About Us - Reviews 2004
2004 Season: Matter Familias The Glider Jasper Lake
Matter Familias by Ginger Lazarus
"I
haven’t had such fun since Fuddy Meers, but Lazarus one-ups the wacky
Fuddy. And you cannot guess how she does it…. Suffice it to say,
the comedy is a class(ic) act…Director Wesley Savick’s cast
is to die for. The singular Helen McElwain is the outrageous mother-to-be
of a slightly over-grown child, dashingly portrayed by Gus Kelley. Nancy
E. Carroll is dead on as the overbearing (in every way) grandma, and Robert
D. Murphy is deadpan heaven as her television numbed hubby. Barlow Adamson
is his funniest yet, hurling himself into the air in an inverted expression
of abject despair. Kortney Adams plays straight man (oh, what am I saying?)
to Karen "Mal" Malme’s wickedly naughty, adorably butch
girlfriend. And Haddon Kime outdoes himself again (and again and again)
with sound effects which rival Lazarus’ insane dialogue. Richard
Chambers goes baby happy, embedding little tykes into the walls like spiders
in cocoons. I’m still laughing myself silly."
Beverly Creasey, Patriot Ledger
"Family
matters in Ginger Lazarus’s amusing and preposterous Matter Familias…In
a splendid production of this new comedy…(V)irtually every
theme of post-modern baby making… is examined and expertly lampooned.
… Matter Familias is well-begotten hilarity, with overlapping
scenes and startling segues… In the lead, Helen McElwain brings a
winning combination of earnestness and impetuousness to Katherine…
Tender with her middle-age son William (sweetly played by Gus Kelley),
her impatience with her own parents is sublime. Dad (Robert D. Murphy)
brings a depth and sensitivity to what could have been a rote role…As
Mother, Nancy E. Carroll is lusciously malicious…Her scheming and
manipulation have enormous comic pay-offs, as do those of Barlow Adamson’s
Claude… Richard Chambers’s unabashedly surreal scenic design
is austere… and Anthony Kudner’s effective lighting scheme plays
up the cheerful brightness without too much glare (it’s a set that
occasionally glows). Haddon Kime’s sound effects include amplified
drinking and swallowing, as well as faux-naive pop music snippets. These
are surprising and always add to the story. Gail Astrid Buckley’s
costumes are astutely chosen, and director Wesley Savick has presided
over an imaginative and delicious clan-bake of a saga. Never mind the
looming "family" holiday—this is a tale for all four seasons."
Sally Cragin, Boston Globe
"Should you choose to keep your distance from Scrooges and
Nutcrackers this month, consider spending an evening in the whacked-out
world of Ginger Lazarus’ new play Matter Familias…(a)
dysfunctional chess game of who is biologically related to whom. Just
when you think Ms. Lazarus will drown everything in whimsy, she rockets
into true zaniness; her satire remains nursery-safe--a Puck in diapers,
if you will--but her clever-clever dialogue is always amusing… Richard
Chambers has designed a spare setting that resembles caterpillar tents
filled with dozens of baby dolls instead of larvae, director Wesley Savick
keeps things as warm and fuzzy as an Edward Koren cartoon and his stylized
cast is seamless…Nancy E. Carroll, a playwright’s best friend,
contributes a wonderfully burlesqued Mother, especially when in labor,
and Barlow Adamson (Claude), whether in comedy or drama, remains an intriguing
mixture of burliness and sensitivity. Gus Kelley…displays a good
sense of comic timing wrapped in a velvety purr…."
Carl A. Rossi, Theater Mirror
"There’s
nuclear meltdown in Lazarus’s outrageous and carefully calculated
comedy, which is well directed by Wesley Savick (He appears to have
become the BPT’s resident director, and for good reason.)… Matter
Familias’s warped maternal instincts are nurtured on Richard Chambers’s
hilarious set where baby dolls push against and through lycra walls."
Liza Weisstuch, Boston Phoenix
"The
Boston Playwrights' Theatre finishes its fall season with an extreme modern
comedy… Ginger Lazarus has moved into the absurd world of …David
Lindsey-Abaire or perhaps… Christopher Durang to explore Matter Familias,
the latest offspring of Ionesco's original vision of the theatre….
