August 6, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Theatre Festival has presented the world premier of Kathleen Clark’s In the Mood. The play is described as a comedy but viewing the magnificent set as one awaits the play to begin, it is apparent the action will spill over into farce.

Because there before our eyes on the widest proscenium opening one can recall seeing at the BTF is the demanding farce stage and those five farce doors. The setting is the enormous upscale apartment of Perri Rubin (Erin Dilly) and her husband Derek (Damian Young) for whom Perri has planned a surprise birthday party and invited scores of guests. (Designer Lee Savage)

Should things go as she planned, the enormous living room, replete with grand piano, cocktail bar, rooms on second floor, and an elevator that opens directly into her living room could almost accommodate them.

One guest is already on scene when the play opens-Nick Eliot (Stephen R. Buntrock) who musing at the piano gets Perri to sing with him (a former boyfriend) the 1940’s hit song, In the Mood, and the play begins with Perri (ala Gertrud Lawrence) clad gorgeously in red, long blond hair hanging to her shoulders, and him, rendering the song.

At the end of the play one is about to see, the song is repeated, bringing the 75 minute, no intermission, play to a close very different from the one it seemed to begin.

The stage is well designed for the chaos that soon erupts. The apartment is on a high floor, naturally, and the elevator, upstage center, is, the desk informs, not working. This a great misfortune for guests struggling to reach the party (few do).

Among those who do are Perri’s husband and Carolyn Shore (Jennifer Cody, uninvited) and Edward Horton (Arnie Burton) and Sally Elliot (Johanna Day). No one else makes it, and the play’s cast is thus assembled for the hysterically funny situations and also snappy dialog and at times epigram, such as one remembers in Cole Porter and even Oscar Wilde.

A plot summary is being deliberately omitted. Audiences will find it out for themselves and respond with belly laughs as they did on opening night.

Director Marc Bruni has served his cast well. There is never time for a dull moment. Each of the six actors, all in significant roles are well cast and throw themselves physically as well as vocally into their roles-ones that when they entered they did not always know they had. Watch out for the word “contractor.” And for lines such as, “my ex-wife and I were the Lunts of Off-Off Broadway.” These are all actors who can think on their feet and roll with the unexpected.

It all makes for an enjoyable evening. As for the play itself, my feeling is that it should, and very possibly will, evolve into a longer two-act play. The script cries for it in trying to pack so much into 75 minutes, and the actors are so gifted and engaging, their talents cry for it too.

Meanwhile, it is rewarding, now and then, to be a part of a new play a-borning; and to wish it well.

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2011 schedule.

July 16, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Sitting in audience of the Fitzpatrick stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival for the opening of A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia, I found myself remembering an evening many years ago when Gurney a yet untried playwright came to see what our little play-reading group would do in a staged reading of one of his plays in our little black-box theatre off Main Street. Our group was founded by Bill Gibson and carried on by Jane Mooney.

In the forty or more years that have elapsed since that eventful night, details have gone hazy. Gurney was unknown to any of us. He was was an affable and not condescending young man, scarcely middle-aged, who drove in from Boston with a family play, perhaps about the Buffalo area. Gurney viewed our production, listened to suggestions and praises, then drove off into the night. A young man, knowing where he wanted to go.

How brilliantly he has gotten there!

Silvia is a gem; one of the many gems he has created over the years!

The plot centers around a family crisis. Greg (David Adkins) and Kate (Jurian Hughes) are empty nesters with their kids off to college and the couple settled in a NY apartment where Greg’s career is winding down and Kate’s is picking up.

And into their life Greg brings Sylvia, another woman whom he has picked up in Central Park and whom he expects Kate to welcome into a ménage a trois, further complicated by the fact that Sylvia is an enormous bouncy stray dog, dog tag bearing only her name, her breed a mix, seemingly, of Lab and Poodle, and a great deal of bounce and pounce, and audacity.

