I see a lot of plays, and I cover as many as I can. But the feast of performances always overwhelms the column inches, so now, with a new summer theater season on the horizon, I’m taking a final look back at the shows I’ve enjoyed since last summer.
Promising Scripts-in-Process
The Life and Death of Queen Margaret is an epic remix of four Shakespearean plays, pushing a supporting character to center stage. That’s Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI and the angry nemesis of Richard III. It’s the work of the Real Live Theatre collective, who are mounting a production this summer.
Susanna Apgar and Kay Lopez in A Streetcar Named Desire –/Rick Teller photo
Danny Eaton, producing director of the Theater Project at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield, is also a playwright. Last year we sampled his latest, Mags, a one-woman piece based on the book This is Paradise by area author Suzanne Strempek Shea. Cate Damon portrayed Mags Riordan, an Irishwoman who, following the accidental death of her son in an African village, founded a clinic there in her son’s name.
In the fall, actor/director/playwright Susanna Apgar held a reading of Dust, her prickly comedy in which an elderly widow’s children pick apart their mother’s failings, and their own, over Thanksgiving dinner. Apgar also appeared in the Theater Project’s impressive A Streetcar Named Desire as the Kowalskis’ upstairs neighbor witnessing the steamy goings-on in Tennessee Williams’ classic.
On Academic Stages
I caught an effectively claustrophobic performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Amherst College, with the audience seated virtually in the characters’ laps. At Smith College, student directors deployed supple multitasking ensembles in a pair of eccentric fables — Mary Zimmerman’s retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling transsexual Orlando.
Our-Lady-of-Kibeho — Derek Fowles photo
And guest director Nicole A. Watson pulled off a rarity in the Valley: a virtually all-non-white cast, in Katori Hall’s Our Lady of Kibeho, set in Rwanda.
Musicals
I enjoyed the jukebox musical Breaking Up is Hard to Do at the Majestic, drawn from the Neil Sedaka songbook, and offerings from two of the Valley’s musical theater mainstays: Lerner and Loewe’s faux-Scottish romance Brigadoon, the Valley Light Opera’s occasional vacation from Gilbert and Sullivan, and the stage version of Mary Poppins from Amherst Leisure Services Community Theater — both of them featuring the redoubtable Heather Williams.
On a Personal Note
When I’m not in the critic’s proverbial aisle seat, I can often be found in the director’s chair. This season, I participated in four area productions.
Eggtooth Productions’ annual Double Take Festival put on short plays scattered throughout downtown Greenfield. I directed I’m Not Herbert, a comedy by Robert Anderson about an old married couple reminiscing sweetly and erroneously about their misremembered past.
Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky, at the Suffield Players‘ theater in northern Connecticut, was about a woman who suffers brain damage in an accident and loses the ability to retrieve and articulate words — the condition known as aphasia. She’s an astronomer, so the piece becomes a metaphor of two mysterious territories: the universe and the human brain.
I was also part of New Century Theatre’s annual 24-Hour Theatre Project in Northampton, a seat-of-the-pants adventure in which six playwrights are randomly assigned actors and given one night to write short plays for them. The scripts are randomly assigned to directors, who have one day to rehearse them for performance that evening. Coming full circle from the fall, my play was written by — wait for it — Susanna Apgar.
The Quick-Change Room — Daniel Johnson photo
Finally, at the end of this month I’m directing a backstage farce: Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room at the Ashfield Community Theatre. It takes place in a Russian theater at the time the Soviet Union was collapsing and giving way to free-wheeling capitalism. But it’s really about the rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma that nonprofit theaters in this country are always in — the struggle to balance the needs of art against the demands of commerce.
Looking back on the winter season just past, and forward to the summer coming up, I’m again surprised and grateful that so many theaters in our fertile Valley manage that balancing act so courageously, creatively, and successfully.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
