Carnival of lost souls

As the trusting Lili, Victoria Thornsbury only finds love at one remove.

I'm torn over Gloucester Stage's current production of Carnival (which closes this weekend).  On the one hand, this intriguing but problematic musical is rarely done, despite its ravishing score - so simply seeing it in any form is to be reminded of how sophisticated and beautiful pop culture was once allowed to be.  And this production is certainly powerfully sung - indeed, some of the vocal performances here border on the terrific.

So I'm glad I saw the Gloucester version, even though it stumbles repeatedly over this show's tricky mood and the harshness of its action.  Carnival , which follows the misadventures of a waif named Lili who has basically run away to the circus, aims to simultaneously conjure the magic of the big top and side show while simultaneously revealing the cruelty lurking behind their gaudy spell.  At a deeper level, of course, it's actually about the deceitful magic of romance itself - as you might guess from its signature hit, "Love Makes the World Go Round" - or even, perhaps, about the seductive dishonesty of men (or rather Men with a capital M).

Not that the Men of Carnival are an appealing lot.  There's the barker who tries to take advantage of Lili only minutes after she has arrived, and there's the shabby Marco the Magnificent, the sexist stage magician long past his prime who's hoping to ditch his current assistant ("The Incomparable Rosalie") and turn Lili into his next trick.  And then there's Paul, the sensitive puppeteer who has been emotionally crippled by his war wounds, and who can only woo Lili through the screen of his puppet show (at top).  All of these men abuse our heroine in various ways - but the crux of the plot is whether Lili will finally be able to divine that only Paul (who is so racked by jealousy that he's sometimes the cruelest of the lot) has the ability to truly love her.

No doubt you can see the problems inherent in a show like Carnival in a politically-correct age such as ours.  Poor Lili suffers so much (at the climax she's even struck in the face) that at times the plot seems to be channeling pure misogyny - and alas, director Eric C. Engel has apparently taken that idea and run with it.  This is a Carnival in which the men have no seductive charm at all - Marco is just a snide user, and Paul is all but drowning in self-pity; and thus while the production concept comes off as supremely knowing,  when Lilli invests her faith in Paul's puppet show, she seems mentally challenged rather than winsomely gullible (and we can't see in her delusion the musical's intended metaphor for our own trust in love's promises).  This is the kind of "dark" interpretation that sounds "challenging" on paper, I know; only if we ourselves are not somehow drawn into Carnival's tawdry spell - if we never believe that, despite everything, love can make the world go round - then we never feel for Lili's travails (we just think she needs an intervention), and there's simply no show.  Instead we get an odd lecture on the structural mechanics of sexism, interrupted occasionally by a pretty song.

Ta-da!  It's the magic of sexism! With Daniel Robert Sullivan, Victoria Thornsbury, and Shannon Lee Jones.

Oh, well - let's talk some more about those songs (but not about this production's rather awkward choreography).  Engel has obviously cast for vocal prowess, and there are some terrific voices here - Victoria Thornsbury warbles like an angel as Lili, and Gus Curry almost makes you love Paul, too, every time he opens his mouth to sing rather than speak.  Meanwhile Shannon Lee Jones and Daniel Robert Sullivan, as Rosalie and Marco respectively, both demonstrate they knew how to wrap themselves around a show tune, too.  Even the chorus (which included the versatile John King) sounded great.  There were occasional balance problems, given the lack of a pit in the Gloucester space, but these were generally passing in nature.  I basically left the show in love, like Lili - only with Bob Merrill's score.

And I think I still respected Michael Stewart's book, despite its obvious issues - I just thought it had been undone by Engel, which seemed strange given his recent triumphs with Alan Ayckbourn (and his buoyant version last summer of The Most Happy Fella).  But here even natural actors like Daniel Robert Sullivan were headed confidently in the wrong direction, while the less-experienced (and less confident) Thornsbury seemed a blank.  And there were conceptual goofs aplenty - for some reason in this French circus, for instance, there was one guy sporting a beret and jaunty bandana, with a thick accent to boot - pourquoi? And to signal that the show was about an awakening, Engel had a crowd of kids literally "wake up" at the start  (and later, to telegraph that his male characters were childish, he sent through a cute little girl in a fake mustache).  If Engel had actually directed the musical appropriately, of course, he wouldn't have needed this kind of semaphore.  But you know, Carnival is supposed to be about learning the facts of life, so hopefully the director has picked up a few pointers by now, too.

Gloucester gets back to the Garden

Steven Barkhimer, Richard Snee, and Barlow Adamson search for pussy up in Gloucester.

