W E D N E S D A Y, J A N U A R Y 7 , 2 0 1 7
‘The House of Blue Leaves’ Review: John Guare’s Dark Mischief
In this revival of the 1971 play, a talentless songwriter considers trading in his life in Queens with a depressed wife for a shot at Hollywood with his gold-digging neighbor. BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Fort Myers, Florida Photos by Nick Adams
Rachel Rachel he Burttram, hel Buurt rrtt t ram m, Greg Gre rreg eeg Longenhagen, Loongenh hagen, Carrie Carr arrrriiee Lund arr
Even though he ranks among America’s foremost living playwrights, John Guare’s work isn’t done nearly often enough in New York. This season’s Broadway revival of “Six Degrees of Separation” will be that play’s first major New York staging since the original production closed in 1992. That struck me as reason enough to catch the Florida Repertory Theatre’s revival of “The House of Blue Leaves,” an identically important play that received a big-ticket Broadway revival in 2011 (David Cromer was the director, Ben Stiller and Edie Falco the stars) that inexplicably failed to ring the box-office bell. That version was outstanding in every way—but so is this one, directed with unshowy, profoundly comprehending skill by Chris Clavelli. That’s no surprise, since Florida Rep is one of America’s top regional companies. But “The House of Blue Leaves,” first performed in 1971, is a fearsomely and famously tricky play to bring off, for it illustrates Mr. Guare’s pithy dictum that “farce is tragedy speeded up.” It’s the story of Artie (Greg Longenhagen), an inept blue-collar songwriter from Queens whose wife, Bananas (Rachel Burttram), is clinically depressed beyond hope of cure. He’s fallen in love with Bunny (Carrie Lund), his downstairs neighbor, a brassy golddigger who believes, God knows why, in the commercial potential of Artie’s songs (one of which rhymes “comical” with “yarmulke”) and wants him to send Bananas to an insane asylum, go to Hollywood and make his fortune—meaning her fortune. As is his wont, Mr. Guare plays this dire situation for belly laughs, mixing in such unlikely supporting characters as a trio of ditsy nuns (Viki Boyle,Michelle Damato and Jason Parrish). But you are never allowed to lose sight for long of the dark desperation of Artie and Bananas, and when things go definitively sour, first with a
bang and then a whimper, the laughter gives way to gasps—and tears. Imagine, if you can, an episode of “The Honeymooners” rewritten by Eugène Ionesco: That’s “The House of Blue Leaves.” Mr. Clavelli and seven of the 11 members of his cast are longtime members of Florida Rep’s regular core ensemble. They’ve worked together repeatedly, and it Michelle Michel Mic he le l Damato, Dam maato atto to, Lee Fitzpatrick, Fit itzpa zpp tri trick ck, shows: This is the Viki Vikki Boyle, Boyyle, Jasonn Parrish Parris Par rish h kind of production whose uncanny stylistic unanimity helps to weld together the play’s seemingly disparate parts. To single out any one of the actors for particular praise would do the others an injustice, for they are all marvelous. Their performances are at once deliberately, anti-naturalistically broad—that, too, is Mr. Guare’s way—and as true to felt life as Ray Recht’s set, a pitifully shabby apartment that looks as though it hasn’t seen the wet end of a mop for at least a decade. The best American regional theater is as good as it gets, Broadway not excluded. But if I had to pick one show from the past few seasons to epitomize its excellence, it might well be Florida Rep’s “House of Blue Leaves.” It’s one of the finest stagings of a John Guare play that I’ve ever seen, anywhere.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
"Florida Rep is One of America's Top Repertory Companies!" THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
T H U R S D AY, J A N U A RY 7 , 2 0 1 6
‘The Cocktail Hour’ Review: Anatomy of a WASP BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Fort Myers, Florida Photos by Nick Adams
Peterr Thomasson, Thom Tho Th omass om asson ass on n, Carrie Carri Ca rriee Lund, rri Lun und, Brendan Brendan Powers
If A.R. Gurney had been born in 1900 instead of 1930, all of his major plays would have had long runs on Broadway and he would now be universally acknowledged as one of America’s leading playwrights. But his penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat came along a couple of generations too late to catch the wave of changing theatrical taste, and so he has never had a Broadway hit. Instead, his plays are regularly staged off Broadway and by smart regional companies from coast to coast. Be that as it may, Mr. Gurney is still one of the very best playwrights that we have, and The Cocktail Hour, which ranks among his finest efforts, is now being performed by Florida Repertory Theatre, one of the top regional troupes in the U.S. If all that sounds to you like a recipe for success, you’re not wrong: Florida Rep’s production, directed by Chris Clavelli, is the most satisfying staging of The Cocktail Hour I’ve ever seen.
