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Aug. 10, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

This has been an amazing summer for theatre in the Berkshires with hit after hit and reviewers scrambling for commending adjectives. Plays have swept from Feydeau farces to the tragedy of Othello and from revivals of beloved classics to runs of new experimental plays.

Now we must add to the long list of fine revivals, the Barrington Stage Company’s production of Noel Cowards’s Private Lives under Julianne Boyd’s spirited direction. As performed, the play is a sheer delight from the moment the lights go off to rise on two identical balconies of a posh hotel on the French Riviera in 1930.

On the stage right are two honeymooners, Elyot (Christopher Innvar) and Sibyl (Rebecca Brooksher). He is tall, self-assured, mature enough to be slightly bored already by his silly, blonde naïve wife’s babble and her jealous references to his previous wife, from whom he has been divorced for the past five years.

That wife Amanda (Gretchen Egolf) was, and still is, capable of giving Elyot as much as he gave her in the give-and-take of their three years of blissful/unblissful marriage.

Of course it is Amanda who appears on the second balcony on her second honeymoon accompanied by her new husband Victor (Mark H. Dold) who seems a fine up-standing blond hero, but is a bit square and unexciting, at least to deal with Amanda, a red-headed hell-cat.

By the end of the first hilarious act, Elyot and Amanda have abandoned their new spouses and are on the run for Paris where the second half of this three act play occurs.

The play from the beginning is fast-paced and from there on takes off even faster. The dialog is full of witty repartee delivered with pace and a flair for just the right innuendo.

Both Egolf and Innvar revel in it as they do with the boisterous physical antics that punctuate the brief quieter moments, ones of music, dancing, or even engaging in a sexually alluring moment of foot fettishing.

Obviously the pair are superbly cast and can do much more in the way of physical antics than the prudery of the 1930s allowed such actors as the Lunts, Gertrude Lawrence, and Coward himself to engage in. Today no audience will be shocked as the couple’s antics almost demolish the set, seeming capable of disarranging every stick of furniture on the stage with the exception of the huge grand piano that remains in place before the great windows with their passionately swaying curtains. (Settings by Karl Elgsti).

All is not mayhem to these spirited lovers. They can dance to a record as well as smash it. And they wear their blue and pink lounge garments with a his-and her-delight. Costumer Elizabeth Flanto has the period right on key, especially those of the women. Amanda’s more dashing than those of second runner, Sibyl, sweet and girlish.

Poor Sibyl, she and Victor run a poor second race although they struggle gallantly. As actors they both inhabit their roles with talent, and in the few moments when they have their own flings of indignation are believable and funny. Indeed, as played, they might evolve into a future, or might not. They are the underdogs and the alpha dogs have more fun.

A fifth cast member Tandy Cronyn also deserves praise. She is only the French maid in a cameo role but not a lowly one. Her opinions, delivered in rapid French, made perfectly clear by her body language, are decided ones, and she knows just what to do with dishes that are in the way of the tray she must set on a table.

But in the end, the play belongs to Amanda and Elyot. How lucky that it is in such good hands in the current production on the Barrington Stage. Running time is an all-too-brief two hours and eight minutes.

Aug. 8, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Plays about dysfunctional families seem to be audience pleasers in this “season of our discontent.” Witness August, Oshage County running off with all the theatre awards in Manhattan. And the world premier of Christine Whitley’s The Goat Woman of Corvis County, at Shakespeare and Company’s new Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre joins the pack.

Whitley’s play is a variation on the mode and might be labeled Contemporary Southern Gothic. It is set in rural Tennessee and full of echoes of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, in which maimed and limited humans are extremely funny but pain us with their tortured limitations and vulnerability. Other echoes from Sam Shepard and even the wilder plays of Tennesee Williams seem woven into its intricate texture and its ability to slip in and out of time and space.

The action is in-your-face realism and your bleacher seat so pulls you into the play that you can smell the bacon sizzling on the stove and the coffee brewing in the pot. The escalating violence is so threateningly real one feels impelled to step in and attempt to stop it.

