Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

In the small, mythical town of Almost, Maine, a place too small to be a town legally and so is denied an actual name, it is 9 on "a cold, clear moonless Friday night in the middle of winter." Nine love stories are acted out before our eyes, all of them taking place simultaneously in this magical world where allegorical love is as passionately portrayed as corporeal love might be in a grind-house movie theater.
"Almost, Maine" is the final offering at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y., and with autumn in the air it is quite the perfect transition into winter.
Don’t let the word "allegorical" fool you. This play is a gem. There are 11 scenes in which four attractive young performers create a world of awestruck lovers, some beginning a relationship, some ending one and many in that in-between state where love is an option or a curse.

Love Story One is precious and is stretched out over three scenes which bracket the evening. Love Story Two is heart-breaking but creates an optimism based on nature’s lighting effects. Love Story Three entices you with a sense of missed opportunities and the fate of the spelling deficient. Love Story Four has a medical bias that denies love then illustrates its more dangerous levels. Love Story Five is allegory pure and simple, stated in bundles of love. That’s act one.
Act two brings Love Story Six in which two best friends discover, to their clumsy horror, what love is all about. Love Story Seven illustrates for all time the effect of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Love Story Eight reminds us of the need to deal with love when it is offered. Love Story Nine gives innocence a whole new meaning.
The basic thing to know about this play before you experience it is this: The twilight zone does exist and it probably inhabits northern Maine, the only state to touch on only one other state. It is a world of free will and few ties and the emotions experienced in deep winter are deep emotions. Snow is everywhere, the night sky is clear and star-filled and so is the stage in New Lebanon.
leni Delopoulos, seen here in this time slot last year in Parallel Lives–the Kathy and Mo Show, returns as the female of interest in four of the nine playlets. She is devastatingly beautiful in "Sad and Glad," distressingly dull-looking in "This Hurts" and wonderfully sympathetic and odd in "Seeing the Thing." Her characters are always well defined and different, her face taking on the perfect look for each of them. It’s a beautiful performance that could only be flawed if her co-workers were less capable than she of creating their own wonderfully different characters. Lucky for her, and us, all four players have this ability in hand.
Jessica Lynn Johnson, the other woman in the company, plays her people with strength and stability. Like Delopoulos, she is a master of voices, facial expressions and posture. She makes "Story of Hope" into a minor tragedy at its highpoint and "Getting it Back" into a major drama with just a flicker of her eyelids at its nadir. It’s a pity that the playwright didn’t write a scene for two women in this work, for it would have been fascinating to watch these two actresses share an emotional moment or two.
David Bodenschatz makes the most of a snowball at the top of act two. His word-challenged Jimmy in "Sad and Glad" is a precious human being who finds he can make the most of his deficiencies if he only just waits for fate to take a hand. Bodenschatz also shines in the "Story of Hope" as an unrecognized old love. He handles this with a sensitivity we don’t expect from a Maine man.
Joseph Dal Porto is romantically challenged as Easton in "Her Heart" and Steve in "This Hurts" and these two utterly different men at opposite poles in the world of allegorical love are curiously attractive to the women they meet and to the audience as well. Oddness is nothing extreme in Dal Porto’s playing; it is merely existing. In "They Fell" he plays with an innocence that is alarmingly realistic.
All four of these actors pull off the nearly impossible in this play. They show us a world where love is not the main thing, but becomes the only thing worth dealing with, at least for the hour of nine p.m., in the upper reaches of America.
Director Tony Capone maneuvers this cast through their erotic paces with perfect pacing and deliberate choices that become endearing memories. He uses the playwright’s, at times, odd language and stranger body language to create a platform of new realities. He has the able assistance of Robert Eberle’s moonless night lighting. Much of the show is set outdoors, in the snow and even though Abe Phelps set is clearly cloth, it becomes snow in the hands of the director, lighting designer and actors.
Summing up this evening of vignettes is easy: wear a scarf to keep your throat fluid so that laughter and an occasional sob can escape as needed, but keep your hands ungloved so that your genuine, heartfelt and non-allegorical applause can be heard.
If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to see it, does it make a noise? In Almost, Maine it probably shouts out loud and so should we.

"Almost, Maine" plays through Oct. 7 at the Theater Barn on Route 20 in New Lebanon, New York. Tickets are $20, $18 at the Sunday matinee. For full schedule and tickets call 518-794-8989.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 5:10 PM | Permalink

Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks by Richard Alfieri. Directed by Michael Marotta.

