Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"Hay Fever" by Noel Coward. Directed by Kate Gulliver. At the Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, N.Y.

A good comedy is hard to find, and when a light, frivolous play is written by Noel Coward, author of "Private Lives" and "Blithe Spirit" and "Design for Living," it must be assumed that this is a comedy, one that will play well and get laughs. "Hay Fever," now on stage at the Ghent Playhouse, would be assumed to be just such a play. A good comedy on Broadway should rack up at least 350 performances. "Hay Fever" in four productions from 1925 through 1985, counted up together, lasted only 292 performances. Yet, it is considered classic Coward.
It has starred, in these four runs, a quartet of classically funny female stars: Laura Hope Crews (49 perfs), Constance Collier (95 perfs), Shirley Booth (24 perfs), and Rosemary Harris (129 perfs). If these women cannot pull off the role of Judith Bliss, who could? Based on American actress Laurette Taylor whom Coward adored in "Peg O' My Heart" the character is an odd mixture of stereotypical "actress" and lover/automaton with a dash of morality-militant thrown in for good measure. Created by George Bernard Shaw she might have been a cornerstone of British matriarchy; Oscar Wilde would have had her more openly wanton and wantingly lovely. For Coward she is somewhat more pedestrian a symbol of the world in which he traveled, half reality and half make-believe with neither half prevailing.

The cast in Ghent does what it can with the material. They don't have much on which to hang performances, but each actor gives credible service to the Coward creation they have been assigned. There's no plot or storyline to carry them far along the path to success, however. The four members of the Bliss family each have invited a weekend guest to the country. They are poor hosts and self-indulgent egotists and basically ignore and embarrass their guests, standing them up to play with others briefly before forgetting them entirely. The guests go home.
Coward does set up some marvelous interactions, however, and these all play out with the requisite laughs from the audience. That's the good side. On the bad side, there are just too many shallow and selfish people on the stage for anyone to become sympathetic. Perhaps our hearts go out to the least reasonable person in the family room of the country house, a fellow named Richard Greatham, invited by Sorel Bliss, the daughter, ignored by her, who falls under the spell of the mother, Judith, an actress whose best days, if not years, are behind her. We lose interest in him in Act Three, but by then we have basically lost interest in everyone.
Richard Lapo plays Greatham with a clean, unfailing faith in his fellow man. There is something so simply honest about him that when he tries to get into the spirit of a game he comes up a total loser, not even realizing that he has screwed it up. You have to love a man like that. Lapo pulls his character into the center spotlight several times without seeming to hog anything. He has a charm that pervades and then falls into an abyss when he is clearly despised by the other characters on stage. It's a lovely performance.
Meg Dooley almost manages to make Judith as enthralling as her character believes herself to be. She has the most difficult role to play. Judith is always in a spotlight, always on stage. She has no honest moments and the difficulty Dooley has is identifying through varying style the moments when her actress is acting for real and when she is acting for an unseen, vast audience. Playing someone who is meant to be artificial and making her real is almost impossible so Dooley cannot be faulted for not getting it right. Presumably neither did Shirley Booth or the others.
Caitlyn Mazzacano plays Sorel and Mike Meier her brother Simon. They are both working as hard as they can to get the characters, often at the loss of maintaining a sense of the period in which their characters are living, 1925. She carries it off better than he does, but he has a charm that almost works for Simon in the second act. I'd love to see them together in something else sometime. They are very very good together on stage.
David Edward Campbell is just fine as David, the patriarch of the Bliss family. If perhaps a bit too American that can be an acceptable choice for a man who is a cypher in a room full of jigsaw puzzle pieces. As his flapper interest (a role that is so confusing that we want to cry right along with her) Jackie Coryton actress Stephanie Tanaka gives a formless performance. She is not to be blamed here because Coward has not given her any consistency with which to work. Jackie is not a flapper, she only wears the trappings of one. The most out-of-place character in the play she does not even seem to serve a purpose other than to pair off with three men in a day and a half. And she is most likely a virgin to boot.
Neal Berntson is fine as Sandy, a role that has only one point - he came by car. Cathy Lee-Visscher does remarkably well, and is most Cowardian, in the role of Myra Arundel, a femme fatale who has the one-liners, the zingers, the most men in her men and the worst defined character history in the entire Coward canon. We are never sure of who or what she is. In spite of this Lee-Visscher makes us like the woman and sympathize with her now and then. That's a triumph.
Funniest character on the stage is Clara, the Maid, played beautifully, if somewhat Thelma Ritter-like, by Ellen Lieberman. I don't think Coward meant for Clara to outshine Judith, but she does.
Director Kate Gulliver has worked with her cast to create an image of a time gone by when fecklessness counted for something. The task is daunting and she has worked hard at it, but the payoff, at the end, is just not there. Timing the laughs is hard when laughs don't come. Stretching the reality button is difficult when so much seems so artificial - including the flowers. This play is funnier than "Ralph Roister-Doister" but it is just as hard to make it work.
She has had ample assistance from the superb costumes by Joanne Maurer and the excellent set by Bill Camp. Lighting Designer Dave Malsan and Stage Manager Mary Reardon need to tighten light cues so that scenes button rather than linger. Accent Coash Burnell Shively gets kudos.
With such an infrequent list of successful productions you may not have many more opportunities to see this uniquely quirky play by Noel Coward. I happen to like his work so I would recommend that you go while you can. Just don't confront me about it not being very funny. I've told you that up front. What it is, to be straightforward, is something you won't see often: a very personal look at the quirky folk of the theater.

