American Divine
The 21 actors–7 in each of the three programs, about a third of them Dolphinback members–have a firm grasp of their multiple characters. The regional accents are almost always convincing, as is the mime used to create a situation on a nearly bare stage: when an actor “sees” a photograph on an invisible wall or “talks” to his pet bird through a hooded cage, the verisimilitude of the moment is flawless. More important, the actors all have a thorough understanding of their characters’ conscious and unconscious motivations, as well as of the poetic devices Pintauro uses to link the plays thematically: they’re true to the work as literature as well as psychological drama. Sitting through three intermissionless plays–for a total of nearly eight hours including breaks–this ever-critical critic kept waiting for the performances to falter. They never did. Though I have reservations about the project’s scope, the last time I remember seeing such consistently well done non-Equity work was in Under Milk Wood at Cafe Voltaire several seasons back.
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Even the flaw in the show’s concept is impressive. When the Dolphinbacks discovered Plays by Joe Pintauro, a now-out-of-print collection of short scripts originally workshopped in the mid-80s at New York’s Circle Repertory Company but never performed publicly, they could have done the smart thing and selected a dozen or so of the best pieces; instead, struck by the intuitive rather than strategic way that images and ideas run through the scripts, they undertook the entire canon. Three directors–Matt Tauber (a non-Dolphinback who also served as executive producer) and company members KellyAnn Corcoran and Jemal Diamond–eventually trimmed a little of the material and asked Pintauro for new texts to firm up the narrative through lines they were seeking. The result is quite an achievement just in terms of time, energy, and money–let alone the beauty of the performances.
The high points of “The Passover,” whose playlets revolve around familial dinners and fear of death, take place in the middle. Rex is an absurdly funny sketch about a PC Soho couple who must break from their vegetarian regimen to eat a pheasant–because the wife accidentally ran over it with her car. The real grabber here, though, is Seymour in the Very Heart of Winter, a beautifully written portrait of an aging, memory-obsessed actress and the working-class chauffeur who loves her. Intentionally or not, it seems a tribute to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: the actress is named Vivienne (recalling Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois), and she eulogizes her failed marriage to a husband she didn’t know was gay until she spotted him with a boyfriend (just as Blanche did). Moreover the plainspoken, simple-hearted chauffeur, like Blanche’s Mitch, adores Vivienne but resents her hauteur. Notwithstanding its resemblance to Williams, it’s an exquisite piece of writing; Melanie Dix is haunting as Vivienne, and Ian Christopher heartbreaking as the lovelorn chauffeur. He has an impressive range: he’s hilarious as the appalled artist in Rex and eerily silent as a mute street person in the spooky Bird of Ill Omen.
