Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"Dial M for Murder" by Frederick Knott. Directed by Flo Hayle. At the Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, N.Y.

Margot Wendice believes she knows and understands her still youthful, tennis-playing, center-stage-addicted husband, Tony. She would defend him to the ends of the earth. She would even do this to Max Halliday, the young American man she loves as dearly as she once loved her husband. In Frederick Knott's play "Dial M For Murder" -- a true classic -- everyone has a motive for bringing a murder case to its conclusion, and no one more so than police Inspector Hubbard, who has seen the case through from investigation to death sentence. The true crime in this play is not the murder itself, nor the intended crime that is aborted; it is the deliberate obfuscation of the deepest motive of all: the need to be appreciated.
On stage now at the Ghent Playhouse, Knott's mystery hit (it played 552 performances in its initial Broadway run, inspired a Hitchcock film and has been restaged and refilmed more than two dozen times) is opening their 2011-12 season. Having seen the play just a few months ago at the Dorset Playhouse in Vermont with a brilliant cast and a director who brought new insights out of the script, it is difficult to see it again so soon and with a company of community players -- whose work I generally like -- doing somewhat less than the summer's professional company brought to their roles. This was inevitable.
Still, the show on stage in Ghent is engaging and endearing and the workings of a good script are still in evidence. For an audience that has never seen the play on stage, this is a well-wrought introduction the work. I feel somewhat out on a limb with someone just out of reach slowly but inexorably sawing my branch off the trunk. I will proceed to tell you what I saw, but that observation will obviously be colored.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:33 PM | Permalink

"Night and Her Stars" by Richard Greenberg. Directed by Eric Peterson. At Oldcastle Theatre Company in Bennington, Vt.

How many men does it take to make a really good man? Start with intelligence, stir in intellect, add a bit of humility and a nattering of morality, throw in a pinch of humanity and heat up with handsome features, a good body and eloquent hair, and what do you have? The impossible dream, it would seem. In the 1950s, all of these elements existed, split among a dozen men who appeared as often as possible on televisions quiz shows. Some, like Herb Stempel, were unattractive savants with miserable lives but transforming brains, men who could remember everything and sort it out quickly from those steel trap brains of theirs. Others, like Charles Van Doren, could channel Don Juan, ignite cigarettes with only their smiles and still spout poetry and history and solve math problems with transcendent grace.
When the game show "Twenty-One" pitted these men against one another, sparks lit up the airwaves and the pulse of the nation speeded up for a while. But then it all changed. Stempel lost his agonizing attraction and Van Doren became a morning pedant. These two, who had combined passion and intelligence, charm and a touch of madness, almost made that historic single person in the minds and hearts of the American public. But when scandal broke around these shows and their own participation became a question mark in the press and in Congress, the world we knew changed drastically. So did the players.
Richard Greenberg's play "Night and Her Stars" deals with this situation. Never a playwright to avoid problems, the author of "Take Me Out," "The Velvet Hour," "Three Days of Rain" and "Eastern Standard" sets his sights on the conflicts within Stempel and Van Doren as well as the conflict between them that sparked so much of the trouble. In its current production at the Oldcastle Theatre Company's soon-to-be-lost home space in Bennington, Vt., an odd thing has happened to the play itself. Director Eric Peterson has created around an extraordinary cast a new problem -- focusing the play.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:40 AM | Permalink

"War of the Worlds" by Howard Koch. Directed by Tony Simotes. At Shakespeare & Company.

On Oct. 30, 1938, Orson Welles Mercury Theater of the Air performed a new "smart" adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel "The War of the Worlds." What made it smart was that the scriptwriter Howard Koch had crafted a show that sounded like legitimate news bulletins and reportage before one character suddenly took over the narrative and told the story through to the end. What made it really smart -- smart as in hurt -- was that nearly half the nation tuned in late and didnt know they were hearing a play and they bought into the story, leaving it before the drama became a monodrama for Welles. Millions of Americans believed that Martians had landed outside the quaint and sleepy little town of Grovers Mill, N.J., and were taking down our country from their cylinder-shaped spacecraft.
Riots ensued. People went crazy. It would take a long time for the 48 states to recover from the trauma of an attack on our soil from outside the known world. By the time the nation was over its defeat, along came Pearl Harbor and the show seemed to be a prophetic glance into the future.
Now Shakespeare and Company is presenting what is touted as Howard Kochs' play about the play. In this new suspense-comedy-drama, a company of actors come together to ultimately produce this mind-shattering radio-play. These, however, are not Welles and company. That is something you have to know before you go. These are six actors on some other show doing their thing according to their scripts.
The other thing you need to know is that you won't really get the effect of this broadcast. Six actors can play a great many people but the can never, at least as written, understand the general alarm, the overwhelming panic that ensued. That cannot be conveyed in this form or format. That would be another play.
What you will come away with is an understanding about the art of listening. There are local jokes galore in the first half of the show and you don't want to miss them. There is a version of the actual radio show's opening moments and that is something you need to know is just part of the show. After all, the studio audience had to be brought along into the joke or conceit of the Koch original script. There was no retelling of the story. The short news items that interrupted the show in progress are given much as they were in 1938 and that slow and realistic warm-up is what made this show so dynamic, so effective.
Simotes has done a fine job of creating the working atmosphere of a radio studio and his actors are so used to working with a style of production that it is almost as though we have stepped back in time to 1938. There is a bustle and a swiftness that are all business here and that works beautifully. The women wear hats and gloves, the men are dapper with their vests and watch chains and coats thrown over shoulders. Simotes has a knack for this era and he plays all of his trump-cards perfectly.
The cast is equal to the task of perfect representation. Jonathan Croy is a perfectly wonderful Broadway and Film Star (all capitalized for strengths) who plays a recurring role on the mystery/soap opera that the show presents. As the show swings into the Welles event, Croy takes on a variety of personae that allow him full range for his abilities. He is crisp and dry, ever urbane as he swaggers into position to play a farmer from New Jersey. He is amply enthralling as an air force pilot. Not the usual broad comic in any of his roles here, Croy shows many sides of his interpretive skills and all to the good.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:15 PM | Permalink

