| Current Season | Past Shows | In The News | Company | Staff | Support | Links | Contact Us |
 Home |
|
20082007200620052004200320022000-20011999-2000 |
|
|
|
|
"Tilt Angel" soars at NJ
Rep in Long Branch
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 10/18/05BY TOM CHESEK Strong cast |
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 |
Tilt Angel  Reginald Metcalf and Ames Adamson At the beginning of Dan Dietz's play Tilt Angel, now receiving its professional premiere, Lois (Andrea Gallo), a middle aged woman, falls gracefully though a blue sky toward earth. She is the victim of a mid-air plane crash. Later in the play, she will quite literally transubstantiate herself as a vegetable garden for Ollie (Ian August), her hungry mentally impaired 21 year-old agoraphobic son, who is helping her to go peacefully into the afterlife. This is done with the help of a blues-singing Angel Bones (Reginald Metcalf), apparently a winged half angel/airlines pilot with goggles. There is no help forthcoming from Red (Ames Adamson), Ollie' s resentful, indifferent father who refuses to claim the ashes. In Cailin Heffernan's cleverly surreal staging of this play, described by the author as "a deadpan Tennessee Fairy Tale," worlds as well as the members of a working class family collide. In actuality, Tilt Angel appears to be an impressionistic dark comedy in which the skewed perceptions of a socially disenfranchised young man are given a vivid reality. In this very imaginatively conceived yet unsettling play, we are privy to Ollie's skewed world, notably his home comprised of disquieting distortions and expectations. Lois had taken about all she could from Red, a callous, crude 3rd generation owner of an auto body repair shop in East Tennessee. She had also done as much as she could for the pathetically limited Ollie, who hasn't left the house in 9 years. Lois, who finally made up her mind to leave them both and begin a new life that includes getting a college education, took the fateful airplane ride and died. At home, the simple-minded Ollie, who likes to dance while doing the housework and laundry, keeps getting calls from "an airlines guy" for someone to claim Lois's remains. Ollie's pleas to the insensitive Red, who barely acknowledges Ollie's existence, only spark Red's fury which he takes out mostly on the metal parts of cars. Red has been estranged from his son ever since an accident occurred years ago in the body shop causing the loss of his arm, but continues to do his repairs with the help of a prosthetic pincer-type apparatus controlled by a harness he wears over his shoulders. Blaming Ollie for the accident, Red has left Ollie to fend for himself. Without Red's help to retrieve Lois' remains, Ollie deals with the problem in the only way he knows: by seeking help from the angel pilot. As both Ollie and Red wrestle with their grief through flashbacks and metaphysical communication, Lois's presence asserts itself as a soul needing closure. Ollie's anxieties about his mother's burial takes him to such abstracted places as inside the telephone lines, the ethereal world and eventually into the fearsome underworld, while Red's unwillingness to claim the body or deal with his son's presence provokes a rather unexpected resolve. Trying to analyze this play may not prove as fruitful as the experiencing of it. Heffernan's direction appears to be in complete accord with the playwright's eerily dramatic contours. And the performances are effective in their eccentricity without being cartoons. August creates a rather poignant portrait of Ollie, who, despite being a social outcast and a failure in his father's eyes, is determined to find a way to help his mother go peacefully into the after-life. Adamson is terrific as the rage and resentment-propelled Red whose life is shattered by the accident and a disintegrating marriage. There is a disarming charm to Gallo's performance as Lois, a woman who, soon after she is married and has done all she can to nurture and protect Ollie, discovers her own potential and seeks out a new life. And perhaps capturing the essence of the ethereal most wittily is Reginald Metcalf, as the lyrical Angel Bones. Praise to the wittily integrated songs and lyrics, assumedly the creation of award-winning Texas-based playwright Dietz, who may have mixed more grit (or is its grits?) into his Southern Gothic comical-tragedy than some people will cotton to. But the experience was refreshingly haunting (seems just right for Halloween). Production values are imaginative. Randy Lee Hartwig and Matthew R. Campbell are both credited with the expressionistic set (impressively lighted by designer Jill Nagle) that provides a virtual collage of various places in and out of this world. Costumer Patricia E. Doherty has to be praised for creating Lois' vegetable garden costume that proves to be as incredible as it is edible. |
| REVIEW OF TILT ANGEL
by Gary Wien Upstage Magazine  (LONG BRANCH, NJ) October
15, 2005 -- This isn't your father's family drama, that's for sure. There
really are maniacial vegetables...
