Love in the Wars at Bard SummerScape July 2014

Love in the Wars

Bard SummerScape at the Fisher Center, Annadale-on-the-Hudson

July 10- 20, 2014

Box office: 845-789 7900

http://fishercenter.bard.edu/

Imagine the fields of Ilium, awash in mud and gore.  Through the angry mist and beneath a burning sun, legendary heroes yell insults over the clash of iron as bone breaks and flesh is torn. Between the Argive camps and Troy’s great walls, men have lived and died for ten years because of a mythic beauty whose face launched a thousand ships. In this place there is no room for women unless it is to serve as a chalice for male lust.  Even at home, women are of no consequence.  This is a Man’s world: rational, orderly, controlled, traditional. In this world, one is mightier than all others: the son-of a god, mighty Achilles.

Now imagine that across this chess board rides a screaming, one-breasted, wild herd of horsewomen pounding vanity and virtue into the muck beneath their fierce mares’ hooves.  They come to bring home men with whom they will breed before tossing them aside as unnecessary as orange peels.  Before them all rides raven-haired Penthesilea, she-wolf; mother-bear; lioness.

In the midst of battle, they come face to face—Myrmidon Achilles, son of Thetis and Amazonian Penthesilea, Ares’ daughter.

The once expansive, dramatic world of war condenses into a moment so fraught with tension the air thickens. The atmosphere is so oppressive it squeezes the very breath out of your lungs.  Sound echoes silently, pregnant with potential.  Motion stops. Two worlds wait to see what will happen next.

Now imagine a bare stage upon which artisans have used their craft to turn wood, cloth, word, light and vibration into a play at which you will sit and watch what happens next.

Come see Love in the Wars at the Fisher Center during Bard’s SummerScape and experience what no one has experienced before: the premiere of the first English translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 play, Penthesilea, written by John Banville, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll with sets by Marsha Ginsberg, lights by Tyler Micoleau, costumes by Oana Botez and staring Birgit Huppoch and Chris Stack as Penthesilea and Achilles. 

But mostly come to see how a production crew and actors not so different from your neighbors (though perhaps better looking) have taken a German play which Goethe said was unplayable and made it into something timeless and accessible to anyone who has every wanted to kill the one they love.  It is a play about power, pride, and the degree to which love and hate war with each other to destroy.  And, it is about how absurd and funny it is that people do such a silly thing while around them the world tries to go on about its business.  

Though I expect it will be hard to not get swept up into the story, I hope you will take notice of how light, wood, cloth, voice and sound are used to suck you into the action.  Consider how the tension of opposites—light/dark, loud/silent, large/small—are used to amplify the story. Realize that behind the 90 minutes with no interruption lies months and months of thought, research, construction and deconstruction.  Everything you experience while in the theater has been taken into consideration so that you will feel as if you were there, on the fields before the walls of Troy, waiting to see what Penthesilea and Achilles might do.  I’m sure that by doing so you will feel what I felt in my brief visit to Theater Two: the incarnation of something like thunder on a hot summer’s day.

And when the play is done, sing your praises to the actors, the designers, the laborers, the writers and to yourself for being willing to walk for just a little while among the muses of days long turned to dust and shadow.

How the Other Half Loves

Photo by Daniel Region

How the Other Half Loves

Ghent Playhouse

6 Town Hall Place

www.ghentplayhouse.org

            Watching Alan Ayckbourn’s play, How the Other Half Loves, is a little like watching a gold medal table tennis doubles match. Dialogue pings and pongs back and forth between the characters. Actors cross above and below each other barely avoiding a collision. Plot lines swirl and tangle themselves as time and space meet over dinner.  It’s a biting comment on marriage, workplace ethics and class.

And it’s funny— very funny. 

Premiered in 1969, the play follows three couples as they try to sort out their marriages and further their careers. Frank Foster (Sky Vogel who doubles quite ably as director) employs Bob Phillips (Todd Hamilton) who has had a one-night stand with Fiona Foster (Prudence Theriault). Bob’s wife, Teresa (Christina Smith) is a frustrated mother with a wild offstage child. In an attempt to conceal their affair, Bob and Fiona implicate another couple–the Detweilers (the Featherstones in the original production).  William Detweiler has recently been hired by Frank.  Detweiler’s wife, Mary, is a shy and retiring woman who is being trained by William to be a good “businessman’s wife.”

Just to add a bit of zest to the mess, Ayckbourn has staged the action, which takes place simultaneously in two separate houses, on the same set. Indeed, he has two dinner parties taking place on two different nights at one table in the same scene.

If you are finding it difficult to follow the synopsis, imagine the skill it takes to enact it.  It’s a little like tossing a hot potato back and forth while dancing a complicated figure as you speak your lines at precisely the right time and pitch. All the while making sure you’re funny and engaging as well as convincing.  Nor is it just the actors who have to be on their toes. Lighting, especially during the dinner party scene, plays a major role in creating both the illusion of separation and a sense of unity throughout the piece.

After having watched several YouTube videos from bigger theaters’ stagings of Ayckbourn’s famous dinner scene, I have to say that the Ghent Players and their crew rocked it solid.

In particular, Sam Reilly and Amber Herrick, as the Detweilers, showed great skill in handling the speedy transitions required of them. Christina Smith and Todd Hamilton both did a wonderful job of creating drunken chaos while Prudence Theriualt made her dinner party chilly. Throughout the play, Sky Vogel’s Frank, the maestro of misunderstanding, does a great job of speeding up or slowing down the action.  His performance helped to center the maelstrom.  Major credit must go to lighting designer Ben Heyman whose use of a chandelier/hanging dining room light fixture helped the audience track what was going on.  His lightboard must have been sizzling from the rapid changes!

