Charlie DelMarcelle — Paul

Flashpoint Theatre Company: What inspires you about this play?
Charlie DelMarcelle:  I don’t know if this is inspirational but I am finding it fascinating that we are spending a great deal of time in rehearsal discussing the nature of “truth” in this play…the ways in which an individual’s sense of self, the human they create for both themselves and the rest of the world, is an essentially flawed construct built upon assumptions and memories that are specious at best.

Director Kathryn MacMillan is pushing us to defend, sometimes to the death, this precious, fragile image of self. As we work on individual beats in the script, it is exciting to hear other actors begin to fight for their character’s version of the events that tore this group of friends apart. Megan’s play seems so simple on first glance but has certainly inspired some energized, even at times heated, debates with-in the cast. I love theatre that engenders dialogue. Hopefully this play will inspire the same response from the audience.

FTC: What scares you about this play?
CD:  I guess I have a lingering fear that the audience could disengage with the play because all of the characters are flawed and are often quite cruel to each other. I know I am getting sick of seeing theatre where people treat each other like shit for two hours.

I am also always excited/scared of any play in which the dialogue is written so naturally and has to be carried by a large ensemble. The vital rhythms of entire sections can be completely destroyed if even a single cue is dropped. You really have to trust the people you are working with and stay on your toes. This is an excellent ensemble but I’m still a little nervous…mostly about my own performance!

FTC: What is the strangest “reunion” experience you’ve ever had?
CD:  My bachelor party…that’s all I’m going to say about that.

But despite all this, much to the delight of every high school English teacher in the United States, people just keep on producing this play. And this year 9th and 10th grade students can catch this tale of star-crossed lovers at the Lantern Theater, whose annual Shakespeare production is the Bard’s version of Twilight. Like all Shakespeare productions, the trick lies not in the novelty of the story, but in the way that story gets told. And the way this production tells this simple story is oddly fussy at best and painfully tedious at worst.

Directed by Charles McMahon and starring Sean Lally and Nicole Erb as the titular pair of lovers, the story is staged an a beige environment of fake-looking bricks and an awkward archway (set design by Meghan Jones). In a vaguely Renaissance world, marked with doublets and stays, chemises and brocades (excellently designed costumes that don’t quite fit into the production by Mary Folino), Romeo (a spitting and spastic Lally who plays the role with emotional energy that is utterly accurate if painful to watch) meets his Juliet (a whining and thoughtless Erb) and of course they fall madly in love. McMahon has peppered the production with odd silent exchanges that have his hapless actors making quick entrances and exits to give us, one supposes, some sort of atmosphere, all lit by Shelley Hicklin’s neat lighting design and scored by Daniel Perelstein’s lovely soundscape. But instead of seeing a fair Verona, where we lay our scene, we see a group of actors trying to make work a direction that extends an already long show even longer. Just once I would love to see a production of this play that really honors that whole “two hours traffic of our stage” business as outlined by the opening Chorus (declaimed by Frank X). So Romeo forgets his precious Rosamund (the lady he’s moaning about at the start of the play, discussed but never encountered) and commits his young emo-band heart to Juliet, who, by the way, is all of 14, as her nurse (Ceal Phelan) and mother (K.O. DelMarcelle) are quick to point out. They want her married to her cousin Paris (Jake Blouch, who also plays Tybalt, Peter, and a host of other characters), but of course Juliet only has eyes for her stalker, Romeo, and no threats from her father (played by Leonard Haas) can deter love’s true desires. Instead of, oh, I don’t know, skipping town, trying to make a go of it in Turin or Florence, the unlucky pair stay in Verona, marry in secret, and set in motion a series of events that lead directly to their deaths. Why do we make high schoolers read this, again?

