Sept. 24, 2010 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, on the schedule at Shakespeare and Co. through November 7, 2010, is on one level full of the suspense, intrigue, and slapstick one associates with a spoof of an Agatha Christie mystery. However, the play is a play within a play, set in a theatre and the two reviewers, sent to view and comment on it, are very much a part of the play itself. Indeed, it is their involvement with what occurs on the stage, complicated with their own self-doubts and angst that brings in an almost Beckett chill underlying the constant roars of laughter that the play evokes.

Everything in the play is in someway double. The set ting is the theatre in which we sit but it is also the vast drawing room of the lonely English house on the moors round which lurk both fog and murder. The reviewers are on the job. So are the actors. But we are in a weird world. A phone on stage may be ringing for a reviewer in the stalls.

The eight actors who thread through this maze of delight are delights in themselves. The zest into which they throw themselves is not only praiseworthy but almost beyond the call of duty. They not only move furniture with alacrity but at times hurl themselves down upon it, or under it or leap over it with such gusto that one feels that perhaps Stoppard should have included in his cast the call for “is there a doctor in the house?”

Director Croy has ssembled a talented and dedicated cast who throw themselves into every moment of the play—even the pauses. And there is a moment when a pause is part of the dialog!

Birdboot (Josh Aaron McCabe) and Moon (Enrico Spada) are both critics, though Spada is a much more uptight one, second string for his establishment. Birdboot is delightfully extravert and overbearing—until he finds himself involved in the plot and participating in the wildest card game ever staged. Moon’s insecurity pulls him, bow-tie and all,onto the stage and into the brooding side of the plot which among other things, involves the power (or lack of it) for the critic himself.

Of the manor’s inhabitants, my favorite had the fewest lines but the most hilarious gait. Meg O’Connor as Mrs Drudge, the help, and how she did help, poor thing…dusting away, hearing on the radio the dire news, dusting away, blindly adding sugar to the tea. She was perfect down to her sturdy, unshapely ankles.

Dana Harrison as Lady Cynthia swept about the manor in her slender beauty. The manor was her domain and she ruled it, with vigor and seductiveness. Men melted at her kisses. As well they might Despite her fragile beauty and great seductiveness, she moved furniture with swirling agility and leapt perilously over it at will.

Alexandra Lincoln, second female lead and not as femme fatale as Lady C, did get to have the lovely moment twice of bounding thru the French doors, center back with the lovely “tennis anyone´ moment. She also threw herself with gusto into the card games which wildly engaged anyone willing or unwilling to play. (She even had a lovely romantic name –-Felicity, though neither lucky in the play in either love or cards.)

Scott Renzoni as the Major Magnus was wheel chair bound until the plot released his scotch plaid, and he could unwind the even ancient plots and undo the past. David Joseph got to die twice as the mysterious stranger, Simon Gascoyne. And graced center stage dramatically.

Inspector Hound (Wolfe Coleman) had one of the lovely lines concerning his brief presence. When suggesting someone call the police and being informed he was the police, he responded, “Lucky I’m here.” Stoppard can do so much with three words!

By the end of the brief ninety minute play, all tangles were quickly unbound (or not). This is a charming play. Go.

August 2l, 2010 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Edward Albee as playwright has a delicate balance with me personally. I find his plays original, dynamic, hysterically funny and at the same time incredibly distressing. I am, personally, an Albee fan with reservations and a certain wariness in seeing one of his plays.

I discovered Albee, playwright quite by accident around 1960 when, living in Lenox, I drove down to Washington Square to meet my friend Alan Schneider (we both got our MA’s in theatre at U of Wisconsin) and see the Beckett he was directing that afternoon at the Provincetown Playhouse, Krapp’s Last Tape.

But Alan was more excited about the second half of the afternoon’s program which he had not directed. It was by an unknown young man who had never had a play produced in US but finally got one done in Germany (in German) and now it was being done here in the US. This was a young man to watch. His name was Edward Albee.

The play was The Zoo Story. In it we meet the first member of that dismally disoriented family into which Albee was disastrously adopted. And we get the first of those long monologs—the story of Jerry and the Dog. Ending in the death of the dog, just as in the play under current discussion, we get the story of Toby and the Cat.

The plot of A Delicate Balance again concerns a family loosely based on Albee bio. Tobias and Agnes (Jonathan Hogan and Maureen Anderman) a middle aged couple seem to have accepted their life in suburbia, although for the past thirty years have had separate rooms, and their privacy has been broken by the almost constant presence of Claire, (Lisa Emery) Agnes unmarried and drunken sister who quite literally lives with them.

Quite suddenly the domestic scene is again shattered by the sudden return of the thirty year old daughter of the marriage, Julia (Mia Barron) who is giving up on her fourth at tempt at marriage and coming back to the parental nest. Only to find out that out of the blue the best friends of the house owners, Tobias and Agnes, Edna and Harry (played by Mia Dillon and Keir Dullea) have suddenly appeared in their living room announcing that some unspecified and indescribable fear has suddenly made them terrified to remain at home and so naturally they have arrived at the home of their best friends whom they knew would be delighted to take them in. Which the startled but accommodating Tobias and Agnes do. And Julia can arrive and go into hysterics because someone is sleeping in her bedroom.

Thus the delicate balance between what one is willing to do for ones relatives as opposed to what one is willing to do for ones best friends begins early and wages its domestic war through a marvelously funny, despite grim forebodings, three acts until it reaches a somewhat sort of finish with all left standing to fight again.

The play is brilliantly written and demands big stars in at least 3 (or 4) of its roles, and equity stars for the lesser two roles of the two friends. The current production under the direction of David Auburn is fortunate in its casting and has made sure that the current production swirls with humor, into which at moments, scarey moments, pull us into realizing just how precarious most family situations have the potential for becoming.

The six characters are clearly defined. Agnes is the mother. She may not approve of what goes on, but on the surface she is quietly in control, although capable of raising her voice (but never her temper). When things get really snarled, she almost calmly takes her screaming daughter and leads her quietly up the stairs to bed in a room that must take the place of the one from which she is screaming about having been evicted. Agnes as calmly as though the naughty child would not eat her carrots. Anderman handles the role with finesse.

Hogan as Tobias is central to the sniping and snarling domestic brawl that swirls through his living room. He treads the delicate balance between total disfunction and some normalcy in his home. And quite suddenly, but perfectly calmly he sits alone in a chair DL and becomes spell-blindingly central as he insists on quiet while he tells us his Tale of the Cat. His facial expressions, small gestures of body language, his thirty years of separate bedrooms, are there in a fascinating manner. There is sniping and sniping.

Claire is so volatile that she is hard to describe. She is as central figure as her sister is and is permitted much more leeway in terms of motor abilities. Claire is scarcely ever still, even when sitting down, even when lying on the floor with a bottle on her belly, even when she is playing the according or untangling whirled up hair. She is what many would describe as a caution. And is one. Emery is well cast and snipes away with glee in her role. Her explanation as to why she is not “a” alcoholic is extremely funny as well as terrifying.

Harry and Edna are totally convincing in their smaller roles. Dullea takes over the bar with calm poise of “being in the living room where he deserves to be as best friend all these years with Tobias:” and what could be more natural? And Edna is so at home that she is considering redecorating some of the chairs, and why not indeed if she is to remain there for the rest of her life?

So, in my own delicate balance on Albee, I would vote on seeing this performance. It takes the Virginia W. family group (always somewhat autobiographical) further along by adding members to the mix and although the former is better known (probably because of the movie), A Delicate Balance is a better play and definitely worth seeing.