First performed in 1988, The Cocktail Hour is a more-or-less autobiographical comedy about John (Brendan Powers), a youngish playwright who comes home to Buffalo, N.Y., the city where he (and Mr. Gurney) grew up, with a surprise up his sleeve for his priggish parents: His new play is all about them. The title? The Cocktail Hour, naturally—and it’s not a wholly affectionate portrait, either. Part of the Pirandellian joke is that Bradley (Peter Thomasson), the martini-mixing patriarch in whose handsome living room the action unfolds, didn’t much care for his son’s previous plays. “Are people going to scream and shout in this one?” he asks. Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet, as the well-mannered Bradley would never dream of putting it. Ann (Carrie Lund), John’s mother, has the best line, a two-way zinger aimed at drama critics who don’t get what her son is up to when he puts WASPs on stage: “They don’t like us, John. They resent us. They think we’re all Republicans, all superficial and all alcoholics. Only the latter is true.” But The Cocktail Hour contains plenty of other laughs, more than enough to briefly throw the
audience off the trail of Mr. Gurney’s intentions. For this is a serious comedy about a family whose members are at odds with one another but are too nice to admit it save for John, who longs with all his heart to break through the blank wall of gentility that separates him from his parents. That’s why he’s written a play about them—and why Bradley is willing to pay him a good-sized chunk of cash if he’ll agree not to let it be produced. I last saw The Cocktail Hour performed by Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in an 890-seat theater whose Broadway-sized stage was a couple of sizes too big for the show. Fort Myers’s 393-seat Arcade Theatre, by contrast, is just right, both for the play itself and for the staging. Mr. Clavelli, a longtime member of Florida Rep’s semi-permanent ensemble, is as adept a director as he is an actor (he played the challenging triple role in the company’s 2011 revival of Mr. Gurney’s Sylvia). He also has a home-court advantage: Three Kate Kaate Hampton, Hamp mpttton on, Brendan Brre ren en ndan nda an Powers an P wer Po wers we of his fellow ensemble members, Ms. Lund and Messrs. Powers and Thomasson, are in the cast, and they act as though they’d known one another for decades, which gives the show a striking air of artistic unanimity. The only outsider is Kate Hampton, who plays John’s older sister, but she fits in so well that you’d never guess she was a ringer. It isn’t easy to play genteel WASPs in a lively way without stooping to over-broad caricature. All praise, then, to Ms. Lund and Mr. Thomasson for steering clear of that fatal trap: They portray the upper-middle-class complacency of Ann and Bradley in a way that is at once comic and sympathetic. A case in point is the way in which Ms. Lund delivers her innocuous-sounding first line, “I’m bringing cheese!” The fluty spin that she puts on the word “cheese” reminded me of Dame Edith Evans’s unforgettably preposterous reading of the line “A handbag?” in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. You can’t get any funnier than that. Yet you never doubt that she’s playing a real person, one who may seem self-satisfied at first glance but has clearly known her full share of sorrow. All this is done with the lightest of touches. At no time does Mr. Clavelli’s cast let you forget that The Cocktail Hour is a comedy. The result is a show that keeps you chuckling— then puts a lump in your throat at evening’s end. Who could ask for anything more?
