Date: Fri 28-Nov-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: DONNAM

Quick Words:

Stern-Iguana-Noises-Ed-theatre

Full Text:

A THEATRICAL TRIPLE-HEADER, FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS

(with cuts)

By Julie Stern

There is a broad choice of exciting regional theatre at the moment, just the

thing for the Thanksgiving weekend when the kids are home from college, or

you're just tired of turkey and football. Three area productions that are

completely different from each other, but all worth going to see, are

TheaterWorks New Milford's rendition of the Tennessee Williams wrenching

drama, The Night of the Iguana ; Long Wharf's pop art-blues-shoot-em-up comedy

action play, In Walks Ed ; and the Danbury Theater Company's classic farce,

Noises Off , which is good enough to keep you laughing steadily for hours.

Iguana is a play about a brief encounter between two lonely people at a seedy

hotel in a Mexican coastal town. The "Reverend" T. Lawrence Shannon is a

defrocked Episcopal priest, who now works as a tour guide. Hannah Jelkes is a

Nantucket spinster who travels with her aged grandfather, the world's oldest

practicing poet. The pair hustles room and board at hotels around the world by

selling her sketches to guests while they listen to his poems.

The play uses the image of endless travel as a metaphor for the journey of

life. For the expatriates Shannon and Hannah, in different ways, the Costa

Verde Hotel is a personal hell. Maxine Faulk, the widowed manager, offers

Shannon refuge as her kept paramour, a degrading life he dreads.

Each of these three is at a desperate point in time: Broke and without any

options Shannon is about to be fired for seducing a teenaged passenger. At 97,

Jonathan Coffin, the poet, is nearing death, and Hannah will not be able to

continue their routine alone.

For Hannah, the hotel is the place where life as she knows it -- her

grandfather has been her only family for the past 30 years -- is about to end.

Penniless, she pleads for them to be allowed to stay, but the implacably

jealous Maxine wants Hannah out of the picture, lest she interfere with

Maxine's plans for Shannon.

For one evening, though, as they listen to the sounds of a captured iguana

struggling against the rope that tethers it, Shannon and Hannah form a tenuous

connection of emotional intimacy that is as powerful as it is fragile.

Director Anne Lohan does a commendable job with her cast. Richard Pettibone is

very strong as the self-deluding Shannon, and Vicki Haag is a fine match for

him as the perceptive Hannah. John Taylor is marvelous as the gallant but

failing poet.

My one reservation was with Suzi Pettibone in the role of Maxine. She captures

the breezy, blowsy West Texas country manner, but she seemed almost benign.

Perhaps because the Pettibones are married in real life, she projects too much

affection, making it seem like a viable possibility for him, when in fact, the

prospect of falling into the clutches of this woman is supposed to represent a

living nightmare for Shannon.

Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams is one of the

three great American playwrights. This is a good chance to see one of his most

enduring works, performed well, on a local stage. Bill Hughes' tropical

veranda set, complete with periodic rain showers, is an added treat.

Keith Glover, the young actor-writer-director whose latest work, In Walks Ed ,

is on stage at Long Wharf, has drawn upon his own background to create a new

genre: a hybrid that combines jazz, westerns, mythology and the black action

movies of the Seventies.

The son of a New York City jazz musician, Glover spent large chunks of his

youth with his grandmother in Bessemer, Ala., where his uncle was a renowned

teller of tall tales. He studied playwriting at Bowling Green University but

says he was more influenced by musicians like Charlie Mingus and Thelonius

Monk than by any literary figures.

In Walks Ed is a highly stylized account of the return, after many years, of a

legendary hitman, one Eddie Paladin, to the Harlem bar where he and his

girlfriend Darlene had been ambushed years ago. Now, 15 years later, Ed is

back, carrying a case with a million dollars, hoping to rekindle past history.

However they must face the combined malice and treachery of the local gangster

kingpin, Bennie "the Jet," a young hoodlum wannabe, Peter Baez, and the world

weary bar owner, Sky, who had once been a father figure to Eddie.

David Gallo's wonderfully grungy set re-creates the basement bar, complete

with a labyrinth of flaking rusted ceiling pipes punctuated by the noise and

electric flashes of the el train overhead.

The story unfolds with sonorous recitations like a series of jazz riffs,

alternating with mocking humor and comic book-style fights with fists and

guns. The theme is loyalty in a world filled with setups and betrayals, but it

is the action that makes it fun.

Leland Gantt is a study in orange velour as the evil Bennie. Joe Quintero is

dumb enough to be lovable as the hapless young hood who keeps updating the

list of the possessions he hopes to buy when he completes his first

"contract."

As Eddie, Keith Randolph Smith projects the dignified formality tinged with

parody of Scottie Pippin doing a Right Guard commercial, while Kim Brockington

is a willowy beauty in the part of Darlene, the one-time gang girl turned

Housing Policewoman.

Beautifully crafted and choreographed, the production is never dull, always

vivid, and frequently very funny.

If you want to spend an entire evening convulsed with laughter, I recommend

taking the family to the Danbury Theatre Company's Noises Off . The Danbury

group is doing an excellent job, calling it the company's "holiday gift" to

its audience. (If you don't mind a bit of "language," this is a good show for

kids from about the fifth grade up.)

A third rate touring company is attempting to put on one of those foolish

English country house farces whose plot depends on split-second timing and a

stage set with numerous doors through which the characters can disappear

before they are seen by other characters.

Their task is complicated by the various and changing romantic liaisons which

threaten to divide the group and provoke melodramatic temper tantrums, as well

as the fact the most talented actor in the company is on the verge of

senility, especially if he gets hold of any alcohol.

The first act shows the play in its final dress rehearsal. For the second act,

the 20-foot diameter turntable rotates to reveal backstage -- the other side

of all those doors through which the characters keep disappearing.

The romantic arrangements have rotated as well, leaving behind some spurned

and angry players. As the play begins on opening night, the frenetic activity

is heightened by struggles over a whiskey bottle and the temptation to grab a

fire axe and swing it at a former lover.

The third act returns to the audience's view, when the play takes on a life of

its own as the harried actors forget their lines and are forced to improvise.

Trust me, this is funny.

Director Joe Harding has done a slick job with his cast, mixing the singularly

awful "play" with the comic characterization of the various actors. J. Scott

Williams is a study in exasperated sarcasm as the womanizing director. Beth

Bonnabeau-Harding as the sardine fixated housekeeper, Bob Lussier and Adrienne

Vournazos as the householders who return unexpectedly from Spain, Al Canal as

the young realtor sneaking in his bit of fluff (drolly realized by Monica

Merkel), Barry Corn as the doddering senior member of the troupe, and Cheryl

Pryzby and Alexis Vournazos as the long suffering technical crew have a lot of

fun and so will you.