Gloucester Stage should have buried this one

Francisco Solorzano and Timothy John Smith share back stories in Last Day.

There's been a bit of chatter of late in the blogosphere around new play development; a few influential theatres (such as Washington's Arena Stage) have admitted they don't really look at unsolicited submissions - instead, these are farmed out to be read by volunteers, who don't have the clout to push a worthwhile script up the food chain even when they find one. If we don't already know you, the message goes, then you better make sure we know you, because there's no way we're going to risk a production purely on the merits of your script. Okay? We're just being honest!

Okay, so let's be honest with you, Arena Stage. The unconscious admission here, of course, is that you can't tell a bad script from a good script all by yourselves. Which is a little depressing! But I've begun to wonder if you - and other theatres - might be better off poking around in the slush pile anyhow rather than looking to friends and friends-of-friends for plays that "match your mission." I mean, could the results really be that much weaker than they already are?

Take Last Day, for instance, currently at Gloucester Stage (which has been having a boffo summer season so far). Without the connections of its author, Richard Vetere, to this particular theatre (and its founder, Israel Horowitz) this aimlessly bleak pastiche would have wound up in the circular file, I'm sure. But instead, thanks to Vetere's history (he's had a few minor hits) and relationships, it's up onstage instead, where it really doesn't belong.

Because Last Day is just an exercise in - well, getting through roughly 100 minutes of playing time; it's basically what you'd expect of some smart playwriting student's senior project. The script seems to begin as a gruesome black comedy in the manner of Martin McDonagh: two cemetery hands - one mysteriously taciturn, the other none too bright - are faced with the grim realization that, because their employer is opening up a new "subdivision," a corpse they disposed of long ago is about to come back to haunt them. To be fair, this isn't that bad a set-up - various lacunae in the backstory promise the usual shocking revelations, and there's a sexy girl wandering around the premises to spice up whatever twists may come our way.

If only Vetere had been able to decide on a plot (or theme), his opening gambit might have yielded a small, but efficiently ghoulish, moral satire. But he hasn't been able to come up with either - or rather he hasn't been able to stick to any of the (many) ideas he has come up with. Instead Vetere shuffles through "twists" which almost all depend on off-stage personages (in the interests of economy, he has boiled his onstage cast down to three), or that strike us as emotionally unrealistic (if not flat-out ridiculous). The playwright does get a little traction out of the creepy re-burial of those mysterious remains; but soon after that we can feel the wheels coming off his funeral procession, even as he begins almost frantically piling on the complications.

First, we seem to be looking at a creepy little essay on the loss of (Catholic) faith; then, we're plunged into questions of adultery; then, a possible new murder! But "Who did you sleep with?" soon morphs into "Who could you kill?" which segues, believe it or not, into "Can you forgive her?" By the time you discover that one of the characters is also gay - and that the adulterous wife always assumed her husband was, too (????) - you may find yourself laughing at Last Day for the wrong reasons. I will say that I've never seen quite so many angles packed into a triangle. I suppose that's some sort of distinction. But my recommendation would still be to deep-six this particular script.

But alas, director Eric C. Engel has decided to mount it, and so three good actors must suffer through it every night. The lovely Therese Plaehn probably comes off best - but then she can coast a bit on in-your-face attitude, and believe it or not, despite the fact that she is willing to commit murder to save a marriage to a man she thinks is gay, she actually has to say the fewest number of howlers. Local luminary Timothy John Smith is probably saddled with the most, but despite the odds, he still has his moments. Sexy Francisco Solorzano (who did solid work in Horovitz's own Sins of the Mother a year or two ago) isn't so lucky as the dim bulb whose wife has been cheating on him and whose best friend turns out to want him in the worst possible way - both of whom, btw, egg him on to commit murder at various junctures. All you can think while watching his confused performance is that he, like his character, should have run for the hills long before the curtain rose.

More (and more) of Loesser

Drew Pulver with (L to R): TS Burnham & Zachary Magee; Back: Haley Sullivan & Mark Turner.

Right now Gloucester Stage is on a roll. They just closed an impeccable production of Alan Ayckbourn's Living Together (which had local critics hoping they'd soon pull together the entire Norman Conquests); now they've followed that success with a most happy production of Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella (playing through July 17) - a show so strong, in fact, that it single-handedly puts Gloucester Stage on the map as a producer of large-scale musicals.

