PAST SHOWS and REVIEWS
A list of previous productions from The Covey Theatre Company
A list of previous productions from The Covey Theatre Company
Playing God
November 2012
Covey Theatre Company's 'Playing God,' a new play by Garrett Heater, is a real treat
by Neil Novelli of The Syracuse Post-Standard
It's a rare treat when a brand-new play turns out to be sharply crafted, zips along in performance, and triggers plentiful laughter while engaging our sympathies with realistic characters and thought-provoking issues. It's even better when the play gets its first production from a wonderfully talented cast under expert direction.
Happily, all those things are true of "Playing God," a new play written and directed by Garrett Heater and produced by the Covey Theatre Company. "Playing God" is as skillfully crafted as Yasmina Reza's "Art" and, for my money, has a lot more gusto. Heater's dialog crackles with the wit and grit of everyday life.
I expect that "Playing God" will be picked up not only by community theaters but by professional theaters around the country.
Heater's premise is that three well-known authors, very much unlike each other, are coralled in various ways into collaborating on a novel. Once Heater gets the story rolling, he uses an audacious device to put events into high gear and raise the theatrical ante; but more about that a bit later.
The first character we get to know is Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins), who has written a string of successful thrillers. Wiggins makes Ann an edgy combination of toughness, tact and savvy. The fact that she fell in love with books at an early age doesn't keep her from a businesslike approach to her craft. Neither does the fact that she's in a troubled marriage. She dresses carefully and leads an ordinary suburban-style life.
Ann is the opposite of 23-year old Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg), who shambles to his writing desk with uncombed hair and non-descript clothes. Paul's first book -- he calls it a "semi-autobiography" -- is a runaway hit, topping the charts and drawing lucrative offers from Hollywood. Paul's life is a disaster area, even more so when early in the play it's disclosed that his book is in no way biographical, but totally fiction. Ann describes him in some unprintable epithets, but Sundberg finds the paths to Paul's positive traits.
Louis Balestra brings depth and nuance to the role of Ken Prescott, the grand old man of pops fiction who retains the respect of other authors even though his era is fading. Ken's genre is chick lit; and while his heroines often find themselves in steamy emotional territory, they always remember that their mothers gave them a ladylike upbringing. He himself leads a quiet life, alone except for his cat.
The basic method the writers use to collaborate is a round robin that works like this: Ken writes a chapter and sends it to Ann; she rewrites it to her taste and sends it to Paul; he rewrites it and returns it to Ken; and Ken, if I understand, somehow draws on everybody's work to shape the final version.
It's an experimental process sometimes used in creative writing classes, but these three authors are playing for high stakes. Ken needs money. Ann needs to get her name attached to a "good book" as she puts it -- something besides a thriller. Paul is afraid that his talent will flame out after one book (and Ken expertly fans this fear to keep Paul on board).
And they all need to keep their own identity and "voice." Along the way, they have to get to know each other a bit. Ann and Paul have extended, often hostile phone conversations. She thinks that he is incredibly talented. He, on the other hand, at first does not even know who she is, though he pretends otherwise.
Novelists say that their characters sometimes take on lives of their own, and Heater puts that notion to startling theatrical use. Down front in the acting area is a small restaurant table. Sometimes when Ken is at his desk writing, a red-haired young woman in a close-fitting but modest purple dress -- one of Ken's chick lit heroines, played by Julia Berger -- drifts up to the table and acts out his narration.
Ken stops and rewrites a passage, and the woman changes personality and actions to fit. She talks back to Ken, challenges him, makes him change some phrases. He obviously likes her, but feels he doesn't really know her. "You've done this with other women, haven't you?" she says rather accusingly.
Heater is dramatizing, to extraordinary effect, the love between author and characters.
But the relationship isn't always love. A rough-looking guy (Jordan Glaski) -- black leather jacket and blacker five-day beard -- comes up to the table. Seems to be on the path to seducing the red-haired woman. Uh-oh. Ken calls him over, orders him to cut it out, and threatens to re-write him as a celibate.
Then, as Ann and Paul in turn create their versions of the story, Berger and Glaski subtly modulate the characters. We get a live sense not only of how authors interact with their characters, but of how these three authors are interacting with each other in carrying out an improbable assignment.
At times, though, we forget about the three authors and focus just on the two fictional characters, which says something, I think, both about the grip of pops fiction, and about Berger and Glaski's skill as actors.
The set has three locales, basically three writing desks, one for each of the authors, and they can move around freely when they talk by phone. In a nice symbolic touch, although they may come close to each other in moments of accord, they never invade each other's spaces.
I don't have any major suggestions for change, but a couple of scenes in the first act, e.g. one between Wiggins and Sundberg, are repetitive and need minor honing.
by Neil Novelli of The Syracuse Post-Standard
It's a rare treat when a brand-new play turns out to be sharply crafted, zips along in performance, and triggers plentiful laughter while engaging our sympathies with realistic characters and thought-provoking issues. It's even better when the play gets its first production from a wonderfully talented cast under expert direction.
Happily, all those things are true of "Playing God," a new play written and directed by Garrett Heater and produced by the Covey Theatre Company. "Playing God" is as skillfully crafted as Yasmina Reza's "Art" and, for my money, has a lot more gusto. Heater's dialog crackles with the wit and grit of everyday life.
I expect that "Playing God" will be picked up not only by community theaters but by professional theaters around the country.
Heater's premise is that three well-known authors, very much unlike each other, are coralled in various ways into collaborating on a novel. Once Heater gets the story rolling, he uses an audacious device to put events into high gear and raise the theatrical ante; but more about that a bit later.
The first character we get to know is Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins), who has written a string of successful thrillers. Wiggins makes Ann an edgy combination of toughness, tact and savvy. The fact that she fell in love with books at an early age doesn't keep her from a businesslike approach to her craft. Neither does the fact that she's in a troubled marriage. She dresses carefully and leads an ordinary suburban-style life.
Ann is the opposite of 23-year old Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg), who shambles to his writing desk with uncombed hair and non-descript clothes. Paul's first book -- he calls it a "semi-autobiography" -- is a runaway hit, topping the charts and drawing lucrative offers from Hollywood. Paul's life is a disaster area, even more so when early in the play it's disclosed that his book is in no way biographical, but totally fiction. Ann describes him in some unprintable epithets, but Sundberg finds the paths to Paul's positive traits.
Louis Balestra brings depth and nuance to the role of Ken Prescott, the grand old man of pops fiction who retains the respect of other authors even though his era is fading. Ken's genre is chick lit; and while his heroines often find themselves in steamy emotional territory, they always remember that their mothers gave them a ladylike upbringing. He himself leads a quiet life, alone except for his cat.
The basic method the writers use to collaborate is a round robin that works like this: Ken writes a chapter and sends it to Ann; she rewrites it to her taste and sends it to Paul; he rewrites it and returns it to Ken; and Ken, if I understand, somehow draws on everybody's work to shape the final version.
It's an experimental process sometimes used in creative writing classes, but these three authors are playing for high stakes. Ken needs money. Ann needs to get her name attached to a "good book" as she puts it -- something besides a thriller. Paul is afraid that his talent will flame out after one book (and Ken expertly fans this fear to keep Paul on board).
And they all need to keep their own identity and "voice." Along the way, they have to get to know each other a bit. Ann and Paul have extended, often hostile phone conversations. She thinks that he is incredibly talented. He, on the other hand, at first does not even know who she is, though he pretends otherwise.
Novelists say that their characters sometimes take on lives of their own, and Heater puts that notion to startling theatrical use. Down front in the acting area is a small restaurant table. Sometimes when Ken is at his desk writing, a red-haired young woman in a close-fitting but modest purple dress -- one of Ken's chick lit heroines, played by Julia Berger -- drifts up to the table and acts out his narration.
Ken stops and rewrites a passage, and the woman changes personality and actions to fit. She talks back to Ken, challenges him, makes him change some phrases. He obviously likes her, but feels he doesn't really know her. "You've done this with other women, haven't you?" she says rather accusingly.
Heater is dramatizing, to extraordinary effect, the love between author and characters.
But the relationship isn't always love. A rough-looking guy (Jordan Glaski) -- black leather jacket and blacker five-day beard -- comes up to the table. Seems to be on the path to seducing the red-haired woman. Uh-oh. Ken calls him over, orders him to cut it out, and threatens to re-write him as a celibate.
Then, as Ann and Paul in turn create their versions of the story, Berger and Glaski subtly modulate the characters. We get a live sense not only of how authors interact with their characters, but of how these three authors are interacting with each other in carrying out an improbable assignment.
At times, though, we forget about the three authors and focus just on the two fictional characters, which says something, I think, both about the grip of pops fiction, and about Berger and Glaski's skill as actors.
The set has three locales, basically three writing desks, one for each of the authors, and they can move around freely when they talk by phone. In a nice symbolic touch, although they may come close to each other in moments of accord, they never invade each other's spaces.
I don't have any major suggestions for change, but a couple of scenes in the first act, e.g. one between Wiggins and Sundberg, are repetitive and need minor honing.
Scribble Squabbles
by Jim MacKillop of The Syracuse NewTimes
Their goal is commercial, not artistic. Three disparate but successful novelists, urged by their shared agent, the unseen Gaby, agree to merge their celebrities to produce a sure-fire bestseller. We never learn the title of the fictional project or fully what it is about in the world premiere of Garrett Heater’s Playing God, the Covey Theatre Company production now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s Bevard Community Room. Not all the three know each other, and neither have they all read each other’s work.
The plan is to have them put the narrative together round-robin, where A starts a passage and then sends it on to B, who picks up where A left off, perhaps changing a line or two, and then moving forward. The conflict of personalities alone makes a good premise for comedy, and there are many laughs, but this is no romp in the park. The loneliness of the act of writing, and the well of pain all creators draw from, mean that Playing God is a dark and thoughtful comedy.
As playwright, director, costumer and set designer, Heater, along with his partner and properties manager Susan Blumer, can define the three complex characters with unusual precision. All three authors regularly retreat to the laptops on their writing desks. Upmarket mystery writer Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins) has the most expensive. She sits in an Aeron chair and decorates her desk with fresh yellow roses. Somewhat less affluent is the tweedy author of romance novels, Ken Prescott (Louis Balestra), whose office includes a couch and a ragdoll play-mouse for his cat. A reject desk from a thrift market sits before wunderkind novelist Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg) in his slovenly digs. His only published work, a “semiautobiographical” novel, has won both critical huzzahs and boffo sales.
Dialogue begins when Ken tells Ann that he thinks the project is a good idea, and a little extra cash could be handy. Many speeches are by phone so that writers can stay near their keyboards. Although Ann has been going through a dry patch, she’s more reluctant. As they are nearly the same age and are both genre writers, Ken and Ann make natural allies. Part of Ann’s reluctance stems from not knowing the third author, Paul Caine, and apprehension about his volatile personality. Her call to him justifies these fears. He rudely dismisses her, doesn’t know her name or her work, and thinks mystery-detective fiction is a load of crap, sadistic at that.
Heater never signals that we’re supposed to think the three novelists are inspired by real-life models, but each speaks for an artistic position and a coherent point of view. Thriller-detective fiction sells well, and Ann relates to at least a dozen female practitioners, Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski) or Sue Grafton, who never suffers writer’s block in her long-running alphabet series (W is for Witness). Paul Caine sounds a lot like critical darling Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), who memorably told Oprah’s Book Club to take a hike. Ken Prescott, a male writer of chick-lit, is harder to place. There are such people, such as Matt Dunn (Ex-Girlfriends Unite) or Mike Gayle (The To-Do List), but they’re not big names. Ken never makes much of his gayness (Ann calls him a “grande dame”), but his sexual orientation seems to be what allows him to make a common cause with both Ann and Paul.
Playing God enjoys a surfeit of crisp, witty dialogue, much of it bitchy. (Ann: “I’m stable.” Ken: “Isn’t that something more sinister—like stagnant?”) But the show’s greater strength is as a triple character study. Not one of the three is a type but a fully fleshed-out person, including contradictions and surprise revelations. We sense this early as Ann’s first telephone conversation takes place while she’s sorting her laundry, even though domesticity is never a part of her fiction, and she dresses by far the most fashionably of the three. We may care about what happens in the contrived collaboration, but we care more about what revelations are forthcoming from the lives of the authors. Heater also wants us to keep our distance and not pick a favorite.
Bit by bit, elements of the troika-novel begin to emerge before us. Ken proposes a drop-dead gorgeous redhead (Julia Berger), whom he dresses provocatively in a clingy, revealing wrap-around. He names her Emily and has her act demurely, such as ordering only water at a sidewalk café. When Ann gets ahold of the text, she immediately upgrades the beverage to red wine.
Given his turn, Paul ups the ante steeply. Although Emily is set to meet a gentleman named Giles, he turns out to be a menacing-looking tough (Jordan Glaski) in a black leather jacket. Paul would push Giles toward a seduction of Emily, but Ken steps in to prevent it as a turn-off to his kind of mass-market readers.
This kind of manipulation of Emily and Giles is what Heater signals in his title, Playing God. But the characters don’t sit still for it. Like the ones created by Luigi Pirandello, they fight back. Emily snarls at Ken, “You make it sound as though I have hemorrhoids.”
The casting is all so apt, it looks as though Heater called up the people he wanted instead of holding open auditions. The actors playing the novelists each deliver layered performances, hinting at but holding off revealing who they really are. As two of these revelations give us darker characters than we expected, Heater is taking a huge chance but giving his players more to do.
Sandburg has racked up strong local credits (The Crucible, Twelfth Night), but he’s never looked as good as he does here. Karis Wiggins, adept at both tragedy (Frozen) and comedy (Barefoot in the Park), fuses both skills here. Louis Balestra, an Equity player with extensive national credits, returns to the Bevard where he last appeared with Contemporary Theatre of Syracuse 23 years ago. Here he polishes some of Heater’s best zingers. Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) winner Julia Berger brings a commanding presence, and Jordan Glaski can turn Giles around on a dime.
Of all people running local theater companies, Garrett Heater is the youngest, most versatile and most prolific.This is his third local premiere, the others being the SALT-winning historical dramas Lizzie Borden Took an Axe (2010) and The Romanovs (2011). He had announced a third historical work, this one on Abraham Lincoln, for this slot, so Playing God looks like something he had held in reserve.
The play is in no way derivative but resembles the intellectual comedies of Yasmina Reza. Playing God, perhaps with nips and tucks in the first act, could compete for national attention. Heater is our local guy and he’s really, really good.
by Jim MacKillop of The Syracuse NewTimes
Their goal is commercial, not artistic. Three disparate but successful novelists, urged by their shared agent, the unseen Gaby, agree to merge their celebrities to produce a sure-fire bestseller. We never learn the title of the fictional project or fully what it is about in the world premiere of Garrett Heater’s Playing God, the Covey Theatre Company production now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s Bevard Community Room. Not all the three know each other, and neither have they all read each other’s work.
The plan is to have them put the narrative together round-robin, where A starts a passage and then sends it on to B, who picks up where A left off, perhaps changing a line or two, and then moving forward. The conflict of personalities alone makes a good premise for comedy, and there are many laughs, but this is no romp in the park. The loneliness of the act of writing, and the well of pain all creators draw from, mean that Playing God is a dark and thoughtful comedy.
As playwright, director, costumer and set designer, Heater, along with his partner and properties manager Susan Blumer, can define the three complex characters with unusual precision. All three authors regularly retreat to the laptops on their writing desks. Upmarket mystery writer Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins) has the most expensive. She sits in an Aeron chair and decorates her desk with fresh yellow roses. Somewhat less affluent is the tweedy author of romance novels, Ken Prescott (Louis Balestra), whose office includes a couch and a ragdoll play-mouse for his cat. A reject desk from a thrift market sits before wunderkind novelist Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg) in his slovenly digs. His only published work, a “semiautobiographical” novel, has won both critical huzzahs and boffo sales.
Dialogue begins when Ken tells Ann that he thinks the project is a good idea, and a little extra cash could be handy. Many speeches are by phone so that writers can stay near their keyboards. Although Ann has been going through a dry patch, she’s more reluctant. As they are nearly the same age and are both genre writers, Ken and Ann make natural allies. Part of Ann’s reluctance stems from not knowing the third author, Paul Caine, and apprehension about his volatile personality. Her call to him justifies these fears. He rudely dismisses her, doesn’t know her name or her work, and thinks mystery-detective fiction is a load of crap, sadistic at that.
Heater never signals that we’re supposed to think the three novelists are inspired by real-life models, but each speaks for an artistic position and a coherent point of view. Thriller-detective fiction sells well, and Ann relates to at least a dozen female practitioners, Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski) or Sue Grafton, who never suffers writer’s block in her long-running alphabet series (W is for Witness). Paul Caine sounds a lot like critical darling Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), who memorably told Oprah’s Book Club to take a hike. Ken Prescott, a male writer of chick-lit, is harder to place. There are such people, such as Matt Dunn (Ex-Girlfriends Unite) or Mike Gayle (The To-Do List), but they’re not big names. Ken never makes much of his gayness (Ann calls him a “grande dame”), but his sexual orientation seems to be what allows him to make a common cause with both Ann and Paul.
Playing God enjoys a surfeit of crisp, witty dialogue, much of it bitchy. (Ann: “I’m stable.” Ken: “Isn’t that something more sinister—like stagnant?”) But the show’s greater strength is as a triple character study. Not one of the three is a type but a fully fleshed-out person, including contradictions and surprise revelations. We sense this early as Ann’s first telephone conversation takes place while she’s sorting her laundry, even though domesticity is never a part of her fiction, and she dresses by far the most fashionably of the three. We may care about what happens in the contrived collaboration, but we care more about what revelations are forthcoming from the lives of the authors. Heater also wants us to keep our distance and not pick a favorite.
Bit by bit, elements of the troika-novel begin to emerge before us. Ken proposes a drop-dead gorgeous redhead (Julia Berger), whom he dresses provocatively in a clingy, revealing wrap-around. He names her Emily and has her act demurely, such as ordering only water at a sidewalk café. When Ann gets ahold of the text, she immediately upgrades the beverage to red wine.
Given his turn, Paul ups the ante steeply. Although Emily is set to meet a gentleman named Giles, he turns out to be a menacing-looking tough (Jordan Glaski) in a black leather jacket. Paul would push Giles toward a seduction of Emily, but Ken steps in to prevent it as a turn-off to his kind of mass-market readers.
This kind of manipulation of Emily and Giles is what Heater signals in his title, Playing God. But the characters don’t sit still for it. Like the ones created by Luigi Pirandello, they fight back. Emily snarls at Ken, “You make it sound as though I have hemorrhoids.”
The casting is all so apt, it looks as though Heater called up the people he wanted instead of holding open auditions. The actors playing the novelists each deliver layered performances, hinting at but holding off revealing who they really are. As two of these revelations give us darker characters than we expected, Heater is taking a huge chance but giving his players more to do.
Sandburg has racked up strong local credits (The Crucible, Twelfth Night), but he’s never looked as good as he does here. Karis Wiggins, adept at both tragedy (Frozen) and comedy (Barefoot in the Park), fuses both skills here. Louis Balestra, an Equity player with extensive national credits, returns to the Bevard where he last appeared with Contemporary Theatre of Syracuse 23 years ago. Here he polishes some of Heater’s best zingers. Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) winner Julia Berger brings a commanding presence, and Jordan Glaski can turn Giles around on a dime.
Of all people running local theater companies, Garrett Heater is the youngest, most versatile and most prolific.This is his third local premiere, the others being the SALT-winning historical dramas Lizzie Borden Took an Axe (2010) and The Romanovs (2011). He had announced a third historical work, this one on Abraham Lincoln, for this slot, so Playing God looks like something he had held in reserve.
The play is in no way derivative but resembles the intellectual comedies of Yasmina Reza. Playing God, perhaps with nips and tucks in the first act, could compete for national attention. Heater is our local guy and he’s really, really good.
‘Playing God’ gives a sharp, vicious glimpse into what it’s like to be an author
By Josh Austin of GreenRoom Reviews
For the three authors in Playing God, writing a book together isn’t necessarily about the integrity of the work, but about whose name will go above the title. It’s a literary world where the biggest book jacket photo is what matters.
The Covey Theatre presented playwright and director Garrett Heater’s new work, which gives a comically depressing look at what it’s like to be a celebrated author. For two has-beens and one up-and-comer, writing a book together leads to serious ego stroking, shameless manipulation and the real question, “Why are we doing this?” One of the authors, Ken Prescott (Lou Balestra) says that it’s possible that the three of them are like driftwood: “When lashed together, it makes a decent raft.”
Heater’s new show is ripe with sarcasm and insecurity. Almost Ibsen-esque, many comments the characters make to each other are cruel and manipulative, veiled in witty banter.
As the lights come up, there are three visible homes—three boundary-less, yet isolating creative nooks for the writers. Ranging from chic and sleek to grungy and gross, the authors are cooped up in their spaces for the entirety of the show, almost. Each space defines its character—what they have become. Which, for the most part, is alone, stagnating.
The show follows the creative process as the writers work together, despise each other and form sordid friendships via telephone. Ken is a cherished “chick lit” author; Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins) is a famed thriller writer; both, kind of forgotten. After all, it’s been “36 months” since Ann has written anything. Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg) is the 23-year-old writing prodigy. His semi-autobiographical book has been a best seller for countless weeks, and he has become known as the “champion of the modern man.”
The jealously is crippling and palpable. No one knows why they are part of this venture, and by the end of the show, it’s still not clear—but it’s better that way.
Throughout the play, as the authors begin to write the book, the audience meets two characters. The Woman, or Emily (Julia Berger), and The Man, or Gilles (Jordan Glaski) are molded to the tastes of the authors. The blossoming plot changes as it travels from inbox to inbox of each writer. The made-up characters begin to reflect the situation the authors are in. Berger is devious and sexy as she interacts with her creators, in particular with Ken. She is seductive, insecure and witty—the brainchild of three literary minds.
Wiggins is the standout performer. Her honest, sincere, occasionally sadist, portrait of a struggling writer is charismatic. She seems to be the only one trying to figure out why she is in this situation. She’s passionate about her writing and expects nothing less from her counterparts.
Balestra delivers a semi-flamboyant author who is dealing with a dying cat. Ken is a frustrating author who feels he should be revered forever. Speaking in metaphors, Balestra keeps Ken’s motivations hidden until the end—and only then, is there pity for the author.
