review of *Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune*

performed at Interplayers Professional Theater through Oct. 3

An apartment. Very dim light. Loud, guttural yelps of orgasmic delight. Laughter. "I wish I still smoked," she says.
Well, they're certainly having a good time tonight.
Too bad the mood isn't maintained in Interplayers' production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (through Oct. 3).
The problem's in the acting. For most of the first act, line-deliveries didn't match emotions described in the script; beats were lost, significant moments rushed through and undervalued.
As Johnny -- the short-order cook who's lonely and curious, but determined to improve his emotional lot in life -- John Henry Whitaker portrays a motormouth who doesn't speak quickly. He's a passionate guy who displays no passion.
Whitaker doesn't enact lines, he recites them. He's supposed to stare at Frankie (Karen Kalensky) intently and doesn't; he's supposed to be playful (during a close-your-eyes-and-sit-on-the-floor game) and isn't. Later, when he's supposed to express shock at witnessing an act of violence over in another apartment, he's about as surprised as when you find something that was supposed to be filed under M filed instead under N.
A carpe diem outburst, delivered while kneeling, seems more creepy than full of any lust for life. The "open your robe" sequence -- Johnny just wants to admire her naked body, just for 15 seconds -- doesn't work as well as in the movie, in which Al Pacino expresses puppy-dog appreciation while Michelle Pfeiffer chatters about this and that, nervously. Here it's more like a gynecological examination with an irritated patient.
Kalensky's character, meanwhile, is insecure and lacking in self-confidence: She's not so sure she wants this fancy-talkin' fella making goo-goo eyes at her, coming on way too strong. But Kalensky's manner is more festive (let's party!) and frantic (who is this guy who I've invited into my bedroom?!) than insecure. Again and again, she pulls her robe around herself, indicating her defensiveness. But Frankie's tattered self-esteem doesn't become evident until much later, and by then it's too late.


For much of the second act, Frankie and Johnny (played in this production by real-life spouses) act like a long-married couple, negotiating just how much they can tolerate in the other. They've lost out on their dreams; they have plenty of regrets; they're feeling older.
Director Jonn Jorgensen doesn't coax much passion out of Whitaker. In a couple of moments calling for tenderness and physical intimacy, Jorgensen has Whitaker planted over by the kitchen counter, all the way across the stage from Kalensky. (A promise never to hit a woman is more credible if you're actually within range of hitting her when you say it.)
The first-act misinterpretations are unfortunate, because Terrence McNally's script has many good observations and touching moments, and because the acting becomes simpler and more heartfelt in both of the hopeful act-ending sequences.
Kalensky has a wonderful monologue when Frankie recalls her high school prom -- illuminated by the sunrise just outside her window, her face glows with pleasing nostalgia.
And Kalensky doesn't make a big deal of Frankie's having the munchies: Her literal hunger implies her emotional hunger and loneliness, but Kalensky suggests the point simply, without indicating her character's neediness.
A lovely final sequence, rendered simply both in the acting and the directing, has Frankie and Johnny bathed in soft light and Debussy's music, yet with the romance undercut -- realistically, amusingly -- by some playful bickering.
So the evening's not a total loss. But McNally's script is much better than the performance it's receiving here.
[photos: playwright Terrence McNally, from the La Jolla Playhouse; Kalensky and Whitaker watching TV, from the Interplayers production; by Young Kwak]

*Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune*

by Terrence McNally
at Interplayers Professional Theater, Sept. 17-Oct. 3 (artistic director: Reed McColm)
directed by Jonn Jorgensen
starring Karen Kalensky and her real-life husband, John Henry Whitaker
The cook has a crush on the waitress. Can they turn a one-night stand into something more?
1987 play starred Kathy Bates, who wanted the movie role, which went instead to Michelle Pfeiffer (with Al Pacino, Nathan Lane, and Kate Nelligan)
McNally will turn 70 on Nov. 3.




