Theater

Sympathy for the Devil

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:27:26 GMT

Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy
Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: So much for those who say Tom Stoppard is all head and no heart.

"It's not just the music, it's the oxygen," sputters Czech rock fanatic Jan, trying to explain what Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones mean when you're wrapped in a straitjacket of repression and looking toward a revolution that will prove more velvet than violent. That feeling of being hemmed in and gazing through a shaft toward the freedom that's in the music is ingeniously captured in the American Conservatory Theater/Huntington Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, currently at the Boston University Theatre (through December 7). Inspired by an Eastern Bloc photograph, Douglas W. Schmidt's monumental set is like a drab tenement laid on its side, so that the audience is looking past gray concrete toward a patch of blank white sky. The production, too, makes it through Stoppard's sumptuously limned tunnel of political argument, Sapphic poetry, human passion, Cold War espionage, and 22 years of Czech history filtered through a lens of disappointed English Marxism to achieve the exhilaration encapsulated in the loud electric-guitar licks that introduce the Rolling Stones at Prague's Strahov Stadium in 1990. But there are some drab patches, as well as brilliant ones, along the way.

The Tony-nominated Rock 'n' Roll is a heady mix, even for one that's seen the churn of Stoppard's brainy blender. The play, its scenes bridged by era-anchoring bursts of the title commodity, straddles not just two decades but two worlds: the leafy academic cloister of England's Cambridge University, where intellectual systems may butt heads but at least dare speak their names, and Prague, in the years between the Soviet quashing of the 1968 Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is on one level about the supremacy of words as well as music. But, critics of Stoppard as a playwright who's all cerebrum, take note: it also sets up a debate between head and heart, sophistry and soul, that pure emotion, riding the music, carries in the end. As one character, a Czech expatriate looking back from the cusp of the '90s to the anarchic '60s, remarks, " 'Make love, not war' was more important than 'Workers of the world unite.' "

Call of the cash

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:46:36 GMT

The Merchant of Venice ; Voyeurs de Venus ; The Oil Thief
Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason.

MONEY: That’s what they want.

Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason. The victim isn’t half as compelling as the avenging victim, and such is Shylock, the diamond-hearted center of Shakespeare’s unsettling comedy set on the Rialto — in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s current rendering (at Midway Studios through December 7) a street as lucre-centric as Rodeo Drive. Coins are jingled and bills peeled away from thick wads of cash from the get-go in a bold, fleet production in which Shylock is not the only man made — or unmade — of money.

Director Melia Bensussen is not the first to suggest that the Christians of Venice are as obsessed with cash as Shylock is. But what Bensussen, an intelligent director who is also a practicing Jew, brings to the table is an unwillingness to take a Sound of Music approach to solving the problem that is Shylock. In her judiciously trimmed modern-dress production, Jeremiah Kissel, also an observant Jew, is a tough if also heartrending Shylock — in the beginning a guy you might meet at a bar mitzvah, later one you might meet in a nightmare. Approached by Antonio and his empty-pocketed chum, Bassanio, for money to finance the latter’s wife-winning mission to Belmont, Kissel’s Shylock is a half-menacing, half-mischievous kibitzer, a fast-talking gum chewer who, every time he mentions the rich sum of 3000 ducats, either takes his head in his hands and shakes it or slaps himself silly. Here the frisky Borscht Belt businessman may hide malevolent intent beneath some pointed clowning, but he’s more likable than Robert Wash’s black-clad, suavely depressive, arrogantly derisive Antonio.

The turning point, of course, is Shylock’s betrayal by his daughter, Jessica, the browbeating of whom Kissel does not stint. But the young lady flees with her Christian lover with not just a casket but also a fat briefcase of booty. Encountering some Christians who have met this tragedy with hilarity, Kissel cuts short his opening riposte at the words, “You knew — ,” thus implicating all Christian Venice in his heartbreak. From this point on, he is agitated but stony, except for a few courtroom flashes mimicking his demonization.

The production separates with uncommon smoothness the play’s courtroom melodrama and its Belmont-set romantic comedy, which is ebullient, particularly when Marianna Bassham’s lively, conspiratorial Nerissa has anything to do with it. The teasing, boudoir-bound comedy of the rings that brings the play to a close, leaving Antonio alone like the cheese, is particularly charming and lusty. Then again, Antonio’s not quite alone. The production’s last image is of Shylock in his counting house, letting hollow coins slip through his fingers.

Rough justice

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:47:17 GMT

The Lieutenant of Inishmore; How Many Miles to Basra?; Legally Blonde the Musical
Except that it's a black farce, not a tragedy, you could call The Lieutenant of Inishmore Martin McDonagh's Titus Andronicus .

THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE: Hammering its audacious juxtaposition of savagery, mawkishness, and sheer stupidity like a stake through a vampire’s heart.

Except that it's a black farce, not a tragedy, you could call The Lieutenant of Inishmore Martin McDonagh's Titus Andronicus. The 2002 Olivier Award winner and 2006 Tony nominee, which is getting its area premiere from New Repertory Theatre (at Arsenal Center for the Arts through November 16), is so rife with mutilation and dismemberment that you might as well direct it with a Cuisinart. Faced with similarly poetical mayhem in the Bard's Titus, David R. Gammons, who won an Elliot Norton Award for his staging, spilled not one jot of stage blood. Now we know why; he was saving it up! Gammons's production of Inishmore sets the largest Aran Island afloat in a bucket of plasma: it gushes like Old Faithful and splatters like Jackson Pollock.

Not that a pristine and stylized staging of McDonagh's 1990s-set wild Irish bloodbath would work. The play's perverse comedy lies in its mix of Grand Guignol and abject sentimentality among a gang of political terrorists who can't think, much less shoot, straight. In Janie E. Howland's design, it opens in a squat hovel backed by cartoon rocks and a large "Home Sweet Home" sampler. In the house, a couple of dimwits bend over the corpse of a cat that's missing most of its head and dripping innards. "Do you think he's dead, Donny?" the effeminate younger one asks his scruffy older counterpart. Afraid so, guys, and the crude assassination of Wee Thomas, beloved pet of Irish National Liberation Army loose cannon Mad Padraic, will unleash a concatenation of carnage worthy of the Greeks — if, say, the entire population of Thebes had been subject to a lobotomy.

