"Lost in Yonkers"

July 30, 2015 — It was the closest to a full house I've seen in a long time. I couldn't spot an empty seat anywhere in the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith, New Hampshire, at their afternoon performance of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers," directed for the Playhouse by Marta Rainer. The capacity crowd had much to be happy about by the end of this funny, poignant play.

Winner of both the Tony and Pulitzer Prize, "Lost in Yonkers" has a fascinating cast of diverse characters. Set during World War II, it's the story of Eddie (Jason Plourde), who has slid deeply in debt to a loan shark who financed his wife's treatment for cancer up until she died of the disease. With payback due in less than a year, Eddie has given up their apartment to leave  his two teenage sons (John-Michael Breen and Jordan Quisno) with his mother, the boys' grandmother  (Donna Goldfarb) and his sister, the slightly whacky Bella (Molly Parker Myers) while he goes on the road across America to collect scrap iron to come up with the cash.

Grandma was born Jewish in Germany and escaped to America before the rise of the Nazis. Her harsh life has left her cynical, incapable of affection, intolerant of what she perceives as weakness in others, striking fear into the rest of the family. Suffering the most is Bella, left to care for her. Bella is the most interesting character, flighty, excitable, by turns upbeat, angry, funny, depressed, starved for love, a challenging role well-played by Myers. She has a clash with Grandma that's a dramatic high-point of the play.

Later, another son, Louie (Nicholas Wilder) shows up. A gun-toting, street-smart bag man for the mob, the only one of the family not intimidated by Grandma, he earns the two boys' admiration. A threatening phone call and strange men hanging around outside lead them to wonder if Louie is in danger. "Are you in trouble?" asks one of the boys. "I've never not been in trouble,'' says Louie. The small role of Gert, another daughter with a really strange speech impediment,  goes to Rebecca Tucker.

Laughs, sadness, joy, pain, intense drama all come together in this play. It's a great theater experience.

"Relatively Speaking"

July 28, 2015 — Mistaken identity is one of the oldest plot devices in literature. Shakespeare used it to great effect, and many others have had varying degrees of success with it. British playwright Alan Ayckbourn's experiment with it in "Relatively Speaking" is highly original and very entertaining.

This production at The Barnstormers in Tamworth, New Hampshire, directed by Blair Hundertmark, is an audience-pleasing presentation. Greg (Buddy Haardt) and Ginny (Amanda Huxtable) share an apartment in London in the late '60s. Ginny is getting ready to leave for a visit with her parents at their countryside home. Greg wants to accompany her, but Ginny is insistent he stay home because her quirky parents needed to be prepared for him in advance. While they debate this, a couple of strange phone calls and a pair of slippers, owned by neither of them, found under the bed lead to raised eyebrows. In spite of all this, Greg proposes marriage, which Ginny seems agreeable to.

Ignoring Ginny's warnings, Greg travels to her parents' home and, due to a delay in Ginny's travel arrangements, arrives before her. Now things get interesting. Sheila (Dee Nelson) and Philip (John Schnatterly) have no idea who he is, but Sheila is cordial and welcoming, Philip not so much. But why has Ginny never told them about him? Why do they seem so indifferent to Ginny, almost as though they don't know her? Finally, Ginny shows up, and things get even stranger. I don't think I'm giving away too much by telling you Ginny has been secretly playing a charade, and it's about to unravel on her

The play has a lot going for it: Ayckbourn's famous comic dialog, delivered by the Barnstormers' fine cast, along with a skilled stage crew that pulls off a major scenery change at intermission, swapping one of set designer Emily Nichols' sets for something completely different.

"Table Manners"

July 23, 2015 — It's been a summer of Alan Ayckbourn plays. It wasn't planned, but I just happened to have seen two Ayckbourn plays so far and at least one more is on my schedule for this summer. The prolific British playwright has written 79 plays which have been translated into over 35 languages, are performed on stages and television throughout the world and have won countless awards.

The Winnipesaukee Playhouse presented Ayckbourn's "Table Manners," directed by Neil Pankhurst, at their theatre in Meredith, New Hampshire. A family and their spouses get together for a weekend at the home of an unmarried sister, Annie (Rebecca Tucker) who lives with their invalid mother who is never seen in the play. The fact that certain family members can't stand each other makes for fiery, and hilarious, dinner table conversation. The table manners of the title are not the sort of manners you would want to teach your children.

