Author: cris-edwards

Russell Lees’ Nixon’s Nixon is an animalistic powerplay in the manner of McClure’s The Beard and Mamet’s Oleanna; two hungry beings in a single room, both jockeying for the upper hand. Here, it’s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, alone on the eve of Nixon’s resignation. To say the situation is timely is an understatement: A presidency is plagued with an unpopular war. Divisive issues distract voters from rampant corruption.

A politician is a salesman, which is to say, a manipulative actor. Throughout the Hamner Theatre’s production, Nixon and Kissinger roleplay; meeting with Chairman Mao, negotiating with Brezhnev. Nixon imagines himself as Napoleon returning from exile to a hero’s welcome. He uses a bust of Lincoln as his Yorick and, later, on his knees, pleads to God for mercy. The room is sparse and utilitarian, with enough chairs to suggest the futility of Ionesco. The men swill themselves in brandy.

Lees suggests (in his conveniently provided author’s notes) that the actors playing the two roles should look little like the actual people they portray. Hamner obeys by casting Chris Patrick as Nixon and Chris Baumer as Kissinger. Patrick is young and more Rowan Atkinson than Tricky Dick. Baumer is genial and lanky, two things Kissinger never was.

Baumer and Patrick are a power plant, carefully and adeptly dealing out niceties under the veil of a political pissing contest between two of the most powerful men in the world. Patrick plays Nixon straight. This is smart. A less confident performer might pillage the toolbox of Rich Little and ruin a lean and simmering role. Since Kissinger always seemed to be doing a mediocre impression of himself, Baumer’s on-and-off dialect isn’t a burden as much as an inevitability of the scenario. Seeing these two local favorites at the top of their game is refreshing. The evening is an uninterrupted 90 minutes of pure acting gold. Tension leads to reconciliation leads to backstabbing, unflinchingly.

Since this is entirely an actor’s play, director Marcello Rollando might have done a lot of work or very little. It’s tough to tell when you pair strong performers with an undulating and solid script.

Much of the play is about how these men want to be remembered, how the history books will present them. Nixon’s Nixon is a sympathetic depiction of Nixon, who is still seen as a crook who hoodwinked the nation. But consider, he admitted his faults, conceded his position, and sealed his place as an impotent leader. Was that less brave than if he’d claimed no wrongdoing and kept hammering through, as many of his successors have? 

It takes a gifted writer to charm centuries of academics and audiences alike with what are essentially dung jokes aimed at con artists. That is why one might be timid to approach any production of Ben Jonson, who constructed ridiculously convoluted plots and wordplays while Shakespeare examined heartbreak and antithetical humanism: It can be loads of fun, or it can be a wooden lesson in another great playwright of Elizabethan England. 

Holiday crowdpleasers are a necessary evil in the industry of community theatre. They offer large casts, are easy to produce, and, most importantly, they help prevent box office atrophy during the chillier months when potential patrons would ordinarily prefer to stay home. With nearby performances elsewhere of A Christmas Carol, The Santaland Diaries, and The Nutcracker, Four County Players’ production of A Christmas Story seems, by process of elimination, inevitable.

In A Christmas Story, our protagonist is Ralphie Parker (you probably already knew this; However, through some unintentional, lifelong process, the film version of A Christmas Story remains unseen by this reviewer), played here as an adult narrator by Robert Ryland. Ralphie’s parents, embodied by the expressive Bill Smith and a treacly Kristin Rabourdin, are earnest and struggling. How working-class parents can manage the Santa-sized expectations of their children is at the heart of the story. The furnace spews smoke, the car is a lumbering lemon, and a turkey on the dinner table is indicative of status in the world.

The adults in the cast are apt. As the grown-up Ralphie, Ryland is articulate and handsome, but seems to drift from affable nostalgia to episodes of ham-fisted mugging as the evening progresses. Aside from Smith and Rabourdin, the only other adult in the lineup is Mary Cox as Miss Shields, the frustrated English teacher. All give their roles a proper go, though—and it might be intentional—histrionics abound and the effect wears thin at times.

The real highlight, though, is the kids. The majority of the cast consists of children, and what a relief to find them all to be delightful performers. Young Ralphie Parker, played by Bradley Shipp, is correctly awkward. Kevin Cox portrays Ralphie’s little brother Randy and, with his peckish build and mangled mop of hair, he turns a footnote role into a memorable facet. Daniel Neele, as buddy Schwartz, would do well to consider acting as a future gig. We also see a roving team of girls who are classmates of the Parker boys. Here, too, the young ladies are just right. A girl even takes a shine to boyhood Ralphie and provides one of the evening’s best moments.

My inner curmudgeon takes issue with the pacing, which wanes between scenes. The result is a production which, including an intermission, runs a full hour longer than the classic film upon which the play is based.

Should any of this prevent you from adding A Christmas Story to your list of holiday destinations? Absolutely not. Was the result worthy of the brief trek to Barboursville? Certainly.

Kids these days sure do like their metatheater. It’s no surprise, then, that PVCC chose two modern classics of the genre—Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Christopher Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare, as a back-to-back crash course in Absurdism.

You’ll never find a heartbreaking production of The Bald Soprano, a projected spoof of nonsensical domestic small talk. Staged with economy and wit, PVCC’s production hits the right notes in Tina Howe’s joyously-Americanized adaptation of Ionesco’s first play. While there are not any break-out performances, per se, the cast makes appropriate dedications to their roles and the direction is suitable. Early Ionesco can be perplexing, natch. Here, it is laden with laughs which, while not always the best choice, are completely delicious.

An intermezzo was presented which consisted of two scenes from The Bald Soprano performed entirely in French. This bit was a clear challenge for the actors—Alex Shannon and Ajah Courts were relief performers in the roles of Mademoiselle and Monsieur Martin—and the novelty of the exercise wore off quickly. The more the performers struggled with their lines, the more the audience wanted to be done with it.

Lastly, The Actor’s Nightmare, a play most commonly seen in undergraduate directing courses. Durang’s popular piece depicts a nightmare that is not unique to just actors: finding oneself alone on a stage in front of an audience without a lick of an idea as to what one is supposed to do. Adding to the grief is a queue of fellow performers who insist the protagonist has attended rehearsals that he cannot recall. In the lead as George Spelvin is Koda Kerl, a lanky young man who seems to have the proper mix of “aw, shucks” and go-for-it-ness to carry the role with relish. As the story moves haphazardly through Noel Coward, Shakespeare, Tenessee Williams and culminates in a hilarious mash-up of the Samuel Beckett oeuvre, the cast earnestly served the story and won some admiration along the way.

While the directing could have been more prescriptive and the acting more polished—no faulting college students for being cast as middle-aged adults—the totality of the evening was sharp, droll and delightful.