[photos by Young Kwak for The Inlander]

*The Graduate* at Interplayers, through May 9

Stage adaptation by Terry Johnson
Directed by Maria Caprile

With Interplayers' Consulting Artistic Director, Karen Kalensky, in the Anne Bancroft role of Mrs. Robinson; Carter J. Davis (*Humble Boy* at Actors Rep) in the Dustin Hoffman role of Benjamin Braddock; Interplayers veteran John Oswald (*Moonlight and Magnolias* at Actors Rep) as Mr. Robinson; and Emily Cleveland in Katherine Ross's role as Elaine Robinson.
Also with Tony Caprile and Tamara Schupman as Mr. and Mrs. Braddock, and, in smaller roles, Dan Anderson, Angela Dierdorff, David Rideout, David McCallum

Tickets: $10-$21
Call: 455-PLAY

[ photo by Austin Odell: Karen Kalensky as Mrs. Robinson and Carter J. Davis as Benjamin in *The Graduate,* Interplayers, April-May 2009

*Waiting for Godot* review

at Interplayers through April 11

Bleak despairing God the anguish can't bear the Beckett anguish searching joy despondent hopeless escape self can't wait won't bear all the sadness give us instead a musical comedy.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: Two tramps on a trash heap talk-talk-talk for two hours. About nothing, nothing at all. (Bleak despairing God the anguish.)

That's the excuse for not going, anyway: It's dreary, nothing happens, we just want to see something that will make us happy.

But Godot, at several junctures, offers a qualified kind of happiness. (Perhaps, during your sojourn here on Earth, you were expecting happiness of the absolute and unqualified kind?)

At Interplayers (through April 11), you'll still be amused, for example, by Reed McColm's look of bliss while munching on a carrot. (He's Estragon or "Gogo," the whinier and more despairing of the two tramps.)

Beckett’s sad clowns enact vaudeville routines that would be funny anywhere: a rapid-fire hat exchange, four men rolling around on the ground and unable to get up, an agreement about hanging themselves followed by an argument over who should hang himself first.

But the jokes are only meant to fend off despair. Yes, we understand, you don’t feel any despair. You don’t have to, because you believe in God.

But what if you’re wrong? What if salvation isn’t coming? (Just suppose, for the sake of argument.) Then how would you act? You’d tell jokes to pass the time. You’d try to keep yourself entertained.

The problem is that director Karen Kalensky's production of Godot, as if straining too hard to find the comedy in a bleak play, hams up the jokes. Somebody refers to having an erection, and there's a lot of comic mugging; or they pause to cogitate deeply, so deeply, and the chins beneath the frowns are propped up by index fingers.

As Vladimir (“Didi”), the more philosophical and resilient of the pair, Jonn Jorgensen forms a pair of sad clowns with McColm. They hug, then break off the hug, smile, hug again, then cry.
But hugs aren't enough when you're facing life's emptiness, and the duo’s exchanges lack vaudeville frenzy. Godot needs to be played fast and faster, to set up the silences.

Fortunately, the second act offers more: more forgetfulness, more fighting off boredom, more slapstick, more direct address to the audience.

In the play’s conclusion, Jorgensen — who did a half-dozen shows here in the mid-'90s, and glad to see him back — achieves the kind of tragic status he could have been hinting at more all along. Riffing on Pozzo's famous description of life's brevity ("They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more"), Jorgensen settled into haunting sadness for Vladimir's final monologue: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.”

As Lucky, the white-haired, bent-backed slave who jumps to every one of Pozzo's commands, Michael Maher groans and grumbles, seething with resentment — and it's funny, at least in the non-verbal sequences. The famous stream-of-consciousness monologue, however — it arrives when Pozzo issues the command to "think, pig" — is disappointing. Maher stumbled and went slow, swallowing his consonants and failing to highlight a rambling speech’s few discernible themes (God is impersonal, human reason is limited).

As Pozzo the grandiose slave master, Damon Abdallah delivers the evening's finest multi-dimensional performance. His voice, deepened, teeters between haughty and insecure. He's sadistic, but he also lets us in on how it's all an act. His angular rodent movements could be assertive, could be paranoid.