New Jersey Repertory Company's latest production is Tilt Angel by Dan Dietz, a modern day family drama told as a fairy tale. It's wildly entertaining, a bit baffling, and rather humorous throughout. It is also the best collection of actors I've ever seen on the NJ Rep stage. Ames Adamson (Red) and Ian August (Ollie) are NJ Rep veterans who star as father and son. Ames does a wonderful job as a red neck body shop worker who's abusive streak has decimated his family. Ian plays Ollie, an autistic child of 21, who gives Forrest Gump a run for his money. He is a simply loveable character performed masterfully by August. Ollie hasn't left the house in nine years, spends all day cleaning and misses his mother terribly. Together they are as far apart as a father and son could be. Andrea Gallo (Lois) plays Ollie's mother who died in a plane crash as she was leaving her husband. After spending years home-schooling her son, she realized she had a thirst for knowledge and decided to leave for college. She knew that her husband would never understand. Reginald Metcalf (Angel Bones) is the angel that seeks to unite the family and her ashes (which were never claimed yet). Reginald adds a spiritual feel to the play with several bluesy, soulful acapella numbers. His costume reminds me of someone from the sixties film, Barbarella - but he manages to make it look dignified nonetheless. The play revolves around the plane crash and how their family was breaking apart long before the crash took place. Flashback scenes reveal Lois trying to explain why she needed to move on. "If I wasn't going to make it with you, I was going to make it with Nietzsche... with Proust... with Kant," she says. His reply, "You trying to tell me you're a lesbian now?" One-liners are mixed in with serious matter as Dietz succeeds in transporting the audience into a fantasy world. Credit goes to the set designers (Randy Lee Hartwig and Matthew R. Campbell) who have created a scene out of "Alice in Wonderland". It is a set that extends into the audience space and peaks your interest because every part is used - sometimes in crazy ways and sometimes in ways that will totally surprise you. The play contains adult language, but doesn't abuse it. All in all, it's a hilarious look at a Tennessee house gone amuck. Somehow I get the feeling that Dan Dietz was the type of guy who never listened when they said everything's already been written. This play is as original as they come! Dietz has done something rare - he has created a fine drama wrapped in fantasy. It's doubtful you'll be prepared for what happens when her ashes are returned to the family. Let's just say that by the time that happens you'll be so wrapped up into this fantasy world that you'll believe anything. So just sit back and enjoy the ride. It's a good one!  |
|
All Over the Map: Finn in the Underworld in San Francisco and Tilt Angel in Long Branch, NJ. Plus: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival wraps up its 70th season
Such stage directions can strike fear into the hearts of theater companies, but they certainly caught the attention of New Jersey Repertory, which is presenting Tilt Angel. Dietz's lush style also hooked the Salvage Vanguard Theatre in his hometown of Austin, Texas, with which he often works. "[These companies] like nothing better than to take a play that seems impossible to stage, and stage it," says Dietz, who acknowledges that finding directors intrepid enough to do them is a daunting task. "When I find a director who really 'gets' my voice," he says, "I really cling to that person." Dietz partly developed his quirky style while writing English translations of Japanese animated films for ADD, the largest distributor of anime in North America. "I was really into anime in my teens and early 20s because I was just fascinated by its storytelling traditions, as well as the idea of fusing man and machine and the high-octane action sequences," he says. His favorite anime series that he's worked on is Dai-Guard -- about a team of hapless office workers forced to commandeer a giant robot to save the world -- which ran here briefly on the Cartoon Network. His playwriting career began to take off after he submitted one of his short works to the Humana Festival on a teacher's recommendation to his graduating class. ("She said, 'Someone's bad play is going to win this contest; it might as well be your bad play.' ") Like most emerging playwrights, Dietz constantly submits scripts to theaters around the country. He remarks: "Those two things, really working on my voice and the pieces I was writing and being brave or stupid enough to spend all that money on postage, have seemed to work for me." For a time, Dietz worked with an underground theatrical society known as RAT, a collective so shadowy that it never even defined its acronym. "It sort of envisioned this idea of theaters that were willing to take risks and do a lot with a little," he explains. Most of RAT's members were small companies but, according to Dietz, a few of them tried to bring their aesthetic to the mainstream. "As the audiences for larger theaters start to dwindle, which they are, my hope is that those theaters will find themselves in a position where they need to take a risk," Dietz says. "That's my hope, anyway." |
"TILT" A WHIRL
A "blues-infused fairy tale" bows at NJ Rep Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 10/14/05BY TOM CHESEKCORRESPONDENT
From "Hamlet" to "Hairspray," "Medea" to Miller, domestic dysfunction
remains a thematic stage staple that continues to pique audience interest
and paint balance sheets black. After all, what better way to escape
the petty pyrotechnics and molehill melodrama of one's own homelife
than with a couple of hours spent literally looking down upon some
angst-infested brood of flustered and frustrated family members, encapsulated
like a globeful of sea monkeys on a set that's equal parts living room
and lock-up? |
REVIEWAbsolutely, Mr. Klonsky? Positively, Mr. Schwartz
Published in the Asbury Park Press 08/31/05BY TOM CHESEK
Despite the audible rimshots, it wasn't all fun and games for poet and essayist Milton Klonsky in the summer of 1966 a mean season wherein he struggled to find his own voice as a writer, even while he played self-appointed guardian to the man who had given him his first professional break, the legendary literary figure Delmore Schwartz. The very untidy relationship between these two real-life writers the insults and inspirations, the fistfights and forgiveness, the hugs as well as the drugs forms the basis for Romulus Linney's play bearing their names. The acclaimed playwright, himself a friend of Klonsky's in the writer's later years, was on hand Saturday night for the opening of a major new production of his work at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch. New York setting Recalling both the many sublevels of Manhattan's hollowed-out
island as well as Dante's various circles of hell, the multitiered
set design by Jessica Parks is a neon-graveyard evocation of New
York's jazz-age glory days, filtered through the smoggy prism of
the late '60s. It's the perfect place for two talented players
to skip across time and space, from the blazing energy of 1940s
Greenwich Village to a chilly bench in Bryant Park. |
A CurtainUp Review
Klonsky and Schwartz
It isn't surprising that Romulus Linney's aggressively schizophrenic
play about Delmore Schwartz opens in a 1966 mental ward at New York's
Bellevue Hospital. The noted American poet has been brought there
for observation by the police after he has assaulted a couple on
a Manhattan street. The obviously delusional Schwartz (John Fitzgibbon)
is visited by his friend Milton Klonsky (David Volin), the skilled
essayist to whom he has long been a mentor.
