Drama festival ends with awards presented 07/02/02

By GORDON JONES

Special to The Telegram

Last Saturday night, I wore my bright red, Tiger Woods, good luck shirt for the final round of the 2002 Newfoundland Drama Festival, in case they were handing out prizes for perspicacious theatre criticism.

Proceedings commenced at 7 p.m. with the sixth production of the week, Bay Theatre’s well-produced staging of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, directed by Stephen Evans.

Set in New York in 1942, the play focuses on a rock-hard, Jewish matriarch, a survivor of European pogroms, who bullies her children and terrifies her grandchildren.

The comic-sentimental story is told from the perspective of two motherless, teenage brothers, whose father is engaged in wartime work, leaving them with their domineering grandmother (Cindy O’Neill) and their dotty but affectionate Aunt Bella (Janice Kitchen). They are also visited for a while by fast-talking Uncle Louie (Kevin Dunphy), a sharply dressed wise guy, on the run from the realm of Damon Runyon.

As always, Simon has a flair for funny repartee, slick cameo portraits, corny philosophizing, emotional manipulation, and formulaic plays that mean a lot less than you think.

Improbable rebellion

In the present case, the formula leads to the improbable rebellion of the downtrodden aunt and the even less probable redemption of the matriarchal monster. Her abuse of two generations of children was only tough love. Reconciliation and kisses all round.

Theatrically adept and behaviourally implausible, the play is as distant from authenticity as alpha centauri. The two boys are the backbone and saviours of the piece — and they represent the only risk that the dramatist takes. Requiring two young actors to remain continuously on stage for virtually the whole play is chancy.

But the risk pays off, as demonstrated by the highly accomplished performances of Jonathan Hann as 13-year-old Artie and Darrin Martin as his 15-year-old brother — performances that were fittingly recognized by the adjudicator’s awarding prizes to the pair of them.

Indeed, Ed Thomason had high praise for the staging and execution of the entire production, quibbling only over relatively minor points of blocking, focus, and actor placement, and awarding the Hans Tode Memorial Trophy to its set designer, Matt Bugden.

In his brief general remarks before the presentation of awards, Thomason applauded the talent, dedication and camaraderie he had encountered in the week-long festival, particularly commending the spirit of sharing and reciprocal learning.

While he tactfully prefaced distribution of awards with a caveat that the vagaries of recognition be placed in the broader context of the 52-year history of festival accomplishment, there is a certain natural interest in knowing who won and who must wait for next year in Gander.

There were two big winners this year — Carol Players of Labrador City, for their focused production of Michael Carey’s Thy Will Be Done, and Beothuck Street Players of St. John’s, for their flamboyant production of David Holman’s Drink the Mercury.

Carol Players swept the awards for costume (Katherine Burgess), best performance by both male and female actors (Ray Saunders and Dana Blackmore — yes, indeed!), best direction (Peter McCormack), audience appreciation award, Margaret Doyle Trophy (voted on by participating groups), and the biggie — the festival award for best presentation of a full-length play.

Host company Beothuck Street Players carried off prizes for best supporting performance by an actress (Jacinta Graham), visual presentation (Fred Hawksley), and excellence in lighting design (Clar Doyle) and stage management (Katherine Elliott). Beothuck’s Rob Power got the OZ-FM Award for imagination and excellence in sound (anything less would have been a gross injustice) and Jason Card was deservedly awarded the VOCM Scholarship for his mimed performance of Government submitting to Big Business.

In the St. John’s Players production of Art, the shifting psychological and emotional connections between stuffy Philip Daniel, rumpled Russell Bowers, and sardonic Michael Coady were acknowledged by the joint award to all three of best supporting actor. Doubtless a bit of a cop-out on the part of the adjudicator, but I would not want to be the person to tell one of them he was the non-principal.

In this production, too, there was something of an innovation, as Festival honorary chairman John Perlin pointed out to me. The president of Beothuck Street Players (Coady) was featured in a St. John’s Players production. The adjudicator was evidently right about collaboration and camaraderie.

No more Albee

While I concur with the adjudicator in all but two of his awards (my lips are sealed as to which), festival ruefulness includes the non-recognition of the exuberant commitment of Michele Dove as Claire in the Avion Players earnest, but unexciting, production of Albee’s A Delicate Balance. Perhaps a Gander sponsor can fix that next year. But please don’t do Albee again.

The Mokami Players production of A Second Wind also deserved more attention. It was by no means perfect in scripting, performance, or production. But at the still centre resides something real and important.

Overall, the continuing success of the provincial drama festival bears witness to the vitality of amateur theatre in Newfoundland and Labrador. It provides a permanent showcase for theatrical accomplishment and an important opportunity for mentoring up-and-coming talent.

Now, about that prize for theatre criticism ...