Not that this North Shore mainstay hasn't tried its hand at musicals before - but they've usually been chamber shows, like Marry Me a Little or You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Loesser's Most Happy Fella is a different beast entirely - and a huge beast, too: it features some 29 different songs, so many that some have described it as "through-sung" (it's not quite) or claimed that it was actually a kind of opera, like Sweeney Todd (again, not quite).

What it is, Loesser once said, is simply "a musical with music." A whole lotta music. Indeed, you could cut half the songs in Fella and still have an enviable score for a standard Broadway show (with encores). It's like a cornucopia of melody; music just seems to pour out of it. True, Fella doesn't boast any timeless standards - those rare numbers in which melody and lyric fuse into mirrored perfection - but it comes close to that gold standard repeatedly, with showstoppers like "Standing on the Corner," "Joey, Joey, Joey," and "Big D." Besides, just trust me - even lesser Loesser is better than anything heard on Broadway in the past fifteen years (at least). 

Of course like many local companies, Gloucester's stage lacks an orchestra pit - a major gap in mounting a musical! - but director Eric C. Engel has dodged this seeming show-stopper by utilizing a version of the score for two pianos (one that was even blessed by Loesser).  This works better than you might think - although alas, here they're both electronic keyboards, not "real" pianos - so inevitably, sometimes they go plinkety-plink.  Still, much of the beauty of the score comes through.  And Engel has pulled together a sterling vocal cast to sing it, including local lights Timothy John Smith, Jennifer Ellis, and Kerry A. Dowling, as well as New Jersey native Drew Pulver.  (The vocal prowess extends throughout the cast, which includes Andrew McLeavey, Dawn Tucker, Bob DeVivo, John F. King, and Eric Hamel - and thanks to piano accompaniment, nobody needs to be amplified, another plus.)

Perhaps keying off the distillation of the instrumental arrangements, Engel has poised the show somewhere between a "concert" and "full" staging; backed by effective projections, the cast sometimes sings from behind music stands, but just as often acts out (and even dances) much of the show. Some critics have deplored this, but I thought it worked well enough, and sometimes even charmed; Engel manages the transitions from one mode to another fluidly (those music stands double as all kinds of props), and the streamlined quality of the production matched the simplicity Loesser aimed for in his story and kept the focus on the score, where it belonged.  Indeed, sometimes I felt I could have done with less staging, or perhaps less dancing - Engel seemingly couldn't afford any featured professional dancers, and while choreographers can sometimes conjure a graceful simplicity with non-dancers (the film of The Sound of Music is the most famous example of this), I'm afraid choreographer David Connolly manages to keep anyone from looking bad, but doesn't quite pull off that "subtle grace" trick.  It seems dancing remains the Achilles' heel of local musical production.

The good news, however, is that most of this sterling vocal cast can act as well as sing.  And they need those acting chops, because Loesser's story is a curious one that flirts with tragedy as well as comedy. It's the tale of Tony, an aging California vinter (Drew Pulver) so taken with lovely young waitress Rosabella (Jennifer Ellis, both at left) that he pitches woo through a series of love letters (attached to a photograph of one of his handsome farmhands!).  When Rosabella arrives, smitten, at his vineyard for their wedding, she inevitably discovers his deception, and of course recoils; but a sudden accident leaves Tony clinging to life, and under pressure Rosabella agrees to take his hand in marriage. 

At this point Loesser cues up a classic triangle - for that handsome farmhand is still hanging around, and soon Rosabella finds herself married to a man she is slowly growing to love (for Tony survives the accident), while carrying the child of another man whom she turned to in a moment of weakness.  This surprisingly adult situation is never quite spelled out explicitly, of course - it's conveyed in that familiar, slightly-oblique manner in which pop culture of the 40's and 50's dealt with such themes.  Still,  the conflicts and mutual moral failures are all clear enough - and a slight distance from explicitness these days feels like a sophisticated balm, to be honest.