Sundberg gives a performance that is grungy and poisonous. He always looks stoned and his new “genius” title might be stripped away as it starts to come out that he might have fabricated his semi-autobiographical novel. His role in this authoring partnership is vague, but there’s is something about his character that is still endearing. Sundberg delivers a desperate performance that is disguised as self-deserving smugness.
Heater’s new show is a captivating, fresh work that reexamines the purpose of passion, the concepts of truth and the odd love between characters and authors. The lights are fading out over the writers. It’s hard to tell whom the protagonist and antagonist is in this show, and that’s a good thing. They’re all desperate and they’re all hungry—but for what?
After all, Ken said it best when he stated that they only thing worse than being dead is watching yourself die.
Covey Company’s ‘Playing God’ a provocative amalgam of drama and comedy
Imaginary characters come to life in Garrett Heater’s insightful new “dramedy” about three writers attempting to co-author a novel
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
Garrett Heater is turning out to be the local theater community’s Renaissance man. He is the artistic director of the Covey Theatre Company, which he also directs. He is an engaging actor and singer, most recently in Covey’s summer production of Avenue Q. He’s also an up-and-coming playwright with local awards to his credit.
Heater’s most recent work is Playing God, now premiering at Covey, which displays his ability to craft a well-written, coherent and creative play.
I must admit, when I first read about the Heater’s concept it sounded dreadful. Playing God is about three different authors who have been contracted to co-write a novel. The ultra-serious title Playing God makes it sound as if the authors will be self-important and histrionic, talking laboriously about the meaning of “art.” The intense-looking poster for the production features the three characters’ faces in stark half-shadow, along with the catchphrase “Three authors. Three egos. One book” — making this look like an intense psychological drama along the order of Equus.
My misgivings were erased after seeing the opening night production. Far from being a ponderous, stilted examination of a faux literary dilemma, much of Playing God is actually rather tongue-in-cheek and quite funny. In fact, it would probably best be called a “dramedy,” with its artful blend of serious insight into human pathos and perfect comic phrasing and timing, poking fun at the ridiculous.
Part of what was off-putting about the concept was just pondering the result. Writing by committee, as we all know from various experiences in our work environments, has to be the worst process to go through and generally results in obtuse material. Yes, it has been done in the real literary world — most recently the 2011 serial novel No Rest for the Dead by Alexander McCall Smith, Sandra Brown, R.L. Stine, and Jeffery Deaver (among numerous others). To me, that sounds gimmicky at best. How could such a book possibly hang together?
To his credit, Heater allows his own characters to approach this inexplicable task with the cynicism that it warrants. They are equally perplexed as to why they have been talked into doing this project. They share an agent and muse aloud to each other as to what her reasoning could possibly be. Is it is a nod to “two washed up hacks trying to rejuvenate their careers?” Is it, as the character Ken Prescott notes, comparable to “lashing together pieces of driftwood to make a better raft?” Or, in another, related nautical metaphor, are two of them being used as a “human buoy” in a desperate tactic to fend off a potential disaster that might befall the third author?
The answer isn’t clear either to the three writers or to the audience — which raises the ante and makes the play immediately provocative and engaging. For you see, the three characters are on completely different arcs in their lives and literary careers. Prescott (played by Louis Balestra with neediness shielded by a patina of dignity) is the older, revered writer of serious merit. He is past the prime of his career and is reduced to living alone and talking to his possibly fatally ill cat, incongruously providing some hilarious moments.
Ann Jackson (played by the classy yet down-to-earth Karis Wiggins) is a former best-selling author of thrillers. She has been suffering from writer’s block for 36 months — also known as three years (a running joke in the play that shows what a slump she has been in). Her marriage isn’t giving her much sustenance either: She and her husband communicate by email in the same house. Into this demented menage á trois enters Paul Caine (played by Covey newcomer, Darian Sundberg). Caine is either a brilliant, inspired wunderkind with a phenomenal career ahead of him, or a total jerk. He is insufferable. (One example: “No one is as interesting as me.”)
Part of Heater’s creativity is evident in how he has the three characters engage with one-another. They never meet face-to-face as a threesome; they live in different places. Their interactions and the narrative thread move forward via their conversations through 21st century communication technology and social networking, demonstrating that Heater is up to speed on current trends. While Prescott talks to the others with a cordless telephone, Jackson has a hands-free miniature device hung perpetually over her ear, and Caine — the Gen-Xer that he is — has a smart phone, naturally. In addition, Wikipedia has a few key moments in the play that are quite droll and contemporary.
The set depicts the three different personalities of the authors very clearly. Prescott’s work desk is mahogany, covered with several old and perfectly aligned books. His chair is sturdy, classic black leather. It evokes the aura of an academic, esoteric person. Jackson’s desk has clean lines with lovely cherry wood, glass and chrome. Fittingly, the most prominent book on her desk seems to be one of her own earlier successes — the one with a younger picture of herself on the jacket. And Paine’s is a complete mess, much like the young author himself, haphazardly strewn with crumpled up papers, off-kilter CD covers and other detritus. Hats off to the properties designer Susan Blumer for making the characters’ respective parts of the stage so clearly an extension of their personalities.
Playing God has another dimension, as well. Two additional characters — The Woman (Julia Berger) and The Man (Jordan Glaski) — are the protagonists in the authors’ evolving novel. We first see The Woman sitting alone in a café in the beginning passage of the book as written by Prescott. The Man enters later, and their storyline is added to incrementally.
Having imaginary characters come to life as a plot device is not unprecedented. Sometimes this is done brilliantly, as with Woody Allen’s 1969 Broadway play and 1972 hit movie, Play it Again, Sam — in which none other than Humphrey Bogart (in his Casablanca persona) crosses into the plane of reality to offer romantic advice to a neurotic movie critic. Sometimes it’s done dreadfully, as in the completely forgettable 2003 Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson film Alex and Emma, where they are simultaneously writing and acting as the characters in the novel being created.
Some of the most hilarious scenes in Playing God occur as the Jackson-Prescott-Caine (or is it Caine-Jackson-Prescott?) novel jolts from author to author in this game of literary Post Office. Is The Man loving and heartbroken? Or is he a dangerous, vengeful killer? Is The Woman a demure lady or a seductress? Berger and Glaski are called upon to change tempo and mood in rapid-fire fashion as the words on the authors’ computer screens are crossed out and rewritten again and again. The “play-within-the play” sparked some of the biggest laughs from the audience.
However, the real action isn’t in the pretend novel the writers are hacking out. In an interview with The Post-Standard, Heater said, “This play has to do with the concept of creating characters and playing God. You’re dealing with three authors who are playing God. And you have three people who are trying to manipulate the people around them.”
It seems to me that the play isn’t about writers manipulating the book’s characters like marionettes. The true action seems to be in Jackson’s, Caine’s and Prescott’s internal passage — how they see some things and recognize some truths in themselves, when held up to the unvarnished mirror of their publishing-world competitors. This fitful journey on the part of three main characters is what makes this comedy-drama have a real heart.
It’s not just a gimmick, like the one conjured up by the offstage literary agent. It’s something much better: a new, good play.
By Josh Austin of GreenRoom Reviews
For the three authors in Playing God, writing a book together isn’t necessarily about the integrity of the work, but about whose name will go above the title. It’s a literary world where the biggest book jacket photo is what matters.
The Covey Theatre presented playwright and director Garrett Heater’s new work, which gives a comically depressing look at what it’s like to be a celebrated author. For two has-beens and one up-and-comer, writing a book together leads to serious ego stroking, shameless manipulation and the real question, “Why are we doing this?” One of the authors, Ken Prescott (Lou Balestra) says that it’s possible that the three of them are like driftwood: “When lashed together, it makes a decent raft.”
Heater’s new show is ripe with sarcasm and insecurity. Almost Ibsen-esque, many comments the characters make to each other are cruel and manipulative, veiled in witty banter.
As the lights come up, there are three visible homes—three boundary-less, yet isolating creative nooks for the writers. Ranging from chic and sleek to grungy and gross, the authors are cooped up in their spaces for the entirety of the show, almost. Each space defines its character—what they have become. Which, for the most part, is alone, stagnating.
The show follows the creative process as the writers work together, despise each other and form sordid friendships via telephone. Ken is a cherished “chick lit” author; Ann Jackson (Karis Wiggins) is a famed thriller writer; both, kind of forgotten. After all, it’s been “36 months” since Ann has written anything. Paul Caine (Darian Sundberg) is the 23-year-old writing prodigy. His semi-autobiographical book has been a best seller for countless weeks, and he has become known as the “champion of the modern man.”
The jealously is crippling and palpable. No one knows why they are part of this venture, and by the end of the show, it’s still not clear—but it’s better that way.
Throughout the play, as the authors begin to write the book, the audience meets two characters. The Woman, or Emily (Julia Berger), and The Man, or Gilles (Jordan Glaski) are molded to the tastes of the authors. The blossoming plot changes as it travels from inbox to inbox of each writer. The made-up characters begin to reflect the situation the authors are in. Berger is devious and sexy as she interacts with her creators, in particular with Ken. She is seductive, insecure and witty—the brainchild of three literary minds.
Wiggins is the standout performer. Her honest, sincere, occasionally sadist, portrait of a struggling writer is charismatic. She seems to be the only one trying to figure out why she is in this situation. She’s passionate about her writing and expects nothing less from her counterparts.
Balestra delivers a semi-flamboyant author who is dealing with a dying cat. Ken is a frustrating author who feels he should be revered forever. Speaking in metaphors, Balestra keeps Ken’s motivations hidden until the end—and only then, is there pity for the author.
Sundberg gives a performance that is grungy and poisonous. He always looks stoned and his new “genius” title might be stripped away as it starts to come out that he might have fabricated his semi-autobiographical novel. His role in this authoring partnership is vague, but there’s is something about his character that is still endearing. Sundberg delivers a desperate performance that is disguised as self-deserving smugness.
Heater’s new show is a captivating, fresh work that reexamines the purpose of passion, the concepts of truth and the odd love between characters and authors. The lights are fading out over the writers. It’s hard to tell whom the protagonist and antagonist is in this show, and that’s a good thing. They’re all desperate and they’re all hungry—but for what?
After all, Ken said it best when he stated that they only thing worse than being dead is watching yourself die.
Covey Company’s ‘Playing God’ a provocative amalgam of drama and comedy
Imaginary characters come to life in Garrett Heater’s insightful new “dramedy” about three writers attempting to co-author a novel
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
Garrett Heater is turning out to be the local theater community’s Renaissance man. He is the artistic director of the Covey Theatre Company, which he also directs. He is an engaging actor and singer, most recently in Covey’s summer production of Avenue Q. He’s also an up-and-coming playwright with local awards to his credit.
Heater’s most recent work is Playing God, now premiering at Covey, which displays his ability to craft a well-written, coherent and creative play.
I must admit, when I first read about the Heater’s concept it sounded dreadful. Playing God is about three different authors who have been contracted to co-write a novel. The ultra-serious title Playing God makes it sound as if the authors will be self-important and histrionic, talking laboriously about the meaning of “art.” The intense-looking poster for the production features the three characters’ faces in stark half-shadow, along with the catchphrase “Three authors. Three egos. One book” — making this look like an intense psychological drama along the order of Equus.
My misgivings were erased after seeing the opening night production. Far from being a ponderous, stilted examination of a faux literary dilemma, much of Playing God is actually rather tongue-in-cheek and quite funny. In fact, it would probably best be called a “dramedy,” with its artful blend of serious insight into human pathos and perfect comic phrasing and timing, poking fun at the ridiculous.
Part of what was off-putting about the concept was just pondering the result. Writing by committee, as we all know from various experiences in our work environments, has to be the worst process to go through and generally results in obtuse material. Yes, it has been done in the real literary world — most recently the 2011 serial novel No Rest for the Dead by Alexander McCall Smith, Sandra Brown, R.L. Stine, and Jeffery Deaver (among numerous others). To me, that sounds gimmicky at best. How could such a book possibly hang together?
To his credit, Heater allows his own characters to approach this inexplicable task with the cynicism that it warrants. They are equally perplexed as to why they have been talked into doing this project. They share an agent and muse aloud to each other as to what her reasoning could possibly be. Is it is a nod to “two washed up hacks trying to rejuvenate their careers?” Is it, as the character Ken Prescott notes, comparable to “lashing together pieces of driftwood to make a better raft?” Or, in another, related nautical metaphor, are two of them being used as a “human buoy” in a desperate tactic to fend off a potential disaster that might befall the third author?
The answer isn’t clear either to the three writers or to the audience — which raises the ante and makes the play immediately provocative and engaging. For you see, the three characters are on completely different arcs in their lives and literary careers. Prescott (played by Louis Balestra with neediness shielded by a patina of dignity) is the older, revered writer of serious merit. He is past the prime of his career and is reduced to living alone and talking to his possibly fatally ill cat, incongruously providing some hilarious moments.
Ann Jackson (played by the classy yet down-to-earth Karis Wiggins) is a former best-selling author of thrillers. She has been suffering from writer’s block for 36 months — also known as three years (a running joke in the play that shows what a slump she has been in). Her marriage isn’t giving her much sustenance either: She and her husband communicate by email in the same house. Into this demented menage á trois enters Paul Caine (played by Covey newcomer, Darian Sundberg). Caine is either a brilliant, inspired wunderkind with a phenomenal career ahead of him, or a total jerk. He is insufferable. (One example: “No one is as interesting as me.”)
Part of Heater’s creativity is evident in how he has the three characters engage with one-another. They never meet face-to-face as a threesome; they live in different places. Their interactions and the narrative thread move forward via their conversations through 21st century communication technology and social networking, demonstrating that Heater is up to speed on current trends. While Prescott talks to the others with a cordless telephone, Jackson has a hands-free miniature device hung perpetually over her ear, and Caine — the Gen-Xer that he is — has a smart phone, naturally. In addition, Wikipedia has a few key moments in the play that are quite droll and contemporary.
The set depicts the three different personalities of the authors very clearly. Prescott’s work desk is mahogany, covered with several old and perfectly aligned books. His chair is sturdy, classic black leather. It evokes the aura of an academic, esoteric person. Jackson’s desk has clean lines with lovely cherry wood, glass and chrome. Fittingly, the most prominent book on her desk seems to be one of her own earlier successes — the one with a younger picture of herself on the jacket. And Paine’s is a complete mess, much like the young author himself, haphazardly strewn with crumpled up papers, off-kilter CD covers and other detritus. Hats off to the properties designer Susan Blumer for making the characters’ respective parts of the stage so clearly an extension of their personalities.
Playing God has another dimension, as well. Two additional characters — The Woman (Julia Berger) and The Man (Jordan Glaski) — are the protagonists in the authors’ evolving novel. We first see The Woman sitting alone in a café in the beginning passage of the book as written by Prescott. The Man enters later, and their storyline is added to incrementally.
Having imaginary characters come to life as a plot device is not unprecedented. Sometimes this is done brilliantly, as with Woody Allen’s 1969 Broadway play and 1972 hit movie, Play it Again, Sam — in which none other than Humphrey Bogart (in his Casablanca persona) crosses into the plane of reality to offer romantic advice to a neurotic movie critic. Sometimes it’s done dreadfully, as in the completely forgettable 2003 Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson film Alex and Emma, where they are simultaneously writing and acting as the characters in the novel being created.
Some of the most hilarious scenes in Playing God occur as the Jackson-Prescott-Caine (or is it Caine-Jackson-Prescott?) novel jolts from author to author in this game of literary Post Office. Is The Man loving and heartbroken? Or is he a dangerous, vengeful killer? Is The Woman a demure lady or a seductress? Berger and Glaski are called upon to change tempo and mood in rapid-fire fashion as the words on the authors’ computer screens are crossed out and rewritten again and again. The “play-within-the play” sparked some of the biggest laughs from the audience.
However, the real action isn’t in the pretend novel the writers are hacking out. In an interview with The Post-Standard, Heater said, “This play has to do with the concept of creating characters and playing God. You’re dealing with three authors who are playing God. And you have three people who are trying to manipulate the people around them.”
It seems to me that the play isn’t about writers manipulating the book’s characters like marionettes. The true action seems to be in Jackson’s, Caine’s and Prescott’s internal passage — how they see some things and recognize some truths in themselves, when held up to the unvarnished mirror of their publishing-world competitors. This fitful journey on the part of three main characters is what makes this comedy-drama have a real heart.
It’s not just a gimmick, like the one conjured up by the offstage literary agent. It’s something much better: a new, good play.
Barefoot in the Park
September 2012
Covey Company’s ‘Barefoot in the Park’ keeps the gags fresh — and the laughter continuous
Neil Simon’s classic comedy, while somewhat dated, stands up well in this effervescent ensemble effort directed by Garrett Heater
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
The Covey Theatre Company’s Barefoot in the Park is a charmingly acted artifact of another era in American theater… and American life.
Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s first huge theatrical success, opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for more than 1,500 performances, launching the career of Robert Redford in the romantic male lead. It was a successful movie in 1967, starring Redford and pre-Hanoi sex kitten Jane Fonda, and featured the memorable Johnny Mercer and Neil Hefti theme song by the same name.
The romantic comedy is set in 1962 and centers on the first few weeks of married life for Paul and Corie Bratter. Paul is somewhat insufferable and straight-laced. Corie is an effervescent and joyful new bride. They’ve just moved into their first apartment — a small, ill-equipped flat on 48th Street in New York City that’s five flights up (six, if you count the stoop). In his 1998 memoir Rewrites, Simon wrote that every play, comedy or tragedy, has to be about “an event. Like the first time ‘something’ has ever happened.” For Barefoot in the Park, that event is moving into the new apartment — which becomes a comic foil and character in its own right, causing much of the conflict between the protagonists and the ensuing highjinks among the entire ensemble.
Paul, played with deadpan seriousness by J. Allan Orton, is trying to buckle down as a newly hired lawyer, reminding his wife repeatedly that he has a court case to attend in the morning. Corie, played with delightful and sweet aplomb by Sara Weiler, has gone directly from her childhood home to this first apartment as a married woman — with just a six-day honeymoon at the Plaza Hotel in between. She spends every day on the phone calling Paul at work because she’s bored. When he’s home and flees to the bedroom to prepare his case, Corie pleads, “Can’t I come in to watch you?”
Corie’s identity is “Mrs. Paul Bratter” — as she proudly exclaims to Harry Pepper, the Bell Telephone installer played by Bill Hughes. And having “my very own phone!” is a milestone for her. Did Corie go to college? We don’t know. Has she contemplated doing something other than paint all the walls an overly pastel blue? We also don’t know. When Corie’s mother Ethel Banks (hilariously played by Karis Wiggins) comes to visit, we learn that at the ripe old age of 50 she too can’t imagine entering the workforce.
At this point, even if you’ve seen all five seasons of Mad Men, you may want to pinch yourself as a reminder that this really was the norm in the pre-Feminine Mystique era. In 1962, only 30 percent of married women worked. The General Social Survey (GSS), an annual survey of social attitudes among the American public conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, found that as late as 1977 “more than half of respondents felt that mothers working was harmful to children.” Times have changed. Barefoot in the Park may be a Neil Simon classic, but it is dated.
What doesn’t change is that people love to laugh. And like so many Neil Simon plays, this one delivers. With spot-on direction by Covey Artistic Director Garrett Heater and great performances by the entire cast, Barefoot in the Park provides continuous opportunities for raucous laughter.
One of the greatest catalysts for laughter in this play is the aforementioned flight of stairs, which every character treats as if he or she has just climbed all 102 floors of the Empire State Building. One by one, they stagger and wheeze their way through the front door of the apartment, occasionally needing assistance to be pulled in the rest of the way, like dead weight. As a device, this shtick never gets stale at the hands (or perhaps feet) of this strong troupe of comedians.
A lot of the pratfalls are sparked by a second continuing catalyst: the abundance of liquor all are sloshing down. Corie mixes up knock-em-dead cocktails in her ill-equipped apartment with as much frequency as Don Draper in the ad man’s Madison Avenue office. One of the funniest scenes in the entire play follows an evening at an Albanian restaurant on Staten Island (where all have had just a bit too much Ouzo), as Paul at last loses control, flailing and flopping on the couch with his equally impaired mother-in-law — who had compounded things by her copious use of “little pink pills”).
The restaurant (and Ouzo) came recommended by Paul and Corie’s upstairs neighbor, Victor Velasco — a gourmand of indeterminate origin (and accent) who helped the young bride pick out chotskies for the apartment while introducing the group to some rather daring foreign culinary items.
Ed Mastin is superb as Velasco, and his ensuing encounter with Corie’s mom is a highlight. At the beginning of the play, Banks’s role in life appears to be sending Corie daily wedding presents (all carried up the stairs by the Delivery Man, played by Bernard Kaplan — who like the others milked the ordeal for all it’s worth). Velasco proceeds to open up Banks to new realms of experience.
As contrived as parts of the plot to this story may sound, theatergoers should know that there were real newlyweds living in this improbable Manhattan apartment.
Neil Simon adored — truly adored — his first wife Joan Baim, who tragically died of cancer in 1973 after 20 years of marriage. The Rewrites narrative of Simon’s first days of marriage to Baim, a former actress and dancer, reads like a plot summary of Barefoot in the Park. The ridiculously small bedroom was true: “One could open the window by standing on the bed, but opening the small closet on the opposite wall was another matter. What we did was walk across the bed, [and] pull the closet door open about three inches, a major feat in itself.” The same for the large hole in the skylight fourteen feet above, the bain of Paul’s existence in the play: “Unfortunately, this also permitted rain, sleep, and snow to fall gently and otherwise on the sofa, the only good piece of furniture we had.” Despite the holes in the ceiling, telephone booth-sized bathroom and impossible bedroom, they were “gloriously happy” in their cheap, multi-flight walk-up. Their young love is what he remembered, treasured and set down for posterity.
Barefoot in the Park might be a sociological artifact, but it is also the lasting valentine to the true love of a real-life couple. And, yes, Joan did like to walk barefoot in Washington Square Park.
Neil Simon’s classic comedy, while somewhat dated, stands up well in this effervescent ensemble effort directed by Garrett Heater
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
The Covey Theatre Company’s Barefoot in the Park is a charmingly acted artifact of another era in American theater… and American life.
Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s first huge theatrical success, opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for more than 1,500 performances, launching the career of Robert Redford in the romantic male lead. It was a successful movie in 1967, starring Redford and pre-Hanoi sex kitten Jane Fonda, and featured the memorable Johnny Mercer and Neil Hefti theme song by the same name.
The romantic comedy is set in 1962 and centers on the first few weeks of married life for Paul and Corie Bratter. Paul is somewhat insufferable and straight-laced. Corie is an effervescent and joyful new bride. They’ve just moved into their first apartment — a small, ill-equipped flat on 48th Street in New York City that’s five flights up (six, if you count the stoop). In his 1998 memoir Rewrites, Simon wrote that every play, comedy or tragedy, has to be about “an event. Like the first time ‘something’ has ever happened.” For Barefoot in the Park, that event is moving into the new apartment — which becomes a comic foil and character in its own right, causing much of the conflict between the protagonists and the ensuing highjinks among the entire ensemble.
Paul, played with deadpan seriousness by J. Allan Orton, is trying to buckle down as a newly hired lawyer, reminding his wife repeatedly that he has a court case to attend in the morning. Corie, played with delightful and sweet aplomb by Sara Weiler, has gone directly from her childhood home to this first apartment as a married woman — with just a six-day honeymoon at the Plaza Hotel in between. She spends every day on the phone calling Paul at work because she’s bored. When he’s home and flees to the bedroom to prepare his case, Corie pleads, “Can’t I come in to watch you?”
Corie’s identity is “Mrs. Paul Bratter” — as she proudly exclaims to Harry Pepper, the Bell Telephone installer played by Bill Hughes. And having “my very own phone!” is a milestone for her. Did Corie go to college? We don’t know. Has she contemplated doing something other than paint all the walls an overly pastel blue? We also don’t know. When Corie’s mother Ethel Banks (hilariously played by Karis Wiggins) comes to visit, we learn that at the ripe old age of 50 she too can’t imagine entering the workforce.
At this point, even if you’ve seen all five seasons of Mad Men, you may want to pinch yourself as a reminder that this really was the norm in the pre-Feminine Mystique era. In 1962, only 30 percent of married women worked. The General Social Survey (GSS), an annual survey of social attitudes among the American public conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, found that as late as 1977 “more than half of respondents felt that mothers working was harmful to children.” Times have changed. Barefoot in the Park may be a Neil Simon classic, but it is dated.
What doesn’t change is that people love to laugh. And like so many Neil Simon plays, this one delivers. With spot-on direction by Covey Artistic Director Garrett Heater and great performances by the entire cast, Barefoot in the Park provides continuous opportunities for raucous laughter.
One of the greatest catalysts for laughter in this play is the aforementioned flight of stairs, which every character treats as if he or she has just climbed all 102 floors of the Empire State Building. One by one, they stagger and wheeze their way through the front door of the apartment, occasionally needing assistance to be pulled in the rest of the way, like dead weight. As a device, this shtick never gets stale at the hands (or perhaps feet) of this strong troupe of comedians.
A lot of the pratfalls are sparked by a second continuing catalyst: the abundance of liquor all are sloshing down. Corie mixes up knock-em-dead cocktails in her ill-equipped apartment with as much frequency as Don Draper in the ad man’s Madison Avenue office. One of the funniest scenes in the entire play follows an evening at an Albanian restaurant on Staten Island (where all have had just a bit too much Ouzo), as Paul at last loses control, flailing and flopping on the couch with his equally impaired mother-in-law — who had compounded things by her copious use of “little pink pills”).
The restaurant (and Ouzo) came recommended by Paul and Corie’s upstairs neighbor, Victor Velasco — a gourmand of indeterminate origin (and accent) who helped the young bride pick out chotskies for the apartment while introducing the group to some rather daring foreign culinary items.
Ed Mastin is superb as Velasco, and his ensuing encounter with Corie’s mom is a highlight. At the beginning of the play, Banks’s role in life appears to be sending Corie daily wedding presents (all carried up the stairs by the Delivery Man, played by Bernard Kaplan — who like the others milked the ordeal for all it’s worth). Velasco proceeds to open up Banks to new realms of experience.
As contrived as parts of the plot to this story may sound, theatergoers should know that there were real newlyweds living in this improbable Manhattan apartment.
Neil Simon adored — truly adored — his first wife Joan Baim, who tragically died of cancer in 1973 after 20 years of marriage. The Rewrites narrative of Simon’s first days of marriage to Baim, a former actress and dancer, reads like a plot summary of Barefoot in the Park. The ridiculously small bedroom was true: “One could open the window by standing on the bed, but opening the small closet on the opposite wall was another matter. What we did was walk across the bed, [and] pull the closet door open about three inches, a major feat in itself.” The same for the large hole in the skylight fourteen feet above, the bain of Paul’s existence in the play: “Unfortunately, this also permitted rain, sleep, and snow to fall gently and otherwise on the sofa, the only good piece of furniture we had.” Despite the holes in the ceiling, telephone booth-sized bathroom and impossible bedroom, they were “gloriously happy” in their cheap, multi-flight walk-up. Their young love is what he remembered, treasured and set down for posterity.
Barefoot in the Park might be a sociological artifact, but it is also the lasting valentine to the true love of a real-life couple. And, yes, Joan did like to walk barefoot in Washington Square Park.
They'll Take Manhattan
by Jim MacKillop of the Syracuse NewTimes
At first glance the announcement looked like a mistake. What could be motivating Garrett Heater and Susan Blumer’s Covey Theatre Company to revive Neil Simon’s nearly half-century-old domestic comedy Barefoot in the Park, now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room? In less than three years the Covey has established a reputation for edgy and very contemporary fare, of which July’s nearly X-rated musical Avenue Q is an apt example. Barefoot might indeed be a crowd-pleaser, with 1,530 performances in its first run and many revivals locally, but Covey has been doing robust box office all along.
Reflecting Simon’s roots in television, Barefoot feels sitcomish, all surface with very little subtext. Polishing that surface, however, is really what this production is about. A still young Mike Nichols, breaking away from sketch comedy with Elaine May, built his reputation as a director with Barefoot, and Heater (coincidentally the same age that Nichols was then) is parading his abilities here.
Not-so-simple Simon: J. Allan Orton and Sara Weiler in Covey Theatre’s Barefoot in the Park.Any director who revives a familiar property, whether Hamlet, Peter Pan or The Sound of Music, is leading with his chin. He not only has to be good, he has to exceed expectations. This is all the more true with early Neil Simon, where the jokes are often perceived to be threadbare and stale. What Heater accomplishes here is to get us to laugh as if we had never heard any of them before. And we do laugh, deeply and consistently all the way through.
Heater’s first smart move was to leave in all the then-current trivia that makes us feel Manhattan newlyweds Corie (Sara Weiler) and Paul Bratter (J. Allan Orton) are living in a distant never-neverland during the Kennedy administration, where no conflict is intractable and happiness is there for the reaching. Coffee is brewed in a percolator, suburban matrons buy Toni Home Permanents, dial telephones come with long cords, luggage comes with hard sides, and $125 a month is a lot to pay for a 48th Street apartment, even if it is a fifth-floor walk-up. And hip young professional Paul is taken aback at the irregularity of other tenants in his building: One couple is (gasp!) of the same gender, only he’s not sure which it is.
“5D” is the address on the door, but we can never forget what exertion it takes to climb that high. The device is in danger of getting weary, but to refresh it Heater casts veteran player Bernie Kaplan, now in his 80s, as a uniformed delivery man, whose entrance looks as though it might be his last. Fifth-floor walk-up also means that the apartment is spartan, but, thanks to scenic designer Maggie Blythewood, the doors slam.
As there is only one set, the apartment is Corie’s turf. She speaks almost half the dialogue in the nearly 2-hour action. Although apparently well-educated and upper-middle class (Paul’s a lawyer), Corie has no thoughts of working outside the apartment, but she does decorate and humanize the place. With the honeymoon barely past, she still craves romance and resents Paul’s spending an evening preparing for a morning in the courtroom. She wants his full attention when he is home and will put on a skimpy, revealing black negligee to warm him up.
Two somewhat older people complicate Corie and Paul’s lives. One is Corie’s fur coat-wearing mother Ethel Banks (Karis Wiggins), from the far New Jersey suburbs. Anything but a cliché, she does not interfere or second-guess and seems to approve of Paul. But as a widow she has an empty house at home and tends to hang around a lot.
Residing in an even tinier apartment above Corie and Paul is the highly ambiguous Victor Velasco (Ed Mastin), “the Bluebeard of 48th Street,” of undetermined accent and no visible means of support. Behind in his rent, he must climb to his digs via a ladder in Corie and Paul’s bedroom, and he’s given to patently bogus claims, like belonging to a gourmet club that also includes Prince Philip and Daryl Zanuck.
So what makes this funny? Sometimes, as his detractors charge, Simon is merely having his characters exchange gags as if they were vaudevillians or burlesque comics:
Paul: Guess who lives in Apartment D?
Corie: I don’t know.
Paul: Nobody else does either. (Pause) Nobody’s been seen there in three years, (pause) except every morning there are nine empty tuna cans outside the door.
Corie: Who do you suppose lives there?
Paul: (five-beat pause) Sounds like a big cat with a can opener.
OK, a superior vaudevillian, but such setups account for only a small portion of Barefoot’s laughter generation. Instead, these are preparation for Simon’s capacity for sprinkling humor all though the dialogue about things that are not in themselves funny, passages that look like nothing on the page or when recorded in a reviewer’s notebook. Ethel suffers from a bad back, for example, and so director Heater and actresses Wiggins and Weiler contrive to get the maximum mileage out of such an unpromising device as her bed board.
There is a kind of plot between the principals and also the second leads, as well as a surprising expression of deep-felt emotion. The scene-stealing moment in this production belongs to Karis Wiggins, during the morning after her Ethel allows Victor to drive her home from the indigestible evening at the Albanian restaurant. It turns out the two never went to New Jersey and, well, here she is, hair disheveled and not wearing her dress in this G-rated comedy. Her great speech of needfulness is all the more affecting for being couched in absurdity.
This is a springboard, also, for Orton’s big scene, His Paul proves that, with enough alcohol, he will unstuff his shirt, burst his buttons and throw away his marbles.
With her name on the program above other credits, it is Sara Weiler who has to keep firing zingers for the full 2 hours. She’s both needful and resilient, a pre-Steinem housewife and a spunky free spirit. Even at rest, her adorable quotient is 10.
As the only character who is comic from the get-go, Ed Mastin’s Velasco gets no heartfelt speech. But he pulls off the slyest trick in the show. Just as this is a role that would have called for the much-beloved Bill Molesky before he decamped for Florida a year ago, Mastin’s roll of the eyes under his dark brows and his throaty cadence when beginning a line brings Molesky back to us. He’s doing a Molesky to get Velasco. You read it here first, folks.
Performers and aestheticians have long been at a loss to explain what makes a line funny, just shrugging off that it’s “all in the timing.” Unfailing timing is what you get all through Covey’s Barefoot in the Park.
by Jim MacKillop of the Syracuse NewTimes
At first glance the announcement looked like a mistake. What could be motivating Garrett Heater and Susan Blumer’s Covey Theatre Company to revive Neil Simon’s nearly half-century-old domestic comedy Barefoot in the Park, now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room? In less than three years the Covey has established a reputation for edgy and very contemporary fare, of which July’s nearly X-rated musical Avenue Q is an apt example. Barefoot might indeed be a crowd-pleaser, with 1,530 performances in its first run and many revivals locally, but Covey has been doing robust box office all along.
Reflecting Simon’s roots in television, Barefoot feels sitcomish, all surface with very little subtext. Polishing that surface, however, is really what this production is about. A still young Mike Nichols, breaking away from sketch comedy with Elaine May, built his reputation as a director with Barefoot, and Heater (coincidentally the same age that Nichols was then) is parading his abilities here.
Not-so-simple Simon: J. Allan Orton and Sara Weiler in Covey Theatre’s Barefoot in the Park.Any director who revives a familiar property, whether Hamlet, Peter Pan or The Sound of Music, is leading with his chin. He not only has to be good, he has to exceed expectations. This is all the more true with early Neil Simon, where the jokes are often perceived to be threadbare and stale. What Heater accomplishes here is to get us to laugh as if we had never heard any of them before. And we do laugh, deeply and consistently all the way through.
Heater’s first smart move was to leave in all the then-current trivia that makes us feel Manhattan newlyweds Corie (Sara Weiler) and Paul Bratter (J. Allan Orton) are living in a distant never-neverland during the Kennedy administration, where no conflict is intractable and happiness is there for the reaching. Coffee is brewed in a percolator, suburban matrons buy Toni Home Permanents, dial telephones come with long cords, luggage comes with hard sides, and $125 a month is a lot to pay for a 48th Street apartment, even if it is a fifth-floor walk-up. And hip young professional Paul is taken aback at the irregularity of other tenants in his building: One couple is (gasp!) of the same gender, only he’s not sure which it is.
“5D” is the address on the door, but we can never forget what exertion it takes to climb that high. The device is in danger of getting weary, but to refresh it Heater casts veteran player Bernie Kaplan, now in his 80s, as a uniformed delivery man, whose entrance looks as though it might be his last. Fifth-floor walk-up also means that the apartment is spartan, but, thanks to scenic designer Maggie Blythewood, the doors slam.
As there is only one set, the apartment is Corie’s turf. She speaks almost half the dialogue in the nearly 2-hour action. Although apparently well-educated and upper-middle class (Paul’s a lawyer), Corie has no thoughts of working outside the apartment, but she does decorate and humanize the place. With the honeymoon barely past, she still craves romance and resents Paul’s spending an evening preparing for a morning in the courtroom. She wants his full attention when he is home and will put on a skimpy, revealing black negligee to warm him up.
Two somewhat older people complicate Corie and Paul’s lives. One is Corie’s fur coat-wearing mother Ethel Banks (Karis Wiggins), from the far New Jersey suburbs. Anything but a cliché, she does not interfere or second-guess and seems to approve of Paul. But as a widow she has an empty house at home and tends to hang around a lot.
Residing in an even tinier apartment above Corie and Paul is the highly ambiguous Victor Velasco (Ed Mastin), “the Bluebeard of 48th Street,” of undetermined accent and no visible means of support. Behind in his rent, he must climb to his digs via a ladder in Corie and Paul’s bedroom, and he’s given to patently bogus claims, like belonging to a gourmet club that also includes Prince Philip and Daryl Zanuck.
So what makes this funny? Sometimes, as his detractors charge, Simon is merely having his characters exchange gags as if they were vaudevillians or burlesque comics:
Paul: Guess who lives in Apartment D?
Corie: I don’t know.
Paul: Nobody else does either. (Pause) Nobody’s been seen there in three years, (pause) except every morning there are nine empty tuna cans outside the door.
Corie: Who do you suppose lives there?
Paul: (five-beat pause) Sounds like a big cat with a can opener.
OK, a superior vaudevillian, but such setups account for only a small portion of Barefoot’s laughter generation. Instead, these are preparation for Simon’s capacity for sprinkling humor all though the dialogue about things that are not in themselves funny, passages that look like nothing on the page or when recorded in a reviewer’s notebook. Ethel suffers from a bad back, for example, and so director Heater and actresses Wiggins and Weiler contrive to get the maximum mileage out of such an unpromising device as her bed board.
There is a kind of plot between the principals and also the second leads, as well as a surprising expression of deep-felt emotion. The scene-stealing moment in this production belongs to Karis Wiggins, during the morning after her Ethel allows Victor to drive her home from the indigestible evening at the Albanian restaurant. It turns out the two never went to New Jersey and, well, here she is, hair disheveled and not wearing her dress in this G-rated comedy. Her great speech of needfulness is all the more affecting for being couched in absurdity.
This is a springboard, also, for Orton’s big scene, His Paul proves that, with enough alcohol, he will unstuff his shirt, burst his buttons and throw away his marbles.
With her name on the program above other credits, it is Sara Weiler who has to keep firing zingers for the full 2 hours. She’s both needful and resilient, a pre-Steinem housewife and a spunky free spirit. Even at rest, her adorable quotient is 10.
As the only character who is comic from the get-go, Ed Mastin’s Velasco gets no heartfelt speech. But he pulls off the slyest trick in the show. Just as this is a role that would have called for the much-beloved Bill Molesky before he decamped for Florida a year ago, Mastin’s roll of the eyes under his dark brows and his throaty cadence when beginning a line brings Molesky back to us. He’s doing a Molesky to get Velasco. You read it here first, folks.
Performers and aestheticians have long been at a loss to explain what makes a line funny, just shrugging off that it’s “all in the timing.” Unfailing timing is what you get all through Covey’s Barefoot in the Park.
One of the things that make Neil Simon….well….. Neil Simon, besides his almost unmatched prolific body of work, is his uniquely “modern” mid-20th century voice speaking on the human condition, real relationships, and relate-able foibles. He is the essence of “it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.”
Covey Theatre's Barefoot in the Park, Truth in Comedy
by David Lowenstein of the Syracuse Post-Standard
Many of the performances in The Covey Theater Company’s production of Simon’s second play, “Barefoot in the Park”, achieve this verisimilitude. And, as we have come to expect from director Garrett Heater and Covey, the impressive production values, including the clever musical choices, support the play with style and expertly rendered period detail.
At the core of the play set in 1962 Manhattan are Corie (Sara Weiler) and Paul (J. Allan Orton), newlyweds moving into a new apartment , five or six flights up, (depending if you “count the stoop”), after six days of passionate honeymooning at The Plaza. They quickly learn the honeymoon is over as the reality of his work, her mother, an eccentric neighbor, and just living together pushes them to the brink of a less than Kardashian length marriage.
Weiler’s Corie is all effervescence and energy. Her excitement is infectious as is her ability to stay grounded and believable giving a high octane performance in the intimate Bevard Room. Orton matches in energy but misses in believability. His Paul is all petulance and pout instead of genuine confusion and conservative problem solving. An example that also acts as a metaphor: He begins to look at notes for his first case as a “real lawyer” and yet his legal pad is clearly blank.
But what really lacks here is the intimate chemistry of newlyweds who have just spent 6 whole days finding, to quote Corie, “a real, physical and spiritual love.” Both actors are working hard to connect throughout the play but it is the evident work that betrays the relationship.
Responsibility must be shared with Heater whose direction is clean, specific but lacks proper pacing in the first Act. Details seeming his niche, I was surprised to hear Corie talk about the delivery of “wrong lamps” that she decided to keep anyway, and yet there were no lamps to be seen.
When mother arrives, in the guise of Karis Wiggins all is forgotten, forgiven, and hilarity ensues. This is a performance of calibrated nuance and Carol Burnette-ish buffoonery.
Add to Wiggins’ star turn, two other reality based, yet ultimately entertaining performances in the creeper pseudo suavity of Ed Mastin as neighbor Victor Velasco and the funny everyman Bill Hughes as Harry Pepper, Heater ends up taking the audience on a truly enjoyable walk in the park.
Covey Theatre's Barefoot in the Park, Truth in Comedy
by David Lowenstein of the Syracuse Post-Standard
Many of the performances in The Covey Theater Company’s production of Simon’s second play, “Barefoot in the Park”, achieve this verisimilitude. And, as we have come to expect from director Garrett Heater and Covey, the impressive production values, including the clever musical choices, support the play with style and expertly rendered period detail.
At the core of the play set in 1962 Manhattan are Corie (Sara Weiler) and Paul (J. Allan Orton), newlyweds moving into a new apartment , five or six flights up, (depending if you “count the stoop”), after six days of passionate honeymooning at The Plaza. They quickly learn the honeymoon is over as the reality of his work, her mother, an eccentric neighbor, and just living together pushes them to the brink of a less than Kardashian length marriage.
Weiler’s Corie is all effervescence and energy. Her excitement is infectious as is her ability to stay grounded and believable giving a high octane performance in the intimate Bevard Room. Orton matches in energy but misses in believability. His Paul is all petulance and pout instead of genuine confusion and conservative problem solving. An example that also acts as a metaphor: He begins to look at notes for his first case as a “real lawyer” and yet his legal pad is clearly blank.
But what really lacks here is the intimate chemistry of newlyweds who have just spent 6 whole days finding, to quote Corie, “a real, physical and spiritual love.” Both actors are working hard to connect throughout the play but it is the evident work that betrays the relationship.
Responsibility must be shared with Heater whose direction is clean, specific but lacks proper pacing in the first Act. Details seeming his niche, I was surprised to hear Corie talk about the delivery of “wrong lamps” that she decided to keep anyway, and yet there were no lamps to be seen.
When mother arrives, in the guise of Karis Wiggins all is forgotten, forgiven, and hilarity ensues. This is a performance of calibrated nuance and Carol Burnette-ish buffoonery.
Add to Wiggins’ star turn, two other reality based, yet ultimately entertaining performances in the creeper pseudo suavity of Ed Mastin as neighbor Victor Velasco and the funny everyman Bill Hughes as Harry Pepper, Heater ends up taking the audience on a truly enjoyable walk in the park.
Avenue Q
July 2012
Covey Theatre Company offers a rich, funny trip to ‘Avenue Q’
Neil Novelli of the Syracuse Post Standard
“Avenue Q” is a sprightly, funny, deeply moving musical, and the Covey Theatre Company’s production of it offers lots of originality and an across-the-board talented cast, making for two-and-a-half hours of sheer entertainment and theatrical power.
As of this writing, both performances on opening weekend were sold out, and for the second weekend an additional performance has been added at 8 p.m. on Thursday, July 19.
The musical overture of “Avenue Q” has a familiar “Sesame Street” bounce to it. You quickly realize, though, that the characters in “Avenue Q” are mostly in their early 20s. The music on “Sesame Street” is what they grew up on, but now it has picked up bite and complexity.
And their lives have changed. Instead of the brightness of Sesame Street, there’s the seedy feeling of Avenue Q. They have to worry about finding apartments and paying bills.
“It sucks to be me,” sings one of the main characters, who is soon joined by the others in a self-pitying lament. Like the rest of the show, the song is a rich, tickling blend of satire and sympathy.
The characters on “Sesame Street” are puppets. So are many of the characters in “Avenue Q,” and the Covey production, directed by Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater, picks up terrific theatrical energy from its use of puppets.
Having mentioned puppets and “Sesame Street,” however, I hasten to add that this is emphatically not a show for younger kids. The themes are adult, and some of the scenes – e.g., puppets having sex – are wildly ribald.