The play focuses on Schwartz' declining sanity after he has left his job at Syracuse University to write poetry and live in New York City. Imagining that his wife was stolen by Nelson Rockefeller and believing he was told what to do by Dybbuks (plural), Schwartz is nevertheless urged by Klonsky to think rationally, to recall his childhood as the son of irrational unhappily married Romanian immigrants. Schwartz's mental instability is dramatized in fits and starts following his release from Bellevue as a kind of neurotic vaudeville act (shades of Smith and Dale on speed) as the two writers review the high and low points of their tight but testy relationship. The fast staccato paced dialogue is unleashed by the manically envious Klonsky and the manically depressive Schwartz in a lyrical point counter point style. Each man is afforded his own time in the spotlight, each confronted by his own demons. Their unlikely friendship began after Klonsky has submitted a poem in a contest judged by an expectedly condescending Schwartz. As egomaniacal as he was brilliant, Schwartz's influence on the 10 years younger Klonsky proved profound, even as it served to block Klonsky's creative flow ("You think any nutball idea that comes into your head is poetry and you can't tell the difference.") The play moves speedily through brief scenes that focus more on the men's r emotional instability than on their intellectual gifts. Both marry and divorce, Schwartz twice. As they concede in concert: "Why should I make one Jewish girl miserable when I can make a hundred shicksas happy." Although he doesn't get the opportunity to rant and rave like his co-star, Volin is impressive as the more conventionally dysfunctional Klonsky, whose preoccupation with horse racing and womanizing may also have led to the artistic paralysis that consumed him during his friendship with Schwartz. When you have friends like Schwartz who tells him, "You're just a prick, posing as a poet," you don't need a bad review from a literary critic. Fitzgibbon has the tougher assignment as he has been apparently encouraged by director Suzanne Barabas to enforce and validate Schwartz's nutty behavior (that includes drunken binges and waving a loaded gun around in Bryant Park), with an excess of flailing hands and nervous body tics. One can't say that Fitzgibbon isn't acting up a storm. Various locales are simply established within Jessica Parks' setting featuring a neon-lit cityscape. The quirky structure of the dialogue, some of it almost singspiel in delivery suggests that Linney sees his play as a lyrical convergence of these commiserating but creative poet/writers. The delivery is sharp, but it eventually grows wearisome. Although he always wanted to write like Schwartz but couldn't, Klonsky was a friend to the end of Schwartz's life. When Schwartz was found dead, destitute and alone in a rat trap of a hotel room, it was Klonsky who came to the morgue to identify him. Though Linney maintained a friendship with Klonsky during the last ten years of Schwartz's life he maintains that Klonsky never once talked about Schwartz, even after his death. Following Schwartz's death, Klonsky began writing with a renewed intensity. One can see the motivation behind Linney's play and find it compelling if also slightly unnerving. |
Klonsky and Schwartz It is 1966. Little-known, little-published poet Milton Klonsky has been contacted by the National Endowment for the Arts. It seems that the Endowment has selected his friend and mentor, the noted American poet Delmore Schwartz for an award and grant, and is trying to locate him. Klonsky knows exactly where Schwartz is. In fact, in about an hour and a quarter at the conclusion of Romulus Linney's new one-act, two-character play, Klonsky and Schwartz, Klonsky will share this terrible knowledge with us. However, first Klonsky will tell us about their twenty-five year relationship and the commonalities in their backgrounds which helped to bind them together.
 David Volin and John FitzGibbon Linney's play is about many things. The identity problems of first generation American who love their immigrant parents, but are ashamed of their accents and patterns of speech. The pain and loneliness which can arise from being turned out by a spouse with whom one remains in love. The anguish and difficulty of coping with and channeling creative genius. However, in order to best understand and enjoy Klonsky and Schwartz pay close attention to the title. Going in, one naturally expects to see a play about the major poet, Schwartz, with the little known Klonsky providing a unique perspective regarding him. The opening gambit, the NEA search for Schwartz, re-enforces this view. As the play develops, it is only a little more even-handed in its focus. However, in the end, it may well dawn upon you that it is with good reason (beyond it being possibly more euphonious) that Klonsky's name precedes Schwartz in the play's title. It seems that foremost, Linney is concerned with the deleterious effect that the charming and brilliant, yet cruelly self centered and paranoid Schwartz had on the underachieving and insecure, yet talented and loyal Klonsky (yet, as Schwartz states in the course of the play, if Klonsky's name were to survive over time, it would be because of Klonsky's relationship to him). Although not known to a wide public (most articles note that he is the father of actress Laura Linney), author Romulus Linney is one of America's most distinguished playwrights. Linney has authored over twenty full-length plays, several short plays, and three novels. He has taught playwriting at Columbia (where he chaired the MFA Playwriting program), Princeton, Penn and the Yale School of Drama. Currently, Linney is a Professor of Playwriting in the Actors Studio MFA program at the New School. His highly regarded work covers subject matter with a wide global expanse and different historic eras. Still the Madison, Tennessee and Boone, North Carolina (where several of his plays have set) reared Linney is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. So who would have thought that Linney would have written a play in which his characters sometimes speak in the rhythms of such ethnic comic vaudevillians as Smith and Dale? Furthermore, throughout the play, the expressions and argot, and concerns of his protagonists, unerringly reflect speech and attitudes common to mid-twentieth century New York Jewish intellectuals. Of course, Linney has been intimate with such individuals, but his ear for their speech and empathy with them is as admirable as it is remarkable. Although his tale is a cautionary one, the style in which he tells it along with his inclusion of some sharp excerpts from the pen of Delmore Schwartz, keeps things entertaining. David Volin and John FitzGibbon fully embody Linney's portrait of Milton Klonsky and Delmore Schwartz. Volin's persona conveys likeability, kindness, enough smarts to kind to hold his own with Schwartz, and a vulnerability which renders him ineffective. FitzGibbon combines considerable charm with the bullying dominance and a very credible paranoid madness. Together, they deliver Linney's rapid fire, interlaced dialogue with the practiced ease of long time partners. Much credit for the smooth integration of the work of Volin and FitzGibbon is due to NJ Rep Artistic Director SuzAnne Barabas, who has directed the play with skill and affection. Scenic Designer Jessica Parks has designed an impressionistic set with cutouts of New York City landmarks (including evocative signs for Klonsky and Schwartz restaurant hangouts, Katz's and the Automat) which nicely complement the play. Although Linney has fictionalized any number of details, it is essential truths which Klonsky and Schwartz illuminates. |
