Review of Sandra, TheaterWorks, Hartford
Playwright David Cale specializes in monologues, and in Sandra, now playing at TheaterWorks directed by Jared Mezzocchi, with music by Matthew David Marsh and creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi, he takes this theatrical genre into the realm of what might be the ultimate film genre: the thriller. If you think that a thriller—in which there is generally mystery and murder and various physical threats as well as psychological tension—might be hard to convey with a solo, narrating speaker, you’d be right. And you’re welcome to see how well the TheaterWorks production, which features state-of-the-art projections on walls and ceiling, pulls that off. The play’s run has been extended through June 27, so you now have more chances.
Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)
Sandra, played with unwavering, forthright earnestness by Felicia Curry, is in her forties, separated from a husband who seems through with a marriage she might try to salvage, and runs a Brooklyn café called Sandra’s. She also seems to be the most isolated café owner one could ever imagine. Apart from that estranged husband whom we meet briefly in the later going (Curry enacts all Sandra’s interlocutors), Sandra has a co-worker/employee who hazards opinions, and knows a couple glimpsed briefly as a fleeting plot-point. Her entire life, it seems, is focused on Ethan, a younger, gay pianist/composer who gifts her a CD of his music before departing for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, whilst remarking, “I feel like disappearing from my life.”
Disappear he does, and Sandra, an emergency contact person for Ethan, gets a call asking if she knows his whereabouts three weeks later. And there are authorities questioning her too. Her solution: head to Puerto Vallarta and try to find his trail.
I have to confess I did not attend Sandra thinking I was going to watch “a thriller.” The fact that Curry delivers the voices of all the other characters in a jokey way and plays Sandra as the type we’re most familiar with from clueless romantic comedies, made me imagine I was watching a play in which Sandra, sleuthing after the perhaps deliberately vanished Ethan, would learn way more about him (and perhaps herself) than she bargained for, and that her search in Mexico would include a wealth of odd-ball characters—like Beauford (a seventy-ish Tennessee Williams wanna-be who seems to base his life on Suddenly Last Summer) whom she meets briefly, or Luca, the quintessential sleazy/sexy Latin lover, by way of Sicily (his seduction of Sandra while Curry plays both parts definitely indicated rom-com). That play would all be in the interests of romance the way most trips to faraway places are.
Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)
But no, tensions mount when Sandra finds evidence, such as Ethan’s handwriting on a note launched in a bottle by a long-haired blonde dude who had accompanied Beauford to the bar where she met him, but who departed when the elderly gent had to take his insulin shot. And so now Sandra isn’t looking for Ethan as much as for this long-haired, nameless dude. And if she finds him?
Thrillers, of course, tend to be the movies you love to shout at because their protagonists so often do the wrong thing or have motives and/or knowledge that are only gradually revealed or which have to surface just to make something implausible slightly less so. And it may be that Cale and company had in mind a send-up of the genre that would have audiences laughing over wild coincidence met by the steady can-do positivity that fuels many an amateur sleuth’s success. But long before Sandra recounts arrests, testimony, witness protection programs and the like you may find yourself wishing she’d take a moment and reflect or philosophize or give us tips on airflight (she goes back and forth between Mexico and Brooklyn a lot), or anything we might want an engaging narrator to do. Instead, it’s all plot all the time, underscored by the fact that—as she’s left alone to tell the tale to us on a stage—we know Sandra won’t meet with an untimely end. And so we might well ask: why are you telling us this?
And what does seeing the play do that simply reading it wouldn’t? Well, there is the immediacy of having Felicia Curry, an Emmy-nominated actor, speak things for us as though just realizing them, which is somewhat harder for a narrator to do in writing, and there is Camilla Tassi’s atmospheric projections, many of Puerto Vallarta itself, which include the ebb and flow of surf seen from above, the text of computer searches, and, in the play’s most dramatic moment, a looming shadow. All visuals are aided by the intricacy of the lighting design by co-lighting designers Amith Chandrashaker and Alex Fetchko. And there are Ethan’s lovely, stately piano compositions (by Matthew David Marsh) which might make you wish a friend more concerned with who Ethan is than where he is had been given a voice to recall him.
Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)
Theatrical monologue is, certainly, a respected and capable genre, and creating suspense via the monologue’s blend of the speaker’s stasis with the kinesis of recalled action that moves through space and time is a hit-and-miss affair. Here, a hallucinating walk at one point is particularly well-rendered by Curry with Tassi’s projections. But when the main action taking place on stage is an actor consulting a laptop, something—other than Ethan—has gone missing.
Sandra
By David Cale
Directed by Jared Mezzocchi
Music by Matthew David Marsh
Creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi
Set Design: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Design: Sarita Fellows; Co-Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Co-Lighting Design: Alex Fetchko; Sound Design: Evdoxia Ragkou; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Hair Design: Tinkia Sadiku; Dialect Coach: Josh FS Moser
Cast: Felicia Curry
TheaterWorks, Hartford
May 30-June 27, 2024