July 25, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Berkshire Theatre Festival’s production of the Neil Simon play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, is a hilarious comedy that at times spills over into farce in the incredible number of disasters that befall the middle-aged couple inhabiting a 14th floor apartment in Manhattan. It is a play that surprisingly has moments of poignancy, as well.

The action all takes place in the apartment of Mel and Edna Edison (Stephen DeRosa and Veanne Cox). When the play opens on a heat wave, with aromas from the city garbage strike wafting in through the windows, with the air conditioning malfunctioning, and with riotous neighbors voices and music disturbing the peace, the final straw is that Mel, now 47 has just been fired from the only job he knows how to do.

Mel is worrying himself into a nervous breakdown, and Edna tries to be helpful and supportive as long as she can. But things get worse when she, having lost her key, goes out for a few minutes leaving time for the apartment to burglarized, down to their last ice cube, and Mel has a nervous breakdown.

At this point, the family assembles from out of town and Mel’s brother Harry and three sisters, in descending ages, Pauline (Jeanne Paulsen), Jessie (Denny Dillion), and Pearl (Alice Playton), appear on the scene. Harry, as family head, attempts to explain to the “girls” how if each were to contribute “x” amount to the situation, things can be worked out. Not an easy task with their interruptions and interpretations, and one shattered temporarily by Edna arriving with a totally different idea.

It is in the tricky family love that poignancy moves in on the play despite the fact that all the scenes are hilarious. And there is a solution, be it slow to arrive in the lives of Mel and Edna, but a solution nonetheless.

The six characters each inhabit their characters meticulously. The dialog is rich and quickly paced, fluent and funny, bewildered and understanding.

As Edna, Cox varies her role nicely from patient support of Mel’s ranting, through attempts to help and encourage, until her own desperate need to literally rend her garments in her need for a hot bath in an apartment with the water turned off.

DeRosa’s Mel brings to his growing desperation moods that vary from a whining desperation to defiant ones of screaming on the balcony at the upstairs neighbors who seem to be having no trouble with their water. Yet he has in him a quality that others love and seek to help. An unsympathetic/sympathetic character able to provoke the strong love (and even envy) of a third leading character in the play, Harry’s final scene with Mel, played strongly by Julian Gamble.

Each of the three supporting roles of the sisters are played by actors with star quality, and each creating a carefully crafted character in the family pecking order.

Warner Shook directed; Scott Bradley designed the great prison-wall front that opens on his intricate set (with almost as many doors and areas as a farce; and they get slammed) and Laurie Churba Kohn’s costumes put us into that 1970s era. Plot lines in script also clue us in in: Erma could be shocked at the high cost of psychiatrist, $40 an hour! Scott Killian was responsible for the sound which included radio sound bites that separated scenes.

The play runs around two hours and seems shorter. Enjoy.

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2009 schedule and reviews.

July 22, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Shakespeare and Co.’s production of Measure for Measure is an atypical play in the Bard’s canon and one not often produced.

Shakespeare has treated the play rather cavalierly, setting it in Vienna but giving the characters Italian names, and so intermixing comedy and near tragedy, so that it fits in no particular genre. It is as though he had given up on real comedy, giving it a dark goodbye in this rather strange play. The plays that follow it are the great romantic tragedies.

The plot concerns sexual corruption in Vienna where the Duke (Tom O’Keef) decides to turn the city over to his deputy Angelo (Gabriel Portuondo) while he himself pretends to vanish but remains behind, garbed as monk, to observe.

Angelo, himself a secret seducer of virgins, boldly announces that offenders will be beheaded and arrests his first victim, Claudio (Ross Bennett Hurwitz), to be thrown into prison and be beheaded the next day.

Claudio’s sister Isabelle (Emily Hagburg) is in a nunnery, about to take her final vows, but when she learns of Claudio’s plight, hastens to the deputy Angelo to plead for mercy for him. However, Angelo is smitten with her chastity and instead makes her an offer: her virginity for her brother’s life, a sacrifice she declines to make.