One of the many difficulties of staging this so staged show, is making the audience understand and recall the feverish obsession of young love, devoid as it is of logic and perspective, but filled to the brim with hope and desire. And that’s not an easy task to charge any two young actors with, but hey, as we  learned from A League of Their Own, if it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. So while we can sympathize with the difficult tasks that Lally and Erb have in front of them, the sad truth is that neither of them discharges their duties particularly well. Part of this might lie in the fact that the two actors have all the chemistry together of an English class. Lally’s moaning and groaning Romeo is met by Erb’s shrill and petty Juliet, in a combination that is realistically juvenile, if not all that interesting to watch. But part of what makes this production flag is the pace, which should be breakneck and exuberant, but instead is sluggish and torpid. McMahon’s cuts are perplexing, he axes some of the most well-known exchanges in the show (it’s really not Romeo and Juliet unless someone bites their thumb) in favor of maintaining many of the scenes that, as historians will tell us, were actually penned to give doubling actors a bit of a breather. And speaking of doubling, this production uses it, well, weirdly. It’s rare to see a production of any Shakespeare play that doesn’t double one character or other, who has that kind of cash to hire a 30 person cast for a non-musical? But typically most modern productions try to use doubling purposefully, pairing two characters that have some kind of allegiance, or connection, something that has significance for the audience. This production, however, pairs people who have no connection, or worse, are enemies, which is frankly confusing. For example, Ceal Phelan plays both Lord Montague, Romeo’s father, and Juliet’s Nurse, her closest confidant and maternal figure. Haas plays Juliet’s volatile father with the same skill as the apothecary who seals his daughters doom. Blouch and Mehan are permitted to stay on their respective family sides, but their frequent exits and re-entrances in virtually identical outfits make it almost impossible to tell when they are playing whom. It’s strange for a play that is this familiar to be this confusing.

The reality is, there is nothing truly terrible about this production, it certainly doesn’t butcher the play and there is no wretched gaffe to make a Shakespeare lover blanche. It simply is about as beige as it’s set, it has no spark, not fire within it to keep this preposterous love story in the realm of the romantic. In this presentation, all we can see are the flaws, the many ways in which Romeo and his Juliet are rather foolish and extremely young, painfully earnest and deeply impulsive. It’s as hard to watch them make mistakes as it is to watch a child first learn to walk or an episode of 16 and Pregnant. You can’t intervene, you can’t fix it, you just have to stand by in mild horror and wait for the tragedy to come. And come it does, but after three hours, it’s almost a relief.

The Lantern Theater Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet has been extended until April 8th. Tickets are available here.

So when we look at a play like Tracy Lett’s August Osage County, now being presented by the Arden Theatre Company,  and we hear this Pulitzer Prize winning work discussed as a “Great American Play”, what does that actually mean? Well, it is, of course, a play with American characters. The Morgan family, the subject of this play, are long time Oklahoma residents, or at least, they were.  As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are all different”.  Well, this is a severely unhappy family, and boy, are they different. Beverly and Violet Weston (David Howey and Carla Belver, respectively) are quite the power couple. He is a washed-out poet turned verbose drunk while she is a cancer patient with a pill-box the size of Montana. They have an agreement, you see, she partakes in large quantities of prescription medication, he drinks whiskey, and everyone pretends it’s normal. As the lights rise on the Weston household we hear Beverly explaining this lovely little arrangement to his new housekeeper, Johnna (Elena Araoz), and, having delivered the information and given us a brief window into his booze-soaked poetic soul, he disappears, never to be seen again. And that becomes the impetus for the rest of the show, as Violet summons her scattered brood home. Her husband’s little disappearing act is the perfect excuse to force her three grown daughters to comfort her. Never mind that Barbara (Grace Gonglewski) is facing martial issues with husband Bill (Eric Hissom). Never mind that Ivy (Corinna Burns) is playing kissing cousins with Little Charles (Charlie DelMarcelle). And never mind that Karen (Kathryn Petersen) is planning on getting married to her creepy boyfriend Bill (Anthony Lawton). The bell tolls for them.

And so the three sisters descend upon their childhood home, only to find it a broken-down mausoleum, the monument to a fractured family blackened with age, neglect and decay. At least, that’s what happens in theory. But while Lett’s script describes a dark, stuffy, mercilessly hot (Violet “doesn’t believe in air conditioning”) claustrophobic nightmare of a mansion, what the Arden has given us is an open and airy scaffold of a house (set design by Dan Conway), warm and glowing in the beams of Thom Weaver’s lighting plot. Everyone looks neat and attractive, well-tailored but comfortable, thanks to Alison Robert’s simple costume design. In short, it’s not a space one would walk into and say, what the hell happened to these people, it’s nice, it’s clean, it’s homey. And that’s a bit of a problem. Because one of the things the play sets up so well is the oppressive nature of the space. The house has come to mimic Violet and Beverly’s relationship, their dysfunction, it’s shut off from the rest of the world, all the blinds drawn and windows shut. It’s stale and abandoned, at least, at the start of the play. But the house director Terrance Nolen’s production gives us never changes, never shifts, never improves or worsens. It’s perfectly nice, and all, but totally inappropriate for a play about a family in crisis converging during a hot summer in Oklahoma.