Blackmore's Bridie shines in Thy Will be Done 06/28/02

By GORDON JONES

Special to The Telegram

The fourth entry in the Provincial Drama Festival at the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre was staged last night by Carol Players of Labrador City. Their selection was a new play by Irish playwright Michael Carey, Thy Will be Done (which is also due to be produced in Carbonear this summer).

One of those quintessentially — nay, parodically — Irish comedies (with a dark secret in the middle), it opens in a dilapidated, rat-infested rural kitchen that used to be a cowshed. In salty language, it proceeds to dramatise a story of implacable hatred between two elderly brothers.

Encompassing arson and adultery, the plot hinges on why, 40 years earlier, little Peter inherited the family farm, rather than his elder brother, Jack; and whether, in future, Peteen’s son, Martin, recently returned from America, will be the beneficiary of his curmudgeonly and miserly father’s will.

Shuttling between the two households and providing much of the comic banter is a crusty but warm-hearted home-help called Bridie (Dana Blackmore). Thin, bespectacled, never having married because she looked after parents who lived too long, Bridie totes around a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and keeps her best rosary beads for when she is dead.

She also functions as the dea ex machina to right past injustice with a satisfying sleight of hand.

As brother Jack, Ray Saunders is immensely easy, natural and convincing, never stepping out of character or ringing a false note — except on the few occasions when he is directed to move from A to B with no justification except the Big Speech is about to occur. Thankfully, this happens rarely.

The two other male parts are less rewarding, although capably performed. Brother Peter — no fault of Nick McGrath — is not constructed as a three-dimensional figure. He is a cut-out figure: the melodramatically oppressive, angry, violent bully we all love to hate.

In the role of the son/nephew, Martin, Robin Walters has more to work with. A little tentative initially, he takes on authority (if too gesturally) in the scene of drunken disclosures. The morning-after farewell scene is negotiated with quiet dignity.

But there is no gainsaying that this is really The Jack and Bridie Show.

Playing off Saunders’ querulous, deadpan Jack, Blackmore’s Bridie is the jewel and linchpin of Carey’s dramatic contrivance. She may sometimes gabble a little in maintaining the scratchily husky, accented voice, but she seized the role by the throat and had last night’s audience eating out of her hand, eager to find occasion to laugh and applaud, and drawing guffaws even from case-hardened theatre critics.

With feuding brothers, disputes over inheritance, shotgun confrontations, religious statuary, offstage funerals, drunken confidences, and comic profanity, Thy Will Be Done operates very much in the territory of Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West.

Both playwrights revel in a rural stage-Ireland where the imaginary denizens devote their time to drinking, swearing, feuding, praying, burying the dead, and trying to keep the skeletons of the past from springing out of the closet into the present — although rendered in Carey’s case with more of a whimsical Irish twinkle than McDonagh’s sardonic Celtic snarl.

Directed by Peter McCormack, Thy Will Be Done aspires to no great dramatic heights, but it delivers well-made, satisfying theatrical entertainment, by way of strong performance and characterisation.

Avion Players take the stage 06/27/02

By GORDON JONES

Special to The Telegram

The third night of the 2002 Provincial Drama Festival was Gander’s turn, as the Avion Players staged Edward Albee’s literate and cerebral comedy, A Delicate Balance, directed by Greg Blumer.

Set in the drawing-room of a martini-and-cognac household, serviced by unseen servants, retired Tobias (Bert Peddle), and his tight-laced wife, Agnes (Annette Crummey), spar with one another with the feints and evasions of long intimacy.

Their household is shared with Agnes’s buxom, dipsomaniac younger sister, Claire (Michele Dove), who finds truth as well as escape at the bottom of a glass.

Into this unstable grouping, Albee introduces the best friends of Agnes and Tobias. Seized by nameless terror, Edna and Harry (Anne Marie Blumer and Ira Crummey), take refuge in their friends’ house, forcing the claims of friendship into strained proximity with the ties of family.

The dystopian extended family is completed by the arrival of brattish, thirty-something daughter, Julia (Shelley Goulding). Never having assumed the full responsibility of adulthood, Julia has again returned home after leaving her fourth husband, only to find her bedroom occupied. I tell ya - as her drunken aunt remarks - there are so many martyrdoms here.

Under these circumstances, the drawing-room becomes something of a battle ground. And, having mapped the contours of human needs, hopes, failures and betrayals, this brittle, wrangling comedy comes finally to a provisional moral and dramatic equilibrium. If not peace, at least a truce.

Originally staged in 1966, its three-act, two intermission structure seems faintly old-fashioned and cumbersome nowadays. So too, it must be said, seems the presentational style in this production.

Blocking and moves are often awkward or mechanical. Time and again, actors march downstage centre or centre right to deliver the big set speech. And, when delivered, the speech fails to rise from the page more often than not.