"Hay Fever" plays through Oct. 31 at the Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, N.Y. For information and tickets, call the box office at 518-392-6264.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:01 PM | Permalink

"The Maids" by Jean Genet. Directed by Thomas Gruenewald. At New Stage Performing Arts Center in Pittsfield.

Was there ever a more specific writer than Jean Genet more adept at confusion and obfuscation? His 1947 play, "The Maids," now being given a superb production by the New Stage Theatre Company in Pittsfield, MA, is a perfect example of how easy it is to absorb the attention of the intellectuals while leaving them unsteady and in mid-air with parachutes that simply will not open. In this new production, one that shines with brilliantine and bubbles with borax, one is left doubting the senses one was born with. There is a compulsion to laugh, but little to laugh at. There is an equal compulsion to cry but nothing to cry about. To make matters even more indelicate one wishes to scream at times, but one knows how inappropriate that would be and so one doesn't.
This oddness of human reactions is the logical outcome, or illogical if you prefer it, of an evening spent with three wonderful actors giving the performances of their lives in cross-gendered roles that constantly vary between simulated life and real life and after a while it is hard to tell which is which. Or what is what.

Solange and Claire, sisters and maids in the large, multi-servanted household of "Madame" are desperately longing to do away with their mistress and live their own lives built on the remnants of their employer's world. Neither one has been successful in killing the woman, but both have had a joyride in her clothing and her attitudes. Except the attitudes are more their own. Or are they? Once she is dispatched to meet either her husband or lover, or both, on his sudden and temporary release from prison, the sisters, or Maids, set about destroying their own illusions of what life could offer them in a future dependent on nothing more or less than the complete loss of the woman who employs them. Or owns them. Or both. Or neither.
With enough plot points to keep Hollywood enlivened for a decade, this mystery play unfolds its secrets slowly and carefully until, by the final moments, you are completely bewildered by Genet's stunning, brilliant and evil mind. Sadistic and Masochistic moments prevail as the sisters play-act and torture one another. Both have too good a time to satisfy either point of view. When Claire decides she's had enough and drinks a cup of tea previously poisoned by her to dispatch Madame, it is never clear that she actually kills herself, and yet her talent as an actress and improvisor may in fact be allowing her to fake her own death just to see how Solange will react. The fate of both these women may be left in the hands of an unseen audience for whom both women perform at length.
Played by three men, as Genet intended, the question then becomes what is real and what is theater. Is there a difference when all is said and done? Is there a need for reality at all? The author makes his point brilliantly when the play is performed - as it is here - by talented men who have no need to pretend to be women as they play women. Instead they are who they are, act as they act, perform as they must.
Ken De Loreto is Madame, the smallest, briefest of the three roles. Here is a character rich enough to throw away a fur coat and a couture gown, yet modest enough to reclaim all of her possessions in the name of liberated love. De Loreto has a style that gives him perfect poise as a woman of stature yet leaves us wondering about her personal values. He offers up a portrayal of trust and faith and hope emerging from hopelessness, faithlessness and mistrust. His Madame is a creature of habit shedding her skin and yet retaining it for future donning as needed.
David Anderson is perfectly brilliant as Claire. He is clear and resonant at all times in what may be his finest performance of his best role yet in this region. His emotional collapse and the aftermath of such an event are stunning to watch. His earlier scenes of dominance and decision are both lovely (the feminine) and determined (the male). He is a joy to behold in drag and a force to be reckoned with as the moments require.
Creating Solange with overwhelming star-power, local actor Daniel Osman is a revelation. He has a 22 minute monologue near the end of the play and the time speeds by as he literally (though not physically) slams into the walls of Madame's boudoir. There isn't a cogent thought he doesn't express, not a fragrant emotion that isn't shattered by him before our eyes. If his world, or her world to be precise, isn't a stack of bibles written in Sanskrit and translated by a drunken poetess with no knowledge of the original language then there is no justice, no honesty, left in this world. Osman manages to confuse our senses, our ears and our minds with the babble Genet has created to give Solange a depth she may not have in reality. Osman keeps everything on the surface, even Solange's pain, and yet he reveals depths to this character that not even the playwright imagined were there.
Keeping this all together is the very talented director Thomas Gruenewald, who has practically choreographed the work. As the two sisters circle one another, alternating a predatory stance with a feminine expression, the director's hand is evident yet not intrusive. He is not in sight, but his actors are. He shows us men donning female attire and wigs. We have no surprises coming and yet he and his actors consistently surprise and delight with sudden alterations and fits of immorality. Even the long monologue is staged with clarity and an unusual breaking of the invisible fourth wall that usually protects "us" from "them."
Charles Tomlinson's set is lovely and appropriate as are his costumes. Benjamin Elliott provides stark lighting that seems to change slightly now and then as emotions peak or dwindle. There is a seamlessness with the pre-show music, Astor Piazzolla's discordant Argentinian dances that aggravate rather than lull.
I have seen four productions of this play, and read it several times, and even the historic note in the program about the source of inspiration leaves me without a true grasp of the author's intention - and I love Genet. This production clarifies moments and still leaves me wondering about the two sisters, the Maids, about the who, what, why and why not. I don't like being left in the dark, but I love being asked to think and that's what this production ultimately does: it makes me think and wonder and question. I can live with that. I like that. I liked this!

