Review: Mr. Pim Passes By is a lovely drawing-room comedy for a delightful evening

April Poland and Ryan Childers in Mr. Pim Passes By (Erik Stuhaug)

Most people know A.A. Milne, if they know him, from his wondrous creations in Winnie the Pooh. But he wrote many more stories and even plays. One of his theatrical creations is currently on stage at Taproot Theatre. Mr. Pim Passes By is what is termed a “drawing-room comedy,” taking place entirely in one room of a turn of the century house, and often focusing on manners of the time.

This gentle comedy has a lovely cast with just the right style of arch delivery, mostly from leading lady, April Poland. Poland plays Olivia Marden, fairly recent wife of the middle aged master of the manor, George Marden (Ryan Childers), a man set in his ways, but crazy about his new wife. Olivia never goes about stamping her foot and confronting her man. She seemingly meekly accepts his edicts (“No, you can’t put up patterned curtains in my established old home”), yet continues sewing curtains confident in finding a way to bend him around her finger and get her way.

Mr. Carraway Pim (Chris Ensweiler) is actually a mild-mannered occasional popper inner, who is mostly a device to deliver partial bits of information that stir the household into a tizzy. His remembering more bits of information and popping back in to deliver them creates continuing moments of changing tizzy. It’s enjoyable fun, though it doesn’t stack up to anything more meaningful. Drawing-room comedies general don’t.

The main pleasure is in watching the actors have fun with their characters, which they all do. A darling performance of note is the youngest character, a ward of Marden, Dinah (Allie Pratt) who folds Mr. Pim into the family and tells him all sorts of secrets in a charmingly offhand way. She is matched in her charm by Daniel Stoltenberg as her almost fiancée, Brian Strange, who, as a painter, does not earn enough for Marden to take him seriously as a suitor. Olivia must find a way to convince her husband that Brian will manage and he should let the match take place.

A fun cameo role of “Aunt” Lady Marden has Kim Morris sweep in and wave her hands about and strut out, and Ginny Hollady maintains social prestige as the maid. They are all veddy British, of course, and lovely costuming (as always) is reflected of the period by Sarah Burch Gordon.

Director Karen Lund is a past master at this type of play, with Taproot liking to produce so many of these lovely, light productions. And set and sound designer Mark Lund has done so many plays here that he probably has every measurement ingrained in his brain. They’ve got it down!

If an entrancing evening is desired and the most taxing thing you want to think about is to wonder whether Olivia really will solve everyone’s problems, this is definitely the play for you. Suitable for all ages. For more information, go to www.taproottheatre.org or call 206-781-9707. 

Review/Discussion: "A Great Wilderness" is a complicated, valiant effort

Braden Abraham and Samuel Hunter (Andry Laurence)

Playwright Samuel Hunter chooses uncomfortable characters or they choose him, as evidenced in his play, The Whale, about a morbidly obese man, and in the world premiere play, A Great Wilderness, now being presented at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Here, the uncomfortable character is an old man ending a career working as a gay-conversion therapist.

When we get invited to a play, we reviewer-types get press releases with blurbs written to entice audiences to come to the show, while encapsulating what it’s about. The Rep said this about this play:

Walt has devoted his life to counseling teenage boys out of their homosexuality at his remote Idaho wilderness camp. Pressured to accept one last client, his carefully constructed life begins to unravel with the arrival of Daniel. When Daniel disappears, Walt is forced to ask for help—both in finding the missing boy and reconciling his past with the present.

Sometimes, even when only reading the press releases once, and cursorily at that, their context can be very influential and not always in a very positive way. The phrase that resonated with me prior to seeing the play was “reconciling his past with the present.” In fact, after seeing the play, what was on the stage really had nothing to do with reconciling his past with the present.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hunter is demonstrably a brilliant, up-and-coming playwright and his challenging topics are gripping. In this play, he clearly desires to get inside of and “play around in” (no fun intended here) the mindsets of people he came into contact with as a boy in small-town Pacific Northwest who believe deeply in Scripture and have been taught that Scripture declares homosexuality a sin, and therefore, want to help anyone they know stop sinning, if at all possible. They have been told that homosexuality is a choice, that it is a “lifestyle,” that it is mutable. Therefore, they can influence someone and train him (usually him) out of it.

