Author: cris-edwards

Aren’t we fascinated when real people live up to well-worn stereotypes?​ The characters in Superior Donuts seem like stereotypes, but they embody realistic contradictions, which makes them endearingly plumb.

Isaih Anderson (left) and Tim McNamara bring nuance and heart to thinly scripted roles in the Live Arts production of Superior Donuts.

When I say that protagonist Arthur Przybyszewski (Robert McNamara) is an old hippie, you know, superficially, just who he is. He smokes reefer to self-medicate, quotes John Lennon and has more hair in his ponytail than on top of his head. But, he’s also a deadbeat dad. He curses a nearby Starbucks while patronizing the franchise. He uses violence to settle a score. We like this guy, and we also understand him.

Live Arts’ Superior Donuts, written by Tracy Letts and directed by Mendy St. Ours and Chris Baumer, bets its smarts and big heart against a formulaic story and wins. McNamara offers a wonderful performance, imbuing a stock character with genuine joy, desperation and anger. Isaih Anderson’s Franco Wicks never steps incorrectly. Franco is a budding Ralph Ellison who needs an income to pay off some very looming debts. He’s too cocksure for his own good, and probably too talented to be working in a donut shop.

The casting is impeccable; a melting pot of characters who are just quirky enough to be plausible. The Russian owner (Sean Michael McCord) of a neighboring DVD shop is affable, despite being a drunk and a racist. Local cop James Bailey (Jason Duvalle Jones), is a caring Trekkie. Randy Osteen (Geri Schirmer), also a cop, is a middle-aged hot pot with a crush on Przybyszewski. Newcomer Diane Key, as Lady Boyle, steals every scene she is in. Even a minor character, Kiril (Shawn Hirabayashi), gives us a shy thug. Ever know one of those? 

Kathryn Springmann’s scenery pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of making Live Arts’ UpStage seem spacious. The use of wainscoting to serve as both a definition of the shop’s floorplan and a banister for the audience is clever.

Accidentally underscoring Friday evening’s performance was a live band at The Box playing a never-ending blues riff, but oddly enough, it kind of worked. The actual soundtrack choices, via Live Arts veteran John Holdren—including Gil Scott-Heron, Public Enemy and Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”—were obvious but spot-on. 

Superior Donuts is a bit saccharin at times. It hopes to be about race and gentrification, but those conflicts are ultimately story garnishes. A final showdown rings false. We expect something more tragic, perhaps a death or a foreclosure, but it never happens. These are transient concerns of an enjoyable script served well by an honest and mature production.

Superior Donuts is engaging, smart, hilarious and often touching. It won’t change your life the way Godot or Lear might, but it does lovingly and truthfully leave you with new ideas. And hey, whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright.

When Paul first shows up at Flan and Ouisa Kittredge’s posh Central Park apartment, he says that he’s been stabbed, and that the only copy of his Harvard thesis has been stolen. But after Paul charms the couple by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier—who Paul claims is planning a live-action adaptation of Cats—the Kittredges forget their discomfort, and insist that this stranger, who seems to know the couple’s children, spend the night recovering in their home.

By morning, we get the inkling that Paul is not who he said he was. John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, which plays at Live Arts through June 12, examines the art of the swindle, which is itself a kind of acting. The story, based on the actual exploits of David Hampton, a con man who managed to infiltrate Guare’s clique of New York art elites, is not really about the mechanics of Paul’s hustle. It’s about being played for a fool.

Performance relies on a mutual agreement to misdirect and to be misdirected. For Paul, played well by a wispy Lance Lemon, the only mode seems to be misdirection. Even after his deception takes the life of a dupe, he doesn’t appear to be remorseful, doesn’t change. He’s not even a very good thief. But he gets under the skin of the Kittredges.

Through Paul, Kay Leigh Ferguson’s Ouisa seems to take a kind of quiet joy in experiencing victimhood. Ferguson gives Ouisa of subtle, matter-of-fact quality that downplays the character’s epiphanies and even her possible attraction to Paul. She plays the flake, only to find that she can stretch out her wings a bit, even be defiant. Unfortunately, the plotting gives Ouisa a somewhat ham-fisted closing; fortunately, Ferguson’s decision to remain on a lower key helps smooth the strangeness of the final scene.

Doug Schneider, known locally as a singer, is one of the best character actors in the area. His Flan lacks transcendence, but it’s hardly a distraction. (The on-stage nudity is, however.) Elsewhere, the bulk of the players are prescribed a scene or two at most, which is a glitch of the scripting. Nonetheless, these thinly-sketched characters are generally given a good go by the cast. I think of Edwina Herring, Alex Davis and Michael Goldstein, who should be given more than a dollop of stage time in future productions.

Six Degrees is fitting material for director Betsy Tucker, who is attracted to multi-layered scripts. (Her Beard of Avon, previously at Live Arts, was not as much about anti-Stratfordianism as it was about gender.) She hurdles the bumpy script with relish. I wondered what this story would have been like had it been penned by David Mamet or Sarah Ruhl or Caryl Churchill, playwrights with a clearer grasp on the notion that chaos and trickery can be redemptive. But even with an elusive and rocky script, Live Arts offers a solid, workhorse production full of compelling performances and ideas. 

Astronomers recently discovered a small solar system that could support life some 20 light years away from earth. I wonder if, in the glare of their own sun, some distant, sentient creatures are also flummoxed by loneliness and failure. In UVA’s impressive production of The Glass Menagerie, these possibilities come to mind. Below a dusky cyclorama sits the silhouetted skyline, peppered with little lighted windows. Within each of those windows on the horizon, a tragic scenario is being played out. I thought I’d grown numb to Menagerie over the years, yet here it is, with fresh sparks.

Daria Okugawa’s Amanda is the epicenter, ignited with confidence and refreshing flirtatiousness. It’s a fully-wrought creation. Amanda’s final reaction to Tom—the raisonneur who guides us through the story—when he’s “going to see a movie” again could be played with command or with resignation. Okugawa doesn’t give us such a convenient answer. She never forces herself upon the character; effortlessly discovering a gem of a performance. She simply finds true moments to play as they occur. And isn’t that the mark of the craft?

The boyishly handsome Alex Grubbs works adeptly on Tom’s journey of frustrating dreams. Lesser actors seize upon Tom’s nascent homosexuality or his unforgivable decision to flee. It’s a tough cipher that Grubbs navigates amicably, with only his epilogue indicating clunkiness. Grubbs and Okugawa possess rich strength. Their scenes together are scrumptious.

Jacquie Walters, as Laura, and Geoff Culbertson, as Jim O’Conner, have a big script problem to deal with. The entire second act is carried by two characters who are superficial in the first act. Jim, the “gentleman caller,” is mentioned only briefly in the first half of the play while Laura, the limping shut-in, haunts the darker corners of the apartment. For a canonical script that is perfect by any other standard, what odd plotting. Walters is slow to warm. Her first reaction to the suitor, an old high school crush, appears to be more appendicitis than nervousness. But, Culbertson sweetly coaxes and Walters coyly follows, obeying the story with patience. 

Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s scenery design is exactly what the play requires: a dilapidated but earnest apartment buried by buildings and fire escapes. The walls have been stripped away, leaving a few errant windows and doors in a style of deconstruction that is typical of theatrical Realism these days; it is only the set designer who adds abstraction anymore. Luckily, the result is a dead-on score here. Too, the sound design is glorious. Instead of thunder claps, we get low rumbles. Instead of pervasive jazz, we get muffled hints of music. Nice.

There is an annoyance I should mention: a few moments when a nebbish goon from the running crew appears onstage to fetch Tom’s coat. There he is, in the world of the play. It breaks the spell something fierce. As a service to the strong work of the cast and designers: Please nix the smirking techie.

Minus this one point, director Richard Warner has concocted a stellar production.

What a shame that phrases like, “It’s the sleeper hit of the season,” are total bullshit because Adelind Horan’s Cry of the Mountain is an appropriate candidate for such a statement. Here we have simple, engrossing theater in the form of a one-woman performance about the mountaintop removal form of coal mining. Maybe that sounds like the last thing you want to see. Your thought would be understandable and incorrect.

In Cry of the Mountain, young Horan portrays a handful of characters who are connected to the coal industry. These characters also happen to be real people whom she has interviewed and here reproduces with every stutter, mannerism and pause graciously preserved. Comparisons to, say, Anna Deavere Smith or even the early stagework of John Leguizamo might be inevitable and not unwarranted. We can see, with honesty, these people, these characters, making genuine realizations and oddly ironic comments about their lives. I am a little worried that, should this production draw its likely success, the whole ordeal will go to Horan’s head, at which point the thing is ruined.

Horan approaches the jagged shores of caricature but never quite lands there. One of the most wonderful things to witness onstage is restraint. It gets dicey, especially in the final scene where, as Larry Gibson, Horan walks an incredibly thin wire. At any moment, she could snuff the mood with a false glare, huff, murmur. She doesn’t.

Driving to the Hamner, I thought specifically of David Mamet’s disdain for “funny voices,” which are a convenient tool for actors who need to cut to the quick. It’s within the DNA of plays like Cry of the Mountain. I should have trusted producer Ray Nedzel and Horan more. Upon leaving, I thought again of Mamet, this time saying, “That which comes from the heart goes to the heart.” Cry of the Mountain might want to persuade, but that’s not the effect it creates. This is not agit-prop art—which, by the way, tends to attract the already-converted—but, instead, it’s art that presents stories. Nothing big, just stories. Hear what you want to hear.

A key observation of the evening: Rainwater hits the top of a mountain and flows to the bottom, picking up pollutants and nutrients alike, destroying portions of land while building up new land elsewhere, without prejudice, as it moves downward. Horan’s narrative beautifully calls upon this metaphor to hint at poverty, industry, class, race and politics. The term “trickle-down economics” is represented by implication, if not by name. Between scenes, Horan sips from a Brita-type filter where gravity pulls water downward through rough grains of carbon as a method of purification.

Afton’s Hamner Theatre continues the local Bard-a-thon by presenting A Midsummer Night’s Dream squarely on the heels of Live Arts’ Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, which arrived soon after Four County Players’ Othello; not to mention the ongoing work of Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center. A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be an overrated script, even for Shakespeare, but its lack of depth might be its charm.

Here, the setting is a high school, so the young lovers are football players and cheerleaders, while the rude mechanicals are janitors and lunch ladies; an interesting idea. This creates odd moments, as when the characters say their names and their occupations: “I, Nick Bottom, the weaver,” when we can plainly see he is a school custodian. And what do Oberon and Titania do there?

Titania’s (April Winsheimer) brood of faeries is played entirely by children. They flutter about, festooned with necktie ribbons, and are entertaining because, well, they are kids. 

The four star-crossed (and uncrossed and recrossed) lovers are all played by teens, as are Puck (Megan Schultz) and Flute/Thisbe (DJ Crocker). As Lysander, Colin Bruguiere proves to be a promising actor. Hermia (Sami Cunningham) and Helena (Noel Quigley) are also strong. DJ Crocker is an apt Thisbe in the never-fail final scene. I look forward to more work from them all.

The rest are adults, including Oberon (Richard Averitt), Hippolyta (Puja Tolton) and Theseus (Dan Trombley). John Holdren, playing Bottom and Pyramus from within a pillow-stuffed Dickies coverall, is the centerpiece and delivers an energetic portrayal.

The stage is set up as a thrust, which means that the audience sits on three sides of the performance space. Directing on a thrust stage is challenging. Often, the actors are unsure where they are supposed to be, so they wander and it’s distracting.

There are uncomfortable moments: Titania seductively straddling an assified Bottom while children look on; Demetrius and Helena actually making out on the sidelines, thus upstaging whatever the hell was happening in the scene. At one point, Holdren breaks into a rap. Huh? It takes us right out of the momentum. There are enough of these moments to leave viewers wondering if there shouldn’t have been a few extra rehearsals to add some prescriptive polish.

Now, before the flame wars begin, I understand that this production was likely germinated by a group of friends who wanted to do something fun and theatrical with their kids. And indeed it is fun on what must be less than a shoestring budget. I enjoyed seeing teens acting like mature adults and adults acting like foolish children. If you feel that even reviewing a production which was created under those terms is against the spirit of the thing, much like critiquing a child’s birthday party, I concede. 

Bard lovers often want to disassemble Shakespeare’s histories and stitch them back together in new ways. Orson Welles did so in his brilliant, but obscure, Chimes at Midnight. Now Sara Holdren, our local Shakespearean cotter pin, brings a fresh take on Henry IV with Live Arts’ new production. 

Holdren, here serving as interpreter, director, costumer, properties artisan, stage manager, graphic designer and marketing coordinator, is a gifted auteur. It must be a labor of love to truncate the two Henry IV texts so carefully. Everything is still here: the warrior posturing, the backstabbing, the heartbreak. Holdren even managed to retain all of the jokes about how fat and drunk Falstaff is.

The cast is woven with talent. Holdren wicks robust, clear performances from each actor. Sam Reeder, whom we last saw in Play On! Theatre’s Arcadia in a spotty, but promising performance, truly delivers here. Likewise, Nick Heiderstadt, who is much too young to be playing Falstaff, squarely deals every hand of humor and pathos. Josephine Stewart, also of Arcadia, navigates her multiple roles delightfully; one moment, she is the blinkingly naive Mistress Quickly and another, a stoic Sir Blunt, hiding beneath a Frisch’s Big Boy cowlick. Unassuming Scott Keith pounces into his portrayals of Hotspur and Pistol, focused and energetic. Fawn-eyed Laura Rikard, an electrifying performer, is on stage too little. The ensemble surges along at a rolling boil, yet takes time to play delicate moments with the precision and intimacy of hand embroidery. Oh, and you will find that they are also endearing singers.

Experience tells me that “scenery design” in Live Arts’ UpStage space is a fool’s errand. (I designed the set for Flyin’ West for UpStage in 2008.) Once the requisite chairs are in place, there is little room left to perform a play. Keith, also as set designer, gives us merely a door and two platforms. It’s more than enough. Costumes by Tricia Emlet, are, as always, top-shelf, though Keith does eventually appear in a fez and codpiece. Thanks to lighting designer Carin Edwards-Orr for only a single blackout during the entire evening. I appreciated the sound design of Jamie Coupar; strange, clever, moody

There is little to kvetch about, except, of course, the running time. At a neatly hemmed three hours with one intermission, it’s a bladder buster. But, the only remedy would be at the expense of content or momentum. Pattern your evening accordingly. 

Musicals are often brushed off as fluffy escapism, and yet the most-enduring ones—from Puccini’s popular operas to Sondheim’s Into The Woods—are about celebrating the frivolity and freedom of youth. That is, until the dread sets in. Cabaret is within this canon and the script is as germane with its politics and rhetoric as it was 44 years ago at its Broadway premiere.

Cabaret is a brave choice for Four County Players. It’s the kind of musical that must be done with the pedal to the floor if it is to be done at all. There are challenging themes flying in from all directions: gender, abortion, totalitarianism, genocide, fear. The legendary Emcee (Dan Stern), is shirtless and glittery. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, seeing someone who is truly free can be scary for a lot of people.

All is well, mostly, in Berlin when we meet the Emcee’s team of alluring burlesque dancers and their patrons. American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Gary White) has arrived in the city to do some writing when he crosses paths with saucy bohemian Sally Bowles (Steph Finn), who is busy sleeping on floors and dancing at the Kit-Kat Club. Middle-aged concierge Fraulein Schneider (Linda Zuby) and Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Francis Deane) find that they are silly in love. The girls want to be with the girls and it’s all dandy.

Then we see the armband and it strikes us like a gunshot. The clockwork approaches and it terrifies.

This is a stunning production for Four County Players. Director Christopher N. Spangler has an all-star team of collaborators. Stern works well as the iconic Emcee and he could go higher still, swinging for the fences. It’s always a pleasure to see Gary White and Steph Finn on stage and they both own their roles here. Deane and Zuby (who, by day, is on staff at C-VILLE) are so good at being cute that, when the tide turns, we are all the more struck at how they can also be so haunting.

Locally, anything musical director Greg Harris touches is gold, so what luck to have his talents employed here. Scenic designers rarely get applause, but our introduction to Dan Hager’s tableau is impressive. Costume designer Amy Goffman plays things subtly and effectively. The live band is reliable and clear.

At times, it seemed as though the cast was holding back a little; as if they were feeling out whether or not all of the burlesque teasing and the homoerotic butch/femme toying was really working for the rural town of Barboursville. If the sold-out run is any indication, the spectators are certainly all on board. Go for broke with that freak flag, cast.