The loud, flamboyant, disruptive Norman, husband of one of the sisters, in an over-the-top performance by Nicholas Wilder, had a past fling with Annie. When he's unsuccessful at rekindling the romance, he tries to seduce Sarah, played by Molly Parker Myers, equally over-the-top. His pretext is to take her away from her boring life with her husband and children for a holiday, of course in separate bedrooms, separate baths, separate everything. "I'll make you happy" in his words.

Jason Plourde, Richard Brundage and Suzanne Kimball, all excellent, fill out the cast, abetted by Meredith Brown's beautifully designed set. I can't wait for the next Ayckbourn play, which will be "Relatively Speaking" at The Barnstormers. Then it will be back to the Winnipesaukee Playhouse for "Lost in Yonkers" by Neil Simon.

"Outside Mullingar"

July 21, 2015 — Tom Frey, Bridget Beirne, Michael Page and Dale Hodges speak playwright John
Patrick Shanley's witty Irish lines in perfect Irish brogues in the Peterborough Players' production of "Outside Mullingar," directed by Gus Kaikkonen. Scenic designer Charlie Morgan's ingeniously designed rotating sets change smoothly from a run-down Irish farm kitchen to a bedroom to a more modern kitchen later in the play.

Located well off the beaten path and surrounded by woods in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Players is one of my favorite theatres. Tonight's play is a comedy, and it does provide plenty of laughs, but also plunges into darkness at times, then lifts your spirits as characters once hurtful toward one another find the capacity for forgiveness and love. In other words, it's very Irish. The actors, all Players veterans, were at the top of their game in a memorable presentation.

"Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike"

July 16, 2015 — Vanya (Dale Place) and Sonia (Dee Nelson), a middle-aged brother and sister (although Sonia makes it very clear she's adopted) live a bored existence together in their country home, paid for by their sister Masha (Anne-Marie Cusson), a successful actress who also sends them a monthly stipend. In spite of the names, they're not Russian. Their classical actor parents named them after characters in Chekhov plays.

Vanya and Sonia have sacrificed any hope of success in life by devoting years to caring for their aging parents, now dead. Sonia, self-pitying, and Vanya, resigned to his dead-end situation, barely tolerate each other. Their housekeeper, Cassandra, a tornado of energy and doomsday prophecy, is played by Cheryl Mullings in a show-stealing performance.

When Masha shows up unannounced with her twenty-years-younger boyfriend, Spike (Evan D. Siegel), Vanya and Sonia's humdrum life is shaken to the core. Masha, flamboyant and domineering, is tall and physically imposing as she towers over the other women in the cast. Spike is an aspiring actor, but his main talent seems to be ripping his clothes off at every opportunity and parading around in skimpy undershorts or bathing trunks.

Things are further complicated when Nina (Angela Hope Smith) shows up, star-struck by the famous Masha and drawing unwanted attention from Spike. Then the pot is further stirred up when Masha announces she can no longer afford the house and is going to sell it, and will also have to end Vanya and Sonia's stipend, leaving them homeless and penniless.

With everything else that's going on, the group prepares for a costume ball in which Sonia garners all the praise, intolerable for the attention-greedy Masha. Later, a play written by Vanya is read, shades of Chekhov's "The Seagull," and Vanya goes off on a five-minute-long tirade against cell-phones, email and other modern technology. "We licked stamps!" he repeats many times. It's a tour de force rant that earns him spontaneous applause.

This bizarre cast of characters romped across the Barnstormers stage in Christopher Durang's "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," directed by Blair Hundertmark, in Tamworth, New Hampshire. A real audience-pleaser with a terrific cast and lots of laughs, this first-night performance by the Barnstormer's best actors was flawless.

"Good People"

July 9, 2015 — Vinette Cotter as Dottie and Jean Mar Brown as her friend Jean, a couple of frumpy, argumentative, bingo-addicted South Boston denizens pretty much stole the first act of David Lindsay-Abaire's "Good People" with their spot-on Southie accents and salty language. They evoked lots of laughter in the first act before the play turned much darker in the second.

