2007 - 2008 Season

Rounding Third | Medea | A Child's Christmas in Wales | Proof | Macbeth | Golda's Balcony | Born Yesterday | Swingtime Canteen

Born Yesterday

Thackaberry and Kahn shine in a pleasantly funny take on Garson Kanin's 1946 play
By Kerry Clawson, Akron Beacon Journal

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, right? Especially if you're a bullying, junkyard baron whose dumb blonde girlfriend gets enough smarts to turn the tables on you.

That's the premise of Garson Kanin's 1946 classic Born Yesterday, which, although it may not reach screwball comedy heights in its Actors' Summit production, is a pleasantly funny ride.

The 1946 play made Judy Holliday a star, with its movie version winning her a 1950 Oscar. The late Kanin's play is a comedic retelling of Shaw's Pygmalion, with crooked empire builder Harry Brock attempting to transform his unrefined, chorus girl mistress into an acceptable specimen of Washington, D.C., society.

It's a predictable but fun plot that works, thanks to Kanin's witty way with words, fun sense of play and well-written lead characters.

Harry (Neil Thackaberry) pushes everyone around, including his cousin who is his assistant (actor Daniel Taylor), his attorney (Dana Hart) and the senator he's in bed with (Steve Ryan.)

The play, meant to be a political satire, doesn't have that kind of bite at Actors' Summit. That may be because Ryan is too mild as Senator Hedges for much of the story's political intrigue to come to the forefront. (The actor also vacillates between a slightly Southern-sounding accent to one with a British-sounding clip.)

Here, the story's more about one man's boorish, never-ending pursuit of more wealth and more power and the underestimated woman who ultimately gets in the way.

Thackaberry's strong characterization as Harry makes nearly all the other personalities pale in comparison. He does a great job of disguising his normally refined elocution with a Tony Soprano-ish tough guy way of speaking. His Harry is coarse and dense at best, and vicious and threatening at worst.

Alicia Kahn is darling as former chorus girl Billie Dawn, Harry's mistress. She perfects the dumb blonde's vacant-eyed stare but also creates a believable evolution as Billie learns to become an actual thinking person.

In an example of Billie's ditz factor, when Harry challenges her to define the word ''peninsula,'' she declares, ''It's that new medicine! ''

Kahn — with her cutesy-pie, high-pitched voice — is especially funny in the play's famous gin rummy scene, where Billie does everything in a dingbat manner but reveals that she actually has a brain. The actress is also a knockout in her beautiful 1940s costumes, especially a pencil-slim, fur-trimmed number.

On the problematic side, Peter Voinovich comes across as disinterested as reporter Paul. He's not geekily charming enough for us to love him as Billie learns to.

Rounding out the cast, Linda Ryan, playing the senator's wife, has a wonderful way of looking perpetually startled by Harry, who's threatening even when he's trying to be hospitable.

Does this play come across as timeless? No.

Politicians could be bought then and can be bought now. But the post-World War II era in which the play is set was a gentler, more innocent time — albeit a sexist time, when dames were dames and only men conducted business.

Born Yesterday paints a broad-stroked lesson against the backdrop of today's presidential election, warning about the dangers the power-hungry can pose to our personal freedoms. As reading opens Billie's eyes to the democratic ideals upon which our country was founded, she reminds us that our government was created ''of the people, for the people and by the people.''

Golda's Balcony (2 Reviews)

'Golda's Balcony' gripping story
Actress persuaded to take role, delivers forceful performance
By Kerry Clawson, Akron Beacon Journal

It's a good thing Neil Thackaberry is persistent. The Actors' Summit director worked for two years to talk actress Dorothy Silver into performing the role of the legendary Golda Meir in Golda's Balcony, which couldn't be a more natural fit for the esteemed Jewish, Northeast Ohio actress.

Plenty of hard work, skill and talent have gone into Silver making the role of Israel's prime minister seem so natural in this gripping one-woman show. In the hands of a lesser actress, the 95-minute, intermissionless piece would be grueling. In a talk-back session after the show, Silver said she lived with William Gibson's script once a day for several months to absorb Meir's essence before rehearsals started.