But what’s in a setting, you might ask? Well, quite a bit, as it turns out.  Without engaging in an hours-long discussion about the effects of nature versus nurture on human development, let’s just skip straight to the point where we all acknowledge that environment has a strong effect on people. Or, in this case, plays. And so while the text itself is a gritty, dirty, shocking and outrageously funny punch to the gut, this particular production is clean, neat, and downright pleasant. In this respect it neuters Lett’s vicious text, and it sterilizes its cast of wonderful actors by restricting them from exploring the boundaries and extremes within the story. Belver’s Violet scarfs down pills and spits out curse words but without any of the bile or true nastiness we need to understand how this family works. Or the toll it’s taking on her children. And as a result, Araoz’s weakly delivered Johnna, who should serve as witness, outsider, friend of the audience, just feels unnecessary, when she should be the audience’s avenue of entry, the person with whom we can be continually checking in and confirming, this is messed up, right?

Burns’ Ivy simmers silently with the resentment of the only child still living near her parents, Peterson’s Karen deflects everything with delicious self-involvement,  while Gonglewski’s Barbara beautifully portrays a woman just trying to keep it together in the face of her parent’s self-destruction, her husband’s infidelity and her child’s (Dylan Gelula) precocious problems, but it’s hard to really feel how difficult this is for any of them when the stakes of the play are so muted.  Rhythmically the show works like a cannon when it ought to be a rock song, despite James Sugg’s solid sound work. As a result, the most famous, or infamous, climaxes of the piece, just happen, rather than actually being earned.

That’s not to say there aren’t excellent performance here, but they all have to fight their way through their squeaky clean  presentation that lays a heavy hand on all the “meaningful” lines and ignores most of the rest. Mary Martello’s Mattie Fae (Violet’s sister, Little Charles’ mother, it’s a good thing they include a family tree in the program) is a strata, she’s so layered, snapping and sassy to cover devastating secrets and strength, and it’s all there, all the time. Her husband, Charlie (Paul Nolan) matches her well, making them the only couple in play that we actually hope will succeed in moving past the past. Gonglewski, Burns and Peterson work together like sisters, silently communicating and condemning each other, wallowing in their memories and baffled by their manipulative mother. Gelula’s Juno-like frankness and physical awkwardness have as their foil the disturbingly believable flirtations of Lawton’s Florida-based Humbert Humbert. And Belver’s Carla, when she has the chance to really get messy, really does breathe the fire of 40 years of hatred, pain and regret.

And we can’t say it’s not a moving story, one that grips the audience long after they’ve left. It’s an excellent play. We’d be moved by a reading of this text, let alone a full production. It’s a play that contributes to Philadelphia in its production, a play that ought to be produced here. No one could possibly argue with the choice. It would just be nice if the execution lived up to the strength of the story.

The Arden Theatre’s production of August Osage County runs until October 30th, and at the very least, it’s worth seeing this stunning play which is already venerated as a classic, despite it’s youth. You can pick up tickets here.

First we must consider the play itself, Uncle Vanya, which is a re-write of a piece that Chekhov had previously created in 1887 titled The Wood Demon.  Apart from being the most masculine of Chekhov’s four major plays (and the only one without a teacher), Uncle Vanya is perhaps the most referential, peppered with allusions to Chekhov’s contemporaries and preprocessors, mocking Tolstoy (who famously once said to Chekhov that “Shakespeare was a terrible writer but you are worse”), mentioning Ostrovsky, and glibly dropping Turgenev’s name. The last is especially tongue in cheek considering the fact that Uncle Vanya as a piece mirrors Turgenev’s A Month in the Country to an astonishing degree. Though this itself is not particularly strange when we consider the fact that all of Chekhov’s major works are subverting  then-traditional concepts of theater. What is, say,  The Cherry Orchard, for example, if not a mortgage melodrama turned upside down? Uncle Vanya itself wrecks havoc with dramatic arc, climaxing with a completely unsuccessful duel (Puskin’s Eugene Onegin it is not) and then leaving us hanging for an entire act as we watch a pathetic and abortive suicide attempt, only to finish with a pair of lonely people working on the estate accounts. It is, in its essence, a play about a loser, whose knowledge of himself as a loser is not enough to elevate him from his failures. After all, Chekhov’s characters never regret the things they’ve done, they regret the things they haven’t had the courage to do.

