Tag Archives: Brendan Patrick Hogan

Theatre

“The Price” Isn’t Right

Attention must be paid to the set dressing.

Arthur Miller’s The Price is set in an attic, that place where we put all the things we don’t want but with which we cannot part. The characters that populate this purgatory have come to negotiate a price on their history–they are selling the furniture. It’s a perfect setting for an Arthur Miller play and in ACT’s current production (through June 22nd) the set also nears perfection.

The Price is one of those plays in which resentments fester beneath the surface until circumstances force them to break out and someone says “let me tell you what really happened.” The script is solid, and respected, if not of Miller’s finest, but in this production, it’s the clutter of furnishings and props that steal the show. The acting and direction, on the other hand, leave something to be desired.

The play centers on Victor (Charles Leggett) the son of a millionaire, who went bankrupt in The Great Depression. Victor’s uncles took over the house, and let their brother live in the attic with all his stuff. Victor dropped out of college and became a cop to support his father. Victor’s brother, Walter, (Peter Lohnes) stayed in school, became a wealthy doctor and sent a little money home to dad.

When our play begins, long after the father’s death, the family is being forced to sell the contents of the attic before the house is demolished. The conflict between the good, happy, and poor Victor and the rich, flawed, and dysfunctional Walter is inevitable and largely predictable, despite some twists and detours in the layers of revelation. However the play belongs to Victor’s wife, Esther, (Anne Allgood) who is the only one who experiences any real change in the play. Unfortunately we don’t see that change occur. We know it happens because the script tells us but the actors show us nothing.

The characters are iconic, almost archetypal: Doctor, Cop, Housewife, (and Furniture Dealer). There is subtlety in the script but this production gives it no support, to say nothing of drawing out further nuance. Rather the complexities of the characters as written are dulled by the actors’ performance. They unfailingly aim for the obvious, retard their pacing, and play emotions instead of actions.

Lohnes is doctor-as-snake-oil-salesman. Yes, Victor says he doesn’t believe Walter but it’s a miracle anyone can, including the audience. He creates the problem of playing a bad actor: the line between playing bad acting and just badly acting is too fine for trifling.

Peter Silbert gives us the furniture dealer, Gregory Solomon as Solomon The Wise, but also Solomon the Borschty shtick-monger. Nonetheless Silbert tends to blow some energy into a play in which the actors rarely seem to be listening to one another.

Leggett employs his paunch and pate to easy effect along with his standard folksy, simple guy accent. While Alyssa Keene is cited as dialect coach she seems to have worked only with Silbert (who still needs some practice). Leggett gets to pull out the stops in Victor’s big emotional moment. It’s good craft and affecting, but that moment feels utterly disconnected from everything around it.

Allgood has the toughest role here. She doesn’t get to indulge in histrionics or interesting character bits and she endures casual misogyny from men who are always telling her to sit down, be quiet, or be more supportive, and calling her “kid”. On top of that her character embodies the dramatic action of the play. Unfortunately we miss that action entirely.

While the arena staging creates its own special challenges Victor Pappas’s direction inevitably found Allgood hunched over protectively at key moments, effectively shutting out the audience. All we could see was that Esther had a view of the world, listened to conversation, and came away with a new view of the world.

So, about that set; Robert Dahlstrom gives us a wonderful NYC skylight-crowned ceiling, high above the stage and a farrago of furnishings, much of it matched to precise descriptions in the set. Also excellent is Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sound design. The music coming out of what appears to be a wind up phonograph, despite its rather electrical whine, is authentic and spot-on.

That nuance and complexity we wanted in the acting—we find it in Alex Berry’s lights and Rose Pederson’s costumes. The costumes in particular demonstrated excellent research and execution in character, and circumstance. Let’s hope future ACT productions will learn something from her.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Heartbreak and Hilarity at ACT’s Middletown

The cast of Middletown. Photo by LaRae Lobdell 

Do you remember that strange play you did in high school, the one that seemed oddly simple? It had almost no set and some of the characters seemed to know they were in a play. Maybe it felt kind of hokey. A boy and a girl met, fell in love, got married and then she died, and there was this stage manager who kept talking to the audience. That play was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and it’s worth recalling before heading off to ACT’s production of Middletown by Will Eno (through September 29).

This is not to say that familiarity with Our Town is necessary. One can go to Middletown without having seen any play before. As with Wilder’s, this town is simple and straightforward, and a couple of the characters do speak directly to the audience. Likewise, this Middletown is about the wonder and beauty of simply being alive, but in the post-Beckett world of Will Eno, language unravels and human connection is as uncertain as it is precious.

 

Photo by Chris Bennion

Fate and time ultimately undo Wilder’s happy world of Grover’s Corners, but even before death enters the play, darkness lurks in the presence of the alcoholic choir director, Simon Stimson. This character looms large in Middletown not only in the person of a mechanic (Ray Tagavilla) with addiction problems, but even in the lovers who keep us hopeful and engaged with the story. Middletown is a hollow place where despair and brutality lie just beneath the surface. Nonetheless, most of its residents seem as happy as those of Grover’s Corners. This disconnection is integral to the dry humor that keeps the audience laughing when it isn’t on the verge of tears.

