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| Charlene Baldridge Photo by Ken Howard |
The Last Match at the Old Globe
Not knowing a let from a love, I went to see the world premiere of Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match Thursday night (February 18) at the Old Globe. Full of dread, I expected a vehicle that capitalizes on sports (in this case tennis) hoping to induce audiences normally not accustomed to theatre to attend.
Though I still don’t know a let from love in tennis terms (there is a glossary in the program), I’m much impressed with this play that runs through March 13 in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre. I found its construction ingenious, its characters deftly limned, and its intensity relentless. I’m also impressed that director Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s name on the title page is in typeface equal to that of the playwright.
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| Troian Bellisario as Mallory All The Last Match Photos by Jim Cox |
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| Troian Bellisario as Mallory |
Previously The Last Match was presented by New York Stage and Film at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theatre in a summer 2015 workshop production. Prior to that it was developed in the Old Globe’s 2014 New Voices Festival.
The match in question is the semifinals of the U.S. Open. America’s finest, coming up on the end of his career at 33, is Tim (Patrick J. Adams). He and his much younger, Russian competitor, Sergei (Alex Mickiewicz), have contended for years. Though affable, Tim worries about aging, especially now that he has a 2-month old son. (Being a parent does give one a sense of mortality.) Tim has always considered Sergei a talented tennis player whom he would someday face in the upper echelons of competition. Those days have come.
The play, which takes place at many competitive levels upon many courts, skips around in time. A scoreboard helps us keep track of the tennis scores and who’s on top, but what matters more than the scores and the locales is the human drama that surrounds, thrives on, lives in, and threatens love.
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| Patrick J. Adams as Tim |
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| Alex Mickiewicz as Sergei |
A former competitive women’s champion until sidelined by injury, Mallory (Troian Bellisario) is married to Tim. We see his possibly purposeful haphazard courtship, his winning of her, and their impossibly arduous, ultimately successful attempts to conceive a child; then the heartbreaking task of carrying it to term. Far from being saintly, Mallory is pragmatic and extremely resilient, and she adores Tim.
Attending Sergei is an actor named Galina (Natalia Payne), who declares, “I need my body to get what I want.” She is an uncensored and extremely powerful Russian woman, who knows just how to manipulate and exhort Sergei and most importantly to soothe his volatility, in order to elicit his best performance on the court and off. To see this pair operate is half the match.
These four fascinating and incisively drawn characters interact and intersect on Tim Macabee’s set, a sunken court with a raised surround that accommodates a table and some chairs that serve as more intimate scene setups, played so well that we taste the French fries and feel we’ve been there in the emergency room. There are no tennis balls, and even without them one feels the tension of the final volley that ends the play.
Denitsa Bliznakova’s costumes, including some rad tennies, are marvelous and marvelously amusing. Bradley King’s lighting takes us both outdoors and indoors, and Bray Poor’s sound design includes crowd sounds that never cover over dialogue – there’s a feat. Paul Peterson expands our world with video design, and David Huber’s vocal coaching is just right with the Russian accents, suggesting without obfuscating the English.
Because of the intimate nature and emotion-laden dialogue, I missed some of that in speeches that faced away from me in the round, but I got what mattered about love, loss, and persistence, and came away brimful with delight over this deliciously intelligent and heartfelt play.
Rasheeda Speaking at Vantage Theatre
Longtime La Jolla residents Robert Salerno and Dori Salois have run a theatre company called Vantage for 28 years. Most of the work has been site-specific, at such sites as a junior high school, Centro Cultural de la Raza, a hotel, and World Beat Center. Their current production, the San Diego premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s off-Broadway hit Rasheeda Speaking, is seen through March 6 at La Jolla Commons Theatre, 1216 Cave Street (La Jolla Congregational Church). The play is co-directed by Salois and Salerno.
Longtime La Jolla residents Robert Salerno and Dori Salois have run a theatre company called Vantage for 28 years. Most of the work has been site-specific, at such sites as a junior high school, Centro Cultural de la Raza, a hotel, and World Beat Center. Their current production, the San Diego premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s off-Broadway hit Rasheeda Speaking, is seen through March 6 at La Jolla Commons Theatre, 1216 Cave Street (La Jolla Congregational Church). The play is co-directed by Salois and Salerno.
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| Milena Phillips aas Jaclyn Dori Salois as Ileen Photos courtesy Vantage Theatre Company |
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| Dori Salois and Milena Phillips |
In the program, Vantage says they chose to bring this particular play to this particular venue to help celebrate The Congregational Church of La Jolla’s centennial. The church, they say, has a long history as a vibrant civic-minded community that makes a difference. Every night after the performance, in the Fireside Room, there is a talkback with a panel of actors, human resource professionals, lawyers, healthcare workers, pastors, playgoers and students to explore the play’s issues.
