As the season winds down, several summer theaters in the area have already folded their tents, with others running through this weekend and a couple playing through the end of the month. You can have your pick of a classic American drama, a classic screwball comedy, several edgy semi- or anti-romantic comedies, a family musical, a “theatrical collage,” a pair of historical plays focusing on overlooked players in large dramas, and a play-in-progress that chillingly parallels today’s headlines.
Chester Theatre Company rings a cheeky change on the likes of Sleepless in Seattle as well as the raft of recent plays deriding today’s digitally-mediated connections. In Blink, a young man and woman develop a half-courtship, half-stalking relationship via a baby monitor in adjacent flats. This New England premiere of a British original (“a mixture of feel-good love story and something sadder and more disturbing”) features Joel Ripka, well-remembered at Chester for The Nibroc Trilogy, The Swan and others.
At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, another British-born two-hander, An Intervention, dissects a friendship under stress, with shifting viewpoints. Playwright Mike Bartlett doesn’t specify his characters’ genders or ethnicities, and WTF’s production features two rotating casts, one of them all-white-male, the other white-female/Asian-American-male. Over on the festival’s main stage, Audra McDonald portrays the damaged, sharp-tongued Josie Hogan in Eugene O’Neill’s bitter, poetic romance A Moon for the Misbegotten, opposite her husband, Will Swenson.
My personal season’s-most-anticipated show is His Girl Friday at Barrington Stage Company through Aug. 30. It’s playwright John Guare’s adaptation of the classic 1940 film and its stage original, The Front Page, both of them paradigms of fast-talking, wisecracking screwball comedy. Set in a New York newsroom, it sets a hard-boiled city editor at odds with his headstrong crack reporter, and features Jane Pfitsch with BSC veterans Christopher Innvar and Mark Dold.
Also at BSC through August is Engagements, “an anti-romantic comedy” about a young unmarried woman making the rounds of her friends’ engagement parties. And this Friday afternoon only, a staged reading of American Son, by Christopher Demos-Brown, in which a biracial couple must face their own racial biases when their son is detained by police after a traffic stop.
At Shakespeare & Company, two new plays, recently opened and both running into September, look at key moments from the past through unusual lenses. The “maid” in Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid is the Maid of Orleans, aka Joan of Arc, who set a new standard for teenage rebellion. S&Co founder Tina Packer plays her long-suffering mum. Red Velvet finds African-American actor Ira Aldridge in 1833 London, playing Othello — the first of his race to do so — at the moment the British Parliament is considering abolition of the slave trade. Lolita Chakrabarti’s play stars John Douglas Thompson, who himself played the Moor here in 2008.
Berkshire Theatre Group’s mainstage season closes with another offbeat two-hander, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, in which two lonely souls reach for love in a moonlit New York. A one-night special this Saturday in Pittsfield, Now Is Our Time, a “theatrical collage” by Annette Miller, explores “the pleasures and perils of the third chapter in plays, poems, prose and song.” And the season’s last children/family show left standing is Mary Poppins, the stage adaptation of the beloved Disney musical about the flying nanny. Valley phenom Rylan Morsbach plays Bert the cocky Cockney. •
Photo credits: Chester, Rik Teller; Shakespeare & Co., Enrico Spada; Berkshire Theatre Group, Michelle McGrady; others courtesy of the company.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann
