Biddeford Journal Tribune

Theater Review by Gregory Morell

Bach at Leipzig

"Bach at Leipzig," the last play of the 2010 Main Stage season at Portland Stage, is a fast-paced, brainy and at times brilliantly funny mix of farce, clever device, and theatrical hi-jinx.

This overly convoluted whimsical recreation of an actual historic event takes place at the Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany in the year 1722. Leipzig, at the time, was the prosperous center of German culture and commerce. The coveted, highly prized, and exalted post of musical director has suddenly become available when a venerable 81-year-old composer, professor and kappelmeister dies on his keyboard in mid fugue.

Six of the finest composers/musicians of Europe descend upon the city to claim his throne. Trouble ensues.

We often ascribe iconic, monk-like characteristics to classical composers and musicians when in fact they were often eccentric, squabbling, petty, trifling, gossipy snipes. As Peter Shaffer explored the more outrageous side of Wolfgang Mozart in his play, "Amadeus," "Bach at Leipzig" gives us a backstage-backstabbing look at J. S. Bach's contemporaries as they struggle to elbow their way to the most prestigious musical post in the land. Bach himself, the eventual winner of the post, is never seen or heard from in the theatrical fracas – he lets his rivals hang themselves.

Lying, cheating, bribery, blackmail, and thievery proliferate as this conniving cabal of six jealous musical rivals maneuver to undo and discredit each other. Foolishness mixes with pedantic diatribes about religion, art, and the complex structure of musical composition (imagine Abbott and Costello lecturing on multivariate calculus). The clever wordplay is punctuated with puns, jibes, goofy slapstick, groan-worthy double entendres, and voracious scenery chewing.

What is marvelous about this production is the superb casting. The delightful ensemble of six actors vividly paint the stage in a colorful spectrum of lively characterization. Dustin Tucker (Johann Martin Steindorff) is hilarious as a carnally obsessed fop. Tom Ford (Georg Balthasar Schott), last seen at PSC as the peg-legged zany in "Irma Vep," displays an impressive range of theatrical expertise as the tightly-wound pontificator of strict tradition. A newcomer to Portland Stage, Colby Chambers (Georg Lenck), brings a lively spark to the stage with each relished entrance. He is an effusive conniver, a reckless gambler, and a polished pickpocket. Ron Botting, Tom Butler, and Daniel Noel round out the distinctive cast.

The unique and well-drawn characters/competitors introduce themselves by reading long-winded letters to various wives, lovers, and associates. Innovation, Traditionalism, Calvinism, Purism, sexual manias, gullible foolishness, and tedious expositions of the proper structure of the fugue are all explored in these carrier pigeon-delivered missives. Plots are devised, conspiracies concocted, all to win the elusive prize.

The setting is stunning jewel of forced perspective by Wilson Chin. A series of white Gothic arches is framed by finely crafted wooden filigree screens that are a design marvel. The wigs also deserve mention. These curly coiffs intimate character personality and make a grand stage entrance at the end of the play when two glowing white wigs descend from the rafters to indicate the passage of 20 years.

The playwright, Itamar Moses, is also an actor and throws many digs about the nature of performance into the mix. Moses composed the play at age 31 and the piece premeired in New York in 2005. Despite a thorough skewering by the New York Times, the play has held its own in major and regional theaters.

Mary's Wedding

“Mary’s Wedding” opened this past Friday at Portland Stage and
continues thru April 25th on their Main Stage. This ninety-minute
two-person romantic drama is set during the tumult of World War I.

This latest offering by The Portland Stage Company continues the
stream of small-cast dramas that have dominated this year’s season.
They have included the two-person bittersweet tale of senior romance,
“The Gin Game,” the two-person outrageous comic farce, “Irma Vep,” and
the three-person South African race relation saga, “Master Harold and
the Boys.”

The modest dimension and scope of the second-floor Portland Stage
theater serves these small-cast dramas well. With slightly less than
300 seats, smartly designed on two levels, the main stage affords
excellent sightlines and a theater intimacy that favors actors and
audience alike.

Acting triumphed on opening night. Annie Purcell and Todd Lawson
charmed the audience with their endearingly awkward innocence, their
blush of adolescent infatuation and their ability to quickly shift
gears and animate the high drama,  pathos, and tragic consequence of a
world at war. The acting challenges are demanding and considerable as
the character and mood transitions are fast and numerous. The job is
deftly handled.

“Mary’s Wedding” is a dream play that foils the delineation between
past, present, and future – “the end is the beginning and the
beginning is the end” as is often repeated by the actors. By defying
any relation to the logic of time and place,  the contrast between the
innocence of first love and the horrors of war – the central theme of
the piece – is played out again and again.

