March 25-31, 2004

art

Play the Field

Cold hearts: Michael Ewing and Julianna Zinkel weather the emotional storms of Wintertime.

City Paper's critics catch up with three new productions.

by David Anthony Fox & Toby Zinman

"A sad tale’s best for winter," advised Shakespeare -- but contemporary playwright Charles L. Mee has paid him no heed. Instead, Mee’s Wintertime is a comedy, one that explores romantic love in various permutations, and leaves us with a smile.

Mee also seems to be having the last laugh. Wintertime, less than a year old, is already popular fare on the national circuit, with the Wilma's current production following close on the heels of a very different one (now closed) at New York's Second Stage.

I saw both, and it's revealing to compare the two visual worlds. At Second Stage, director David Schweizer offered a field of dazzling white, complete with a nearly insurmountable snowbank through which characters entered the vacation cottage that is the play's central location. This was a Wintertime replete with optimistic love: in other words, a farce.

The equally elegant setting of Jiri Zizka's production at the Wilma is altogether grayer, a silvered winter of leafless trees and the occasional flurry. This cottage, with its Victorian leaded glass windows, suggests the enchantment of a faded storybook.

So Zizka serves notice: Here Wintertime will be a gentler, more nostalgic season. The love is slower, more reflective.

There's no one correct approach to comedy, of course -- not even the virtuoso kind of Wintertime, in which 10 characters (five men and five women, of at least two generations) pair up in various likely and unlikely ways. Sometimes Zizka's style pays off, as when he humanizes one of the central characters -- Ariel, the ingenue -- to a degree I hadn't imagined possible.

Yet much of the time Zizka's production narrowly misses. Wintertime's first act demands a kind of eclat which here is just out of reach. (It doesn't help that there's a critical piece of miscasting: Maria, a middle-aged Mediterranean sexpot -- think Anna Magnani -- is played by Elizabeth Hess as a pinched blonde WASP who gesticulates amateurishly.)

But things improve in the second act, where Zizka's brand of bittersweetness feels more right. There are especially likeable performances by Julianna Zinkel (Ariel) and Michael Laurence (Bob, an unexpected guest). In the minus column are Janus Stefanowicz's unflattering, thrift-store-eclectic costumes, but there are compensatory pluses in Jerry Rojo's set, beautifully lit by Jerold R. Forsyth.

Best of all, the Wilma has confirmed my belief in the strength of Mee's script -- which through two productions of very different kinds remains funny, sometimes trenchant, and preserves a deeply original comic voice. If you've not had a chance to experience Mee's work, now's your chance!

The ongoing collaboration of playwright Michael Hollinger and the Arden Theatre has produced some happy results, but there are bumps in every road. Tooth and Claw, their fifth work together, has its moments, but Hollinger, a delightful writer of comedy, seems cowed by the grandeur of his very serious theme -- evolution, no less -- and his new play emerges as over-earnest and dramatically inert.

Too bad, because it's an intriguing idea. Tooth is set in the Galpagos Islands, where biologist Schuyler Baines, newly appointed director of a conservationist sanctuary and lab, has the theoretically pure mission to save an endangered species of tortoises. In practice, however, Baines runs aground of nature and man. She must face an ecosystem that, through years of, um, monkeying around, has brought together a host of incompatible animals: To save one means banishing others.

Add to this a crisis of economic reality. The desperately poor Galpagos fishermen have some earning potential in harvesting the sea cucumbers that proliferate in the area. These creatures are a highly prized commodity in Japan, but overfishing them for external sales threatens the ecosystem and the tortoises.

It's a complex situation, and to Hollinger's credit, he lays it out in clear terms. But there's a flat-footed worthiness about it reminiscent of high-school science lectures and of having to read through stacks of moldering National Geographics under my parents' approving eyes.

Part of the problem is that the issues of Tooth so overwhelm the characters that we fail to connect to the play on a human scale. Baines is potentially interesting -- she's well-meaning, but shrill and overzealous. But there's not enough development; instead, Hollinger sets us on a course of rather confusing subplots. There's the relationship between Baines and a gay male co-worker, which is implausibly cute for this context. Another pairing -- between Baines and a mysterious older man -- is meant to resonate with The Tempest, but it's not clear how or why.

Still, Tooth offers important issues, and there is some elegance to Hollinger's structure. (And who knows? Maybe you enjoyed those National Geographics more than I did.) Director Terrence Nolen offers an uncluttered production that lays out the issues clearly, and the actors are honorable (with a delightful turn by Shirley Roeca as a very pregnant secretary). I do wish that the critical role of George the Tortoise, who is at least as significant as any other character, had been played by a living creature, rather than a rock. It might help humanize -- or at least reptile-ize -- what is ultimately a rather dry evening of theater. --D.A.F.

It begins thrillingly: The Roman crowd, waiting for Julius Caesar, sounds like it’s waiting for a rock star (the sound design by Lindsay Jones is a knockout throughout). And, without compromising the seriousness or the complexity of Shakespeare’s troubling power play, this energetic, imaginative production, directed by Lou Jacob, remains thrilling to the end. No togas: The place and the time are ambiguous -- both now and then, both here and there, keeping us vividly engaged while not grinding the relevance axe. It’s a terrific Julius Caesar, and I am very glad to hear that 7,000 high-school students will see it -- a perfect way to turn young people into the serious theater audiences of the future.

Shakespeare's play about the limits of power in rulers and the limits of responsibility in the body politic is a troubling meditation on the fine line between civic duty and self-aggrandizement, between the evils of tyranny and the dangers of mutiny. There are no clear good guys or bad guys (except maybe Octavius, the next Caesar) and the only fools are the general public, easily swayed this way and that, offered a government handout one day, ready to go to war against it the next. If this sounds familiar, well, play after play shows us that the inexhaustible Shakespeare wrote for all times.

Stephen Novelli as Cassius is lean and hungry, intelligent and wily; he is the perfect foil for Pearce Bunting's stiff-necked stuffed shirt of a Brutus who is troubled by questions and events he is temperamentally unsuited to handle: He is the wholesome jerk, a Mr. Noble to Novelli's sophisticated, tormented Cassius. Tom Teti as Caesar is superb, clothed in a white suit and self-importance. Christopher Patrick Mullen is a restless, wired Casca, and Kathryn Petersen gives a fine and moving reading of Portia, Brutus's wife. There are small, deft turns by Joe Guzmn and by Forrest McClendon, whose bearing alone is worth the price of admission.

"I am no orator, as Brutus is" -- well, that's putting it mildly. John Lumia, attempting to convince us that he is "a plain, blunt man," delivers some of the most famous of Marc Antony's ferocious and bloodcurdling lines -- "Cry "Havoc!' And let slip the dogs of war" -- like an automaton. This memorize-and-recite approach, which must have some interpretive idea behind it, is the only serious flaw in the production.

The ensemble is tight and smooth and the battle scenes are brilliantly choreographed (brava Samantha Bellomo), while the lighting (Thomas C. Hase) on/in, under/over James F. Pyne Jr.'s clever, minimalist set is surprising and exciting. --Toby Zinman

WINTERTIME

Through April 18, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824

TOOTH AND CLAW

Through April 11, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122

JULIUS CAESAR

Through May 2, People’s Light & Theatre Co., 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern,610-644-3500