Dave Read

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.

July 20, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The basic idea behind Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour now playing at the Berkshire Stage Company is a fascinating one.

The action of the play takes place in the incredibly messy office of John (Austin Lysy) just back from WWI (that war they thought would end all wars); the time is April 1919. John’s father is going to back him, minimally, to become a publisher with enough to publish one book. He has advertised for scripts and been deluged with them, stacks and stacks of manuscripts lie everywhere.

Set designer Wilson Chin has not only gone all out on cluttered office, he has created the illusion that the dingy office is high up in a Manhattan loft with the back wall a great slant of windows that look out on the a lofty hotel (the Plaza?) across the street, all giving the feeling of being high above the city.

We soon learn that the deluge of scripts is not what John needs or wants. He already has two scripts he is eager to print. Both are memoirs.

The first is huge, (filling great boxes and obviously far longer than War and Peace.) Its author is Denny, (Brian Avers) best friend from his Princeton days, desperate to have it published because only his success can win for him the woman he loves, the beautiful Rosamund (Heidi Armbruster), a woman whose unusual laugh haunts him.

The second script is a much shorter one, written (she claims without ghostwriter) by the enchanting femme fatale Jesse (Opal Alladin), a gorgeous, mature, black singer with whom John is having an affair. At first glance one would think the play could evolve into a hilarious retake of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma in which only one of two dying patients can be chosen for the treatment.

However the play is much more complex than that.

The fifth character Gidger (Nat DeWolf) is first aware that something much more significant than John’s difficult choice is going on. Gidger is only the put-upon office menial, but it is he who ultimately alerts John to the dreadful machine that, coming from nowhere, has landed in the outer office and is spewing out typed pages at an alarming rate. This awesome machine is brilliantly brought on-stage by the set, sound, and lighting crew who present it as great shadowed spinning wheels beyond the office door.

This situation and the five characters, all talented and winning actors, wonderfully garbed in 1919 regalia by Jessica Ford, spin about the stage in the first act, one written with witty dialog, strong character roles and a laugh a minute. We learn much about them which will become significantly important in the second act. The play seems to be an hilarious comedy and all is still joyous at intermission. Although put-upon, slighted Gidger is the only one to be sensing danger.

Act two, a longish one, is still to come and in it the hilarity vanishes. That great machine is printing out the future decades, the ways in which these five characters will be remembered in 1990, and the comic tone is gone from the play. The laughs are few or ironic (Gidger’s dog, a marvelous off-stage character who appears only at the beginning of act one, is the subject of many, wrongly attributed, typed pages.)

Thus, the whole tone of the play shifts to darkness – that comes after the violet hour? One becomes confused in this act as to the playwright’s intent. The future is not pretty. Gidger finds himself valiantly singing “Que Sera, sera” and wondering where the song comes from.

The future is not what was planned, not understood by future writers of this 1919 present.

The five actors, still trapped on stage in 1919 but having to face what the century will make of them, could give up, but they don’t. In the end, they are trooping off to see a 1919 play, the lost tickets for which the play began; a play in which they will know the ending when the play begins with the maid coming in to put flowers on the coffee table, but determined to enjoy it anyway.

And they hurry off not to miss the curtain. Herein probably lies the play’s theme.

This has been a difficult play to describe, the mood and tone shift from act one to act two having jolted, as probably the author intended. However, for me, the second act was too cluttered, needing streamlining. The author is talented, having written such moving scripts as Three Days of Rain, and director Barry Edelstein has seen that his actors present the play with grace, agility, even poignancy, as well as all the hilarity.

But the play in the second act tries to give us too much, a bit like the character Denny with his enormous script.

However, it is well worth seeing for its talented cast and excellent staging, but it is not an easy play to untangle despite all the talent that has gone into its making.

July 17, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

… be assured that The Three Sisters at Williamstown is a haunting experience you may never forget. Theatre can’t get any better than that!

Anton Chekhov is undeniably unique and the four masterpieces (five if one includes Ivanov) he composed during his brief life have inspired the course of contemporary theatre for more than a century.

His plays are beautiful ones, comedies he called them, but poignant, full of love and yearning, orchestrated by subtle recurring themes that weave through their four act structure.

Birch trees are almost their signature. And they are large cast plays of a dozen actors. But ideally with no “stars.” Each is part of an ensemble and has a fully developed off-stage life—one full of memories, dreams, hope and fears And each too, no matter the size of his role has a “moment,” a time in which one can identify with the angst of the buried life.

Because the plays are so uniquely crafted, although they are frequently produced, the true Chekhov spirit must be in the bones of the director.