 (LONG BRANCH) - I've often wondered what it must have been like to be among the first audiences to see a Samuel Beckett play. Did the people at the early showings of "Waiting For Godot" really know they were watching history? Did they revel in the confusion? Were they laughing incredibly at the jokes? Or did the play simply sail over their heads, leaving them perplexed as to what they had just witnessed. Was it art? Madness? Or did they walk out muttering what the hell was that?' As I watched the New Jersey premiere of Klonsky and Schwartz by Romulus Linney, I felt as if I was among the crowds at an early Beckett performance. And the experience was thrilling. Klonsky and Schwartz is a roller-coaster ride of nonsense and true meaning rolled into one. It tells the tale of Milton Klonsky, a struggling writer and Delmore Schwartz, a brilliant poet who becomes his friend. The play is based on the true story of the two artists who lived in New York City during the 1960s. Klonsky (played by David Volin) is haunted by the thought that he will only be remembered for being a friend of Schwartz (played by John Fitzgibbon) - a thought driven into his subconscious by Schwartz repeatedly. Klonsky finds himself constantly in a state of rewriting his work over and over. Nothing is ever good enough to be deemed finished - or good enough to present to Schwartz for his approval. SuzAnne Barabas, the Artistic Director of the New Jersey Repertory Company, is the director of this production. She has put together a show that just might be one of the fastest paced productions I have ever seen. Between the pace of the play, the language of the artists (including moments of poetry recited throughout) and splashes of music, the play takes on the appearance of a beatnik poem. "I think it's in the writing," explained SuzAnne Barabas. "It leads us there. It's the type of play that you should see a few times and you'll get something different out of it each time. The first time you kind of go along for the ride and then when you see it again you can begin picking out things because it's not a linear play. And yet there is a story that does have linear movement. We've tried to make it as accessible as possible. "When I first read it I thought the payoff was amazing. I didn't know who Klonsky or Schwartz were. I was just so moved by the experience and the human relationship of the two men - it didn't have anything to do with the poetry. The poetry is glorious, but it was the relationship of these two men of 25 years and the payoff at the end, which was very moving to me." The play was obviously very moving to her husband, Gabor Barabas as well. Prior to the performance, he told of his childhood in Hungary and how he developed his love for poetry. That love and hunger for words was the perfect introduction to the play. We've included an excerpt here. The play succeeds on many levels and the two actors do a wonderful job. Romulus Linney, a two-time Obie Award winner, has come up with another brilliant work. If you like theatre to challenge you, you'll love Klonsky and Schwartz. |
NOT STARSKY AND HUTCH
Tale-of-two-scribes "Klonsky and Schwartz" premieres at NJ Rep Published in the Asbury Park Press 08/26/05BY TOM CHESEK It's an age-old dramatic premise: the intellectual and emotional tug-of-war between mentor and protege, with the iconic hero ultimately revealed as a very flawed, very human being. In the two-character play now onstage at New Jersey Repertory Company, the mentor has pretty much bottomed out by the time the curtain goes up and it's the protege who assumes the leadership role as the older, more famous figure spirals into the closing act of a lost life. While the title might bring to mind a pair of polyester-age TV cops, "Klonsky and Schwartz" promises to make up for a distinct lack of airborne car chases with snapshots of a turbulent relationship between two writers each speeding his way along a physical and spiritual journey of his own. It's that relationship between the two (real-life) literary figures that forms the basis of Romulus Linney's script a story charged with the author's own personal connection to one of the principals. The "Schwartz" in question is the legendary scribe Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), a poet, prose artist and editor known as much for his own works ("In Dreams Begin Responsibilities") as he is for the posthumous tribute paid him by people from Saul Bellow ("Humboldt's Gift") to Lou Reed ("My House"). The other half of the play's equation is Milton Klonsky. A poet and scholar of considerable talent, he's a guy who also had the "genius" tag applied to him in his time albeit a man whose reputation lacked the rock star mystique that the burned-out Schwartz would accrue in the decades after his passing. That the name Delmore Schwartz retains a certain undeniable cachet with artistic types became evident when the playwright was approached by TV star Chris Noth (of "Law & Order" and "Sex and the City" fame) to develop a stage project based on Schwartz's life. In the course of his research, Linney (whose daughter is screen actress Laura Linney) stumbled upon an astounding fact: His own good friend Milton Klonsky had been Schwartz's closest confidante in his final days to the point of having been the one to identify Schwartz's corpse at the city morgue following the writer's death at a local transient hotel. "I found to my surprise that the man who was closest to him when he died had been a good friend to me in the last 10 years of his life," Linney recalled in an interview from a few years back. "Yet after Delmore died, Milton never talked about him." Characterizing his late friend as "a very nurturing person, even though he was disappointed in his literary accomplishments," Linney set about crafting a theatrical chamber piece that honors the life and legacy of Klonsky as it examines the last days of Schwartz a man who, as we meet him, has quit his academic job to drink, ingest barbituates and, hopefully, compose the most scintillating poetry of his once-stellar career. Kicking around the bars, Automats and institutions of downtown Manhattan in the summer of 1966, the two men fight (to the extent that most productions have required the services of a fight choreographer), bond, reference pop-culture touchstones and work to dispel the demons that dog them. Following a 2002 premiere in Connecticut (with Noth in the part of Schwartz), the play has appeared in professional productions on both coasts, and arrives at NJ Rep's Lumia Theatre in Long Branch for a New Jersey premiere engagement that opens Saturday night, following preview performances that continue at 8 today. Directed by NJ Rep co-founder SuzAnne Barabas, the show stars a pair of actors with an impressive list of credentials on Shore area stages. As Schwartz, NJ Rep regular John FitzGibbon promises to bring some of the powerful stuff that informed his role as a washed-up alcoholic professor in "Winterizing the Summer House" a couple of seasons back. David Volin, whose resume includes a fine turn as Bottom in "Midsummer Night's Dream" at Holmdel Theatre Company, tackles the part of Klonsky after a busy summer spent with Monmouth University's Shadow Lawn Stage series in West Long Branch. |
