores of his day, once an upper-class woman steps out of the societal boundaries, she either becomes an outcast/outlaw or dies—Bettis’ Julie lives to belt from the bottle again, we have no doubt.

John (Kelvin Grullon), Christine (Silvia Dionicio), Julie (Christine Sprang) in The Queen of Basel at TheaterWorks Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Meanwhile, what about John and Christine? Well, what’s love got to do with it? Christine, to ring real changes on Strindberg’s oblique view of the shocks that shake the subaltern’s heart, gets a heartfelt, stressful, tear-fueled aria—in Spanish, which John doggedly translates for those of us stuck with some version of the King’s English—that describes horrors aplenty in her lengthy backstory for Julie’s benefit (as in: that hotel worker you didn’t bother to tip—who knows what they endured to end up at this job?). This to inspire sorrowed sympathy before she delivers her coup de grace to that man-borrowing harpie.

Christine gets the last laugh and that should count for something. Silvia Dionicio seems most at home as the confrontational Christine at the end (in her downhome street duds) but the hoops the character leaps through to be all the play wants her to be feel more and more contrived with her every “just at the wrong moment” appearance. It might be better if Bettis struck the Strindberg scaffold entirely and tried to figure out who these characters really are.

So: the play, if you don’t overthink it, is a lively three-hander with gestures toward social justice. Not only that, it spins a theater-classic into our day so that it can be about “real people” (as in: people who didn’t live 140 years ago in a Scandinavian country) and can sketch out how all are victims of patriarchal white capitalism with its sexism, racism, and jobs below the poverty line.

It's theater. Why that harsh aftertaste? It’s good for you!

The Queen of Basel
By Hilary Bettis
Directed by Cristina Angelis

Set Design: Rodrigo Escalante; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Lighting Design: Emma Deane; Sound Design: Germán Martínez; Intimacy Director: Lauren Kiele Deleon

 Cast: Silvia Dionicio, Kelvin Grullon, Christine Spang

TheaterWorks Hartford
February 3-February 26, 2023 

The Play's the Thing

Review of The Mousetrap, Hartford Stage

Famed mystery writer Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is probably best known for being the longest-running play in British history. It ran continuously from 1952 until the pandemic of 2020 briefly closed it. It reopened in May 2021. Perhaps that significant blip in shows is reason enough to mount a local production. In any case, though I’ve heard of the show my whole life, I’ve never seen a production before the current one at Hartford Stage directed by Jackson Gay.

The other famous thing about the show is that everyone who sees it is exhorted by a note written by Christie herself, read at the final curtain, not to reveal whodunit. And, indeed, going in, I had no idea who the culprit would be. It may be that curiosity—learning the facts of the case—and secrecy—not sharing them—has done much to keep audiences attending. If there’s something very quaint about the play—and there is—it has to do with the fact that Dame Christie set the bar for the “gathered all in one place for a period of time” murder mystery and to attend the play is to be at once reminded of all the fun tropes of the genre.

Such as: a handsome space in which characters can enter and exit in various directions (kind of like all those doors in the Clue boardgame); Riw Rakkulchon’s set is simply fun to look at, with a huge picture window framing diagonal trees, a big fireplace, back stairs, various couches and settees, and plenty of antlers. It looks like a ski lodge or a sitting room at the Overlook Hotel (and, indeed, there’s a hell of a snowstorm happening outside); so: yes, another trope: the trapped until further notice visitors are left to their own devices, and part of each “device” is how each looks, as furnished by Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s apt and inventive costumes; then add the furtive qualities of the guests at this guesthouse, none of whom seem quite on the up-and-up.

The cast of The Mousetrap at Hartford Stage, directed by Jackson Gay; photo by T. Charles Erickson

And that’s the mainstay of the play and the quality this production plays with the most. We hear—from a radio—that there’s been a murder in London and that there is a suspect at large. The description of the suspect could fit almost any of the guests and even the host, Giles Ralston (Tobias Segal) who, with his wife Mollie (Sam Morales), are newbies to the hotel business and this is their first go-round. Key to the shenanigans here is that we don’t quite believe anyone is bona fide, but the question, then, is motive.

And here the story probably would work better in narrative prose than in scenic dialogue, because we have to learn about events that motivated the first murder, having to do with local child abuse and a malevolent judge and, perhaps, grown survivors of the original infractions who may be enacting revenge. Turned into a play, the murder mystery’s device of letting suspects “hold the floor” until we think we know whether they could’ve “done it” or not becomes the main driving force. We, as audience, simply kill a few hours watching these Brit types perambulate and asseverate—earning our laughs by being silly and flighty and odd.

We’re helped in our sleuthing by the presence of Detective Sargeant Trotter (Brendan Dalton, energetic and emphatic if a bit in over-his-head) who arrives on snow-skis and has the wherewithal to try to figure out who everyone is and what connection they may have to the murder. A second murder, in situ, heats things up because now a murderer is clearly among them and anyone connected to the deceased persons is likely next or the culprit.

Foreground: Christopher Geary as Christopher Wren and Sam Morales as Mollie Ralston; background: Tobias Segal as Giles Ralston in The Mousetrap, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As the suspects/guests, Christopher Geary as Christopher Wren is a comical study in nervous mannerisms that might betoken guilt or just a lot of sensitivity; even more ominous is Jason O’Connell’s creepy but amusing Mr. Paravicini, the only guest who didn’t book ahead but instead arrived because his car allegedly overturned in a snowdrift; Ali Skamangas, as Miss Casewell, seems to have issues stemming from darkly hinted-at early trauma (otherwise she seems to be pretty well-wrapped compared to the two just mentioned); as the constantly fault-finding Mrs. Boyle, Yvette Garnier doesn’t quite have the grasp of the diction the others have—which may or may not be a clue; as Major Metcalf, Greg Stuhr is sturdy and serviceable, and tends to be more observer than observed. The host couple are affable but don’t really come forward as take-charge types, and so seem to be in constant reaction mode.

Jason O’Connell as Mr. Paravicini in The Mousetrap at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The tone veers around a bit between farce and suspense but the main note director Gay achieves is a tongue-in-cheek rendering of all the aforementioned tropes. It’s all in fun, ultimately.

And so, all in all, it’s a diverting evening, as they say. The fun is in the feeling of revisiting a sense of theater that comes with its own requirement to settle in and watch it unfold at a pace that works against our current theater’s effort to score with every breath. There is no real subtext here other than the fact that persons aren’t always who they pretend to be and that playing at anything, occupationally, is a role. Even being a killer is a part that one only takes on by enacting it—one could otherwise be as bland as milk. That, I suppose, is the attraction of a mystery and, in this sprawling production at Hartford Stage, part of the mystery is how Christie’s play plays so well after all this time. 

Ali Skamangas as Miss Casewell (supine) and Sam Morales as Mollie Ralston in the Hartford Stage production of The Mousetrap; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The Mousetrap
By Agatha Christie
Directed by Jackson Gay

Scenic Design: Riw Rakkulchon; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Krista Smith; Original Music & Sound Design: Broken Chord; Wig & Hair Design: Carissa Thorlakson; Vocal & Dialect Coach: Thom Jones; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Assistant Stage Manager: Noam Lautman; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast:
Brendan Dalton, Yvette Ganier, Christopher Geary, Sam Morales, Jason O’Donnell, Tobias Segal, Ali Skamangas, Greg Stuhr

Hartford Stage
October 13-November 6, 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

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.