“Mary’s Wedding” is a poetic evocation of love and loss, of yearning
and separation.  It is tender, endearing, beautifully acted, and
directed with precision.  The action moves quickly  from  the no-man’s
land of war-torn France, to the quiet plains of the Alberta
countryside, to the prow of a ship crossing the Atlantic in the middle
of the night, to a mother’s small town tea party, to secret rendezvous
in a prairie barn and erotic night rides on horseback.

All takes place within the confines of a stark bedroom of wooden
furniture set against three walls with the texture of a an antique
lampshade dusted with bouquets of rose petals. As the action
proceeds, these diaphanous walls become transparent scrims through
which we see farmland fields, the barbed wire barricades of World War
I trenches, and the façade of a country barn. Each shift of tableau
is achieved through a simple fade of clever lighting.

Suspension of belief looms large as an umbrella becomes a gun, a
dresser and bed board become horses, and a wooden rocking chair a
utilitarian prop that assumes a myriad of identities.

Our lovers, a young rustic Canadian farm boy and Mary, his confident
English born bride-to-be, are separated by the call to war and we
learn of their fate through Mary’s long and convoluted dream on the
eve of her marriage.

Playwright Stephen Massicotte is Canadian. He is both an actor and
playwright. “Mary’s Wedding” is his first and best known work. The
success of the piece is in the hands of the actors. However, the
entire momentum of the Portland Stage production is greatly aided by a
superb soundscape provided by sound designer, David Remedios. Rolling
thunder, clock chimes, automatic gunfire, pounding rain, and the
chortle of frightened horses are dubbed and overdubbed in an ever
changing undulation that underscores all the action. It drives the
illusion of two actors caught in the matrix of an ever-changing
dream.

An enchanting spell permeates the theater as weather constantly
changes from flashes of lightning and rainstorms to a placid night sky
of starlight and falling snow. The compelling use of this fusion of
sound, light, and weather effects bring the illusory world of the
dreamer into the collective consciousness of the audience.

The play runs for an enchanting ninety minutes and is presented
without intermission.


Gregory Reynolds Morell

The Mystery of Irma Vep-A Penny Dreadful
Review by Greg Morell

Presented by Portland Stage
Runs through Dec. 24th
207-774-0465

Zealously outrageous, unpredictable, and a wild romp through theatrical chicanery,  Portland Stage’s The Mystery of Irma Vep is fast paced comedy not for the nervous.    

Originally written and performed by Charles Ludlam, the founder and director the Off-Off Broadway Ridiculous Theater Company, this play is a tour de force for two actors able to totally transform themselves from one zany character to the next in seconds flat.  

Charles Ludlam died at the age of 44, however he left a mark on American Theater having written and created many original pieces of avant garde drama at his petite playhouse in New York’s Sheridan Square. Although the recipient of many awards, none of his theater works assumed a life of its own with the exception of Irma Vep.  Mr. Ludlam does have the distinction of having the street that ran in front of his New York theater named after him: “Charles Ludlam Lane.”    

Irma Vep became a popular favorite of regional theaters across the nation, in fact, this is the second run of Irma Vep presented by our own Portland Stage.  

The curtain opens to blasts of Hitchcockian minor chords, flashes of lightning, and rolling thunder. The lightning and thunder continue to punctuate every turn of the plot, a convoluted comic Gothic farce of thievery, murder, vampires, werewolves, a 3,000 year old mummified princess that comes back to life, a portrait that bleeds, and Neil Diamond song parodies, all set in an Upstairs-Downstairs Victorian gender bent phantasmagoria.  

Laughter reigns supreme and kudos to the unflagging energy of the two actors that embrace the script like eager eaters devouring a sinfully rich dessert. Tom Ford and Steven Strafford share the stage portraying seven different characters in a bafflingly quick charade of identity change.  

Tom Ford enters stage as the peg legged manservant, Nicodemus. Through out the course of the play, the audience cannot help but become endeared to his outlandish characterizations. His countenance, high forehead, broad toothy smile and frenzied comedic gestures are winningly reminiscent of the Bob Hope of the late 40’s and early 50’s. His partner in comedy, the more severe Steven Strafford, skillfully plays the foil with aplomb. Overall, the acting and the overacting is pure pleasure.  

