A CurtainUp Berkshire Review
The Stillborn Lover

http://www.curtainup.com/stillbornlover.html

The game of Go is the major symbol in the late Timothy Findley’s symbol-laden Stillborn Lover. The play lives up to its billing as a combination mystery, love story and morality play but truth in advertising does not insure an exhilarating experience. The mystery hardly has you at the edge of your seat. The love story is overwhelmed by ambiguity (a flaw that applies to most of the characterizations) and detour issues like Alzheimer’s. And, as a morality play, this breaks little new ground.

Like another play reviewed this week, Mark St. Germain’s highly entertaining Ears On a Beatle (the review), this is a factionalized version of an actual event. As St. Germain was inspired by the now declassified FBI files on the Beatles star John Lennon, Findley jumpstarted his story with the case of Canadian ambassador to Moscow John Watkins who in 1955 was accused of homosexuality. The play exacerbates the drama of the Watkins affair with a murder that may have KBG or CIA links and by having the fictional Mrs. Watkins, now Marion Raymond, descend ever more deeply into the nether world of Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, even with Richard Chamberlain as the beleaguered diplomat to lend buzz to this American premiere (it opened in Ontario in 1993) and the excellent Lois Nettleton as his confused wife, as well as a physically interesting production, The Stillborn Lover lacks the vigor needed to make it come fully and satisfyingly to life.

Everything starts out promisingly enough with the prelude in which lighting designer Fabrice Kebour bathes the all gray Japanese set in squares illustrating the voice-over of the above quoted Go game definition. The multiple platforms and sliding scrim walls suit the Cold War aura of grimness and the neutrality and self-containment of the main players in this game. The abstract staging also works well to accommodate the numerous scenes where the downstage action and dialogue are mirrored by a silent scene further upstage and also to suggest the various locations: Nagasaki where Harry and Marion Raymond’s (Chamberlain and Nettleton) daughter Diana (Jennifer Van Dyck) was conceived as a sort of atonement for that awful and unnecessary second bombing, the bedroom and balcony of a Cairo posting, and several rooms in the home of their friends Juliet and Michael Riordan (Jessica Walter and Keir Dullea).

The main drama plays out in a “Safe House” in Ottowa to which Raymond, his wife and his lawyer-daughter Diana (Jennifer Van Dyck) have been summoned for what turns out to be an investigation into the death of a young male prostitute in a Moscow hotel room. The presence of the Riordans, he an ambassador risen to the post of Minister of External Affairs and now poised to step into the shoes of the dying Prime Minister, is at first reassuring. But ambition and friendship don’t always mix and it will come as no surprise that as the Raymonds must face the tumbling of their surface facade of a happy family, the Riordans must decide whether to stand by their friends or grab the gold ring that will elevate them to the highest seat of power. In fact Michael has already put his stone into the Go square since it is to him that the two Royal Canadian investigators who round out the cast of characters must report. Those investigators, Superintendent Jackman (Robert Emmet Lunney) and Corporal Mahavolitch (Kaleo Griffth), lurk in the background even when not actively front and center. Their very presence turns the term “safe house” into an oxymoron.

What is surprising is that the charismatic Chamberlain never quite lives up to the applause that greets his appearance (I’m told this happened in the performances before the one I attended). Granted he has some impassioned moments with his wife and daughter but those moments tend to drown in over-cooked, predictable dialogue — not to mention all those too obvious metaphors. For the most part he looks more like a pained bystander than a man in deep crisis. Nettleson is much more emotionally engaged but she too has to cope with overblown dialogue. Jessica Walter as the wannabe First Lady gets some nice ironic lines, but not enough to give her part the build-up it could use. KeirDullea underplays the smarmy Minister to the point of making almost no impression at all.

The Stillborn Lover is most lively and its dialogue most incisive in the scenes between the Javert-like Jackman and the Raymonds’ daughter Diana. Happily, Robert Emmet Lunney and Jennifer Van Dyck make the most of their opportunities though their characters, like everyone else’s, remain rather opaque. Near the end Chamberlain has a fine moment when he accuses Jackman of trying to entrap him by using his aide-de-camp as a male prostitute. With a disdainful look at the hunk-y Mahavolitch, he lands the play’s one funny line: “Tell him to put his clothes on. I’m not interested in young men wearing purple running shorts.” The hunk’s baring all for a frontal and rear view gives Berkshire Theatre Festival the distinction of nudity on both its stages. In this case, nudity doesn’t do what a little more irony and humor might have done to save the Stillborn Lover from being a theatrical still birth.

“WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JIMMY STEWART?”

