Tag Archives: Elyse Williams

“Sex, Lies, and a Sycamore Tree” Almost Goes for the Jugular

Review: Sex, Lies, and a Sycamore Tree

By Perry Tannenbaum

Away somewhere in Sycamore Grove, a subdivision in the burbs of a certain fast-growing New South city in the Carolinas, there’s a diversity problem. For the McLeans and the McDaniels, lily-white next-door neighbors in playwright Elaine Alexander’s new comedy, Sex, Lies, and a Sycamore Tree, there’s still too much of it.

Owners of an ostentatious year-old McMansion that the pushy missus already plans to expand, the McLeans project an image of wealth that clearly intimidates Tracy McDaniels as she enters her neighbor’s posh patio for the first time. She’s an English teacher who has lived in Sycamore Grove with her carpenter husband, Rick, since long before Hugh and Ali arrived next door, refugees from California’s wildfires, mudslides, and property taxes.

They don’t fit in.

The McDaniels can remember when the subdivision actually resembled its name, with more modest ranch houses like theirs and many more trees. On one memorable occasion, Tracy cussed out the greedy real estate developers who were heartlessly bulldozing the signature sycamores at a city council meeting. Now their sycamore is the only one left.

Alexander herself is directing the world premiere of her new script at The VAPA Center in the Charlotte’s Off-Broadway black box – a perfect vantage point for the playwright to gauge what’s working and what isn’t. She also designed the set. On opening night, Alexander could be seen among us in the front row, scrutinizing her brainchild. Likely, she discerned some needed touchups, but she could hardly have been dissatisfied with her sharp cast.

I’m not sure we had ever seen Elyse Williams in a role as declassee as Tracy before, so I was instantly wary. Her slacks and her wig, the flamboyant antitheses of down-to-earth, were not going to help me overcome my qualms. Keith Hopkins as the rugged and grizzled Rick, on the other hand, instantly clicked with his apt attire and Alexander’s crafty characterization.

For Rick, the McLeans’ invite is a bit of a godsend, a chance to visit one of these neighborhood McMansions as a guest rather than as a laborer or a handyman. Yet he comes armed with defenses against his hosts’ possible pretensions, carrying with him a six-pack of craft beer and a bag of Doritos – in case he is offered anything he can’t pronounce.

As we can quickly divine from the stemmed glassware and the spigot-less bar on Alexander’s set, Rick is right on-target with his premonitions. After a year in the neighborhood and their recent trip to Portugal, the McLeans will ply their dear neighbors with Portuguese wine, gazpacho, and a sprinkling of Portuguese idioms. The gallant Hugh has even saved a pocket-sized book of Portuguese poetry for the occasion.

Hugh’s gallantry and savoir-faire are driven by a fairly active libido, so Tom Schrachta has quite a juicy role in counterbalancing Rick’s savvy, crafty vulgarity. In addition to his newly acquired Portuguese, Hugh can hurl some choice Freudian jargon at Mr. Six Pack. Yet Hopkins can parry with choice verses from the King James Bible and the occasional Shakespearean quote on loan from his wife’s teaching curriculum.

The collision between California and the Carolinas – Old and New South – is sharply delineated in the men’s lifestyles. Yet Alexander has crosswired their presumed political leanings.

It’s that lone sycamore lurking behind the scenes that triggers the plot and unveils the main conflict.

Fran Kravitz gets to drive the plot as the fiendishly scheming Ali. She hasn’t belatedly invited her neighbors over to make friends, but rather to make amends for their tree’s trespasses. Nor does she wait until the first bottle of Alvarinho is emptied or the first beer can is crushed. Instinctively, both of the McDaniels come to the defense of their innocent centuries-old sycamore – earning Ali’s patrician scorn and the stigma of liberals.

Yeah, we get to hate Kravitz quickly, and the hits keep coming. Her initial hospitality at the beginning of her opening night performance was too big and loud for the room, so I had misgivings, but her subsequent belligerence and deceit were nicely calibrated, on par with Williams’ righteousness and occasional moral lapses. Kravitz meshed well in the Lies and Sycamore components of Alexander’s plot.

