August 15, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Sir Noel Coward’s final stage work, Noel Coward in Two Keys, composed of a pair of one act comedies, is an unexpected joy. It is the final main stage production of the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s 80th summer season.

The two comedies, Come into the Garden Maud and A Song at Twilight both are set in the private suite of the Hotel Beau Rivage, Lausanne-Ouchy, Switzerland in the mid 1960s.

The plots are unrelated but the same four actors are cast in each play and only the hotel waiter, Felix (Gian Murray Gianino) appears in a the same role in both plays.

The two plays are of special interest because they mark the end of a fifty year career of writing for the theatre. They were produced in London for the first time in 1966, shortly before Coward’s death, under the direction of Vivian Matalon who also directed them in Manhattan in 1974 and who has directed this production.

Coward’s distinctive style, crisp dialog, witty repartee, clear, spare prose, and distinctive, mainly witty sophisticated characters, are all present in these plays, but, writing at the end of his career, he has added something more. While they remain comedies, they are deeper and a bit darker than those plays of gay banter and physical mayhem, such as Private Lives, written decades earlier, and these later plays concern more mature characters.

In the lighter of the two plays, Come into the Garden Maud, Verner Conklin (Casey Biggs) and his wife Anna, (Mia Dillon), rich, middle-aged Americans, are “doing” Europe. Amiable, laid-back Verner would prefer to be back in America and has no interest in the social ambitions of his spouse, a flighty self-important, social-climber.

But an old friend of Anna’s, Maud Caraganania, the charmingly energetic Maureen Anderman, drops by briefly on her way to drive off to Rome and see her first grandchild. And lives are changed forever.

A Song At Twilight stars the same three characters in a more complex plot, still witty and sophisticated but concerning the public baring of long kept secrets in their lives. Each of the three also play a character far-removed from that he or she played in the opening play.

Biggs is a celebrated esteemed British author, regal, if grumpy in his smoking jacket. Dillon is again a wife in this play but instead of a nagging empty-headed one, she is a loving but realistic German woman who has protected her husband for twenty years.

And Anderman is a regal, successful British actress, known and loved in the Western world, and about to publish her autobiography. She appears on the scene trying to manipulate a startling revelation of materials long hidden concerning the characters’ private lives.

To reveal more of the plots, especially that of the second play, would be a disfavor to audience members rather unlikely to have seen either. The second is not a tragedy but by the end it is deeply serious and its subject matter is significant, coming from Coward at that particular time.

Brilliantly acted by the three participants, the current production is a moving tribute to Coward. Matalon’s direction is impeccable.

Of special importance, considering the subject matter, it is significant that in the London production Coward himself played the role of the writer, a character who is so enchantingly Noel Coward, a writer, who during his career had to cope with a strict moral code in the British licensing of subject matter.

Just as his own songs have ornamented his plays, so do the two titles of these two swan song-plays seem to me to be Coward having his last fun with words, scoffing at prudery and coming out with just a song at twilight.

I found him and them enchanting. You will too.

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.