Just in case you can't quite limn the theme of Round and Round the Garden, the last round of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests (and also the final leg of what amounts to a triple crown for Gloucester Stage, where it runs through this weekend), the playwright spells it out for you in a joke straight out of the middle-school playground - or maybe some James Bond extravaganza.

For when we first meet the benighted men of Ayckbourn's sardonic roundelay, they're actually out among the flower beds of the title, forlornly calling, "Pussy?  Pusss-ssyyyy . . ? Pussy!"

Yes, they're looking for pussy - and having a damned hard time finding any (the thin excuse for their antics is that the local cat is up a tree).  Their helpless consternation serves as the motor of Ayckbourn's comic action - which follows, once again, the pathetic search for - well, you-know-what - by unlikely lothario Norman (Steven Barkhimer), who is desperate to bed his wife's sister, her brother's wife, or even his own spouse.  All these campaigns (even the marital one) fail epically, of course - as they've foundered in the previous two installments of Ayckbourn's triptych (which all follow the same events, during the same weekend, from different parts of the same house).  The difference this time, however, is the way Ayckbourn subtly shifts his focus from the eponymous Norman to his eponymous Conquests - and what an unflattering light he generally sheds on them.


It's perhaps not surprising, however, given the pressures of political correctness, that today's critics can't seem to see the cards Ayckbourn has played right in front of their noses.  Indeed, if you read the local reviews, you'd imagine that the hapless Norman is meant to be (or at any rate should be) the object of our patronizing scorn.  Not that he doesn't deserve that, and worse - anyone who would seduce his wife's sister has it more than coming - but Ayckbourn has already dispensed with most of that condemnation in Table Manners and Living Together (set, of course, in the dining and living rooms, respectively).   This time around, the playwright has Norman's judges in his sights.  And what he sees isn't pretty.  You could even argue that the play amounts to a long, unforgiving analysis of the inability of women to connect romantically with men.

Indeed, as we watch Garden, we keep being reminded of the unseen matriarch - mother of Ayckbourn's unhappy trio of siblings - installed at the top of the house in question.  In the end, she is calling the shots - and she's bitter, and bed-ridden; and what's more, demands that her daughter spend her day reading her the dirty parts from bodice-rippers she picks up at the grocery store.  It's a grim picture - but gradually we realize all the women in the play are headed in the same direction: a sterile grasp on domestic power, with a sex life permanently relegated to fantasy.

It's at such moments, of course, that you realize the attempts to pigeon-hole Ayckbourn with the likes of Neil Simon will ultimately fail; for The Norman Conquests boasts a steadily-unfolding thematic structure that lies beyond Simon's skills, even at their best.  Indeed, we're struck again and again in Garden by the nested ironies of the trilogy's eventual conclusion. For while Norman has been flailing away at attempted adultery, in turns out that another romantic gambit has actually been underway the whole time - this one of loyal, true love, in fact, from a man (the cluelessly earnest Tom) who is utterly opposed to Norman's glibly romantic narcissism.  The trouble is, his proposal fails, too; the woman in question actually rejects the real thing when she has her chance.  Indeed, she mutters that she probably won't be ready for commitment until she has "taken a trip" - which is precisely what Norman has been begging her to do.

So if you're looking for irony, you'll find it in spades among the spades of Ayckbourn's Garden.  But perhaps the most ironic thing about his play is the way its action grows lighter even as its themes grow darker; Garden may be a bit ungainly in its structure (the playwright often has to dodge the scenes he has already written that are now unfolding off-stage, as it were), but it's graced with some of the trilogy's strongest physical comedy (a specialty of the spry Barkhimer), which is brought off with confident panache by the skilled farceurs at Gloucester, most of whom have been playing these characters for years (the theatre staged Table Manners two summers ago).

There is one newcomer to the cast - Adrianne Krstansky has replaced Jennie Israel as Norman's wife, the long-suffering Ruth.  I can't pretend I didn't miss Israel's suffocating martyrdom - which all but perfectly suppressed Barkhimer's impishness - but Krstansky finds her own, slightly brassier way with the role, and at any rate this time around Ruth is more often enmeshed with Tom (Barlow Adamson), the gently doltish veterinarian who's clearly in love with Norman's sister Annie (a spectacularly frazzled Sarah Newhouse).  Adamson is so good in this part that we almost buy the playwright's conceit - of a grown man sweetly out of touch with his own libido; but I'm afraid that skillful as he is, Adamson can't always quite hide the fact that Tom feels a bit too much like a constructed foil for Norman - slightly more caricature than character.