Driven actor racking up miles, roles
NJ Rep show is Volin's 6th this year in his home
state
Friday, August 19, 2005
BY PETER FILICHIA
David Volin marks his sixth Garden State show of 2005 on Thursday, when he opens in "Klonsky and Schwartz" at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch. "I'm racking up thousands of miles on my car," the 39-year-old Tenafly native and resident says. Volin feels the commuting is worth it to play Milton Klonsky (1921-81) -- "a poet, a writer and a recluse when he wasn't a womanizer. Very little is written about him." All of Klonsky's books -- including the well-received "The Fabulous Ego" (1974), which dealt with the corruption of power -- are out of print. "Klonsky wrote poems that, he admitted, nobody understood but him," Volin says. "Maybe he felt that if you can't understand a piece of writing, you really can't say if it's bad or good." The play by Romulus Linney, father of actor Laura Linney, concerns Klonsky's relationship with Delmore Schwartz (1913-66) -- also a poet, writer, recluse and womanizer, though a far more famous one. "He was the only person Klonsky would let judge him, even though Schwartz was often uncomplimentary. In fact, they met when Schwartz was judging him in a poetry contest," Volin says. The play takes place in 1966. The National Endowment for the Arts is trying to find Schwartz to give him an award and can't find him. They finally do, thanks to Klonsky. "Klonsky embraced his poverty," Volin says. "He held it up as a shield to anyone who said he wasn't successful. 'No,' he said, 'I am writing. What I do isn't business, but art.' And I relate to that." Between 1993 and 1999, Volin was working in a low-level job for a consulting firm. By night, he would act with his own New York troupe, The White Buffalo Theatre Company. ("The great thing about working in an office is that you can Xerox scripts for free.") When the company shut down, Volin went for broke. He gave up his day job, moved back to Tenafly and concentrated on acting. He has worked steadily ever since. "I'm my own publicist-manager-agent, always checking to see who needs an actor at what theater. That's led to a lot of repeat work. So many theaters say, 'We'd like you to do this play because we know you can.'" After he appeared at New Jersey Rep in "Raft of the Medusa" in 2001 and "The Laramie Project" in 2002, SuzAnne Barabas, the theater's artistic director -- and the director of "Klonsky and Schwartz" -- decided that Volin was her man. He'll be busy until October, which precludes his doing "Art" at the Women's Theater Company in Wayne, where he played an obsessed Mae West fan in "Dirty Blonde" in January. In March, he was at Tri-State Actors Theatre in Sussex, playing Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- "which means playing part-animal, part- human," he says, before noting that he got to play an entire animal in "Go, Dog! Go!" at The Growing Stage in Netcong. "As emcee," he says, "I was the only dog to have lines." This summer at Shadow Lawn Stage in West Long Branch, he was in Steve Martin's "The Underpants" as the mortified husband. As soon as it closed, Volin grew six weeks' worth of beard to play a 70-year-old judge in Jules Feiffer's "Little Murders." Volin points out that though Feiffer had written the judge for the play's original 1967 production, he dropped him just before the Broadway premiere. "I'm glad he put him back." |
|
Drama depicts three ages of 'Innocence'
Published in the Asbury Park Press 07/13/05BY TOM CHESEK
Francie (or Frances or even Francesca, as she's variously branded throughout) could be commenting upon the fact that the dramatic peaks of her family's history the births, the deaths, the challenges of forging a new life in a strange place mostly occur offstage, or in a time frame separate from that in which the characters are interacting. Unseen, too, are the men who figure prominently in Francie's life her husband, her neighborhood grocer Papa, her seaman brother Johnny although these absent characters are vividly invoked at times through reminiscence and a bit of playful imitation. As it turns out, much of "A Child's Guide" revolves around what's not there the missing persons, misplaced objects and unspoken secrets taking center-stage prominence over the more mundane details of what at first glance appears to be a largely uneventful life. What we do have on display (in a production directed by NJ Rep regular Dana Benningfield) are snapshots of a 50-year span in the life of a woman who's spent a lot of time "praying that God doesn't lose interest in me" a woman who comes late to the realization that it's impossible to make it through the present while living in the past. The Brooklyn-born Sessa's script opens in the wartime summer of 1944, with Francie and her sisters Catherine (Corey Tazmania) and Marion (Deborah Baum) in tentative mourning over brother Johnny, gone missing from the naval vessel on which he was stationed. Adding to the anxiety is the fact that Francie's beau also is off to fight the good war and assuming a bizarre prominence is the apparent loss of a glass crystal decoration from a table lamp, an object variously described as a "prism" and a "star." Then again, certain objects take on a special significance in this play, tinged as it is with a realism that's distinctly more magical than matter-of-fact. The family dinner table is said to possess a soul, celery plays a recurring role in the proceedings and the eventual rediscovery of the glass "star" treats the bargain-store bauble with the deference normally granted some talisman out of Tolkien. A saga of bonds In fact, you'd do well to check all preconceptions of what this
play is all about at the door. Playwright Sessa has cited the script
as "autobiographical" in its origin with his own Italian-American
family members, but if you're anticipating a lot of caricature "fuhgeddaboutit" accents
and expecting the action to be punctuated by busy kitchen scenes,
then get thee instead to a venue that's showing "The Godfather's
Meshuggenah Wedding." While the actresses occasionally affect a
Lawn Guyland inflection or two and Papa Luigi hovers just this
side of tangibility, it's first and foremost a saga of bonds that
can never be severed of words and deeds that resonate across
time, of ordinary lives that have a profound influence. |