"The Maids" plays at New Stage Performing Arts Center above the Beacon Movie Theatre at 55 North St. in Pittsfield through Oct. 31. For tickets and information, visit newstageperformingarts.org.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:55 PM | Permalink

"The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. Directed by Julianne Boyd. At Barrington Stage Company.

The funny thing about Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" is there is no funny thing about it. It is a serious play with a serious message, one that almost gets lost these days, set in a time long before our own yet a dead-on satire of the McCarthy vs. the Army hearings that were being televised to a vapid nation back in the early 1950s. Using the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of 1692 as his setting Miller took on the rigors and agonies of the un-American activities hearings and did so in a way that still has resonance today.
Julianne Boyd's highly personal production of this classic is now gracing the boards at Barrington Stage Company's downtown theater on Union Street in Pittsfield. It is peopled with actors playing characters so well that each actor will for now and perhaps all time be identified with the men, women and children they are playing. Gordon Stanley, for example, makes Giles Corey into a man of hidden strengths willing to sacrifice everything in the name of remorse. And yes, these traits are evident in the writing, but it is the honest, forthright, in-your-face picture painted by the actor that makes a difference this time around. It will be hard to forget his face and voice in this play when he undertakes other roles. Giles Corey is now perceived as Gordon Stanley plays him.

The play, in short, is about the effect that five girls have on a town of nice people in an emerging nation. Religion takes a perverse role when the concept of Devil worship and control overrides all other concerns of the day. Trials for witchcraft take place and the dominant role of a single individual over that nation is soon evident. Good men and women who will not name names, point fingers or give up friends and neighbors are put into jail, or hung until dead. A farm couple struggling through a marriage that has been challenged by lechery are caught up in the maelstrom. The play does not end happily.
Robert Zukerman plays Deputy Governor Danforth who presides at the trials. This is a thankless role, one in which an actor portrays the single-minded hatred of a man obsessed with destroying evil. Zukerman makes him as hateful as it is possible to be while putting forth ideals. His unflagging persistence with a single facial expression is well-imagined and well-wrought and puts us into that uncomfortable state that is so much a part of what Miller was writing about. In his presence we feel threatened.
Kim Stauffer is perfect as Elizabeth Proctor, the farm-wife-victim of a young girl's hatred and resentment. Jessica Griffin is chilling as that girl, Abigail Williams, whose own lust for Elizabeth's husband helps to set into motion the charade of madness and possession that she fosters. Proctor himself is played to perfection by Christopher Innvar. Proctor's emotions and his intelligence are balanced in Innvar's portrayal of the man. From the outset he is a man on trial and his final scene is played with a cold, perverse view of justice. This is the performance of this actor's career, I think. It's the one I'll cherish.
Glenn Barrett is the sensitive Francis Nurse and he delivers his character with unanticipated charm and finesse. Jeff Kent is Thomas Putnam, a land-grabbing opportunist. Peter Samuel plays Reverend Parris whose daughter triggers the action in this play. Matt Neely plays the court official with brains and heart.
The women and girls, Peggy Pharr Wilson, Gabrielle Smachetti, Caroline Mack, Maggie Donnelly and Rosalind Cramer as a wonderfully wrought Rebecca Nurse are all just fine in their respective roles. Edward Cating is a fascinating Judge Hathorne and Betsy Hogg turns the role of Mary Warren, a troublemaker who almost changes things for the better, into a personal triumph.
Starla Benford is superb as Tituba, the Barbados slave-woman. Fletcher McTaggart is unforgettable as the Reverend John Hale from Beverly, Mass, who attempts time and again to rectify situations that are completely out of his control.
Boyd has blended these many images into a tapestry that reeks of turmoil. She has kept her actors from taking the baby-steps into parody or outrageousness and kept the action, and actors, real. Watching her production, beautifully designed by scene designer David M. Barber, costume designer Kristina Sneshkoff and lighting designer Scott Pinkney, is like being a fly on the wall. There is a true sense of being there rather than of watching a play.
It is impressive to find a playwright's bio included in a program locally when the play is an old one, a classic. Barrington Stage Company has included on of Arthur Miller and reading it reminds us of the power this man wielded in his time. Boyd's company has delivered a gift to the Berkshires and even though it takes three hours to completely unwrap it, at the end the wait and effort is all so very worthwhile.

"The Crucible" plays through Oct. 24 at Barrington Stage Company's Union Street theater in downtown Pittsfield. For information and tickets, call the box office at 413-236-8888.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:10 PM | Permalink