Like “Sesame Street,” though, “Avenue Q” raises the life issues that face its focus age group, and while neither show offers all the answers, at least the issues are presented.
The puppets in “Avenue Q” are not very big, maybe two to two-and-a-half feet in size, and they are worn on the actors’ arms. The puppet characters are rather childlike, but with their silly faces, bright colors and stumpy arms, they are capable of the widest possible range of real-seeming emotions.
Because the skilled actors controlling the puppets are going through those same moves and emotions with their own bodies and voices, you get situations with a lot of additional resonances.
For example, Kate Monster (Sara Weiler) meets Princeton (Garrett Heater), a guy her age, and you can guess how that’s going to turn out. But because of the puppets, Kate and Princeton’s encounters take on uncanny depths. It works like this:
Kate the Puppet is a couple of feet away from Princeton the Puppet. Both puppets talk to each other and are variously happy, hopeful and insecure at their first meeting. They both want this to lead to something deeper, and that matters even though the puppets are obviously only fleece, felt and plastic.
At the same time, puppeteers Weiler and Heater are standing fairly close. While their puppets are getting acquainted, Weiler in her role as Kate and Heater in his role as Princeton are also getting acquainted.
This gives the effect of events echoing each other, and it gets to be like reality squared and cubed. The effect can build to big crescendos when other characters come in, for example when Lucy the Slut is sashaying around Princeton, to Kate’s dismay.
Over time, we see the young characters come together, sort out their not-quite-adult lives, and feel a little better about present and future.
Karin Franklin-King, exuding a down-to-earth tone of ease and reality, absolutely anchors the show in her role as Gary Coleman, past his fame and now an apartment super wearing a tool belt.
Weiler’s Kate Monster is a bright, independent young woman, a teacher’s assistant, but she really wants to find that special other. He might turn out to be Heater’s Princeton, who wanders in clueless, wondering what to do with his B.A in English. Later when Kate and Princeton have broken up, Weiler’s terrific singing of “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” reveals it to be one of the world’s great torch songs.
Directors and actors deserve high praise for a tightly-paced show, and for making the complex blending and shifting of characters seem effortless. Josh Taylor is Trekkie Monster, who believes that “the internet is for porn!”; Josh Mele is Brian, a deeply unfunny stand-up comic; and Sunny Hernandez is Christmas Eve, Brian’s wife, a psychotherapist who in a song advises Kate, “The more you love someone, the more you want to kill them.”
Jodie Baum is the puppeteer for Lucy the Slut, a hot number with blond curls and overstuffed bosom; Lucy’s come-hither song to all the men gets big-time belting from Baum: “I can make you feel special.”
David Cotter’s Rod is a closeted and conflicted gay man; and Rob Lescarbeau generates similar energies as Nick, Rod’s roommate, who may not be gay even though he insists that he is not gay. Kyle Johnson and Alexia Crescenzi are the Bad Idea Bears, who visit these 20-somethings with just the wrong advice; they tell Princeton at a crucial moment, “Buy beer.”
Neil Novelli of the Syracuse Post Standard
“Avenue Q” is a sprightly, funny, deeply moving musical, and the Covey Theatre Company’s production of it offers lots of originality and an across-the-board talented cast, making for two-and-a-half hours of sheer entertainment and theatrical power.
As of this writing, both performances on opening weekend were sold out, and for the second weekend an additional performance has been added at 8 p.m. on Thursday, July 19.
The musical overture of “Avenue Q” has a familiar “Sesame Street” bounce to it. You quickly realize, though, that the characters in “Avenue Q” are mostly in their early 20s. The music on “Sesame Street” is what they grew up on, but now it has picked up bite and complexity.
And their lives have changed. Instead of the brightness of Sesame Street, there’s the seedy feeling of Avenue Q. They have to worry about finding apartments and paying bills.
“It sucks to be me,” sings one of the main characters, who is soon joined by the others in a self-pitying lament. Like the rest of the show, the song is a rich, tickling blend of satire and sympathy.
The characters on “Sesame Street” are puppets. So are many of the characters in “Avenue Q,” and the Covey production, directed by Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater, picks up terrific theatrical energy from its use of puppets.
Having mentioned puppets and “Sesame Street,” however, I hasten to add that this is emphatically not a show for younger kids. The themes are adult, and some of the scenes – e.g., puppets having sex – are wildly ribald.
Like “Sesame Street,” though, “Avenue Q” raises the life issues that face its focus age group, and while neither show offers all the answers, at least the issues are presented.
The puppets in “Avenue Q” are not very big, maybe two to two-and-a-half feet in size, and they are worn on the actors’ arms. The puppet characters are rather childlike, but with their silly faces, bright colors and stumpy arms, they are capable of the widest possible range of real-seeming emotions.
Because the skilled actors controlling the puppets are going through those same moves and emotions with their own bodies and voices, you get situations with a lot of additional resonances.
For example, Kate Monster (Sara Weiler) meets Princeton (Garrett Heater), a guy her age, and you can guess how that’s going to turn out. But because of the puppets, Kate and Princeton’s encounters take on uncanny depths. It works like this:
Kate the Puppet is a couple of feet away from Princeton the Puppet. Both puppets talk to each other and are variously happy, hopeful and insecure at their first meeting. They both want this to lead to something deeper, and that matters even though the puppets are obviously only fleece, felt and plastic.
At the same time, puppeteers Weiler and Heater are standing fairly close. While their puppets are getting acquainted, Weiler in her role as Kate and Heater in his role as Princeton are also getting acquainted.
This gives the effect of events echoing each other, and it gets to be like reality squared and cubed. The effect can build to big crescendos when other characters come in, for example when Lucy the Slut is sashaying around Princeton, to Kate’s dismay.
Over time, we see the young characters come together, sort out their not-quite-adult lives, and feel a little better about present and future.
Karin Franklin-King, exuding a down-to-earth tone of ease and reality, absolutely anchors the show in her role as Gary Coleman, past his fame and now an apartment super wearing a tool belt.
Weiler’s Kate Monster is a bright, independent young woman, a teacher’s assistant, but she really wants to find that special other. He might turn out to be Heater’s Princeton, who wanders in clueless, wondering what to do with his B.A in English. Later when Kate and Princeton have broken up, Weiler’s terrific singing of “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” reveals it to be one of the world’s great torch songs.
Directors and actors deserve high praise for a tightly-paced show, and for making the complex blending and shifting of characters seem effortless. Josh Taylor is Trekkie Monster, who believes that “the internet is for porn!”; Josh Mele is Brian, a deeply unfunny stand-up comic; and Sunny Hernandez is Christmas Eve, Brian’s wife, a psychotherapist who in a song advises Kate, “The more you love someone, the more you want to kill them.”
Jodie Baum is the puppeteer for Lucy the Slut, a hot number with blond curls and overstuffed bosom; Lucy’s come-hither song to all the men gets big-time belting from Baum: “I can make you feel special.”
David Cotter’s Rod is a closeted and conflicted gay man; and Rob Lescarbeau generates similar energies as Nick, Rod’s roommate, who may not be gay even though he insists that he is not gay. Kyle Johnson and Alexia Crescenzi are the Bad Idea Bears, who visit these 20-somethings with just the wrong advice; they tell Princeton at a crucial moment, “Buy beer.”
Covey Theatre’s ‘Avenue Q’ a raunchy but endearing production that will have you laughing, blushing
Here’s one “block party” you’re not likely to forget anytime soon
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
The most entertaining local address is not Carousel Center Drive, soon to be renamed DestinyUSA Drive. It’s Avenue Q. That’s not a street in a neighborhood in the City of Syracuse or the environs of Onondaga County, but the locale of the hilarious production playing at the Bevard Theatre downtown.
Avenue Q beat out the megahit Wicked for the Best Musical Tony Award in 2004. It also trumped the witches by winning Tony Awards for best book and best original score. This catchy, top-notch production by the Covey Theatre Company, directed by Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater, certainly shows why. Avenue Q is clever and constantly engaging, with an accessible story, laugh-out-loud lines and memorable Broadway songs.
As the poster clearly shows, and most theater fans by now know, Avenue Q is a send-up of every Sesame Street trope—from oversized hand puppets in eye-popping colors to the “educational” videos explaining important learning concepts. It is by turns raunchy and endearing, ribald and touching. Like the 2011 Tony Award winner The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q includes things you never thought you’d see or hear on a musical theatre stage. Like Book of Mormon, it’s both wildly irreverent and sweet to the core.
The heart of the play and of this production are the on-again, off-again couple, Princeton—a recent college graduate with a “useless” bachelor’s degree in English; and Kate Monster—a furry, nicely coiffed substitute kindergarten teacher. They are played by standouts Sara Weiler and Heater (also the Covey’s artistic director). Weiler is just plain adorable and Heater has true stage presence. (Not to keep bringing up Mormon, but Heater would be incredible in the lead role of Elder Kevin Price.)
The denizens of Avenue Q are a mish-mash of eccentrics, including the unemployed comic Brian (played by Josh Mele); Brian’s Japanese-American—not “Oriental”—girlfriend, Christmas Eve (played by Sunny Hernandez); the Cookie Monster-inspired Trekkie Monster (played by Josh Taylor) and the Bert-and-Ernie pairing of Nicky and Rod (Rob Lescarbeau and David Cotter, respectively). When seeing Nicky and Rod’s interaction it certainly makes one wonder how many children asked their parents, “Why are Bert and Ernie always together and why do they sleep in the same bedroom if they’re not brothers?”
The superintendent of the somewhat seedy block of flats is none other than Gary Coleman, down on his luck after the demise of Diff’rent Strokes and selling off all his possessions on eBay to stay afloat. As in the original Broadway production, Gary Coleman is played by a woman—in this case Syracuse’s local treasure, Karin Franklin-King. A Miss Piggy-style temptress Lucy the Slut (played by Jodie Baum) arrives on Avenue Q to shake things up a bit, as she shakes her maracas, so to speak.
The entire cast is uniformly strong and credit must also be given to the supporting puppeteers who ably assist in the portrayal of the puppet and “monster” characters. The puppets’ eyes are fixed, yet their faces impart much nuance of expression merely by a slight angle of the head, posture of the body or position of the hands. At the same time, some puppeteering is not subtle at all. (Have reviewers ever before had to include the disclaimer “graphic puppet sex” as a guide to family viewing?)
Some of the tongue-in-cheek “lessons” depicted in Avenue Q are the reverse of those imparted by The Children’s Television Workshop’s long-running series. If you work hard and do well in school you might just end up unemployed, living on a dead-end street in an outer-borough. Instead of staying home to do your homework, why not have an excessive number of Long Island ice teas? People may not always be supportive and kind, but may relish when you have flopped, engaging in some musical “Schadenfreude.” And instead of a happy Reading Rainbow kind of world, it turns out that “Everybody is a Little Bit Racist,” as another one of the irresistible songs proclaims.
With the downturn in the economy in which college graduates are unemployed and living in less-than-ideal circumstances, it could be that Avenue Q resonates more with audiences today than it did when originally conceived in 2002 by Robert Lopez and Richard Marx as a potential television series. Rather than becoming a hit TV show, it was developed Off-Broadway and shortly moved to Broadway to its well-earned and lasting acclaim.
In Syracuse, the opening night show was sold-out, as was the Saturday, July 14 performance. The Covey Theatre Company webpage posted an additional performance in its two-weekend run, which is likely to be a best seller. With the strength and popularity of this delightful production, it’s too bad that Avenue Q couldn’t be a more extended destination.
Here’s one “block party” you’re not likely to forget anytime soon
By Laurel Saiz of CNY Cafe Momus
The most entertaining local address is not Carousel Center Drive, soon to be renamed DestinyUSA Drive. It’s Avenue Q. That’s not a street in a neighborhood in the City of Syracuse or the environs of Onondaga County, but the locale of the hilarious production playing at the Bevard Theatre downtown.
Avenue Q beat out the megahit Wicked for the Best Musical Tony Award in 2004. It also trumped the witches by winning Tony Awards for best book and best original score. This catchy, top-notch production by the Covey Theatre Company, directed by Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater, certainly shows why. Avenue Q is clever and constantly engaging, with an accessible story, laugh-out-loud lines and memorable Broadway songs.
As the poster clearly shows, and most theater fans by now know, Avenue Q is a send-up of every Sesame Street trope—from oversized hand puppets in eye-popping colors to the “educational” videos explaining important learning concepts. It is by turns raunchy and endearing, ribald and touching. Like the 2011 Tony Award winner The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q includes things you never thought you’d see or hear on a musical theatre stage. Like Book of Mormon, it’s both wildly irreverent and sweet to the core.
The heart of the play and of this production are the on-again, off-again couple, Princeton—a recent college graduate with a “useless” bachelor’s degree in English; and Kate Monster—a furry, nicely coiffed substitute kindergarten teacher. They are played by standouts Sara Weiler and Heater (also the Covey’s artistic director). Weiler is just plain adorable and Heater has true stage presence. (Not to keep bringing up Mormon, but Heater would be incredible in the lead role of Elder Kevin Price.)
The denizens of Avenue Q are a mish-mash of eccentrics, including the unemployed comic Brian (played by Josh Mele); Brian’s Japanese-American—not “Oriental”—girlfriend, Christmas Eve (played by Sunny Hernandez); the Cookie Monster-inspired Trekkie Monster (played by Josh Taylor) and the Bert-and-Ernie pairing of Nicky and Rod (Rob Lescarbeau and David Cotter, respectively). When seeing Nicky and Rod’s interaction it certainly makes one wonder how many children asked their parents, “Why are Bert and Ernie always together and why do they sleep in the same bedroom if they’re not brothers?”
The superintendent of the somewhat seedy block of flats is none other than Gary Coleman, down on his luck after the demise of Diff’rent Strokes and selling off all his possessions on eBay to stay afloat. As in the original Broadway production, Gary Coleman is played by a woman—in this case Syracuse’s local treasure, Karin Franklin-King. A Miss Piggy-style temptress Lucy the Slut (played by Jodie Baum) arrives on Avenue Q to shake things up a bit, as she shakes her maracas, so to speak.
The entire cast is uniformly strong and credit must also be given to the supporting puppeteers who ably assist in the portrayal of the puppet and “monster” characters. The puppets’ eyes are fixed, yet their faces impart much nuance of expression merely by a slight angle of the head, posture of the body or position of the hands. At the same time, some puppeteering is not subtle at all. (Have reviewers ever before had to include the disclaimer “graphic puppet sex” as a guide to family viewing?)
Some of the tongue-in-cheek “lessons” depicted in Avenue Q are the reverse of those imparted by The Children’s Television Workshop’s long-running series. If you work hard and do well in school you might just end up unemployed, living on a dead-end street in an outer-borough. Instead of staying home to do your homework, why not have an excessive number of Long Island ice teas? People may not always be supportive and kind, but may relish when you have flopped, engaging in some musical “Schadenfreude.” And instead of a happy Reading Rainbow kind of world, it turns out that “Everybody is a Little Bit Racist,” as another one of the irresistible songs proclaims.
With the downturn in the economy in which college graduates are unemployed and living in less-than-ideal circumstances, it could be that Avenue Q resonates more with audiences today than it did when originally conceived in 2002 by Robert Lopez and Richard Marx as a potential television series. Rather than becoming a hit TV show, it was developed Off-Broadway and shortly moved to Broadway to its well-earned and lasting acclaim.
In Syracuse, the opening night show was sold-out, as was the Saturday, July 14 performance. The Covey Theatre Company webpage posted an additional performance in its two-weekend run, which is likely to be a best seller. With the strength and popularity of this delightful production, it’s too bad that Avenue Q couldn’t be a more extended destination.
Hand Jive
by Jim MacKillop of the Syracuse NewTimes
Naughty puppets tell it like it is in Covey Theatre’s area premiere of the not-for-kids musical Avenue Q
Television, that much-maligned medium, has been a vehicle for shared experiences. Talk to older folks and they all remember Lucille Ball stuffing chocolates from the conveyer belt into her mouth. For audiences born since 1965 everyone has seen a thousand hours of Sesame Street, even more than of The Brady Bunch. Decades later the lessons that Sesame Street fostered linger on, and not just silent vowels. The ethnically diverse street of an inner-city neighborhood, complete with puppets, became a national template, replacing the white bread suburbs of Leave It to Beaver.
Harder to sustain, however, is the cheery, upbeat Public Broadcasting optimism about just how special you are and how everything in the world is open to your honest effort. Hey, kids, meet rejection, failure and loneliness, via Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty’s musical Avenue Q, the summer production from the Covey Theatre Company at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Theater. The surprise winner of the 2004 Tony Award, Avenue Q is a one-of-a-kind show, and it’s not just because of those puppets.
Ever since pop culture discovered postmodernism more than two decades ago, spoofs and parodies of well-established vehicles, plays, movies and TV have been rampant. But this is different. Avenue Q does not so much parody Sesame Street as enter into dialogue with it. Composerlyricist Marx worked for Sesame Street and several members of the original cast performed on the show, and later returned to it. In some ways, Avenue Q is more homage than spoof. The thesis appears to be not so much that the PBS show does not hold up as much as a mere human being—or their puppet equivalents— can’t hold up to the promise of it. Musically, Lopez and Marx’s songs speak in the jaunty Sesame Street idiom. In bringing the show to the BeVard, not an ideal venue for musicals, the Covey troupe has ensconced six players in the right balcony, led by double Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) winner Bridget Moriarty and including such luminaries as Jeff Unaitis on the second keyboard. This is an assurance that the songs pack more wallop than the dialogue, trenchant as it may be. Musical numbers such as “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” and even more, “It Sucks to be Me,” are bitterly effective. The songs contribute to Avenue Q’s unique achievement—of making pathos comic.
Avenue Q does not violate Sesame Street’s copyright restrictions, which is a good thing because of some rough language and a much-discussed steamy sequence of love-making (with puppets). Makes no difference; we make the connections easily. There are 11 puppet characters and three fully human ones who interact, just as they did on the PBS series. Easiest to connect is gravel-voiced obsessive Trekkie Monster (Josh Taylor), who clamors for Internet porn instead of cookies. Similarly, the roommates Rod (David Cotter) and Nicky (Rob Lescarbeau) clearly evoke Bert and Ernie, only here their affection for one another is out of the closet.
The two characters who become the love interest are a regular guy puppet, Princeton (Garrett Heater), and a girl from some fur-covered, discriminated-against group, Kate Monster (Sara Weiler), from the Trekkie Monster family. Other characters fly beyond any Sesame Street convention, such as the terrible-tempered school administrator Mrs. Thistletwat (Bethany Daniluk) or the in-your-face aggression of Lucy the Slut (Jodie Baum).
Along with the 11 puppets, some single-rod, some double (requiring two handlers), Covey Theatre has given Avenue Q a professional gloss with two other expenditures. One is a large, highdefinition screen with graphics from the original production, like a dotted-line medical readout of Lucy that also traces the outline of her ample bosom. The second is a huge, wooden façade of an urban scene, complete with doors that slam and windows that can be reached through behind-the-scene ladders. Although not credited in the program, the entire frame was purchased from an earlier production in Rhinebeck.
Action begins when Princeton, a recent college graduate, goes to the city hoping to find a purpose in his life, as soon as he can locate an apartment and a job. He has no luck with Avenue A and can’t find a place until he gets to Avenue Q, the deflating hidden message in the title. There he meets Kate and Trekkie, Rod and Nicky, as well as a couple who are thinking of getting married, despite cultural differences.
Brian (Josh Mele) is an excruciatingly awful Jewish comedian, whose loudmouth routines fall flat despite the actor’s well-known comedic abilities. It’s like having a singer always hit the wrong notes. His equally loud fiancée, Christmas Eve (Sunny Hernandez) is Japanese; we can tell from the Madame Butterfly knitting needles in her black wig. Christmas is supposed to be a therapist, but given her bossy demeanor we’re not surprised she has zero patients.
Kate announces that her dream or purpose is to open a special school for her minority group, “people of fur,” to be called the Monstersori. Clueless, Princeton complains that such a school would discriminate against non-monsters, or reverse discriminate. Instead of taking the high-minded Sesame Street line of accepting difference, or diversity is strength, the denizens of Avenue Q shrug the whole thing off with the number, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”
Not quite fitting into the plot is a superintendent named Gary Coleman (Karin Franklin-King), who manages a run-down Avenue Q property. The real Gary Coleman was alive when the show opened, although he never played the role himself and frequently threatened to sue. Sesame Street, of course, often featured cameos from celebrities, and Lena Horne actually made reciting the alphabet exciting. At the time Avenue Q opened, Coleman had become a bitter joke, a once-promising and charming child actor, from the 1980s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, who never quite grew up but was left with continuing indignities. One of the songs for the Avenue Q Gary is “Schadenfreude,” about taking pleasure from the misfortune of others.
Although she does not fit tightly into the plot, Jodie Baum’s character, Lucy the Slut, establishes a dominating presence when she shows up at the café where Brian’s gags are falling flat. Lucy storms in with a hot number, “Special,” and fires up all the boys. In a show with more than a dozen strong performers, Baum has a way of bending the spotlight to her character.
Co-directors Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater have done a hundred things right with this tricky and complex show. Among them is the strong casting, with adorable Sara Weiler as Kate. We’re not used to seeing Heater as a romantic leading man or a singer, but he’s the right man for the job. Rob Lescarbeau and David Cotter deliver more than they have been credited with here.
Anticipation has been running high for this area premiere of Avenue Q, and the Covey Theatre has already scheduled an extra performance for Thursday, July 19, 8 p.m. This week’s final shows on Friday, July 20, and Saturday, July 21, have already sold out.
by Jim MacKillop of the Syracuse NewTimes
Naughty puppets tell it like it is in Covey Theatre’s area premiere of the not-for-kids musical Avenue Q
Television, that much-maligned medium, has been a vehicle for shared experiences. Talk to older folks and they all remember Lucille Ball stuffing chocolates from the conveyer belt into her mouth. For audiences born since 1965 everyone has seen a thousand hours of Sesame Street, even more than of The Brady Bunch. Decades later the lessons that Sesame Street fostered linger on, and not just silent vowels. The ethnically diverse street of an inner-city neighborhood, complete with puppets, became a national template, replacing the white bread suburbs of Leave It to Beaver.