The plot centers around Charlotte (Keira Naughton), a thirty-four year old woman who lives in an improvised barn loft home with her fifth husband Randy (Thomas Kee) and David (David Rosenblatt), her teen-aged son from a previous marriage. Charlotte is fey in having an unusual ability to heal sick and wounded goats. (One she has saved and nurtured resides in the unseen lower levels of her barn home.)

She also has a dark secret in her past and a very current legal problem which brings on stage John (Daniel Berger-Jones), a fledgling lawyer from Nashville.

The three family members dominate the play, tormented, wounded, violent and, at times, ruefully funny in their tortured entanglements that involve physical abuse and suffering. Their skillful acting pulls you onto the stage, even though you would rather not be there.

The well acted lawyer role is minor in only developing Charlotte’s complex character and her ways of using sex to achieve her goals. Berger-Jones, playing the only “sane” character in the plot, handles it with skill.

As written, the play, although occurring mainly in the present, slides very skillfully into past moments in Charlotte’s life that are so pivotal they should be allowed to accrue as the playwright lets them and not be anticipated by this review. They are aided by a magnificent light complex that studs the entire theatre’s ceiling.

Let it suffice that the actors are wonderful. Naughton inhabits her mercurial character with dynamic power giving us a woman who loves her wayward son but cannot show it, fears but puts fear behind her, uses her beauty to her advantage and almost destruction, and has spent a life mired in a limited educational background, one in which all she possesses and values is her beauty and longing for beautiful clothes and maybe even a home worthy of living in. In the complex role emerges a sympathetic character.

As do, surprisingly, Kee and Rosenblatt in theirs.

Kee’s role is also a complex one, seemingly unsympathetic at first, driven by forces that we do not understand, he can be, as we see in the second act, something much more. He is equally driven, equally involved, equally vulnerable.

While in a secondary role, but still vital one, Rosenblatt may utter the most four letter words in the play (convincingly), he has a vital scene in the second act in which one wants for him the love and understanding his misguided mother also wants to show but does not know how.

And crazy as it seems, at the very ending of this tortured and torturing play, there seems to be hope, probably still of a southern gothic kind, but still hope.

This is a play to experience more than once to enjoy. And the intimacy of the current seating arrangement of the flexible new theatre space the Bernstein supplies is a suitable setting for it. Set designer Susan Zeeman Rogers has worked creatively with the seeming limitations of the stage space; Mathew Miller has provided skilled lights for the time and mood changes; Bill Barclay’s music supports, as do Govane Lohbauer’s costumes.

I find this a good production rather than a great one. But the play as a world premier is still searching, the author is young and talented, and the opportunities of the acting space are still to be explored.

Meanwhile a talented director, Robert Walsh, has brought us a challenging evening at Shakespeare and Company.

August 6, 2008 (Matinee) performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Footnote to a masterpiece: Shakespeare’s Othello opened on July 25, and I, unavoidably, could not attend the press opening. Wanting my independence, I carefully avoided the reviews of others and conversations with those who had seen it.

I can now report that obviously it was, and is, a smashing success. For the matinee I attended at Shakespeare and Co.’s Founders’ Theatre, the house was packed to the second balconies.

The audience was mesmerized; even after what, of necessity, had to be a long first act,
(Othello is one of Shakespeare’s longest tragedies, out-stripped only by Hamlet and matched by King Lear) everyone was back for the final act which not only kept them in quiet awe but that ended in roar of applause that brought the entire audience to a standing ovation and repeated curtain call.

The current Othello now playing in repertory on the Founder’s stage through August 31 is the best production of tragedy that I have ever seen there.

Further, I would compare it favorably with productions at England’s Globe and Stratford’s Avon. (I recently had a Shakespeare intensive three-week summer course at Cambridge which included frequent trips to both stages, plus one Sunday morning of having the Globe stage to our group where we improvised scenes, for the benefit of tourists, trying to discover “where Desdemona’s bed had to be” in terms of sight lines, pillars, etc.)