Co-directed by her husband, Reuben, and Thackaberry, Silver creates an emotionally forceful character in a dark, thick wig as her scratchy-voiced Meir looks back on her life's work, culminating in the darkest days of her political career. Golda's Balcony is pegged to Meir's turning point as prime minister: the difficult decisions she faced in her effort to save Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1974.

Golda's Balcony flashes back and forth to show Meir's evolution as a political figure. That includes her childhood days surviving the Russian pogroms, her political awakening in Denver and Milwaukee, her Zionist work in Palestine, and her various political offices once the Israeli state was established.

Through Silver's fine-tuned characterization, we see the history of the Jewish state unfold through the eyes of a remarkable leader who helped create it. Silver has said that for the play to work, Meir's strength and utter devotion to her work must come alive.

Her Meir is deeply serious, dryly funny and highly driven. Through the force of Silver's emotion, there is no question that Meir's singular goal is the redemption of the human race through the preservation of the Jewish state.

That mission came at a personal sacrifice for Meir, whose marriage to Morris Meyerson crumbled.

The play takes place on a simple stage with a distressed-looking backdrop and two screens that look like blackboards illuminating historical photos from Meir's life. Those visuals, essential to the show, aren't nearly as fancy as the high-tech, sweeping images in the 2005 tour that starred Valerie Harper. But they do justice to Gibson's work.

Golda's Balcony premiered on Broadway in 2003, starring Tovah Feldshuh. Dramatic tension pervades Gibson's piece — updated from a failed version in the 1970s — as Meir sits on a devastating Israeli secret: the existence of an underground nuclear reactor at Dimona. After Israel is invaded, Meir must decide whether Israel should use its nuclear weapons against Egypt and Syria, possibly setting off a worldwide chain reaction.

Due to time, director Thackaberry has trimmed a very telling anecdote revealing that Meir knew the Egyptians might attack directly through her own daughter's kibbutz, but didn't warn her daughter for national security reasons. This scene adds a different dimension to Meir's larger-than-life character that some might not find admirable.

Gibson's show title, Golda's Balcony, symbolizes two emotionally dramatic balconies in Meir's life — with one vista representing joy, hope and a new beginning, and the other symbolizing military might, war and destruction.

The play's well-balanced tug of war between themes of idealism and survival is not only a perfect metaphor for Meir as a person, but also makes Zionist history come alive in an intimate way.

Golda Meir lives again at Actors’ Summit
Dorothy Silver ‘excellent’ in ‘Golda’s Balcony’
David Ritchey

Theater can’t be much better than Dorothy Silver’s performance as Golda Meir in Actors’ Summit Theater’s production of “Golda’s Balcony.”

Silver is the only person on the stage. As Golda Meir (1896-1978), the prime minister of Israel between 1969 and 1974, Silver is gold. What a performance! At the moment the curtain call started, the audience was on its feet and applauding.

William Gibson wrote the script and also is known for writing “The Miracle Worker” and “Two for the Seesaw.” Both starred Anne Bancroft on Broadway and in the movies.

This is Gibson’s second version of the Meir story. The first version, which was not successful, had several characters on stage. In the version now playing at Actors’ Summit, Meir is the only character on stage. This version played on Broadway for 15 months and soon will be released as a feature film with Valerie Harper playing Meir. In this version, the audience is aware of Meir’s conversations with her husband, Morris Meyerson, and with Henry Kissinger, King Abdullah, her staff and others. Gibson makes this character larger than life — yet Meir herself was larger than life. Few women had Meir’s impact on the world.

She was an idealist who thought Israel could be carved out of the desert and become a homeland for the world’s Jews. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine, but when she was 8, she moved to Milwaukee with her family. In 1921, she moved to Palestine to join a kibbutz. She moved upward through the political ranks in Israel until she was elected, in 1969, as the prime minister of Israel. She died in 1978 in Jerusalem of lymphatic cancer.

