It's a dog's life

A.R. Gurney's Sylvia -- now playing at Florida Studio Theatre -- reminds me of that gimmick in the animated movie Up -- a dog-collar device that instantly translated canine thoughts into speech. "Squirrel. I like you!" The playwright does the same thing with Sylvia's thoughts. Except that Sylvia speaks for herself.

In case you haven't heard, the title character is a dog. Not a talking dog. Sylvia is played by a young woman, (Katharine Abbruzzese). That's the gimmick.

Abbruzzese doesn't actually wearing a dog suit. She just acts like a dog. Instead of barking, her character shouts "Hay hey hey." When something threatens her, Sylvia says, "I might bite." Everything she says is at the level of instinct: "I like you; I'm scared; I'm hungry." On top of that, the playwright puts words in a dog's mouth that obviously wouldn't enter a dog's mind. Strictly for laughs. It's anthropomorphic, what can you do?

The plot: Greg (Warren Kelley) a man (in the middle of a mid-life crisis) picks up a stray dog (AKA Sylvia) at Central Park. He brings Sylvia back home to his empty-nest apartment. His wife, Kate, (Rita Rehn) doesn't want a dog. They fight. Decision: Sylvia gets to stay on a trial basis. Should she stay or should she go? The clock is ticking. Various friends and therapists are dragged into the argument. Then Greg and Kate finally decide.

Needless to say, apart from the few odd dog-haters and rogue vivesectionists in the audience, most people sympathize with the dog, root for the dog, worry about the dog. That's the dramatic tension. The play has a shameless pro-dog bias.

Along the way, the dog gimmick allows Gurney to poke fun at the eternal romantic triangle. Structurally, Sylvia resembles a play about a wife's battle with the other woman -- she just happens to be a pooch. (We're talking competition for affection, folks. This is strictly clean material.) Sylvia also takes a few playful nips at psychobabble and trendy notions about gender. Mostly, it's a play about either keeping or kicking out a cute dog.

It's warm, funny stuff. The audience was laughing its head off much of the time. Abbruzzese is a great physical comedian. Kelley, coincidentally or not, plays his character as a vulnerable puppy dog; Rehn, who's basically the villain in the piece, manages to avoid seeming like Cruella de Ville; the Harvey Korman-esque Jeffrey Plunkett plays a trio characters along a spectrum of genre. Hilarious as well. Director Kate Alexander plays it all for laughs.

As she should. Sylvia is an entertainment. It makes no big statements about man and the universe. It makes a few small statements. Some people like critters, some don't. If you let a dog into your life, your life gets better.

Aside from Cruella de Ville, who's going to argue?

‘Sylvia'
Through Aug. 29
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

The Drawer Boy

The truth will set you free. Beautiful sentiment, but is it true? Our lives are held together with stories. Some are lies. It that bad?

Michael Healey’s "The Drawer Boy" poses these questions. It's the latest Banyan Theater Company play--basically a comedy with a few weepy, tragic elements. Carole Kleinberg directs.

The time: 1972. The place: a farm. The play's stars are what Garrison Keilor calls "bachelor farmers." They're Canadian, not Minnesotan. It's your basic "Mice and Men" arrangement. Angus (Kenneth Tigar) is brain damaged, thanks to a door that intersected with his skull in the London blitz of World War II. (He's the titular "drawer boy"--a bright architect/artist before the accident.) Now, he has basically no short term memory. Morgan (Don Morgan)takes care of him, and keeps him at peace with a bedtime story explaining the accident. And others. Then Miles(Ken Ferrigni)shows up. He's a young actor taking notes about life on the farm so he can write a play about it. Or at least a scene. Morgan obliges him -- and gigs him with various, stupid, humiliating tasks. (Washing rocks, digging corn out of cow crap, etc.)

Miles overhears Angus' bedtime story and weaves it into his play. Angus overhears, and it triggers a cascade effect in his brain. Good news: he gets a partial recovery of his short term memory. (And the inexplicable ability to quote Shakespeare.) Bad news: the false memory of Morgan's bedtime story starts unraveling. The painful, real truth is bubbling to the surface.

Kleinberg's direction is easygoing and naturalistic. She draws out the comedy without falling into sitcom territory. Ferrigni and Higgs create a nice, comic antagonism. Tigar is great in the thankless task of playing a simpleton -- a role which tends to cloyingly milk the audience for sympathy. (See "Tropic Thunder," Simple Jack.) Tigar underplays it and pulls it off.

Without spoiling the ending, the play offers a powerful look at the two-edged razor of lies, truth and storytelling. Razor image aside, it's a warm-hearted, gentle play. Don't expect a bloody, Flannery O'Conner-style epiphany. Nobody dies. There's no fight. There's no big statement.

The playwright doesn't presume to settle the question of harsh truth vs. necessary fiction. He offers his own truth: an honest, sympathetic look at decent people making hard choices.