The current production at the Founders’ has everything going for it. Nine of the cast of eleven actors, who play the seventeen roles, are Equity members; and with the exception of a couple of newcomers to the Company, most are veterans, some with as much as 22 years in residence. The talented director Tony Simotes has been a member since the start, 31 years ago. This is a brilliant team, working in harness and never missing a step.

The setting has been kept majestic but simple; scene changes are slight but effective.

Heading the cast are the two antagonists, Othello (John Douglas Thomas) and Iago
(Michael Hammond).

Thomas is heartbreaking in his quiet devotion to his young wife: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.” and in his honest inability to sense such villainy as Iago possesses. But there is complexity in the character, a dark African belief in even witchcraft that can erupt and bring about the horrors of Desdemona’s death. His agony and his physical and vocal torment are awesome.

Hammond creates the most convincingly evil Iago one can imagine. He dominates the early half of the play in which he connives with his “motiveless malignity” to bring down the man who is so great. He is agile and vulgar, in body, face and voice. He is cruel for the sake of cruelty. This is the best performance he has ever given. And in his long years with the company that has been many.

Newcomer Merritt Janson, as Desdemona, is a surprise. As the young bride she is beautifully and appealingly a glowing expression of that innocent youngness. One wonders if she could possibly have the skills demanded of the later scenes of horror and awareness. Her innocent attempts to return Cassius to Othello’s favor are just that. Innocent. Awareness, but of what she is unsure, begins to come with the loss of the handkerchief. And by the time of the last grim scenes in her bedroom, she has grown into a maturity beyond her years. A splendid performance by a fine actress one hopes to see again on the Founders’ stage.

As Emilia, Kristin Wold provides an evolving character who at first connives with her scheming husband but who, when she understands his enormity, grows into fear, comforting of Desdemonia, and finally defiance and open repudiation of him.

LeRoy McClain’s Cassio is convincingly swept into Iago’s scheming web. One believes that he believes Iago, and is not himself as villainous. (His casting can raise questions. He mirrors Othello in racial casting. And conveniently understudies him.) In any other play (with cross-casting of all types now accepted and safely ignored in most plays) his race would not matter. In this production’s casting, to some it may provide motivation not present in Shakespeare’s original script.

Tom Rindge, new to the acting company, handles the role of Duke of Venice competently and performs eloquently in the sword-fighting for which he shares honors with his mentor (Simotes) the director and fight director of the play.

The supporting cast is studded with lesser roles or cameos by Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Jonathan Croy, Michael F. Toomey, Walton Wilson, and Ryan Winkles, all handled with dexterity, including skillful doubling.

This is a production that deserves nothing but praise. The plot is chilling, the language is beautiful and the actors are suburb. Even if you can only get a seat in the highest balcony, see it. This Othello is one that will remain in your memory for a long time.

August 2, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Beckett’s tramps don’t need Irish accents but they very possibly have Irish ancestors.

Looking back on theatre history of the 20th century, it is apparent that one play has generated more speculation, interpretation, and ambiguity than any other single play as critics, academics, and audiences, troubled but delighted by it, try to extract from it the author’s intent as to meaning and production details.

The play of course is Samuel Beckett’s (1906 – 1989) Waiting for Godot, first production in French in Paris in 1953 and first Broadway production (in Beckett’s own translation) in 1956.

During his lifetime, Beckett refused to elaborate as to the play’s meaning (although he scoffed at the godot/god suggestion, pointing out that did not work in French). “I am no intellectual,” he insisted. “All I am is feeling.”

However, he was intensely interested in how his plays were performed, attending rehearsals (even those in German) and insisting that Alan Schneider direct English language perfomances in America. For Beckett, performance was vital.

Since his death, directors have tended to join the ranks of the seekers for meaning, reveling in how much still seems to lay hidden within the play, the characters, and ultimately, in its style of production.

Although the script has always occasionally referenced the presence of an audience, the productions I have seen were essentially representational—great for the poignant moments that break one’s heart, but also enclosing the slapstick clowning.

