WPCNR WHITE PLAINS AFTER DARK. On the Aisle At The Rochambeau. By John F. Bailey. March 9, 2003: Like the fall season on Broadway, articles on how theatre is dying, and how Broadway is overpriced come out. They came out in the Times just last week. But that’s poppycock. Theatre is not dying at all. It’s alive in community theatre. It came back to live at The Rochambeau Theatre in Fort Hill Players production of The Real Thing this weekend.
FILLING THE STAGE: Seven hard-working actors and actresses, interacting flawlessly, become real with a labyrinthine script inducing actor-actress combinations of sparks, emotion, and reality. So convincing, they earned four spontaneous applauses after precision- played scenes from a very mixed audience of 50 old and young patrons of the arts at the kindly Rochambeau stage Saturday evening.
Photo by WPCNR StagedoorCam
The Fort Hill Players “Oh so British and Proper” production of Tom Stoppard’s
The Real Thing Saturday evening is no exception, because it’s exceptional.
.
Play begins with a scene from a play.
The audience did not get it at first, not realizing that the first scene is actually a scene from Henry Boot’s play, “House of Cards.” In scene one, the Netherlands native, Dirk Marks as actor Max conducts a cloying, clever supercilious, round-about interrogation of the droll strawberry blonde “Bacall-ette,” Syl Farrell, playing his wife. While the audience is struggling with the typical clipped British accents, Pinteresque in the extreme by Ms. Farrell and Mr. Marks, Marks inquires about Ms. Farrell’s business trip.
Farrell, looking progressively nervous, unwittingly gives up the evidence of her adultery on a trip to Geneva in the first scene. The scene switches gears on you when she is found out.
Lesson one: you commit adultery, it always gets discovered.
Farrell and Marks get the embarrassment, the triumph, and pain of discovery with expressions and body language that mirror exactly how it feels. Farrell particularly comes apart well in this scene with the stages of being discovered: expletive, shock, denial, realization, sense of loss – all in one scene. This young woman has a Lauren Bacall, Joan Collins voice that is icy, cool composed, and it’s a tour de force the way she comes undone. Farrell’s Charlotte on stage is the table-setter for the emotional swings you will experience in the rest of the play, and Ms. Farrell delivers. What the audience had seen as amusing is abruptly delivering pain.
Lesson two; Love feels so damn good.
Next, the scene switches from “a play within a play” to a real life Sunday afternoon, when Stanley Wexler as Mr. Boot and Ms. Farrell, as Boot’s wife Charlotte. Boot, filled with the ebullience of a man in love again, has invited Max and his wife, Annie who is an actress in Boot’s new play. Buxom, flamboyant redhead Lorna Whittemore’s entry as Annie is dramatic, and daringly suggestive when Max and Charlotte leave the room.
Ms. Whittemore plays the character as overwhelming and she is in love with Mr. Wexler’s playwright. She shamelessly flirts him in front of his wife just as a woman does when she is strong for you. That teasing sense of conspiracy is sweetly, shockingly done and not easy to play. All the actors stage movements here are realistically choreographed, switching seats, walking around each other, trying to ignore the obvious heat in the room.
It is a scene showing how in the beginnings of love it sweeps you away one day when someone comes into your life and makes you feel so damn good.
Lesson three: Love is pain.
The audience is understanding what is going on here now. From the compulsion of that first physical and personal attraction between Annie and the lovestruck Boot in the Sunday afternoon scene, they are jerked into the next phase. They witness Mr. Marks’ Max emotional confrontation of Annie with evidence of her infidelity with Mr. Boot.
Marks may not have that scene quite right here, but he may be fooling the critic. He’s close. He cries a little too quickly, moves through the scene a little too quickly, not quite the right inflection and pace in his lines, but he is close. Though this may be intentionally the way Marks plays this real life “discovery” scene. He is smooth when “acting” the discovery of the wife in the play in Scene One. But playing Max in real life, when the same thing happens to him he is not as smooth. He is ripped apart and you feel his pain and that is to his credit as an actor.
Stoppard’s play is tricky that way. Maybe that’s the direction here in Max’s part and Stoppard’s message: Plays are so well-acted, but real life, you don’t say your lines as well, because you’re making them up.