Eno updates Wilder’s stage manager with an opening monologue by a public speaker (R. Hamilton Wright). Where many plays begin with a plea for donations before the show, this public speaker gathers our attention to no end; he just goes on gathering. Every time he approaches a conclusion, he subverts it. This is par for the course in the land of Will Eno.

The story of Middletown is one of life: birth, death and the struggle in between. The actions, the language and even voices seem to lead nowhere, constantly circling back on themselves or coming up short in a dead end. Jennifer Zeyl’s set also suggests a cul-de-sac as created by a preschooler, in spare lines and primary colors. A vent on each of the two houses stands out as a remarkable detail that keeps the set in the real world, but everything else has the feel of plastic. It’s a world in which Gumby would feel at home.

Nonetheless, we get swept up in this world and a central romance between a man and a woman who combine the shy innocence of Wilder’s lovers with Simon Stimson’s pain and loneliness. John (Eric Riedmann) is in between jobs he hates. His new next-door neighbor, Mary (Alexandra Tavares), is pregnant, after more than a year of trying, and largely alone while her husband travels for work.

Photo by Chris Bennion

Their story gets broken up by interludes between the townsfolk. Most prominent among these are the Mechanic, The Cop (Matthew Floyd Miller), and The Librarian (Marianne Owen). More fleeting figures comment on the play and the themes of the beauty and futility of life. Some of these monologues drag, but they give way in the second half to the heightened circumstances of the hospital.

85 years after Our Town, the hospital is where we conduct our essential dramas of birth and death. Mary goes there to give birth alone, and John is taken there after an attempted suicide. In between the acts is a pre-intermission meta-theatrical scene in which an audience of Middletowners attending the play responds to it during intermission.

ACT’s production is excellent. The acting sometimes gets mired in the thicket of Eno’s language, losing the audience’s attention, but this show does more in its first five minutes than most do in two hours. The cast is flawless, often making surprising verbal choices and strong physical ones. Riedmann conveys John’s insecurity with elbows  invariably tucked into his stomach. Renata Friedman brings a thrusting angularity to characters at either end of the autism spectrum. Aaron Blakely’s astronaut goofily tells us he’s in outer space rather than being in outer space.

Design is excellent, from the innocuous pop guitar (a la Grey’s Anatomy) that would grate in any other circumstances to the cop’s mustache. Even the timing of the initial house light fade helped tie together an evening that is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

A Tell-All Memoirist Comes Home in “Other Desert Cities” at ACT

Pamela Reed as Polly Wyeth and Marya Sea Kaminsky at her daughter Brooke in Other Desert Cities at ACT Theatre (Photo: Chris Bennion)

The familiar give and take of family secrets and threatened revelations gets a Hollywood shine and sociopolitical update in ACT’s production of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities (through June 30). Hamstrung by an under-rehearsed cast and a weak-jointed plot, the show still provides an amusing, if sentimental, evening of entertainment.

Marya Sea Kaminsky plays Brooke Wyeth, the liberal novelist daughter of prominent Republican and former Hollywood celebrity parents, who goes home to Palm Springs at Christmas for the first time in six years. The holiday is just a small turn of the dramatic screw. Her ostensible reason for returning home is to present her soon-to-be-published tell-all memoir to her family but to what end? She says she wants their blessing for dragging out the family’s tragic past, but claims surprise at their defensive response. That’s one of the two key weaknesses in the framing of this story.

While costumes, set and lights are all top quality, the acting and directing are lacking: Opening night saw some stumbling over lines and the opening scene struggled to find its feet. While we are dealing with a show-business family that does the soft-shoe of normality, Victor Pappas’s cast oversells the façade. Their indicating of false cheer comes off as bad acting. This mellows in later scenes as the play stops trying to be funny and the cast lives in their roles instead of playing actors acting.

While fans of Baitz’s Brothers and Sisters—TV’s overwrought family drama of the over-class—should be sure to catch this show, Other Desert Cities gives us more than just television fare presented on the stage. It also contains both subtle and overt sociopolitical implications that will hook more discriminating audiences along with some fine character work.

Though a few references remind us that events unfold in 2004, Brendan Patrick Hogan’s curtain-raising collage of sound bites sets the scene most directly kicking off with Rumsfeld and Bush. This consciousness is reinforced as each character describes the others as representative of the political divisiveness demonstrated in national politics. Notably Polly (Pamela Reed), Brooke’s unforgiving mother, tosses off references to her daughter as a whining liberal, almost from her first entrance. The red, blue, and purple members of the family quickly come into focus.

As the conflict simmers between Brooke and her parents, further family dynamics take hold, and for much of the play, the cast gives authentic life to complicated characters who are difficult to love. Polly’s sister, Silda (Lori Larsen), and Brooke’s brother, Trip (Aaron Blakely), act as Brooke’s worse and better angels, with Trip serving as family peacemaker. Between Silda and Polly’s sororal conflict and the sparring between Brooke and her mother, women in the audience have much fodder for catharsis. For this reviewer, there was interest without epiphany and release with little tension.