Plausibly motivated and ruthless, Kravitz was also the most convincing in the Sex sector. But Alexander layers on more sex, and it’s here where she is less artful than in the more compelling legal and moral struggles. It looks very early like Hugh and Tracy have a prior history – and that both are taken aback at encountering each other so close to home.

How this is possible after living as neighbors for a year is just the first thing we ought to have explained. By not fleshing out the details, Alexander allows these elements of the comedy and drama to remain noticeably slapdash. Although the playwright does contrive to set aside quality time for Hugh and Tracy, most of the meatiest time they have alone together happens during intermission.

When Hugh’s gallantries and jovial deflections ignite Rick’s jealousy, opening the gates to his choicest Scripture and Shakespeare, the sexual chemistry layered onto the conflict really does turn up the heat in a delightful way. As soon as we see Hopkins stalking in with the axe that Rick has discovered in the McLeans’ backyard, we can see comedy and drama beginning to teeter on the tip of the blade.

Furthermore, Hugh’s roving eye gives some common cause for Rick and Ali, providing extra leverage when she litigates and negotiates a mutually beneficial resolution to the matter of the McDaniels’ pesky sycamore. With so much lying, scheming, and betrayal going on around him, will Rick be the last to succumb?

No less suspenseful, we wonder if the two families can become good neighbors and if the two couples can remain intact. Slapdash or not, this is complicated.

Alexander’s instincts seem to tell her not to get too bogged down in the moral, political, economic, and environmental issues she brings up – no to be too dogmatic or preachy. That allows her drama, her comedy, and her audience to breathe more easily. It allows her to favor dramatic and comic impact over message and allows her plot and her characters to have more sway.

All to the good, especially with this cast in Alexander’s directorial hands. Yet I still wish for more eloquence and passion from both sides of the Sycamore controversy. I’m never sure that the playwright quite realizes the magnitude of what she has accomplished here.

She has greatly levelled the playing field in a debate that usually pits big business, real estate developers, grasping politicians, and banks in a one-sided battle against private homeowners and brainy conservationists. Here we have two families with these conflicting interests – with the McLeans retaining enough monetary advantage to keep it real. Let’s have Tracy, Rick, and Ali all fervently pleading their cases as if their futures depended on it, OK? And keep the sex (plus backstory) intact.

It’s hard to deny that if George S. Kaufman were working this material, now or 90 years ago, his slant would have ultimately been more progressive. Why should we be more cautious and regressive now?

Yes, we are in purple North Carolina rather than blue California, but who are we convening in these seats at this world premiere? Overwhelmingly, we are progressives and liberals who still get the gist of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and settled science. That is the reality now and that will be the reality in the foreseeable future: whether or not PBS, NEA, CBS, and Stephen Colbert survive this disgusting decade.

“On Golden Pond” Is Still Sugary at CP, but Never Cloying

Review: On Golden Pond

By Perry Tannenbaum

Although I had not seen the original 1979 Broadway production – and had staunchly avoided playwright Ernest Thompson’s 1981 Hollywood adaptation – I thought I knew all I cared to know about On Golden Pond when it finally caught up with me at Theatre Charlotte in 2006. Through unsolicited excerpts flashed at me on TV, I had become all-too-familiar with Henry Fonda’s crustiness as Norman Thayer Jr., Katharine Hepburn’s gritty steadfastness as his wife Ethel, the whininess of Jane Fonda as their daughter Chelsea, and the gooey honey that bound them all together.

Were there other characters in the script? That was one of the unexpected delights I discovered as my first full encounter with On Golden Pond, like so many others with The Sound of Music, turned out to be better than I feared. Yet as I also find with that Rodgers and Hammerstein evergreen, there’s a recoil effect that comes with intervening years, and I was dreading On Golden Pond once again as it opened at Central Piedmont Community College.

Directed by Marilyn Carter, the stage version proved to be somewhat sweeter than the film; largely because Elyse Williams gives a sunnier, more domesticated rendering of Ethel; dispelling the hardy Yankee, outdoorsy Hepburn effect. Williams and Tom Scott are less iconic and godly as the elder Thayers than Hepburn and Henry, so Amy Pearre Dunn as Chelsea seemed far more sensible and far less petulant than Jane. Toss in the other people who enter the Thayers’ summer home in Maine, and the story seems less about age-old family animosities and far more mundane.

After many years of estrangement, Chelsea, with her dentist fiancé and his son, arrive to celebrate the dour Norman’s 80^th birthday. The betrothed couple presumes to impose twice upon their hosts’ hospitality, sleeping together in the same bed and then – with Norman’s grumbling permission – dropping off Billy Jr. for a month while they fly off to Europe. The Billy invasion has unexpected results, shifting the story away from centering exclusively on the Thayers and their parenting. Ultimately, it also takes in the tribulations of Norman’s aging, his surprising capacity for growth, Ethel’s sweet forbearance, and the realities of a successful marriage.

This is the penultimate show at Pease Auditorium, which will be demolished after Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap plays there this summer. It’s hard to think of any script that has ever fit Pease’s squat stage better than Thompson’s rustic yarn, for James Duke’s set design takes fine advantage of Pease’s panoramic width, and the dwarfish staircase up to the Thayers’ bedrooms hardly seems to matter. I can’t remember if there ever was a curtain drawn across this epic stage, but a curtain would have been largely redundant when the elderly couple arrived, for all the furnishings were covered in drop cloths until, one by one, the Thayers lifted and folded them. Thompson showed a fondness for such elaborate episodes of stage business to kick off his scenes, but it grew less effective in subsequent scenes, where the scurrying business veered toward farce.

The sweeter Ethel in the CPCC Theatre production allows Scott, as a retired Penn professor, to venture close to maximum orneriness – because he’s the one formidable figure onstage. His words stung when Norman and Chelsea had their long-delayed showdown, but part of their impact came from Dunn’s stunned reaction, so I could believe that Norman was being almost casually honest rather than intentionally hurtful. Spoken by Scott instead of a cinematic icon, Norman’s inbred racism also counted for more.

The big dramatic moments of On Golden Pond, as well as most of comedic moments, come because Norman is such a thorny force to be reckoned with – and so insistently morbid. In his confrontations with Chelsea, her fiancé, and Billy, Scott not only wore Norman’s armor well but also showed that it could be pierced. With Ethel, he could be more vulnerable and yielding, which made the climax of the final scene very moving.

Williams was more than sufficiently cheery as Ethel for Norman to spout all his morbid thoughts in self-defense. Sugary, yes, but never cloying. What surprised me most about Williams’ performance opposite Scott was her consistent strength paired with one of the most robust acting voices in town. She was not only as audible as Scott in combat with Pease’s wayward acoustics, she was more consistently intelligible, for Scott occasionally softened his projection or toyed with a regional accent. There was easily enough force from Williams for us to grasp that Ethel was the decider of where things belonged in the house, yet the nuances of her deference toward Norman and its impact upon her relationship with Chelsea were also preserved.

I didn’t get the impression that Dunn was in her early forties, so I missed the overlay Chelsea’s missing her child-bearing years in her bitterness. Unresolved issues with her parents seemed nettlesome rather than crippling, with Scott taking on more of the animosity between father and daughter. Chelsea’s grudges against Mom and Dad were more evenly split here. At her point of aging, Dunn didn’t seem as desperately in need of healing as Norman did, facing the deterioration of his memory. Paul Gibson as Bill really did seem to be the adult upgrade Chelsea needed for her second marriage, showing his mettle when Norman tested it, tellingly enriching our portrait of his perspective father-in-law.

We would hardly miss mailman Charley Martin if Thompson had surgically removed him from his scenario, but Todd Magnusson makes him winsome enough, a garrulous exemplar of local color and a longtime admirer of Chelsea, though he could have been a tad surer in picking up and remembering his lines. Stepp Nadelman has more onerous difficulties to overcome in his first big Charlotte outing as Billy, and the youngster made himself better heard than many older actors have at Pease Auditorium, especially when it counted. Nadelson is no longer at an age where merely standing there and smiling would make him appealing, yet Thompson lavishes a considerable amount of texture upon Billy, commensurate with his ultimate importance to Norman. Although there were occasional drop-offs in his projection, Nadelson’s acting never flagged.