The Scene

Hartford Stage, Hartford
through May 4, 2008
April 13, 2008
By Donna Bailey-Thompson

This lively, well-written play bears one essential resemblance to the sophisticated drawing room comedies of yesteryear: actors perform. And oh my, do they! Warts and all. The first act is awash in superficiality. By intermission I didn’t care about any of the four characters. If I had not returned for the second act, I would have crafted an ending and it would have been deader than a doornail wrong. Or, said another way, "Don’t judge a book by its cover," because in Act 2, the covers come off.

Here’s some of what is learned in Act One. Clea (Christy McIntosh) has come to NYC from Ohio bringing her annoying Valley Girl sing-songing mannerisms with her. Lewis (Liam Craig) is a bachelor and faithful friend to Charlie (Matthew Arkin) an actor who has not landed a role worthy of his talent in several years, and to Charlie’s wife, Stella (Henny Russell) who hates everything about her work she loves. (Yes, you read that right.) On a rooftop exposed to the city’s light-twinkling skyline, Cleo prattles on to Lewis and Charlie about being interviewed by a woman she describes as a "Nazi Priestess," not realizing that the woman is Stella. Not that Cleo would care: she is hedonistically uncaring. However, she is sensitive to Charlie’s body language and tone as it applies to her and she challenges him to be honest. In spite of his initial dislike of the airhead, he allows himself to be drawn into her web. Exasperated, he exclaims, "How can you know so much and so little at the same time?"

Surely all four actors were recruited from Central Casting: they are ideal in roles they honed at the George Street Playhouse (New Brunswick, NJ), with whom Hartford Stage has formed a new partnership – an alliance that fosters the artistic and business needs of any successful theater.

Playwright Theresa Rebeck headlines her blog with this revealing quote, "As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me." She dips into her characters’ subterranean closets and while there, she eschews cheap jokes and instead burnishes lines that range from ruefully funny to piercingly hysterical. And in the process, she crafts a dynamite script.

The Bluest Eye

Hartford Stage, Hartford
Through April 20, 2008
By Bernadette Johnson

“There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941,” begins the narrative to a backdrop of sheets hung out to dry. As the sheets are taken down and folded, a simple set is disclosed gently and deliberately, as are the ugly secrets and the harsh realities in the coming of age of Pecola Breedlove (Adepero Oduye), a poor, 11-year-old black girl growing up in Ohio in the 1940s. Pecola’s family life, such as it is, is defined by an abusive father’s drunkenness and a mother’s bitterness.

Based on Toni Morrison’s Nobel-prize-winning novel of the same name, the play unfolds through a combination of convincing dramatic portrayals and transitional commentaries, offered sympathetically by Pecola’s grammar school friends, sisters Claudia (Bobbi Baker) and Frieda (Ronica V. Reddick), who share their perspectives (as adults) on Pecola’s tragic vulnerability.

Society’s mirror tells Pecola she is ugly. She prays for blue eyes, not to see the world differently, but to be seen differently, like the little white girls that fill the pages of her “Dick and Jane” reader.

Oduye expertly conveys Pecola’s angst through her remoteness and wistful reflection: her stooped shoulders, her cringing, her expectation of rejection. Particularly heartrending is her explanation of disappearing, piece by piece, except for her eyes, which, of course, she “sees” as blue.

Baker, on the other hand, adds pathos and humor as she releases her pent-up anger and jealousy of “white girls” by beheading and dismembering her white doll.

Also offering comic relief are Ellis Foster’s dissertations (as Daddy) on kindling and coal, and Miche Braden’s mock diatribe (as sharp-tongued but compassionate Mama) on milk consumption. There is so much more: Silhouettes, gossiping women, a magician, stardust, Braden’s soulful Gospel hymns and a dramatic storm that floods the stage.

Through it all, Pecola’s inner storm rages unceasingly. She carries her emotional scars with her straight through to a chilling, but not totally unexpected, ending. This is drama at its finest.

"Zerline's Tale"

Hartford Stage, Hartford CT
through February 10, 2008
By Donna Bailey-Thompson

The accomplished actress Elizabeth Ashley in, essentially, a one-woman play, holds an audience’s attention for 75 minutes as she stirs a cauldron of major emotions that stem from a time in Zerline’s life. Burbling from the past into the present are desire, jealousy, abandonment, revenge, all woven into a narrative that Ashley spins with the skill and aplomb of a Scheherazade. As Zerline tells her story, she re-experiences the feelings that surfeited her being forty years earlier. Within an aging female servant, there still lives a flirtatious country girl, once innocent but now worldly wise, who revels telling about her romances, and who especially relishes the memories of perfect bliss and of schemes to avenge her heartache.

Ashley as Zerline represents the epitome of type casting. She’s the right age (she comfortably acknowledges she is 68). Like Zerline, to borrow a reference to Agnes Gooch, she’s lived. Among her professional kudos is the Tony Award she won when 22. In 1974 when 34, she sizzled as Maggie in a Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." In 2005 in Hartford Stage’s "Cat..." she was Big Mama ("Elizabeth Ashley’s Big Mama endures her husband’s verbal abuse; across her face play waves of grief as she braces for his fatal illness.") As Zerline, a maid who absorbed many of her employer’s refinements, her fluid gestures reflect her study of ballet, lo so many moons ago.

Adapted and translated by Jeremy Sams, this is the American premiere of "Zerline’s Tale" and the first English-language production. The play is based on one chapter from a novel, "The Guiltless," by Hermann Broch.