McDonagh, the author of the creepier if less gruesome The Pillowman, and the Leenane trilogy, does mean to make a point about the numbing mindlessness of sectarian violence. But the play hammers its audacious juxtaposition of savagery, mawkishness, and sheer stupidity like a stake through a vampire's heart. Padraic, who was deemed too unstable for the IRA, has splintered from a splinter group, which has lured him back from a tour abroad trying to detonate chip shops and torture drug dealers by axing his only, if feline, friend. Seems this trio of cat-battering patriots have it in for Padraic because of his persecution of pushers, at least one of whom had funded their operation — until Padraic cut his nose off and fed it to a dog (which choked, causing the sort of outrage here evoked only by cruelty to critters). With so much violence afoot, there's little room for sex. But don't tell that to 16-year-old Mairûad, a militant if boyish colleen whose crush on Padraic comes in handy.

Of myth and men

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:47:15 GMT

The ART’s Communist Dracula Pageant ; the Publick’s Faith Healer
There is more pageantry than either Stalinism or Stoker in The Communist Dracula Pageant , Anne Washburn’s ambitious jumble of a Romanian-history play now in its world premiere from the American Repertory Theatre.

THE COMMUNIST DRACULA PAGEANT: The greater point would seem to be that history is as much theater as theater is.

Photos: The Communist Dracula Pageant

There is more pageantry than either Stalinism or Stoker in The Communist Dracula Pageant, Anne Washburn’s ambitious jumble of a Romanian-history play now in its world premiere from the American Repertory Theatre (at Zero Arrow Theatre through November 9). Taking its cue from the self-deluded dictatorship of Communist-nationalist strongman Nicolae Ceausescu, which ended in December of 1989 faster than you could do your Christmas shopping, and reaching back to the 15th-century reign of the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, the play is a grotesque meditation on the march and media manipulation — from Gutenberg to television — of history.

The complete, longwinded if whimsical title is The Communist Dracula Pageant by Americans, for Americans, a play about the Romanian Revolution of 1989 with hallucinations, phosphorescence, and bears — which underlines the far-ranging intent of this sinister satire of the political rewriting of the national script. But its best parts riff on the cheesy, propagandistic pageants favored by Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, at the height of their power. After a brief opening gambit lifted from the pair’s kangaroo-trial transcript, the play jumps back to 1976 to imagine such a spectacle, in which a glamorized, intellectualized version of Elena (who painted herself a scientist despite a fourth-grade education) celebrates the 500th anniversary of the death of Tepes, who quickly gets into the act, strutting in velvet robes and a bejeweled cap.

Tepes, despite his nasty habit of skewering citizens on sticks, is considered a national hero in Romania for his actions against the Turks. And in the Captain Hook–esque figure of Will LeBow, he delivers a message both ghoulish and seductive, in which national identity is a skein of pride and ruthlessness, history a mesh of rumor, imagination, manipulation, and fact. This conjured Tepes is joined in the play’s flag-waving celebration of Ceausescu-esque aggrandizement and Romanian lore by robotic “pageanteers” in coveralls, folk costume, hammer-and-sickle headdresses, and military uniform, all singing the praises of “Dracula, a man . . . sinisteracula, simicuracula, perhapula.” Finally, this messenger from history looks up into the grid of lights and is surprised to find written in the stars the name CEAUSESCU.

Love and politics

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:45:43 GMT

Boleros for the Disenchanted ; November ; Martha Mitchell Calling
In Boleros for the Disenchanted , Puerto Rican–born José Rivera looks beyond the fairy dust and sexual spark to probe the full meaning of “till death do us part.”

BOLEROS FOR THE DISENCHANTMENT: Jaime Tirelli and Socorro Santiago try to keep the enchantment going.

In Boleros for the Disenchanted, Puerto Rican–born José Rivera looks beyond the fairy dust and sexual spark to probe the full meaning of “till death do us part.” But at the same time that this moving if hardly magical work, which is based on the playwright’s parents’ marriage, is about connection, it is also about disconnection — about a married life lived severed from all roots but each other. In other words, Boleros is as much an emigrants’ as a couple’s story, and it’s seen here in a production by the Huntington Theatre Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through November 15) that follows the script’s premiere last May at Yale.

At first glance, Rivera’s look at the beginning and the end of romance seems more naturalistic than the magical-realist works that have made his name. Well, at last glance, too, there being no guerrilla angels or anthropomorphized moons in sight. Set in Puerto Rico in 1953, act one tells how pious if tempestuous Flora loses a philandering fiancé and gains a better young husband in Eusebio. Act two takes place 39 years later in Alabama, where Flora and Eusebio, now in their 60s, deal with disease, a destructive deathbed confession, and the disenchantment of the title. Still, if Boleros does not spin a metaphysical or apocalyptic fantasy in the manner of Cloud Tectonics or Marisol, neither is it entirely realistic: act one unfolds in a glimmering haze of nostalgia through which the tried and toughened couple of act two cling to a dream of “the enchanted island,” whose enchantments, alas, did not include gender equality or employment.

Chay Yew’s production for the Huntington makes the visual most of the play’s 39-year leap. As young Flora transfers identity to her older self along with a favored sweater, young Eusebio puts his shoulder to rotating Alexander Dodge’s floating set, trading a colorful Caribbean abode backed by a tangle of banana trees for the cramped tract house in which a bedridden Eusebio and a drudgingly ministering Flora are winding down their union. This does not change the fact that, except through exposition, we miss the meaty middle of their story — in which Eusebio neither realizes the American dream nor shakes the frisky, desperate machismo of his original, materially emasculating culture, and the sensual if saintly Flora is denied the one thing she frankly demanded in act one: sexual fidelity. But the point is not so much what the couple didn’t get as what they did: a lifetime of each other, warts and all. And that is tenderly conveyed, if with more grit than sentiment.