Harder to sustain, however, is the cheery, upbeat Public Broadcasting optimism about just how special you are and how everything in the world is open to your honest effort. Hey, kids, meet rejection, failure and loneliness, via Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty’s musical Avenue Q, the summer production from the Covey Theatre Company at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Theater. The surprise winner of the 2004 Tony Award, Avenue Q is a one-of-a-kind show, and it’s not just because of those puppets.
Ever since pop culture discovered postmodernism more than two decades ago, spoofs and parodies of well-established vehicles, plays, movies and TV have been rampant. But this is different. Avenue Q does not so much parody Sesame Street as enter into dialogue with it. Composerlyricist Marx worked for Sesame Street and several members of the original cast performed on the show, and later returned to it. In some ways, Avenue Q is more homage than spoof. The thesis appears to be not so much that the PBS show does not hold up as much as a mere human being—or their puppet equivalents— can’t hold up to the promise of it. Musically, Lopez and Marx’s songs speak in the jaunty Sesame Street idiom. In bringing the show to the BeVard, not an ideal venue for musicals, the Covey troupe has ensconced six players in the right balcony, led by double Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) winner Bridget Moriarty and including such luminaries as Jeff Unaitis on the second keyboard. This is an assurance that the songs pack more wallop than the dialogue, trenchant as it may be. Musical numbers such as “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” and even more, “It Sucks to be Me,” are bitterly effective. The songs contribute to Avenue Q’s unique achievement—of making pathos comic.
Avenue Q does not violate Sesame Street’s copyright restrictions, which is a good thing because of some rough language and a much-discussed steamy sequence of love-making (with puppets). Makes no difference; we make the connections easily. There are 11 puppet characters and three fully human ones who interact, just as they did on the PBS series. Easiest to connect is gravel-voiced obsessive Trekkie Monster (Josh Taylor), who clamors for Internet porn instead of cookies. Similarly, the roommates Rod (David Cotter) and Nicky (Rob Lescarbeau) clearly evoke Bert and Ernie, only here their affection for one another is out of the closet.
The two characters who become the love interest are a regular guy puppet, Princeton (Garrett Heater), and a girl from some fur-covered, discriminated-against group, Kate Monster (Sara Weiler), from the Trekkie Monster family. Other characters fly beyond any Sesame Street convention, such as the terrible-tempered school administrator Mrs. Thistletwat (Bethany Daniluk) or the in-your-face aggression of Lucy the Slut (Jodie Baum).
Along with the 11 puppets, some single-rod, some double (requiring two handlers), Covey Theatre has given Avenue Q a professional gloss with two other expenditures. One is a large, highdefinition screen with graphics from the original production, like a dotted-line medical readout of Lucy that also traces the outline of her ample bosom. The second is a huge, wooden façade of an urban scene, complete with doors that slam and windows that can be reached through behind-the-scene ladders. Although not credited in the program, the entire frame was purchased from an earlier production in Rhinebeck.
Action begins when Princeton, a recent college graduate, goes to the city hoping to find a purpose in his life, as soon as he can locate an apartment and a job. He has no luck with Avenue A and can’t find a place until he gets to Avenue Q, the deflating hidden message in the title. There he meets Kate and Trekkie, Rod and Nicky, as well as a couple who are thinking of getting married, despite cultural differences.
Brian (Josh Mele) is an excruciatingly awful Jewish comedian, whose loudmouth routines fall flat despite the actor’s well-known comedic abilities. It’s like having a singer always hit the wrong notes. His equally loud fiancée, Christmas Eve (Sunny Hernandez) is Japanese; we can tell from the Madame Butterfly knitting needles in her black wig. Christmas is supposed to be a therapist, but given her bossy demeanor we’re not surprised she has zero patients.
Kate announces that her dream or purpose is to open a special school for her minority group, “people of fur,” to be called the Monstersori. Clueless, Princeton complains that such a school would discriminate against non-monsters, or reverse discriminate. Instead of taking the high-minded Sesame Street line of accepting difference, or diversity is strength, the denizens of Avenue Q shrug the whole thing off with the number, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”
Not quite fitting into the plot is a superintendent named Gary Coleman (Karin Franklin-King), who manages a run-down Avenue Q property. The real Gary Coleman was alive when the show opened, although he never played the role himself and frequently threatened to sue. Sesame Street, of course, often featured cameos from celebrities, and Lena Horne actually made reciting the alphabet exciting. At the time Avenue Q opened, Coleman had become a bitter joke, a once-promising and charming child actor, from the 1980s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, who never quite grew up but was left with continuing indignities. One of the songs for the Avenue Q Gary is “Schadenfreude,” about taking pleasure from the misfortune of others.
Although she does not fit tightly into the plot, Jodie Baum’s character, Lucy the Slut, establishes a dominating presence when she shows up at the café where Brian’s gags are falling flat. Lucy storms in with a hot number, “Special,” and fires up all the boys. In a show with more than a dozen strong performers, Baum has a way of bending the spotlight to her character.
Co-directors Susan Blumer and Garrett Heater have done a hundred things right with this tricky and complex show. Among them is the strong casting, with adorable Sara Weiler as Kate. We’re not used to seeing Heater as a romantic leading man or a singer, but he’s the right man for the job. Rob Lescarbeau and David Cotter deliver more than they have been credited with here.
Anticipation has been running high for this area premiere of Avenue Q, and the Covey Theatre has already scheduled an extra performance for Thursday, July 19, 8 p.m. This week’s final shows on Friday, July 20, and Saturday, July 21, have already sold out.
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Photography by Amelia Beamish
The Romanovs
October 2011
Dynamic drama recalls doomed dynasty
DOWNTOWN AFTER DARK for The Eagle October, 2011 By RUSS TARBY
If the downfall of Russia’s Romanov Dynasty had no hemophiliac prince and no controversial cleric, it would still be a story brimming with romance, revenge and revolution. But the presence of the bleeding boy Alexie and the over-sexed holy man Rasputin elevate the tale of the royal family’s fate to epic proportions. No wonder the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the 1917 Russian Revolution has inspired so many marvelous movies, from 1932’s “Rasputin and the Empress” to the Disney-animated “Anastasia” in 1997.
Now, Syracuse’s award-winning playwright and producer Garrett Heater adds his meticulously researched stage play, “The Romanovs,” to the list of dramas documenting the Tsar’s inevitable undoing.
Flawed characters
Presented by the Covey Theatre Company at the Mulroy Civic Center, downtown, “The Romanovs” stars David Witanowski as Tsar Nicholas II, known here as “Nicky,” and Katharine Gibson as Empress Alexandra, known here as “Alex,” and Bruce Paulsen as Rasputin, known here as “our friend.”
All three principals create characters overflowing with authenticity while plagued by individual weaknesses. Witanowski’s tsar is kindly, overcautious and ultimately indecisive. Gibson’s empress evinces a degree of intensity unusual for turn-of-the-century women. Alex is both headstrong and heart-sick. Her resolve weakens rapidly, however, when her meddlesome friend, Anna (a delightful Kate Huddleston) introduces her to the charismatic Rasputin. For his part, Paulsen turns the priapic priest into a monstrous manipulator whose motivations rarely stray from drunkenness and debauchery.
Support cast sparkles
While the leads — especially Gibson — charge the two-act play with an electric verisimilitude, several supporting players also sparkle.
As Alexandra’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, actress Amy Blumer plays two terrific scenes with Gibson, one in which Elizabeth describes the bloody aftermath of her husband’s 1905 assassination by bomb and one in which she says goodbye to the empress forever after clashing with her over Rasputin in 1918.
Robert Kovak, the play’s only actor with actual background in the Russian language, shines as the military leader Grand Duke Nikolasha, and 9-year-old actor Christof Deboni portrays a charming Alexie, the medically challenged heir to the throne. As Maria, the governess of the royal family’s five children, Kimberly Panek expresses a wide spectrum of emotions. In the first scene, she glows as she carries into the reception hall the infant son, Alexie, played by a real newborn, Calvin Mele. Later, an arrogant Rasputin ruthlessly rapes Maria who is soon fired after she refuses to acknowledge him as an honored palace guest.
As Nicky’s mother the Dowager Empress Dagmar, Susan Blumer excels as a cranky, autocratic busybody yearning for the dynasty’s glory days while boldly disapproving her son’s inability to send Rasputin packing.
Rounding out the cast are Amy Ligoci, Maya Dwyer, Liz Russell, Esther Richardson, John Price and Michael Penny.
Terror staged tastefully
Covey’s crew — director/costumer Heater, lighting technician Bob Dwyer, prop mistress Susan Blumer and stage manager Tim Hahn — all deserve credit for decisions and effects which smoothly support the script and the cast.
For instance, the difficult rape scene — while bordering on brutal — is convincingly staged, as it must be to confirm Rasputin’s true nature. The final scene of the family’s mass execution depicts terror tastefully as Dwyer’s flashing lights mimic the flurry of gunshots in the basement of a house in the Ural Mountains.
A couple constructive criticisms: while Karen Procopio styled wonderful wigs for the ladies, she seemed befuddled by Rasputin, whose bobby-pin littered straight black coif jarringly clashes with his curly black beard. And, though the action takes place between 1905 and 1918, the royal family never seems to age. Unfortunately, the audience ages plenty as the play times out at two hours and 45 minutes, at least a half-hour too long.
Despite those picayune complaints, “The Romanovs” rises well above the level at which we find most local theater. Heater, who won deserved accolades for last year’s “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe,” has done it again. Syracuse is lucky to have the youthful Heater honing his prodigious talents here. Theatrically speaking, this guy’s a genius.
DOWNTOWN AFTER DARK for The Eagle October, 2011 By RUSS TARBY
If the downfall of Russia’s Romanov Dynasty had no hemophiliac prince and no controversial cleric, it would still be a story brimming with romance, revenge and revolution. But the presence of the bleeding boy Alexie and the over-sexed holy man Rasputin elevate the tale of the royal family’s fate to epic proportions. No wonder the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the 1917 Russian Revolution has inspired so many marvelous movies, from 1932’s “Rasputin and the Empress” to the Disney-animated “Anastasia” in 1997.
Now, Syracuse’s award-winning playwright and producer Garrett Heater adds his meticulously researched stage play, “The Romanovs,” to the list of dramas documenting the Tsar’s inevitable undoing.
Flawed characters
Presented by the Covey Theatre Company at the Mulroy Civic Center, downtown, “The Romanovs” stars David Witanowski as Tsar Nicholas II, known here as “Nicky,” and Katharine Gibson as Empress Alexandra, known here as “Alex,” and Bruce Paulsen as Rasputin, known here as “our friend.”
All three principals create characters overflowing with authenticity while plagued by individual weaknesses. Witanowski’s tsar is kindly, overcautious and ultimately indecisive. Gibson’s empress evinces a degree of intensity unusual for turn-of-the-century women. Alex is both headstrong and heart-sick. Her resolve weakens rapidly, however, when her meddlesome friend, Anna (a delightful Kate Huddleston) introduces her to the charismatic Rasputin. For his part, Paulsen turns the priapic priest into a monstrous manipulator whose motivations rarely stray from drunkenness and debauchery.
Support cast sparkles
While the leads — especially Gibson — charge the two-act play with an electric verisimilitude, several supporting players also sparkle.
As Alexandra’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, actress Amy Blumer plays two terrific scenes with Gibson, one in which Elizabeth describes the bloody aftermath of her husband’s 1905 assassination by bomb and one in which she says goodbye to the empress forever after clashing with her over Rasputin in 1918.
Robert Kovak, the play’s only actor with actual background in the Russian language, shines as the military leader Grand Duke Nikolasha, and 9-year-old actor Christof Deboni portrays a charming Alexie, the medically challenged heir to the throne. As Maria, the governess of the royal family’s five children, Kimberly Panek expresses a wide spectrum of emotions. In the first scene, she glows as she carries into the reception hall the infant son, Alexie, played by a real newborn, Calvin Mele. Later, an arrogant Rasputin ruthlessly rapes Maria who is soon fired after she refuses to acknowledge him as an honored palace guest.
As Nicky’s mother the Dowager Empress Dagmar, Susan Blumer excels as a cranky, autocratic busybody yearning for the dynasty’s glory days while boldly disapproving her son’s inability to send Rasputin packing.
Rounding out the cast are Amy Ligoci, Maya Dwyer, Liz Russell, Esther Richardson, John Price and Michael Penny.
Terror staged tastefully
Covey’s crew — director/costumer Heater, lighting technician Bob Dwyer, prop mistress Susan Blumer and stage manager Tim Hahn — all deserve credit for decisions and effects which smoothly support the script and the cast.
For instance, the difficult rape scene — while bordering on brutal — is convincingly staged, as it must be to confirm Rasputin’s true nature. The final scene of the family’s mass execution depicts terror tastefully as Dwyer’s flashing lights mimic the flurry of gunshots in the basement of a house in the Ural Mountains.
A couple constructive criticisms: while Karen Procopio styled wonderful wigs for the ladies, she seemed befuddled by Rasputin, whose bobby-pin littered straight black coif jarringly clashes with his curly black beard. And, though the action takes place between 1905 and 1918, the royal family never seems to age. Unfortunately, the audience ages plenty as the play times out at two hours and 45 minutes, at least a half-hour too long.
Despite those picayune complaints, “The Romanovs” rises well above the level at which we find most local theater. Heater, who won deserved accolades for last year’s “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe,” has done it again. Syracuse is lucky to have the youthful Heater honing his prodigious talents here. Theatrically speaking, this guy’s a genius.
Covey Theatre Presents Original "Romanovs"
by Tony Curulla - Syracuse Post-Standard
If you like theater with one foot in the fictitious “realm” and the other firmly planted in history, Russian history, that is, then a visit to The Covey Theatre Company’s “The Romanovs” may assuage your desire for an intriguing historical drama. Also, you won’t see it anywhere else (not yet, anyway) because the script is an “in-house” original penned by Covey co-founder Garrett A. Heater. He also directs the production.
Heater’s “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” was given positive reviews and additional accolades last year, and another “historical” original is planned for next year that is based around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It looks as though Central New York will be getting its share of history lessons along with interesting drama—a potentially potent combination.
The work at hand gives us a glimpse into the domestic, as well as the political, milieu involving the Russian ruling family dynasty that lasted approximately three hundred years. This play, however, deals with the last thirteen of those years (1905-1918), when Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra were in power, but were subsequently overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution that planted the seeds for the eventual communist state.
Within that historical framework, however, what perhaps makes this the stuff of interesting theater is the character of Rasputin, the notorious debauched “monk”, who held so much power and sway within the royal family, and in particular with Alexandra given her belief that Rasputin’s spiritual “connections” had saved the life of her youngest child.
Heater has managed to effectively present these historical personages as flesh and blood entities (with one exception) much because of the efforts of an experienced cast. Chief among them are Katherine Gibson (Alexandra), David Witanowski (Tsar Nicholas II), Susan Blumer (Dagmar, Nicholas’ mother), Kate Huddleston (Anna Vyrubova), Robert Kovak (Grand Duke Nikolasha), and Bruce Paulsen (Rasputin).
The play is starkly presented with minimal scenery and stage props except for the seemingly authentic costuming, dramatic Russian music, and historically informative voice overs. This further necessitates the effective rigors of the actors’ words and movements to keep us “in the moment”.
By and large, this occurs seamlessly with most major roles fulfilled with fidelity and believability. In particular, Gibson’s Alexandra is fraught with a multi-dimensional interpretation that obviates the necessary vacillation between physical and mental strength to psychological weakness. Also, Kovak’s Duke is demonstrative of an opinionated underling who demonstrates strength and even a sense of humor, howbeit often of a mocking cynicism. In fact, Kovak’s character is among the most interesting simply because he has a sense of humor that is outwardly displayed in an otherwise humorless environment.
Paulsen’s Rasputin who, dramatically, becomes a pivotal character in this piece, is too reminiscent of “stock” evil/horror/even monster character renditions. Between a plethora of guttural utterings and gait and movements closer to Frankenstein’s creature than to a deceptive, sinister “holy man”, I was left wondering if the play was attempting to treat history as a Halloween trick.
Most effective scene for its depth and revelation of character occurs between Nicholas and his mother as Witanowski and Blumer parry forth with intimate family secrets, and show the effectiveness of well-written dialogue performed well.
The least effective scene is an unfortunately long, unnecessarily graphic rape scene when Rasputin has his violent way with Marie (Kimberly Panek), the housemaid. Much of the time, particularly in theater, less is more, and certainly, this scene could do a lot more with much less.
Overall, the pace of the production certainly could use some picking up, and this could be achieved through some minor, but judicious, cutting, along with fewer and shorter pauses in movement ,dialogue, and scene changes. Despite the fact that Russian history and literature are slow, weighty and long, I’m not so sure this theatrical portrayal needs to be.
Review of 'Romanovs' misses nuanced acting
Syracuse Post-Standard
To the Editor:
De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but I can’t help but think that Tony Curulla’s Oct. 20 critique of Bruce Paulsen’s portrayal of Rasputin in Garrett Heater’s “The Romanovs” is way off the mark. True, Paulsen’s Rasputin lurches when he is drunk or dying, but the contrast between such scenes and those when he is on his best behavior and establishing psychological control over Alexandra and her family belies Curulla’s characterization. I should say, rather, that Paulsen’s nuanced performance makes believable the problematic, but historically undeniable, impact of Grigori Rasputin on the Romanov family and Russian history.
Paulsen’s casting and performance is one of the (many) high points in Covey Theatre’s performance of “The Romanovs.”
Jack Miller
Syracuse
Royal Blue
By James MacKillop - Syracuse NewTimes
Only two instances do not establish a pattern, but in his second original drama in less than 12 months, playwright Garrett Heater demarcates clear priorities with The Romanovs. He likes family dramas in which characters are defined in bouncing off each other in roles we all know intuitively: father, mother, children. By taking ambiguous episodes from history, he can begin with ready-made issues and then solve them.
In his November 2010 production of Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, Heater quite plausibly explained how a daughter in an affluent family might murder her parents and get away with it. In The Romanovs, the Covey Theatre Company production now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room, Heater leaves himself less room to invent. No matter what their follies and failures, the last Russian royal family is done in by the Bolsheviks. What that leaves Heater to illuminate is the domestic turmoil before the end.
A stage play, novel or movie set in history is entitled to make any invention it wishes. William Shakespeare established the template here. The real live Julius Caesar was not sufficiently clever as to address his assassin, “Et tu, Brute?” and so the Bard had to think it up for him. Similarly, Czar Nicholas II in life was a notorious anti-Semite, the man in whose reign Tevye and his brood were driven from Anatevka. Here he is a man of conscience and a less-than-forceful autocrat. Similarly, the notorious mad monk Rasputin is still revered by latterday mystics in post-Soviet Russia who claim that all you have heard about him comes from biased and inaccurate press. It is with Rasputin, however, that Heater is most inventive.
History is not thrown in the waste basket, however. The 17 scenes, nine in the first act, eight in the second, are all conscientiously dated, from January 1905 to July 17, 1918. Taken directly from contemporary testimony, Heater projects voice-overs from people who care about what is happening to Russia and the royal family, like King George V of England (Bil Hughes), V.I. Lenin (Richard Mulligan) and Yurovsky the assassin (Rob Mulligan). The events of 90 years ago were unquestionably brutal, and their resonances are with us still.
Things begin to go badly for Russia and the royal family 12 years before the storming of the Winter Palace. In a fit of military hubris, the Russians war with the Japanese, the first such conflict between a European and an Asian nation, leading to the Kremlin’s humiliation. In the same year fighting
broke out on the streets in a preview of the enormous upheaval to come. In this production’s bare set, we never see combat or weapons, but we do have uniforms, created by playwright-director Heater.
In those brightly colored uniforms Czar Nicholas (David Witanowski), dressed as the nominal head of the army, confers with his military aide, Grand Duke Nikolasha (Robert Kovak), an ironist and the only wit in the cast. He reports that 93 peasants have been shot during a demonstration. Or was it 4,000? Nicholas is horrified at the loss of life, but also a bit confused. Just how bad was the bloodshed? How did it happen? Who was responsible? These are not just political questions but epistemological ones.
In this well-polished piece of exposition Heater tells us the most important things we need to know about the Czar. He would like to do the right thing, the strongest and most virtuous, if only he knew the truth. And usually he does not. His scolding mother, Dowager Empress Dagmar (Susan Blumer), cannot beat sense into him Most of the action takes place in the royal household. The beautiful, selfpossessed czarina, Empress Alexandra (Katharine Gibson), has just given birth to a son and heir as the action begins. In what may be a community theater first, the infant son Alexie is played by a live but very quiet infant, Calvin Mele, the son of veteran performers Jodi Bova and Josh Mele. When Alexie reaches age 9 or so he is played by Christof Deboni, in what turns out to be one of the most demanding roles in the entire project. Along with a series of florid emotional changes, Alexie must suffer near-death experiences from his hemophilia, the fatal blood disorder.
In scenes of theatrical economy, Heater sketches individual characters for the four Romanov sisters, starting with Olga (Amy Ligoci), the most bookish. He has the most fun with Anastasia (Esther Louise Richardson), the one later thought to have survived to become fodder for hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Here she is a tomboy and scamp, a torment to Alexie.
Alexie’s condition, of course, is greater torment for his parents. Despairing of any hope for a cure from contemporary medicine, Alexandra falls prey to the coaxing of her naïve, flibbertigibbet friend, Anna Vyrubova (Kate Huddleston). She sings the praises of a wonder-working holy man from the boondocks, Grigori Rasputin (Bruce Paulsen), even though she admits, “He smells like a goat.” The holy man promises to heal the child, and he appears to do just that. Once ingratiated in the household, his slimy tentacles slither everywhere.
Up until this point playwright Heater has hewed fairly close to the historical record, but with the mad monk he cuts loose. There may be lots of information about Rasputin, but it is disputed. It was apparently a Bolshevik fabrication that his very name means “licentious.” Heater’s character may draw more from dramatic history or recent news. Does he cavort with followers on the hillside, urging them to “cleanse” themselves through sin? So did Dionysus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. For lack of personal hygiene look to Moliere’s Tartuffe.
Lubriciousness? Try Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. For hypocrisy and violence Heater might have drawn on Osama bin Laden, the puritan who loved to relax with porn.