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T H U R S D AY, J A N U A RY 8 , 2 0 1 5
Lewis Black, Playwright
A bride-to-be’s ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend shows up on her parents’ doorsetp on her wedding day in Lewis Black’s ‘One Slight Hitch’ BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Fort Myers, Florida Ni k Adams Nic Adam Adam dam ams Photography Phot hotogr hotogr ograph ograph aappphy Nick
It isn’t unusual for actors to try their hand at playwriting, and some of them, like Zoe Kazan, do it very well. But except for Woody Allen, I can’t recall any working comedians who’ve been particularly successful at writing for the legitimate stage. (Unlike Mr. Allen, Steve Martin didn’t start writing plays until after he stopped doing stand-up.) This makes sense, since stand-up comedians are short hitters who work with a company of one. Plays call for a larger canvas, as well as a grasp of dramatic structure that is alien to the smash-and-grab methods of even the most inspired comics. Enter Lewis Black, who is best known for his appearances on “The Daily Show.” Mr. Black, who started out as a playwright but never had much luck at it, has taken another shot at bucking the odds with a two-act play called “One Slight Hitch” that’s been making the regional rounds and is now being performed by Florida Repertory Theatre, a top-notch company whose custom is to offer its audiences something light in January. On the surface, “One Slight Hitch,” a comedy about a wedding that goes haywire, fills the bill with ease—but Mr. Black’s play is more serious than it seems. The first surprise about “One Slight Hitch” is that it’s not at all the kind of play you’d expect from a stand-up comedian. Instead of being a slurry of one-liners held together by an exiguous plot, it’s a solidly built piece of theatrical carpentry about a nuclear family in comic crisis. From “The Philadelphia Story” (to which “One Slight Hitch” bears a definite resemblance) in the ’30s to “Never Too Late” in the ’60s, such plays used to be Broadway’s commercial stock in trade, but they’ve pretty much died off in recent years. Hence it’s a nostalgic treat to watch Mr. Black ring the changes on the once-familiar, still-hummable theme of what
happens to a seemingly happy, soon-to-be-wed couple (Rachel Moulton and Sid Solomon) when the ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend of the bride-to-be (Nate Washburn) shows up without warning at the front door of her horrified parents (Martin LaPlatney and Carrie Lund ) on the morning of her great big wedding. What gives “One Slight Hitch” its distinctive flavor is that Delia, the mother, is a member of the Greatest Generation who was forced to marry in haste and fear during World War II and has longed ever since to make up for it by putting together a super-wedding for one of her three daughters. Mr. Black’s brand of comedy has a strong political flavor, so it figures that Delia and her family should be staunchly Republican suburbanites. The twist is that Delia, as a shrink might put it, has insight into her condition, and expresses it with great poignancy in the play’s final scene: “We ache[d] for life, hoping to flood the world with innocent children, replacing the smell of death with baby powder….We tried to share that dream with you, our children, but the smoke had cleared and you couldn’t smell it.” That’s a tricky mix to manage, and “One Slight Hitch” doesn’t always jell, in part because the first act, which feels like the setup for a four-doors-and-a-guy-in-drag farce, is too loosely written (Mr. Black could have trimmed 10 minutes out of it). But the laughs flow freely after intermission, and Ms. Lund, one of the mainstays of Florida Rep’s semipermanent ensemble, is very much up to the challenging task of finding the emotional heart of Delia’s climactic monologue. Mr. LaPlatney is striking in a different but equally satisfying way as her husband, who responds to the rising tide of chaos in his household by paying one or two (or five) visits too many to the living-room bar. He gets most of the biggest laughs in “One Slight Hitch” and earns them all, though I was also struck by Georgia Mallory Guy, who plays the middle daughter, a nurse who goes in for serious drinking and casual sex (“Whose bachelor party was it?” “I’m not sure—it was so dark inside that cake”). Florida Rep has a knack for getting comedy right, and Chris Clavelli, who was wildly funny in the company’s 2011 production of A.R. Gurney’s “Sylvia,” turns out to be similarly accomplished as a director. It’s not easy to strike the right tone in a play like this, but Mr. Clavelli’s staging steers confidently down the center. Ray Recht, the set designer, knows just what a comfortable but nondescript Cincinnati living room would have looked like (the play is set in 1981) and has put it onstage with absolute fidelity. I hope that Mr. Black continues to prune the script of “One Slight Hitch,” but it’s already effective just as it is—enough so that I’d like to see him try writing a straight drama—and Florida Rep, not at all surprisingly, does it full and satisfying justice.