Pacing is generally slow, although things pick up in the second act, with the business of Claire and her accordion, topped by a distraught Julia bursting in with a gun, throwing tantrums over being ousted from her nest by the intrusive neighbours.

The greatest challenge of the play, however, is the dialogue. The language of a playwright who uses words like succinct, aphorism, and gaucheries cries out to be tossed and juggled, tasted and relished.

Albee’s dialogue should crackle and sparkle, like freshly poured champagne. Here it fizzles, despite valiant efforts by Michele Dove to revive it with the swizzle stick of her ebullience.

Taking on a play as demanding as A Delicate Balance shows considerable courage and zeal. Simply getting through it is a victory. But successfully scaling its linguistic heights and sounding its behavioral depths is quite another matter.

Drink the Mercury kicks off drama festival 06/25/02

By GORDON JONES

Special to The Telegram

This year’s Provincial Drama Festival — the 52nd turn of the wheel — showcases six productions exemplifying a range of styles, nationalities and themes — a new Irish comedy by Michael Carey, one of Neil Simon’s steady, if shallow, stream of Broadway hits, an urbane French comedy about art and friendship, an Edward Albee modern classic, and no fewer than two plays centring on occupational disease, crab asthma in Labrador, and mercury poisoning in Japan.

The latter show opened the Festival last night, presented by the host company, Beothuck Street Players, before a substantial house at the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre. Written by David Holman and directed by Fred Hawksley, Drink the Mercury is a passionate and compassionate theatrical disquisition on the collaboration of business and government in disclaiming responsibility for environmental mercury-poisoning of fishers of Minimata Bay.

The principal focus is the long and painful dying of a young girl (Krystin Pellerin) and the subsequent political activism of her angry and grieving parents (Bruce Brenton, Janet O’Reilly). Presentation is highly stylized, emulating conventions of Japanese Noh theatre. On a bare stage, simply costumed actors play representative figures, both animate and inanimate — father, mother, factory, government, schools of fish, scavenging birds. Painted cloths are carried on to depict the village or the sea. Large papier-mache fish are manipulated by stage hands. Action is mediated by a female narrator (Sharon Tracy) and by choruses of anonymous villagers and citizens. Elaborately choreographed choric movement, mime, and narrative are accompanied by an expressive soundscape created by drums, bells, gongs, cymbals, xylophone, and wood blocks, played by three percussionists in full view.

Emotionally gruelling

Flamboyant and diverse — sometimes even lyrical — in its initial theatrical effects, representing rural life before the Fall, the presentation becomes increasingly stark, relentless and emotionally gruelling as it proceeds to explicate the medical and social impact of 36 years of industrial effluent poisoning a once-prosperous fishing community.

The second act of the play, starting with the death throes of little Ioka and moving on to recount the struggle of surviving victims and their families for justice and reparation, becomes increasingly polemical, argumentative and declarative.

We have moved from traditional performance theatre to agitprop theatre — rabble-rousing slogans, demonstrations, political addresses, and the missionary passion of the morally justified.

There are many wonderful things in this production.

The moving simplicity and economy of some of the earlier scenes, the skill and ingenuity of the miming, the choreographed movement of the chorus, the scoring and performance of the soundscape, and the intimidating, multiplying Factory, played by one, then two, then three actors (Duane Tulk, James Hawksley, Tana Kayler), stamping about in piped-mask and long, chimney-like fingers to pour glittering pollution on the stage floor to the accompaniment of cacophonous, post-industrial percussion.

By the same token, there are some longeurs.

The deliberateness of movement and mime slowed the pace, sometimes intolerably, accentuated by the time it takes to get on and off a very large stage. There is some repetitiveness and some overemphasis of material in both acts, but especially the second. Both would benefit from pruning and tightening. The eloquent music and movement of the first half are largely displaced in the second by docu-drama and speechifying. Telling and arguing take precedence over showing.

This did actually happen. It is outrageous. And reparation remains outstanding. Nevertheless, however well justified, effective theatrical expression is needed to contain and focus the outrage of the second act. I am not sure that it has yet been found.

Despite these reservations, there is much more to praise than to blame in Drink the Mercury, which provided a striking and well-executed start to Festival 2002.

The Beothuck Street hosts can be proud of themselves for taking on a challenging and at times remarkable piece of theatre.

Tonight, the St. John’s Players will remount the production they staged at the LSPU Hall last month — Yazmina Rez’s Art, a sophisticated comedy about the impact on a three-sided friendship of a white-on-white abstract painting.

Curtain time is 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

Mainstage production is prefaced at 7 p.m. by Barbara Barrett’s Phoenix Theatre presenting a curtain-raiser, entitled Final Dress Rehearsal, in the Basement Theatre.