But that doesn't mean he isn't as much fun as the rest of the company, which is rounded out by the ever-skillful Richard Snee and the surprisingly affecting Lindsay Crouse (whose performance, I think, has grown over the years from the most unsteady of the ensemble to the most poised).  As ever, this talented crew has been astutely and sympathetically directed by Eric C. Engel, on yet another wittily skewed set from Jenna McFarland Lord.  You could argue, I think, that here and there this production doesn't fully tap into the near-tragic sense of frustration at the root of Ayckbourn's Garden; but it's still a blooming good time, and you'd be a fool to miss the final bows of a three-year project that I think may become something of a local legend.

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 - seemingly - 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.

Sins of the Mother is one of the best of the year . . .

. . . but it still could be even better.

And that, I think, is good news. Already it's the strongest local "new play" of 2009, and the production up at Gloucester Stage (which closes this weekend) is likewise one of the best of the year, and a splendid finish to the company's 30th anniversary season (which has been consistently strong). It's also a testament to the phenomenal staying power of Israel Horovitz, who at a spry and vital 70 has demonstrated once again that he hasn't lost his touch - even if this time he hasn't quite attained his full reach.

Although to be bluntly honest, he's had the time - Sins first took a bow as a one-act six years ago, and the current two-and-a-half-act version has already hit the boards in Olympia, Washington (and is rumored to be destined for New York). As a result, it's highly crafted. Highly crafted - at times the dialogue could serve as the basis for a master class in late naturalism. And the actors at Gloucester - some of whom have worked their way through the material before - have, under Horovitz's own direction, matched his craft with an ensemble of performances impressive in their subtlety and technique.


The violence (from Robert Walsh) may not surprise, but it still shocks.

The setting (as it has so often been for Horovitz) is Gloucester, in particular its working class underbelly, where down-on-their-luck stevedores and fishermen rub elbows with the town hookers and drug dealers - and in hard times even join their ranks. That's the dark secret casting a long shadow, in classic theatrical style, over a quartet of unemployed men hanging out in a union hall in Horovitz's taut first act, in which the playwright almost revels in his pitch-perfect ear for the local dialect, while steadily insinuating the threat of violence beneath his characters' camaraderie.

Needless to say, that threat becomes all too real in Horovitz's first-act climax, which is hardly surprising (yet still an effective shock). It's hard to say more, however, about Horovitz's second act without giving too much away about the dramatic cards he has up his authorial sleeve. Yet I admit I'm itching to, because I feel that even in this latest iteration, the playwright is still palming his ace. Suffice to say Horovitz has constructed an intriguing game of cat-and-mouse for his second act, which leads to a surprisingly original twist - one that could potentially vault the play into small-classic territory. But Horovitz doesn't develop this shift nearly enough (I will say that it represents the moral difference between impulsive and pre-meditated crime); instead he basically reprises material from his first act to hustle the characters through his last moral hoop.

Which is too bad, because he has a fine cast here that would certainly be up to further challenges. The sudden shuffling particularly short-changes the charismatic Francisco Solorzano (as the returning native who sets the gears of the plot in motion), and the appealingly dim David Nail (as the buddy caught by mischance in fate's machinations). Most of the second-act dramatic riches instead go to leads Robert Walsh and Christopher Whalen, and both are particularly memorable; indeed, I don't think Walsh, a mainstay of the Actors' Shakespeare Project, has ever been better. Meanwhile Whalen, who hails from New York, proves a particular find, and neatly essays a classic method-acting problem (he plays identical twins) while keeping the two characters' externals (even their accents) exactly alike. One last note to the author, though - a central theme, that of the interlocking "known-ness" of the Gloucester community, is beautifully evoked throughout. Surely, therefore, the strange, subverting presence of the second, "shadow" twin deserves a bit more contemplation. That - and a deeper development of the second-act twist - could make this Mother nearly immaculate.

Getting Albee's Goat

This is the second time in three years that Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? has been trotted out to shock the locals; the play first kicked up its heels at the Lyric Stage, in a production that won actress Paula Plum an IRNE, and has just closed a run at Gloucester Stage, which has been enjoying a generally strong summer season. So why has Albee's ode to livestock now been re-purposed as summer stock? Perhaps because, to tell true, the envelope-pushing premise of Albee's nastily funny near-masterpiece still scandalizes: his hero, Pritzker prize-winning architect Martin, ensconced in a glorious haute-bourgeois lifestyle in a postmodernly be-columned home, with a beautiful, accomplished wife and a trendily gay son in tow, has fallen in love with Sylvia, the eponymous barnyard beauty, and has descended into besotted bestiality.