That same honesty requires me, however, to confess that Loesser doesn't handle well the climax(es) of his melodrama - the book of Most Happy Fella (which he wrote along with all the words and music), after holding us for most of its length, collapses at its finish.  But by then you don't really care, because the gorgeous hits have kept on coming, and in a wild variety of styles (one reason this show isn't an "opera" is that the Verdi and Puccini - whom Loesser channels for his more rapturous flights - really count as just one more genre he's working in).

If I were going to get really picky, I'd also point out that Pulver's baritone, so lustrous at its deep end, sounds stretched at its top, and Ellis sometimes thins out a bit, too.  Both are generally delightful, however - Pulver in particular all but sparkles with a rough masculine sweetness that seems just right for Loesser.  And I have to say Timothy John Smith is in peak form - his rendition of "Joey, Joey, Joey" (at right) sends chills down your spine.  Meanwhile the hearty Kerry A. Dowling gets to stretch out in a role that's all but tailored to her - sometimes, in fact, you feel she's about to walk off with the whole damn show.  (I was likewise charmed by Bob DeVivo's bright-eyed take on her pacifist sweetheart.)  I was only disappointed in Dawn Tucker's turn as Tony's scheming sister, Marie - Tucker has a sweet swet of pipes but seemed to be hanging back from the darker side of the role.  But so what if the show has a flaw here and there - I have to say that it still made me a most happy fella indeed.

Lindsay Crouse and Richard Snee in Living Together.

Last summer it seemed I was alone in raving over Gloucester Stage's production of Table Manners, the first play in Alan Ayckbourn's celebrated trilogy The Norman Conquests. In the Globe, Louise Kennedy smiled wanly but held her nose; meanwhile, in the Phoenix, Ed Siegel said it made him laugh but didn't "haunt his dreams."  Okay . . .  Meanwhile the Herald only deemed it "a solid production." Then last winter I had to argue for all I was worth to get it an IRNE nomination, and I don't think the Nahton Awahds deigned to notice it at all . . .

But as is so often the case here at the Hub Review, over the period of about a year everybody seems to have come around to my opinion; critic after critic now attests that Table Manners was a classic, to which this year's sequel, Living Together - which is blessed with the same artistic team - doesn't always measure up.

And in a way they have a point - Living Together isn't quite the play Table Manners is, primarily because for much of its first half we feel the exposition and action of the earlier play is merely being reworked in variation - perhaps an inevitable problem in a suite of comedies which are constructed to wrap around each other. Once again we find we are spending the weekend with three couples (thus three plays?), linked by blood or marriage, who are working their way through the disappointments and imprisonments of middle-class middle-age as they tend to an ailing matriarch in her dismal suburban homestead.  And once again the perpetually priapic, but not terribly attractive, Norman is attempting to give existential despair the slip with one "affair" after another - and he doesn't much care if this involves betraying his own wife with her sister; indeed, he's happy to do every female-in-law in his family (we assume he'd stop at actual incest). And needless to say, the women in question are disapproving when they must play the betrayed victim, but rather more accommodating when they are Norman's actual targets - while their hapless menfolk are pretty much blind to everything.

But Living Together does eventually break some new emotional ground in its second act (and brings a touching new perspective to its clueless cuckolds) with the arrival of Norman's own wife, Ruth, who seemed so, well, ruthless in Table Manners but here is carefully complicated by the playwright into a more sympathetic figure. Utterly self-possessed and professional, Ruth seemed a kind of steamroller in the earlier play; she simply refused to believe Norman's squirrely horniness - or the depression that fed it - was worthy of her notice. But here we appreciate her overbearing calm is largely the result of her emotional (and literal) myopia - the blindness of this playwright's fools is one of his signatures - and Ayckbourn gives her a sweet, trusting openness to seduction (which Norman, of course, is happy to exploit). Indeed, the play climaxes cleverly with a desperately erectile Norman managing a startling sexual trifecta - in one case right beneath the nose of an uncomprehending spouse; like Ayckbourn himself, Norman is a master at cramming multiple narratives into a very confined space.

Still, does Living Together deepen the content of The Norman Conquests as much as it could - or should? My feeling is - not quite, although it's still a richer dramatic meal than you can expect from almost any of our millennial playwrights, and Gloucester Stage is carrying on here at nearly the same level it achieved with the trilogy's first installment.