That’s a lot of evil for a single actor to project. Bruce Paulsen, very tall and blessed with an opera singer’s sonorous voice, moves and speaks slowly, not unlike Boris Karloff in the 1930s, but with more indecent dialogue. Czar Nicholas, not always oblivious, discerns the calamity the monk promises to be. But Katharine Gibson, one of the most admired leading ladies in community theater, is put to the test in retaining her character Akexandra’s faith in this outrageous charlatan, without seeming a blithering fool.
The audience knows more than the royal family. Seemingly alone in the residence Rasputin violently forces himself upon blameless servant Maria (Kimberly Panek). Rape scenes are meant to shock and disgust. (Compare what happens to Aldonza in Man of La Mancha, which is also on the current local floorboards.) In the name of history and the playwright’s anathema at moral cancer, this pushes the limits here. Paulsen, a radio announcer on WCNY-FM 91.3, advises listeners that one scene is R-rated. It prefigures the even greater violence coming to the Romanovs.
The epic collapse of a 300-yearold dynasty is harder to handle than a hatchet murder in Fall River, Mass. Yet playwright, director and costumer Heater gets us involved with the follies and beauties of this doomed family.
by Tony Curulla - Syracuse Post-Standard
If you like theater with one foot in the fictitious “realm” and the other firmly planted in history, Russian history, that is, then a visit to The Covey Theatre Company’s “The Romanovs” may assuage your desire for an intriguing historical drama. Also, you won’t see it anywhere else (not yet, anyway) because the script is an “in-house” original penned by Covey co-founder Garrett A. Heater. He also directs the production.
Heater’s “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” was given positive reviews and additional accolades last year, and another “historical” original is planned for next year that is based around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It looks as though Central New York will be getting its share of history lessons along with interesting drama—a potentially potent combination.
The work at hand gives us a glimpse into the domestic, as well as the political, milieu involving the Russian ruling family dynasty that lasted approximately three hundred years. This play, however, deals with the last thirteen of those years (1905-1918), when Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra were in power, but were subsequently overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution that planted the seeds for the eventual communist state.
Within that historical framework, however, what perhaps makes this the stuff of interesting theater is the character of Rasputin, the notorious debauched “monk”, who held so much power and sway within the royal family, and in particular with Alexandra given her belief that Rasputin’s spiritual “connections” had saved the life of her youngest child.
Heater has managed to effectively present these historical personages as flesh and blood entities (with one exception) much because of the efforts of an experienced cast. Chief among them are Katherine Gibson (Alexandra), David Witanowski (Tsar Nicholas II), Susan Blumer (Dagmar, Nicholas’ mother), Kate Huddleston (Anna Vyrubova), Robert Kovak (Grand Duke Nikolasha), and Bruce Paulsen (Rasputin).
The play is starkly presented with minimal scenery and stage props except for the seemingly authentic costuming, dramatic Russian music, and historically informative voice overs. This further necessitates the effective rigors of the actors’ words and movements to keep us “in the moment”.
By and large, this occurs seamlessly with most major roles fulfilled with fidelity and believability. In particular, Gibson’s Alexandra is fraught with a multi-dimensional interpretation that obviates the necessary vacillation between physical and mental strength to psychological weakness. Also, Kovak’s Duke is demonstrative of an opinionated underling who demonstrates strength and even a sense of humor, howbeit often of a mocking cynicism. In fact, Kovak’s character is among the most interesting simply because he has a sense of humor that is outwardly displayed in an otherwise humorless environment.
Paulsen’s Rasputin who, dramatically, becomes a pivotal character in this piece, is too reminiscent of “stock” evil/horror/even monster character renditions. Between a plethora of guttural utterings and gait and movements closer to Frankenstein’s creature than to a deceptive, sinister “holy man”, I was left wondering if the play was attempting to treat history as a Halloween trick.
Most effective scene for its depth and revelation of character occurs between Nicholas and his mother as Witanowski and Blumer parry forth with intimate family secrets, and show the effectiveness of well-written dialogue performed well.
The least effective scene is an unfortunately long, unnecessarily graphic rape scene when Rasputin has his violent way with Marie (Kimberly Panek), the housemaid. Much of the time, particularly in theater, less is more, and certainly, this scene could do a lot more with much less.
Overall, the pace of the production certainly could use some picking up, and this could be achieved through some minor, but judicious, cutting, along with fewer and shorter pauses in movement ,dialogue, and scene changes. Despite the fact that Russian history and literature are slow, weighty and long, I’m not so sure this theatrical portrayal needs to be.
Review of 'Romanovs' misses nuanced acting
Syracuse Post-Standard
To the Editor:
De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but I can’t help but think that Tony Curulla’s Oct. 20 critique of Bruce Paulsen’s portrayal of Rasputin in Garrett Heater’s “The Romanovs” is way off the mark. True, Paulsen’s Rasputin lurches when he is drunk or dying, but the contrast between such scenes and those when he is on his best behavior and establishing psychological control over Alexandra and her family belies Curulla’s characterization. I should say, rather, that Paulsen’s nuanced performance makes believable the problematic, but historically undeniable, impact of Grigori Rasputin on the Romanov family and Russian history.
Paulsen’s casting and performance is one of the (many) high points in Covey Theatre’s performance of “The Romanovs.”
Jack Miller
Syracuse
Royal Blue
By James MacKillop - Syracuse NewTimes
Only two instances do not establish a pattern, but in his second original drama in less than 12 months, playwright Garrett Heater demarcates clear priorities with The Romanovs. He likes family dramas in which characters are defined in bouncing off each other in roles we all know intuitively: father, mother, children. By taking ambiguous episodes from history, he can begin with ready-made issues and then solve them.
In his November 2010 production of Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, Heater quite plausibly explained how a daughter in an affluent family might murder her parents and get away with it. In The Romanovs, the Covey Theatre Company production now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room, Heater leaves himself less room to invent. No matter what their follies and failures, the last Russian royal family is done in by the Bolsheviks. What that leaves Heater to illuminate is the domestic turmoil before the end.
A stage play, novel or movie set in history is entitled to make any invention it wishes. William Shakespeare established the template here. The real live Julius Caesar was not sufficiently clever as to address his assassin, “Et tu, Brute?” and so the Bard had to think it up for him. Similarly, Czar Nicholas II in life was a notorious anti-Semite, the man in whose reign Tevye and his brood were driven from Anatevka. Here he is a man of conscience and a less-than-forceful autocrat. Similarly, the notorious mad monk Rasputin is still revered by latterday mystics in post-Soviet Russia who claim that all you have heard about him comes from biased and inaccurate press. It is with Rasputin, however, that Heater is most inventive.
History is not thrown in the waste basket, however. The 17 scenes, nine in the first act, eight in the second, are all conscientiously dated, from January 1905 to July 17, 1918. Taken directly from contemporary testimony, Heater projects voice-overs from people who care about what is happening to Russia and the royal family, like King George V of England (Bil Hughes), V.I. Lenin (Richard Mulligan) and Yurovsky the assassin (Rob Mulligan). The events of 90 years ago were unquestionably brutal, and their resonances are with us still.
Things begin to go badly for Russia and the royal family 12 years before the storming of the Winter Palace. In a fit of military hubris, the Russians war with the Japanese, the first such conflict between a European and an Asian nation, leading to the Kremlin’s humiliation. In the same year fighting
broke out on the streets in a preview of the enormous upheaval to come. In this production’s bare set, we never see combat or weapons, but we do have uniforms, created by playwright-director Heater.
In those brightly colored uniforms Czar Nicholas (David Witanowski), dressed as the nominal head of the army, confers with his military aide, Grand Duke Nikolasha (Robert Kovak), an ironist and the only wit in the cast. He reports that 93 peasants have been shot during a demonstration. Or was it 4,000? Nicholas is horrified at the loss of life, but also a bit confused. Just how bad was the bloodshed? How did it happen? Who was responsible? These are not just political questions but epistemological ones.
In this well-polished piece of exposition Heater tells us the most important things we need to know about the Czar. He would like to do the right thing, the strongest and most virtuous, if only he knew the truth. And usually he does not. His scolding mother, Dowager Empress Dagmar (Susan Blumer), cannot beat sense into him Most of the action takes place in the royal household. The beautiful, selfpossessed czarina, Empress Alexandra (Katharine Gibson), has just given birth to a son and heir as the action begins. In what may be a community theater first, the infant son Alexie is played by a live but very quiet infant, Calvin Mele, the son of veteran performers Jodi Bova and Josh Mele. When Alexie reaches age 9 or so he is played by Christof Deboni, in what turns out to be one of the most demanding roles in the entire project. Along with a series of florid emotional changes, Alexie must suffer near-death experiences from his hemophilia, the fatal blood disorder.
In scenes of theatrical economy, Heater sketches individual characters for the four Romanov sisters, starting with Olga (Amy Ligoci), the most bookish. He has the most fun with Anastasia (Esther Louise Richardson), the one later thought to have survived to become fodder for hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Here she is a tomboy and scamp, a torment to Alexie.
Alexie’s condition, of course, is greater torment for his parents. Despairing of any hope for a cure from contemporary medicine, Alexandra falls prey to the coaxing of her naïve, flibbertigibbet friend, Anna Vyrubova (Kate Huddleston). She sings the praises of a wonder-working holy man from the boondocks, Grigori Rasputin (Bruce Paulsen), even though she admits, “He smells like a goat.” The holy man promises to heal the child, and he appears to do just that. Once ingratiated in the household, his slimy tentacles slither everywhere.
Up until this point playwright Heater has hewed fairly close to the historical record, but with the mad monk he cuts loose. There may be lots of information about Rasputin, but it is disputed. It was apparently a Bolshevik fabrication that his very name means “licentious.” Heater’s character may draw more from dramatic history or recent news. Does he cavort with followers on the hillside, urging them to “cleanse” themselves through sin? So did Dionysus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. For lack of personal hygiene look to Moliere’s Tartuffe.
Lubriciousness? Try Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. For hypocrisy and violence Heater might have drawn on Osama bin Laden, the puritan who loved to relax with porn.
That’s a lot of evil for a single actor to project. Bruce Paulsen, very tall and blessed with an opera singer’s sonorous voice, moves and speaks slowly, not unlike Boris Karloff in the 1930s, but with more indecent dialogue. Czar Nicholas, not always oblivious, discerns the calamity the monk promises to be. But Katharine Gibson, one of the most admired leading ladies in community theater, is put to the test in retaining her character Akexandra’s faith in this outrageous charlatan, without seeming a blithering fool.
The audience knows more than the royal family. Seemingly alone in the residence Rasputin violently forces himself upon blameless servant Maria (Kimberly Panek). Rape scenes are meant to shock and disgust. (Compare what happens to Aldonza in Man of La Mancha, which is also on the current local floorboards.) In the name of history and the playwright’s anathema at moral cancer, this pushes the limits here. Paulsen, a radio announcer on WCNY-FM 91.3, advises listeners that one scene is R-rated. It prefigures the even greater violence coming to the Romanovs.
The epic collapse of a 300-yearold dynasty is harder to handle than a hatchet murder in Fall River, Mass. Yet playwright, director and costumer Heater gets us involved with the follies and beauties of this doomed family.
Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
Production in Fall River, MA
August 2011
A big THANK YOU to all of our supporters on Kickstarter who pledged over $3,500 to send our cast to Fall River, MA where we performed the show twice in Lizzie's hometown! Here we are (sans Kate Huddleston, our wonderful Abby Borden) outside the actual home where the murders occurred, which is now a delightful bed and breakfast! We were also able to view vintage Borden artifacts at the Fall River Historical Society including the blood-stained bedspread from the guest room where Abby was murdered, her severed false hair piece, the hatchet head which is still considered the murder weapon, and many authentic photos of the home and it's infamous inhabitants. Our cast had a truly wonderful time and you helped give Covey Theatre its first official tour! Thanks again!!!
Tattered Fabric: Fall River's Lizzie Borden
Review by Faye Musselman
The play delivers absolutely all it says in the program. Most all voice-overs were lifted verbatim directly from inquest, preliminary or trial testimony. The play manages to interject the incest theory in a way that will give you pause for re-consideration if you’ve never bought into it before.
What I particularly liked was that the characters, except for Uncle John Morse, were age appropriate. Even Carmen Viviano-Grafts bore a striking resemblance to Emma Borden from the most known photo of her. She played Emma with just the right mixture of loyal and nurturing sister coupled with what we know to be Emma’s own fierce dislike of her stepmother.
Garrett Heater, writer/director, did a very, VERY good job interjecting the more known theories such as a possible daliance twixt Lizzie and Dr. Bowen. The later played by Jordan Glaski was excellent in conveying his concern for Lizzie,while suspending your belief in his actually BEING a doctor. His portrayal was consistent in the professionalism of his character but was subtle enough in keeping you guessing about their true relationship – again a credit to writing as well as delivery.
Kate Huddleston played Abby Borden and her portrayal was reminiscent of Abby’s character in the 1975 Legend of Lizzie Borden made-for-tv movie. Often shrill, always unappealing, a person not well read on the case would believe she was just as portrayed. Poor Abby gets a bad rap because there’s nothing to validate she was anything but kind to those girls for as long as possible. Kate does a terrific job in showing her loyalty to her husband while still conveying her strong interest in the legacy of his money. We can understand her, we can even sympathize with the burdens she endured, but we do not like her. Kudos to Kate! Not an easy role.
The primary character, of course, is Lizzie and her part was played beautifully by Katharine Gibson. Through dialog we understand why she hated Abby, through acting and writing we are never certain as to whether or not she did it. Her particular acting chops, I think, came out when her father wants to take her “down to the basement”, an obvious location and metaphor for sexual abuse. We know she is 32, we know her father dominates. But Ms. Gibson does such a wonderful job we find it totally credible that it just very well may have happened that way – thus, explaining the rage of the act, if you choose to believe Lizzie guilty. Katharine was the obvious standout performer of the cast but I tend to think their talents fed into her own.
The set was minimalistic but seemed to be so much more because of the staging. (Thus, less is more.) The use of lighting was exceptional during the two periods of time of the slaying. Bright red lighting as the backdrop to intense music, leaving much to the imagination and leaving the audience to imagine an intruder, Lizzie or an unnamed other. Totally plausible. Totally believable. Strong stuff and very well executed.
My favorite part of the entire play was a monologue delivered by “Andrew” in the second act. Played by Bernard Kaplan he speaks of “what your mother would have wanted for you” (meaning their real mother) in a suspended state with Lizzie and Emma frozen on stage. The writing here was absolutely terrific. It had me riveted throughout and stayed with me for days. In fact, as I write this, I am still haunted by it. Beautiful writing, Garrett, and so well spoken by Mr. Kaplan. “Andrew” also did a very believable job when putting his lascivious hands on Lizzie and first coercing her, then demanding of her that she go “down to the basement”. Not an easy thing to do and it could have come out corny or clumsy but Bernard did it very well.
Beth Schmidt played Maggie with a most believable accent and was quite convincing; Susan Blumer made a good Churchill; C. J. Parsons equally as good as John Morse and Jodie Baum gave us shades of Alice we may not have thought of before. All in all, the entire cast was excellent. The set was excellent. The use of lighting and music was superb, but the writing – the writing which weaves so well the many threads of this tale was absolutely exceptional!!
I’ve seen several plays on the Borden case, including musicals, including a ballet, and so far, this is now my very favorite of all I’ve seen. I would see it again. And again. And if YOU haven’t – you should. Absolutely.
Art
July 2011
Molesky: Hilarity to Pathos in Final CNY RoleBy Tony Curulla
Syracuse Post Standard
The Covey Theatre Company, yet again, presents unusual, interesting drama (recently presented “The Graduate”, and last year, the original play, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe”) in offering the ninety-minute, one-act serio-comedy, “Art”.
This tight, emotional rollercoaster by French playwright Yasmina Reza from 1994, won the Olivier Award for best comedy in 1998 and a Tony Award the same year for best play.
This is an “actor’s play”, and director Garrett Heater has cast three of the best in choosing Bill Molesky (Yvan), Michael O’Neill (Serge), and Josh Mele (Marc). And what an appropriate choice for Molesky’s “send off” performance (he’s re-locating to Florida in the fall) for Central New York audiences! I say “appropriate choice” because this rather small, very focused play allows for large acting stretches from full-blown hilarity to high seriousness , and even to pathos, and Molesky, true to practiced form, dives headlong into all three emotional realms.
When Marc discovers that his good friend, Serge, has paid 200,000 francs (approximately $40,000!) for a “white painting”, or what Marc sees as, essentially, a blank canvas, he becomes overly emotional and incensed that Serge could do such a thing, and questions Serge’s values.
Marc confers with a mutually good friend, Yvan, about the situation, and the latter withholds judgment until he sees the painting. Upon viewing, Yvan, in the spirit of compromise and understanding, admits that, to him, the work does have artistic merit, however “modern” and unconventional. This sends Marc further off the emotional cliff into a state of outright anger because he is incapable of understanding the concept beyond the mere visual. Of course, much of the comedy is mined from the incongruities between the actual subject and the levels of anger and even feelings of outright betrayal that these three skilled actors are able to put forth.
Not only is Mele’s Marc impetuous in his out-of-hand dismissal of the painting, but he has become unnerved and driven to psychological areas separate from the discussion. Molesky’s Yvan, burdened by a plethora of personal problems from questioning his upcoming marriage to dealing with a nagging mother, is more interested in restoring peace among the three friends, especially since he has so little of it in his life at home. Both Marc and Yvan seem to be “cut” from similar emotional cloth.
On the other hand, O’Neill’s Serge, a calculating exercise in cool intellect and logic, baits both of his friends with controlled commentary as starched and stiff as his crisp slacks and shirt, leading the three into a frenzy of criticisms and questions of their life choices that goes way beyond the original subject of the painting, or even of anything related to aesthetics.
What is so riveting about the piece is not so much anything that comes from subject matter or plot reversal, but it is the sheer quickness in shifts of emotions that the three actors have honed to such a sharp edge. It is through the deft handling of these mercurial rhythms of the play that this drama is firmly hammered home.
The play’s title and its visual focus on a “modern” painting is somewhat of a “red herring” in that it’s not really so much about “art”, or even the larger discussion of aesthetics. However, if art is supposed to reflect real life, then the play’s complexities (like the modern painting in question) are driven by a surface simplicity. It’s not a “what you see is what you get” scenario as much as it is a “there’s a lot more here than meets the eye” as we witness these characters dissembling and revealing, simultaneously.
Syracuse Post Standard
The Covey Theatre Company, yet again, presents unusual, interesting drama (recently presented “The Graduate”, and last year, the original play, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe”) in offering the ninety-minute, one-act serio-comedy, “Art”.
This tight, emotional rollercoaster by French playwright Yasmina Reza from 1994, won the Olivier Award for best comedy in 1998 and a Tony Award the same year for best play.
This is an “actor’s play”, and director Garrett Heater has cast three of the best in choosing Bill Molesky (Yvan), Michael O’Neill (Serge), and Josh Mele (Marc). And what an appropriate choice for Molesky’s “send off” performance (he’s re-locating to Florida in the fall) for Central New York audiences! I say “appropriate choice” because this rather small, very focused play allows for large acting stretches from full-blown hilarity to high seriousness , and even to pathos, and Molesky, true to practiced form, dives headlong into all three emotional realms.
When Marc discovers that his good friend, Serge, has paid 200,000 francs (approximately $40,000!) for a “white painting”, or what Marc sees as, essentially, a blank canvas, he becomes overly emotional and incensed that Serge could do such a thing, and questions Serge’s values.
Marc confers with a mutually good friend, Yvan, about the situation, and the latter withholds judgment until he sees the painting. Upon viewing, Yvan, in the spirit of compromise and understanding, admits that, to him, the work does have artistic merit, however “modern” and unconventional. This sends Marc further off the emotional cliff into a state of outright anger because he is incapable of understanding the concept beyond the mere visual. Of course, much of the comedy is mined from the incongruities between the actual subject and the levels of anger and even feelings of outright betrayal that these three skilled actors are able to put forth.
Not only is Mele’s Marc impetuous in his out-of-hand dismissal of the painting, but he has become unnerved and driven to psychological areas separate from the discussion. Molesky’s Yvan, burdened by a plethora of personal problems from questioning his upcoming marriage to dealing with a nagging mother, is more interested in restoring peace among the three friends, especially since he has so little of it in his life at home. Both Marc and Yvan seem to be “cut” from similar emotional cloth.
On the other hand, O’Neill’s Serge, a calculating exercise in cool intellect and logic, baits both of his friends with controlled commentary as starched and stiff as his crisp slacks and shirt, leading the three into a frenzy of criticisms and questions of their life choices that goes way beyond the original subject of the painting, or even of anything related to aesthetics.
What is so riveting about the piece is not so much anything that comes from subject matter or plot reversal, but it is the sheer quickness in shifts of emotions that the three actors have honed to such a sharp edge. It is through the deft handling of these mercurial rhythms of the play that this drama is firmly hammered home.
The play’s title and its visual focus on a “modern” painting is somewhat of a “red herring” in that it’s not really so much about “art”, or even the larger discussion of aesthetics. However, if art is supposed to reflect real life, then the play’s complexities (like the modern painting in question) are driven by a surface simplicity. It’s not a “what you see is what you get” scenario as much as it is a “there’s a lot more here than meets the eye” as we witness these characters dissembling and revealing, simultaneously.
Bill of Goods
by Jim MacKillop, Syracuse NewTimes
A juicy role in the play Art provides a serendipitous swan song for actor Bill Molesky
With community companies we usually expect the play to be the thing. Directors start with shows, such as The Sound of Music or Reefer Madness, and then search for a cast. Not this time. For the Covey Theatre Company’s production of Art, now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room, we start with the cast.
Even without being the top winner (seven times!) at the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Awards, Bill Molesky has enjoyed incomparable prestige among his colleagues. Now that he has sworn to leave town at the end of summer, Molesky had to appear in something as a finale and a farewell. After a false start with another project by playwright Yasmina Reza, director Garrett Heater turned to her Art, about three guys and a white painting. As expected, Molesky’s role, Yvan, favorably exploits his prominent strengths. More surprising is that the other two players, Michael O’Neill and Josh Mele, both SALT winners, are never overshadowed. This is a play about male bonding and friendship.
Art, which opened in Paris in 1994, has been one of the world’s most produced stage works over the last 20 years for many good reasons. The verbal wit, well-polished in Christopher Hampton’s translation, retains all its incisiveness and penetration. It’s that rare comedy of ideas where no one is excluded from the joke, but deep enough to provoke post-theater conversation again and again.