NEW YORK TIMES THEATER REVIEW THE New Jersey Repertory Company may never win the Tony Award for regional theater, but it deserves some kind of prize for sheer unpredictability. Its last show here, ''Ten Percent of Molly Snyder,'' was as whacked-out a comedy as New Jersey is likely to see this year. But its new show, ''A Child's Guide to Innocence'' by Vincent Sessa, is as delicate and nuanced a drama as you'll find, its three actresses telling a sublime intergenerational tale beautifully. At the center of it is Catherine Eaton as Frances, whom we first meet in Brooklyn in 1944. She is the oldest of three sisters, and of course it is wartime and there is a brother overseas. Corey Tazmania and Deborah Baum play Frances' sisters in the opening vignette, but by the final segment of Mr. Sessa's intriguingly structured triptych they are playing her grandchildren, and it is 1995. We don't see much of Frances' life over this 51-year span -- the play's middle segment is set in 1975 -- but somehow by the end we know a lot about her, and about those she loved and lost. Mr. Sessa's inspired stroke is to tackle almost nothing head-on. Indeed, it takes a while in the opening segment for a story to catch hold -- the sisters are so chirpy (far chirpier, in fact, than any real sisters would be) that they're hard to listen to. Gradually, though, it sinks in that their brother is missing in action and what we're seeing is their collective defense mechanism; each copes with the news differently. Even so, though, Mr. Sessa stays away from anything overt; the first segment remains a collection of fragments. It's a deliberate device and an effective one; not until 31 years later, in a harrowing, heartbreaking monologue by Ms. Eaton midway through the play, does he let all the pieces coalesce, and the waiting makes the moment all the more powerful. ''A Child's Guide'' becomes irritatingly New Age-y at times (''I think a table has a soul when a family sits at it''), and the final segment, with its ''greatest generation'' references and Frances in a coma, feels a bit shopworn. But in general Mr. Sessa shows great restraint, as does the director, Dana Benningfield; they don't try to do too much with the story, and thereby do quite a lot. It's a lovely portrait of how ordinary lives can be defined by a few pivotal moments, of how the world's great events can have a profound impact at a very small, personal level. ''A Child's Guide to Innocence'' continues through Aug. 14 at the New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch, (732)229-3166, www.njrep.org. |
This review was broadcast live on July 14th, 2005 In the Sicilian-American, Brooklyn household of 1944 that Vincent Sessa transports us to, something is always left on the dinner table. The spirits of the people who sit there over the years are infused into its very wood, animating it -- if you will. So you leave a bit of food for the table. I noticed an audience member nod at this. But the few pieces of fruit that can be spared for this ritual are covered. Sessa's character explains, "Nothing that people want should be seen all of the time." Indeed Sessa's play, A Child's Guide to Innocence, is run through with themes of anticipation, yearning, longing, joy deferred and innocence lost. And yet there is a delicious taste to this hunger unrequited. He conjures at times truths, half-truths and downright superstitions so distantly familiar that their sudden recollection can cause one to physically ache. Sessa also touches on the metaphysical element that exists in every period, present in the everyday as well as the profound. Francie, the eldest sister in the first act played by Catherine Eaton, declares, "Something is happening to us -- somewhere else." And we believe her feeling is palpable. That we can be affected by the actions of others somewhere else acting in our name is a powerful theme. One can't help but draw parallels between the World War whose scars our three principals carry through three generations and the Iraq War we find ourselves in now. Just as the characters strive to retain -- or feign -- their innocence about the war, because knowledge would carry responsibility maybe even complicity, we can't help but make comparisons between Mr. Sessa's quote-unquote just war and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. That we can affect and be affected by actions of others near or far is a tantalizing concept. Marion, played by Deborah Baum, says, "Mama is ready to go now. I hear her. She has a different walk when she holds her handbag." We are affected consciously or unconsciously by even the most subtle of actions. Perhaps it is not the recognition of how buried in our pasts the experiences are that Mr. Sessa resurrects for us, but how innocent we were when we first had them. And it is the interplay between knowing and not knowing and the fear that occupies both states that is the central theme of Mr. Sessa's excellent play. Corey Tazmania, as Catherine, Joan and Julia, has exquisite comic timing. All three actors are flawless. Dana Benningfield does an excellent job of direction. One suggestion: since the three actors play numerous characters -- with no intermission, some cues -- black outs between acts, changes in dress or hairdos might smooth these transitions a bit. For tickets call 732-229-3166 or call to win a pair of tickets now. Vincent Sessa has accepted our invitation to join us in the studio very soon, hopefully with Dana Benningfield. And the cast and I discussed doing a radio drama -- they're very excited about the prospect... Maureen Nevin |
Review: A Child's Guide To Innocence  In case you're familiar with NJ Rep (New Jersey Repertory), it's a wonderful theatre company located in downtown Long Branch. It uses Equity actors - sometimes well known, sometimes not so well known - but it is not an experimental theatre. It's a theatre that prides itself of presenting NEW work. In fact, the overwhelming majority of productions through the company's seven years have been world premieres. Some of those works have been outstanding, some have needed a little polishing, and some have already moved on to many more productions across the world. But theatres like NJ Rep are where these works get a chance to be performed in front of an audience. And, every now and then you get a glimpse of brillance from an emerging playwright. Last Saturday night, I saw such brilliance from Vincent Sessa. I can't say that "A Child's Guide to Innocence" is a perfect play. The production had many flaws, but the final two scenes were as good as any American drama I've seen in the past decade. So good, in fact, that it almost makes you forget about the problems that marred the production in the beginning. The play starts out telling the story of three sisters from Brooklyn who are awaiting their brother's return from World War II. One of the sisters (Francie) is also awaiting the return of a soldier she has fallen in love with. As the play progresses we follow Francie's life through the next fifty-odd years with stops in 1975 and 1995. It's a remarkably well written look at how the generations change within a family as we are introduced to Francie's