The set, designed by Actors’ Summit’s co-artistic director, Neil Thackaberry, includes several levels, with desks on two levels and a table with teapot and cups on a third level. This simple set provides a kitchen table or resting place and two offices for one of the most powerful women to ever have lived.

Co-directors Reuben Silver and Thackaberry had the good sense to get out of Dorothy Silver’s way and let her glorious talent shine through. Reuben and Dorothy Silver have been married a long time and have appeared in many productions together. Their influences on each other’s performances cannot be measured or discovered at this point in their lives. We can only be thankful that these two wonderfully talented people have decided to live their lives in the Cleveland area and perform where we can see their work.

Dorothy Silver’s beautiful, crystal-like voice zooms and soars as she describes Golda’s marriage to Meyerson, her children and her fight to preserve her beloved Israel.

Silver seems to approach a role from the inside out. She knows the character, the characteristics of her character and then adds on the exterior movements of the character.

Those of us who have been fortunate to see her in other productions know Silver is a consummate actress. Simply stated — it doesn’t get any better than Dorothy Silver as Golda Meir.

Proof (2 Reviews)

Actor's Summit shines in award-winning play
Father and daughter team have leads in David Auburn's 'Proof.'
Hudson company's excellent production moving and credible
Akron Beacon Journal

Proof is a play about math only in the way that The Wizard of Oz was a play about tornadoes. Math is what drives three of the main characters in David Auburn's 2001 Tony Award-winning play, but it's not the point of the drama. In the Actor's Summit's excellent new production, a family sorts itself out, not through mathematical proofs but through honest, often raw, dialogue.

Friday night, director Wayne Turney led one of the strongest shows I've seen by the Hudson company. Despite a few rough spots that will presumably smooth out as the production continues, the cast cohered admirably well.

A table and chairs in front of a pair of doors simulates the porch of the family home in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. Actor's Summit's co-artistic director and founder, A. Neil Thackaberry, has immersed himself in the role of Robert, a math whiz and professor at the University of Chicago who peaked early, then declined into mental illness. Robert's mind for numbers has lost its edge, but he can still deliver poetic zingers about life - even after his death.

Constance Thackaberry, Neil's daugher, is occasionally self-conscious in the role of Robert's daughter, Catherine, a promising mathematician who quit school at Northwestern to take care of her father in Hyde Park. Catherine's malaise smacks more of bratty 20-something attitude than the clinical depression the playwright has specified. Yet elements of her portrayal are excellent. Thackaberry makes you feel her conflicting emotions about her controlling, annoyingly perfect older sister, Claire (Alicia Kahn), who comes to visit the family home on Chicago's South Side for Robert's funeral.

The actors create a credible kinship between Catherine and Robert, setting them apart from the practical Claire.
Keith Stevens brings an intentionally awkward and endearing charm to the character of Harold Dobbs, a former grad student of Robert's at U-C. Hal inadvertently pushes Catherine into a defining moment when, while searching in the house for work by Robert, he discovers a mathematical proof Catherine claims as her own. (In a flashback that reveals U-C graduate Auburn's writing at its funniest, Robert introduces Harold to Catherine by saying, ''Hal's in the infinity program.'' It's a telling detail about a university where I remember many doctoral students being referred to as ''lifers.''

Constance Thackaberry's Catherine seems quick enough to have written her own groundbreaking proof. In this performance, there wasn't much tension over the question. More edge in the air would further sharpen this production, but it's a fine one nevertheless.

Proof won not only the 2001 Tony for Best Play but the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for drama for playwright David Auburn, whose family has long ties to the University of Akron. (Proof was also produced as a movie, released in 2005.) Most recently, the son of Mark and Sandy Auburn wrote and directed the movie The Girl in the Park, starring Sigourney Weaver and released in 2007. Let's hope more plays are in store from this gifted writer.

