Christian Casper | Art on My Sleeve

Theater Review: Charlotte’s Theatre Crimes of the Heart

By Perry Tannenbaum

It’s been a long time – nearly 15 years as far as I can tell – since I’ve spent an evening with Beth Henley’s lovable Mississippi Magrath Sisters. Looking in on them at Theatre Charlotte’s revival of CRIMES OF THE HEART affirms how vividly these deftly differentiated sibs stick in a theatergoer’s memory. First and foremost, you’ll remember kooky Babe, who doubts her own sanity after shooting her husband. Carefree temptress Meg seems to be the enviable paragon, looking down on her sibs as she waltzes back to the home sod with her Left Coast cool, but she’s beginning to doubt her own specialness now that her stab at stardom has come up empty. Lastly, that dear and dutiful doormat, Lenny, with her shriveled ovary and low self-esteem.

If the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner is beginning to show its age, I couldn’t tell it by the audience reaction at the Queens Road barn. The quirkiness and the comedy still work, but at a distance of 35 years, we can begin to appreciate what made CRIMES OF THE HEART so unique when it burst upon the scene.

Prize-winning plays and novels set in Dixie had invariably been about elegant, decayed, and tragic folk, following the Southern archetypes embraced by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Harper Lee. Henley showed us once and for all that the eccentricities celebrated in You Can’t Take It With You could play just as well down in Mississippi – even when peppered with dark Arsenic and Old Lace humor.

Yet Henley’s comedy is notably more realistic than Kaufman’s crowdpleaser and both lighter and saner than Arsenic. That’s because the Magrath sisters are quirky rather than balmy – and because no significant antagonist appears onstage. When Cousin Chick drops by to chide or alarm the sisters, she is more of an irritant than an antagonist, her exits usually comical hasty retreats. She’s more like the recurring meanie from a TV sitcom than a force to reckoned with. The only real threat is State Senator Zachery Bottrelle, convalescing offstage somewhere with the bullet hole in his gut that Babe put there.

The Magrath Sisters came equipped with leavening agents that had usually been absent from American comedies: sorrows and regrets. You could easily presume that these were Southern heirlooms from Williams’ iconic dramas, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that this quality in Henley’s heroines may have had its roots in the novels of Jane Austen. Like Gentle Jane, Henley doesn’t presume to show us how men speak to each other when ladies aren’t in the room.

Directing for the first time at Theatre Charlotte, Christian Casper isn’t trying to reimagine our leading characters. Nor is set designer Chris Timmons trying to depict the Hazelhurst, Missisippi, home as any more luxurious or squalid than you might expect. We’re in a bland, slightly cheesy smalltown home, and its only discordant element is the dwarf fridge in the kitchen.

One of the ways that Henley binds her comedy together and makes it memorable is with the pair of ceremonies framing the action in celebration of Lenny’s 30^th birthday. As you’ll see in the final moments, budgetary constraints are a bit more exposed than strictly necessary – cakewise and candlewise. But if Casper isn’t sufficiently savvy about the technical strategies to make the final scene truly shine, he certainly doesn’t mess up the opening.

Lenny’s clandestine celebrations get us off to a charming start with Meredith Westbrooks Owen as the pitiful birthday girl, repeatedly hunched over her wee little cupcake, singing to herself. Comedy – and the big news about the crime – burst in with Zendyn Duellman feasting on the role of Chick. Catty, gossipy, and fault-finding don’t completely describe Chick, for she’s also vulgar and trashy, richly deserving the Magraths’ scorn. Picking up a pair of pantyhose that Lenny has obligingly bought for her at the store, Chick begins squirming into them before our very eyes.

Henley meant Chick’s struggles to appear “slightly grotesque” in her stage directions, but Casper has Duellman going way beyond that. Like Lenny, we don’t care whether Chick remembers her cousin’s landmark birthday or not, but the same lapses from her younger sisters clearly hurt. Lenny’s clandestine candle-lighting lingers as an subliminal rebuke, underscoring her siblings’ tendency to be insensitive, neglectful, and self-absorbed. Beyond that, they expect Lenny to perform all the family’s mop-up chores, chiefly the onerous task of caring for bedridden Old Granddaddy.

From the moment that Jennifer Barnette enters as Meg, there are conflicting airs about her of regality and rebelliousness, elegance and uncouth. One minute, she’s lighting up a cigarette to vex Chick, the next she’s disconcerting Lenny by cracking pecans with her shoe. What a fascinating character arc for Barnette as she careens from Coca-Cola and stolen candy crèmes to bourbon and birthday cake. But of course, Barnette’s physical comedy – or even Chick’s, for that matter – will pale in comparison to Babe’s prodigies.

Emily Klingman performed them on opening night with a neurotic edge that eventually won me over. She repeatedly convinces us that Babe is the youngest, most immature person onstage, quite capable of obsessing morbidly over why her mom killed the family cat when she committed suicide. And hey, when a kitchen oven and a chandelier are among your props, you will get laughs.