daughters and later her granddaughters. "A Child's Guide to Innocence" is held together with a secret that Francie kept to herself throughout her life until revealing to her children one day. It's a secret that will most likely take everybody by surprise and plays a significant role in shaping her life. The little things in life - like family secrets and the bond between family members - are a major part in Sessa's creation. The final two scenes are so good that it makes me yearn to see a slight rewrite of the first scene to take this production to the level it deserves. Sessa tries too hard to make us like three sisters (two of which we will not see again) to develop the idea of the family tree. As the trio waits for news of their brother the conversation simply rambles back and forth. The effect is that while the sisters are waiting for any news, the audience begins to wait for something new to happen. Waiting is very difficult to show on stage and Sessa needs to trim some of the early pages to get the story moving a bit quicker. The early one-liners almost make it seem like a drama that wishes to be a comedy. But once the story is allowed to breathe, it is a breathtaking dramatic piece. The play mixes in ideas about family and religion amidst the hopes and dreams of the sisters. Francie's big dream is to be a good housewife - and Sessa shows how even that dream is much bigger than we ever imagine. Francie touches so many lives through one lifetime that it makes you wonder who are the lives that you yourself may have changed. One flaw in this production was a rather poor selection of accents from the sisters. They sound nothing like first generation Italian-Americans or even resemble the accents one hears in Brooklyn. This wouldn't be so bad in many parts of the country, but in an area where so many people are from New York City - it becomes very noticeable. All in all, it is refreshing to see playwrights still digging deep into their soul to produce dramatic works like "A Child's Guide To Innocence". Even more refreshing is to see theatres like NJ Rep continue to take chances and succeed more often than not. You can catch "A Child's Guide To Innocence" at NJ Rep Theatre in Long Branch until August 13th. |
THEATER: OUT OF THE ORDINARY
"A Child's Guide to Innocence" gives women a positive voicePublished in the Asbury Park Press 07/8/05BY MICHAEL KAABE
"I like to wear many creative hats," explained Benningfield, originally from Texas. As an actress, she has appeared in several NJ Rep productions, including Mike Folie's "Lemonade." As a literary manager, Benningfield assists with the reading and assessment of original scripts that are considered for staging by NJ Rep. While reading through the many submissions the troupe receives, Benningfield came across a drama by Vincent Sessa called "A Child's Guide to Innocence." "The play is about a series of ordinary women who can make an extraordinary difference in the lives of people around them, not necessarily by doing extraordinary things," Benningfield said. Having taken an interest in directing, and already having a directing credit at NJ Rep, Benningfield is making her directing debut with "A Child's Guide." The story originated for Sessa as an autobiographical piece, said Benningfield, who believes her experiences as an actress have influenced her in developing the desire to direct. "I found that I was focused on how to present a story theatrically, and dramatically in terms of seeing it onstage and not just being about the research of the piece or writing revisions," she said. "My contributions to the plays were really becoming about putting the play on its feet and cutting lines that I felt . . . you don't have to tell an audience." With this play in particular, Benningfield has felt the artistic scheme with the play from the printed page and enjoys the opportunity to stage it, working with actors. "The thing about Vincent is that he grapples with big ideas and then puts them in settings in which they can be easily identified," she said. In "A Child's Guide," the big ideas are exploration of family tradition during a time of war, religion and secrecy. The action of the play takes place in a grocery store in Brooklyn in 1944. It is the beginning of a family story that sprawls 50 years into the future, capturing a legacy of hope tradition and courage in three Italian women. According to Benningfield, Sessa originated his work as an autobiographical drama because the women in the play contain elements of his mother and his aunt, both Italian, "but we wanted the play to be more universal than just the Italian-American experience, so that the play can be seen as an experience of very ordinary people and how they influence their future generations." Also, World War II has a very significant impact on the characters, she added. Thematic message There are a few surprises in the play the director will not give away,
but she does want us to know what message she sees in this work. |
The LINK NEWS Theater Review By Madeline Schulman "A Child's Guide to Innocence," by Vincent Sessa, is a beautiful and touching play, designed to move and delight an audience. Running at the New Jersey Repertory Company, on Broadway in Long Branch, this family history is wonderfully acted by Catherine Eaton, Corey Tazmania and Deborah Baum, and splendidly directed by Dana Benningfield. An actress herself, the director brings out the nuances of the characters as they re-live three days, but decades apart. Eaton serves as the connecting thread, playing the same woman at 21, 51, and 71, as she believable changes from young woman to matron to older woman without altering makeup or costume. Her two co-stars each cleverly morph into three very different characters, appearing first as her sisters, then as her daughters, and finally as her granddaughters. The action starts in a Brooklyn grocery store in June, 1944, at the height of the war (WWII) as sisters Francie, Catherine and Marian wait for news of their brother Johnny, lost at sea, and Francie, the oldest, longs for letters from her fiance, Freddy. They vacillate between hope that Johnny has survivied and fear that he has not. The events of that day echo through the years in the second and third scenes, as the years pass and we learn how that day in 1944 has affected the family's life. Throughout, the dialog is leavened with flashes of humor - while describing the movie "Jaws" one daughter says she would need a "horse Valium" to go swimming in the ocean at night. A granddaughter, challenged to identify Charles Lindbergh, mutters, "He invented the Lindy?" One symbol throughout the play, as evocative as Laura's unicorn in "The Glass Menagerie," is a piece of glass which dangles from a hurricane lamp, variously described by the characters as a star or a prism. We learn in the first scene that it is missing, but not how or why. Just as we learn Johnny's fate and Freddy's, we do find out the significance of the prism, and as a star or prism should, it scatters a light on all that has gone before. The single set serves equally well as a grocery store, Long Island dining room, and grandmother's bedroom. "A Child's Guide to Innocence" is highly recommended as an emotional and intellectual pleasure. |