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F R I D AY, J A N U A RY 9 , 2 0 1 4
VINTAGE ‘LACE’
“Arsenic and Old Lace” Succeeds on Every Count! BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Fort Myers, Florida
Viki Vikki Boyle V Booyyylle and Bo and nd Carrie Caar Car C arrie ie Lund ie L nd Lu nd in in ‘Arsenic ‘A Arrse A ssen een nic ni ic and andd Old Oldd Lace’ Ol Lacce’ e’ Nick Nick Adams Nic N Adda dam ams Photography Phot hoottogr og aph pphhyy
most agile of screen farceurs, to overact so grossly that the plot is thrown out of balance, you may not realize that it's an uncommonly well-constructed piece of comic storytelling. The trick to making it work is for the leading actors to play it straight—albeit with a smile. Abby and Martha (Viki Boyle and Carrie Lund) are invincibly and adorably ignorant of the fact that their thoughtful little "charity" could land them in Sing Sing, just as Jonathan (Peter Thomasson), their renegade nephew, must come across not as a slapstick thug but as genuinely scary. And Mortimer (Michael Satow), the nice-boy nephew whom Mr. Grant played in the film, must steadfastly resist the temptation to stoop to scene-stealing muggery: He's the straight man, the fall guy who makes his colleagues look good.
It surely tells us something instructive about America in the 1940s that two of the best-loved stage plays of that turbulent and anxious decade were farces whose central characters are—not to put too fine a point on it—somewhat wrong in the head. Elwood P. Dowd, the genial hero of Mary Chase's "Harvey," is a booze-loving ne'er-do-well whose best friend is a 6-foot-tall white rabbit that only he can see. As for Joseph Kesselring's "Arsenic and Old Lace," it revolves around the skullduggeries of three multiple murderers, one of whom is an escapee from a prison for the criminally insane who looks just like Boris Karloff (and was played in the original Broadway production by Mr. Karloff himself). The other two are a pair of sweetly fluttery maiden aunts whose charitable causes include what they think of as mercy killing: They've poisoned a dozen lonely old men and stashed the corpses in the basement of their cozy Brooklyn home. That's a decidedly odd-sounding premise, yet "Arsenic and Old Lace" ran for 31/2 half years on Broadway, after which Frank Capra turned it into a hit movie, so it must have had something compelling to say to a nation at war. Though "Arsenic and Old Lace" hasn't been seen on Broadway since 1987, it continues to be mounted by high-school troupes and community theaters. Major-house regional stagings appear to be growing increasingly scarce, however—the last one I saw was at Baltimore's CenterStage in 2007—so I decided to check out Florida Repertory Theatre's revival, directed by Dennis Lee Delaney, both because of the sterling track record of that excellent company and because I was curious to find out how "Arsenic and Old Lace" would go over in the blood-soaked age of "Dexter." The answer is that it's still very, very funny, and that Mr. Delaney and his well-matched cast succeed in making every laugh count. If you know "Arsenic and Old Lace" only from the 1944 film version, in which Mr. Capra instructed Cary Grant, normally the
Mr. Delaney has made sure that these things happen—or don't—and the result is a staging that succeeds on every count. Ms. Boyle and Ms. Lund are absolutely perfect, but everyone else is memorable in all the right ways. Even the smaller supporting roles are vividly drawn (Jason Parrish, for instance, is a hoot as the bird-brained cop who almost gets Mortimer planted in the cellar). Richard Crowell's set, which suggests a Victorian dollhouse decorated by Edward Gorey, enhances the play's comic atmosphere without telegraphing its punches, as do Ashli Arnold's period costumes. "Arsenic and