Set designers and decorators (Ben Heyman, Sky Vogel, Todd Hamilton & Nancy Hammell) did well given the space constraints. I think that the contrast between the uptight Foster’s upper/middle class home and the slovenly white-collar house of the Phillips could have been made more obvious. Joanne Maurere’s costumes evoked the polyester-era well though again I felt that the class divisions were not quite strong enough.

One major point of confusion for me comes from a note in the program stating that the play is taking place in the present.  There is a conversation between Frank and Teresa in which Teresa places the action as happening in the early 1980s. The clothing and props reminded me of the ‘70s while the furnishings were much earlier.  This led me to wonder about the accuracy of Ayckbourn’s comment that the play needs to be placed in 1969 and being British, I assume he would prefer a British setting.  Stereotypes help a writer take short cuts so it is much easier to imagine the Fosters as the stereotypical distracted British lord and self-important lady of the manor.  The Phillips’ drunken brawls and the Detweilers’ middle class modest and fearful demeanor have been BBC fodder for decades.  Too, English accents designate class better than American leaving American producers with the challenge of showing class through design elements rather than language.

But I’m not sure if How the Other Half Loves would have been more poignant if there had been greater class delineation between the couples.  Ultimately the writing is so funny and the action so quick that one is never given a chance to experience the pathos of affairs, poor communication, sycophancy, wild children, drunkenness and manipulative spouses.  I suppose pacing the play differently would give the audience a chance to think about what is happening and to identify with one or more of the characters and situations.  But then it would become what I was afraid it was going to be: one of those terribly pedantic, stilted, depressing domestic tragedies in which clever people say nasty things about nothing in particular.

Happily, the Ghent Playhouse met the challenge well and I had a wonderful time.  I laughed a lot.  And I came away feeling very proud of my community theater.   Well done!

And… please be sure to buy raffle tickets for the 50/50 drawing!  For a mere pittance you get a chance to bring home half of all they collect— the other half going to the theater.  

Meaningful Noise

Miss Saigon, Rhinebeck 2014

One of the problems I have with the modern tendency to turn everything into a musical is that great material, excellent acting, and a profound message are put to music in such a way that it makes it difficult to really experience them.  Rhinebeck’s production of Miss Saigon is a case in point.

 Set over a period of three years in Vietnam, the action centers around a disillusioned GI named Chris (Jarek Zabczynski) and a village girl turned prostitute named Kim (Jasmin Sue Rogers) who meet and fall in love a few weeks before the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. The plot twists on the fate of Chris’s and Kim’s Amerasian son, Tam (Derrick Maxwell). 

            Rogers’ drop-dead amazing performance as Kim gives the play a poignancy and reality that humanizes the loud Broadway splash of the score.  I would have loved to listen to her sing her parts acoustically just for the pleasure of hearing the heart and strength of character she puts into her role. The chemistry between Zabczynski and Rogers is palpable. So too is the tender connection between Rogers and her little brother, Maxwell, whose comfortable stage presence illustrates the real tragedy of the story: the fact that the sound of history is the wail of mothers losing their children. Originally inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese mother sending her daughter off to her American father, the show is often seen as a love story. But I think of it as a homage to women and the abuse they suffer at the hands of men.  For me the question Miss Saigon asks is, “What about the women?”

            Unfortunately, the answer is as it has always been. They have one choice: sacrifice yourself.  Sacrifice your body, your heart, your life, your child.  Perhaps if Schonberg and Boubil had been less concerned with pounding the audience with sound, the sorrows of the Vietnamese women might not have gotten lost in the noise.  Thankfully, the cast and crew of the Rhinebeck production do their job well and I left the theater grateful for all that mothers have done to make the world as wonderful as it is.

            Thank you, Mom.

            Now for the fun part.

Jarek Zabczynski is affecting as a Chris. He is entirely lovable, which is important because otherwise Kim’s love for him would have made the play ridiculous.

            Sal Polichetti is Rat Pack, slimy perfect in the role of Engineer, combining just the right amount of irony and optimism for the Fagan-like character who moves the action through history much as the Emcee did in Cabaret.

            Elizabeth Gerbi (as Chris’ wife) and Daniel Rushton (as  Kim’s rejected fiancé) portray just the right amount of confusion and anger over the situation.

            As John, Chris’ friend , Jovan Bradley’s bluesy voice and straight from the hip integrity do well as the voice of reason in an otherwise irrational situation.

            Shouts-out to the chorus of men and women for managing to perform complex numbers in such a tiny space and in particular to the women who open the show in brazen and fleshy glory. Their presence on stage highlights the plight of all the invisible women affected by the idiocies of civilization.

            The stage crew… WOW! How on earth did you manage it?  You are awesome geniuses.

            Choreography, sound and lighting performed the difficult job of simultaneously responding to the grandiosity of the score while creating a claustrophobic environment in spite of a few technical glitches.  And personally, I think feeling the vibration of sound was as powerful as having a helicopter fly overhead. 

            Costumes and props: oft ignored but truly appreciated for the way your work completes the illusion. 

            Praise for director Anna Marie Paolercio who took a gigantic Broadway show and squeezed it onto the small stage thereby helping me understand what all the noise was about.

            Miss Saigon will be playing at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck May 2-25. Tickets: (845) 876-3080 or visit http://www.centerforperformingarts.org/