The gap this time around, surprisingly enough, is Steven Barkhimer's Norman, who seems a bit too melancholic and deflated in the first act, and not quite relentless enough in the second. Ideally, we should sense behind Norman's tiny triumphs the emotional hollowness that, yes, haunts him - but while Barkhimer is clearly aware of this dimension of the role, he hasn't yet figured out how to crack it. Meanwhile, as the disapproving control-freak Sarah (who eventually becomes one of Norman's attempted conquests, too) Lindsay Crouse still hasn't fully put on the pair of bossypants Ayckbourn has written for her, perhaps out of fear of seeming too unsympathetic to the audience (she shouldn't worry); but Crouse does bloom nicely once her character starts to respond to Norman's attentions.

The rest of the cast - Richard Snee, Sarah Newhouse, Barlow Adamson, and Jennie Israel - is pretty much flawless. Newhouse is once again utterly believable as the disappointed Annie, who's literally in a slump, while Snee's comic timing is impeccable as the meticulously sublimated Reg, who's always devising parlor games so complicated even he can't remember all the rules. But it's Adamson and Israel who come off this time as best in show, even though Adamson has the least emotional development to work with, and Israel (who plays Ruth) the most. I'm not quite sure, in fact, how Adamson makes his dunder-headed character's silences work theatrically, but he does. And as for Israel, she all but walks off with the production in the second act; I wrote last summer that her Ruth was probably the best work I'd seen her do, and the performance has only deepened since then.

Meanwhile director Eric Engel skillfully keeps Ayckbourn's many comic gears turning smoothly - but I'm not sure he has made the climactic seductions quite as touching (or disturbing) as they might be. There are perhaps deeper, and even darker, dimensions to The Norman Conquests than the Gloucester cast reaches - still, this little playhouse, which often offers Boston's most sophisticated summer theatre, has come one step closer to completing one of the subtler artistic achievements I've seen on a local stage in the past few years. So I can't wait for the final installment next summer (which may the theatre gods grant!).

Walk on two Wilde sides

In Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, the audience essentially gets two plays for the price of one. The first is an elegantly constructed farce that glitters with epigrams just as brilliant as those in Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (which would follow Husband in a matter of months). The second is an absorbing drama in which ethical lapses come back to haunt the flawed people who committed them - a drama that is subtle in its characterizations and calmly sympathetic in its moral perspective.

But you see the problem. An Ideal Husband often seems divided against itself, as sparkling archness and mournful self-awareness seem like incompatible tones; yet they co-existed within this particular author, and thus are constant bedfellows in this strange portmanteau-play, which is mischievous and moving by turns.

I confess I've never seen these two sides of Wilde brought into alignment - although the possibility of doing so remains tantalizing, and even though I mostly enjoyed Gloucester Stage's rendition, directed by local star Karen MacDonald, which runs through August 29.

But wait, there's more background. This production was inspired by a hilarious version done up in drag by Bad Habit Productions last winter (which I reviewed here). Working from a slightly trimmed text, the witty kids at Bad Habit whipped up a ditzy, Hasty-Pudding-style farce in which everyone was either slipping into or out of drag practically every minute; the results were a hoot, but blind-sided the serious half of the play; as I wrote then, the audience had to just sit through those parts and wait for the epigrams to crank up again.

Enter MacDonald, who was clearly hoping to weld those high spirits to a deeper reading of the drama. Alas, the resulting polyglot feels like neither fish nor fowl - although often it does fluff its feathers, or flex its fins. The trouble this time around is that the drama predominates, which makes the farce (and the drag) feel a bit forced - particularly since Wilde's factotum in the play, Lord Goring, is here played resolutely straight (and successfully so) by Lewis Wheeler. But the resonance of the drag motif depends on Goring being a closet case, frankly - so if he's definitely hetero, we wonder to ourselves, why is everybody else cross-gendered?

Oh, well, ours is not to reason Wilde, I suppose. The good news is that MacDonald does well by most of the scenes individually - she just can't make them hang together; I think she's a genuine director (in addition to being one of our best actresses). Which doesn't mean quite all of her dramatic ideas come off - and she misses completely the opportunity to make Wilde's villain, the seductive Mrs. Chevely, truly complex in the play's climactic scene.

