Tag Archives: Sandy Rustin

DCP’s “The Cottage” Is a Merry Hideaway for Secret Lovers and Cigarettes

**Review: The Cottage at Armour Street Theatre**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Davidson, NC – One of my late mother’s favorite Yiddish words, ongepotchket, sprang immediately to mind as soon as we walked into the Armour Street Theatre for the local premiere of Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage. Our first glimpses of Kate Baker’s scenic design had that unique tang. Gaudy. Cluttered. Colorful. Ornate. Massively overdone. Impossibly baroque.

That impression only magnified at the other end of the hallway when more of the rusticated clutter of this latest Davidson Community Players production came into view. It deepens further once the farce begins, for in addition to a stairway, two downstairs exits, and an upstage front door, Baker has crafted an invisible entrance that will eventually come into play – and cunning little crevices where Rustin’s characters, all but one of them acquainted with the cottage, will reach in and fob cigarettes.

It’s Monday, June 4, 1923, some 90 minutes from London by train, and this countryside retreat is the perfect place to be naughty. By the end of the show, I wasn’t sure whether half the budget was being frittered away on faux cigarettes.

Nor could I rid myself of the idea, driving home, that this cottage – which takes on a decisive cameo role in the denouement – was an apt metaphor for this whole amorous mismatched group of Brits.

We likely think at the outset that we should be emotionally invested in Beau, who is carrying out his yearly love orgy with Sylvia, his brother’s wife, and juggling multiple illicit affairs. We’re used to seeing such farces written by men, after all. But Rustin’s brand of farce has different beats, a conviction that women should get equal portions of the cake, and sympathies toward Sylvia, who is clearly getting the short end of the stick.

More than reversing our perspective, Rustin explores love: its levels, vacillations, and simultaneities. You may sour on a partner in her bucolic world, but it is not at all axiomatic that you transition to hating them. Throughout all the crossfire of who’s cheating on who, who’s been keeping secrets from who, who’s been wronged by who, and who’s underappreciated by who, none of the six characters rises to a moral high ground or plummets far below.

Except perhaps the monster in the group, who is arguably the most deceitful.

In a rather amazing coup for DCP, their Cottage is directed by Hanley Smith, who originated the role of Deirdre in 2013 at the Astoria PAC in Queens, NYC, before moving up to the triggering role of Sylvia at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, four years ahead of the Broadway premiere in 2023. Not a far-flung coup, to be sure, since Smith is a Davidson College grad who starred in Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte’s production of The Vibrator Play in 2011.

So whether or not she has directed anywhere else before her DCP debut, Smith quickly establishes that she has a sure feel for this script. From the outset, Julia Howard’s performance as Sylvia was at least as extravagant as the scenery that surrounded her – and the sofa where she rehearsed her most alluring poses. This has been her one-time-a-year sex-capade, and it was obvious that she wasn’t planning for it to end, though Beau’s work week was set to begin.

No, no, no. Her plans, executed yesterday evening with a couple of telegrams, are to leave her husband Clark and marry Beau. Thoughtfully, the second wire was sent to Beau’s wife, Marjorie. Part of Sylvia’s kooky charm comes from her not being steadfast in her beliefs or resolutions – a trait that is contagious among Rustin’s creations – for she regrets sending her liberating telegrams as soon as she hears a loud knock on the front door.

Sylvia’s miscalculations will greatly increase Howard’s chances to shine, and still clad in her negligee, she’ll continue to stand out from the parade of visitors. As already hinted, Beau has been busier at the game of love than she anticipated. Ben Allen must merely be “Perhaps the best-looking man in Britain” to match the playwright’s description, so a certain amount of vanity must be coupled with his sexual rascality and his savoir-faire as a deceiver.

When Beau is celebrated repeatedly instead for the beauty of his flaming robe, should Allen act upset? Perhaps not, for Rustin consistently sets aside perfect moments, on the brink of upset or disturbance, for Beau to suggest a cigarette or a spot of tea. Good manners and posture were must-have accessories for Allen’s geniality in the early moments of this unpredictable morning at the cottage. On the spectrum of flappability, he seemed to be permanently perched at the opposite end from Sylvia.

Until he opened the front door, first to his visibly pregnant wife Marjorie and then to brother Clark. Their suspicions have been eradicated by Sylvia’s batch of telegrams. So while it’s unseemly to disclose her hiding place before you see this farce, it’s also unnecessary for Beau to maintain his charade and keep her there.

Sadly, for Amanda Pippin as Marjorie and Andrew Pippin as Clark, neither had the histrionic opportunity to rev up to a towering jealous rage. They have a couple of surprises of their own to reveal. After Sylvia fully digests them, she’s probably correct in thinking that she has more right than Beau to be miffed. Regardless, it was so much fun watching Howard come to that realization and then watching Allen nearly catch up.

The Pippins neatly pull off the trick of being humdrum, wholesome, and deliciously wicked at the same time as their insouciance confounds their fellow adulterers. Nor are they the ones to be ruffled when, one after another, a third couple comes knocking at the door: Cate Jo as the déclassé Deirdre and Andrew Williams as the reputedly murderous Richard.

Like Marjorie, dear Deirdre will have good news and bad news. But nobody seems to react to any news at the cottage in the way the teller anticipates. Howard takes honors as the most thoroughly cheated person onstage as Sylvia, while Allen as Beau, the target of Richard’s wrath, takes cover like all the others. Jo makes for a loopy Deirdre, loopier after guzzling from a gin bottle, and hers turns out to be a rather physical role, what with all the hiding and staggering she must do in varying states of sobriety.

Williams, as Deirdre’s ex, has a past that’s as chequered as Deirdre’s, but all of that came since he and Sylvia last met many years ago. In everyday life, when not boasting of murdering Deirdre’s lovers, he passes for an everyday pharmacist, so the role offers a delicious range for Williams in spite of his late arrival.

To her credit, Sarah Deutsch’s costume designs are only slightly upstaged by the set. If you know who Stanley Baldwin was and his political affiliation, identifying the era of Rustin’s lively farce won’t be a formidable challenge. Otherwise, Hanley doesn’t orient us in either the printed or the digital program. The gorgeous Victrola must be your guide.

But only Rustin is to blame for Richard’s lame excuse for his false beard and mustache, so I’m not blaming anybody at DCP for making these disguises glaringly clumsy. Let the moment pass and richly enjoy the rest. This production is definitely worthy of its pedigree.

“Clue” Reaches New Heights of Silliness at Matthews Playhouse

**Review: Clue at Matthews Playhouse of the Performing Arts**

By Perry Tannenbaum

2023~Clue~18

Apparently, I didn’t have much of a clue about CLUE, a new comedy by Sandy Rustin based on the 80-year-old board game and its 1985 screen adaptation. I presumed that Matthews Playhouse would be staging the musical version that has periodically skulked around regional and community theatres after ignominiously posting its closing notice a week after it opened Off-Broadway in early December 1997.

Our playbill, listing “Original music composed by Michael Holland,” kept me in the dark a bit longer until the show began without an overture or an opening number. While we waited, we had the chance to fill out a form and predict which of the “usual suspects” would be revealed as the culprit – or culprits – at the end of the show. It’s a pretty simple form since, unlike the board game, we don’t have to sniff out where the murder takes place and which of six lethal weapons is used. Simpler than the movie, too, which was famously released with three different endings. 2023~Clue~4

After directing a nearly sublime Book of Will at Belmont Abbey College back in February, Jill Bloede shows that she and her sure comedy instincts can lift up the utterly ridiculous in Matthews. She and set designer Marty Wolff aren’t going to let us forget that Clue is a board game. With sliding wood panels for walls and cunning little swinging gates for doors, we can see three rooms at a time on each side of the stage simultaneously, with a corridor representing the Boddy Mansion’s hallway completing the symmetry – seven of the nine rooms depicted (even more primitively) by the humble game board’s overhead view.

Flimsy as those thin walls may appear sliding in and out of view, they must be sturdy enough to accommodate the workings of secret panels that either flip their graphics or open and shut widely enough for the comings and goings of arms visibly wielding weapons. If your Clue erudition has stuck with you since childhood, you’ll remember that those weapons are a candlestick, a lead pipe, a monkey wrench, a dagger, a rope, and a revolver.

It’s with the entrance of our prime suspects that the plot of Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay and Rustin’s script, mimicking the film’s plot setup, swerve from the classic simplicities of the Parker Brothers’ game. Each of the six guests who have been invited to the Boddy Mansion is given one of the aliases bestowed on the iconic game pieces. Each now has a colorful – but compromising – back story that he or she is being blackmailed for. Serious enough misdeeds lurk beneath all our guests’ respectable facades for a murder motive, and their sophisticated enough for them to apply for membership among the avatars of more evolved adult board games. 2023~Clue~19

So Colonel Mustard does have a military background, and Mrs. Peacock, a US Senator’s wife, has reason to be prideful. Mr. Green has a gay bent that could be costly as news of the McCarthy un-American hearings, circa 1954, seep through in radio broadcasts, and Miss Scarlet’s flame seems to be fueled by undercover stints as a high-priced madame. Professor Plum was apparently disgraced in another profession before finding refuge in academia, and Mrs. White… why is she dressed in black? Presumably because one or more of her late husbands could be the skeleton in her closet.

Now if you or I were anonymously blackmailing six evildoers with DC connections, you might think twice – or 700 times – before inviting even one of those cash cows for dinner, blowing your cover and, in a faraway secluded manor, endangering your own life. Ah, but the Lynn-Rustin silliness has just begun. Let’s distribute the six iconic murder weapons among the six color-schemed guests! And after all, if six possible murderers are gathered for an evening of killing and sleuthing – and dinner! – why limit the victims to just the ever-ready Mr. Boddy? 2023~Clue~10

The whole Boddy household staff might be available to boost the body count: the maid, the cook, and the butler. Maybe we could liven (or deaden?) things up with a stranded motorist, a snoopy cop, or even a singing telegram girl? Hey, it’s a party!

With Allen Andrews as the suave and mysterious butler Wadsworth greeting mutton-chopped Jeremy Cartee as the pompous Colonel Mustard, the ball gets rolling nicely as the pair let us in on the rules of the game. Andrews as Wadsworth is so slick of a host greeting all of our suspects that he manages, through sheer brass and sliminess, to cast suspicion on himself. Cartee, meanwhile, must vie with longtime local diva Paula Baldwin as Mrs. Peacock for the distinction of being the most arrogant and pretentious of the suspects. Baldwin makes up for lost time by being the most outgoing, neurotic, and loquacious guest. 2023~Clue~17

Clad in a screaming red dress, red hair garishly beribboned, and wrapped in a boa, Vanessa Davis as Miss Scarlet is the polar opposite of the cool Mary Lynn Bain as the semi-funereal Mrs. White. While Davis shoots seductive glances everywhere, Bain seems to be in perpetual mourning.

Yvette Moten’s costume designs are predictably color-coded, but they are not altogether studded with solid hues. While Andrew Pippin as the reserved Mr. Green gets to wear the most stylishly coordinated and urbane ensemble in harboring the deepest secret, Moten allows herself to go fairly wild over Johnny Hohenstein’s outfit as Mr. Plum: a cringeworthy maroon plaid jacket striped with deep purple and sky blue, a weirdly coordinated motley bowtie, and the loudest purple argyle sweater she could find.

Kathleen Cole is most notable for all the costumes – and phony eyebrows – that she wears, changing from the Cook to the Singing Telegram Girl before resurfacing as police backup. That glittery delivery girl outfit would liven any costume ball. 2023~Clue~1

Bloede obviously takes much delight in maneuvering her game pieces. Sometimes they scurry around so swiftly that we lose track of them, and at other times, Wadsworth and staff parade them from room to room with a ceremoniousness that actually does evoke silly avatars moving around the squares of a game board. Yet there wasn’t a single missed beat during all the hectic scene changes at the Saturday matinees, never a missed cue, and never a flubbed line.

We seem to all get nine different rooms with all the back-and-forth of the sliding walls, so efficiently whisked in and out of sight from the wings. But I don’t remember seeing a ballroom, so I’m sure we don’t see more than eight.

Eight is enough.