RECOMMENDED

WHEN:Through Dec. 8

WHERE: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron

TICKETS: $25-30

CALL: (773) 929-1031

“Off we go, into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky.”

This musical riff, which leads us into “Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart?,” Art Shay’s winningly direct and often politically incorrect memoir, is full of breezy (and perhaps blinding) hope.

nd that certainly was the spirit with which the enterprising young Bronx, N.Y.-born Jewish boy entered World War II, where he served as an aviation navigator in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Europe under the command of the Hollywood star whose name graces the title.

Of course, seeing your pals shot down in flight as they try to rack up the 30 bombing missions that will get them off the hook can alter your attitude toward war. So can witnessing many other forms of mass destruction. And sure, it changed Shay, who went on to a career as an internationally admired photojournalist with strong Chicago roots. But it certainly didn’t make him an apologist.

Just watch the way John Sterchi, the vigorous, likable, no- nonsense actor who plays Shay in this one-man show, stomps his foot on the map of Germany painted on the stage floor at the American Theater Company. Each stomp sets off an explosion that conjures the Allies’ bombing raids on Cologne, Essen, Munich and other cities. There is no joy in it, but there is resolute determination, just as there is righteous disgust when Shay speaks of writer Kurt Vonnegut’s misguided piety about the destruction of Dresden, and when he notes that he has no interest in attending bridge-building reunions of American and German veterans.

The sense of disgust, and the senselessness of it all, is there when he tallies up the numbers of sons (and fathers and uncles and husbands) who died in World War II and later in Vietnam. And of course it is palpable when he remembers an ever-nagging tragedy at home–the death of his own beloved son Harmon. A naive hippie and college dropout who was a computer wizard before any accessible computer was on the market, Harmon vanished into the wild blue yonder- -no doubt murdered somewhere in Florida–before his 21st birthday.

Written in an alternately punchy and rambling style–as if shaped from answers to the questions of an interviewer who was organized but open to detours–the show is rich in anecdotes and personal asides. And Sterchi, guided by veteran actor (and veteran) Mike Nussbaum, finds just the right mix of nostalgia and toughness, with excellent design work from Martin Andrew (set), Geoffrey Bushor (lighting) and Jason Tratta (sound).

The Illusion
Adapted by Tony Kushner from Pierre Corneille
Directed by Paul Mullins

Critical Reviews

The Illusion is a mystifying tale
By Allen Crossett, Drama Critic, August 15, 2002On the surface, The Illusion is easy enough. Pridamant, an aging father, seeks news of his prodigal son from the sorcerer Alcandre. Fifteen years earlier the father disowned his son and drove him away, and now, before the father dies, he wants to see his son again. He says he wants to tell his son that he loves him.

What the magician offers is a vision of three episodes from the son’s life. Names change, relationships change, and each of the scenes takes place in a different setting, and only when the final vision reaches its climax does the father discover the truth. And this truth he doesn’t much like.

Pierre Corneille wrote L’Illusion Comique (Theatrical Illusion) in 1636 as a young man, before El Cid and other tragedies established his fame. About 350 years later a young Tony Kushner came along and freely adapted the work, before his fame was defined by his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America. There is something unmistakably youthful about The Illusion for it’s a work in which heady ideas can swirl in metaphor.

In creating his version, Kushner pares away much of the ornamentation of 17th century French theater, and he takes Corneille’s five-act comedy and reduces it to a lively two acts. This is not a translation, however; Kushner’s version is in many ways a new play.

Summarizing the story is much easier than offering an interpretation, even when the production of this curious piece now at The Shakespeare Festival is directed by Paul Mullins. This talented director last season staged Ionesco’s Rhinoceros with stunning success, and now he returns with this tantalizing dark comedy.

What does it all mean? One approach is to see The Illusion as a play about love. Near the end, the sorcerer explains to Pridamant, “Love, which seems the realest thing, is really nothing at all.” And a moment later he adds, “The art of illusion is the art of love, and the art of love is the blood-red heart of the world.”

The Illusion is also a play about the theater where artist and audience work together to create reality out of make-believe. The setting is the cave of the magician, near a small town in the south of France during the 17th century, and program notes include an extended excerpt from the “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic. In this passage, Plato argues that true reality is found not in the world of sight and the other senses but rather in the higher, spiritual world of the ideal and universal.

This is the idea that seems to permeate the production, and it starts with the audience at the theater first accepting the actors who portray the father and the magician as real people. And then it moves to those actors becoming an audience for the three episodes that function as short plays within the frame of the larger play.