Elsewhere, however, she draws credible work from a cast that hasn't always been ideally cast. Wheeler, as mentioned, is believable husband material, and if he doesn't convey the hint of hauntedness that makes a great Lord Goring (the play all too obviously parallels the author's own situation), still, he delivers Wilde's wit with confidence - and that's half the game. As the compromised powerbroker whose past has at last caught up with him, Brendan Powers proved almost as charming, although he seems a bit young for the role, and not, perhaps, truly guilt-stricken. The strongest performance in the cast came from Angie Jepson (above left, with Wheeler) as the sparkling Mabel - although she was double-cast as the scheming Mrs. Cheveley, which proved a stretch - she hasn't either the experience or presence (yet) for what may be Wilde's greatest character. As the naively unbending wife of that tainted powerbroker, Carrie Ann Quinn was even more at sea, I'm afraid, although she did grow in vulnerable complexity as the play progressed.

But somehow much of the Gloucester production, particularly in the play's superior first half, was subtly gripping despite these flaws. Then again, I've never seen this play fail (compare to Romeo and Juliet, which never succeeds). This version may not be ideal, but it's thoughtful enough to convey the essence of Wilde's ideas - and far more thoughtful than much of our regular-season fare. With it, Gloucester Stage continues to cement its reputation as our best local summer theatre.

How good is Alan Ayckbourn, anyway?

The sardonically seductive author.

Gloucester Stage's new production of Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners is remarkably strong; so strong, in fact, that it bumps up against the inevitable question about this prolific British playwright:

Just how good is Alan Ayckbourn, anyway?

But first, there's really no question that Table Manners, the "first" part of the stage triptych The Norman Conquests, is an effective entertainment. There's likewise no question it's a startling achievement in stagecraft: the sexual conquests of the eponymous Norman orbit each other across three separate scripts but a single time frame; in fact each comedy takes place in a separate room of the same country house over the same weekend. And the scenes in the separate plays all click together like a dramatic Rubik's cube; given a turntable set, they could be acted together in interconnected sequence - and indeed, a full, seven-hour version recently played (in the round) in New York to rave reviews. This interest in teasing apart and pasting back together what used to be called "dramatic unity" is typical of Ayckbourn - How the Other Half Loves, for instance, brilliantly stitches together two separate times in the same place.

But if Ayckbourn expands the structure of dramatic possibility in one way, he seems to almost shrink it in another. For there's also no question that embedded in his modest farces are echoes of truly great dramatic literature - Table Manners sometimes mimics The Cherry Orchard, in fact, and Chekhov in general seems to hover over much of Ayckbourn's oeuvre like an ancestral ghost. The only problem is that the Russian master haunts the playwright's achievement as well as his characters.

For if Chekhov's great theme was 'weakness,' then Ayckbourn's, to be honest, is simply 'smallness.' It's not that his characters fail in their passions - it's that they don't really have passions to begin with. There's no grand manner in Ayckbourn, and no grand manor, either, as there's no gentry left, just the bourgeoisie: and they live in apartments, hotel rooms, and cramped little houses, where the only manners on display are "table manners," i.e., codes of consumption. And the playwright is pretty rigorous in his diminished expectations - in play after play, the food isn't very tasty (in Table Manners, it all comes out of tins - and a "salad" is a single lettuce leaf); the furniture is second-hand, and even the romantic getaways are to places like "East Grinstead."

Of course there's no romance anymore, either, just sex - so no "romantic getaways," just "dirty weekends." And as in life, so in drama: Cyrano de Bergerac has given way to No Sex Please, We're British. In a way, Ayckbourn is the poet, or perhaps the critic, of that decline - only he never really leaves the sex farce behind; instead, he beautifully limns its limits. Designed for the theatres in which he once worked, his scripts remodel their repertory staple without ever altering its basic floor plan; the new additions and wings operate as just more apartments and hotel rooms, nestled above, under, and within each other like so many nesting Russian dolls. The structure gets bigger, but the scale remains the same.