Old Lace" is set in "the present," meaning 1939, and Ms. Arnold hits the target squarely in the middle. The only thing that doesn't always come off is the incidental music. Mr. Delaney, who doubles as sound designer, has layered in a number of horror-flick background-music cues, presumably to underline the fact that Jonathan is a dead ringer for Mr. Karloff. Perhaps this idea might have worked more smoothly in a different house, but the music occasionally covers up the dialogue in Florida Rep's 400-seat Arcade Theatre, causing a few punch lines to misfire. That, however, is the only thing even slightly wrong with this charming revival of a comedy whose effectiveness is (so to speak) a mystery. Russel Crouse, one of the play's original producers, described it as follows: "It is not a homespun idyl of sweetness and light. Its principal characters are murderers or maniacs or both. Its love interest consists of several heatless scenes in which the juvenile tells the ingenue to go home and stop bothering him. It is as devoid of sex as a plate of corned-beef hash." Yet "Arsenic and Old Lace" continues to delight audiences at a time when you can turn on your television at any hour of the day or night and see a roomful of pretty-looking cops peering earnestly into a cadaver. No doubt it will return to Broadway yet again before long, exhumed to show off a sitcom star, and no doubt that production will be funny, too—but not a bit more than this one.
"Florida Rep is One of America's Top Repertory Companies!" THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
F R I D AY, J A N U A RY 1 4 , 2 0 1 3
Hunting ‘Foxes’ in Florida Fort Myers, Florida
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Carrie Lund & Sara Morsey in THE LITTLE FOXES
How good is "The Little Foxes"? It depends on what you're comparing it with—and how well it's done. Lillian Hellman's 1939 play about a greedy small-town merchant family is neither subtle nor poetic, and if it's performed in the manner of a hiss-the-villain melodrama, you'll go home feeling as though you'd just spent 2½ hours in a dentist's chair. But Ms. Hellman knew how to nail a plot together so tightly that the seams don't show, as well as how to ring down a curtain so hard that the audience gasps. Of such talents are sure-fire plays made. Do "The Little Foxes" right and it can't miss. The Florida Repertory Theatre is doing it very, very right, and the results are superlative. You've probably seen "Foxes" at least once, either onstage or in William Wyler's 1941 film version, so I'll limit myself to saying that Regina Giddens (played here by Sara Morsey) is one of the nastiest pieces of work in the history of American theater, a woman so determined to best her brothers (Mark Chambers and Peter Thomasson) in a shady business deal that she's more than happy to do it over her husband's dead body. Regina is so despicable, in fact, that the key to making "The Little Foxes" work is to keep her awfulness under wraps for as long as possible. An exaggerated performance will sink the show, but Ms. Morsey is careful to carry herself in the genteel manner of a Southern lady right up to the moment when she unsheathes her razor and starts slashing. You'll definitely believe her when she tells Horace (Craig Bockhorn), her sickly husband, that "I hope you die soon. I'll be waiting for you to die." Maureen Heffernan, the director, previously worked wonders with Florida Rep's productions of Brian Friel's "Dancing at
