August 7, 2011 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Shakespeare and Co’s riveting production of Shelagh Stephenson’s Memory of Water, has been playing to rapt audiences at the Bernstein Theatre for the past month, and praise for the script, the six talented actors, the direction and all aspects of the play have been deservedly lauded. Therefore, this belated viewing of the play will confine itself only to a discussion of the four women in the script and the incredibly nuanced performances they perform, several times a week.

The action covers a small period of time and all takes place in the bedroom of the mother of three daughters, assembled at home for this weekend of the funeral of that mother in the small Northern England home in which they all grew up.

More significantly, the only set is the bedroom of that mother, dominated by the huge bed in which she slept and the closets full of her clothes, the dressing table full of her adornments. And even her ultimatum that she “rest” (in her coffin) in that room the night before her funeral.

Even from the beyond she returns to dominate. Annette Miller as Vi, impeccably dressed in dark green and not a hair out of place appears in two cameo’s with her daughters in which, as it was in life, all about her and without any thought of pity for the conflicted and grieving children She moves with a calm elegance, self-assured. Still vain, selfish and not much interested in or sympathetic for her children. When on stage, she dominates as she did during their growing up, a time in which her life was more important than theirs. Miller plays her to perfection.

And how have those children turned out? She might have been vaguely interested in having a handsome son. But her children where three daughters, the third totally unexpected, menopausal.

That child, the most rueful of all, Catherine, for me was the saddest one of all. She explodes into the room when she arrives, booted, padded coat, earflap cap and baggage covered with snow. Elizabeth Aspenleider knows how to explode. She is antic, chatting a mile a minute about a latest suitor who will be arriving for the funeral (he won’t, he is “suitor” in her mind more than his) but for most of the first act her buoyant character revs up the chat and the action into which she pulls the other sisters into defrocking the closets bursting with mother’s gowns. The is boisterous, hiding the knowledge she has always had of not being wanted in the family roster, not being able to keep the boy friends she meets, not having a sense of how wrongly dressed she is for a funeral.

Mary (Corinna May) one of the two elder daughters has succeeded on worldly terms, become a doctor and has for some time been mistress of a married man by whom she longs for his separation from his wife and the fathering of a child by her. Doctor that she is, she knows her birthing time is running out. One yearns for her to have that child. She would love it, nurture it as her mother failed to do for her.

Teresa (Kristin Wold) is the other elder sister, the one who stayed in the town near her mother. She is a health food nut, is prone to settle on details as to casket choice etc. A topic the other two don’t seen smitten with. Having been the only one of the three who remained home in the sense of evidently marrying and living not with her mother but nearby, the event of her mother’s last illness and dying at 75 has rested mainly on her. Her husband, for she has one, travels all over the landscape in connection with his job in the food business. Her life has been dull at best and is not apt to change much.

As the door closes on these three children, each dressed for the funeral as her own feelings and character seems to define she should, one can feel they have a certain resilience and will carry on—though I personally worry about Catherine, the so unwanted baby, and the fact that the so-wanted baby of Mary will never be born.

It is a tribute to the author that within a short play, she can bring so much of the rough and tumble of the lives of these women to vivid life and create the roles the four actresses so illuminate.

But it is further important to note that despite the maternal neglect, this is not a depressing play but a buoyant one. The dialog is witty and much of the time very funny. One enjoys the play and the characters. One believes in them as real people, coping in a weekend of stress, but capable, although mother-maimed, of going on with lives of their own, such as they may be.

The standing ovation at the play’s end is for resilience. These women will carry on and put the weekend behind them. Life goes on.

And this dynamic play goes on til Labor Day.

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August 6, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Theatre Festival has presented the world premier of Kathleen Clark’s In the Mood. The play is described as a comedy but viewing the magnificent set as one awaits the play to begin, it is apparent the action will spill over into farce.

Because there before our eyes on the widest proscenium opening one can recall seeing at the BTF is the demanding farce stage and those five farce doors. The setting is the enormous upscale apartment of Perri Rubin (Erin Dilly) and her husband Derek (Damian Young) for whom Perri has planned a surprise birthday party and invited scores of guests. (Designer Lee Savage)

Should things go as she planned, the enormous living room, replete with grand piano, cocktail bar, rooms on second floor, and an elevator that opens directly into her living room could almost accommodate them.

One guest is already on scene when the play opens-Nick Eliot (Stephen R. Buntrock) who musing at the piano gets Perri to sing with him (a former boyfriend) the 1940’s hit song, In the Mood, and the play begins with Perri (ala Gertrud Lawrence) clad gorgeously in red, long blond hair hanging to her shoulders, and him, rendering the song.