Which is, of course, both utterly funny and utterly disgusting - i.e., a classic Albee trope - and the author plays both sides of this tennis match of violated social norms expertly; thus the summer crowd up at Gloucester found itself laughing and gasping in about equal measure. And there's a weirdly disturbing political edge to the work as well: as this gay playwright needlingly reminds us, it wasn't so long ago that gay love was as beyond the pale as goat love, and he makes wicked hay out of the fact that Martin's wife could extravagantly embrace her ass-fucking son while extravagantly rejecting her goat-fucking hubby.

But then again, Albee's not really out to make a case for "zoos" (as I believe they call themselves - don't ask me how I know that). Instead, he's digging around in our current culture of tolerance for something, anything, that might bring down into the modern drama something like the fury of Greek tragedy (indeed, Albee tosses in a ref to the Furies themselves, and designer Eric Levenson has cleverly given us a set that's a kind of new age Greek temple, with a family photo on its altar). For after all, Oedipus was the original motherfucker, and other Greek heroes and heroines were prone to such indiscretions as dismembering their own children - ancient tragedy all but depended on taboo. With that principle in mind, Albee wants to take us to the brink of real extremity, and he understands that in doing so, his tragedy must vacillate on the edge of farce.



And the current Gloucester Stage production often trembles on this thrilling edge, at least when actress Anne Gottlieb (above, with Robert Pemberton as Martin) is melting down before our eyes as wronged wife Stevie, who gets one of the best arias of outrage in the Albee canon. I wondered if Gottlieb (whom I myself have worked with before, and was impressed by) could make me forget Plum, but to tell true, she makes the role utterly her own; she manages to make Stevie more vulnerable, tortured, and vengeful than I remembered, even while hanging onto the precise farcical mechanics which power her speeches, and make them horrifying hilarious (Stevie basically smashes everything in the house over the course of her big scene).

Co-star Robert Pemberton keeps up with Gottlieb here and elsewhere, but on his own he seems much less confident in his portrayal of Martin, and director Eric C. Engel doesn't seem to understand the tone of the opening scenes, in which Martin's dark secret tugs at his subconscious mercilessly (he finally spills the beans to his best buddy, an adequate but not quite forceful enough Dennis Trainor, Jr.). The last man in the cast doesn't fare too well, either - Jesse Rudoy seems determined not to play toward gay cliché as the couple's bewildered son, but hasn't quite developed a credible alternative for the role, either.

But all this is forgotten in the last, wrenching scene, in which Stevie returns to her ruined hearth and home, having made good on her promise of revenge - and poor Sylvia makes her only on-stage appearance. Fortunately, at this point Pemberton threw himself utterly into Martin's emotional death throes, and Gottlieb was more chillingly believable than ever. And somewhere, the Furies were smiling.

Breathing room

Nancy E. Carroll and Paula Plum only occasionally breathe life into The Breath of Life.

I had a dream. A dream about Gloucester Stage's season turning into a virtual Greatest Actress Smackdown this summer, following Karen Macdonald's brilliant performance in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, and the current turns by Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll in David Hare's The Breath of Life.

But alas, the dream is over, because the celebrated, cerebral Hare often leaves our local leading ladies high and dry - particularly in his first act - even though The Breath of Life was originally designed as a vehicle for those grande dames across the pond, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. And who knows, perhaps those stars kept things moving, but I'm not sure how, because Hare seems to have forgotten to give this vehicle a working set of wheels.

Perhaps the problem lies in the essential contradiction at the heart of the piece. Hare is known for his cool dissections of political and moral failure, in which the political and the personal, we slowly realize, are all but impossible to tease apart; his outlook is unsparing, his voice tinged with wearily knowing acid. But how this approach could map to a high-brow matinee vehicle is a little hard to parse, and Hare certainly hasn't solved the problem. He gives us an intriguing set-up (long-time wife and long-time mistress finally meet, in a lonely cottage on the Isle of Wight), but rather than really dig into the specific conflicts of these characters, he spins yarns of generational decline and political irony that might have been lifted from any of his other plays (indeed, I felt a few were out-takes from Skylight or The Secret Rapture). Meanwhile the playwright lets drop - or perhaps drip is the better word - details of this pair's actual past at an almost irritatingly slow pace (and he barely bothers with anything like complicating action - to get us into slumber-party territory, for instance, lazy David simply has one character fall asleep for no reason).