Director Wesley Savick keeps a loose but effective rein on his experienced
cast…. The center of this family cyclone is… comedienne Helen
McElwain…. Her practiced dead-pan timing… is perfect for this
role…. Katherine's adopted son William is handsomely played by Gus
Kelley… with more than a slight sense of suppressed incest. The dynamo
behind the turmoil is Mother, archly created by award-winning actress
Nancy E. Carroll… (and) TV-addicted Dad is Robert D. Murphy…
passive through it all but sensitive when need be…. Barlow Adamson…
gets to let us see his comic demons. As adopted sister Lisa, Kortney Adams
…is a convincing partner to Karen "Mal" Malme's Lisa M.
as they plan to have a baby together…. How the playwright brings
these three into the web of unlikely relationships which energizes the
farce would make Feydeau proud…. The high-jinks of this play are
all managed quite neatly on Richard Chambers' abstract white set, whose
walls are lumpy with baby dolls protruding through the covering…
Haddon Kime's witty soundscape… keeps things humming along. Gail
Astrid Buckley finds appropriately straight garments for the skewed family,
plus some classical Greek garb for Katherine's nightmare …(and) MFA
student Anthony Kudner's lighting casts an even glow over the proceedings.
Will Stackman, On the Aisle
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The Glider by Kate Snodgrass
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Birgit Huppuch, Laura Latreille, and Kimberly Parker Green in Kate Snodgrass's The Glider.
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"Once
in a while a play is written with such clarity and performed with such
transparency, it's possible to forget you're in a theater and feel you're
eavesdropping on a real moment in someone's life. ... The Glider
has achieved this impressive combination of unaffected naturalism within
the heightened reality of the stage.
Everything comes together in this intimate
family drama, from the humor and heart of Snodgrass' dialogue and Wesley
Savick's precise direction of three superb actresses to Richard Chambers'
richly detailed set and Haddon Kime's spooky sound design.
The action takes place in the boathouse
of the family home (outfitted with exquisite props) on a lakeside in Michigan.
Almost immediately, Snodgrass creates a tension between the lake's gentle
beauty and its dangerous, mysterious depths. That same tension, between
the surface appearances and the complicated emotions hidden underneath,
drives this taut and tender drama.
Snodgrass skillfully disarms the audience
and defies expectations.... Snodgrass doesn't resolve all the power plays
or the emotional ripples she creates. Instead, her characters cling to
us long after the play ends, and their struggles continue to resonate
with the insistent swinging of the glider."
Terry Byrne, THE BOSTON HERALD
"There are plenty of plays about the ever present friction which
threatens to pull families apart, but Kate Snodgrass’ new drama,
The Glider, is a cut above…Richard Chambers’ exquisite rendering
of the lakeside boathouse and Haddon Kime’s lapping water make the
revelations wash over the play as if a tide were forcing them to shore.
The three actresses (under Wesley Savick’s flowing direction) make
Snodgrass’ script soar. Laura Latreille is magnificent as the world
traveler who left home and didn’t look back. Birgit Huppuch gives
her best performance to date as the tightly wound, deeply wounded middle
sister. Kimberly Parker Green glows as the youngest and most vulnerable
of the three….Snodgrass manages to make the ordinary desperation
in families extraordinary."
Beverly Creasey, PATRIOT LEDGER
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Laura Latreille and Kimberly Parker Green in Kate Snodgrass's The Glider.
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"(The Glider)…may just be the best new play put up this
year…Wesley Savick has directed this superb cast as a tight ensemble,
including intense confrontations with overlapping dialogue. Richard Chambers…has
once again come up with an architectural set full of intriguing detail.
Rachel Padula-Shufelt has costumed each of the three with care, enhancing
their characters. Haddon Kime has provided atmospheric sound which enhances
the selective realism of the production. But these three performers could
probably have the show work on a bare stage with a few essential props
and some chairs….In an ideal world, such a show would move somewhere
for an extended run….This Chekovian drama will probably be seen again
in these parts, but this production will be hard to beat. Avoid regret;
get tickets now."
Will Stackman, ON THE AISLE
"(T)his is the ‘best show of the year’…The
actresses are…powerful women capable of keeping or revealing secrets
but rarely capable of compromise. They love each other—and hate each
other, too; in other words, they’re sisters!… They have been
directed by Wesley Savick, whose carefully detailed vision for the play
nowhere betrays his expert fingerprints. The sisters reach fever pitch
in their arguments, to the point that the only possible resolution often
seems a violent one, their emotions are that intense. But in addition
to shaping the action, he has orchestrated the whole in such a way that
he is in total control of the audience’s focus. It’s not simply
moving figures about on the stage: who says what, when, (but) he moves
the audience’s eye from moment to emotional movement in ways that
movie-makers shift focus with cuts and close-ups. In general, he rivets
attention so precisely on what’s happening that the story unfolds
in a rush of nuanced confrontations…But, of course, he’s bringing
to life a text that actresses will kill to play…I think every theatre
in America—professsional, community, school—will gladly pay
royalties to give their very best actresses a crack at these roles…"
Larry Stark, THEATER MIRROR
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Birgit Huppuch and Laura Latreille in Kate Snodgrass's The Glider.