And within those episodes there could well be yet another level…or more.

Mullins is working with a very impressive cast that includes John FitzGibbon as the father, with Edmond Genest as the magician and Craig Wallace as his servant. Robert Petkoff portrays the son, and Margot White appears in each episode as the woman he loves, with Amanda Ronconi as her servant. Completing the ensemble is Lorenzo Pisoni as the son’s rival, with Paul Niebanck as a lunatic.

Adding immeasurably to the exotic mood of this production is the superb work of set designer Michael Schweikardt, who finds all sorts of clever ways for the setting to explore reality and illusion, and costume designer Jacqueline Firkins, whose 17th century costumes are magnificent.

The work of lighting designer Michael Giannitti and sound designer Jason A Tratta also contribute significantly.

Parts of The Illusion are very funny while other parts are strange and mystifying. The direction by Paul Mullins, however, provides clarity in both its exquisite visual imagery and its reflection of intelligent thought.

“The Illusion” will be staged through Aug. 25 at F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, Madison. For tickets, call (973) 408-5600.

With French neo-classicist Pierre Corneille’s 1636 comedy “L’illusion Comique,” the writer has chosen a distinctly lightweight vehicle for adaptation, albeit one shadowed by themes of loss, family dysfunction and betrayal. Written in 1990, Kushner’s “The Illusion,” currently being presented by the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival as their third main stage production of the season, pays tribute both to the classic conventions of Corneille’s comic form while, at the same time, tweaking those same conventions.

The result is a Corneille-Kushner hybrid, to quote critic Jack Helbig—a two level entertainment serving as a meditation on the power of theater and storytelling and on the function of memory, while offering a genuinely moving story of a remorseful old man’s search for his long-lost son. Kushner doesn’t hesitate to pare down the work to two acts, yet, when the muse hits, add several scenes of his own.

A wonderful ensemble effort by the Festival cast under the inspired, stylish direction of Paul Mullins. In the role of Calisto, handsome Robert Petkoff makes a fervent, endlessly libidinous wandering son. His female counterpart–referred to as Melibea, then Isabelle, and finally Hippolyta—-is played by lovely Margot White. Ms. White’s adolescent Melibea starts out with the singsong, know-it-all plaint of a “valley girl,” and moves, ultimately as Hippolyta, into the heartrending regret experienced by a betrayed, wounded wife.

As Elicia/Lyse/Clarina–wily maid, lusty lover and concerned confidante–Amanda Ronconi performs with infinite charm and spunk. Lorenzo Pisoni undertakes the swashbuckling roles of Pleribo/Adraste/Prince Florilame with panache, and his display of swordsmanship against the agile Mr. Petkoff, elegantly choreographed by fight-meister Rick Sordelet, draws gasps from the audience.

Lending a manic comic note, with enough buffoonery to provoke gales of laughter yet sufficient suggestion of deep-seated vulnerability to earn our sympathy, is the superb Paul Niebanck as Matamore. His is a truly artful comic riff, mining, to perfection, the verbose braggadocio of this pedantic wordsmith (maid Lyse is branded a “dread Medusa of the linen closet,” for example). I loved his work here.

Rounding out the cast with distinction are John Fitzgibbon as the searching father Pridamant and Craig Wallace as both the Amanuensis, mute assistant to the sorcerer, and as Isabelle’s harsh and dictatorial father.

Director Mullins has opted for a dark, rather somber palette for the play. Following set designer Michael Schweikardt’s marvelously voluptuous red felt roses that anchor the first fantasy, there are few visual fireworks to keep us riveted as the play moves on. So much the shame, given the opening touch of whimsy that this talented designer offers as an eye-popping tease.

Performances of “The Illusion” at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Drew University, Madison, conclude August 25. For ticket information call (973) 408-5600.

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/01730522.htm

BY CAROLYN CLAY
A Dream Play
By August Strindberg. Adapted and directed by Eric Hill. Set design by Yoshinori Tanokura. Costumes by Olivera Gajic. Lighting by Matthew E. Adelson. Sound by Jason A. Tratta. With Craig Baldwin, James Barry, Kanajuan Bentley, Tara Franklin, Reba Herman, Alexander Hill, Richard T. Johnson, Greg Keller, Ann Mahoney, Brian C. Sell, Rachel Sledd, and Joshua Tussin. In the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through August 4.