Lughnasa" and A.R. Gurney's "Sylvia." Hence it seems safe to say that she deserves much of the credit for steering Ms. Morsey away from the low road of premature overacting to which so many Reginas before her have succumbed. Here as before, Ms. Heffernan makes a point of not getting in between the play and the audience. Unlike the New York Theatre Workshop's horrendous high-concept 2010 revival of "The Little Foxes," in which Ivo van Hove transplanted the action of the play from 1900 to Right This Second in order to underline its continuing relevance, Ms. Heffernan takes it for granted that you're smart enough to figure out that kind of thing all by yourself. Nor does she stoop to exaggeration, not even for a moment: Everybody onstage behaves like a real person, and the plot twists are allowed to happen rather than being self-consciously detonated. It helps—a lot—that Florida Rep has so fine a group of actors on which to draw. Some of the cast members are part of the company's permanent ensemble, others guests, but all are well matched to their parts, especially Mr. Thomasson, who is satanically charming as Ben, the brother with the brains, and Carrie Lund, who comes within a whisker of stealing the show as Birdie, Regina's pitiful, downtrodden sister-in-law, who drinks to cover up the knowledge that she was married for her money. Ms. Lund snaps hungrily at every crumb of praise that the family flicks to her, knowing that's all she's going to get. The New York Theatre Workshop production, which sported the stalwart likes of Elizabeth Marvel and Cristin Milioti, was acted with a sumptuous skill that helped to paper over Mr. van Hove's directorial malpractice, but Florida Rep has nothing to apologize for: This cast is just as good. The crudities of "The Little Foxes," in which Ms. Hellman wore her Marxist politics like a bloody blouse, are so obvious that they need not be pointed out anymore. The point is that she embedded them in a plot so deftly wrought that it doesn't matter. Whatever your opinion of capitalism may be, "The Little Foxes" will sweep you along so briskly and self-confidently that only an ideologue would deny its theatrical effectiveness. Of course it's not a masterpiece—it's far too simple-minded to be great—but few American plays written in the first half of the 20th century have proved to be so durable, and Florida Rep's revival gets everything out of "The Little Foxes" that there is to be gotten. Photo Courtesy of Nick Adams Photography
"Florida Rep is One of America's Top Repertory Companies!" THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
F R I D AY, J A N U A RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 2
As Good As Broadway! BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Fort Myers, Florida
I'm delighted to report that Florida Rep's staging, directed with hair-trigger precision by Dennis Lee Delaney, is at least as good as the Broadway version, and better in one respect: The casting is less predictable. On Broadway, the presence of James Gandolfini and Jeff Daniels signaled from the start that the husbands weren't as nice as they looked. Not so Craig Bockhorn and Chris Clavelli, whose transformation into beasts of prey is a well-kept surprise. Shelley Delaney is properly insipid as Mr. Clavelli's mousy wife, and Carrie Lund couldn't be better as the self-righteous hostess Chris Clavelli & Carrie Lund in GOD OF CARNAGE
who disintegrates into sniveling hysterics as soon as she knocks back a stiff tot of rum.
"God of Carnage," whose film version was released a couple of weeks ago, had already been
Mr. Delaney's staging is so fine that you could
making the regional-theater rounds for the past
use it to teach students how to direct a
year and a half. Small wonder: Yasmina Reza's
farce—every piece of body language tells—and
four-character stage farce, which tells the tale of
Robert F. Wolin's ultramoderne living-room set
two well-heeled married couples who come to
tells you all you need to know about the social
blows after their children get into a playground
pretensions of the characters before they've said a
scrap, is a lightweight, deftly wrought comedy of
word out loud.
bad manners that can be mounted without breaking the bank (it requires a single set). Having reveled in Matthew Warchus's star-studded 2009 Broadway production, I was curious to see how "God of Carnage" would hold up when played by less familiar faces, so I flew down to Fort Myers to check out the Florida Repertory Theatre's production. Craig Bockhorn, Chris Clavelli, Carrie Lund & Shelley Delaney in GOD OF CARNAGE
"Florida Rep is One of America's Top Repertory Companies!" THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
F R I D AY, J A N U A RY 1 4 , 2 0 1 1
A Real Tail-Wagger Fort Myers, Florida
Michelle Damato, Gordon McConnell in SYLVIA
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
A.R. Gurney's "Sylvia," which is being performed with terrific comic energy by the Florida Repertory Theatre, is both clever and cute in all the right ways. First seen in New York a decade and a half ago, Mr. Gurney's droll tale of a dog who comes between a middle-age man and his frustrated wife has long since become a regional-theater staple, as well it should be. Not only is "Sylvia" one of the funniest small-cast plays of the past quarter century, but just beneath the surface it has serious things to say about the travails of what one of the characters calls "the dangerous years…the years between the first hint of retirement and the first whiff of the nursing home." Moreover, Mr. Gurney says them so amusingly that you almost fail to notice the sharp bite of the medicine of truth. The trick to "Sylvia" is that the title character, a stray poodle-Labrador mix, is played by a young woman (Michelle Damato) who is capable of conversing with her master (Gordon McConnell) and mistress (Carrie Lund) when no one else is around to eavesdrop. Greg, who found her in the park one day, is deep in the throes of a work-related midlife crisis. Accordingly, he falls for Sylvia in much the same way that another man might fall for a younger woman, much to the horror of Kate, his wife, who didn't want a dog in the first place and really doesn't want one on whom her husband dotes to the exclusion of everyone else, Kate included. Stir in a third actor (Chris Clavelli) who plays three smaller roles, two of them in drag, and you get a recipe for Gurney-style comedy, meaning that most of the laughs—many of which are very loud indeed—are faintly but unmistakably flavored with a jigger of rue.
I had to miss Long Wharf Theater's well-received revival of "Sylvia" in New Haven last March, so I decided to fly down to Fort Myers to see the play done by Florida Rep. Maureen Heffernan, who directed the lovely production of Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa" that I saw there two seasons ago, has done an equally fine job this time around. Here as before, her staging is blessedly free of obtrusive tricks: Ms. Heffernan appears to simply let the play happen, and though you know it's vastly more complicated than that, you never stop to think about how she did it. Ms. Damato is entirely delightful in the canine role created Off Broadway by Sarah Jessica Parker in 1995. Her frisky body language and dead-sure comic timing couldn't be bettered. Not that her colleagues are anything other than right on the button: Here as in the two previous Florida Rep shows I've seen, you get the feeling that you're watching a permanent ensemble at work on stage, one whose members know and trust one another.
I wonder how many of the citizens of Fort Myers know exactly how lucky they are to have access to a theater company like Florida Rep. It's easy for regional theatergoers to assume that to see the really good stuff onstage, you have to go to New York. But after three visits, I feel secure in saying that Florida Rep is one of America's top repertory companies, a troupe that consistently chooses strong plays and produces them with polish and imagination. They've yet to steer me wrong.
"Florida Rep is One of America's Top Repertory Companies!" THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
FEBRUARY 12, 2010
Florida Rep Production is
Satisfyingly True and Warm-Hearted Fort Myers, Florida You" opened more than a quarter-century ago, and professional productions have become comparatively rare. This is mainly because the play calls for a cast of 19, thus putting it out of the reach of cost-conscious regional companies, though the fact that Capra's film was so portentously windy doesn't help. Not so the Florida Repertory Theatre's festive new staging, which is as light and sweet as fresh-spun cotton candy.
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU John West & Christina Perez
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
The Pulitzer Prize for drama, like the best-picture Oscar, rarely goes to uncomplicatedly funny plays, but in 1937 the judges made a welcome exception and gave it to "You Can't Take It With You," the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy about an extended family whose variously eccentric members have all chosen to renounce worldly ambition and (as the saying goes) follow their bliss. A year later Frank Capra's film version knocked down a best-picture Oscar, thereby sealing the original play's long-standing reputation as a classic of American comedy.