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"Kate
Snodgrass’s study of three squabbling sisters is packed with subtlety
and surprise twists. (She) has wrought an effective new work. The
scene is a broken-in boathouse (beautifully rendered by set designer Richard
Chambers…)…Snodgrass is well served by having the very gifted
Laura Latreille portray the world-roaming photojournalist sister, Francesca.
Latreille has absorbed the character’s restlessness…into her
very bones…Deftly directed by Wesley Savick, this richly layered
play is adult entertainment of the finest sort. It will leave you
pondering the permeability of moral absolutes and the maddening bonds
that mean family. (Grade A)"
Sandy MacDonald, EDGE Boston
"…the acting under Wesley Savick’s direction has real
muscle to it. Latreille is always a strong presence…Kimberly
Parker Green shows considerable promise as Chrissy…And Birgit Huppuch,
superb as Essie, the desperate housewife, simultaneously makes your skin
crawl and heart melt."
Ed Siegel, BOSTON GLOBE
"Kate Snodgrass’s The Glider…is a suspenseful one-act…Snodgrass
has a firm grasp on the tangled psychology and entwined passions in a
family of sisters…Wesley Savick has directed the play as if more
were at stake than one might think at first glance, and the result is
watchable, even enthralling…The performances are all solid…Haddon
Kime’s sound effects…are evocative without being intrusive,
and Andrew Foley’s lighting design…does well by Richard Chambers’s
creatively accoutered cabin…All in all, this Glider is easy to coast
along with."
Sally Cragin, BOSTON PHOENIX
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Jasper Lake by John Kuntz
The Boston Herald raved, "Jasper Lake sparkles with a haunting allure” and “marks a great leap forward for [Kuntz].” The reviewer continues: “The poetic rhythm of his language, as well as his use of choral responses, heighten the play's surreal feel as well as its sense of impending doom…. Kuntz and [the play’s director Douglas] Mercer together cast such a hypnotic spell across Jasper Lake, that every moment of mystery, fear, shock and dismay touches the audience the way a stone tossed in a pond creates a unmistakable ripple."
A Boston Globe review remarked that the play “marks development in Kuntz's craft as a playwright, particularly in the area of risk-taking." The reviewer adds, " Jasper Lake combines Kuntz's wit, particularly sharp when centered on literature and pop culture, with the ability to tell a story."
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Floating anxiety
John Kuntz’s beckoning Jasper Lake
BY CAROLYN CLAY (Boston Phoenix)
Issue Date: October 15 - 21, 2004
Jasper Lake
By John Kuntz.Directed by Douglas Mercer. Set by Eric Allgeier. Costumes by Carlos Romay. Lighting by Eric Larson. Sound by Haddon Kime. With Sarah Abrams, Eric Gould, Amanda Sywak, Edouard Tournier, Sharon Mason, Bill Molnar, Jennifer Burke, and William Gardiner. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through October 17.
Like the rest of us, John Kuntz has a two-sided brain. But his cranial duplex is laid out a little differently. On one side live the eccentric, goofball inventions — grandmotherly ex-managers of Smurfs on Ice, guys who have to sit on sugar — that have cracked us up in the playwright-performer’s four solo shows. Across the way, however, is a genuine, even poetic penchant to disturb, most tautly flexed in the play he wrote for himself and Paula Plum, Sing Me to Sleep. Jasper Lake is Kuntz’s most ambitious ensemble drama, a haunting and fragmented chamber piece for eight actors, and the best thing he’s penned since Sing Me to Sleep. But too many extraneous laughs from next door are allowed in.
As we’re told in a choral prologue, the play is named for a beautiful and seemingly indifferent body of water on which the affluent shoreside community of the same name sits, harboring, like the lake, secrets and echoes of secrets. The myth of Narcissus and Echo doesn’t slide in until late in the 95-minute work, fixing it, in part, as a study of upper-middle-class self-absorption beneath which desperation grows like algae. Echoes, though, come in early and often. At first, as the play’s characters share the opening narration, which is backed by soft piano, water noise, and shadows of groans, I thought, "Oh no, Jasper Lake Anthology; who can pull this off?" But the echoes prove accumulatively powerful and disturbing, not only providing trickle-down connections between almost placid acts of violence but setting up the play’s principal relationship between two troubled, and troublingly callous, young women, one of whom is dead.
The central set piece is an old bathtub that stands in for the center of the lake, a vortex "where voices collect like fish in a whirlpool," as well as the scene of a previous suicide. Suicide is a motif in the play, a balm that may tempt even the family cat of one of the play’s two households. Said family comprises the near-somnambulistic, migraine-afflicted Nora; her husband, Mitchell, who is sexually abusing his stepdaughter; and his provocative but hurting 17-year-old victim, Jennifer, who is in psychic communication with the young woman who killed herself in the tub and looks on à la The Lovely Bones. Except that she’s not in her own little heaven but hovering overhead in a car with a Britney-Spears-roadie-manqué she picked up at a gas station. Affecting a collision between this clan and the new folks next door is maniacally friendly Midwesterner Deb, who has just moved to the enchanted spot with workaholic clothes-hanger-manufacturing spouse Jerry and their teenage son, Caleb, who has been in "trouble" though a jury let him go.
Pop culture of a certain age is built into Kuntz’s brainpan, and here we get a spattering of family sit-com, popular song, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, "Touched by an Angel", John Hughes’s œuvre, and various chronicles of the creepy. Parts of it are over the top and cut into the dominant mood of sadness and dread. But those tones do prevail, even over jokes about washboard abs that look as if they were carrying a couple of loads of laundry and a sublimely loony neighborhood cocktail party in which the benumbed Nora stares into a cheese plate seemingly on the brink of paralysis and the passive Jerry confides to a corner an S&M daydream involving a naked dentist and an orgasm of hummingbirds.
With regard to the wacky humor that pervades Jasper Lake: no one is asking Kuntz to become David Lynch. The combination of sit-com and Psycho is what makes his sensibility unique. But some of the jokes in Jasper Lake seem like archly Kuntzian flotsam and jetsam drawing us out of a refreshingly un-spelled-out tale of old sorrows translated into dysfunction deeper than words. We’re told that jasper is a kind of quartz found at the bottom of rivers and lakes that’s a symbol of healing. A chunk gets ritually passed on here, but in Jasper Lake, the only way to heal seems to be to put oneself beyond healing.
New York–based director Douglas Mercer helms an at once formal and surreal staging that, abetted by Haddon Kime’s sound design, maintains the uncomfortable feeling of the play even when Jennifer Burke’s Deb is behaving like a mad cheerleader in a morgue. Although funny, this cartoon bull with a china collection is overwritten and overplayed given the enigmatic oddness of what else is in the water. Because Jasper Lake has been entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (Kuntz is a master’s candidate in BU’s graduate playwriting program as well as a Huntington Playwriting Fellow), the piece had to be cast with non-Equity actors. They acquit themselves well, especially BU senior acting major Amanda Sywak, who as Jennifer mixes ache into pert arbitrariness as surely as her precocious character might concoct a cocktail
Through A Pond Darkly
Reviewed by Beverly Creasey for Theater Mirror
John “Ingmar Bergman” Kuntz has written a murky mystery about a lake which inspires the worst in human behavior. JASPER LAKE may look like paradise to an outsider but, like Peyton Place just up the road a piece, it would seem to provoke murder, incest, suicide, adultery and racism. Everything but the kitchen sink pops up in Kuntz’s tragi-comic (not enough of the comic for my taste) slice of affluent Americana.
I stand corrected. The kitchen sink stands center stage: Actually, it’s a gleaming porcelain tub in Eric Allgeir’s spare set. The creepy goings-on are intriguing but I wasn’t sure who murdered whom or even if there was a murder. I even assumed (incorrectly?) that the teenage girl in the tub was the grownup with slashed wrists. Maybe it’s a memory play and everyone is already dead, a la George Romero. Maybe Kuntz wants to keep us in the dark.
Douglas Mercer’s cast keeps the mystery afloat, with standout performances from Amanda Sywak and Eduoard Tournier as the troubled teens and from Eric Gould as the hilarious hitchhiker Sarah Abrams adopts as a soulmate. Haddon Kime’s gushes, gurgles and gasps gave me the chills and Kuntz’s sadistic view of lake shore living will have me thinking twice about where to vacation next summer.
To 2003 season reviews - Monticel', Haymarket, Pictures of Patty Hearst >