The Drawer Boy
A Banyan Theater Company production
July 5-Aug. 1
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

Family Secrets Preview

Carolyn Michel takes the stage this week in Florida Studio Theatre’s production of “Family Secrets,” a one-woman show by Sherry Glaser and Gregory Howells. Michel portrays all five members of a Jewish family who have moved from the Bronx to Southern California. It’s a family affair in more ways than one. Michel’s husband, Howard Millman, is directing.

“It’s a relief to know I’m in good hands,” says Michel. “This play is a high-wire act without a net. I transform in plain sight and never leave the stage. I do all my costume and wig changes in front of the audience.”

Michel’s characters include: Bev (“a mom with her own story to tell”); Mort, the father (“a straightforward guy in a complex family”); their rebellious 16-year-old daughter, Fern; their 20-something daughter (“who’s still finding herself”); and Grandma Rose (“an octogenarian who never lost herself”).

According to Millman, the characters are loosely based on Glaser’s own family members. “The play’s family is very specific. At the same time, it’s every family. You’ll laugh, but it’s the laughter of recognition and unflinching honesty.” He adds that the playwright has known her share of personal tragedy, and isn’t interested in saccharine stereotypes. “Glaser is gritty and fearless as a writer,” he says. “She makes us laugh through the pain of real life and real relationships. She never denies the heartbreak.”
Doing justice to Glaser’s edgy material was anything but a heartbreak. “It’s what we live for,” laughs Michel. “This really is as good as it gets.”

Millman’s and Michel’s creative collaboration dates back to their years at the Asolo Repertory Theatre. Millman held dual tenures as the Asolo’s former producing artistic director; Michel is a longstanding Asolo Rep actress.

Millman understands Michel’s process. “Before she walks into rehearsal, she has the role down,” he says. “She’s memorized her lines and plotted it all out in her mind.”
Michel says, “Howard is my mirror. I can’t see myself, but I can see myself through his eyes. I may think something works. He can look at me and say, ‘That doesn’t work; try this.’ And I’ll try it.”
“Family Secrets” marks Michel’s fifth one-woman play. It’s a form she is drawn to. “There’s an intimacy in any solo production,” she says. “You’re speaking directly to the audience, drawing them in, getting them on your side.”

She adds that it’s really the play speaking to the audience—and that the play deeply spoke to her. Michel says she was surprised by the play’s warmth and humanity. “Sherry Glaser is a legendary comic talent,” she says. “I expected belly laughs. But I didn’t expect it to touch me the way it did.”

“We can all relate to the Fishers,” says Millman. “They’ve been called a dysfunctional family. I think that’s a mistake. Families function by being dysfunctional! We all have skeletons in our closets.”

“Family Secrets” runs June 30-July 25, at Florida Studio Theatre’s Gompertz Theatre, 1247 First St., Sarasota; Tickets: $19-$34. For information, call (941) 366-9000 or go to www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

I ain't afraid of no "Ghosts"

Ibsen had his axes to grind. Religious hypocrisy, the fear of social disapproval and blind conventionality were at the top of his list. What will people think? It's a deadly thought. People ruined their lives to keep up appearances. Evidently Norway in the 1880s was not a swinging place.

In Ghosts -- the Banyan Theater's latest offering -- Ibsen swings all of his axes. Well, let's switch metaphors. The play reminds me of Mousetrap -- that classic Rube Goldberg-esque toy game where boots kick balls, gears turns and ultimately a cage traps a plastic mouse. Here, the wheels turn, and at the end, a charity asylum burns down, rotten secrets emerge, and the machinery crashes down on a young painter. (He's been running with the early free love crowd, but forced to return home to mom.) The family maid he's fallen in love with is his sister. His saintly father was actually a randy bastard. (Mom covered it up and faked dad's sainthood. What will people think?) Dad passed his brain pox on to sonny boy. Now, he's going mad with syphilis. Blind too. OK, that's the bad news. There's no good news. He begs for death. Mom, be my Mother Morphine. Please kill me. It's living damnation; hell on earth. This play is so grim you expect the playwright to add "The dog died" as a postscript.

Letting the horror of the past touch you takes an imaginative leap. If the 1800s was the age of hide-it-all, ours is the age of tell-it-all. The free-to-be-you-and-me crowd won out a long time ago. Lady Gaga and Howard Stern can be a pain in the ass. But a cult of self-immolation at the altar of the ghosts of the mind seems worse.

As someone once said, the past is another country. Based on this play, I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there.

OK, now a quick take on the Banyan performance itself.

Contemporary translators Rick Davis and Brian Johnston put Ibsen through the Pinter blender. Gil Lazier follows their lead and turns the flame down on Ibsen’s histrionics. Peter Thomasson plays Pastor Manders as a prick. Jessica Peterson plays Helene (the mom) as a tower of strength with cracks in it. (There are cracks of self-contradiction in Ibsen’s original characterization. Somebody that strong wouldn’t be a coward. I don’t buy it, but let it pass.) Steven Clark Pachosa plays the smarmy, gimpy con artist and gets most of the laughs in the play. Gretchen Porro plays Regina, the maid who’s really the sister. She plays it straight. Not oversexed—just sexed. A typical teenager in a bad time and place to be a teenager. As the doomed son Osvald, Gordon Myles Woods kicks ass. A damn tough role, but he totally lives it and makes you buy his character.