Two old, rarely-to-never-done plays have been declared undead in the Berkshires this week. Both are introduced by ringing telephones. But whereas Eric Hill’s grotesque and balletic Berkshire Theatre Festival staging of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play makes a connection, Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck proves a call waiting that may in all good conscience be ignored. Both Strindberg’s dream and Miller’s ” fable ” are in impressive productions, though, the former with a talented cast of young unknowns, the latter in a looming Scott Ellis–hewn frame of Americana at the center of which is Scent of a Woman star Chris O’Donnell in his stage debut. And it must be admitted that the young Miller, as represented in this Williamstown Theatre Festival revival of his 1944 Broadway flop, comes off as saner than the Strindberg of his 1901 dreaming — though the Swedish playwright, asleep, is less of a snooze.

In adapting and directing Strindberg’s turn-of-the-century fantasia — which has oftener than not defied staging — Hill takes his cue from Ingmar Bergman, who successfully streamlined the work in the 1970s. But whereas Bergman had the swirl of Eastern, Christian, surreal, and domestically hellish imagery in the piece unfold as the ” dream ” of the character Strindberg calls the Poet, Hill places it between the ears of a contemporary woman teetering on the brink of suicide. As she crumbles to the floor, spilling a cup of coffee to the insistent ring of an on-stage telephone, A Dream Play’s strange, allegorical world flashes through her mind like danced lightning. The woman becomes Strindberg’s Agnes, who is often conflated in the piece with its Indra’s Daughter, the Hindu deity who travels, Jesus-like, to Earth, only to declare humanity the pitiable result of the coupling of Brahma and Maya — a joyless bundle of guilt at war with sensuality. Here the Daughter is both Agnes’s doppelgänger and her spiritual guide (and in Hill’s staging the two are Parent Trap–worthy doubles), and the ” dream ” is a moment of crisis in which the modern woman must choose between life, with its attendant responsibility and sorrows, and blowing her brains out.

Obviously, we can — and do — dream any damn thing, and one too many yoga classes coupled with a dour period novel might put A Dream Play into a troubled 21st-century head. Hill wisely dispenses with some (but not all) of Strindberg’s Christian imagery and a lot of his nattering about class, paring the play to 90 minutes. But the dream retains, for the most part, its period poetical setting, with the contemporary Agnes — now a glimmering, slick-haired mirror of Indra’s Daughter — set down in its swirl. And swirl the play does, in the intimate Unicorn Theatre, with little of the clunky elaborateness Strindberg envisioned. (The playwright gets his symbolic plants and flowers, but here they sprout, Magritte-like, from the heads of several characters.) With a sound design that ranges from grinding electronic noise to Bach, this chamber Dream Play feels more like a well-executed bare-bones modern-dance work than an arcane expressionist spectacle by modern drama’s mad, marriage-bashing genius.

The Daughter’s sorrowful overview of human life is deftly married here to an almost carny sensibility, Strindberg’s godly Glazier a slithery figure with a large bottle atop his head, his Foulstrand Quarantine Master a circus barker of the damned, his robed academics cavorting in Groucho masks. The play’s more portentous elements are not slighted, but the sad, symbolic profundities of loving and suffering, coupling and coming apart, are presented with a lightness that belies without erasing their magnitude. Both Ann Mahoney, as Agnes, and Tara Franklin, as Indra’s Daughter, manage the job of pained, compassionate onlooker in a manner that is believable and touching without being heavy-handed. Craig Baldwin, his eyes rimmed in black, is a grim yet empathetic figure as the duty-touting Lawyer with whom Agnes temporarily joins her destiny, only to be beaten down by the squalidness of domestic life. Greg Keller brings an almost goofy optimism to the Officer, cheerily awaiting his beloved though his uniform grows moldy with age. And the entire ensemble rises to the challenge of Hill’s precise, now frenzied, now robotic design.

A CurtainUp Berkishire Review
Coyote On a Fence
http://www.curtainup.com/coyoteonafence.html

Bobby Reyburn knew no charity or wisdom or peace in his life. And the only person who ever loved him taught him how to hate — from John Brennan’s obituary of his death row prison neighbor. This is CurtainUp’s third review of a play by Bruce Graham. Like those earlier plays (linked below), Coyote on a Fence is a provocative, incisive drama. While it can easily be viewed as a message or issue play, it never descends into polemic at the expense of entertainment. Sure, it will have you thinking and talking about capital punishment, but for the hour and a half you’re in the theater, you’ll simply find yourself caught up in Graham’s smart and often sardonically funny dialogue, James Warwick’s crisp and edgy direction, and the superb performances of the actors.