Self-sacrifice is enough to win our affection for Lenny, but Henley calls upon two good men to help in sealing our fondness for her more self-centered sibs. Allen Eby is Doc Porter, surprisingly mellow for a man whom Meg left drenched and limping after a spectacular breakup during Hurricane Camille. On the other hand, Cole Long as dorky Barnette Lloyd, the legal eagle who is trying to keep Babe out of jail, seems uncannily capable of homing in on his client’s ditzy wavelength.

Theater Review: Sleuth

By Perry Tannenbaum

Between the time that Edward Albee was the playwright of the moment on Broadway with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962 and the torch was passed along to Peter Shaffer when Broadway unveiled his two sensations, Equus in 1973 and Amadeus in 1979, Peter’s twin brother, Anthony, probably came the closest to equaling their éclat with Sleuth in 1970. Central Piedmont Community College produced Amadeus at Pease Auditorium in 2006, so they can no longer be accused of favoritism between the twins now that they’re bringing Sleuth to the same venue. Sleuth is tricksy, twisty, and suspenseful, a battle of wits between a successful mystery writer and a younger travel agent who plans to wed the writer’s wife once the estranged couple is legally divorced. Above all, Sleuth is brainy, witty entertainment with undeniable appeal.

Andrew Wyke, the celebrated detective novelist, while cultivating lavish and eccentric tastes, has a keen sporting zest for game playing – and takes vicious delight in besting an opponent. But Wyke underestimates Milo Tindle, a scrappy fellow of humbler origins who turns out to be far more resilient and resourceful than we might have thought.

When Anthony’s Sleuth burst on Broadway, it logged more performances in its initial run than either of Peter’s hits in their original runs – more performances, in fact, than Virginia Woolf has logged to date in all four of its Broadway engagements combined. Sleuth still has not achieved the prestige – or sparked the Broadway revivals – of the others. It’s noticeably lighter; the whole game playing motif seems borrowed from Virginia Woolf, particularly when Sleuth becomes a best-two-out-of-three affair – and the movie version starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier seems so definitive. It may have been more than 40 years since I last saw this film, but as the action unfolded at Pease, I remembered Olivier’s distinctive way of reading “Punchinello” a minute before the moment arrived, and Wyke’s wounded, “You mocked Meridew!” evoked a similar echo.

At Halton Theater, where CPCC Summer Theatre launched their 2016 season with Annie and Chicago, production polish – including the Halton’s historically wayward sound system – has risen to unprecedented heights. With James Burns’ scenic design and Don Ketchum’s technical direction, that trend continues at panoramic Pease, where the width of the stage may be four times its height. Under these constraints, Burns delivers the most luxurious set ever seen at Pease for Wyke’s country home, lavishly outfitted with more props, furnishings, and glazed windows than the script requires. The big maritime dummy that must laugh at Wyke’s wit, the crockery that must shatter under gunfire, and the concealed wall safe that must explode all responded reliably on cue, though a little more volume and smoke from the dynamite would not be amiss. Really, it’s a kind of synergy: Burns’ set establishes confidence in the solidity of the production and Ketchum’s tech makes good on it.

Gerry Colbert was masterful in bringing out the charming and the vile aspects of Wyke’s fine breeding, a wily spider meticulously weaving a fatal web to ensnare his younger, less urbane guest. Christian Casper wasn’t the most docile patsy as Milo, all the better as Wkye gradually, skillfully exposes and preys upon his weaknesses and insecurities. It was delightful to see Milo’s comeback in Game Two after intermission, though I needed to depend on overheard audience reaction after the show to confirm that the disguise devised for Casper by costume designer Rachel Engstrom really worked. Watching Wyke crumble under Inspector Doppler’s examination was perhaps the most satisfying part of Colbert’s whole performance, a retribution the patrician brute richly deserved.

Only Game Three of the drama failed to meet my highest expectations. Directing the show, Carey Kugler uses the full width of the Pease stage as skillfully as you’ll ever see, but in opting for clarity at the end instead of heightened tension and urgency, the thrill of this thriller is diluted. The ten minutes that Wyke has to solve Milo’s three riddles before the cops arrive felt like 20. Getting Milo’s clues clearly and following Wyke’s ratiocination isn’t as important as conveying his terror. In the aftermath, I was quite satisfied with how Colbert and Casper ended their joust, but Kugler and lighting designer Sarah Ackerman need to find a way to frame it more dramatically.

If you haven’t seen Sleuth before, there are some twists and deceptions from Shaffer that I must not betray. Watching these unravel for the first time in live performance is a special pleasure, but those coming back to Sleuth will find a unique joy in listening to the whoops of surprise during and after the show. For that reason, I can’t comment in any detail on the work of newcomers Stanley Rushton as Inspector Doppler, Robin Mayfield as Detective Tarrant, and Liam McNulty as Constable Higgs. I can only give you my word that they were every bit as effective as Phillip Farrar, Harold K. Newman, and Roger Purnell were in the original Broadway production.