These characters go through hell. The actors put in a hell of a performance.

Ghosts
A Banyan Theater Company production
Through July 11
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

Welcome to the Machine

Sophie Treadwell's Machinal is a scary artifact of a lost era. Her play (based on a true story!) is an expressionistic bad trip from the 1920s about a secretary who married her boss and then killed him for true love. I figure the playwright asked herself "Why would somebody do that?" and then answered the question with this play. Her central character is defined as a character without choices. She's trapped in a machine. That machine is society. Patriarchal, oppressive, hierarchial and deadly.

OK. Nightmarish. But that was then and this is now. A director staging this play in 2010 has the choice of serving up a historical artifact or twisting the material around in a new, subversive context. Director Dmitry Troyanovsky took the latter approach. And a gusty approach it is.

Troyanovsky set the play in the present. By doing that, he shifts the spotlight. Instead of looking at the mad world, we're looking at a mad character. The protagonist marries someone she hates, finds someone she loves, won't leave the man she hates -- and then kills him in an act that's inevitably self-destructive.

It's a different nightmare -- and more frightening. The character's not trapped, but she thinks she's trapped. She's a victim of her own choices, not a victim of circumstance. But she doesn't think she has any choice. That's terrifying. You feel echoes of Susan Smith and all the other tabloid prodigies of our brave new world.

The source material sometimes fights with the new spin. In a weird way, that only adds to the nightmare. The character, in her head, is living in the 1920s. It's all the more creepy.

This is a white hot production. The young actors bled their lives, souls and hearts into this thing. It's a nightmare, yeah. But it's a dream of a play.

'Machinal'
Short version: We have met the machine and it is us.

Through March 21
FSU/Asolo Conservatory production
Cook Theatre, FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

The good, the bad and the ruined

Just caught the open of Lynn Nottage's Ruined at Florida Studio Theatre. A light-hearted romp it's not. At the same time, it doesn't grab you by the lapels and shout a message in your face. The play inches its way along before announcing its heavy issues. It's more of a slap in the face when the truth finally comes out.

The setting seems offbeat and lighthearted at first -- Mama Nadi's whorehouse, the best little whorehouse in the Congo. Patrons check their guns, bullets and violence at the door. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course it doesn’t work out that way. The violent world outside makes its presence known. Mama's main attraction is a gifted singer. She’s been “ruined.” Readers of Nicholas Kristoff’s gut-wrenching editorials will know what that means. If you skip his editorials, I’ll spell it out.

She’s a woman who’s been raped so repeatedly (and often with foreign objects) that her insides are torn up and festering. Like the Little Mermaid, she walks in perpetual pain. But the pain is not redemptive. It’s just pain. The kind of pain we don’t want to think about.

Without slapping you in the face, this play makes you think about it. It promises you a sweet redemption—then pulls the rug out from under you. The characters in the play remain ruined. We, of course, know they’re not just characters in a play.

Like it or not, the playwright leaves the ball in the audience’s court.

Ruined
Through April 3
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
floridastudiotheatre.org.

The magical "Mystery Plays" are waiting to take you away ...

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's The Mystery Plays is really two plays. Both are genuinely disturbing. Greg Leaming directed the recent FSU/Asolo Conservatory performance. Great theater -- but I didn't expect it to get under my skin the way it did. If spoilers disturb you, read no more.

In The Filmmaker's Mystery, a gay filmmaker (Dane Dandridge Clark) survives a train wreck and discovers, hello, he's really a sin eater. This is sort of like a Jr. Jesus Christ, without the job perks. He gets to take the sin and guilt of various victims of various calamities. On himself. To allow the victims to go on to heaven. He gets to go blind and become an outcast from society. But one dead guy (Kenneth Stellingwerf) proves to be indigestible.

Ghost Children reveals a young lawyer (Kim Hausler) who confronts the man (Ron Kagan) who brutally murdered her parents and younger sister 15 years ago. Along with being the killer, he's also her brother. The supernatural doesn't enter into it. The horror here is Sacasa's precise imagination -- what would go through the killer's mind; why he would do it; how his sister would react; the shadow it would cast on her mind; the cost of forgiveness.

Reviewers like to compare Sacasa to Rod Serling. He reminds me more of Neil Gaiman (who wrote the Sandman graphic novel series) and Guillermo del Toro (the director of The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth). The connection is more than the mix of reality and fantasy. It's more a genuine sense that an Other World really does exist -- and it's not a fantasy. And not always friendly.

Horror comes in two flavors: It's either absolutely irrational or it's a bloody application of divine law. Sacasa suggests a third possibility: horror is a reflection of divine law -- which makes no sense to human reason.

That really scares me.

'The Mystery Plays!'
Short version: Gets under your skin.

Through Nov. 15
FSU/Asolo Conservatory production
Cook Theatre, FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000