Take a moment to imagine, if you can, what would happen when a bitchy, rude, self-important 35ish male ex-chorus boy, gay and uncomfortable about it, is thrown into a room with a giddy, self-important, Southern Baptist minister’s wife whose attitudes are self-protective, arrogant, judgmental and informed by her senior status in a condo filled with wealthy widows.
Put the place where they meet inside her apartment overlooking St. Petersburg Beach in Florida where attitudes support neither of their backgrounds and add into the mix the fact that he is there to teach her how to dance, something she doesn’t need to learn, a paid employee who can be dismissed at any moment for anything from insolence to stepping on her toes.
That is the relationship set up by playwright Richard Alfieri in his play "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" currently on the boards in New Lebanon, N.Y., at the Theater Barn.

Lily Harrison has companionship needs and they might be supplied by Michael Minetti. That is the crux of the plot here. In reality, however, it is Minetti who needs companionship and Lily is not, based on her background, his ideal new best friend. What the playwright achieves in this play, rendered in seven dance-oriented scenes, is the creation of a new relationship with strong tendrils. As they wind around their two characters and as a friendship is ultimately formed within them, those grasping vines become staked supports for both of them.
This is a delicious comedy, character driven and supported brilliantly by two superb actors and a director who understands how dance can support every human emotion. Michael Marotta does the best work of his season here this year with this play. He defines the sensitivity of the issues through gestures and physical proximities. He clarifies relationships through the tension he creates between his characters’ interpreters. Even his set change transitions carry forward the themes of the play and the idea of dance as a universal form of expression.
Ruthanne Gereghty is a feisty Lily. Stately and elegant, Lily in her hands is a woman of taste and discrimination who accepts nothing at face value, even when the lines would have us believe she does exactly that. Gereghty manages with a look or a small gesture to show us that there is something behind the line, something working against the spoken word in her character. She dances divinely, with a grace and a charm that makes even the modest Frug or Monkey seem perfectly right for her. The actress has a sweet voice with an edge. She does modest anger, immodest humor and the occasional four-letter word with equal grace and charm. In the second act when Lily reveals more truths about her family life than we might expect to hear, Gereghty plays with a restraint that allows the audience to react to bad news rather than taking it all on herself and depriving the audience of its own response. It is a truly lovely performance.
Matthew Daly continues his summer of unusual characters with Michael. This is an actor to watch, obviously, as he transitions from overly visual chorus boy type to underplayed gentleman to charmer to madman to human with a heart. The role allows him to use the talents he has displayed in three successive musicals at the Barn, all in one character. His dark good looks are an asset here. He overplays the gayness of his character to the extreme required, then pulls back into the dancer who gave up a career to care for an ailing mother with warmth and charm.. Daly is one of those Theater Barn actors who always seem to be better than expected in a summer stock company. He is proving his professionalism in this play allowing himself to be broad and comic while bringing out the closed-in, closeted human being within, a man who uses funny lines to hide the true emotions that are playing out somewhere else, in some other world of his own creation.
Physically this is one of Jonathan Knipscher’s best designed shows. With Michelle Blanchard assistance the costumes for the seven scenes of this play tell us almost as much about Lily as her words and actions. They are perfect. Michael’s costume choices are equally well thought out and the production’s sheen is based as much on their looks for each dance as on their emotional outbursts.
Abe Phelps and Michael Marotta have conceived a Florida condo with style. Their vision of Lily and her home choices is largely Florida Room with a heavy emphasis on pink. It works for the character, allowing her costumes to alter our image of her drawn from her environment. This is clearly a clever device created by the director.
Robert Eberle’s lighting was a bit heavy on the red, but his transitions from emotion to dance to scene climax were always fascinating and almost filmic in a 1960's Joshua Logan way.
Applause should also go to Emily James Durning for her lovely set change transitions.
See this one before it closes. It’s an unusual evening that makes you laugh, allows you a single, furtive tear, and lets you enjoy the art of social dancing taken to its dramatic brilliance.

Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks play Friday, Saturday and Sunday through September 16 at The Theater Barn on Route 20 in New Lebanon, NY. For information and tickets call 518-794-8989.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 4:40 PM | Permalink

Master Harold...and The Boys by Athol Fugard. Directed by Hal Brooks.