Ms. Whittemore delivers Annie’s concern at being found out, of feeling the blood of the relationship spilled for good, the devastation of what she has done to Max . She’s good. She showcases consternation, fidgety body language. You don’t quite know if she’s more unhappy at getting found out, or relieved, a very subtle emotion to show and Ms.Whittemore creates this dichotomy of feeling. (The two main feelings you get when an affair is discovered are guilt and relief.).She plays a very tricky gamut of behavior here. I mean this is dialogue folks, delivered the way it was meant to be with the hesitation, the anxiety of “the real thing.”
Lesson four: Love is a wonderful thing.
In the final scene of Act I, we view a day in Annie and Henry’s blissful first few weeks together, and together they just do this scene solid. From Henry’s above-being jealous attitude that Annie is frustrated at, represented by Henry’s line describing how young people feel about love: (“Love is happiness expressed in banality and lust”); to Annie’s funny flounce as she says, “You’re not jealous,” (a perfectly performed line, by the way), You see the loyalty, the allegiance, that really, really fine feeling that no one else matters.
This couple “works.”
Stanley Wexler and Lorna Whittemore are not Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, they can act. They act real and represent real people. Ms. Whittemore’s touching rendering of Annie’s all-too-familiar insecurities people who have been in love know about, that Henry is not jealous of her are just so cute. This scene is one of the best played of the night. And the good scenes keep on coming all night from this “stage couple.”
As Intermission arrives, the audience is not quite certain as to what to expect next.
In Act two, we see Annie and Henry two years later. Annie has befriended a soldier jailed for rioting in a demonstration when she and Henry first met. He is in prison and has written a play. She wants Henry to fix it.
Wexler, as Henry, really warms to his character here delivering a hilarious critique of the prisoner’s very bad play. Wexler, who gets all the best lines in this play, rarely loses a punchline to his British accent, something very hard not to do. He slows the punchlines, with the timing of a master comedian. He gives you the appropriate accompanying body emotion writers have, moves that I, as a writer, can assure you are very typical.
The lines Stoppard gives him are priceless “slice-ups” of bad writing. (“It’s not literary and it’s no good.”) (“Writing rotten plays is proof of rehabilitation?”),and his soliloquy about comparing a good play to a cricket bat, is something a good writer will relate to, and the audience found amusing. You’ll begin to loosen up from the emotional endomorphens when you see this scene. Henry sends Annie off to Glasgow to do a show which starts a new cycle
Enter the Supporting Actors
Good words have to be keyboarded in support of the supporting actors. Billy Zane lookalike, Kevin Rishel is in his stage debut as Billy, a young actor. Billy meets Annie on the train and echoes a scene in the prisoner’s “bad play” which Henry is back at home writing.
Rishel has that lovestruck puppy look combined with raw lust that appeals to older women and he shows that off in the scene that starts Annie on an affair with him. Rishel as Billy delivers some intentionally bad Shakespeare to impress her, baring his abs, which he has. Rishel has the seductive look that can set women on the roller coaster ride to affairland, yet captures the one-track mind of the younger lover. Every man can see himself as being like Rischel’s character, and Rischel has him down.
Paging Cyndi Lauper
Bernadette McComish does a cameo star-turn as Debbie, Charlotte and Henry’s daughter, who is about to run away with a rock musician. Ms. McComish delivers a Cyndi Lauper image right out of the “Achin’ 1980s” the time of the play, complete with splayed red hair sprout, holes-in-her stockings punky look, and snotty superiority. Ms. McComish, a very poised and professional young lady in real life, transforms herself into the rebellious young daughter. Farrell as her mom, discusses her first experiences, and Wexler’s Henry intellectually spars with her about what “The Real Thing” is. Wexler accuses Debbie of “building bridges on incomprehension and chaos.” His second soliloquy on words is one of the great appreciations of writing and self-expression, while opening up insights into the love beyond mere sex.
Here again, Wexler as Father, McComish as daughter and Farrell as mom nail it. Every father will identify with Wexler’s delivery and emotion and earnestness and perhaps file it away for future reference.