This sense of trivial iteration makes it easy to dismiss Ayckbourn as "the British Neil Simon." But that quip is problematic for several reasons. The first is that Simon, too, could be quite good, in plays like Lost in Yonkers - more telling is the fact that while Simon occasionally summoned the seriousness for something more than a sitcom, Ayckbourn has been remarkably consistent over the years; his work may be repetitive, but it's generally of the same pretty-high quality. Which means Ayckbourn regularly achieves a sense of real drama - the characters are drawn deeply and sympathetically enough that we understand everyone's point of view, and realize that no one is entirely in the right; at several points in The Norman Conquests, for instance, we can feel whole systems of feeling, and maybe even philosophy, pivoting on trivia.

Ayckbourn also has a subtle political dimension that's both liberating and reactionary - something which Simon relentlessly eschews (more on that later). And he's completely happy with unhappy endings - Table Manners, like most of his "farces," ends with a stab at freedom that feels somehow like a downer, because we know its promise can't be real. And that may be the gist of Ayckbourn - in his world, passion and hope and liberty and even art are all false dreams that he and we know can't be realized. Seen that way, his very smallness is of a piece with his aesthetic; form and function are as one in Ayckbourn. And isn't that supposed to be a good thing?

Like many a critic, I'm not completely convinced by my own argument - but something tugs at me about Ayckbourn; he can't really be dismissed just because he's limited and dispiriting, and just because he insinuates that the dinner theatres are right and Shakespeare and Chekhov are wrong. How you feel about him may reflect how you feel about Reg, one of the characters in Table Manners who's obsessed with building balsa-wood models of airplanes. Intricate and beautiful, they're obviously metaphors for the plays themselves, and smart, sardonic Reg is probably a factotum for Ayckbourn, too (tellingly, he's cuckolded at play's end). One feels the defeat implicit in Reg's pastime - why doesn't he try to work on a real plane? But at the same time, balsa wood models are beautiful when perfectly rendered - and who hasn't peered at a perfect one in admiration?


The talented cast of Table Manners. (Eric Levenson)

Up at Gloucester Stage, Table Manners is pretty nearly perfectly rendered, too. Or at least its imperfections hardly matter. Several members of its solid cast - Steven Barkhimer, Sarah Newhouse, Richard Snee, and Jennie Israel in particular - are doing their best work in recent memory, and director Eric C. Engel has drawn from them, and from his whole ensemble, a beautiful sense of - you know, ensemble. Here and there I wished for a bit more shading on this or that aspect of this or that character - I loved Barkhimer's impish wit as Norman, for instance, but wondered if there shouldn't be a slightly stronger twist of bitters beneath it. Meanwhile Barlow Adamson is perhaps slightly too credible as a possible beau for another disappointed character. And one actor, Lindsay Crouse, is miscast, but covers for it with an impeccably detailed performance that almost convinces you she's got the character's inner conflict goin' on, too.

I had a few other quibbles - the set, in which everything was at the wrong angle, worked as a kind of obstacle course for the actors (which is very Ayckbournian), but its metaphor was a bit obvious - and one poor audience member actually took a spill over it, too. And though Engel rendered the surface of the script beautifully, he didn't quite pull off - in part because of Ms. Crouse's miscasting - whatever emotional resonance can be wrung from its big twist, when its most sexually-judgmental character suddenly succumbs to Norman's rather-resistible charms. There's more pathos to be found there, or perhaps more punch - at any rate more something.

But what gave the evening real resonance was, oddly enough, what a friend of mine summed up with the comment, "This play feels dated now - and that's what's interesting." I couldn't have agreed more. Ayckbourn's whole conception of Norman - immature and irresponsible and innocently selfish, but still fighting for spontaneity and life - recalls a masculine ethos that today has been utterly crushed; nowadays, masculinity is defined by either power or pathology, but not by poetry. And maybe more's the pity. Norman's seductions (of even his wife's sister!) do seem contemptible, until we meet his wife Ruth, one of Ayckbourn's most brilliant creations: Ruth is sympathetic and strong, and calmly competent and utterly suffocating. To her, romance is faintly ridiculous in and of itself. And if a play can be construed as a reflection of a pitched cultural battle, then there's no denying that since the debut of Table Manners, the Ruths of this world have won. Indeed, when I perused Louise Kennedy's review in the Globe, I felt a weird frisson of recognition: this was Ruth talking. But can any artist actually predict his critics? Perhaps in his next Rubik's-cube-style script, Ayckbourn might consider including the audience, too.