Better yet, each production, even without changing a word, keeps giving us a different drama. When Art moved to London in 1996, the star was presumed to be Albert Finney as Serge, the haughty aesthete who buys the painting that sets the argument in motion. When Art moved to New York City, Victor Garber’s Serge lost ground to the cynical Marc played by Alan Alda, whom audiences had not seen so edgy before.
The three Parisian men describe themselves often as “best friends” and have been getting together for 15 years for a boys’ night out. As recounted by Marc (Josh Mele) in an opening monologue, the evening’s light entertainment began slowly because Yvan (Bill Molesky) was late again. In the interval, the host, Serge (Michael O’Neill), a dermatologist, proudly announces to Marc alone that he has just purchased a painting for 200,000 francs (about $35,000 when Art premiered). Attributed to a fictional artist name Andrios, Serge is convinced he has an artistic treasure and also a sound investment. The gallery owner would buy it now for 220,000 francs. Marc, an aeronautical engineer, curtly deflates Serge’s vanity of possession with a snap judgment: “It’s shit.”
Yvan, whose tolerance has been described as a liability, tries to find a middle ground. He also wants to please. When he privately hears Marc’s rant against the painting, he smiles and nods agreement. Later, alone at Serge’s place, he claims to be moved by the painting’s subtle power. This middle ground is quickly discovered by both Serge and Marc. They pelt Yvan with brickbats like “spineless,” ”coward” and “amoeba.”
The painting is a 3-by-4-foot rectangle.
Serge would have us believe that there are many different shades of white as well as streaks of gray and light blue, but we don’t see them. Upon inspection, at least from the seats where critics sit, we can perceive tex tured patterns across the surface. These evanescent details are not enough to assure that Serge isn’t displaying the work upside down.
Although the name Andrios is Reza’s invention, the all-white painting is no mere playwright’s contrivance. Kasimir Malevich, a now forgotten Russian Supremist, produced the original white-on-white canvas in 1918. As Reza employs Serge’s painting here, it is a stand-in for modernism, which started around the time of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907 and has been losing ground to post-modernism recently. Modernism was always confrontational and argumentative. Modern art, whether it was Dadaism in painting or Serialism in music, was always about taking a stand. The new art asked the viewer or listener to forget those needs bred into us from evolution, like the craving for comfort, beauty and reassurance, and to seize the revolutionary aesthetic.
Although Reza pointedly links each man with a profession, they remain flesh and do not become manipulable symbols. Serge, the dermatologist, makes his living on surfaces and appearance. Marc, the aeronautical engineer, is a practical man of science and an iconoclast. His emperor never wears clothes. If the play were American rather than French, he’d be ranting against elitists. What makes him French is a quality we find rarely in the United States outside special military units and certain cults, a kind of non-erotic embrace. Marc is affronted and wounded that Serge has taken to the painting in the first place. Mending that broken bond is what leads to Art’s unexpected conclusion.
The most human of the three, if not the most admirable, is the schlemiel Yvan. He has the two best comic speeches in the play, one short, one long. In the short he defines life from his limited perspective: “Marriage, children, death, stationery.” In the show-stopping aria of whining, Yvan must spin out a zigzagging narrative of misdeeds that might have come toward the end of a Feydeau farce. It’s a bravura moment for Molesky as Yvan explains how his future in-laws dominate his life and his accommodating unwillingness to get into fights makes life miserable and how it will doom his upcoming marriage.
With his rich baritone and heavy dark brows, Molesky was not built to be your average light comedian. The greatest contribution his persona gives to Yvan is a moral weight that will not let the character be blown off, as he has been in other productions, when Serge and Marc make their peace. The character from the Molesky repertory this Yvan most resembles is his almost Tolstoyan portrayal of Lady Bracknell in Simply New Theatre’s 2008 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, whose gravity paradoxically made the absurdity of her concerns even funnier. This Yvan plumbs an existential angst that Serge and Marc do not know. “You’re always talking about yourself,” Serge observes unsympathically.
Engineer Marc, as embodied by Josh Mele, one of our best-known tenors, could hardly make a sharper contrast with Yvan. With the precise speaking voice only trained singers have, Mele’s Marc is angrier and more forceful than those who have come before, while still crackling with humor. Marc speaks to us first in a soliloquy, and his disgust with the painting drives the action. It is Mele’s passion and solidity that carry Marc on the longest arc of any character.
With a new white beard, Michael O’Neill is the oldest of the trio and also the tallest. Perhaps it is O’Neill’s many appearances in nice-guy roles that give his Serge unusual sympathy. He also can make plausible Serge’s assertion that there really is something in the painting if we only had the patience and heightened sensibility to see it. But when combat comes with Marc, O’Neill’s Serge can throw a stinging jab.
Director Garrett Heater keeps the trio constantly on the move. His resolution of the fraternal conflict is surer and more convincing than that in other local productions. And with enormous changes at the last moment, his Covey Theater Company enters a second year with sure footing.
by Jim MacKillop, Syracuse NewTimes
A juicy role in the play Art provides a serendipitous swan song for actor Bill Molesky
With community companies we usually expect the play to be the thing. Directors start with shows, such as The Sound of Music or Reefer Madness, and then search for a cast. Not this time. For the Covey Theatre Company’s production of Art, now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room, we start with the cast.
Even without being the top winner (seven times!) at the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Awards, Bill Molesky has enjoyed incomparable prestige among his colleagues. Now that he has sworn to leave town at the end of summer, Molesky had to appear in something as a finale and a farewell. After a false start with another project by playwright Yasmina Reza, director Garrett Heater turned to her Art, about three guys and a white painting. As expected, Molesky’s role, Yvan, favorably exploits his prominent strengths. More surprising is that the other two players, Michael O’Neill and Josh Mele, both SALT winners, are never overshadowed. This is a play about male bonding and friendship.
Art, which opened in Paris in 1994, has been one of the world’s most produced stage works over the last 20 years for many good reasons. The verbal wit, well-polished in Christopher Hampton’s translation, retains all its incisiveness and penetration. It’s that rare comedy of ideas where no one is excluded from the joke, but deep enough to provoke post-theater conversation again and again.
Better yet, each production, even without changing a word, keeps giving us a different drama. When Art moved to London in 1996, the star was presumed to be Albert Finney as Serge, the haughty aesthete who buys the painting that sets the argument in motion. When Art moved to New York City, Victor Garber’s Serge lost ground to the cynical Marc played by Alan Alda, whom audiences had not seen so edgy before.
The three Parisian men describe themselves often as “best friends” and have been getting together for 15 years for a boys’ night out. As recounted by Marc (Josh Mele) in an opening monologue, the evening’s light entertainment began slowly because Yvan (Bill Molesky) was late again. In the interval, the host, Serge (Michael O’Neill), a dermatologist, proudly announces to Marc alone that he has just purchased a painting for 200,000 francs (about $35,000 when Art premiered). Attributed to a fictional artist name Andrios, Serge is convinced he has an artistic treasure and also a sound investment. The gallery owner would buy it now for 220,000 francs. Marc, an aeronautical engineer, curtly deflates Serge’s vanity of possession with a snap judgment: “It’s shit.”
Yvan, whose tolerance has been described as a liability, tries to find a middle ground. He also wants to please. When he privately hears Marc’s rant against the painting, he smiles and nods agreement. Later, alone at Serge’s place, he claims to be moved by the painting’s subtle power. This middle ground is quickly discovered by both Serge and Marc. They pelt Yvan with brickbats like “spineless,” ”coward” and “amoeba.”
The painting is a 3-by-4-foot rectangle.
Serge would have us believe that there are many different shades of white as well as streaks of gray and light blue, but we don’t see them. Upon inspection, at least from the seats where critics sit, we can perceive tex tured patterns across the surface. These evanescent details are not enough to assure that Serge isn’t displaying the work upside down.
Although the name Andrios is Reza’s invention, the all-white painting is no mere playwright’s contrivance. Kasimir Malevich, a now forgotten Russian Supremist, produced the original white-on-white canvas in 1918. As Reza employs Serge’s painting here, it is a stand-in for modernism, which started around the time of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907 and has been losing ground to post-modernism recently. Modernism was always confrontational and argumentative. Modern art, whether it was Dadaism in painting or Serialism in music, was always about taking a stand. The new art asked the viewer or listener to forget those needs bred into us from evolution, like the craving for comfort, beauty and reassurance, and to seize the revolutionary aesthetic.
Although Reza pointedly links each man with a profession, they remain flesh and do not become manipulable symbols. Serge, the dermatologist, makes his living on surfaces and appearance. Marc, the aeronautical engineer, is a practical man of science and an iconoclast. His emperor never wears clothes. If the play were American rather than French, he’d be ranting against elitists. What makes him French is a quality we find rarely in the United States outside special military units and certain cults, a kind of non-erotic embrace. Marc is affronted and wounded that Serge has taken to the painting in the first place. Mending that broken bond is what leads to Art’s unexpected conclusion.
The most human of the three, if not the most admirable, is the schlemiel Yvan. He has the two best comic speeches in the play, one short, one long. In the short he defines life from his limited perspective: “Marriage, children, death, stationery.” In the show-stopping aria of whining, Yvan must spin out a zigzagging narrative of misdeeds that might have come toward the end of a Feydeau farce. It’s a bravura moment for Molesky as Yvan explains how his future in-laws dominate his life and his accommodating unwillingness to get into fights makes life miserable and how it will doom his upcoming marriage.
With his rich baritone and heavy dark brows, Molesky was not built to be your average light comedian. The greatest contribution his persona gives to Yvan is a moral weight that will not let the character be blown off, as he has been in other productions, when Serge and Marc make their peace. The character from the Molesky repertory this Yvan most resembles is his almost Tolstoyan portrayal of Lady Bracknell in Simply New Theatre’s 2008 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, whose gravity paradoxically made the absurdity of her concerns even funnier. This Yvan plumbs an existential angst that Serge and Marc do not know. “You’re always talking about yourself,” Serge observes unsympathically.
Engineer Marc, as embodied by Josh Mele, one of our best-known tenors, could hardly make a sharper contrast with Yvan. With the precise speaking voice only trained singers have, Mele’s Marc is angrier and more forceful than those who have come before, while still crackling with humor. Marc speaks to us first in a soliloquy, and his disgust with the painting drives the action. It is Mele’s passion and solidity that carry Marc on the longest arc of any character.
With a new white beard, Michael O’Neill is the oldest of the trio and also the tallest. Perhaps it is O’Neill’s many appearances in nice-guy roles that give his Serge unusual sympathy. He also can make plausible Serge’s assertion that there really is something in the painting if we only had the patience and heightened sensibility to see it. But when combat comes with Marc, O’Neill’s Serge can throw a stinging jab.
Director Garrett Heater keeps the trio constantly on the move. His resolution of the fraternal conflict is surer and more convincing than that in other local productions. And with enormous changes at the last moment, his Covey Theater Company enters a second year with sure footing.
The Graduate
May 2011
Covey Theatre Provokes Thought and Laughter With "Graduate"
by Tony Curulla
Syracuse Post-Standard
Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have said, “All of American Literature begins with a book by Mark Twain called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.
A similar idea might be true for the new genre of American films that were born in the 1960’s and 70’s. Perhaps the proliferation of iconic, breakthrough films of that era from directors like Scorsese, Hopper, Coppola, Cimino, Penn, and others began in 1967 with a film by Mike Nichols called “The Graduate”. I think that statement could certainly be construed to be as true, or at least, as convincing, as Hemingway’s.
Covey Theatre Company offers the stage production of “The Graduate” some forty-four years later, and the premise is as relevant today as it was in the 1960’s because like any quality piece of stage, film, or written literature, it’s not about an era, fashions, music, or even Simon and Garfunkel (as great as that soundtrack is!). It’s about human behavior that isn’t defined by a generation or a calendar.
Well-deserved kudos go to director Garrett Heater for underscoring Terry Johnson’s stage adaptation as being a separate entity from the film by not replicating the incomparable church sequence, and by filling the musical interludes with recognizable songs from the era, sans Simon and Garfunkel.
To sum up this play’s premise would be tantamount to re-stating the premise of something as well-known as “The Wizard of Oz”, however, just as a basic reminder: Benjamin Braddock (Rob Fonda), newly graduated from college is disillusioned, confused, and seeking direction in his life. He feels alienated from his family, as well as all of his family’s friends and relatives.
Despite the exhortations by his father (Bob Fullenbaum), and mother (Katheryn Guyette) to be more social and open, Benjamin, instead, falls prey to the seductive advances of one of their friends, Mrs. Robinson (Moe Harrington).
Things get really complicated, however, when he falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Kimberly Panek), and his feelings are eventually reciprocated. This whole scenario, of course, gets further seasoning when Mrs. Robinson’s husband (Wil Szczech) finds out, first about his wife’s affair, and then about the fact that Benjamin is in love with his daughter.
Szczech brings a convincing comic urbanity to the role as he initially advises Benjamin about the positive future in “plastics” (a purposeful and unobstructed metaphor for the emptiness and falseness that Benjamin perceives around him), and later, his palpable anger over the situation fluctuates from control to absurd comedy.
Both Fullenbaum and Guyette are perfect as the well-meaning, but clueless parents who would just give anything to be able to get through to their son. Their many attempts through cajoling and yelling provide much in the way of comedy borne from recognizable frustration.
Of course, the seminal scenes between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are what make for sparks, and even steam, at times, in that the production includes several scenes of partial nudity and one of full nudity accompanied by judicious lighting by Michael Blagys.
Fonda’s innocence and awkwardness, never overplayed, is balanced in the right measure by Harrington’s seductive persistence and visceral determination as the experienced older woman who exudes charm and danger, simultaneously.
Harrington bares all in ‘The Graduate’
Maureen “Moe” Harrington delivers a bravura performance as Mrs. Robinson in the Covey Theatre Company’s version of “The Graduate” closing this weekend at the Civic Center’s Bevard Theater, downtown.
DOWNTOWN AFTER DARK for The Eagle May 19, 2011 By RUSS TARBY
If you’re a regular theatergoer here in Central New York, you may think you’ve seen a lot of actress Moe Harrington.After all, she played Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl,” Keeley Stevens in “Pete’N Keeley,” Ellen in Jeff Kramer’s “Lowdown Lies” and Officer Celeste Luna in Donna Stuccio’s “Elegy in Blue,” not to mention any number of other leading roles as well as her annual self-produced cabarets.Unless you’re her husband, however, you’ve never seen her the way she appears as Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” playing through this weekend at the Civic Center’s Bevard Theater.That’s right, Moe sheds every stitch in one memorable scene early in Act 1.Not only is the actress’s flesh exposed in this stage version of the famous 1967 film.
So is her soul.Her acting chops have never been better, and Harrington capably captures Mrs. Robinson’s devil-may-care approach to life and love. Her portrayal of the booze-addled, unfaithful wife is a dynamic performance full of highs and lows including shouting and whispering, dressing and undressing, fighting and fornicating…
Under the watchful eye of director Garrett Heater, the entire cast of this “Graduate” follow Harrington’s lead to turn in yeoman performances. Rob Fonda portrays Benjamin, the recent college graduate who’s the object of Mrs. Robinson’s seduction. Wil Szczech plays the cuckolded Mr. Robinson. Bob Fullenbaum and Katheryn Guyette portray Benjamin’s pushy parents and Kimberly Panek plays the Robinson’s attractive, college-age daughter.
In minor roles Geno Parlato, Erica Dutelle, Basil Allen and Bruce Paulsen round out the cast.Since playwright Terry Johnson adapted the story for the stage by drawing upon the original novel by Charles Webb, don’t expect a scene-for-scene recreation of the film. But do expect an often gripping, occasionally humorous and always well-acted version of this coming-of-age classic.
by Tony Curulla
Syracuse Post-Standard
Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have said, “All of American Literature begins with a book by Mark Twain called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.
A similar idea might be true for the new genre of American films that were born in the 1960’s and 70’s. Perhaps the proliferation of iconic, breakthrough films of that era from directors like Scorsese, Hopper, Coppola, Cimino, Penn, and others began in 1967 with a film by Mike Nichols called “The Graduate”. I think that statement could certainly be construed to be as true, or at least, as convincing, as Hemingway’s.
Covey Theatre Company offers the stage production of “The Graduate” some forty-four years later, and the premise is as relevant today as it was in the 1960’s because like any quality piece of stage, film, or written literature, it’s not about an era, fashions, music, or even Simon and Garfunkel (as great as that soundtrack is!). It’s about human behavior that isn’t defined by a generation or a calendar.
Well-deserved kudos go to director Garrett Heater for underscoring Terry Johnson’s stage adaptation as being a separate entity from the film by not replicating the incomparable church sequence, and by filling the musical interludes with recognizable songs from the era, sans Simon and Garfunkel.
To sum up this play’s premise would be tantamount to re-stating the premise of something as well-known as “The Wizard of Oz”, however, just as a basic reminder: Benjamin Braddock (Rob Fonda), newly graduated from college is disillusioned, confused, and seeking direction in his life. He feels alienated from his family, as well as all of his family’s friends and relatives.
Despite the exhortations by his father (Bob Fullenbaum), and mother (Katheryn Guyette) to be more social and open, Benjamin, instead, falls prey to the seductive advances of one of their friends, Mrs. Robinson (Moe Harrington).
Things get really complicated, however, when he falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Kimberly Panek), and his feelings are eventually reciprocated. This whole scenario, of course, gets further seasoning when Mrs. Robinson’s husband (Wil Szczech) finds out, first about his wife’s affair, and then about the fact that Benjamin is in love with his daughter.
Szczech brings a convincing comic urbanity to the role as he initially advises Benjamin about the positive future in “plastics” (a purposeful and unobstructed metaphor for the emptiness and falseness that Benjamin perceives around him), and later, his palpable anger over the situation fluctuates from control to absurd comedy.
Both Fullenbaum and Guyette are perfect as the well-meaning, but clueless parents who would just give anything to be able to get through to their son. Their many attempts through cajoling and yelling provide much in the way of comedy borne from recognizable frustration.
Of course, the seminal scenes between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are what make for sparks, and even steam, at times, in that the production includes several scenes of partial nudity and one of full nudity accompanied by judicious lighting by Michael Blagys.
Fonda’s innocence and awkwardness, never overplayed, is balanced in the right measure by Harrington’s seductive persistence and visceral determination as the experienced older woman who exudes charm and danger, simultaneously.
Harrington bares all in ‘The Graduate’
Maureen “Moe” Harrington delivers a bravura performance as Mrs. Robinson in the Covey Theatre Company’s version of “The Graduate” closing this weekend at the Civic Center’s Bevard Theater, downtown.
DOWNTOWN AFTER DARK for The Eagle May 19, 2011 By RUSS TARBY
If you’re a regular theatergoer here in Central New York, you may think you’ve seen a lot of actress Moe Harrington.After all, she played Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl,” Keeley Stevens in “Pete’N Keeley,” Ellen in Jeff Kramer’s “Lowdown Lies” and Officer Celeste Luna in Donna Stuccio’s “Elegy in Blue,” not to mention any number of other leading roles as well as her annual self-produced cabarets.Unless you’re her husband, however, you’ve never seen her the way she appears as Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” playing through this weekend at the Civic Center’s Bevard Theater.That’s right, Moe sheds every stitch in one memorable scene early in Act 1.Not only is the actress’s flesh exposed in this stage version of the famous 1967 film.
So is her soul.Her acting chops have never been better, and Harrington capably captures Mrs. Robinson’s devil-may-care approach to life and love. Her portrayal of the booze-addled, unfaithful wife is a dynamic performance full of highs and lows including shouting and whispering, dressing and undressing, fighting and fornicating…
Under the watchful eye of director Garrett Heater, the entire cast of this “Graduate” follow Harrington’s lead to turn in yeoman performances. Rob Fonda portrays Benjamin, the recent college graduate who’s the object of Mrs. Robinson’s seduction. Wil Szczech plays the cuckolded Mr. Robinson. Bob Fullenbaum and Katheryn Guyette portray Benjamin’s pushy parents and Kimberly Panek plays the Robinson’s attractive, college-age daughter.
In minor roles Geno Parlato, Erica Dutelle, Basil Allen and Bruce Paulsen round out the cast.Since playwright Terry Johnson adapted the story for the stage by drawing upon the original novel by Charles Webb, don’t expect a scene-for-scene recreation of the film. But do expect an often gripping, occasionally humorous and always well-acted version of this coming-of-age classic.
COO COO CA-CHOO
Moe Harrington plays a memorable seductress in Covey Theatre’s take on The Graduate
by James MacKillop for the Syracuse NewTimes
If the 44-year-old film remains available and every sentient person remembers most of the action and dialogue, you have to wonder why British playwright Terry Johnson adapted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate in London a decade ago. His staging leaves the date in the 1960s, when $5 per hour was a huge wage for unskilled labor, and a hotel room for assignation could be rented for $12 a night. The movie remains fixed in time, but as the TV series Mad Men has taught us, things from just a few decades ago are transformed when we look back with our wised-up eyes. People back then hadn’t given much thought to cougars. We think about them all the time now.That “we” includes playwright Johnson and Covey Theatre Company director Garrett Heater, who has unmistakably given immense thought to this production, currently on the boards at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room. Johnson rounds out characterization a bit, drawing more from Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, and adding two scenes, one at the end that cannot be revealed. Outwardly much of the rest looks the same. “Plastics,” one of the most famous lines of dialogue in the history of Hollywood, is still there, only now uttered by Mr. Robinson. What is changed is the way the characters resonate with one another, generating the kind of tension that makes “drama” synonymous with “stage play.” It looks the same but feels vastly different.
Without having seen the London or New York City productions we cannot know for sure why this version feels so different from the movie, but it seems likely to be director Heater’s doing. In casting blond Rob Fonda as the title character, Heater gets more of the look of Benjamin Braddock of the novel, a disaffected upper-class WASP who has graduated from tony Williams College. Fonda, who has experienced a run of innocent travelers, including Clifford in Cabaret and Brad in The Rocky Horror Show, gives us a Benjamin who rejects the inauthenticity of upper bourgeois life but who never attempts open rebellion. He’s sort of a Holden Caulfield who can deal rather than drop out. Along with this comes an unguarded impetuousness that can get him in trouble and inflict pain.