In Anders Cato’s innovative, riveting, and magnificently performed production on the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn stage, the presentational style dominates the play, and we, the audience, are pulled totally into what is happening on the stage—which is always a stage, one with a real door and a real doorknob.

And yet, while the Chaplin-like tramps cavort through their incredible sufferings, Cato is able at critical moments to make us forget to be part of the play, to pull us into silence and awe as Vladimir (David Adkins) speaks these chilling lines:

“Was I sleeping, while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He will know nothing. He’ll tell us about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. Astride a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the whole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”

Cato’s version is able to make us forget being audience at such moments. In that lies the amazing side of this performance, despite the fact that most of the time we are a part of the play, the innumerable scenes of hilarity in which the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon (Stephen De Rosa) cope with their infirmities: the weak bladder and the lame feet.

Beckett has written into his script many specific antics; Cato and his two tramps have found many more and gallop away with them. To cite only one, the bawdy antic gymnastics involved as Vladimir helps Estragon put on his shoes are ingenious.

The two play off each other beautifully. And beneath their quarrelling, their cavorting, and their banter there is the sense of an abiding dependency and love as they go on waiting.

The second pair of actors, Lucky (Randy Harrison) and Pozzo (David Schramm) are just as talented. Pozzo with all of his three hundred pound girth oozes onto the stage to dominate with his cruelty and inhumanity. His voice booms with vitriolic passion as he devours his lunch before those starving on stage. He is detestable in his voluptuous greed, his cruelty to Lucky, his inhumanity. During most of his long scene in the first act he dominates and plays to his audience as well as to the actors on stage.

And yet in the second act, blind and helpless, he can, despite all the hilarity in the efforts of others to raise him from his fallen state, have a moment one can never forget in which furiously and angrily he rants in torment only to end quietly “… the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” But it is only a moment before he shouts his over-powering self off the stage. A masterful performance.

Lucky, the speechless dumb servant, weighted by Pozzo’a regalia (and symbolic weight of all man’s inhumanity to man) is marvelously cast in a role far removed from those recent leads on the BTF stage (in Equus and Amadeus). Only allowed one spoken cue, when it comes, it is a torrent of babble without punctuation or pauses, sense but nonsense, a volcano of words that spill from him. As delivered, it is as riveting as is his tormented body.

And when he is ordered to dance, his abilities and the dance he executes combine pain with defiance and a macabre humor. A directorial touch not only has the dance repeated (it deserves repetition) but in the second act Vladimir attempts repeating it—again an insightful addition to the action.

Indeed the play abounds in far more physical action than the script provides. Small moments such as the tenderness with which Vladimir removes his coat and puts it across the shoulders of the sleeping Estragon and the moments when the pair pass the time with a canter about the stage. And then sudden moments beyond laughter when they regard the tree as useless without a rope on which to hang one’s self.

The setting is an innovative nowhere—a seeming room with dirt strewn, open doorways right and left through which these four can pass. But it is also a room with an upstage center door. With a door-knob. Through this door (to another universe, but one that perhaps includes the unseen Godot) enters A Boy (Cooper Stanton).

The part is a small one and directors seem to have trouble dealing with it. (In a long-ago production at the BTF, the lad (Kris Tabori) was dressed in blue and posed as the figure in the Gainsborough painting.) That did not work for me. Regretfully, neither does the current one.

The too-tall lad, in shorts, could scarcely fit under the door jamb and he, a skillful young actor, seemed directed to be wooden and flat. This role is important not only for his messages, or non-messages, but because within Vladimir’s interrogation of him there are lines such as, “ Where do you sleep?” Vladimir, who unlike Estragon, never seems to sleep, seems to almost remember a world in which a boy could sleep, in the hay with his brother.

So for me, he must be a real believable boy of some sort in this unbelievable non-world. But of course I am reading into it something I can’t find.

Besides the door, the set has one other significant feature. The ceiling has a great opening (through which the lone tree can extend,) but more importantly, the moon that rises at the end of each act can appear.