Scenic Designer Alexander Dodge has replicated a typical small bedsitting room in a substantial European home – high ceiling, mammoth wardrobe, a shuttered window, a fireplace that burns large chunks of coal, a narrow bed, and more – and two people occupy that space, Zerline and Man (Jon David Casey) who is almost as mute as Zerline is verbose. Casey is attentive, caught up in Zerline’s memories. Let’s face it: we’re all suckers for a good story well told.

This polished production is Director Michael Wilson’s ninth project with Elizabeth Ashley, a collaboration that works exceedingly well.

“Chick: The Great Osram”

Hartford Stage through Nov. 11th
By Shera Cohen

This biographical play of arts entrepreneur Arthur Austin had to be presented in Hartford. Better known as Chick, this was the man who became the director of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, bringing it to its heyday in the 1930s. Presented in 90-minutes, without intermission, the play is essentially three long monologues. One might think, well, that can’t possibly work. However, with the skill of two excellent actors, it can.

Chick was a man whose passion was visual art. He hated the exhibit goers who looked at a painting (modern, Picasso-like art) and asked: “What does it mean?” To him the meaning was inconsequential. It meant feeling, love, a tingling of sensations that made each piece alive. In many ways “Chick” is a lesson in art appreciation. Although didactic in parts, it is a subject that this reviewer learned much from. Through the exposition of only two characters, we become familiar with and understand the life that was Chick’s.

Robert Sella (Chick) makes a bizarre entrance in a wizard costume. His exit in the final scene is equally odd. Sella portrays the man as over-the-top as is necessary for who the real Chick was – the life of the party, a name-dropper, buddies with the rich and famous, and yet a man with a façade. Sella has a lot of work to do in this tour-de-force role. He is perfect for the job.

His real-life wife, Enid Graham, portrays Chick’s wife Helen. While living the high life, this is a woman portrayed with vulnerability, lack of confidence, and inner torment. The purposeful hesitation in her words as she speaks to the audience as her confidants is an easy, instant give-away of what is to come.

Playwright David Grimm’s dialogue is elegant and artful, with the words depicting the characters that speak them so well that this could have been a radio drama and essentially achieve the same goals. There are many lines that should later be quoted by anyone interested in the arts.

A short video of the Wadsworth’s Paper Ball is shown between two of the acts. Many in the audience seemed to be familiar with this spectacle. One wonders, however, if this play would work as well on tour, or if it must and can only be presented at Hartford Stage.

“I Am My Own Wife”

Hartford Stage, Hartford
Through May 13
By Bernadette Johnson

Phew! What an exhausting role! James Lecesne makes it look easy. He does a phenomenal job in this one-man show that is peopled with a cast of at least 34 characters (count them in the program), including the play’s author himself. Lecesne never leaves the stage and shifts seamlessly from one character to another with a simple twist or turn, changing voice, intonation, posturing, and even languages, speaking German just as fluently as English (though this reviewer does not know German, a patron was heard to remark that his German was excellent). Much credit is due to vocal and dialect coach Ralph Zito.

Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning “I Am My Own Wife” chronicles the true (or mostly true) tale of Lothar Berfelde, a woman in a man’s body, aka Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a celebrity in her own right, museum curator/obsessive collector of antique furniture, gramophones and music machines of all sorts. Berfelde was a transvestite caught up in the maelstrom of World War II Germany and the ensuing Russian invasion, whose museum basement became a gathering place for the persecuted gays and lesbians of the Nazi/Communist regimes. It is also revealed that key to her survival was her role as an informant.

Lecesne is most convincing and fascinating as the incredible Charlotte. Other roles, that of the play’s author in particular, though still most remarkable, were sometimes hurried and confusing. With very little to work with, simple props and therefore, few distractions for the audience, Lecesne is totally focused, the quintessential story-teller.

Kris Stone (scenic design) and Marcus Doshi (lighting) depict a museum that is ornate in its very simplicity, a backdrop, a supporting character of sorts, in which the gramophone figures prominently.

Be prepared to wonder. Be prepared to laugh. Be prepared to enter into the intrigue.

“Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner”

Hartford Stage, Hartford
through April 1
By Bernadette Johnson

Hartford Stage has little onstage, but a lot on its plate with Luis Alfaro’s comedy, or more aptly, tragi-comedy, a tale of two sisters with voracious appetites — one for food, the other for sex — and both with unresolved issues.

The script is never rolling-in-the-aisles funny, though there are many chuckles and some interesting commentaries on life and human foibles. The audience is expected, however, to swallow a great deal as Minerva, the food-crazed sister, balloons from obese to buoyant and literally “lifts off.” This script is not tethered in reality.

That said, Elisa Bocanegra as Minerva is outstanding and convincing. She struggles as much physically with her ever-expanding girth — difficulty walking, labored breathing — as she does psychologically, with its impact on her life. (Kudos to costume designer Christopher Acebo — Minerva’s added pounds look “natural”). Minerva’s monologue “letters” to Mee Chee, a “fat-farm” soul mate, are moving and tender, and Bocanegra infuses vulnerability. Yetta Gottesman as Alice is pert and saucy, and the “love” scenes with “Officer” Fernandez (James Martinez) are refreshingly uninhibited.

Act two introduces odd elements that for some strange reason, the other characters — Felix Solis as Minerva’s understanding husband Al among them — accept as normal, and the plot thickens, but never quite solidifies. The play’s end is ambiguous — leaving the audience wondering what really happened.

The “simple scene” changes are fast-paced (aptly by stagehands dressed as chefs), though perhaps too frequent and distracting, and a refrigerator and beds figure prominently. Perhaps more aptly titled “Bed and Breakfast,” “BL&D” is a lot to digest. As Alice tells Fernandez late in Act II, not only do “We never quite get what we want,” but we don’t even have a clue as to what that might be. It’s simply not on the menu.