As for The Graduate’s most memorable character, word circulated last winter that Heater had to do some persuading to get musical comedy veteran Moe Harrington to take the role of Mrs. Robinson. About a halfhour into the first act it is revealed to us what he was looking for: Harrington’s persona and her extraordinary voice.Harrington was up for a Lifetime Achievement at the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) awards this year because she’s beloved in the way only a few players are. A skilled comedienne, she cites the role of Ellen in local author Jeff Kramer’s riotous Lowdown Lies as one of her favorites. She’s always one of the best gagsters at awards ceremonies, and her default modes are laughing and smiling. Thus when Harrington turns into a dark-browed predator, even though we know it’s in the script, we’re just as startled as Benjamin is. The film’s producers famously wanted Doris Day as the original Mrs. Robinson, but our own Moe, our Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, does what the gorgeous but jaded Anne Bancroft could not.
Harrington has done non-singing, noncomic roles often enough, but Heater appears to be the first director to have exploited the silkiness of her speaking voice. It’s unusual in a larynx so devoted to cabaret singing, which turns other women into Mermanesque cicadas. The softness could have seduced Benjamin on the phone without him even seeing her. In her lushness we also hear a note of needfulness. Out of this, though, Harrington can forge a dart when she wants to strike at Benjamin, and she can embody ripping pain when a righteous Benjamin strikes back.
There’s no question that messing around with Mrs. Robinson is a bad idea and, admittedly, she’s an evil person. She usually wears black, even to the wedding. Then again, evil on stage is hardly a liability, which is why we prefer Dracula to Mina, Lucy or Jonathan Harker. Playwright Johnson was wise to give her more dialogue than in the movie.
Kimberly Panek capably takes on the heavy burden of making virtue and sweetness interesting as Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. Experience counts: She had previously played Sandy in Grease. The two scenes playwright Johnson added to the film script both give Elaine more to do and provide support for Mrs. Robinson’s contention that the daughter is at least 10 percent of the mother. In a line retained from the film, she demands to know if Benjamin has read Ayn Rand’s rightist screed, The Fountainhead. Despite Elaine’s childlike love of Cheerios, she has some surprises for her husband in their coming life together.
Beyond the love triangle of boy-girl-mother, The Graduate is also a critique of suburban consumerism, most of which has taken different forms more recently. The several parents, whom Benjamin calls “grotesque,” are gently drawn comic figures, almost endearing when compared with grown-ups in, say, Judd Apatow or Farrelly Brothers movies. In what could have been a thankless role, Katheryn Guyette turns Benjamin’s mother into a scene-stealer, a walking domestic obsession, like Barbie in Stepford, only nuts. Bob Fullenbaum’s Mr. Braddock is readily given to bluster but never becomes an ogre. He’s quick to reverse course and take Benjamin’s side, if possible.
Heater gets more out of the role of Mr. Robinson by casting Wil Szczech, the same man who played the lusty Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons for Simply New Theater a few years back. By attributing to him the iconic line, “Plastics,” Mr. Robinson becomes the macho embodiment of the world sensitive Benjamin dreads to enter. Of course, Benjamin never intended to cuckold, but we know he has indeed been gored. His subsequent rage, although justified, comes off as impotent.
Director Heater squeezes much fun out of four supporting roles, starting with Erica Dutelle as the stripper, more ironic than in the film. Gennaro Parlato prudently underplays the seen-it-before hotel clerk. Bruce Paulsen switches from barfly to sober cleric within moments, and Basil Allen as the psychiatrist milks seven-beat pauses for all their worth.
Like other dramas taken from the silver screen, The Graduate calls for many, many rapid scenes changes with all kinds of furniture schlepped back and forth on casters, as well as multiple uses for Maggie Blythewood’s fixed set. Le Moyne College lighting expert Michael Blagys performs tricks of concealment never called for at the Jesuit college.
So how does the move from screen to stage work? A line like, “You’re the most attractive of any of my parents’ friends,” gets a bigger laugh when we hear it live, even when we know it’s coming.
Moe Harrington plays a memorable seductress in Covey Theatre’s take on The Graduate
by James MacKillop for the Syracuse NewTimes
If the 44-year-old film remains available and every sentient person remembers most of the action and dialogue, you have to wonder why British playwright Terry Johnson adapted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate in London a decade ago. His staging leaves the date in the 1960s, when $5 per hour was a huge wage for unskilled labor, and a hotel room for assignation could be rented for $12 a night. The movie remains fixed in time, but as the TV series Mad Men has taught us, things from just a few decades ago are transformed when we look back with our wised-up eyes. People back then hadn’t given much thought to cougars. We think about them all the time now.That “we” includes playwright Johnson and Covey Theatre Company director Garrett Heater, who has unmistakably given immense thought to this production, currently on the boards at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room. Johnson rounds out characterization a bit, drawing more from Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, and adding two scenes, one at the end that cannot be revealed. Outwardly much of the rest looks the same. “Plastics,” one of the most famous lines of dialogue in the history of Hollywood, is still there, only now uttered by Mr. Robinson. What is changed is the way the characters resonate with one another, generating the kind of tension that makes “drama” synonymous with “stage play.” It looks the same but feels vastly different.
Without having seen the London or New York City productions we cannot know for sure why this version feels so different from the movie, but it seems likely to be director Heater’s doing. In casting blond Rob Fonda as the title character, Heater gets more of the look of Benjamin Braddock of the novel, a disaffected upper-class WASP who has graduated from tony Williams College. Fonda, who has experienced a run of innocent travelers, including Clifford in Cabaret and Brad in The Rocky Horror Show, gives us a Benjamin who rejects the inauthenticity of upper bourgeois life but who never attempts open rebellion. He’s sort of a Holden Caulfield who can deal rather than drop out. Along with this comes an unguarded impetuousness that can get him in trouble and inflict pain.
As for The Graduate’s most memorable character, word circulated last winter that Heater had to do some persuading to get musical comedy veteran Moe Harrington to take the role of Mrs. Robinson. About a halfhour into the first act it is revealed to us what he was looking for: Harrington’s persona and her extraordinary voice.Harrington was up for a Lifetime Achievement at the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) awards this year because she’s beloved in the way only a few players are. A skilled comedienne, she cites the role of Ellen in local author Jeff Kramer’s riotous Lowdown Lies as one of her favorites. She’s always one of the best gagsters at awards ceremonies, and her default modes are laughing and smiling. Thus when Harrington turns into a dark-browed predator, even though we know it’s in the script, we’re just as startled as Benjamin is. The film’s producers famously wanted Doris Day as the original Mrs. Robinson, but our own Moe, our Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, does what the gorgeous but jaded Anne Bancroft could not.
Harrington has done non-singing, noncomic roles often enough, but Heater appears to be the first director to have exploited the silkiness of her speaking voice. It’s unusual in a larynx so devoted to cabaret singing, which turns other women into Mermanesque cicadas. The softness could have seduced Benjamin on the phone without him even seeing her. In her lushness we also hear a note of needfulness. Out of this, though, Harrington can forge a dart when she wants to strike at Benjamin, and she can embody ripping pain when a righteous Benjamin strikes back.
There’s no question that messing around with Mrs. Robinson is a bad idea and, admittedly, she’s an evil person. She usually wears black, even to the wedding. Then again, evil on stage is hardly a liability, which is why we prefer Dracula to Mina, Lucy or Jonathan Harker. Playwright Johnson was wise to give her more dialogue than in the movie.
Kimberly Panek capably takes on the heavy burden of making virtue and sweetness interesting as Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. Experience counts: She had previously played Sandy in Grease. The two scenes playwright Johnson added to the film script both give Elaine more to do and provide support for Mrs. Robinson’s contention that the daughter is at least 10 percent of the mother. In a line retained from the film, she demands to know if Benjamin has read Ayn Rand’s rightist screed, The Fountainhead. Despite Elaine’s childlike love of Cheerios, she has some surprises for her husband in their coming life together.
Beyond the love triangle of boy-girl-mother, The Graduate is also a critique of suburban consumerism, most of which has taken different forms more recently. The several parents, whom Benjamin calls “grotesque,” are gently drawn comic figures, almost endearing when compared with grown-ups in, say, Judd Apatow or Farrelly Brothers movies. In what could have been a thankless role, Katheryn Guyette turns Benjamin’s mother into a scene-stealer, a walking domestic obsession, like Barbie in Stepford, only nuts. Bob Fullenbaum’s Mr. Braddock is readily given to bluster but never becomes an ogre. He’s quick to reverse course and take Benjamin’s side, if possible.
Heater gets more out of the role of Mr. Robinson by casting Wil Szczech, the same man who played the lusty Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons for Simply New Theater a few years back. By attributing to him the iconic line, “Plastics,” Mr. Robinson becomes the macho embodiment of the world sensitive Benjamin dreads to enter. Of course, Benjamin never intended to cuckold, but we know he has indeed been gored. His subsequent rage, although justified, comes off as impotent.
Director Heater squeezes much fun out of four supporting roles, starting with Erica Dutelle as the stripper, more ironic than in the film. Gennaro Parlato prudently underplays the seen-it-before hotel clerk. Bruce Paulsen switches from barfly to sober cleric within moments, and Basil Allen as the psychiatrist milks seven-beat pauses for all their worth.
Like other dramas taken from the silver screen, The Graduate calls for many, many rapid scenes changes with all kinds of furniture schlepped back and forth on casters, as well as multiple uses for Maggie Blythewood’s fixed set. Le Moyne College lighting expert Michael Blagys performs tricks of concealment never called for at the Jesuit college.
So how does the move from screen to stage work? A line like, “You’re the most attractive of any of my parents’ friends,” gets a bigger laugh when we hear it live, even when we know it’s coming.
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Photos courtesy of Amelia Beamish
Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
November 2010
Lizzie Borden case solved!
DOWNTOWN AFTER DARK for Nov. 18, 2010 The Eagle, Syracuse, N.Y.
BY RUSS TARBY
Of all the books and movies about the Lizzie Borden murder case, nothing cuts to the core as incisively as Garrett Heater’s new two-act play, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe,” which made its world premiere last Friday in downtown Syracuse.
On a sweltering Aug. 4, 1892, an aging middle-class couple, Andrew and Abby Borden, were hacked to death in their modest home in Fall River, Mass. Lizzie, a 32-year-old spinster, was tried and acquitted of the brutal slaying of her father and stepmother, but most folks still figured she was guilty.
Drawing on testimony from the inquest and subsequent trial, Heater’s spellbinding script clearly depicts the desperately dysfunctional New England family. Andrew, ably played by Bernard Kaplan, is the miserly paterfamilias with a creepy fascination with his daughters' deceased mother. Kate Huddleston shines in the otherwise tarnished role of the greedy, domineering stepmother, Abby. Andrew’s two unmarried daughters are the reserved Emma, portrayed by an introspective Carmen Viviano-Crafts, and the spendthrift Lizzie played by Jodi Bova, who brings a surprising joie de vivre to the role of the suspected murderess.
Fast-paced play
A quintet of well-defined supporting characters keeps the dialogue snapping with hints of rivalry, resentment, thievery and incest. Beth Schmidt’s turn as the maid, Bridget Sullivan, drew an occasional chuckle as she tries to assert herself with her immigrant’s brogue clashing audibly against the Borden’s brisk English. Likewise, Susie Blumer provides a pinch of comedic relief as a nosy neighbor lady, and David Witanowski’s buoyant Dr. Bowen, though married, adds a measured suggestion of romance. C.J. Parsons bristles and boils as the girls’ uncle and Andrew’s financial advisor, while Jodie Baum plays Lizzie’s chum, Alice, realistically vacillating between friendly fidelity and the darkest doubts.
Heater’s script brilliantly blends courtroom voiceovers and characters’ soliloquies to break up interaction set entirely at the scene of the crime – the tearing-at-the-seams Borden household. Director Jenn DeCook and stage manager Tim Hahn pull all the elements together assuring an attention-grabbing, swiftly paced two-hour performance that seizes you by the neck and doesn’t let go…until after Lizzie’s final, ever-polite plea for tranquility…is revealed as a cold-blooded rationale for killing.
Roaring ’90s recreated
As a Victorian period piece, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” comes fully to life thanks to Heater’s obsessive attention to detail. Not only are Heater’s costumes and Kathy Procopio’s wigs period-perfect, DeCook also insists on an authentic 19th century ironing board, bulky black shoes, real coffee, mutton and pears, and antique sofas, tables, desktops and chairs provided by Baldwinsville ‘s Alternative Decorating Studio. While the performances and production values are totally top-shelf, what makes Heater’s play a true triumph is how it allows the facts to unfold bit by bit as untruths are concocted and evidence destroyed. Lizzie’s own contrasting alibis inevitably damn her, but the playwright avoids preaching, instead unveiling each clue in good time, letting the audience itself put two and two together.
“Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” is exceptional theater. Heater should make every effort to have it staged in Fall River, Boston and beyond. For now, it’s scheduled for two more shows at 8 p.m. I suggest you make your reservations today.
Covey Theatre Co. debuts
“Lizzie” marks the debut of a new troupe, the Covey Theatre Co., operated by Heater, Blumer and businessman/producer Michael Penny. And an auspicious debut it is! Lizzie Borden herself, who scandalized Fall River in the early 20th century by inviting actors and actresses into her home, would certainly approve…
CHOP TALK Syracuse NewTimes November 17, 2010
By James MacKillop
Start with the most disputed acquittal in American jurisprudence, even ahead of O. J. Simpson’s. Despite damning circumstantial evidence, Lizzie Borden was found not guilt of the murder of her father Andrew and step-mother Abigail. They died of nineteen and eleven strokes from an axe respectively, not forty and forty-one as the ghoulish jump-rope ditty would have it. That rhyme, whose words we all know, supplies the title to Garrett Heater’s brand-new drama, Lizzie Borden took an Axe. Twice forty whacks have been applied to Lizzie’s history in graphic novels, TV movies, two operas and a ballet, all attempts to tease out the “truth.” Heater’s play is no whodunit. It’s more of a Why-do-it.
Although still a young man, Heater has served a sustained apprenticeship as both an actor and director with different local companies, especially the Baldwinsville Theatre Guild. The SALTAcademy has recognized his work on both sides of the footlight. As if to prove that his time has been well-spent, Lizzie Borden turns out to be quite a polished piece of work, often counter-intuitive. The murders take place off-stage, for example. And the courtroom scenes are reported in voice-overs. Like the masters of the twentieth century golden age, Heater emphasizes layers of characterization, in which each person’s secret is revealed late in their narrative arcs, often indirectly. Happily he shuns the common sin of actors-turned-playwright, of writing scenes calling for gaudy displays of rhetoric or emotion, what he or she might love to play if given the chance.
Lizzie Borden is the inaugural production of The Covey Theatre Company, which Heater has founded with Baldwinsville pal Susan Blumer, who takes a supporting role here, and Michael Penny. The novelty of the company should not be overplayed, however. Covey, or perhaps we should say Heater, has drawn on many respected and familiar faces, starting with Kate Huddleston, a SALT Lifetime Achiever, as the hated step-mother Abigail. SALT nominee Jodi Bova appears in the title role, along with SALT winners Jodie Baum, Carmen Viviano-Crafts and David Witanowski in supporting roles. The Covey begins with credibility.
Note also that John Nara, rumored to be leaving town at any moment, serves as lighting designer. Given that Lizzie Borden is also produced in the BeVard Room of the Mulroy Civic appears to be the successor to Nara’s much-lauded Simply New Company, which closed down last spring. Added to this are Karen Procopio’s wigs, Heater’s own cache of period costumes and posh late Victorian furniture from an uncited source, and you can see that Lizzie Borden looks quite a bit like Nara’s enormously successful production of James Joyce’s The Dead.
When we first view the family life of the Borden household two years before the murders, things are not going well. Contention reigns, and the script does not encourage us to take sides. The parents Andrew (Bernard Kaplan) and stepmother Abigail (Kate Huddleston) sound a little like those familiar ogres, the stuffy Victorian parents, but individualizing touches abound. Abigail, addressed as “Abby” by her resentful younger step-daughter Lizzie, has risen from less affluence than the Bordens to take an uneasy place in the household. She resents demeaning comparisons with the late first Mrs. Borden and suffers from a verbal clumsiness that invites stinging attack from Lizzie.
Paterfamilias Andrew might have some money, but he’s too much of a skinflint to be called “rich.” A proud self-made man, he resents the hordes of immigrant labor that has made his success possible and thinks he should be loved and appreciated for having put poor people to work. Lacking the refinement of the real upper class, he regularly bellows his anger when he doesn’t get his way. His laments for his deceased first wife take an unsavory turn when he leans toward Lizzie and swoons that he can still see his beloved in his daughter’s eyes.
Lizzie (Jodi Bova), as she must be, is Heater’s most audacious creation. If the story were to be Hollywoodized or sentimentalized, she would have to become to object of our affections, but that does not happen here. A leading lady and choreographer, Bova is more of a looker than the historical Lizzie, whose photo is on the cover, but that does not detract from the characterization. In the opening dispute with her parents over an inheritance, we can sympathize with her sense of having been shorted. But Lizzie seems too grasping, it’s hard to stick with her. Not that she hasn’t had some privileges, one of which was a grand tour of European art treasures. Then she chides Abby for not having traveled.
Although the neighborhood gossip Adelaide (Susan Blumer) gives useful information, we don’t always grasp its meaning on first hearing. There are puzzling, ambiguous quirks in Lizzie’s behavior, like the petit mal she succumbs to, perhaps brought on by menstruation. Lizzie reveals most of her prickly self in exchanges with others. Continually, she bullies the Irish maid Maggie (Beth Schmidt) about hard labor in sultry hot weather. As the action proceeds, she strikes a contrast with her older, cooler, more upright sister Emma (Carmen Viviano-Crafts). The most ambitious of these dialogues is also the subtlest. In it she contends with the fawning friend Alice (Jodie Baum), essentially a power play over who has the stronger hand.
Misused and put-upon, Maggie is a fuller character than might be expected. This may be an accommodation to some of the hare-brained speculations, cited by Heater in the program, that assume a bigger role for her in the murder. Beth Schmidt’s authentic but not cartoonish accent underscores the demeaning ethnic slurs Maggie had to endure from Abigail, Andrew and his equally bigoted bother-in-law, John (C. J. Parsons). Well-spoken Dr. Bowen (David Witanowski) arrives to illuminate the rising paranoia in the household before the murders. While a faithful married man, his good looks and proximity to the Borden household set Adelaide’s tongue a-wagging, and signals that Lizzie might have attracted a lover. Amplified voice-over with testimony from the trial reveals the voices of Bill Molesky, Josh Mele, Michael Penny and playwright Heater.
In a murder mystery without screaming, spilled blood, or exposed skin, director Jenn DeCook keeps the tension high. She relies on a strong experienced cast, where the women seemed called upon for greater shades of subtlety. The role of Lizzie marks an enormous breakthrough for Jodi Bova, previously best known for outrageous comedy, like Debbie Does Dallas, which she also choreographed. If she did not actually slaughter her parents, she had the motivation (mostly not revealed here). And although a Sunday school teacher, her arm had enough motivation to wield the axe.
selection from They Talk the Lines, December 22, 2010 by Jim McKillop
In a play about a double murder with intimations of incest, Garrett reveals character subtly and slowly, giving intimations of Chekhov. Jodi Bova was the wounded butterfly in the title role, with strong support from Kate Huddleston, Carmen Viviano-Crafts, David Witanowski and Jodie Baum.
Covey Theatre Inaugurates With Murder Most Foul
Saturday, November 13, 2010 Tony Curulla for the Post-Standard
Despite the substantial number of community theater companies in town, somehow most are able to boast reasonable longevity, so it isn’t often that new ones are born. Let’s face it: what with expensive facility rentals, costume and prop expenses (beg, borrow, steal, and rent), and show royalties, together with a finite (howbeit, enthusiastic) audience base swimming upstream against a strong current of economic downturn, it may be sheer determination (and perhaps a muse or two) that manages to keep so many afloat.
So when some people decide to “double down” and establish a new company (Covey Theatre Company), and inaugurate its inception by presenting an original work (“Lizzie Borden Took an Axe”) by one of those same people (Garrett A. Heater), that’s a bold move and a statement of belief. The new company opened its first performance on Friday evening to the applause of a substantial audience who got what they came for: taut, interesting drama performed well.
In this bloodless rendition of a very bloody and very real double murder that took place in Fall River, MA in 1892, and under the capable direction of Jenn DeCook, Garrett Heater’s original script raises more questions than answers, and that’s what it should do because the audience came for compelling intrigue, not historical dogma. And compelling it is, as well as historical. Framed around actual court transcripts that are utilized as voiceover scene separations, Heater’s script, nonetheless, is presented, dramatically, in a series of scenes taking place in Victorian dressing and sitting rooms, parlors, and formal dining rooms, and skillfully executed by an experienced cadre of community actors.
Jodi Bova is all business in the title role as she exudes a convincing combination of Victorian charm and palpable hate for her stepmother, Abigail (Kate Huddleston), as well as disgust for her father, Andrew (Bernard Kaplan). Her tough exterior belies a pampered, yet tortured, history that includes an intimated, yet obvious, incestuous relationship with her father. Kudos for authenticity belong to Beth Schmidt as Bridget Sullivan, the feisty, yet so-put-upon Irish maid. Her flawless accent, together with appropriate, but never exaggerated movement, was a fine example of controlled stage savvy.
Victorian manners and behaviors abound as exemplified through characters Emma Borden, (Carmen Viviano-Crafts), the older and tight-lipped sister, the “keeper” of the family secrets, and friend Alice Russell (Jodie Baum), who becomes uncontrollable at the thought of telling a lie. Neighborhood gossip and “watchdog’ duties go to Susan Blumer’s Adelaide Churchill, doling out suspicion and innuendo in several scenes. Both C. J. Parsons (Uncle John) and David Witanowski (Dr. Bowen) turn in fine performances, as their characters attempt to inject some control and objectivity to the bizarre goings-on.
Heater’s costumes, together with Karen Procopio’s wigs, serve up healthy doses of Victorian finery, along with a plethora of period furniture (some for sale after the show’s run). A nicely lighted set through the efforts of Todd DeCook (construction) and John Nara (lighting) creates the appropriate atmosphere purposefully antithetical to the events.
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Photographs courtesy of Abel Phillips