An industry developed, as we know, that worked to “cure” young boys of their sins of homosexual thoughts or actions, and psychology participated in the wrong-headed notion of mutability for many, many years. Often, this therapy was also given in a wilderness camp environment, a get-away from normal life in order to allow new ways of living to be cemented before returning.

Now, we are evolving, and we begin to understand that this is not a “choice” and not mutable. It is as biologically determinate as blue eyes or brown hair or left-handedness. And we know traits are dominant and recessive. Yet no one who is righthanded can change to being lefthanded without almost superhuman efforts after losing an arm, for instance.

We know that boys who went through this kind of conversion therapy were essentially told that they could not stay who they were, were sinners, and could be saved. We know that boys who went through this therapy sometimes committed suicide, probably because they couldn’t change and didn’t feel like there was any other choice left.

Hunter wanted to illustrate the issue with a man who he reveals in the play to have had homosexual feelings when younger, and by having dialogue that states that those who often feel drawn to be therapists in the field are probably those who struggled with the same feelings as the boys they take on as clients.

What we see on stage, however, does not nearly get to Walt, the older man, working to reconcile his past with his present. That would really be a longer play or a different play.

What is on the stage is more about the legacy of building something and letting it go when the builder is gone. Much of the dialogue focuses on Walt’s transitioning to an elder facility and his friends’ desire to sell the camp he built rather than continuing the services of conversion therapy he offered there.

If the couple who wants to sell had wanted to go in a completely new direction, that would have been a clearer topic. But as Hunter writes this version (who knows if he will consider a rewrite?), it turns out that the couple consists of his ex-wife and her second husband, a … wait for it … conversion therapist, though a townie one. At one point, she accuses Walt of never having loved her, the implication being that since he was homosexual, he was unable to give her the love she needed. Then why would she marry another conversion therapist, if conversion therapists are mostly all men who struggled or struggle with homosexual issues themselves? (Not to mention that it’s a terrible accusation to say homosexuals can’t love people they’ve committed to, unless it’s supposed to be a statement from a still bitter ex-spouse.)

Braden Abraham directs a wonderful cast of acting talents in this interesting subject, who flesh out these characters as fully as they can. Michael Winter is compassionate as Walt, who is ending his career and uncertain of his impact on his “boys.” Jack Taylor displays great instincts as Daniel, the boy at the center who is lost and afraid and gentle and suspicious. Christine Estabrook plays a bossy, but understandable ex-spouse, with R. Hamilton Wright as her caught-in-the-middle spouse with few options to know what to do. Gretchen Krich has a fairly easy role as a forest ranger who doesn’t need to involve herself in the controversy. Mari Nelson does a solid turn in an underdeveloped role as Daniel’s mother.

As a non-Christian who is hyper sensitive to Christian thought, one of the surprises for me was how little Scripture there actually was in the play. It feels like Hunter missed the boat in this regard: the whole reason these Christians feel they must root out the sin is because of how central Scripture is to their whole lives. Everything revolves around the Bible and everything comes back to the Bible. I feel like I have some insight here from personal experiences.

Even the mother, married to a man who shunned his son, yet was one of the pastors of a mega-church, apparently, rarely mentions anything Biblical. No one prays for the missing boy. No one prays, at least out loud, for him or herself and for guidance. There is a crisis and yet no prayers are said? No one holds hands? No one invokes God or Jesus, almost at all?

There is, perhaps, a very important exploration here. Boys continue, and girls continue, to commit suicide. The It Gets Better project and online musicals like TheHinterlands try to penetrate the vast middle of this country to get word to those small-town boys and girls who feel different and who are afraid of themselves and what they are told is their sin that they control.

