On Golden Pond
Even before the Baby Boom generation came to dominate popular culture by their sheer numbers, American playwrights usually cast elderly characters as stubborn old tyrants or dotty old foozles. These days, they are more often Alzheimer-riddled burdens on their descendants...a fashion due to change as the Boomers themselves confront their twilight years. But in 1978, ahead of the rest ( albeit still behind D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game ) , a not-yet-30 playwright named Ernest Thompson established the prototype for a new genre of geriatric romance.
On Golden Pond's lovers are the 79-year-old Norman Thayer and his 69-year-old wife, Ethel. Their trysting place is the Maine cottage where they have passed the last 48 summers...46 of these married to one another. Like many such couples, their conversation has settled into a curmudgeonly complacency, the vigorous Ethel accommodating her husband's physical and cerebral infirmities with serene acceptance. But their gentle journey into that Good Night is interrupted by the arrival of their estranged daughter, accompanied by a fiancé and a future stepson...a disruption to the status quo that will force Norman and Ethel to bridge long-neglected generation gaps and in doing so, forestall the stagnation that would precipitate their own deterioration.
The sentimentality suggested by its title ( "golden" evoking images of sunsets, autumn leaves and heaping portions of what advertisers call "warmth" ) could easily lull audiences into an equally undesirable state of sedation. Fortunately, this Drury Lane Oakbrook production has the talents of Tony Mockus and Ann Whitney, actors only slightly younger than their personae, who swap one-liners with the stichomythic agility of seasoned veterans. Jacob Zacher, playing the teenaged Billy Ray, Jr., deftly slings vintage argot as if it were MTV-minted. Rounding out the ensemble is Michael McKay as local-yokel Charlie Martin, Kathryn Jaeck as the alienated Chelsea Thayer, and Michael Accardo as the clueless Billy Ray, Sr. Scenic designer Kurt Sharp's shoreline residence...its idyllic ambiance enhanced by the distant call of loons, courtesy of sound engineer Dan Mead...is comfortable enough to promote post-show inquiries about time-share plans. Or at least, to render the prospect of Getting Old in affluent white America a little less foreboding.
Titanic
With show-stopping, jaw-dropping lines like, "A douche is one thing, but a vaginal zoo is quite another," you know you're not in Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio territory with black humorist Christopher Durang's Titanic. Oh sure, there are the requisite upper-crust passengers, a nautical crew guiding the fated ship on its first voyage, and somewhere in the distance, drawing closer, a humongous iceberg ready to violently penetrate the maiden liner's nether regions.
What Christopher Durang has done with the White Star Line's ill-fated voyage is to use it as a backdrop for some of the most inspired, absurd and dark comedy this side of the Atlantic. In this production, described in its press materials as "sweet, short and dirty," we meet a cast of characters so sexually depraved and selfish that impending disaster is only a minor annoyance in their various fumblings and connections. To begin with, we have the sniping, backbiting, and polymorphously perverse lead couple, Victoria ( Jennifer Matthews ) and Richard ( Chad Idol ) . These two, intent on divorce when they are once more ensconced on land, lust after almost anything that moves, including their son, Teddy ( Steve Rich ) , whom the father sometimes refers to as Dorothy, and the mother insists on calling a 14-, then a 10-year-old boy, even though we know he is at least 20. Teddy only too gladly accepts his father's money in exchange for sexual favors, and worries about an infection he may or may not have gotten from the bites of hamsters inserted in his sister's ( or is it his aunt's? or is it the captain's daughter? ) vagina. And the creature that some call Lydia, some call Harriet, and some call Annabelle is perhaps the most outrageous sexual predator on board. Played with winking, over-the-top sexuality by Liz Warton, this delicious young thing will sleep with anyone, but what she loves most is stuffing various wildlife up her vagina … we know of a former dalliance with a hedgehog, then the afore-mentioned hamsters, and finally, in a nautical mood, a molting, mint-loving seagull. We also have the ship's captain ( Kevin Grubb ) , who has his wife executed, enjoys wearing a dildo on his head unicorn style, has an aluminum foil fetish and has almost no interest in seeing the ship on its safe passage. When one of the characters asks him, "Who's steering this ship?" he helpfully offers, "I'll check." And last, as some sort of balance, we have the handsome young sailor ( Steve Welsh ) , whom everyone lusts after and who is the only character concerned with the collision course the ship is on, toward disaster, and "going down" in history.
With all of the above going on, this farcical dark comedy of sexual manners makes it difficult to think of the Titanic as anything other than a vessel of insane, inane sexual desires, a hotbed of passion so heated it's a wonder it didn't just melt that damn iceberg. Open Eye, under the expert direction of Christopher Maher, has done some astonishing work here. The entire cast is flawless, Maher has directed them perfectly … they play the style of the piece for all its worth and never step outside the surreal world Durang has created, which is why the lunacy and the humor work so well. The simple set design ( by Jon Sevigny and Chris Maher ) works almost effortlessly, rotating to reveal the deck, a hallway, the ship's dining room, the captain's quarters, and a state room.
Theater companies who don't have big budgets should look to this production to see how imagination and intelligence can fill in quite well for dollars.
Titanic is way, way, over the top and so funny, it might actually leave you, appropriately, wet.
Five Rooms Of Furniture
In 1959, a young African-American woman named Lorraine Hansberry wrote about a Black family who unexpectedly inherit enough money to give one of them...but only one...the means to a Better Life. A Raisin In The Sun established protocol for a generation of dramas to follow. And now, over 40 years later, another young Black playwright, Dhana-Marie Branton, addresses the same dilemma in Five Rooms Of Furniture.
The family this time consists of Rufus Carter and his older sister Ina Mae, with whom he has lived since his wife left him, along with the former's daughter Vernell, married to an army veteran with a problem readjusting to civilian life, and the latter's daughter, Rachel, a recently discharged U.S. Navy officer. The fortune is five storage rooms of German furniture, shipped to Rufus' neighbor for safekeeping until after the war by owners who never lived to reclaim their property. This now-precious cargo was willed to Rufus on the occasion of its warden's death...but once again, the dispute is over who most deserves this bounty: Ina Mae, who has sheltered her younger brother since childhood? Vernell, encumbered with the care of her mentally incapacitated husband ( who is persuaded to take his medication only after it is presented to him as "vitamins" to aid him in preparation for his re-enlistment ) ? The estranged recovering-alcoholic Rachel, whose retirement ambition is to open an antique furniture store?
Branton's semi-autobiographical text could use some fine-tuning: some revelations come a bit too quickly and conveniently, possibly precipitated by too much exposition before the plot begins to move. And the tragedy of ex-GI Gary's psychological instability only emerges after being played for laughs throughout most of the action.
But director Jonathan Wilson believes in this material, as does a hard-working cast led by LaDonna Tittle and Ernest Perry, Jr. as the Carter siblings ( the latter replicating the body language of double-amputee Rufus with virtuoso agility ) . Sandra Watson, Penelope Walker and Stefano Mizell likewise contribute stalwart supporting performances, which, combined with the museum-accurate ambiance supplied by a topnotch technical staff, render this early-opening production already one of the season's highlights.