An eleventh-hour revelation is a bookending weak point that damages the plot’s credibility and sets up a satisfyingly ambiguous ending that elicited applause from the opening night audience. But don’t get up from your seats quite yet. Baitz is more interested in providing comfort than asking questions, so he leaves us with a sentimental coda that wraps us in a fuzzy blanket of optimism.

In sum Other Desert Cities falls in a grand tradition of American theatre, though written to sitcom standards, suggesting a weightier version of A.R. Gurney or a lighter take on Edward Albee. Given a couple weeks for the cast to shore up their lines and settle into their characters this production will offer pleasant pre-Independence Day national soul-searching without assigning any serious homework on the subject.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

ACT’s Ramayana is a Most Epic of Epics

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Ramayana for ACT Theatre by LaRae Lobdell of PhotoSister.com

Rafael Untalan as Rama, Khanh Doan as Sita in ACT's production of Ramayana (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Cast of Ramayana performing the Wedding Dance (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Brandon O'Neill as Hanuman in ACT's production of Ramayana (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

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Ramayana for ACT Theatre by LaRae Lobdell of PhotoSister.com thumbnail

The word epic gets tossed around a good deal and not only by theatre theorists interested in Bertolt Brecht but also by young people who find the word “awesome” insufficiently demonstrative. The Ramayana is one of the stories for which the word was fashioned. ACT’s current production (here given the Indian pronunciation: rom-EYE-ah-nah) lives up to the billing with a lightning-fast, three-hour production that leaves us joyful, contemplative, and newly in love with theatre (at ACT through Nov. 11; tickets).

Ramayana is akin to the Iliad in that it is a collection of stories surrounding the abduction of a princess, Sita (Khanh Doan), and the efforts of her husband, Rama (Rafael Untalan), to free her from the demon, Ravana (John Farrage). Within that story are didactic and engaging tales of royal succession, divine intervention, romance, rivalry, jealousy, duty, justice, and more. It touches on nearly every facet of life. With this level of ambition the nearly-three-hour running time feels minimal but the abridgements are handled deftly. Often a few, generally wry, words suggest what is undoubtedly a lengthy litany in the original text.

If there is a flaw in this production it is that actors are sometimes lost from view on the floor. The problem is the mark of a very fully enacted and absorbing production. Physical actions reach up atop a second story and often collapse in prostration but unless the prone actor is at least as far upstage as center we lose sight of him in the silhouettes of those in front of us—this coming from someone who is well over six feet tall.

In a lesser production this would be a minor quibble (who worries about missing a bit of action?) but there is nothing extraneous in Ramayana, every prop and gesture incites our interest. When Ray Tagavilla as Rama’s brother, Bharata, bows before him, he also removes Rama’s shoes and places them on a throne as a symbol of the servitude of his regency. Missing that bit of action can create a hole in a narrative that—rich as it is—can be nearly as spare as CliffsNotes given the eventful plot.

The genius of this production finds its emblem in the portrayal of Jatayu, the eagle, who attempts to rescue Sita as Ravana abducts her. Jatayu enters as the shadow of a simple rod puppet (designed by Greg Carter). The puppet is cardboard-thin and elaborately painted and perforated as in wayang kulit, the traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry form in which the Ramayana is often performed.

After crossing the scene this depiction graduates from a direct reference to a new evocation. Jatayu returns in the form of a woman with a gauze shawl, shadowed by gauze draped over three poles that suggest a bird’s body with wings. This gives us a simple and modern depiction of the enormous physical bird and its very human emotional conditions. Similarly the adaptation as a whole both references the traditions of the Ramayana and updates the visual and fabulistic elements to serve ACT’s audience with both the colloquial and the spiritual, low and high arts. All told it is a transcendent achievement.

Despite the story’s vast scale physically, philosophically, and emotionally, the production easily sells us on emotions that could seem laughable to American audiences. Tagavilla is brilliantly cast in his most prominent role as Bharata, who unwillingly winds up serving as regent during Rama’s exile. He makes the immensity of Bharata’s torment at his impossible position both palpable and natural.

Farrage has a similar achievement. Though, as Ravana, he sustains an aggravated voice for most of the show he largely avoids seeming cartoonishly villainous. Anne Allgood’s entrance as Ravana’s sister, Soorpanaka, has all that cartoonish villainy, yet laughing at her tragic obsessiveness frees the audience to feel a childlike delight. That we gasp in horror at her subsequent treatment returns our equilibrium and keeps the show grounded.

Soorpanaka’s disfigurement is not the only time the audience audibly gasps at the simple magic onstage. Sita and Rama disappear, a giant destroys battalions before Rama’s arrows lay him down, characters are consumed in fire, and all of it furloughs our disbelief. Matthew Smucker’s sets and Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sound design elevate simplicity into enchantment by engaging our imagination. The set mostly consists of bamboo and gauze. The sound design often both cues from and reinforces live instruments and voices, expanding the scale of the tangible.

But rather than laud the contributions to this production with an epic of criticism, let it suffice to say that from the adept adaptation to Hanuman’s hijinks, ACT’s Ramayana is a tremendous success and worth repeated attendance.