The main Victorian Drawing Room set, which looks like it popped right out of the box of the CLUE board game, was designed by Portland Stage’s Artistic Director, Anita Stewart. However, the scenic device that was most clever and campy, making the audience laugh out loud, was the parade of two dimensional miniature card board cutouts that were pulled across the stage like a child’s toy  train. This occurred when the inane convolutions of the plot took the play to the sands of the Egyptian desert. Tiny little pyramids, a camel and a palm tree were all a part of this ludicrous cardboard cavalcade.

Guest Director Christopher Grabowski laced the action with delightfully amusing pantomime, costumes were provided by Loyce Arthur, Lighting by Chistopher Studley and Sound by Gregg Carville.

Irma Vep continues through February 21st with performances
Wednesday-Friday at 7:30, Saturdays at 4 & 8  and Sunday at 2 pm.  For tickets and more information call the Portland Stage Box Office at
207-774-0465.   Tickets range from $16 to $36.

Gregory Reynolds Morell
Box 1084, Northampton, MA 01061
Director: Antic Arts Center www.gregmorell.com <http://www.gregmorell.com>
Writer, Producer
Morell.Gregory@gmail.com
207-251-8724 or  800-321-6463

PSC’s ‘Gin Game’  a triumph of acting

By Gregory Morell
Journal Tribune Arts Reviewer

PORTLAND – “The Gin Game” is a masterly crafted two-person love story of two cantankerous nursing home residents who are dying of boredom and remorse. The second play of the Portland Stage 2010 season, it opens on Visitor’s Day at the Bentley Nursing Home, but our players have no expectations of company. What unfolds is a skillfully rendered drama of humor, pathos, remarkable acting and a rousing series of gin games.
 
Seeking refuge and solitude from Visitor’s Day, the unlikely pair of Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey encounter each other on the Nursing Home’s neglected scrap heap of a back porch. The back porch set is strewn with the institution’s unwanted debris, broken walkers, old crutches, cracked clay pots, dusty books and tattered furniture. The curtains are faded, the shingles gray and weathered, even the plants have browned and gone to seed. Here we find Weller Martin in a worn blue plaid bathrobe and slippers playing a frustrating game of solitaire at the rickety card table.
 
He is soon joined by a distraught Fonsia in a frumpy house dress and kerchief. The two disgruntled miscreants engage in a few reluctant pleasantries but soon find themselves commiserating about the horrid conditions of the nursing home, the incompetence of the staff, and their mutual disdain of the activity director’s programs of dance classes, choral concerts and the bill of faire at the cafeteria.
 
“Does the food here give you diarrhea?” 

The dialog is a humorous and spirited banter of complaints, laments, resentments and fault-finding, which they deliver with relish.  Weller has a passion for the game of gin, and believes himself a consummate expert. He entices the hesitant Fonsia to join him at the card table for a friendly game and after explaining the rules, and finer points of the game, they play hand after hand. Their newfound friendship blossoms. Much to the amazement of both players, the novice Fonsia wins every game. 

Love is in the air as the first scene of Act I ends. When the play resumes a week later, the dismal porch remains the same, but Weller is now dressed in a spiffy senior outfit of bow tie and suspenders. He anxiously awaits Fonsia and dresses up the card table with a tablecloth and a little pot of plastic flowers. The new found enchantment of cards and romance has also touched Fonsia as she appears in a perfumed dress, a coy smile on her lipsticked lips and her hair left free-flowing. 

Trouble soon ensues, of course: As Fonsia continues to win every game, Weller’s temper flares. The play becomes heated. The duo waltz into a barrage of jibes and insults. The rancor escalates as the play and the gin games continue. Soon the frailties of their past, their misdeeds and their life regrets are explored in acrimonious diatribes. Yet through their arguing, teasing, carping and sniping their compassion and genuine feeling for each other is clearly apparent and palpable. The bittersweet love story of Fonsia and Weller is a story well told by the production team of Portland Stage. The intimacy of the theater’s size is an ideal venue for the scope of this show. The success of the play rests heavily on the quality of the two lone actors. 

The work of Cristine McMurdo-Wallis as Fonsia and J. Patrick McNamara as Weller is touchingly rendered. These veteran actors of stage, screen and television bring a charming and engaging chemistry to the stage. They aptly explored the complex layers of loneliness, love, joy and disillusionment that is so well crafted in this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which was written by D.L. Coburn. Director Sally Wood is undoubtedly deserving of praise as well for her work. 

“The Gin Game” continues through Nov. 15 with performances Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 pm, Saturdays at 4 and 8 pm, and Sundays at 2 pm. Portland Stage is located on 25A Forest Ave. in downtown Portland. For tickets contact the box office at 774-0465.