While the production of A Great Wilderness begins to explore the issue, the best parts of that exploration are the scenes between Walt and Daniel. The rest of the characters get in the way, right now, and distract from what probably should be the heart of the experience, and the challenge to Walt should probably be right in front of him: Daniel. Staying put. Believing in himself. Showing Walt that Walt can love himself, too.

I welcome your comments.

(Information at www.seattlerep.org or call 206-443-2222.)

Endangered Species Project moves to ACT Theatre

Next Up: The Madwoman of Chaillot, Monday February 3 at 7:00pm at ACT Theatre

Mark Anders, an originator of ESP, and talented actor and director and musician in town, is passionate about Endangered Species Project and their move to ACT Theatre, this month, as part of ACT’s Central Heating Lab adventure. I asked Mark about how ESP started and a bit about the move and what they expect in the future.

Mark says, “A group of actors and a director or two, including Cynthia White and Dan Kremer, Jeff Steitzer, and Larry and Jeanne Paulson, and Amy Love (and a couple of other people) and I began some conversations about how there are plays that just don’t get done anymore. Either because they’re too many characters for modern American theaters to remount them, or look too expensive to theaters, too many sets, or because they’ve been forgotten or fallen out of fashion.

“We gravitate to what is known as the ‘well-made play’ though I don’t quite know what that means, since every play should be a well-made play. All those plays that are silent on the bookshelves. So, we’ve rediscovered a bunch of playwrights, new to me, and it’s been thrilling for me to read them.

“We also knew that Susan and Clayton Corzatte would have extensive knowledge of the kind of plays we would want to do. We didn’t know, at first, that Clay was suffering from ALS, but later, there were ways we were able to keep him involved. With Susan’s help,he directed The Show-Off, for example After he passed, we picked The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker because it was the play on which Susan and Clay met (they were both acting in it). And that was one of the reasons we wanted to do it. The only month we’ve skipped since we started was the month that Clayton died.”

Back at the beginning:

“Cynthia White had been in charge of a reading series down in Ashland, OR, and the group was talking about plays we missed, like The Little Foxes. I was in it and think it is so tightly and expertly written and you just get on the ride. You get sucked into the plot and off you go. Those are the kinds of plays that appealed to all of us. That old narrative joy that we all learned to love as kids, ‘Tell me a story.’

“One of the great things about doing readings, more than a regular play, is that the audience has to enter into it with us, and their imaginations are being called into play. It’s like an exalted radio play. I’d love to see these plays on stage, but in some ways, readings make the plays come alive in a way that done fully with a big set wouldn’t necessarily do.

“We wanted to do the readings with top notch actors, given limited rehearsal time. We put our toe in the water and started a monthly reading. The name (ESP) arose out of our discussion, that these plays were endangered, in danger of dropping out of the culture."

The very first play they did was Both Your Houses by Maxwell Anderson, on February 14, 2011. Both Susan and Clayton Corzatte were actors in that reading.

“We started scheduling plays and finding directors and the director usually casts the play. Our members often make proposals of plays they’d like to do. Our first list was huge and it's just grown from there. Some of the time, we pick plays that are good for a time of year, or one time the Seattle Rep was doing Or, a play about Aphra Behn and we did an Afra Behn play (The Lucky Chance, April 2012).

“We’re getting more adventurous and doing plays that hardly anyone would recognize now. Like Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale that (director) John Dillon brought to us. I didn’t know Zona Gale and now I’m a huge fan.

“It’s a huge amount of work to keep the organization going. We now have a steering committee which I am on. Casting was difficult for me because I had some guilt about calling up my friends to ask them to do a play with me for no money. I’ve always wanted to pay actors. I don’t need to be paid because I’m part of the organization but we’ve always paid for the permission to do a reading, unless they’re in the public domain. It’s not terribly expensive but it’s one of our costs, including copying scripts. We’ve mostly not had to pay for the venue.