Played in a pale green living room/drawing-room combo type space designed by Meghan Jones, the set itself looked to be ripped directly from someone’s home, the frayed edged on either side of the space a tribute to Stanislavski’s slavish dictate that theater should be like peeking in on someone’s living room. A single samovar haunts stage left (a move that had my seat mate smirking, “I guess that makes it Russian”), and furniture is arranged and re-arranged to represent different rooms in the house.  The fact that the piece is played with audience on three of the four sides is a good if often-made choice, breaking the now-traditional single audience bank and forcing an intimacy between actor and spectator. However, director Kathryn MacMillan’s staging often has monologues and exchanges played with majority of the audience getting a view of the actors profiles and backs as they move in circles around the square playing space, depriving the viewers of a clear stage picture.

Above the house space hang a sparse collection of bare branches, which is frankly an extremely confusing design. First of all, the entire play takes place over the course of a month in the summer , wouldn’t the trees have leaves on them? And why would there be tree branches hanging over the living room, aren’t we to imagine a roof overhead? Is the estate really in that much trouble that Vanya and Sonia can’t afford to build a roof? Faulkner once called Chekhov the first true surrealist, and while it’s possible this production may have used these branches to reference this, nothing else about the piece really supports that. The music, product of sound designer Christopher Colucci, is equally jarring, reminding me of nothing so much as Hannukah tunes, which is odd, because from what I can remember from my time living in Moscow, Judaism remains extremely unpopular in the former Soviet-Union. Luckily, solid lighting design by Thom Weaver inspired no philosophical questions, nor did it remind me of uncomfortable conversations about my religion held in broken Russian, and Millie Hiibel’s costume design was largely strong as well, though why Sonia would be wearing outfits more appropriate in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks is anyone’s guess.

Sonia herself, played unevenly but often strongly by Melissa Lynch (who is, by the way, far too pretty to be calling herself plain. Why do pretty actresses always get cast as Sonia?) seemed to vary from act to act, faltering at the start of the play, bursting with energy and talent through the middle and breaking our hearts before the intermission, then diminishing somehow and finishing the play right back where she started. Lynch is joined by a rather limp Astrov (Charlie DelMarcelle, who, while charming enough to be likable, plays Astrov too causally and without a sense of true depth), and a strong Yelena (Pig Iron member Sarah Sanford whose performance is thoughtful and layered, if not bursting with vivacity). Serebryakov (David Howey) is appropriately pompous and Maria Vasilyevna (Ceal Phelan) supports the action well, but there is a general lack of inner life in this production, giving it an indifference which feels at odds with how high the stakes of the play really are. There is a dearth of subtext, and a causal air that renders the text repetitive and uninteresting, rather than charged with meaning. The sole exception of this is Peter Delaurier’s Vanya, which is excellent, dynamic and strong with hundreds of subtle levels and a constant consciousness of the world of the play that is exciting to watch. The only negative of this is that Delaurier’s supremely saturated and smart performance highlights what is lacking in the production, and the sharpness of his internal pacing draws attention to the almost sluggish rhythm of the piece itself.

One of the most poignant and authentic things about Chekhov’s work is the continual trope of things happening, big things like duels and suicides and admitting that you love someone who doesn’t love you back or whom you shouldn’t really be loving, and then life goes on, just the way it always has. Uncle Vanya portrays an interlude, a month in the lives of these unhappy people who live in a house where hope has died (Sonia’s deceased mother’s name was Vera, which is Russian for hope; Chekhov is nothing if not subtle). Visitors come, disrupt the lives and schedules of Sonia and Vanya, and then they leave, and time continues onward, stretching towards infinity. It is little wonder that the only Chekhov play permitted to be produced during the reign of the Soviet Union was The Cherry Orchard (with Trofimov as the voice of the proletariat), because it’s hard to believe in hope and change when all you see are things just staying the same. We are devastated by the people we see in Chekhovian tragicomedy, not in the least because we find ourselves reflected in their depths.  And if the Lantern Theater Company’s production doesn’t give us all we would like or expect from this work, it does leave us with a Vanya who grasps for life, even while he understands that life has past him by. Because what more is left to us but that? The task is as futile as it is necessary, and if you are sick of living, well, just think of the alternative.

The Lantern Theater Company’s production of Uncle Vanya runs until November 21st. Tickets are available here.