'PROOF' adds up at ACTORS' SUMMIT
Roy Berko (Member, American Theatre Critics Association), The Times Newspapers

Is there a thin line between genius and mental illness? Can a person ìburn outî when s/he gets near the age of 40, no longer able to muster up the deep thoughts that appeared so easily in their early twenties? Can a woman be a mathematical genius? These are only three of the questions broached by playwright David Auburn in his prize winning play 'PROOF.'

'PROOF' centers on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, who was a brilliant mathematician in his younger years. As he passed forty, he lost his acuity. He wrote continually, but the material was irrational. After he dies, Hal, a former student, probes into his ramblings with the hope of finding something worth publishing, thus pushing ahead Hal's stalled career. With Catherine's help, Hal discovers a paradigm-shifting proof about prime numbers in Robert's office. He assumes it was Robert's work. Catherine claims the proof was conceived by her. Hal questions this conclusion, doubting that a woman with little in-depth knowledge of mathematics could create such brilliance. His reaction not only ends their relationship, but brings front-and-center Catherine's fear of following in her father's footsteps--mathematical genius and mentally ill.

'PROOF' was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play.

What's interesting to many is that Auburn attended the University of Chicago where he studied political philosophy, not mathematics. In reality, it matters little as there is no actual inclusion of mathematical concepts. This should relieve those who fear the show because it might be too abstract and technical.

Actors' Summit's production, under the guidance of Wayne Turney, is excellent. It is well paced and each of the actors develops a clear character.

Constance Thackaberry gives the right edge to her performance as Catherine. Is she a clone of her father - brilliant and on the way to insanity? Or, is she the product of her sister Claire's attempt to control her out of guilt for the failure to provide aid to their father as she plotted her own life track? You'll leave the theatre appropriately asking those questions.

A. Neil Thackaberry gives a meaningful performance as Robert. He walks the line between insanity and brilliance with surety. Alicia Kahn is properly up-tight as Catherine's sister, Claire. Her pronunciation, body language, clothing, hair style and attitude are character perfect.

Keith Stevens is on-target as Harold Dobbs, Robert's former student.

CAPSULE JUDGEMENT: Actors' Summit's 'PROOF' is a well conceived production of an excellent script. There isn't a weak link in the production chain.

A Child's Christmas in Wales (2 Reviews)

Actors’ Summit’s ‘Christmas in Wales’ is warm, witty, wise
David Ritchey, The West Side Leader

The holiday season invites families to do things together. Actors’ Summit Theater’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” tells the story of one family’s perfect Christmas Day and is the ideal holiday celebration for those who want to share the season with their family.

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a reminiscence based on a story by Dylan Thomas (1914-53) and was adapted for the stage by Jeremy Brooks and Adrian Mitchell. The dialogue has the rolling cadence of Thomas’ poetry, yet the poetry and the language never get in the way of understanding.

The story is autobiographical. Occasionally, the action stops and the character of Dylan Thomas (Keith Stevens) talks to the audience. Dylan’s lines to the audience are taken directly from the original story and give the audience his poetical best.

The plot line follows a Christmas Day. The Thomas family gets up and has a traditional Christmas breakfast. Dylan goes out to play with his friends. He returns home and greets his aunts and uncles as they arrive and bring him presents. He goes out again to play with his friends, but this time he has to take his cousins Brenda (C.J. Bonde) and Glenda (Erica DeRoche). Then, the children return home for cake and traditional Christmas games. Finally, the day ends, the relatives leave and young Dylan is left with warm memories of a Christmas in Wales.

As the story progresses, we learn that Elieri (Rachel Maria Anderson), Dylan’s favorite aunt, sometimes has waves of sadness that pass across her face. She lost two brothers in World War I and still mourns their loss.

Uncle Tudyr (Daniel Taylor) and Uncle Glyn (Peter Voinovich) have political leanings that bother some of the other uncles. But the aunts are charming, quiet and loving.

When Mother (Mary Jane Nottage) burns the turkey with her new gas stove, which she doesn’t trust, the family dismisses the problem. They’ll eat vegetables. But Elieri calls a hotel and has a large turkey with all of the trimmings delivered before the end of the scene.

This is Christmas from a child’s point of view. This child doesn’t have many problems and has a loving family that treats him with respect.

The script calls for a great deal of music, which is sung without accompaniment. One can only guess how this large cast can start on key, often with harmony, and never go off key.

Actors’ Summit offered “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” several years ago, so the story seemed fresh. Part of the newness off the production was that MaryJo Alexander directed. The last time the show was offered, Neil Thackaberry directed. Also, some different actors took roles. All of this worked to make this warm, sentimental story fresh and new.
In addition to directing, Alexander was responsible for the costumes. Once again, she had perfect costumes for the cast. The men’s suits, the women’s dresses and the shoes were textbook correct for the period between the world wars.

It seems almost unfair to single out any one performer for his or her work in this beautiful ensemble production, so here are some highlights: Stevens gives us a hint of the poet and writer Thomas was to become. He sings well, has strong acting skills and seems perfectly cast in this role.

Voinovich received applause from the audience for his greedy, funny postman scene early in the play.
Marci Paolucci created an Aunt Hannah who had wit and charm. Paolucci sings well and contributed a good deal to the family sing-along.

This show is a “don’t miss” this holiday season. It runs just under two hours and will play through Dec. 23.

A Child's Christmas in Wales at Actors' Summit
gocitykids.parentsconnect.com

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner...that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six." —Dylan Thomas, from A Child's Christmas in Wales

The Actors' Summit production is true to the original radio story written by Dylan Thomas: it captures the warmth and joy of 1930s Christmas celebration, enjoyed by the sea with friends and family. While it's hardly a slapstick, there's plenty of humor in the predictable traditions - from the tipsy mailman to presentation of Auntie's lovingly hand-knitted (but under-appreciated) muffler - to keep audiences entertained.

We recommend the show for ages four and up, but note the show appeals more to older children who are more likely to appreciate the many witty lyrics sung to the tune of traditional carols, which will be lost on younger children, as will the somewhat subtle humor of a family's (gentle) disagreements.

All ages can enjoy the production, however, thanks to some very creatively staged action sequences, including a snowball fight and other horseplay by the shore.

Even the youngest show goers appreciate good vocal talent, too, and this Actors' Summit production is brimming with terrific voices. While Keith Stevens delivers as a very personable, likable Dylan Thomas - and convincingly portrays both the young boy and the nostalgic adult - there's not a weak link in the cast.

The result is a solid performance that keeps even young guests attentive. Parents still working to instill in their little show-goers an appreciation of live theater can feel comfortable bringing kids to Actors' Summit, where the entire staff is welcoming and accommodating to families. And, just as important, they're smart enough to provide a 15-minute intermission and to stock the concessions with favorite candy munchies.

The show runs about 100 minutes, plus intermission. Enjoy the show!

Medea

The fates and the furies
Tony Brown , The Cleveland Plain Dealer

The omnilateral destruction wreaked by hatred is also the compelling theme of Medea, poet Robinson Jeffers' gorgeously gory-tongued adaptation of Euripides' tale of a mother who avenges her husband's unfaithfulness by killing their kids.

On a set that is little more than a pair of benches and a double door, director Neil Thackaberry creates 95 minutes of hell, a compilation of rash decisions by irrational humans caught up in fates they brought upon themselves.

The cast of one dozen (including two adorable children) is varied in its individual abilities, but all are capable or better.

Dark-eyed Sally Groth, whose work in the area heretofore has tended toward sunnier roles, shimmers with a motherly beauty as Medea, burning with an inner fire so volcanic it could only emanate from a woman scorned.

Thackberry could tweak the final scenes to better stoke our horror, but this is a transfixing, transforming experience.

Through Sunday, Nov. 4, at 86 Owen Brown St., Hudson. $18-$25. 330-342-0800.

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.)