It is an enormous moon and the image of the two tramps, their backs to the audience standing viewing it, is emblematic of the play. A painting by Caspar David Friedrich has been usually given as inspiration. (I happen to root for Beckett’s Dublin friend, the artist Jack Yeats and his stunning painting Two Travelers, which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.)

What all this amounts to is the inability to put into a few words all the wonders of this play which continues to tantalize.

Obviously, the production is riveting one and not to be missed. Indeed one could see it several times and still not take in all its incredible nuances. Everyone connected with it has exhibited labors of love. Whatever productions of Waiting For Godot you have seen, (or not seen or even read) see this one. It will keeping you laughing, but awe you as well.

Personal note on Beckett:

Reading Beckett and imagining performances, I always find echoes of the Irish Beckett. He was born in Dublin and lived there until graduation from Trinity College. The Abbey Theatre was in its blossoming and he was alive to that inheritance.

One has only to look at J. M. Synge’s tramps in Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding, or the tramps of Yeats in The Cat and The Moon (one blind, one lame), or even at the strange tramp duo in Yeats’ Purgatory, played on a bare stage with a tree and burned house. And of course there is the waiting, waiting, waiting in Yeats’ early neo-Noh play At the Hawks Well, and waiting the theme of Godot.

Beckett’s tramps don’t need Irish accents but they very possibly have Irish ancestors.

July 31, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

“… one of the most hilarious, zany, and rapid paced farces to ever grace the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage.”

Turn David Ives loose on translating Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear and you have one of the most hilarious, zany, and rapid paced farces to ever grace the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage. Evidently each actor auditioning for director John Rando must have had to prove skills in physical gymnastics, vocal pyrotechnics, and the ability to remove clothes with agility.

The play opens in the elegant blue and white drawing room of Victor Chamdebise (Mark Harelik) whose wife Raymonde (Kathryn Meisle), suspecting her husband of infidelity, is aided by her friend Lucienne (Mia Barron) in concocting an anonymous letter that will lure him into an assignation to expose him.

In the wrong hands, indeed several hands, this letter will result in the entire large cast suddenly being whirled out of the blue drawing room for appearances at The Frisky Puss Hotel, where Act 2 takes place in a maze of numbered doorways, stairways that slant upwards and downwards, and even a huge revolving bed that changes one room into another at the touch of button. All amid pink, purple, flowered décor that screams “naughty.”

The flamboyant cast includes in its misunderstandings, frantic chases, and jealousies:

• Lucienne’s husband Don Carlos Homenides de Histangua, given to frequent tirades in Spanish and flourishing a pistol that when fired brings down bits of ceilings;
• Victor’s friend Roman Tournel (Tom Hewitt) a womanizer of talent, with eyes for his friend’s wife;
• Victors’s nephew, Camille Chandebise (Carson Elrod) whose same last name adds to confusions while his speech defect, when not corrected by a bite bar supplied by Dr. Finache, (Brooks Ashmanskas), often makes anything Camille says total jibberish;
• and Victor himself, who is not always who he seems.

If this sounds incomprehensible, do not be alarmed, the whole play speeds merrily along, despite verbal confusions, lines one misses because the audience is a-roar at the antics, or it is impossible, and not necessary, to understand them. It is as though one in the audience is awash in the misunderstandings.

Act 3 gets all safely back in the blue and white drawing room, although some are lacking articles of attire, and all the muddles and confusions are finally resolved.

All the actors in this play romp their hearts out. With two intermissions it runs close to three hours but seems to whiz by gloriously in much less time. Everyone deserves high praise, including the announcer who advised us to turn off our cell phones in a French we could all understand.

July 25, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

In his role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Eric Hill once again gives a subtly nuanced performance of a man of singular learning (and piety), self-true, with a personality defined by his conscience, stoic and brave, but affable, gentle, and loving.

As Chancellor of England, More steadily defies Henry VIII’s decision to sever himself from his wife Catherine of Aragon who has failed to produce an heir to the throne and seeks to to marry Anne Boylyn from whom he expects a brighter future.

As The Common Man (Walter Hudson), in ever changing roles, keeps reminding the audience, when royalty roars and the members of the Royal Court devise their schemes, that it is best to lurk low with bowed head.

Such information, delivered directly to the audience, is a Brechtian device, breaking the 4th wall and bringing the audience into a safe distance from identifying with More too much.

For More does not bow his head. He stands tall until, on the scaffold, he must put it on the block. Where, ironically, that Common Man (who within the play assumes so many distancing garbs) is the executioner.

Hall in the role, although worried even before the King (Gareth Saxe) floats on his great boat into More’s garden, is serene, friendly, and dignified.

It is a delightful scene with a jaunty, young Henry trying to cajole More into admiration of a tune he has composed. All surface friendliness, but suddenly, sensing More’s resistance, he hurries his departure.

It is a result of this encounter that Henry will make sure that More becomes Chancellor, a role in which he hopes to keep him in line.

However, early in the first act, More is essentially untroubled. He knows the law and feels, despite his religious convictions, he can escape the net Henry hopes to throw over him. We see him reassuringly buoyant with his family .

He jokes with his wife Alice (Diane Prusha) about the lavish meal she has prepared for the royal guest who failed to enter the house and devour a bite. She is unaware of how dire the situation can become but still, for some reason, is almost fearful.

Prusha during the course of the play gives us a carefully shaded role as gradually she comes to grips with the true dangers of More’s determination. She is hurt, but valiant, by the reduced circumstances and in her final scene, her deep love for this man, whose conscience she still cannot understand, is in the bowl of custard she brings to his cell, and her hurt grief when he, knowing her despair, praises it and her humble gown. One tiny moment of long-wedded love, beautifully played by both.

And by his daughter Margaret (Tara Franklin), also present in all the family scenes, who, understanding sooner than her mother and more than her mother understands, loves her father so deeply she will reluctantly place around his neck the chain of Chancellor, which will lead to his death sentence. Another role, minor but pivotal, beautifully delineated, full of grace and awareness, fear and love.

But the family scenes do not dominate. More must face the villains of the play, armed with his legal awareness and his conviction of what is right.

The villains are everywhere with the Common Man scurrying among them.

The direst (in terms of power) is the off-stage king, determined to have his way. But he has a diabolical agent in Thomas Cromwell (David Chandler). There is a snake-like playing of his role, agile and deadly.

And he grooms for evil the venal Richard Rich (Tommy Schrider) who, a nobody, but craving corruption, sells his soul gladly, betrayal after betrayal, for a fine coat and a minor post in Wales. Schrider’s ambition and evil is more repulsive than even Cromwell’s.

Even the Spanish Ambassador, (Thom Rivera) in the most elegant of all the elegant velvet coats and supposedly on More’s side, wants to hatch a plot in Scotland, which More calmly rejects.

The political cards are stacked against More from the beginning. The Common Man will keep us aware of that. Dukes and Cardinals will fawn with Kings. And a man must live, as best he can, in a world such as man finds himself in.

In such a world, a man of More’s convictions and fortitude cannot live. Yet the playwright, and Hill’s acting of the role, keep us distanced beyond tears. We can admire the man but not completely understand him, his ability to put his family through so much but having so much moral courage. The role demands a self-awareness, a detachment that keeps him calm in all moments.

All of these actors, and those not named, grace the production, well-directed by Richard Corley. The setting (great movable stone-like pillars, shifted agilely for the many scenes) soar, forbiddingly, over the action on the stage. The minimal staging evokes the river via the oar of the boatman.

The play is well worth seeing. Although its running time is a long, it is difficult to know what could be omitted because all is so worthy. It won a Tony on Broadway in 1962 and has been present often on film, TV, and in revivals. Indeed, as I write, the New York Times announces a revival.

And since New York is a long drive from the Berkshires, we are fortunate to have A Man for All Seasons playing in Stockbridge.