“We had no idea if we were going to make any money and in the beginning we only had 20 or so audience members. We asked for donations to cover costs. Then we started getting nicer amounts of donations, averaging about $5/person, and we bought some music stands for ourselves to replace broken ones. We have a little money in the bank, now. Not enough to pay actors what we'd like, yet, but seed money.

“We’re hoping the move to ACT Theatre will help us do a lot more in the way of raising funds. We grew a much bigger audience at North Seattle Community College up to around 140. We didn’t really outgrow NSCC, but another of Richard Ziman and Leslie Law’s efforts (Sandbox Radio Collective) was moving to ACT Theatre’s Central Heating Lab, a coproducing relationship, and with Richard’s and Leslie’s priming, ACT asked us if we wanted to produce there, too.

“There are aspects that I like and aspects I don’t. Downtown means you have to park and there’s no way to park for free anymore. That’s a bit of a drag. But being in a big time theater doing these plays feels good to me. NSCC was incredibly supportive, going out of their way to make sure we were taken care of, but it’s great to feel a part of the theater scene, rather than away from it, as I felt a little at NSCC. I think it’s attractive (to actors) for people to be performing in the ACT space.

“$15/ticket is different. That came after heavy discussion with ACT about what we should charge. That’s what ACT charges for a lot of things. There are also people with the ACTPass which allows those subscribers to come to things at ACT included in the Pass. With this reading, we are starting compensating actors for their services.  And we’re paying for their parking.

“We’ve been encouraged by ticket sales and it’s doing well, though not sold out. ACT also takes their fair  share out of the $15. We'll see how this first reading goes.  

“When we move on to plays a little less famous than Madwoman, we’ll see how we do as far as how much we can pay actors, depending on our attendance. We’re planning on doing some huge casts as far as sheer numbers of actors. One of the impacts is for these audiences to see just how many people these plays had in them. Dead End by Sydney Kingsley is gargantuan. He talks in his introduction to the play that he had to diagram everything for himself because it was so complex. He directed it as well. He has boys in the tenement house and the rich apartment across the way.

“(The play is set) on the East Side in NY in the ‘30s and things are kind of dire. The rich apartment house is having its entrance repaired and the rich people have to come in and out the servants’ entrance and they had to rub shoulders with the poor people next door. It’s a very current feeling. The plays that ESP tries to pick still have things to say to us now.

“I’m thrilled we’re even considering attempting it! It’s 39 speaking parts! Once in a Lifetime by Kaufman and Hart (another play we might do) has 60 parts. We’re talking about a lot of characters and several settings, as well. Madwoman also has 17 or 18 actors playing slightly more than that number of parts. That’s a lot of actors on stage! And a lot of fun.

“We have such a devoted core of people who come. This is an experiment. We’ll see where this leads us. We want to try this and see if there is as much hunger in the Seattle community for this as we have in doing it.”

For more information, go to www.acttheatre.org or call 206-292-7676. Or you can go to their website at www.endangeredspeciesproject.org. Comments welcome on this blog.

Review: Well done The Foreigner at Village is a familiar farce

Erik Gratton, Angela DiMarco, Jonathan Crimeni in The Foreigner (Tracy Martin)

The Foreigner

Village Theatre

Issaquah through March 2

Everett: March 7-30

The Foreigner by Larry Shue is a tight, almost perfectly written farce: every little detail introduced into the plot is used later and is a clue to the unfolding mystery. Case in point, at the beginning of the play, we find out that a young man who is developmentally disabled is said to take one bite out of an apple and then leave the apple behind, and deny that he’s even done it. The audience thinks it’s quirky character development, until we later find out who has been leaving the apples and why.

There are half a dozen tiny moments like that in the script and as you begin to see them unfold, your interest in what you already saw and what it might mean later deepens. An old bromide, attributed to Anton Chekhov the playwright, is that if you put a gun in your play, it better get shot later on. In The Foreigner, all the “guns” get shot. You can see for yourself at the Village Theatre with their well done production.