Robert Cacioppo, the company's artistic director, has put together a nicely matched cast, rehearsed them to the hilt, and turned them loose on a set by Richard Crowell that is crammed to the ceiling with junk of every conceivable kind. The results are satisfyingly true to the warm-hearted humor of "You Can't Take It With You," a play that has been more influential than is generally realized (fragments of its comic DNA can be found everywhere from "Harvey" to "The Munsters"). Among many other good things, John West and Christine Perez play the romantic scenes absolutely straight, ensuring that they don't get lost in the general craziness. The word went out last week that Anna D. Shapiro, who directed the original production of "August: Osage County," will be staging "You Can't Take It With You" on Broadway next season. That's OK by me—the two plays have more in common than you might suppose— but Florida Rep's revival, like the splendid version of Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa" that the company mounted last year, sets the bar high for all comers.
Alas, the last Broadway revival of "You Can't Take It With
" F L O R I D A R E P S ET S T H E B A R H I G H ! ” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JANUARY 16, 2009
Chekhov’s Fingerprints Fort Myers, Florida
DANCING AT LUCHNASA Rachel Burttram, Michelle Damato, Carrie Lund
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Brian Friel, the greatest playwright of our time, is an Irishman whose works have the fingerprints of a Russian all over them. Anton Chekhov, Mr. Friel's master, wrote plays in which plot takes a back seat to atmosphere, and Russia itself is always the star of the show. As Mr. Friel has pointed out, Chekhov's flesh-and-blood characters "behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever -- even though they know in their hearts that their society is in meltdown and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. Maybe a bit like people of my own generation in Ireland today." Might it be this transnational spirit that also makes Mr. Friel's plays so accessible to American audiences and actors? Whatever the reason, the Florida Repertory Theatre, a company that could scarcely be further removed from Ballybeg, the imaginary Irish village where most of Mr. Friel's plays are set, is putting on a production of "Dancing at Lughnasa" so sympathetic and comprehending that you can all but smell the peat burning in the onstage stove. A cross between "Three Sisters" and "The Glass Menagerie," "Dancing at Lughnasa" is a semiautobiographical memory play whose narrator (Chris Clavelli) tells what happened to
his family during two summer days in 1936. Young Michael lives in a cottage with Chris (Rachel Burttram), his unmarried mother, and her four sisters, all of whom are barely making ends meet. The longings and frustrations of the Mundy sisters have grown too great to bear, and what was once a close-knit family is now -- like Europe itself -- on the verge of disintegration. The genius of "Dancing at Lughnasa" is that Mr. Friel has portrayed this sunset hour with the lightest of comic touches, letting the audience laugh as the black shadows that surround the Mundys grow imperceptibly longer. Much of the quiet beauty of this production arises from the fact that it is performed by what amounts to a near-permanent ensemble of Florida-based actors. They fit together like an oft-assembled jigsaw puzzle, and the unanimity with which they enact Mr. Friel's tragicomedy is profoundly satisfying. Of the five sisters, Ms. Burttram, Michelle Damato, Carrie Lund, Lisa Morgan and Jan Wikstrom, I can say nothing better than that they act just like a real-life family: Each one creates a wholly individual character, yet all give the impression of being cut from the same branch. Maureen Heffernan's staging is a model of creative taste. Though it abounds in subtle touches like the family-album tableaux that are sprinkled throughout the evening, she never lets any of her ideas get between you and the play. Likewise Ray Recht's thatched-roof set, in which kitchen-sink naturalism is leavened with similarly subtle touches of fantasy meant to remind the viewer that Mr. Friel is showing us the Mundy family through the scrim of memory. As Michael truly says in his closing monologue: "In that memory atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory." I confess to not having expected to run across so stirring a production of "Dancing at Lughnasa" a stone's throw from the Gulf of Mexico. Yet that is what Florida Rep has given us, and anyone unlucky enough not to have seen this modern masterpiece should make haste to Fort Myers, where the weather is warm and the theater fine.”
"PROFOUNDLY SATISFYING! Make haste to Fort Myers, where the weather is warm and the theatre fine!"
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL