2000 - 2001 Season

2 1/2 Jews | Oedipus Rex | Wit | I Do, I Do!

I Do, I Do! (2 Reviews)

'I Do, I Do' marries humor and emotions
Actors' Summit Duo makes intimate connection with audience
By Connie Bloom, The Akron Beacon Journal

I Do, I Do,the feel-good musical based on Jan de Hartog's Tony award-winning play The Fourposter, is a contradiction of what Broadway musicals are supposed to be, which is first and foremost huge. It features a cast of two. The musical opened on Broadway in 1966, when Mary Martin and Robert Preston enacted a husband and wife whose marriage endures 50 years of triumphs and misadventures, from newlywed bliss to old age. While the cast was small, the score by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt was diverse enough to showcase the considerable talents of the stars. Their roles were so demanding -- the actors sing and dance for more than two hours -- the run had to be kept short. Actors with wobbly stamina would be out of the question.

The Actors' Summit production of the comedic romp hits high notes on all counts. I Do, I Do runs through June 30 in the professional theater company's temporary home in Hudson. Wayne S. Turney and MaryJo Alexander are captivating as Michael and Agnes, who deliver a sumptuous repast of emotions as they navigate the choppy waters of marriage. The action takes place around the carved oak four-poster bed in center stage. His and hers chairs and bureaus are on either side, with the bureaus downstage, a few feet from the audience. It is there the actors retreat to fiddle with their hair and adjust their makeup -- aging to gray-haired senior citizens who are leaving their cavernous home for an apartment in the final scene.

The clever staging keeps the audience intimately connected, swept up in the action from the very first melody. In one scene during her childbearing years, Agnes hangs up the clothesline, children's rompers attached, by thrusting it into the hands of the people in the front row. The story opens in 1900, when the young couple in love -- he a writer of novels -- are about to leave for their church wedding. She is wearing her wedding gown, one of several exquisite costumes with painstaking detail; he dons a top hat and tails. They sing of their memories and fears (All the Dearly Beloved)and rhapsodize over their future (Together Forever) and the meaning of marriage (I Do! I Do!) with powerful emotion. It's not long before life's realities supplant their glee, and Michael, a nervous father-to-be, becomes obsessed with his own labor pains.

When she begins having them, he runs for the doctor, shoving an empty crib next to the four-poster. There are other bumps in the road. At one point, they make a list of each other's irritating habits and engage in a hilarious argument (Nobody's Perfect) with perfectly timed barbs as tempers flare.

Artistic director Neil Thackaberry has delivered a wonderfully paced evening that should not be missed.

Bride and groom celebrate their life on Actors' Summit stage
MaryJo Alexander (Agnes) and Wayne Turney (Michael) star in Actors' Summit production of I Do! I Do!
By David Ritchey, West Side Leader

Fifty years ago, I Do! I Do! opened on Broadway in its original form as The Fourposter. Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn played the only two characters in the play. Fifteen years later, in 1966, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt adapted The Fourposter into the musical I Do! I Do! The show opened on Broadway with Mary Martin and Robert Preston singing the roles. Interestingly, that same year, Tandy and Cronyn were acting on Broadway in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, a play that received the Pulitzer Prize.

Now, Actors' Summit offers this love song to marriage in its Hudson theater home. The action of the play starts in 1900 and is set in and around a bed shared by the characters Agnes and Michael. The play opens on their wedding day and ends years later when their children have left the house and they move from that house to a smaller apartment. The story is predictable for the era when it was written, the late 1940s and the early 1950s. For example, on their wedding night, both Agnes and Michael are virgins and, of course, this leads to a number of laughs. Then children arrive, mature, marry and move from the house.

The plot is complicated when Michael develops an attachment to another woman. Although they reconcile, Agnes and Michael have to come to grips with whether they really have loved each other over all of the years. The story is romantic, warm and delicate. Yet, the show may be a bit too candy-coated for some in the audience.

I Do! I Do! has 19 songs, and Agnes and Michael sing most of them as duets. Each gets a solo turn, however. In the song "Nobody's Perfect," each enumerates a list of annoying habits of the other. The reactions from the audience indicated that those annoying habits weren't solely the property of the characters on stage. Several times, wives could be seen poking husbands in the ribs during the description of the more annoying habits.

The only song that achieved popularity beyond the show was "My Cup Runneth Over," which continues to be an American standard.

The cast includes MaryJo Alexander (Agnes) and Wayne Turney (Michael). Each is completely charming in her/his role. Alexander has a pleasant singing voice and seems to enjoy her few turns at dancing. She grows in her role as Agnes. She is her most believable in the final scenes as the mother of the bride, as a woman who wants to leave the home to find herself, and, finally, as an older woman.

Turney, who translated and adapted Oedipus Rex, presented by Actors' Summit earlier this year, brings to the role a youthful excitement. The audience gets to watch him slowly grow old, and this gradual change doesn't leave the audience surprised when Turney becomes a charming curmudgeon by the end of the story. Turney sings well and has an enthusiasm for his dance sequences.

This production might be the perfect wedding party for this summer's brides and grooms. The issues raised in the story could be the basis for discussion on this side of their I do's.

The mature folks in the audience seemed to identify with Agnes and Michael. If you've been married a few years, you might want to take your spouse and see your lives unfold on the stage.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
Ray Berko, Times Newspapers

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. That same month, the world seemed poised on the edge of a nuclear war when the United States faced off against the Soviet Union over the presence of nuclear weapons on Cuba. Much like the missile crisis, George and Martha, the play's protagonists, hurl threats, epitaphs, and fight a battle of wills.

Interestingly, though the play is considered to be one of modern America's classics, the script did not win the Pulitzer Prize. The committee actually selected it as the winner. However, the award is overseen by Columbia University, and the trustees decided that the explicit language, interest in "taboo" subjects, and controversial public reception made it the wrong choice. Nonetheless, it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for Best Play that year.

In this era of Jerry Springer and similar television shows which are embraced by the public, the profanity and hateful words between George and Martha that so shocked audiences in the 1960's, now seems commonplace.

The story concerns the relationship between George, a history professor, and his wife, Martha, the daughter of the college's president. It depicts a series of battle games with escalating stakes upon which George and Martha have built their marriage. The proceedings encompass a young couple, Honey and Nick, who are guests in the house.

Director Neil Thackaberry, in a master stroke of interpretation, decided to pull away from the oft-used device of George and Martha constantly shouting at each other. Instead, using a clue from the script in which the characters comment on the fact that they are "numbed enough," he chose to have them underplay their lines. This is not to say the venom is not present. Much like snakes, the couple strikes quickly and often, subtly, with deadly results.

Paula Duesing and Tom Fulton's performances are both astounding and outstanding. They totally understand the nuances of Albee's lines and live their roles. Though his lines are effectively delivered, Peter Voinovich doesn't have the physical presence to play Nick, the young professor who is described as a stallion. In addition, he sometimes feigns feeling with exaggerated facial expressions.

Robert Stegmiller's light and set designs are excellent.

Actors' Studio should be justly proud of their mounting of Who's Afriad of Virginia Woolf?. If you like fine modern theatre at its best, see this production.

Wit

Thought-provoking Wit well worth trip to Hudson
Actors' Summit production of complex play is excellent
By Elaine Guregian, The Akron Beacon Journal

Curling up in a chair and reading the deeply inquisitive, dryly funny play Wit gives a person a better chance than a live performance does to really absorb the material. Where the famously complex 17th-century poet John Donne is involved, it doesn't hurt to have time to mull things over.

This might be the perspective of Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., the central character of Wit and a professor who loves the life of the mind more than human interaction. The excellent production now being given by the Actors' Summit might change her outlook. It's well worth a trip to the company's temporary home in Hudson.

As Vivian is diagnosed and treated for advanced ovarian cancer, we see her own emotional concerns overlooked (except by her kindhearted nurse, nicely played by Sally Groth) at the same time that her understanding of human nature grows. Head shaved, wearing two hospital gowns tied back-to-back, Vivian narrates a series of scenes in which she's attended by the polite but remote Dr. Kelekian (A. Neil Thackaberry, who also directs the production), three students (Sue Antol, Megan Elk and Devon Stanley) and a self-centered clinical fellow, Jason (Peter Voinovich), who forgets whom his research is supposed to serve.

A former teacher of Vivian's, played by Susan Speers, lets us see Vivian from another perspective. No one in Margaret Edson's play is a caricature, though certainly Jason's abrupt bedside manner strikes a chord of recognition. Whenever Jason enters the room, he asks Vivian how she feels, but heads straight for her medical chart without looking at her. Voinovich astutely saved his eye contact for the point where Vivian asked him about his career. Suddenly, she had his full attention. Clearly, Vivian is mere research fodder.

Paula Duesing's thoughtful characterization let us feel the effort of her attempt to be brave, in between breaking down into language that is ever more ``Anglo-Saxon,'' as she so delicately puts it. Still, Edson avoids putting Vivian on a pedestal. Vivian realizes that the compassion that she wishes for now is something she routinely withheld from her students, in the name of intellectual rigor. It's refreshing to see an academic played not exclusively as a prig or a role model, but something less black and white. The comments about academic competition don't seem mean-spirited, just on the mark.

Vivian's crowning moment is in a scene where she imagines she is back at school, operating an overhead projector and explicating a poem by John Donne. By inserting a pedantic little ``Hmmm?'' with a rising inflection every few paragraphs, Duesing added a wonderful bit of coloring to a role she inhabited beautifully. Her vaguely upper-crust accent wasn't completely reliable, but there was a candid, raw humanity in her facial expressions and a guilelessness to her delivery. These qualities made her character credible and hugely sympathetic despite her self-acknowledged flaws. Even in her most snide moments, Vivian's humor came across as clever, not catty.

The playwright called for an empty stage, with furniture (bed, exam table, IV poles and other medical equipment) rolled on and off. Using additional props and lighting (provided by Robert Stegmiller), Actors' Summit was able to supply all the visual information that was needed. The play's emphasis on character development rather than on complicated sets made it a good choice for this small, fledgling company. In the fall, the group expects to move into its permanent home in Hudson. Before that, it will mount a production of I Do, I Do June 7-30 at the same location as Wit.

Oedipus Rex

New translation of Sophocles' classic tale is presented with power and style by Actors' Summit theater troupe
By Elaine Guregian, The Akron Beacon Journal

MaryJo Alexander was carrying around a valuable piece of paper on Friday night, and it wasn't a script for the play Oedipus Rex, opening that night. It was a freshly issued permit from the city of Hudson that would allow the Actors' Summit theater company, of which she is associate artistic director, to renovate an industrial building into a permanent home.Counting its newest location, the peripatetic company has moved seven times over its two-year history.

Through April 28, the company, led by artistic director A. Neil Thackaberry, is presenting Sophocles' classic tragedy Oedipus Rex, in a new translation by Wayne S. Turney. It's worth following the group to the former Sherman's True Value Hardware store in Hudson to see this show.By curtaining off part of the store and setting up risers for seating, Thackaberry and Alexander created an intimate setting.

This production takes a traditional approach -- no updates. The actors, including the eight-member chorus, wore full masks and robes (all designed by Alexander) suitable to the ancient Greek setting. A pyre burning in the middle of the stage served as a ritualistic center for the movements of the chorus as they commented on the action.

The production would have been better off without the intrusive score by Sebastian Anthony Birch. It emphasized dramatic climaxes in an obvious way that detracted from the flow of action.

The main players took multiple roles. Alex Cikra was a dignified Oedipus who appeared convincingly broken by the news that he had, as the fates foretold, killed his father and not only married his mother but had four children with her.

Maryann Nagel took the roles of his wife/mother, Iocasta, along with playing the shepherd and a servant.

Wayne S. Turney's elegant diction and forceful manner made him persuasive in the roles of Kreon, Teiresias and the messenger.

Productions of Oedipus Rex vary, depending on the translations they use. Turney's version relaxes some of the formal language, usually in a positive way.

The company has just completed a run of the show at Cleveland State University, where Turney teaches theater, and the actors sounded comfortable with the cadences of Turney's translation.Only occasionally did the language seem overly casual.

What matters most is that the audience feels the agony that Oedipus and Iocasta experience when the truth about their incestuous relationship becomes known. In this production, the force of the story comes through.

2-1/2 Jews

Love amid the laughter
Feisty family members learn of ties that bind in heartwarmer '2-½ Jews'
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

Amid all its kibitzing, fighting and bitterness, Alan Brandt's 2½ Jews is a heartwarming story about the complicated ties binding fathers and sons.

The comedy, presented by Actors' Summit at its temporary home at Old Church on the Green in Hudson, is successful because it is both funny and serves as a warning against trampling on the very relationships that define us. A colleague once spoke about the delicate silver threads that bind human relationships. In 2-½ Jews, the silver threads amid three generations of men are always in peril of breaking.

At the heart of the show is the lovable 79-year-old Morris Minter, played with more than a little mischievousness by Cleveland actor Reuben Silver. Without Morris, this play just wouldn't be funny.

Silver's delivery of Morris' stubbornly comical lines sprinkled with colorful Yiddish putdowns - is impeccable. Silver is a great choice for the role: He's a me actor who is also schooled in Detroit's Yiddish theater.

This actor cuts a funny figure as Morris, in horribly mismatched clothing and ever-present suspenders. Silver reels us in by showing us that Morris has finally reached wisdom and acceptance: It has taken him until his 70s to admit that he is proud of his son, Nathan.

For all their differences, these three men are much the same in their pigheadedness. Morris is a master at splitting hairs, a trait that Nathan (Neil Thackaberry) must have inherited to become a successful attorney. Nathan is the most overbearing and egotistical -- in constant competition with his son, Marc, and still trying to prove himself to his father. Despite his accomplishments as a civil rights attorney, Nathan can't help being a bit like his old-world father, complete with a martyr complex. And though Marc is the most open-minded of the three, he's still critical like his father. "Fathers and sons make each other nervous. It's just the way it is." Nathan says in one telling line.

Morris and Marc try to warn Nathan that he's been estranging his wife by putting his career first for years. But Nathan is blind to the damage he's doing by emotionally shutting out those closest to him.

The Actors' Summit set is quite bare, with somber-looking, thick wood screens and a few sticks of furniture on a stage that used to be an altar or this company that the set was easy to move, considering Actors' Summit was supposed to open its new home several blocks away but is still awaiting Summit County permit approval.

At times, this play leans toward the heavy-handed. There are no laughs m a locker room scene between Nathan and Marc. But the story effectively bounces between dark tension and bittersweet humor.

Underneath the friction is a lot of love, and even redemption. We leave thinking about fully embracing our relationships -- not taking them for granted.

Actors' Summit is a professional, not for profit, 501-c-3 professional arts organization. We are seeking volunteers and board members. For more details, email us or call MaryJo or Neil at 330-342-0800.

Actors' Summit is working under a developmental agreement with Actors' Equity Association (the Union of professional Actors and Stage Managers.)