Celebrated musical writer, Brian Yorkey, returns to his old home at Village Theatre to direct this play, their annual non-musical production. He directs a solid cast of seven who sometimes make their numbers look larger (through adept costuming).

The basic ingredients start with a despondent Brit (Erik Gratton) being dragged to rural Georgia by his army buddy, Froggy (Patrick Phillips), to get cheered up while his buddy does some military drills there. But he is so shy and afraid of people that Froggy, spur of the moment, tells the proprietess, Betty (Sharva Maynard), that Charlie doesn’t speak a word of English, hoping to ensure that everyone will leave Charlie alone. Once Charlie is thought not to understand, secrets start pouring out around him and he finds a facility inside himself to begin to enjoy life.

The plot developments are a bit absurd, and Charlie is supposed to find a way to rescue everyone, but it’s a romp with great fun moments. There is a wonderful bit where Charlie is “taught” English by the young disabled boy Ellard (Anthony Lee Phillips) that is a crowd-pleaser. Ellard’s sister, Catherine (Angela DiMarco), is being duped by her fiancée (Jonathan Crimeni) and a nasty side-kick (Eric Ray Anderson who starts off nibbling the furniture and ends up biting big chunks of it in a hysterical bad-guy turn).

Technical support here is luscious, as usual, with a great thunderstorm on a unit set depicting an old lodge (by Matthew Smucker), essential sound work from Brent Warwick to create the outdoor noises, intricate lighting from Tom Sturge, and fun costuming from Melanie Burgess. Charlie’s get up, in particular, helps set a complete tone for his character.

For more information, go to www.villagetheatre.org or call 425-392-2202. Comments welcome on this blog.

Review: American Wee-Pie: A cupcake of sweetness in every performance

Tracy Leigh and David Goldstein in American Wee-Pie (Paul Bestock)

AMERICAN WEE-PIE
SEATTLE PUBLIC THEATER
Through February 16 

We're having a terrific start to 2014 with theatrical productions this month. One of those productions you should definitely plan to see is Seattle Public Theater's American Wee-Pie by Lisa Dillman. It is a sweet morsel of a play (couldn't resist!) that focuses on a very identifiable human condition: what the heck do we do with ourselves once we are on this earth? Is it enough to just 'have a job' or is life supposed to be more than that? Where is the joy? The answer: the clowns bring it. 

Personality-less, humorless Zed (Evan Whitfield) has come back to his boyhood home to bury his mother. The only other family he has is a sharp-tongued, impatient older sister, Pam (Alyssa Keene), who has impatiently already packed up almost everything in the house. He isn't even certain that he has many feelings about losing his mother - none that he can access, at least. 

He bumps into school friend Linz (or Lindsay) (Tracy Leigh) who gallantly says that when other kids thought he was retarded, she defended him and said he was shy. Linz is the great heart of the play. She is full of feeling and bigger than life and readily admits that she had a shitty time in school, too, and could be very much like Zed, but had found her man, who loves her completely for herself. She takes the meeting as a sign that destiny is afoot, and Zed is to quit his boring, disconnected job to come work for them in their cupcake shop. 

Linz' man is Pableu (David Goldstein), a cupcake auteur who is trying to create the perfect cupcake, with ingredients like root vegetables and odd spices. Some of the funniest scenes involve elaborate tasting rituals that amp up the clowning aspect, though they don't necessarily add too much to the story. But these small savored moments are part of the fabric of small moments that Dillman seems to want to point to and say, 'Hey, these are the roses you're supposed to be smelling.' 

There is a friendly local postman who made friends with Zed's mother (one of several roles for Stephen Grenley), and who befriends Zed, as well, over Scrabble. There is a burial plot salesman (Grenley again) who somehow brings such enthusiasm for his trade that he entices Pam into giving up her job to try it. Zed gets more and more emotionally available and alive as the play moves on. 