At the end of the play one is about to see, the song is repeated, bringing the 75 minute, no intermission, play to a close very different from the one it seemed to begin.

The stage is well designed for the chaos that soon erupts. The apartment is on a high floor, naturally, and the elevator, upstage center, is, the desk informs, not working. This a great misfortune for guests struggling to reach the party (few do).

Among those who do are Perri’s husband and Carolyn Shore (Jennifer Cody, uninvited) and Edward Horton (Arnie Burton) and Sally Elliot (Johanna Day). No one else makes it, and the play’s cast is thus assembled for the hysterically funny situations and also snappy dialog and at times epigram, such as one remembers in Cole Porter and even Oscar Wilde.

A plot summary is being deliberately omitted. Audiences will find it out for themselves and respond with belly laughs as they did on opening night.

Director Marc Bruni has served his cast well. There is never time for a dull moment. Each of the six actors, all in significant roles are well cast and throw themselves physically as well as vocally into their roles-ones that when they entered they did not always know they had. Watch out for the word “contractor.” And for lines such as, “my ex-wife and I were the Lunts of Off-Off Broadway.” These are all actors who can think on their feet and roll with the unexpected.

It all makes for an enjoyable evening. As for the play itself, my feeling is that it should, and very possibly will, evolve into a longer two-act play. The script cries for it in trying to pack so much into 75 minutes, and the actors are so gifted and engaging, their talents cry for it too.

Meanwhile, it is rewarding, now and then, to be a part of a new play a-borning; and to wish it well.

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2011 schedule.

July 16, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Sitting in audience of the Fitzpatrick stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival for the opening of A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia, I found myself remembering an evening many years ago when Gurney a yet untried playwright came to see what our little play-reading group would do in a staged reading of one of his plays in our little black-box theatre off Main Street. Our group was founded by Bill Gibson and carried on by Jane Mooney.

In the forty or more years that have elapsed since that eventful night, details have gone hazy. Gurney was unknown to any of us. He was was an affable and not condescending young man, scarcely middle-aged, who drove in from Boston with a family play, perhaps about the Buffalo area. Gurney viewed our production, listened to suggestions and praises, then drove off into the night. A young man, knowing where he wanted to go.

How brilliantly he has gotten there!

Silvia is a gem; one of the many gems he has created over the years!

The plot centers around a family crisis. Greg (David Adkins) and Kate (Jurian Hughes) are empty nesters with their kids off to college and the couple settled in a NY apartment where Greg’s career is winding down and Kate’s is picking up.

And into their life Greg brings Sylvia, another woman whom he has picked up in Central Park and whom he expects Kate to welcome into a ménage a trois, further complicated by the fact that Sylvia is an enormous bouncy stray dog, dog tag bearing only her name, her breed a mix, seemingly, of Lab and Poodle, and a great deal of bounce and pounce, and audacity.

Sylvia not only pees on Kate’s rug, she ASSUMES she could sit on Kate’s couch. Marriage in jeopardy. A serious situation for Kate and Greg but an absolutely hilarious one for the audience with laugh lines coming so fast one misses a few. And it is not only the dialog that is hilarious. The uneasy trio members all have to be athletes, very often not on their feet and being dragged in directions they don’t want to go.

Director Andres Cato’s guiding hand has rung every possible variation on the production—timing and pace, scenes flowing seamlessly after each other, moods shifting from hilarious to touching, or “naughty,” or unexpected.

Sylvia, (Rachel Ray Jones) and her costumes, from bedraggled in the park to preeningly wooing when in heat she meets Buster in the park, are gloriously seductive. And she knows it. Jones seems to have literally climbed into Sylvia by donning her clothes, Her bite is usually restrained but her bark is utterly remarkable.

Adkins is convincingly unaware of the sacrifice he is asking of his wife. His sudden love for Sylvia, giving a meaning to his days in a time when he has lost meaning and confidence, seems to him reasonable.

Hughes as the wife, expected to accept without a struggle her husband’s aberrations, is sympathetic, resourceful and willing eventually to bend but not break. It is she that at a strategic moment finds and tosses the red ball.

The versatile Walter Hudson plays three supporting roles, necessary in plot development in the park or the psychiatrist’s office, each with panache.

The New York skyline set, assisted by lighting affects in evoking the park on the apron, and changing color for mood changes in plot, is effective.

All this adds up to asserting that over the years Gurney has continued to write play after play, success after success.

Sylvia is an especially delightful one.

As for the rest of those long ago hopefuls performing in the black box theatre, I haven’t a clue. But it’s nice to remember that we performed early Gurney, and in Stockbridge!

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2011 schedule.