Abdallah has a beautiful speech about the beauty of twilight ("this veil of gentleness and peace") that's matched by the subtlety of (Dan Polzin's -- XX) Justin Schmidt's lighting scheme, with the light gradually turning from pink to rose to — this being Beckett — the sudden onset of night's blackness. ("That's how it is on this bitch of an earth," mutters Pozzo.)

None of them know why they're here. They feel powerless to go on, they don't know whether to split up or stick it out together. (Bleak despairing God the anguish.) Didi and Gogo, in other words, are a lot like us. We are the ones who are waiting for Godot, and misery loves company, and a production of Beckett's play, even one as uneven as this, has its consolations.

[ photo: Samuel Beckett, Hebden Bridge Arts Festival in the U.K. ]

*Waiting for Godot* at Interplayers, March 26-April 11

Samuel Beckett's "tragicomedy in two acts" in which "nothing happens, twice"
*En Attendant Godot* was composed in French from Oct. 1948-Jan. 1949, so in a sense, the play is 60 years old
But its premiere wasn't until Jan. 1953, in Paris.
English-language premiere: Aug. 1955, in London.
(The title's often mispronounced: The emphasis is on the first syllable -- GOD-oh -- to rhyme with Irish "boyo," slang for "friend" and often used dismissively, as when an American man addresses another adult male as his "buddy.")

directed by Karen Kalensky
with Reed McColm (Estragon, "Gogo"), Jonn Jorgensen (Vladimir, "Didi"), Damon Abdallah (Pozzo), Michael Maher (Lucky) and Keith Hahto (The Boy)

Lights by Justin Schmidt, set by Dan Polzin, sound by Karen Kalensky; stage managed by Ginny Abdallah

Interplayers has got it *Together Again*

Interplayers is alive again -- the nearly full house, Joan Welch herself up there in the top row, the lively opening scene of Reed McColm's old/new Christmas play, the Spokane-obligatory but still nice-to-see standing ovation ... it felt like the turning of a corner, a rejuvenation.
It remains to be seen if playgoers will similarly turn out in droves for, say, the bleakness of Beckett when it's still gray and slushy (*Godot* in March at this same theater), but for one night at least, it felt like the Interplayers of old: a solid comedy, buzz in the lobby, people enjoying themselves.
Casual playgoers like their festive comedies for the holidays, and McColm delivers with *Together Again for the First Time*: a blended family that doesn't really get along, a bunch of wise-crackers who are hiding problems like bossiness and disappointment in love, being controlling and being in denial.
Two actors middle-aged, seven in their late teens or 20s: This show has done well in schools, as McColm acknowledges, because it has lots of age-appropriate roles for the college crowd. Better yet, it should appeal to twenty-something playgoers, because this isn't syrupy-sweet Christmas fare mired in long-ago nostalgic cultural assumptions of their grandparents. (*Star Wars* had only been out for nine years when McColm wrote this play, and it's used as Meaningful Analogy by the outsider-psychologist character [Damon Abdallah, likable and self-assertive]. The two brothers in the play treat *Star Trek* as almost current, but the mind-meld wrestling was amusing and not too dated.)
McColm knows his tricks: referring to outside events and characters in order to make a unit-set show feel as if it's part of a larger world; characters ignored by a swirl of characters, acting out their own little dramas and crying out for attention; episodes punctuated by out-of-left-field stingers from over there by the Christmas tree; throwaway jokes and gestures that round out characterizations without being underscored heavily (look at this! significant action over here!).
Bobo's away from his copy of the script just now, but despite having read and reread it and seen the movie (and now this first-ever professional production), he wants to go back over it, pore over the lines, recapture the zingers that brought delighted chuckles.
It was inevitable that, for a cast of nine that's heavy on the young'uns, a few would be making their professional stage debuts. But despite some missteps and mis-timings (oddly under-emphasized lines, slight bobbles with delivery or the logistics of props), this is a strong ensemble.