Just the right edge
Jac-que Robinson as the prisoner playwright, Brodie, appears in the final scene to watch his rewritten play on television. Robinson, a veteran young actor around the county, masters the body positions of a rebel. The audience does not like him. Mr. Robinson has perhaps the worst written part in the play but he makes lemonade with it. Stoppard stopped working when writing these lines, in my opinion, but that is not Mr.Robinson’s problem. In his verbal sparring with Henry, he shows his ingratitude for what Henry has done for him. Robinson’s seething insolence has fire, meanness, and self-pity that’s real. He demonstrates to Annie the realization of how we often go wrong by clinging to romanticized, preconceived notions about others.
Shades of Sheridan Whiteside
If you’re thinking the play is worth going to see for seeing Stanley Wexler, you’re thinking right, Mr. and Mrs. White Plains.
The elegant Stanley Wexler, an opera singer for twenty years is suave, smooth, and pompous as Henry Boot the playwright, but when it comes to his craft, his Henry Boot is uncompromising. He delivers his Henry’s romanticism endearingly and his remarks on 60s music flavor the show. I liked his believable bit on how Bach stole his music from Procal Harem’s Whiter Shade of Pale . (Boot loves music of the 1960s, and songs by The Ronettes, Neil Sedaka, The Everly Brothers, among others serve as segues during the blackout scene changes). The audience loves him more throughout the play.
Wexler’s Henry uncannily finds himself reliving the play scene we have already seen in the first scene of the play, and he and Whittemore’s Annie do it well.
Wexler is distraught when Annie has not returned on the overnight train. In an accelerating, disbelieving manner, he finds himself conducting an eerily similar interrogation of his Annie.
The humor of Wexler’s logical, precise, up-and-down-the-vocal range interrogation of Annie is worthy of Sherlock Holmes. It is funny, but has a sarcastic edge to it. As he discovers his lover’s secret fling, he drives home the somber realization in the audience how slippery is the slope of adultery. It always is found out. Line by line, we see his hurt crack, spread and break out on the stage. The audience sees the playwright experiencing pain of discovery he had written about in the “House of Cards” at the top of the show. Though funny, it, too spills the blood of infidelity that stains a relationship and will not come out.
Wexler, the center of the action most of the time, handles the part of a fastidious and self-important Brit part (first made popular and since duplicated and rewritten many times by the Sheridan Whiteside character in The Man Who Came to Dinner) like a virtuoso in the acted word with range, pitch, articulation never out of pitch, never overacted. A tremendous body of work by Mr. Wexler in this production.
Strong support from the redhead and the blonde.
I have to compliment and give a rose to Ms. Whittemore on her getting the indignation and casualness just right as Annie tries to explain chatting with a friend in Houston Station to Henry. Her flouncing, her defensiveness, the humorous “explain aways” Stoppard (the real author of this play) gives her are just right.
Farrell as Charlotte and Whittemore as Annie, are mirror images in the emotions of women “fancying” and getting found out in the way they play it in body language, voice and inflection.
When Director Carin Zakes told me she had to work with actors individually then in pairs before going to full scenes to get the details right, I now see why. Ms. Zakes has formed a team of a cast which understands the play, is meticulous in detail and every action, who bring out the best in each other. It’s what theatre is all about: being a team, delivering a playwright’s message.
The set was designed by Anthony Fabrizio. Lighting, subtlely setting the scene since there is no curtain (whatever happened to curtains in theatre anyway?), was designed by David Ullman. I especially liked the bringing up of two table lights to begin scenes. The Real Thing was produced by Joan Charischak.
You, Mr. and Mrs. White Plains have two more weekends to catch this show, it’s just going to get better. The emotions will be worked harder. The lines timed even better. The soliloquies more moving, and it’s already good. It runs Fridays March 14 and 21 at 8; Saturdays March 15 and 22nd at 2 and 8. Tickets at $14 and well worth it are available by calling 421-0008.
Seeing this play tells us that “theatre” always lives. It reveals mysteries of life to each of us: writers to actors, actors to audience. The audience takes these guideposts and insights back to their daily lives and just perhaps, plays them better when the moments come along for them in real life if the plays are good. This spirit lives in local community live theatre where they act for fun.
Photo by WPCNR StageDoorCam