Or perhaps the problem lies in Eric C. Engel's direction. Engel is know for his subtle work with local actresses - only this time maybe he got too subtle. Plum and Carroll are superb craftswomen, but neither has a high-voltage presence in repose, as it were, and Engel indulges Hare's theatrical reticence almost to a fault; he's going for mystery, we can tell, but what he gets is anomie.

Things look up, it's true, in the second act, when the implicitly-promised long, dark night of the generational soul finally begins to kick into gear, and Hare starts to limn a political metaphor for his two leading ladies. This doesn't quite count as dramatic conflict, but at least it's ideological conflict, and it's literate and intelligent, and skewers with deadpan skill the fatuous self-image of the Baby Boom (motto: "We left no loft uncoverted!"). And once they're given something to actually play, Carroll and Plum begin to bloom, and for a while Breath of Life seems to really breathe.

And perhaps that's enough. Certainly Hare shows us, yet again, that political theatre needn't descend into the nuttily surreal antics of so many "edgy" American authors to needle us with uncomfortable truths. Indeed, his political critiques - of American moral blindness, of an entire generation's insufferable self-indulgence - are all the more effective precisely because they are set in an utterly conventional theatrical frame. So even if The Breath of Life isn't always dramatically alive, at its best it's still a breath of political fresh air.

The last of the stone-cold kill-joys

Ken Baltin and Karen MacDonald re-heat Last of the Red Hot Lovers.

It sometimes seems that certain local critics just don't want you to have a good time - unlikely couple Louise Kennedy and Bill Marx come immediately to mind, following their pans of Gloucester Stage's Last of the Red Hot Lovers, which closed last weekend (I guess you could call Marx's screed a pan-once-removed, as he smeared the show without even seeing it). Yesterday I made the trek up to Gloucester to catch the last performance, while delivering the first check of the Bill Marx Theatrical Benevolent Fund (see post below) - and was unsurprised to discover that, just as I'd heard, Macdonald's performance was among the best of the year, and that Baltin's was nearly as good. If you skipped Lover because of those stone-cold kill-joys Kennedy and Marx, then you missed out on a red-hot evening.

Now I'm not here to pretend that Neil Simon is Chekhov, much less Shakespeare - still, (dare I say it?) he has his mild virtues in his better plays, and Last of the Red Hot Lovers is one such play - or at least was revealed to be one in David Zoffoli's sensitively-directed production, which struck me as superior to the miscast, mediocre film (which featured an unlikeable Alan Arkin). Red Hot is certainly several cuts above the likes of, say, the ART's Trojan Barbie or The Communist Dracula Pageant - fatuous dreck I couldn't even bring myself to review - or, yes, the Huntington's How Shakespeare Won the West or The Miracle at Naples. And it's certainly rooted in timeless human experience - in a word, the eternal urge of even the happily-married man to rove. When Bill Marx wrote "what planet is this play on?", I could only think "Uh, Bill - what planet are you on?"

Of course it's true that Simon is severely limited as an artist. Indeed, maybe he isn't really an 'artist.' He can't seem to envision a character who is knowingly cruel (much less evil), and when it comes to the ravages of such social ills as racism, poverty, classism (you name it), he can't relate. He's a politically-blindered craftsman of white (okay, Jewish) domestic comedy, and rarely swims into even the deep end of that shallow stream. Hence he can't manage much in the way of a developing arc; Simon is all about premise, not plot, and depends on tics or repeated gags to get him through an entire act. Indeed, the basic structure of Red Hot repeats itself three times, with minor variations (take that, Beckett!).

And yet there are stretches in the play where you feel Simon's suddenly much better than the paragraph above would lead you to believe he could be. His nebbishy middle-aged hero, Barney Cashman, is attempting to have a "fling" (in his mother's apartment, no less), because he's driven by a dawning awareness that everyone who reaches a certain age eventually shares: that death is on the horizon, growing slightly closer every day, and that what life we have left looks increasingly circumscribed. Men feel this, women feel this, everybody feels this, and it has its poignance, clichéd as that may sound - and to give Simon his due, he not only evokes this sentiment expertly in Barney, but then has his first "conquest" slam it to the mat with even more expertise. Other masculine delusions take even broader body-blows, because, of course, the point of this three-part exercise in attempted adultery is to guide the errant Barney back into the arms of the good woman he has at home.