The ensemble here is lovely and Whitfield draws the audience into applauding his successful reclamation of life. He plays mostly the straight man to the other four clowns of varying depth. This is subtle clowning, the exaggeration of human characteristics to make us laugh, but all tightly within the confines of a certain reality. Leigh has mastered her character, in particular, to be everything silly, bumbly, and yet raging with love. 

Director Anita Montgomery moseyed over from ACT Theatre to create this little dream cake and gets topnotch production help with gorgeous sound design from Robertson Witmer, quirky character costuming from Candace Frank, and subtle lighting from Tim Wratten. A somewhat static set, mostly a cupcake looking shop, by Andrea Bryn Bush, works well for some scenes, but not quite for those in the family home. But at least scene changes are immediate. 

The play was first performed in 2013, so it's very current in understanding our recession and people getting stuck in jobs they are afraid to move away from with great unemployment still rampant. But Dillman is there to encourage you not to be afraid and to give change a try. Who knows? You might like it a lot more than what you've got right now. 

For more information, go to www.seattlepublictheater.org or call (206) 524-1300. Comments welcome on this blog.

Review: The Little Dog Laughed at ArtsWest - More Than a Comedy

Heather Hawkins, Alex Garnett, Jeff Orton (photo by Michael Brunk)

THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED
ARTSWEST PLAYHOUSE
Through February 16

Suppose you are a closeted actor on the verge of getting a really big film, and you and your agent are on the verge of making it to the top of the heap, instead of crawling around the pile with the rest of the grunts. Suppose the biggest irony is that the script of the film is about two Gay men, but the idea that Gay men would actually play the roles is gross to the powers that run Hollywood, so if you come out, you could ruin the movie and your big career move. 

In fact, that's still very much a Hollywood stereotype, if you look at huge films like Brokeback Mountain, and more recently at Behind the Candelabra, the HBO giant starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, even now winning the top awards for not being Gay. So, the script story in The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane is not too far off, even today, though he wrote the play in 2006. 

The ArtsWest production, starring the quartet of Alex Garnett, Jeff Orton, Heather Hawkins and EmilyRose Frasca, does a fine job of presenting the dilemma. 

Mitchell (Garnett), the actor, hasn't even been that interested in sex all these years, still conflicted about his sexuality, and insecure. Every once in a while, he pays for some fun, and meets Alex (Orton) after a phone call to an 'agency.' Diane (Hawkins), the agent, saw something in Mitchell and has stuck with him through thin, but when she sees his deepening relationship with the 'rent boy,' she starts to get worried. 

Alex, as written, is full of contradictions. He makes his money by having sex with wealthy men, but does not consider himself homosexual. He kind of has a girlfriend, Ellen (Frasca), though she also has sex with wealthy men. Yet, when he has the chance, at the top of the show, to 'roll' Mitchell and split, he doesn't. Something in Mitchell's vulnerability stirs something more in Alex and he finds himself wanting to stick around. 

That is a piece of the buggy ride that this more-than-comedy takes you on. It feels like a romp, and Hawkins' foul-mouthed, off-hand delivery definitely keeps that feeling alive. But there are also tender moments and some (perhaps unintentionally) awkward ones. Mitchell starts to accept himself and wants to out himself, consequences be damned. The men begin to have real emotions toward each other. 

In an interesting twist, Alex's character arc is most interesting. He has the farthest to go in finding out about himself and has the most integrity. Mitchell, at least, knows he's homosexual and it's more a matter of whether he will make that public or not. 

While Hawkins gets most of the big laugh lines, she is occasionally a bit broad, needing a stronger hand from director Annie Lareau. But by the end of the play, her character's smarts and calculation are fully revealed, and an appreciation for all that she does is inevitable. 

Caution for children younger than mature teens: there is a brief moment of male nudity, aside from regular vulgar language. For more information, go to www.artswest.org or call (206) 938-0339. Comments welcomed on this blog.