Still crazy after all these years

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:13:52 GMT

The Force is with Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking
Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive.

SURVIVOR: Fisher’s saving grace is her scathing wit.

Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive. Really, she’s as funny as Dame Edna Everage and as screwed-up as Britney Spears crossed with Sylvia Plath. In her one-woman show Wishful Drinking (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 26), this scion of Hollywood royalty lets her pimpled personal history hang out, from a childhood caught in the winds of scandal to an adolescence as a Star Wars icon in hairmuffs to an adulthood spent in the lusty embrace of drugs, alcohol, manic depression, and Paul Simon. Lumpy, candid, and caustic at 52, the artist formerly known as Princess Leia sprinkles wry humor like heavy pixie dust across her cautionary tale of a life that “if it weren’t funny would just be true — and that is unacceptable.”

Not only is Fisher’s on-stage memoir immensely entertaining, it’s been trumped up with multimedia accouterments uncommon in a one-person show. There is a contemporary living-room set backed by roiling orange and a montage of projections. Fisher enters warbling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as newspaper headlines fly behind her chronicling events from the severing of America’s sweethearts — her parents, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — to her own hospitalizations and bad reviews. (She’s declared “bovine and unappealing” by infamously misogynistic critic John Simon.)

The writer/performer breaks the ice by recalling the moment when she woke up with a dead friend in her bed. (“He not only died in his sleep, he died in mine.”) Then she backtracks to the beginning of an existence that’s been equal parts celebrity and absurdity. The events and relationships revisited in Wishful Drinking may be twisted, but Fisher’s ironic celebration of the success-studded train wreck of her life will keep you doubled over for two hours. It’s only in the aftermath that you worry about this poster girl for bi-polar disorder, who apologizes early on for any memory lapses she may suffer as a result of recent shock therapy — which she heartily recommends. (If Wishful Drinking has a serious purpose, it is to destigmatize mental illness.)

I sink, therefore I am

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:22:55 GMT

Zeitgeist’s expanded Seascape. Plus Gutenberg! The Musical
Seascape , Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company.

SEASCAPE: The lizards are cute, but less is still more.

Seascape, Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company. The feisty troupe is presenting the American premiere of the playwright’s whimsical existential fantasy in its original three-act form (at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza through October 25), in which the playwright splices in an episode of The Little Mermaid. Here the play’s at-odds aging couple, having had an energizing if initially terrifying beachfront encounter with a pair of giant lizards just up from the briny, are dragged back into it by their reptilian counterparts. The play, in this initial version, was presented in the Netherlands prior to the sleeker edition’s Broadway premiere. But this is the first time it’s been produced on American soil (well, American sand, four and a half tons of it dragged by Zeitgeist into the BCA) — and for good reason.

Sure, a peek at Albee’s rough draft will prove interesting to theater scholars. It’s interesting to me, less for the gleaming moray-eel eyes and plastic lobsters of the excised act than because it places the final version’s hopeful conclusion at the close of act two and substitutes a tougher ending redolent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the human couple are left to make do with each other. But this original Seascape, most of the content of which made it verbatim into the shorter version, both belabors the play and interferes with its inner — not to mention its evolutionary — logic. We can’t, after all, be sure that massive English-speaking lizards won’t appear in Montauk or on Cape Cod, raring for a chat. But we do know that humans shanghai’d to the ocean floor would drown — unless they suddenly grew gills, and wouldn’t that be anti-evolutionary? Just asking.

Zeitgeist honcho David J. Miller is always up for a challenge, but this one seems less an ambitious leap than a stunt — though the director’s reasons for doing the play in the first place are thoughtful enough. In addition to restoring Albee’s journey to the bottom of the sea, Miller’s production addresses the playwright’s displeasure with the 2006 Lincoln Center revival (the work’s first Broadway appearance since its initial two-month run), which focused on Seascape’s comedy of inter-special manners. Miller’s production is more earnest, emphasizing the play’s mordant ruminations on evolution — on whether the knowledge of mortality and the naming of emotions are really preferable to a mindless swim in the primordial soup.

Cry me a river

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:19:14 GMT

The Dreams of Antigone; In the Continuum; Show Boat
It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous.

THE DREAMS OF ANTIGONE: Did Sophocles really need to be improved?

It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous. Antigone alone has been given a new look by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Seamus Heaney, A.R Gurney, and Judith Malina, to name a few. Now Trinity Repertory Company’s artistic director, Curt Columbus, gets in on the act with The Dreams of Antigone, an Upstairs, Downstairs update of the tale of Oedipus’s martyred daughter that’s in its world premiere on the company’s home turf (through October 26). It’s easy to understand the motivation: the formality of Greek tragedy can be intimidating, and the device of the Chorus, as it chants its cautionary if sympathetic strophes and antistrophes, is hard to handle. But why not leave well enough — and Sophocles did well enough — alone?

Columbus’s rewrite, undertaken in collaboration with the Trinity acting company, weaves ancient Greece and contemporary America into a script that begins “We the people” before segueing from the US Constitution to Sophocles’s story of heroic defiance in the face of unbending governmental authority. The piece is intended to resonate with a crowd for whom the role of fate and the will of the gods have less pull than they did with the original audience and to examine the roles of myth, the populace, and even theater itself in determining the course of public events. It asks why Antigone’s story has so stubbornly endured and whether there is a point at which it might have gone in another direction.

You remember the basics: Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, fought a brutal civil war over control of Thebes, at the culmination of which they killed each other. Their uncle, Creon, seeking to restore order and establish his own authority, has declared Eteocles a hero and Polyneices a traitor who deserves to rot where he fell. The new honcho issues an edict — which Antigone disobeys — that anyone who tries to bury him will be executed. In the Greek play, Antigone places her allegiance to a Higher Authority ahead of her allegiance to the State; here it pretty much comes down to “doing the right thing.” And too much of the script has that sort of blunt, simplistic ring — as if it were the result of intense improvisation rather than authorial intent. Columbus’s audaciously Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard brimmed with colloquial vigor; this one, with its shared narration and political speechifying interspersed with family squabbling, ricochets between the obvious and the jarring — as when dead relatives appear in dreams, calling snide attention to their incestuously twisted family tree or, in the case of the brothers, re-enacting the battle for Thebes as a joust played out on high, movable scaffolds. Hey, this is Antigone, not American Gladiators.

Undiscovered country

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:24:23 GMT

New Rep’s Eurydice, the ART’s Let Me Down Easy, SpeakEasy’s The Light in the Piazza
A young woman steps off the Elevator Styx into a Hades ruled by Pee-wee Herman.

EURYDICE: What if Orpheus’s wife chose oblivion over the return to complicated life?

A young woman steps off the Elevator Styx into a Hades ruled by Pee-wee Herman. The estimable Anna Deavere Smith embodies victims of war, cancer, and the Rwandan genocide as she turns herself into a Nancy Drew seeking to solve the mystery of “grace.” Mortality is on the menu this week in New Repertory Theatre’s Eurydice (at the Arsenal Center for the Arts through October 5) and the American Repertory Theatre’s Let Me Down Easy (at the Loeb Drama Center through October 11), works so diverse and piercing that they demonstrate the groaning board of theater, with shimmering myth at one end of the table, incisive documentary opposite.

Sarah Ruhl, now 34, began her profound and playful meditation on Orpheus’s wife while still a graduate student at Brown mourning a father who had died when she was 20. That her teacher was Paula Vogel will be apparent to anyone spellbound at the intersection of poetry and whimsy that is the locus of her work. In Eurydice, Ruhl shifts the focus from the ultimate music man, who induces the gods to release his dead wife and then loses her again when he fails to follow instructions, to Eurydice herself, as she’s caught between her desire to follow her husband back into the world and the delicate limbo in which she has reconnected with her deceased dad. Welcoming her to the Underworld, Eurydice’s father teaches her forgotten words and family history. And when the daughter who at first does not remember him (she thinks he’s a porter) demands to be shown to her room in this borderless territory occupied by a bossy chorus of talking stones and ruled by a petulant prince on a tricycle, he lovingly constructs her a shelter of string.

Ruhl’s unconventional Eurydice explores both the pain of loss and the converse comforts of memory and forgetting, music and language. Orpheus’s thoughts are tunes; Eurydice loves books. In Hades, where the river Lethe is a slit in the floor, the Stones advocate letting go of earthly recollection. And in Ruhl’s Freudian version of the tale, it is not Orpheus who makes the mistake that sends his recovered wife back to the Underworld but Eurydice herself, choosing childish oblivion over a return to complicated life.

Buffalo’d Bard

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:06:42 GMT

This West doesn’t win the East
It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West , which opens the season at the Huntington.

THE PREMISE SEEMS IRRESISTIBLE If only the execution didn’t wander cross-country.

It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West, which opens the season at the Huntington (and runs through October 5). But this talented, prolific playwright blows hot and cold, and Shakespeare isn’t one of his successes — though the premise seems just about irresistible. Set in the mid-19th century and based on real events, the play is about a New York tavern owner named Thomas Jefferson Calhoun (Will LeBow) who, inspired by a visiting Ohio actor’s tales of prospectors in the California gold rush who revere Shakespeare, assembles a theatrical troupe to trek across country to perform for them.

The company includes Calhoun’s family — his wife, Alice (Mary Beth Fisher), who retired from the stage upon becoming pregnant and has always longed to return, and their daughter, Susan (Sarah Nealis), an eager novice. They’re joined by the Ohio thespian Buck Buchanan (Erik Lochtefeld) and Susan’s childhood friend John Gough (Joe Tapper). They take on a couple who claim to be English (Jeremiah Kissel and Kelly Hutchinson) but are obviously inauthentic both as Brits and as a couple (he’s gay), and an older character man (Jon De Vries). Their star is a handsome drunk and sometime celebrity (Chris Henry Coffey) who just got thrown out of another company; his wife, a gifted actress to whom he has just become reconciled, begs to come along too.

The play, which is performed without an intermission, is episodic; the problem is that it’s also misshapen. It begins as a genial — and not terribly eventful — comedy, but halfway through it makes an abrupt tonal shift, as the troupe is beset by internal and external difficulties. Handling the personal problems of the actors (illness and sexual jealousy), Nelson veers into melodrama. Then, when the actors land in South Dakota and find themselves drawn into the Indian wars, the play becomes didactic and heavy-handed as the playwright feels the need to address the themes of racism and religious intolerance. For a space, the troupe is broken up and Buck winds up being adopted by religious zealots who teach him to shoot at Native Americans and blacks. This dreadful section, which is reminiscent of the worst excesses of Little Big Man, is jarring; I felt as if I’d wandered into some other play. Moreover, the drama keeps getting interrupted by narration shared by the ensemble in the old-fashioned reader’s-theater style, in which each character describes his or her own actions.

Still doing it

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:00:25 GMT

A Chorus Line at the Opera House
In the finale of A Chorus Line , 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands.

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION? The premise may be dated, but the staging continues to look great.

In the finale of A Chorus Line, 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands. Created by production teammates director/choreographer Michael Bennett, scenic designer Robin Wagner, and lighting designer Theron Musser, this is one of the all-time great images of the musical stage. In the touring edition of the show now at the Opera House (through 12 October), it’s been re-created under the direction of Bennett’s long-time associate Bob Avian, and it still glitters.

The show-biz gypsy’s highest aspirations are ironically fulfilled in this glamorous but banal chorus of high-shouldered, hat-doffing kicks and anonymity. A Chorus Line has no plot, really, only the stories of the hopefuls as they’re put through their paces by a hardbitten director, Zach, and his dance captain, Larry. The initial workshop process, during which Bennett coaxed real chorus dancers to pour out the painful personal stories that were developed into the script, has become as much of a legend as the show itself.

A Chorus Line isn’t about the great American success story — a star-is-born sort of thing. Instead, it’s about modest talent, hardship, desperation, getting old, and what you do for love. More than three decades after its premiere, the show is still entertaining, but I’m not sure the triumph of the little guy is still a poignant theme. Or that even dancers do anything for love any more.

The show begins with a stageful of boys and girls [sic] in practice clothes running through dance combinations as Zach scans them to make the first cut. They sing about how they need this job, but what we learn as Zach interviews them is that they probably don’t need the money so much as the personal validation. They’ve all constructed some identity for themselves, and dancing is what makes them feel real.

In 1975 we didn’t know much about teenage sexual experiments, abusive parenting, surgical body enhancement, or the homosexual underground — at least, nobody talked about those things in a mainstream show. Under Zach’s sadistic prodding, the auditionees reveal these intimacies as part of their tryout. Their stories now seem not quite ordinary but not quite shocking, either. As played by Michael Gruber, Zach seems more sympathetic, almost likable, and — miked to the max — the show plays for its surface glamor and expertise rather than its darkness.

Fall on the boards

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:16:36 GMT

From A Chorus Line to Tennessee Williams and the Grinch
There are tours to the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Italy, Iraq, the Aran Islands, and even the Underworld on area stages this fall.

CHAPLIN-ESQUE Aurélia Thierrée conjures a “topsy-turvy world of surreal surprises, tricks, and
transformations” in Aurélia’s Oratorio at the ART.

There are tours to the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Italy, Iraq, the Aran Islands, and even the Underworld on area stages this fall. We’ll meet the Devil on a couple of occasions. It’s an election year, so, no surprise, we’ll get politics both real and imagined. And as befits the state of the economy, the Grinch will show up to steal Christmas before Thanksgiving. Just don’t look for Brigadoon: the village of the title may loom out of the Scottish mists once every 100 years, but it won’t be this one. The pre-Broadway tryout scheduled for the Colonial Theatre has been postponed.

Not to worry: there’s still lots of real estate on the rialto. Already up and running: the replication of Michael Bennett’s iconic pre-reality-show musical, A CHORUS LINE (at the Opera House through October 5); the Huntington Theatre Company’s world premiere of Olivier- and Tony-winning playwright Richard Nelson’s HOW SHAKESPEARE WON THE WEST, about classical players strolling through the California Gold Rush (at the BU Theatre through October 5); and the American Repertory Theatre’s presentation of writer/performer/professor Anna Deavere Smith’s consideration of the human body, LET ME DOWN EASY (at the Loeb Drama Center through October 11). Here’s some of what’s on the horizon.

DOWNTOWN
With both Brigadoon and Harry Connick Jr.’s turn in the Broadway-bound “new Gershwin musical” Nice Work If You Can Get It gone up in smoke, the Broadway Across America/Boston season has become spring-loaded. There is, however, the touring production of the Broadway hit LEGALLY BLONDE: THE MUSICAL; based on the 2001 Reese Witherspoon flick about a pink-clad apparent airhead conquering Harvard Law, it conquers the Opera House October 28–November 9. Molière’s favorite religious hypocrite turns up a few days too early to get his lusty mitts on Elle Woods (though you know he’d like to) when California-based Dell’Arte Company brings its “daring adaptation” of the 17th-century French master’s TARTUFFE to the Cutler Majestic Theatre (October 25). Then Boston gets its first look at Broadway’s holiday-record-breaking heist of Whoville, DR. SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. Conceived and directed by three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien, the musical extravaganza about the meanie with the undersized heart comes to the Wang Theatre November 26–December 28.

New blood

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:23:31 GMT

ART and the Huntington (and Boston theater) get a youth transfusion
The famously adventurous American Repertory Theatre is soon to be taken over by a woman who spent her summer directing . . . the vintage Broadway hits Kiss Me, Kate and Hair ?

ROLL OVER, SHAKESPEARE: Diane Paulus turned the Bard on his ear in The Karaoke Show (top, based on The Comedy of Errors) and The Donkey Show (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

The famously adventurous American Repertory Theatre is soon to be taken over by a woman who spent her summer directing . . . the vintage Broadway hits Kiss Me, Kate and Hair? Meanwhile, across the river, the reins of the relatively staid Huntington Theatre Company are in the hands of a guy whose first directing job was with a guerrilla troupe occupying a squat in Prague — an abandoned Salvation Army Center that he and a band of burglarizing thespians broke into and turned into a theater? In light of these facts, the change in artistic directorship at the area’s largest regional theaters sounds less like a changing of the guard than an episode of Trading Spaces.

But there is more to Hair helmer Diane Paulus and lock-picker Peter DuBois than the biographical data above. The 42-year-old Paulus, who begins her tenure at ART in October, is a Harvard grad with directing credits as diverse as opera and The Donkey Show, the latter a ’70s-disco riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ran for six years off-Broadway. DuBois, 38, comes to the Huntington from New York’s Public Theater, where he was first an associate producer and then a resident director. Before that, he was for five years artistic director of Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, a midsize regional company that during his tenure grew to be the state’s largest-arts-producing organization. Both of these hires represent an infusion not just of new blood but of still-pulsing hormones: Paulus replaces a 60 year old who five years earlier supplanted a 75 year old. DuBois takes over from a 70 year old. In an age of graying theater audiences, this is a good thing.

DuBois joined the Huntington this past December as artistic director elect and replaced outgoing honcho Nicholas Martin full-time in July. His stint as AD-in-waiting was, as he characterizes it, “fast and furious,” with the planning of his first season interspersed with freelance directing gigs that included Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw for Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays and a restructured version of Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre. Paulus, who succeeds the abruptly departed Robert Woodruff, will not put her imprimatur on a season until 2009–’10. As she sets about hatching it, she fulfills commitments to direct Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito for Chicago Opera Theater and Death and the Powers — with music by MIT’s Tod Machover, libretto by BU’s Robert Pinsky, and story by her writer-husband, Randy Weiner — at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo. Now both Paulus and DuBois will be turning in their passports to put down roots in Boston.

Old wives’ tales

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:47:58 GMT

Follies at the Lyric; We Won’t Pay! by the Nora
A pretty girl is less like a melody than like yesterday’s news in Follies , the New York Drama Critics Circle Award–winning 1971 musical that lost money but became the stuff of legend.

FOLLIES: The Lyric fields a heroic revival of Sondheim’s legendary 1971 musical.

A pretty girl is less like a melody than like yesterday’s news in Follies, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award–winning 1971 musical that lost money but became the stuff of legend. An amalgam of showmanship, nostalgia, and nostalgia for a certain kind of showmanship, the show is set in a faded New York theater about to be razed for a parking lot. The original production was inspired, in part, by a photo of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of what had been the Roxy Theatre. And the musical about former showgirls reuning at the scene of their one-time “follies” — both Ziegfeldian and romantic — features a fair share of emotional wreckage as well, the rubble of the heart raked by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim into a dizzying, dissonant swirl of moxy, heartache, and homage. There is no actual debris on stage at Lyric Stage Company of Boston, which fields a heroic revival (through October 11). But the sense of lives lived amid the grit of regret is very much present.

The seeds of this full if compacted production were sown in Overture Productions’ impressive 2003 concert staging of Follies at John Hancock Hall. Lyric honcho Spiro Veloudos, who directed that outing, is once more at the helm, with many of Boston’s no-longer-ingénue divas reprising their roles. And replacing Tony winner Len Cariou, who phoned in his performance, is Larry Daggett, who comes to the role of successful but scathingly dissatisfied Ben Stone with a string of Broadway credits and a powerhouse baritone that, paired with Leigh Barrett’s soprano deployed in its lush upper register on “Too Many Mornings,” brings the house down along with the first-act curtain.

Follies has its fanatical devotees as well as its detractors. Given the glorious pungency of the score, it’s hard to imagine being among the latter. But the metaphor and the atmosphere of the show, which shadows its aging returnees with hue-less ghosts of their younger selves, outshine James Goldman’s book, whose central storyline is mired in romantic cliché. It focuses on two couples that married wrong on the cusp of World War II, their illusions rekindled and disappointments deepened by this return 30 years later to the scene of the crime. Young lawyer Stone was involved with Sally Durant but married her roommate, Phyllis Rogers. On the rebound, Sally married Buddy Plummer, the salesman who adored her. Thrown back together amid the once hopeful and freewheeling friends of their youth, these four uncork regret and vituperation along with too much champagne. Their feelings explode in the brilliant final sequence: a “Loveland”-set vaudeville in which pert 1940s-esque numbers by their younger selves are followed by ghoulish, sassy, or heartbreaking turns by the principals. But much of what comes out of their mouths that is not song sounds like As the World Turns circa 1970.

Return of the screw

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:19:57 GMT

The Woman in Black haunts Gloucester Stage
Line up your goosebumps: Gloucester Stage is rushing Halloween with a bit of Victorian hokum entitled The Woman in Black.

GHOST PLAY: And there’s little one can say about the malevolent title character without giving away the gimmick.

Line up your goosebumps: Gloucester Stage is rushing Halloween with a bit of Victorian hokum entitled The Woman in Black (through September 14). Adapted from a 1983 ghost tale by novelist Susan Hill, Stephen Mallatratt’s two-man play adds meta-theatrics to the mystery swirling about Eel Marsh House, across Nine Lives Causeway, on the misty East Coast of England, where a young solicitor named Arthur Kipps is sent to sort out the affairs of a recently deceased dowager. In the novel, this “true story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy” is told in the first person by an older Kipps to counter the ghoulish exaggerations of his ghost-story-telling stepchildren. In the play, Kipps has hired an actor to help him turn his story into a performance that he hopes will exorcise the hangover willies of his unsettling youthful errand, if not its fateful after-effect. I must say it all struck me as tedious and silly, and the play-within-a-play trick really slows things down. But the work has been running for almost 20 years in London — can two decades worth of the satisfactorily spooked be wrong?

At Gloucester Stage, the show begins on a rudimentary stage thrust out from a squat, gilded proscenium. Furniture is blanketed. A few trunks are stacked. The rehearsal-ready set looks like a thing designed by Miss Havisham. (David Reynoso actually did the honors.) Quite suddenly the lights go up on Steven Barkhimer as an awkward older Kipps nervously clearing his throat before droning from a script as thick as the phone book. He is soon interrupted from the house by Shelley Bolman’s boyish but merciless actor coach, admonishing him to perk it up and threatening to make “an Irving” — not an Olivier or Gielgud — of him. Although Hill wrote her story in the 1980s, it’s clear she styled it after Victorian prose of the genre, with echoes of Charles Dickens and Henry, not to mention M.R., James. And Mallatratt retains the writerly, melodramatic feel of the narrative. But to me the tale, full of fog and fright and the vehicular equivalent of the headless horseman, sounds more like parody than the thing itself.

Body politic

IRIS FANGER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:37:56 GMT

Interview: Anna Deavere Smith contains multitudes
Anna Deavere Smith is a writer/actor/activist who listens.

Anna Deavere Smith appears in Let Me Down Easy at the Loeb Drama Center September 12–October 11

Anna Deavere Smith is a writer/actor/activist who listens. She builds her award-winning one-woman, multi-character shows by conducting hundreds of interviews, then melding them into one devastating kaleidoscope of the causes and effects of a particular cultural trend or event. (Said events have included the race riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles.) She seems to inhale the diverse personalities of her interviewees whole, their words, their gestures, their postures, their gut feelings, exhaling them in a collage that is revelatory as both social commentary and human portraiture.

After teaching for a decade at Stanford University, Smith left California in 2000 for a dual appointment at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and its law school. The accolades for Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and House Arrest have included a MacArthur Fellowship, two Tony nominations, two Obie Awards, 17 honorary degrees, and being shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. But she’s probably best known for her role as Michael Douglas’s press secretary in Rob Reiner’s The American President and her subsequent television turn on NBC’s American President–influenced The West Wing. Next year she’ll be seen in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Here’s what she had to say about her latest one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, which the American Repertory Theatre is hosting starting next Friday.

Tell us something about this project.
I did the show at Yale, but I’ve changed it. My work always changes until I shut it down, so this is part of the process. I’ve been on a journey; it started in 2000 at the Yale School of Medicine, where I was invited to look at doctor-patient relationships, and I was so fascinated about how the patients spoke to me. I guess when you’re uncomfortable, or have had a bad experience, you want to talk. Basically, for my work in theater, I’m looking for people who want to talk. Now it’s really dealing with mortality, and about how we are with other human beings. I see it as a search for grace in a sometimes distressing world, and in the face of our inevitable mortality. I went to Rwanda to do research 10 years after the genocide; I went to the north of Uganda and talked to child soldiers and sex slaves. I went to South Africa to do research on AIDS, at a time when the president of the country was not acknowledging the disease; I went to the army hospital where they bring the soldiers who have been injured in Iraq. And I went to Katrina and spent time at a cancer center in Houston. It’s been a very long journey. What you won’t see but was in the show in New Haven was that I spent a lot of time talking to people who have no physical problems, who in fact make a living with their bodies: Lance Armstrong, supermodel Veronica Moss, Lauren Hutton, a boxer, a bull rider. The sports people are not in this version. I decided to focus more on spiritual than physical things.

Home invasion

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:14:06 GMT

Mishegas meets metaphor in Fabuloso
Fabuloso is about what happens to a vaguely disappointing marriage when a couple of maniacs show up at the door insisting they’re family.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: What to do when “family” come to call?

Fabuloso is about what happens to a vaguely disappointing marriage when a couple of maniacs show up at the door insisting they’re family. Once the light dawns that this wild ride is in fact a comic metaphor for the bedlam that comes with having children, the play seems both clever and rather sweet. Indeed, playwright John Kolvenbach penned the work, which is in its world premiere on Wellfleet Harbor Actors’ Theater’s Julie Harris stage (through September 6), in the wake of welcoming two sons in 15 months. The play can seem arbitrary, however, particularly as infants do not fight with knives, drink copious amounts of alcohol, or speak.

Here’s the ostensible premise. Kate, who works in a bank, and Teddy, a part-time girls’ soccer coach who considers himself a failure, are home of an evening in their one-bedroom apartment when Ted gets a blast from the past. Arthur, a motherless rich kid taken in by Ted’s family during his teen years but lost track of for two decades (and never mentioned to Kate), calls to say he’s coming over. Teddy, who doesn’t “want him to see me like this,” is thrown into a dither. But it gets to be 3 am, the former faux sibling hasn’t shown, and Kate’s in her underwear. Cue the knock at the door, whereupon Arthur blows in like a hyperkinetic, overemphatic Peter Pan. And he’s followed by a murderous Tinker Bell of a fiancée, against whom Arthur quickly arms Kate and Ted with their own kitchen knives. We will learn that Samantha often threatens Arthur with bodily harm: it’s one of the adorable pair of adult-size children’s favorite games. The immediate source of her ire is her discovery that the family her intended has taken her to meet are made up entirely of hired impostors. Running for his life, Arthur has brought his love to be embraced by the only family he knows: Teddy.

Sunny chaos, alternating with melodramatic chaos, ensues. Arthur and Samantha drink wine and eat Fluff in the host couple’s bed, borrow their clothes, keep them up all night, include them in a carefully choreographed dance routine to a 1920s vaudeville ditty (for which an old-fashioned record player has been ordered in the wee hours), engage in an elaborate game of playing dead, and clearly have no intention of leaving. Arthur’s happiest years were the five he spent playing Spin to Teddy’s Marty, and for him the new arrangement, albeit cramped, is “paradise found.” At first Teddy, too, reverts to childhood, forcing Kate into the role of Ms. Mom. But confidences are exchanged, guns are brandished, and eventually regression leads to rebirth: of Teddy’s flopped ego as well as of his and Kate’s marriage. As for the grown-up rug rats, in their ascots with pajamas and cocktail dresses, they’re both cute and exhausting — like the play.

Dysfunction junctions

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:53:20 GMT

Spelling Bee in Beverly; The Goatwoman in Lenox
“Have you ever been in a gymnasium in the round before?” asks one of the participants toward the top of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at North Shore Music Theatre.

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE: Emy Baysic is all perky defiance as the over-programmed Asian prodigy.

“Have you ever been in a gymnasium in the round before?” asks one of the nerdy participants toward the top of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at North Shore Music Theatre (through August 31). And yes, it is strange to witness this delightfully quirky musical set in a middle-school gym in NSMT’s large arena. But the ad lib reflects what’s best about William Finn & Rachel Sheinkin’s unlikely Broadway hit: the oft-ironic witticisms and asides that trump Finn’s catchy but unmemorable score and the feel-good-about-yourself message that’s built into the small-scale songfest in which six young adults play nervous, oddball adolescents vying for top orthographic honors — plus a chance at national glory — at a county spelling bee.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee began life as an original improvisational play called C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E (take that to Broadway) created by Rebecca Feldman and a group called the Farm. The musical version — which retains an improvisational edge in that it includes several audience members as spellers — began life in 2004 at the Pittsfield–based Barrington Stage Company, which claimed the right to the first regional production following the show’s odyssey to Broadway. The NSMT staging, directed by Jeremy Dobrish, is a co-production with Barrington Stage that has been reworked for the round. And though the hyperactive adolescent excitement seems smaller than it did when the show played at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, the show’s geeky, idiosyncratic charm for the most part survives the transition from proscenium to doughnut.