The stage of the Unicorn Theatre has been transformed into the darkly claustrophobic world of an unnamed prison. Jessica Wade’s multi-level unit set is dominated by two small adjoining prison cells, whose occupants can reach in and out of the cell bars, but cannot see each other. One of the cells is furnished to give some semblance of “home” with a shelf to hold books and photos. At one side of the cells there’s a bar room booth and at the other a visiting area. Downstage is an area resembling a dog run, but actually the prisoners’ exercise yard. The boxes at the top of the steps at either side of the stage are also utilized. This dynamic setup, takes us back and forth between the two convicts at the drama’s center and the prison guard and New York Times reporter who help to create a sense of drama that reaches beyond the prison walls. The action gets underway with the sounds that accompany each execution (Jason A. Tratta’s eerily evocative sound design is a powerful mood setter throughout). Outside the prison gate, there’s the cheering and jeering of the crowds; inside, as prisoner and editor of The Death Row Advocate John Brennan (Michael Waelter) describes it, “the silence rolls in, one cell at a time.” John, a white educated former social worker is an anomaly in the largely undereducated minority prison population. As each execution attracts protesters and pro-execution yea sayers, tearful relatives and the deafening silence spreading through the cells, it also brings an obituary by John, who is passionately committed to writing something about these men’s lives that shows that, no matter what their crimes, there was a side of them that was decent. The execution which sets the play in motion also empties out the cell next to John and brings him a new neighbor. Bobby Reyburn (Greg Keller) is everything John is not — unschooled, rabidly racist, a mass killer. Worse still, he is as committed to his belief in a God who hates Jews and “niggars” as John is to finding good even in the face of evil. (The coyotes of the title are a metaphor for the predators who, according to Bobby, should be destroyed). The conflict between the two men is further exacerbated by Bobby’s acceptance of his impending execution as a first step to heaven, which is contrary to John’s belief that the death penalty is a form of murder which every prisoner must fight by demanding clemency to his last breath. What lifts John and Bobby out of the realm of stereotypically odd couple in adjoining cells — one who has turned what looks like an unjust imprisonment into an almost saintly cause, the other a loathsome sociopath — are Graham’s subtly honest and unromanticized characterizations, especially as interpreted by Waelter and Keller. John can be as pompously annoying and self-deluded as he is admirable, and Bobby, believe it or not, manages to charm and amuse even as he repels. While two convicts are the pivotal characters, with the tension from the tick-tocking of the clock set to end their lives commanding our attention, the two other players help us to see the many sides of Graham’s story and intensify its drama: Shawna DuChamps (Mary E. Hodges) and Sam Fried (Richard Ercole), a Jewish reporter from The New York Times who’s read the Death Row Advocate and requested a series of interviews with John. Shawna is, like the tick-tocking clock, always present, always in her prison guard uniform even when she is in the bar room booth addressing an invisible reporter. Sam Fried (Richard Ercole) challenges John’s insistence that capital punishment is murder. He admires the writing of the obituaries but sees them as a whitewash. At one point he passionately defends the article he wrote about John’s obituaries as “undemonizing” the men who are monsters to the rest of the world: “You people frighten us. We-are-not-the-bad-guys just because we want to protect ourselves.” Sam and Shawna could be viewed strictly as devices for presenting society’s view of how to judge and deal with murderers. However, like John and Bobby, they are fully dimensioned, flesh and blood people, played with immense feeling and sympathy. Ms. Hodges who, according to her program bio is fresh out of acting school, is simply terrific as the prison guard. Wearied and toughened by close to twenty years as a prison guard she’s as impatient with the “ya-hoos out there blowin’ their horns” as the excuses of those she guards about what landed them in prison. And yet, underneath all her cussin’ and hard as nails talk, there’s a remaining spark of compassion for people like John and a yearning for the reporters (and by extension, society) to view her as an ordinary, good person. Coyote on a Fence has moments when it veers towards cliche. It is, in spite of the playwright’s not wanting it to fit that label, a message play — albeit an entertaining one. It is also a play that is best suited to small theaters like the Unicorn and the Blue Heron Arts Center Off-Broadway where it ran briefly last season. Wherever it goes next, I couldn’t think of a better director than James Warwick or a more impressive cast than the quartet he’s assembled here to insure its success. COYOTE ON A FENCE By Bruce Graham Directed by: James Warwick Cast (in order of appearance): Mary E. Hodges, Micahel Waelter, Richard Ercole and Greg Keller Set Design: Jessica Wade Lighting Design: Tamy Owens Slausan Costume Design: Toni Wright Sound Design: Jason A. Tratta Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, MA, (413) 298-3868 Running Time: 100 minutes without intermission br> 7/06//2000-7/29/2000; opening 6/07/2000