Meanwhile the Duke in disguise is observing all, and falling in love with the pure and resisting Isabella in the bargain. Matters are eventually resolved into a happy ending by various interventions involving a “bed-trick” of female switchings and several other ploys. The play can thus end on a happy note with several couples hand in hand and the nunnery left behind. Whether or not general morality in Vienna in is forever saved is unclear, but the music is happy.

The young actors are in a cast of ten, doubling as other characters in a plot that involves at least 25 characters, all of whom are charming and talented and slip in and out of roles and costumes with alacrity. Indeed, they also manage the frequent scene shifts from prison, to nunnery, to brothel.

They display competent skill, whether thy are whether creating a poignant pleading virginal near-nun, a bawdy inhabitant of a brothel, a monk or a lecher, a towering hangman, or young man being made a sacrificial victim of a new law. All are members of the Performance Internship Program, chosen from the 87 who applied to participate in it and arrived with skills already proven but here to be honed.

Director Dave Demke has served them well, and vice-versa, and the play as a whole is enhanced by charming original songs composed by Composition Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center. The singer is mainly actor Claudio, a young man who combines a lovely singing voice to his acting skills

Costumer Kelly Marie Schaefer has been busily inventive. The nun-like Isabella was magnificently garbed in white, and a special joy was the executioner, the super-tall Nathan Wolfe Coleman who, throughout the play, handled a major role of Lucio whom Shakespeare called a fantastic, which he was indeed.

Although, for many, the play is an ugly duckling among Shakespeare’s swans, it has been highly praised and loved by some of its critics including, T. S. Eliot, who admired its marvelous poetry and Wasteland/Ash Wednesday mood and plot.

This reviewer found the production and presentation of the play better than the play itself, and was glad for an opportunity to experience it.

• Shakespeare & Co. 2009 schedule
• Review: Hamlet – June 26, 2009
• Review: Pinter’s Mirror – June 14, 2009
• Review: Golda’s Balcony – June 17, 2009
• Review: Bad Dates – Feb. 1, 2009

July 16, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Sam Shepard’s True West rivals in brilliance and escalating violence the thunderstorm that delayed its tonight’s opening. Indeed, the building tensions of murderous rivalry and rage that swept across the stage through nine scenes exceeded the storm.

All the action occurs in Neil Patel’s scrupulously designed set (seen first as an exterior that suggests the ticky-tacky suburban sprawl forty miles from LA on the edge of the desert where coyote packs howl by night. As the play opens, uniformed stage-hands roll it and we see the meticulously staffed kitchen, replete with appliances down to the last pot holder.

It is evening, the ingenious lighting by Ben Stanton hangs blue over the set and spills in through the large window where scores of thriving plants temporarily defy the chrome kitchen appliances.

“Mom” (Debra Jo Rupp), who owns the house has gone off to Alaska and Austin (Nate Corddry), her younger son, college-educated and now a small-time writer who does at least sell scripts to a Hollywood producer, has come away from his city home (and wife and three kids) to write in peace and quiet and to water the plants.

But as the play begins, his brother Lee (Paul Sparks) a drifter, ten years older, uneducated and unsuccessful, not seen for five years, has appeared in the kitchen. And the sibling rivalry which has evidently always existed in this self-destructive family can again begin.

Lee decides to stay and at first Austin seems to try to make the best of his unwelcome presence, cajoled into lending him the car, in which Lee drives about at night stealing small appliances from the neighbors.

However, when Lee not only intrudes on Austin’s meeting with his movie contact Saul Kimmer (Stephen Kunken), a dapper, over-dressed LA type, but takes over, tensions and what plot there is in this rather plotless play, lash out and the very room in which the play takes place is demolished.

Near the play’s end “Mom,” who is a small, and somewhat out-of-it-all creature, returns unexpectedly from Alaska to total ruin, not only of the room and its contents, but, sadly for the plants that no one has found time to water. Hers has proved a dysfunctional family at best. Her husband has been lost for years out on the desert, where hilariously but ruefully we learn during the course of the play, he has even lost his dentures in a doggy bag at a fast food joint.

Shepard is hard to categorize. His writing is distinctively his own; menace looms and gradually grows as the packs of coyotes get larger and louder. His characters fight for space (in a crowded and empty world) as at times Pinter’s do, but he is not like Pinter.

His dialog is rapidly paced, full of laugh lines, though ones growing out of a situation of confrontation that is, itself, devastating.

The characters, flailing about in their empty and meaningless lives, are expertly acted,. Lee is full of snarl, jealousy, betrayal and menace. Austin is finally a drunken, goaded, creature, swirled into his brother’s toaster-stealing world and piling up toast until he is driven to attempted homicide. Kimmer is swarmy, flamboyant, fickle, given to poses and gestures, and Mom, all vague acceptance of her children’s destruction, ruing, really, only her lost plants (and a few pieces of antique china which Lee grabs to carry off to the desert, if he does indeed get back there.) is eager to depart early.

As for his title, True West is not the western Roy Rogers flick idea Lee tricks the agent into accepting, canceling out Austin’s very different and almost completed script, but True West is possibly the awful sprawl of Southern California and the root-less-ness and emptiness of its too many inhabitants in the current world.

Whatever, Shepard’s play catches and has caught the imagination of our times. Written in the 70’s, by the 80’s it had moved from off-Bway status to gleaning all the Oscar nominations on Broadway where it ran for more than 700 performances.
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It may well prove to be Williamstown’s hit of the season. Besides it’s talented cast, the magnificent set, ingenious lighting (especially the lowering and raising blue moon spots or day-time blistering suns.), and great supporting sound (by Darren L. West) not only of coyotes and crickets but of music linking the scenes.

Director Daniel Goldstein can be proud of this production which seems to me, with limited Shepard experience, to have captured whatever it is that makes a Shepard play True Shepard, whatever that is!

• Williamstown Theatre Festival schedule 2009 season
• Williamstown Theatre Festival

July 12 performance reviewed by Ed McDonnell

If you visit the Barrington Stage Company to see Underneath the Lintel, you may get more than entertainment. Playwright Glen Berger and the gifted actor Glynis Bell offer you a little something extra: immortality. Of a sort.

You have to be in the right state of mind, receptive, to say the very least, and of course there’s a catch. When a librarian of Hoofddorp, Holland, receives a book overdue by 113 years, she can’t stop wondering and she won’t leave it alone. She undertakes to pursue the story that must be there.

Increasingly obsessive, not understanding her obsession, she risks her job and burns through her money and vacation time, fixing on the next and the next in a series of shaky leads or “lovely evidences” as she calls them, or “significant scraps.”

Chasing from city to city into several continents, all along the way she pauses to marvel at the grotesque nature of the thin trail, the enormity of the puzzle and her own uncharacteristic willingness to jump off into uncertainty. The chronicle of the case is alternated with pieces of her ordinary “real life” in Hoofddorf and we find that once, at an early age, reluctance cost her dearly.

She is brought to contemplation through her tireless detective work in evaluating, besides other “lovely evidences”:

1. a ticket from a Chinese laundry in London, from 1913;
2. a tram logbook from 1912 Germany;
3. a disintegrating pair of pants corresponding to the claim ticket;
4. notes on the condition of a dog, named for a houseplant;

She feels the stupidity and trivialness of death: “Do you know how Aeschylus died, that towering playwright of ancient Greece?” she asks. It has to do with a falling turtle. “Fourteen people in America die every year by vending machines…shaking them for the fifty cents…” She feels the vastness of time and that it cares nothing for the countless organisms that come and go, most of them leaving no trace, and a very few leaving, apparently, special messages.

The size of the universe, its age, and the inevitability of death are playwright Glen Berger’s only concerns. “I write plays to help me keep these three facts in the front of my head. In other words, I write to try to keep myself engaged with the Bewildering and Infinite.”

The librarian begins to believe that the faceless “A.” may be more than a nameless, meaningless lost soul whose life’s intersection with her own is only coincidence. He may be…a myth. And the suggestion that this myth may be more than an old story generated by its times and preserved for its changing relevance, its value as illustration of timeless things or just its whimsy, is a deep shock.

Here her mind opens wide, with a new appreciation of life. Not her life, but Life entire, the Universe. Despite the pervasive humor of the play to this point, the viewer is urged toward this unsettling experience and to one of his own. Separated by only minutes from her considerations of these things, the librarian weeps for a lost opportunity in love.

Are we insignificant? Do you want immortality? There’s a catch. There’s more than one.

• Barrington Stage Company schedule 2009 season
• Barrington Stage Company

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July 14 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

• Berkshire Theatre Festival schedule 2009 season

Berkshire Theatre Festival production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is a delightful, buoyant, bawdy and perfectly charming romp though the awful adventures that Candide (Julian Whitley). He was brought up to believe “That all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” by his mentor Pangloss (Ben Rosenblatt) and naïvely does believe and put into action by daring to woo the beautiful, innocent, and saucy Cunegonde. Her family put a stop to that by quickly banishing the young lovers, and they are sent out into a world that is anything but best.

a delightful, buoyant, bawdy and perfectly charming romp

Their travels, beginning alone but meeting up at times only to be separated and demeaned time after time in dozens of countries, Europe in act I and in America in Act II, include ship wrecks, revolutions, Church and State confrontation, as all the imperfections of those inhabiting various lands rape, imprison, even kill (or seem to) poor Cunegone, Candide and Pangloss, who all manage to survive and reach an ending in which, now world-weary and much older, they decide to accept the life they have and live simply together in love and “Make Our Garden Grow.”

That such a plot could be at times hysterically funny, at other times shockingly boisterous and cruel, must be credited to the excellent huge cast of 21 young actors, all of whom as ensemble, with lightning speed, change costumes and characters creating the feeling that at least fifty actors are careening through this play.

The two leads, Candide and Cunegonde, each have several solos, performed with operatic skill. His includes “It must be so” and “It must be me.” Hers—“Glitter and Be Gay.” The two pianos make it possible for all to come out clear and beautifully with no microphones. And when the whole cast sing the big buoyant well-loved songs, the rousing enthusiasm make an orchestra’s absence be forgotten. Indeed, it should be noted that often two pianos were not needed and pianist Matthew Stern magically and ably plays a second-lead role such as Governor or religious patriarch.

Pangloss seems dead early on in the play, but do not believe it. He will miraculously return and one will realize where he’s been all the time.

Threading all the plot and holding it together remarkably is The Old Woman (Julia Broder), a dominating, ever-present creature, who has lost one buttock, but this does not stop her from appearing, gypsy-like, in various countries, but never losing her individual accent. She is especially effective in her solo, “I Am Easily Assimilated” and in a second act duet “We are Woman” with Paquette (Becky Webber), a lusty wench also banished. Webber is especially agile in seduction and in scaling the heights to steal gold, and is a fine singer.

And there is Maximilian (Kyle Schaefer) brother of Cunegonde, so enchantingly self-admiring that one would almost take him for the hero he considers himself as he takes front stage in the big numbers “Best of All Possible World’s” and “What’s the Use.”

The setting, by Eric Kiernman, works efficiently and pertly and is a colorful jungle-gym of platforms, ladders, and moving parts, and well lit by Jamie Davidson. Costume designer Jessica Risser-Milne has supplied the multiple regalia into which the ensemble characters keep changing as nations multiply.

This production is so surprisingly staged, so courageously paced, and so cheerfully presented that it should play to packed houses as it did the evening this reviewer saw it.

Oh, yes. There was a Director behind it all, holding all the swirling pieces and places together. Ralph Petillo working from the various possible scripts that over the years have evolved combining the talents of our own Berkshire poet, Richard Wilbur, who wrote the lyrics, and our once-own Lenny Bernstein, and a book by Hugh Wheeler.

There have been many Candides in the last fifty years. The current one at the Unicorn is a winner. And very, very funny, despite all the adversity. Enjoy.