|
A paranoia paradise at NJ Rep Published in the Asbury Park Press 05/24/05BY TOM CHESEK
If you're a nonhabitual theatergoer who's looking for something a little edgier than "Annie" but still accessible in its own way, Richard Strand's two-actor play now being seen for the first time on the East Coast in a new production by New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch is a good place to get your dash of bitter social commentary, chased by a frosty mug of flat-out funny business. Under the direction of NJ Rep co-founder SuzAnne Barabas, it's an entirely accessible and (at a tad under 90 minutes) economical excursion into paranoia paradise, the Abbott and Costello routine that famed funnyman Franz Kafka never got around to writing. The "fun" begins when one Molly Snyder (Stephanie Dorian) arrives at the office of one Mr. Aaron (Michael Irvin Pollard) with a simple request to have her street address corrected on her driver's license. When the blandly annoyed civil servant suggests she accept what has been given to her insisting that he's only looking out for her best interests Snyder moves to take control of the situation. Big mistake. While Molly a somewhat full-of-herself artist who dresses in what she probably thinks is some sort of thrift-store chic attempts to assert her rights as an individual, she opens up a wormhole that sends her careening into a pencil-pushing purgatory. Issued a death certificate instead of a corrected license, she very quickly finds her house repossessed, her assets frozen and her butt in convict orange as she awaits execution for Murder One. Molly's attempts to put her affairs in order from pleading with the local bank officer to seeking a pardon from the president of the United States are met each step of the way by Mr. Aaron, or a whole lot of people who happen to look exactly like him. Ostensibly appearing as several different characters of assorted races, genders and sexual preferences (all of which seem to take the form of that same bald-headed bureaucratic Beelzebub with an office painted in what's variously described as beige, ecru, alpaca and champagne), the enigmatic man behind the desk never fails to throw down roadblocks of paperwork and protocol at every turn. It's a process that leads our frustrated heroine from a mild simmer to volcanic eruptions of verbal vitriol and vein-popping violence. Identity crisis As an underlying theme, loss of one's identity used to be largely
the province of Rod Serling and his sci-fi brethren; these days
the dehumanizing effects of modern American life and the very real
threat of identity theft put all of us at the threshold of our
own personal trip to the Zone. Playwright Strand knows that we
know this, and consequently his script avoids beating the audience
over the head with an obvious stick in favor of going for the gut-level
laugh. |
|
MOLLY SNYDER 100 Percent Enjoyable at NJ Rep The Link News Review by Milt Bernstein The Percent of Molly Snyder, a fast-moving two-person play, and the latest offering of the NJ Repertory Company in Long Branch , can easily qualify as one of the funniest and most original comedies seen there. To anyone who has ever had to visit a Bureau of Motor Vehicles, a tax department, or any similar governmental organization, Molly Snyder's experience in trying to correct a tiny error in her records will evoke a spark of recognition. In this case, the results are quite hilarious, though eventually tragic as the unfortunate young woman, beautifully played by Stephanie Dorian, encounters the ultimate bureaucrat in a rapid succession of tableau-like scenes which differ from each other in very subtle but suggestive ways. Playwright Richard Strand spares no opportunity to satirize the self-serving pomposity and indolent indifference of the bureaucrat, played wonderfully well by Michael Irvin Pollard, in a succession of various guises each one more ridiculous than the one preceding it. This little play comes full of surprises, and was enthusiastically received by the full house on the night we saw it. SuzAnne Barabas, who is artistic director of the company, and with husband Gabor founded the company seven years ago, did an outstanding job of staging this comedy, which ought not to be missed by anyone with a free evening or afternoon and a lover of the theatre. |
Here's a comic nightmare all New Jerseyans can relate toPublished in the Asbury Park Press 05/20/05BY TOM CHESEK
Of course, if you've lived for as little as a month in New Jersey, you've probably got at least one good true-life horror story centered around the old Department of Motor Vehicles and its no-less intimidating successor. Soviet-style waiting lines, "Twilight Zone" losses of identity, "X-Files" bureaucratic conspiracies, Kafka-esque runarounds jaded Jerseyans have seen all this and more in their time. And it's about time somebody in the arts community did something about it, even if that somebody is West Coast-based playwright and professor Richard Strand. In "Ten Percent of Molly Snyder," a two-character play making its East Coast premiere at New Jersey Rep's Lumia Theatre in Long Branch, author Strand presents a comic rhapsody-in-red-tape that commences when a young woman (Stephanie Dorian) sees a DMV agent (Michael Irvin Pollard) with a simple request to rectify an incorrect bit of information on her driver's license. Suffice to say that it goes on from there, spinning off into a nightmarish scenario that director SuzAnne Barabas characterizes as "capturing the frustration that we all experience in dealing with things like the cable provider, the credit card company, the insurance company . . . only done in a very funny way." According to the NJ Rep co-founder and artistic director, "Simply trying to get a person on the phone sometimes illustrates how our society is taking away all trace of the individual . . . it's as if everybody is becoming the same person." The play, which was originally staged by Chicago's legendary Steppenwolf company, features a couple of familiar faces from NJ Rep's fantastic stock company. Both actors were seen to fine advantage in previous Rep productions Dorian as a fiancee and mistress in the riotous romantic quadrangle "Lemonade," and Pollard as a nebbishy corporate neophyte in the giddily absurd "Big Boys." |
Written by John de la Parra, RedBank.com They laugh, they cry, they scream, they live life right before our eyes and it all comes crashing down with the weight of the metaphysical, with the weight of words. The NJ Repertory Theatre presents the world premiere of Ruth Wolff's compelling Beyond Gravity. |
|
The NJ Repertory has brought the specter of high art to Long Branch and the whole cast and crew are ready to blow your mind with it. Beyond Gravity is a play about life's seemingly neurotic nuances that challenges the viewer to admit that we all have to fool ourselves sometimes in order to deal with life. In the very act of attending the theatre we are invited to willfully suspend o | |
"Tilt Angel" Flies
in Many Directions 