"Stones In His Pockets" by Marie Jones. Directed by Phil Rice. At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

Hollywood intrudes on many of us in strange and awful ways. In the play "Stones In His Pockets," it intrudes on a small town in Ireland to make a realistic drama about Irish landowners and the people affected by their intolerance, greed and prevarication. Using locals for "color" in the film, the filmmakers affect the townspeople in much the same way the film's characters affect the lives of the fictional folk around them. Life mimics art. Art realizes life.
"Don't we all dream?" one of the denizens demands of his friend. This is the question that truly invests this gigantic play for two actors with the unique combination of qualities that lets us laugh a little, cry a little and sigh a little for the loss of those individual qualities which separate the Irish folk from the rest of us. "Don't we all dream?" when asked demands an answer and no answer is sufficient, for naturally we all do as we must, but our dreams -- once at the surface for others to see and ridicule -- are almost never met with a necessary touch of reality.
Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn meet on the movie set in County Kerry. They are "extras" making 40 pounds a day. As they get to know one another better, their deeper secrets emerge in conversation and action. As so often happens in these two-handers, the actors eventually play about two dozen different characters, marked in this production by the changing of hats, which bring on altered voices and different stances. In the case of the production closing the season at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y. there couldn't be two better actors to face the task of creating a village and its interlopers than Matthew Daly and Trey Compton.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 7:34 PM | Permalink

"The Trial of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" by Edward Bernstein. Directed by Macey Levin.

Two different actors play Arthur Mandel, a Jewish tailor from Berlin whose life is inextricably entwined and complicated by the growth in power of the Nazi Party in the late 1930s. We meet him as an older man, already - and recently - dead. We find him as a young man about to fall in love. What the author makes manifestly clear is that these are the same man at two of the most important moments in his life. What we learn about him, eventually, in this play is that the decisions of the young man have affected the older man in strange ways.
In his later years, he has read the law and found a new vocation. That he hasn't had much practice in this profession doesn't deter him, once he reaches heaven, in pursuing his dream of prosecuting the man he officially blames for the death of his young wife during World War II and the deliberate omission of Jewish immigrants coming from a war-torn and overly anti-Semitic Europe. The man is former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR. Roosevelt has been something of an American God or icon. It's been hard to touch the man with polio who sacrificed his life for his country. Bernstein does the best he can to tarnish the holy-man image with this play, and that may be the single-most erratic problem with this show.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 2:58 PM | Permalink

"Birthday Boy" by Chris Newbound. Directed by Wes Grantom. At Berkshire Theatre Festival.

At the Unicorn Theatre of Berkshire Theatre Festival, a new, locally grown play is being offered as an end-of-season production. It is a world premiere. As I've noted many times before this summer, world premieres are both risky and fun. We don't know what we'll get, even if we've been informed about the new play. We go expectantly, hoping for another major triumph. We probably pray a little, as well, pray for success and for a truly happy experience. To find a total reward is often much more difficult than we like to believe. More often we get a play like "Birthday Boy" - a great idea realized nicely to a particular point and then, well, not so much.
The basic problem with "Birthday Boy" is simple: there really is no play there, just an extended sketch, an idea that could play out in so many ways but instead replays itself constantly and leaves the audience with an ambiguous ending that merely stops, rather than ends, the play. The writing is lovely; it is poignant, funny, lyrical and dramatic. The characters are very interesting also: quirky, withdrawn, exuberant, humiliating, imaginative. The plot is simple and resolvable, but its structure, awkward and uneven, takes it down a lonely pathway to a brick wall. That will not do, Mr. Playwright.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:02 PM | Permalink

"Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" by Margaret Engel and Allison Engel. Directed by Jenna Ware. At Shakespeare & Company.

Raised in Texas, died in Texas. That could encompass the life of Molly Ivins if she had not intruded on our national conscience through her skillful reportage, her brilliant and observant mind and her fine-old Texas-style use of humor and gall in calling a spade a spade and not meaning a black person.     
After dubbing the recent President from Texas, during his former life as a Texas Governor, "Shrub," she commented on his role in Federal politics "however you put it, George W. Bush is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America." It was that sort of incisive and deliberate political writing that endeared Ivins to Americans well outside of her Texas haunts.
In a new play about the reporter and columnist, "Red Hot Patriot," we meet the woman herself toward the very end of her life. She is at her desk in the newspaper office trying to write a column about her father, a man whom she has been unable to fathom for her entire life. She has gotten down three sentences and is stumbling about the rest of it. A cancer survivor herself, she is being assaulted by news stories from her own personal history on the AP machine and each one inspires her chatter. It isn't until late in the one-act, 93 minute play that she realizes the awful truth about her own status. She has died. Even this doesn't stop her from laying down a few more insightful remarks and that, it seems to me, is true Molly Ivins.

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Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:20 PM | Permalink