Karen Kalensky, fine as the Martha Stewart wanna-be, was convincing in all her domestic fussiness. But where she really shone was in confrontations with her sons: hitting them on the shoulder and calling them "lumps," blaming them for their flaws in ways that made it plain for all to see that actually, she was still venting her anger at the man she'd divorced eight (or more) years ago.
McColm himself, as the addled patriarch, nicely blends an Archie Bunker mentality with an ability to forbid further conversation when feelings are getting hurt too much: He's both obtuse and kindly, and it's an interesting combination to watch.
But the play, more than the movie, focuses on Roger -- the older of the matriarch's two sons, too much like his irresponsible father -- and Thomas Stewart pulls off the resentment and the compassion, the wise-ass self-loathing. Stewart took command of the stage as the architect (and other roles) in the season-opening *Dining Room." Stewart bites off hurtful one-liners, joshes around like a little boy, vents his anger, opens up his own wounds, and somehow also ends up making the play's most compassionate gesture. With humor and pain, he hits all the notes of a complex role.

All the other "kids" have their moments, and one virtue of McColm's script is that it achieves character revelation without resorting often to the predictable technique of the isolated, self-revealing monologue.

The movie has different scenes (bickering at Christmas dinner, the taping of a TV special that disintegrates because of smoldering family tensions) and less chaos (there are more two-shots and three-shots in the DVD, more F2F confrontations). McColm says that he deliberately upended his college professor's advice to write a comedy that starts slowly and has a chaotic final scene -- he and director Jack Bannon deserve much credit for an opening 20 minutes that builds and cross-cuts in dizzying ways, so well that it'd be well worth a second visit just to catch all the nuances.

At intermission, Dannie, Wife of Bobo (woman of long-suffering), made the often-heard comment that McColm's characters "act just like my family."
Bobo muttered something about how the play's universal like that -- a lot of people see their own family in this show.
To which, Kylie, Daughter of Bobo (wise at age 12), rejoined:
"I didn't think that many people knew our family."

Which is a nice compliment for McColm and the Interplayers cast to receive. *Together Again* shows us facets of ourselves - the pettiness and gratutious vengefulness, but also the cleverness and capacity to forgive and regenerate. It's a pleasant, fun, well-acted, sobering, crack-you-up kind of Christmas comedy. And it doesn't hurt that one of our own wrote it and tussled with it for about as long as many of the cast members have been alive, and that it has graduated to Lifetime and is serving in the meantime as a nice diversion in Spokane's downtown living room.
You have until Dec. 6 to see it. Afterwards, you'll be surprised at how well Reed McColm knows your family.

[photo: Reed McColm, at BooksInMotion.com]

opening-night review of *Exits and Entrances*

at Spokane Interplayers Ensemble through Nov. 1

It’s a play about lives in the theater that, ironically, isn’t very dramatic. Athol Fugard’s remembrance of the “ageing old gay ham” who changed a young man’s life is simply too talky and static. Fugard’s *Exits and Entrances* — a two-hander for idealistic young playwright and rueful old actor, directed without much energy here by Karen Kalensky — spends too much time telling us about emotions instead of enacting them. It’s a meandering play of reminiscences without many effective points to make, and even in its set pieces of dramatic intensity — three soliloquies in which the veteran actor is expected to display his craft — Maynard Villers isn’t entirely up to the role’s demands.
*Exits and Entrances* (at Interplayers through Nov. 1) intensifies in a second-act debate about political versus escapist theater — and it nicely advocates the necessity of humility in a couple of sequences — but for the most part, and despite the understated sincerity of Damon Abdallah as the youthful idealist, it’s talky and uninspiring evening (even at just 100 minutes, and even with an intermission added).
Fugard (who’s 76 now) has written a memory play spanning 1956-61. Calling himself, simply, the Playwright, he inserts himself (as a dresser and fellow actor) into the stage-life of Andre Huguenet, the preeminent South African actor of his era. The two men talk and reminisce and talk. After an effective scene-setting monologue by Abdallah delivered in a good-enough-for-my-ears South African accent, we’re thrust backstage at an amateur-except-for-Huguenet production of Oedipus Rex, with the veteran running his lines, dabbing on makeup and then venturing out under the lights after his calamity has struck and he’s self-blinded.
Much of the problem is that for the Oedipus sequence, costume designer Janna Cresswell has put Villers in a ridiculous purple and gold toga that’s supposed to evoke the grandeur of ancient Greece but instead looks like John Belushi in *Animal House* crossed with Liberace. It’s a fatal blow. Villers delivers Sophocles’ lines about the inescapability of fate without too much sawing of the air, but he can hardly be expected to achieve tragic eminence when he’s draped in a gaudy eyesore of a bathrobe. (Villers’ opening lines, ironically, are about the ugliness of a spear-carrier’s knees. Didn’t anyone think to put Oedipus in a simple floor-length white toga?) ...

*Exits* isn’t entirely a failure. The play’s best exchange arrives after intermission in a debate over the value of political theater. The argument grows heated, with Abdallah pacing about on behalf of brotherhood and Villers practically laughing in his face, stating with assurance that all that white people in 1961 want are nice escapist comedies. Abdallah squats before his mentor, Villers leans over in his chair, and the two men grasp one another’s wrist, almost sharing a moment of almost-insight — but then, like so much else in *Exits,* the moment’s allowed to dissipate, unexplained and unexamined....

In Villers’ defense, Fugard fires up the pressure cooker: We’re told again and again that the speech we’re about to hear Huguenet deliver was his “most remarkable ever,” or something that sent chills up onlookers’ spines, or for once involved an actor who wasn’t merely watching himself act but was utterly and completely consumed in the emotional complexities of his role.
You try delivering a speech after an introduction like that.
On the featured soliloquies, Villers goes 1 for 3....

Kalensky deserves credit for bringing Interplayers a work of ideas and emotions by one of the world’s most respected dramatists. But *Exits and Entrances* doesn’t connect the actors’ humility with universal appeal, and it isn’t written or acted convincingly enough here to have the inside-baseball appeal for drama fans that a life-in-the-theater play should have. Interplayers’ *Exits* should be counted as a failed experiment.

*** For the rest of this review, please pick up a copy of Thursday's Pacific NW Inlander (Oct. 23 '08 issue).

*Exits and Entrances* at Interplayers

with Damon Abdallah as the Playwright and Maynard Villers as Andre
runs Oct. 16-Nov. 1
directed by Karen Kalensky

Athol Fugard's somewhat autobiographical script retells encounters in 1951 and 1956 between a young, idealistic South African playwright (unnamed, but clearly Fugard) and Andre Huguenet (known as "the Olivier of South Africa")

world premiere in L.A., July 2004; N.Y. premiere in April 2007

opening-weekend review of *The Clean House*

at Spokane Interplayers Ensemble through March 15

Sarah Ruhl's *The Clean House* is about messiness (both literal and emotional) and about living fully and living in denial. Full of jokes about death and sad ruminations about human foolishness, it's a play stocked with dreamy/quirky/absurd situations. It's a play that lurches from silliness to the sublime and back again, and it often requires exaggeration, hysteria and surrealism in its performers.

It's too bad, then, that the cleanup crew of director Karen Kalensky's cast in the current Interplayers production (through March 15) misses quite a few spots. While the actors frequently aren't up to Ruhl's subtle tonal changes, however, they do manage to accumulate several polished sequences along the way.

At one juncture in Act Two, for example, Kalensky's actors collectively create the kind of absurdist, funny/sad hysteria that Ruhl's script expects. Charles (Gary Pierce) strips down to his bathing trunks, chasing after the happiness that his mistress represents. Selena Schopfer (as Charles' proper physician-wife, Lane, forever weariug a white lab coat in her gleaming white-on-white home) crumples onto a sofa, sobbing over her straying husband. A Portuguese woman in black (Silvia Lazo as Matilde, Lane's non-cleaning cleaning woman) paces around, trying to coin the perfect joke. And Lane's sister Virginia (Anne Selcoe) charges around the living room, wielding a vacuum cleaner aimed at the heart of all the dirt and grime that has accumulated in her sister's living room and in both their personalities. Sequences like this -- full of frantic movement, both funny and sad, with characters reacting seriously to others' absurdities and while some make fun of others' misfortunes -- live up to the script's promise.

Too bad the energy/absurdity meter is running so low for so much of this show. In a serio-comic show with surreal sequences (Matilde walks into Lane's dreams, Matilde's dead parents somehow merge with Lane's husband and his mistress), actors need to plunge into the freakiness with heads held high. As the mistress, Jackie Davis shows the way with head held high during a couple of key moments. Lying down like a patient etherized upon a table -- and with Pierce methodically, lovingly "sewing up" the woman he loves after an operation -- Davis rises in mid-operation to recount the course of true love. It's a bizarre episode, but played with dignity and for the high stakes that it demands. Similarly, the entire cast endows the evening's concluding death with signs that are both dignified and absurd.

Yet for too much of the evening, there's the sense that Ruhl's delicate poem is being recited haltingly, unevenly. Often I found myself silently urging actresses just to go for it -- play the scene to the fullest, not by treating extreme situations with calm seriousness, but with the kind of ranting hysteria they demand. Lane confronting the absurdity of a cleaning woman who won't clean; Virginia extolling Charles's charisma even as she finds herself fondling his dirty underwear; Matilde portraying her parents' goofiness in the context of their deaths -- episodes as exaggerated as these could do with more in way of exaggerated acting.

In Tony Kushner's *Angels in America,* the dead speak to the living and prophets explode through the ceiling -- and two brief but comic Alaska episodes in Ruhl's play feel almost like homages. I bring up the parallel because in *Angels,* characters are playing for high stakes, laughing and crying simultaneously over the dual plagues of AIDS and homophobia. Ruhl's characters confront adultery, emotional repression, disease and mortality, agoraphobia, regret. And they cast off the shackles and learn how to laugh -- and then willingly put on the shackles again, if only because we're all chained to our mortality. The difference between the accomplished TV and stage performances of *Angels* that I've seen and the performances in the Interplayers *Clean House* is the difference between playing hysterically because the circumstances are themselves hysterical and playing a scene in a restrained manner so as to point out the distinction between the restrained acting and the highly charged emotions. The first is event-centered; the second is actor-centered. Sometimes you've just gotta scream, you know?
The people in our dreams act in histrionic, high-stakes ways, and Ruhl's play is like a dream. Or should be.

Gesticulating with her gangly arms and wiggling her butt while needlessly dusting an already-been-dusted lamp, Lazo occasionally catches Matilda's free spirit. An opening joke fell flat, probably because it's told in Portuguese (though other, later jokes, because they were told more demonstratively, did manage to cross the language barrier and bounce right into the land of humor). Lazo overdoes the quizzical, scrunched-face bit when confronted with others' strange behaviors, but she excels at floppy-limbed intrusions into others' emotional crises, butting in with "Do you wanna hear a joke?" just when people are taking themselves most seriously.

Kalensky directs effectively, moving Selcoe around the stage's perimeter as Schopfer tails after her in a sisterly squabble, and allowing Selcoe's clean-freak Virginia to revel by letting go of her cleanliness obsession in a brief outburst.

"If I don't laugh for a week, I feel dirty," says Matilde. We all have a lot of crap encrusted around our souls. We should clean them out. We should ignore the voice mail's blinking light, ignore the looming specter of our mortality. What we should do is, we should tell more jokes. The Interplayers version of *The Clean House* doesn't deliver all of Ruhl's humor and pathos, but it gets some of the punch lines right.