Fugard has made a career out of understanding the black men of his country. He has done it brilliantly in plays like "Valley Song," "Boesman and Lena," "Blood Knot," and "Sizwe Banzi is Dead."
In this play, he opens up his heart completely to the differences that controlled the country of his birth at the time of his youth. He creates this sense of personal memoir, personal experience through which to explore the difficulties of the universal human heart.
Hally, the Master Harold of the title, along with Sam and Willie, the black men who work for Hally’s mother at the Tea Room, are very different people, although they unveil the similarities they share, almost shocking each other with the reality of the depths of their humanity.

Hally loves, reveres and hates his father. His violence encountering the concept of this man and his sweetness in his actual conversation with him reflect in his handling of Sam and their long-standing friendship. Willie’s desire for recognition as a winner fights his need to abuse his partner the more he needs her help to win a dance contest. The abuse he uses is classic in the world he inhabits, but it is unlikely to be the road to success. Sam has to be the strong person in both of his companion’s lives here, but he also has to break that strength in order to survive in this world. In what should be an ordinary, usual afternoon, trapped inside the shop they make their afternoon home by a heavy rain, these three suddenly collide and many difficult strains in all of them emerge. Even the complacent Sam is pushed into emotional outbursts.
Clifton Guterman plays Hally. It isn’t that he is white that makes a difference for us, but rather his deep, underplayed superiority that makes it all work. Guterman approaches the role with an arrogance that is marvelous. His teenager, high school student Hally, is a being who knows his place in the world of apartheid and he has not usually abused it, but this day he does and he feels, as we can see, the internal emotions of that abuse. Guterman is not always likeable, but he makes us always feel something like sympathy for his character. We don’t want to tolerate his behavior, but we do because he lets us inside through his facial expressions, through his body language. As his Hally strives to be intellectual and not emotional he becomes more and more emotionally strung out. That constant surge to control and simultaneously protect his small world is what Guterman brings to the fore so well. It’s a difficult role for a young actor and this man does well with the challenges.
Wendell Franklin is a charming, attractive Willie. Willie’s urge to dance, his clear devotion to his elder, Sam, his quiet admiration for the wrong things in Hally, are all well presented by Franklin. He makes the most of the character’s needs in this play.
Guiesseppe Jones is an excellent Sam. He plays tolerance, patience and anger with equal force and strength. He is sweet to both of his compatriots when it is called for, almost saccharine with Hally at times. However, when his anger is called for, when it strikes both the personal and political overtones of the play, Jones is in complete control of his role. Oddly, though, the very end of the play loses some of its resonance due to what may be a flaw in the writing, or a flaw in the direction of the play. Sam makes his position clear to Hally, makes a decision and seems to stick with it. Minutes later Fugard has him return in a more submissive mood, more subordinate and less recalcitrant. That would be fine, but somehow the playing of this scene feels wrong and the final moment of the play, with just Sam and Willie, also seemed out-of-step. Jones’s Sam is a man who clearly knows how things are and how things must be, but his concept of how they should be just wasn’t well-defined. In an otherwise perfect performance the final moments lost some of their clarity.
On an excellent set by Wilson Chin, lit emotionally by Stuart Duke, director Hal Brooks has created a tiny world where everything moves smoothly and with that familiarity that says this is home, this is right. For most of this production’s emotional time line Brooks has taken the right choices and worked his actors into their proper places. It’s a very revealing play, directed to be just that, very revealing. Although the title character would seem to be the focus of the play, Brooks has subtly moved our attention to Sam and his concealed history - we know less about him in the script than we do about Willie. That shift, a directorial shift, provokes questions that this production cannot answer.
Patricia Norcia has coached her three actors well in their South African accents.
"Master Harold ... and The Boys" is, as it always was, very good theater. The short run of this play demands a prompt response, and it is the same way within the play. Don’t hesitate or you will lose an opportunity to see something unique, a play whose message can be read in many ways by many people. It all depends upon your experiences in this world.

"Master Harold ... and The Boys" plays at the Weston Playhouse through Sept. 8. It then plays a week of school-audience matinees through Sept. 14. It resumes performances on tour beginning Tuesday, Oct. 2, at the Casella Theater, Castleton State College, Castelton, Vt, Wednesday, Oct. 3, at Dibden Center for the Arts, Johnson State College, Johnson, Vt, Thursday, Oct. 4, at Chandler Center for the Arts, Randolph, Vt, Friday Oct. 5, at Flynn Center, Burlington, Vt, Saturday, Oct. 6, and Sunday, Oct. 7, at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, N.H. For full schedules, prices and tickets, contact the Weston box office at 802-824-5288.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 11:34 AM | Permalink