Sylvia not only pees on Kate’s rug, she ASSUMES she could sit on Kate’s couch. Marriage in jeopardy. A serious situation for Kate and Greg but an absolutely hilarious one for the audience with laugh lines coming so fast one misses a few. And it is not only the dialog that is hilarious. The uneasy trio members all have to be athletes, very often not on their feet and being dragged in directions they don’t want to go.

Director Andres Cato’s guiding hand has rung every possible variation on the production—timing and pace, scenes flowing seamlessly after each other, moods shifting from hilarious to touching, or “naughty,” or unexpected.

Sylvia, (Rachel Ray Jones) and her costumes, from bedraggled in the park to preeningly wooing when in heat she meets Buster in the park, are gloriously seductive. And she knows it. Jones seems to have literally climbed into Sylvia by donning her clothes, Her bite is usually restrained but her bark is utterly remarkable.

Adkins is convincingly unaware of the sacrifice he is asking of his wife. His sudden love for Sylvia, giving a meaning to his days in a time when he has lost meaning and confidence, seems to him reasonable.

Hughes as the wife, expected to accept without a struggle her husband’s aberrations, is sympathetic, resourceful and willing eventually to bend but not break. It is she that at a strategic moment finds and tosses the red ball.

The versatile Walter Hudson plays three supporting roles, necessary in plot development in the park or the psychiatrist’s office, each with panache.

The New York skyline set, assisted by lighting affects in evoking the park on the apron, and changing color for mood changes in plot, is effective.

All this adds up to asserting that over the years Gurney has continued to write play after play, success after success.

Sylvia is an especially delightful one.

As for the rest of those long ago hopefuls performing in the black box theatre, I haven’t a clue. But it’s nice to remember that we performed early Gurney, and in Stockbridge!

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2011 schedule.

July 10, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The glorious thing about As You Like It that is now playing at Shakespeare and Company’s Founders Theatre is that it will be with us in repertory through September 4th. Meanwhile, ten days after its opening, rave reviews and word of mouth have made it the hit of the season. Deservedly.

Tony Simotes has assembled a dedicated, all-star cast of actors who have been playing Shakespeare leads with the Company for years, many of them even in earlier productions of As You Like It but in a different role from that played in this production. Kudos to the entire cast!

As for sets, lights, original music, dance and costuming, again the departments have been headed by experienced and innovative masters of their trades. More kudos. (Simotes choreographed the acrobatic wrestling scene himself.)

So, rather than try to out-rave the raves in another review, this reviewer will deal with only the epilog, delivered by Rosalind, as directed in Shakespeare’s manuscript. Its significance is that it brings layers and layers of meaning into the cross-dressing, androgonouus theme that were there all along, from that first mad dancing of the Charleston at the play’s opening and the even madder dancing at its end.

Simotes knew what he was doing when the set the play in Gay Paree shortly after the first world war, and the costume designer knew what he was doing when he dressed his dancing actors as silent film stars of the day.

As Rosalind, Merritt Janson has the most wonderful role in the play and handily steals the show (abetted by her surrounding cast) carrying it gracefully to the heights that would have had Shakespeare himself clapping in the wings.

One would feel she had ascended the heights. But no. She has out-staged herself, carrying the whole cast into the highest complexity and joyous abandonment, slightly naughty but never quite over the top.

She gets the epilogue! Stands and delivers it in her virginal white wedding gown. Every inch a woman. And in Shakespeare’s day the prologs and epilogs belong to the men. Indeed she would in his day have been a male, a young boy pretending to be a girl who in the play, dressed as a boy, would be wooed by another boy, dressed as a boy whom she suggested pretend that she was a girl, despite her garments, and kiss her and the mirror images of boy/girl would ambigiously envelop the whole play and all the hysterical misunderstandings and promises and surprises.

Shakespeare must have had great fun writing this play – so full of possibilities and impossibilities and mistakes and near-mistakes. All whirling around this one character as she/he bids us goodnight and urges kindnesses and understandings worth listening to.