It is therefore absolutely joyous to announce that Michael Greif’s production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters now playing on the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage is magnificently cast, intuitive, compassionate and deeply moving.

There is so much to praise in this production that a brief review cannot adequately cover all, that makes (as is evident) “where to begin” a problem.

But even there the director has helped us, adding no new words to Paul Schmidt’s excellent translation, but a wordless musical prologue in which for the only time in the play we are clearly in the yearned for Moscow of years ago and the three young girls in white dresses whirl briefly among the dancers and uniformed soldiers. A brief glimpse of innocent delight and joy. In Moscow.

Moscow. The word threads the play. In the first act (set in the dull provincial town) the word is evoked more than a dozen times. (It will weave through all the acts, its use diminishing as hope diminishes until in the final act only Ferapont, (Peter Maloney) the deaf old servant, who has never been there will mention the place, one in his mind confused with St Petersburg, another place about which he knows nothing.

As the first act opens, the sun is shining. It is the name day of Irina, (Aya Cash) youngest of the sisters, only 20 and having spent the last eleven years of her life in the provincial town. Wearing white, she is radiant with the hope that after a year of mourning for the brigade commander father whose career appointment has exiled them from their beloved former home, they can now go back.

Surely now brother Andrei (Manoel Felciano) better educated than even Irina and her sisters who all know German, English and French, with she even knowing some Italian as well) can become a professor and take them all to Moscow.

Masha, (Rosemarie DeWitt) unfortunately married a pedantic local teacher and whose sense of defeat is present in her black dress, will spend weeks visiting them. And Olga, (Jessica Hunt) beautifully cast as one who at 29, feeling spinsterhood, is still young of body, beautiful of face, and full of love for her two sisters.

It is in this great bonding of the sisters that another thread of this production weaves through the play, the closeness that three motherless girls, not widely separated by age, have always had. That will be so vividly present as they navigate the troubled acts of the play in which hope diminishes. That breaks the heart as, their arms around each other, they “accept” and even hope (for others) in the final act.

Meanwhile, in the first act, the scene is bright as other characters assemble for the name day celebration. Cherbutykin (Michael Cristofer) the old doctor, who once loved the sisters’ mother appears with his costly inappropriate gift of a silver samovar.

Vershinin, (Stevie Ray Dallimore) the new battery commander, not only is brought to be introduced but his having recently come from Moscow, and his engaging talk about his unfortunate wife and children, etc suddenly waken the brooding Masha who announces, “I’ll stay to dinner.” And sets in motion the Vershinin/ Masha theme that will weave, with whistling, and melody the words that haunt Masha, “A green oak grows by a curving stone. And on that oak hangs a gold chain.”

So the dinner party grows as more young cadets are added to the party Tuzenback (Keith Nobbs) and Solyony (Stephen Kulken) two rivals for Irina’s love; and a couple of young soldiers bringing childish toys and a camera for a group photo.

The moment is the happiest the play can reach. For just at the end of the first act enters the woman who will doom any happiness – Natasha (Cassie Beck), a vulgar, uneducated local girl who, enamering Andrei will eventually devour all before her.

The casting of all in the play is superb. Natasha is, as she should be, taller, broader, coarser looking, annoyingly speaking. The sisters, despite disappointments, are ever supple and, though wounded, charming and loving.

Having introduced his characters in the first act, Chekov lets them play their hearts out in the scenes that follow. Although probably most in the audience know the plot, I save it unspoiled for those few who may experience its unwinding for the first time.

Each will take home a moment he/she can never forget be it only Irina in Act 3 suddenly exclaiming, “I have forgotten the Italian for window and ceiling!” Or Masha’s pedantic but well-meaning husband telling her she is a good girl. Or Olga and Irina on twin cots shoved from their room by space for “Bobik” or “Sophia.”

The beautiful home designed by Allen Moyer will have been gobbled up by Natasha by the play’s end and she cannot wait to get at the trees. However in Chekhov, life goes on it … and does.

After-note: If you are haunted by Andrei and that baby carriage in the final scene of the play, you might want to know that so was Brian Friel, the Irish playwright who has adapted several Chekhov plays for the theatres in Dublin. His affinity for Chekhov is strong and in 2002 he wrote and produced Afterplay in which one can meet Andrei 20 years later, finally in Moscow. It too will break your heart, but it is a lovely two-character play.

Published by the Gallery Press (in Ireland) in a volume called Three Plays After but also obtainable on our side of the Atlantic. I picked up my copy at the bookstore of the Shaw Festival, read it flying home, and keep it next to The Three Sisters on my Chekhov shelf.