Yet this time-honored tale strikes Bill Marx as "representative of the zombie-like dependence on the hopelessly dated." I kid you not. He rattles on: "does anyone think that the one-liner ridden Last of the Red Hot Lovers would have even a tangential connection with life-as-we-know it? Even mildly misogynistic escapism has moved on." Instead, Marx proclaims, the theatre should take a hint from (wait for it) the academy's favorite schizophrenic Shakespeare-hater, Antonin Artaud (at right), and "supply us with new “myths” that meditate on reality, fresh ways of looking at the conflicts in today’s world that provide a sense of context as well."

Wow. That sounds like fun, doesn't it. Somehow I rarely get the yen, on a warm summer evening, to meditate on reality in a fresh way that provides a sense of context. Indeed, I can't imagine anyone suggesting that while the sun was setting over a nearby bay - not even Antonin Artaud, the poor schmuck. But hold that thought, because I'd like to take a glance at Louise Kennedy's caveats, too.

Unsurprisingly, where Marx found mild misogyny, Kennedy found, yes, sexism. To her, Red Hot is "too old, too stale, and too dated in its approach to men and women to feel like a real comedy of human life." And why? Well, because "Simon stacks the deck so much in Barney’s favor that we start to get annoyed on behalf of the women."

And let me say upfront: that's flat wrong. Simon simply doesn't stack the deck in Barney's favor - indeed, in the final scene, for a while Barney looks like something of a shit, and the playwright comes closer to judgment than he does in the case of any of his women.

Kennedy likewise says that Simon's women "exist only as fantasy figures - and disappointing fantasy figures at that . . . They’re props, not people." But again, dead wrong. The lines just don't work that way. All three female roles are complex, and Karen Macdonald has a heyday with each. There's Elaine, the tough, suburban sex addict hiding psychological (and probably physical) wounds from her brutal husband; Bobbi, the 60's butterfly whose "freedom" is a mask for her instability; and finally the hilariously morose Jeanette, whose loss of faith in humanity (because her husband's best friend is - Barney!) finally brings our "hero" to his senses.

But then Kennedy gives herself away with this line: "Barney, apparently, has a right to reinvent himself, to explore the sexual revolution, to be free" while those fantasy-figure women, apparently, do not. Simon, however, makes it clear that Barney doesn't have that right; indeed, that highly conventional moral is the point of the play. So how did Kennedy get things so wrong? I don't know, but her review - like so many others about plays that deal with the battle of the sexes - has the feel of a template of personal grievance pounded down onto artistic material that actually doesn't fit the mold she wants to see. Kennedy mentions that in the performance she attended, an audience member whispered "It's all about him" - when actually, as usual, Kennedy would prefer that it be all about her.

So I just want to say, once and for all: "Louise Kennedy, you have the right to reinvent yourself, to explore the sexual revolution, to be free. Just like Barney Cashman." There. Let's hope that takes care of it.

Meanwhile, Marx would prefer that theatre be all about what the professor said it should be (never mind that no, Bill is not actually a professor). This is a tougher nut to crack - in fact, it may be uncrackable. Is there a cure, after all, for anhedonia? Maybe, but it would require years of therapy.

So let's get back to Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Surely director Zoffoli's most inspired gambit was to turn all three of the show's female roles over to Karen Macdonald, the long-under-utilized mainstay of the A.R.T. This both gives the script a conceptual punch it otherwise lacks, and of course, gives this talented actress a chance to show us exactly what she can do. And no one could deny that Macdonald went to town - indeed, she acts as if she's just gotten out of prison (which is in a way what the A.R.T., which seems to be dismantling its acting company, amounted to). Macdonald has worked through different accents, different body languages, different everything for her three women, and pretty much commands the stage every second she's on it. Baltin plays well off her, and develops an awkward sweetnes that actually works better than the nervous frustration of Alan Arkin (and, I imagine, James Coco, the role's originator on Broadway). But basically this is Macdonald's show. Here's hoping she has many more like it.

Before signing off, however, I have to praise the design work of Frances Nelson McSherry (costumes), Rachel Padula-Shufelt (wigs and makeup) and Eric Levenson (set), who together expertly conjure the late sixties without quite tipping over into self-conscious parody. Which, of course, also provides the perfect frame for the "dated" attitudes that bug Marx and Kennedy. This production did play as "dated" - precisely dated; it brought me back immediately to the year of its premiere (1969) in a way that many conjurations of the 60's (like TV's "Mad Men") do not. That within that musty frame a few human truths might lurk seems to have never occurred to these critics. But the many middle-aged (or older) couples roaring with laughter at the performance I attended seemed to understand the play just fine.