My praise of Cotter and Brown in no way lessens the contribution of the rest of the fine cast of veteran performers at the Barnstormers Theatre in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Under the direction of Paul Mroczka, Dee Nelson plays the lead, Maggie, a single mother fired at the beginning of the play by her supervisor, Stevie (Buddy Haardt), for habitual tardiness due to having to care for her retarded adult daughter. Stevie is sympathetic, but has no choice. Maggie, with no college education and few skills, is now jobless and the rent is overdue.

Desperate, Maggie pays a visit to an old Southie school-mate, Mike (Blair Hundertmark), now a successful physician, hoping he can give her a lead on job opportunities. Maggie's big mouth soon turns a cordial conversation into something more confrontational, but she manages to finagle an invitation for herself to a party at Mike's house.

 Maggie is later notified the party has been canceled but thinks Mike has just had second thoughts about inviting her. In the second act, she shows up anyway at Mike's home to find only Mike and his wife, Kate (Nicole Powerll) present with a sick child upstairs. At first, Kate is sympathetic to Maggie's plight, but once again, outspoken Maggie turns things into an increasingly ugly confrontation, making vague references to Mike's Southie past, racism (Kate is African-American), past affairs, and questions about who fathered Maggie's retarded daughter.

Nelson and Hundertmark deliver fine performances in this second act as anger and recrimination flare. Powell is more subdued and at times her soft voice is difficult to hear in the farther corners of the theatre. But this is an excellent play with superb acting all around, a theatre experience that may be hard to top for the rest of this season.

"Lend Me a Tenor"

July 8, 2015 — After the subtle humor and very British understatement of Alan Ayckbourn's "Intimate Exchanges" at the Peterborough Players, Ken Ludwig's "Lend Me a Tenor" felt like walking into a Marx Brothers movie. With all the broad slapstick, hysteria, running around and door-slamming that are Ludwig's hallmarks, this play caters to completely different tastes than "Intimate Exchanges," but I found much to like in both.

"Lend Me a Tenor" is being staged by the Papermill Theatre Company at Jean's Playhouse in Lincoln, New Hampshire. When an Italian tenor of international renown is booked for a performance of "Otello" in Cleveland is, shall we say "indisposed," chaos, panic and mistaken identities prevail as the theatre manager attempts to groom a replacement who will fool the audience. Almost anything I say about this play will be a spoiler, so suffice it to say the Papermill cast, led by Matthew Hager, Alex Levenson, Gary Trahan and Alex Canty, is brilliant and the laughs are non-stop. Set designer Al Forgione created a very stylishly furnished living room and bedroom set with lots of doors to be slammed, essential in any Ken Ludwig play.

This production was directed by Producing Artistic Director Scott H. Severance, a man who knows something about comedy. I enjoyed his work in a number of Barnstormers productions during his acting days. I hope he hasn't given up performing for good. He was one of the funniest men in New Hampshire summer theatre.

"Intimate Exchanges"

July 7, 2015 — The audience got to choose the ending in "Intimate Exchanges." We cast votes for one of two endings at intermission, having no knowledge of the nature of either. The choices were "the prodigal returns" and "a christening." I chose the former, the latter won. I wasn't particularly impressed with that choice, but I have no way of knowing how the other would have ended. Author Alan Ayckbourn wrote sixteen endings!

Gus Kaikkonen directed this production. Two actors played five roles, two by Beverly Ward and three by Kraig Swartz. Ward is particularly talented at playing multiple characters. She played three in 2014's "Last of the Red Hot Lovers." Her characters are so different in personality, speech and mannerisms it's easy to imagine you're really seeing different women. Swartz differentiated his three characters with wigs, beards and costumes, but they were all Swartz. That's not a bad thing. He's a gifted comedic actor who has had many memorable roles at Peterborough Players, but he's not as adept at playing multiple personalities as Ward.

Alan Ayckbourn's comedy has a light touch. This was a charming little play, not one to really fire up an audience, but definitely pleasing. It's strong point was the acting. Scenic designer Charlie Morgan's excellent set consisted of stone walls, an archway, a tree and shrubs, constructed to facilitate quick changes, ending as a cathedral. Off-and-on rain drumming on the Players' ancient roof was a nice added effect.