Meanwhile, be assured that The Three Sisters at Williamstown is a haunting experience you may never forget. Theatre can’t get any better than that!

July 11, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

If the bland title of playwright Karen Zacarias’ The Book Club Play now gracing the Berkshire Theatre Festival stage leads one to expect a predictable comedy concerning the motley types who inhabit the ubiquitous book clubs that seem to exist everywhere, think again.

While the play begins innocently enough with the members of this club being filmed for a documentary concerning books—why they read or how their first encounter with Pat the Bunny or Tarzan or Heathcliff changed their lives, that is deceptive at best.

Very quickly the little comedy becomes more as the five club members (soon to be come a sixth over whom acceptance rules fuel the plot) seem to forget they are on camera and their real feelings about the others, about themselves, and especially about the angst within them become entangled in confrontations and conflict.

All this is presented in rapid-fire, hysterical dialog with smashing comic thrusts that keeps the audience a-roar.

But there is more. This play keeps us aware of technology and film for the great pale multilevel set (that includes the living room where the club meets and indulgences in the food of the evening, a big item to some who bring and some who devour) but is also at times filming space of the events, planned and unplanned that get disastrously out of hand.

We in the audience experience this technology as great titles, author names, etc. are projected on the soaring white walls, pulling us into the documentary itself. It is an ambitious undertaking and works most of the time, although time itself gets a bit jangled even though projected titles of dates help keep one on track.

Thus the multipex interweaving of real life, documentary life and projections—to say nothing about the one-shot laugh lines that pepper the script, make this an ambitious play involving a great deal more than the title can suggest.

… an astonishing, hilarious, and at times moving play, one difficult to describe but rewarding to see.

And there is one other added element—a 7th character, The Expert/Pundit. This role actually becomes half a dozen more roles as she/he (for so skillfully does Sarah Marshall inhabit this role that it is hard to believe one woman is all the commentators) suddenly breaks into what plot there is, to appear now down right, legless, in a wheel chair or up center ready to leap into space. It is a virtuoso role. Absolutely brilliant.

Brilliant too are the very individual inhabitants of the book club. Leading the pack is the leader of the club Ana (Keira Naughton) who not only decrees, brings intimidating refreshments, vetoes new members, but also would be a writer herself and keeps a disastrous diary. Her marvelous hysteria, provoked by her losing authority over the group at a trying moment brings on a tirade (death wish) that sets the humorous plot whirling with angst. And brings out the most dramatic acting and skills of the other five group members.

The pivotal moment is triggered when Jen (Anne Louise Zachry) the youngest member of the club, whose journalistic hopes are still confined to writing obit columns, brings to a monthly meeting Alex (Bhavesh Patel) whom she has encountered in her apartment building’s laundry room reading War and Peace.

Patel is brilliantly funny adding a colorful and dynamic twist to any scene he inhabits. (He really was reading the book although his garb and antics would not suggest it.) But it is his suggested inclusion in the group that sends Ana into her tail-spin that involves all.

Including her husband Rob (C. J. Wilson) whose greatest interest in the club seems to be the refreshments and fond memories of Tarzan. Although even his laid back attitude to Ana and literature can be animated beyond devouring twinkies.

Lily, Cherise Boothe, remembered for a fine performance in Blues for an Alabama Sky, remains calm in the fray and handles some of the funniest one-liners in the play with aplomb. She can express concern without hysteria and probably not only read but understood the books on the club list.

Tom Story, BTF veteran and creator of very different roles here plays Will, the gay-man-out, in the group. Full of angst and oh so sensitive. His winter garb seems not only his attempts at hiding from the inclement weather but from the reality of a situation itself.

These six club members (or in Patel’s case, possible member) and the ingenious Pundit whose presence adds the seeming half a dozen more to the cast, make this an astonishing, hilarious, and at times moving play, one difficult to describe but rewarding to see.

Director Nick Olcott has somehow held together all the interwoven mechanics of the convoluted script and created an atmosphere in which the seven actors could each have a chance to play their souls out.

The play has been developing for a couple of years and still could be clearer at times. But it is an exhilarating evening in theatre and the stage is awash with first-rate talent.

And although the characters and technical gimmicks overshadow Ahab and Tolstoy and even that Bunny that got patted, ultimately the play is about books – words – communication and the obscuring and sharing of it. A fairly hefty topic for a summer comedy.

And yet it whirls along as zanily as our world of 2008 seems to be whirling.