The spelling bee has become a pervasive metaphor of late, from the Myla Goldberg novel Bee Season (which became a 2005 film) to the 2006 movie Akeelah and the Bee to the documentary Spelling Bee. But none of those features the outlandish likes of stocky, sloppy William Barfee, who suffers from a “mucus-membrane disorder” as well as from a nut allergy so acute he can’t be in the presence of still-packaged peanut M&Ms and who spells with the aid of a “magic foot” snaking in script across the floor. Neither do they offer hippy-dippy, home-schooled Leaf Coneybear or pint-sized gay activist Logainne Schwarzandgrubenierre, whose impossible last name joins those of her two pressuring dads. Really, as these linguistic warriors deploy their painful backstories and hifalutin phonemes, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Suspicion

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:59:40 GMT

Othello at Shakespeare + Company, Doubt at Gloucester Stage
With John Douglas Thompson’s Moor, more is evidently more.

OTHELLO The big gestures here are earned.

With John Douglas Thompson’s Moor, more is evidently more. The bristling African-American actor was a fiery Othello at Trinity Repertory Company in 1999 and a more varied if less volatile one at the American Repertory Theatre in 2001. Now he’s the breaking heart of an anxious, atmospheric staging of the tragedy — the first in its 30-year history — by Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company.

Inspired by the paintings of Goya and set in the 1820s, director Tony Simotes’s Othello (in repertory through August 31) is shadowy yet exuberant, stormily scored by composer Scott Killian and pushed along by Michael Hammond’s Iago, who is unusually hail-fellow and hearty, even in the soliloquies wherein he improvises his plan to deploy “the green-eyed monster” against the black general who has passed him over for promotion. Plotting to convince Othello of his new wife’s unfaithfulness, the ensign promises to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch” — at which Hammond claps his hands with such flamboyance you think he might jig. Moreover, the scoundrel’s interactions with the other characters are marked by a forcible if friendly energy that might warn but rather charms them, perhaps seeming as “free and open” as the nature of the Moor.

With its blatant villain making up the plot as he goes along, Othello is one of the Bard’s most straightforward tragedies. Not to mention, with its bestial imagery, one of his most vividly written. And like all Shakespeare & Company productions, this one is very well spoken, especially by the chiseled Thompson, who ventures to give the Moor a light African accent (as well as an African off-duty wardrobe). Although the actors’ tongues race as swiftly as the production does, slowing down only to prolong the agony of Desdemona’s tender murder, you hear every word, and the imagery sticks deep.

Like many modern productions, this one tries to tie Othello more to the racism of our time than to that of Shakespeare’s. Not only is Venice’s hired general black, so is LeRoy McClain’s Cassio — which makes Iago less a creature of what Coleridge called “motiveless malignity” than a man chafed by affirmative action. And Hammond’s Iago exhibits more motive than most: he does seem to brood both on being passed over for the lieutenancy bestowed on Cassio and on the possibility that Othello or Cassio (or both) may have slipped between his sheets. Cuckoldry, real or imagined, is a potent thing in the very masculine world of this Othello, part of the tragedy of which is that men trained to violence, without any war to fight after the enemy’s convenient drowning, are shored up on Cyprus with nothing to do but play drinking games and brawl.

Vintage mirth and vintage laughter

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:41:35 GMT

Hay Fever at the Publick; A Flea in Her Ear in Williamstown
Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband.

HAY FEVER Ignorance is Bliss — or maybe it’s the other way around — in Noël Coward’s vintage
piffle.

The drawing room moves outdoors at the Publick Theatre, which fields an al fresco staging of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners, Hay Fever (in rep through September 14), that whips the vintage piffle into a paradoxical froth of lightweight histrionics. Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband, J. Hartley Manners, who penned the hoky Peg o’ My Heart for her. If so, Coward was probably not invited back, for the Blisses of Hay Fever are hardly portrayed as heavenly hosts. In less than 24 hours, the self-absorbed and self-dramatizing quartet of actress mom Judith, novelist dad David, adult son Simon, and 19-year-old daughter Sorrel, each of whom has invited a weekend guest without informing the others, manage to drive their company not only out the door but over the edge.

Described by Sorrel, the sole still impressionable Bliss, as “slapdash,” the bickering and eccentric family unit revolves around Judith, who may for the moment have retired from the stage but can no more retire from drama than she can from breathing. Neither can she be weaned from the adulation beamed across the footlights, so she’s asked athletic young blockhead Sandy Tyrell to spend the weekend making eyes at and declarations to her. David has invited a diffident and somewhat dithering flapper, Jackie Coryton, whom he wishes to study “in domestic surroundings” with an eye toward turning her into fiction. Sorrel’s guest is the dapper, much older “diplomatist” Richard Greatham; Simon’s is a sultry Mrs. Robinson of a London socialite called Myra Arundel, whom his mother accuses of using sex “like a shrimping net.” There is, moreover, only one desirable guest room (the second best is referred to as Little Hell), and the meager staff are under the command of Mom’s former dresser, the lackadaisical Clara, who’s generous with neither tea nor sympathy.

The brief weekend evolves over three acts, which director Diego Arciniegas has trimmed to less than two hours including intermissions. So even though the action consists of little more than petulance, posturing, and the plotting of escape, it’s easy to be charmed and hard to be bored as the Blisses conduct their delicate grandstanding, first disregarding, then swapping, then ensnaring their guests in arbitrarily conjured romantic melodramas that culminate in a reprise of Judith’s own Peg o’ My Heart, a cheesy potboiler called Love’s Whirlwind.