Originally produced by Rivendell Theatre Ensemble in Chicago, Rasheeda was developed at Chicago Dramatists and Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, and then produced by The New Group in New York City. The play is set in the reception area of Dr. Williams (Steve Oliver) in Chicago, where the racist doctor seeks to replace Jaclyn (stunning Milena Phillips) with a white woman. To effect this he promotes Ileen (Dori Salois) to office manager so she can record Jaclyn’s behavior to support/document his decision when the time comes for the axe to fall. Up to this point, the two women have had a cordial working relationship. No dummy, Jaclyn, who has some odd ideas about office pollutants, quickly sizes up the situation.
The 90-minute play takes its title from Jaclyn’s marvelous 11th hour speech about the racism she encounters on her work-bound bus each day. This section is the play’s best. Oddly, Jaclyn has disparaging things to say about her Mexican neighbors, as if the playwright wants us to know that racism is an equal opportunity occupation. June Gottleib portrays an elderly patient.
Phillips’ performance is simply splendid and worth the cost of a ticket. The others did not fully or comfortably inhabit their characters on opening night. The Commons facilities are comfortable and made even more so by use of the church parlor as a place to consume refreshments and chat.
Through March 6, Fridays at 7pm, Saturdays 5pm, Sunday 5pm, 1216 Cave Street, La Jolla CA 92037 www.vantagetheatre.com $20-$50
David Mamet’s short play Duck Variations, also set in Chicago, producedby Jerry Pilato of Different Stages, plays the same evenings, Fridays at 9pm, Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 7:30pm. It stars Rhys Green and Duane Weekley.
Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight at New Village Arts
An unusual challenge when the protagonist is dead and speaks Physics, a phoreign language one never learned
Time and Space have obliged tonight, according to the Marquise, and they don’t do that very often, so she – suddenly alive again – decides to “defend” her life. To relate it. To make apology. It’s a kind of chalk talk with living illustrations: she is twain, both herself and an illustration of herself. The play was written when the playwright was still in grad school and was commissioned by and premiered by South Coast Repertory in 2009.
What playwright Lauren Gunderson (one of the nation’s most produced playwrights this year) takes on is a life, specifically the life of Emilie, la Marquise du Chatelet, an 18th century physicist who was Voltaire’s consort. Emile defends her scientific bent and also explores her human, voluptuous self, the one who left her husband and three children to become Voltaire’s mistress, giving fuel to his writing genius. She then tired of him and took on another, younger lover, by whom she became pregnant. She died of an infection soon after childbirth, followed within a year by the death by her infant. When her life ended she was pissed off because she was in the middle of writing a translation of Newton into French, expounding, refuting and enlarging his theories.
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| (left to right) Skyler Sullivan as Voltaire plus Dagmar Krause Fields as Madam, Christina L. Flynn as Soubrette and Zackary Bonin as Gentleman All photos of Emilie by Daren Scott |
The framing device of the play, though not unique, is interesting and draws us along. But having Emilie “defend” (in the true meaning of the word) her life, by using puppet actors in pale colors as she narrates the action, separates us from emotion. Emilie is not allowed in this space and time convergence to touch anyone from the past; only her stand-in, Soubrette, is allowed touch and be touched. Apparently human emotion cannot exist “here” except as played out by pale characters. Only at the end of the two-hour play did I, presumptive stand-in for the audience, feel any empathy. The other personal creator of distance is physics itself: and that subject has its own language, foreign to many.
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| Skyler Sullivan and Jo Anne Glover Photo by Daren Scott |
Director Kristianne Kurner does a fine job casting and staging this freakish (in the true sense of the word) work, which in reality is an oddly attired historical docudrama.
Jo Anne Glover, who can do no wrong, portrays the real, dead Emilie in living color. The only other character consistently wearing color is Voltaire. He is played by Skyler Sullivan as a rather effeminate dandy in a ridiculous (probably purposeful but distracting) wig created by Peter Herman, who excels at all the wigs used in the show. Dagmar Krause Fields plays Madam, an older, largely disapproving set of characters, mother, aunts and others; Zackary Bonin (a fine job) creates the Gentleman, who portrays husband and lovers; and Christina L. Flynn is Soubrette, Emilie’s stand-in. In the end, the scene remembered is that between Emilie and Soubrette. We die alone, holding hands with ourselves, and that, of all the play’s messages about being a gifted woman in a man’s world, is the truest.
Production artists are Kurner, scenic designer; Elisa Benzoni, costume designer; Bill Bradbury, sound designer; Jonah Gercke, assistant director, the aforementioned Herman; and Chris Renda, lighting designer.
Emilie – La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight…plays Thursdays-Sundays through March 6 at New Village Arts Theatre, 2787 State Street, Carlsbad, $32-$35, www.newvillagearts.orgor 760.433.3245
Footnote:
Not to be missed (review forthcoming in the March 4 Gay San Diego) is Now or Later at Diversionary Theatre through March 13.
J. Tyler Jones as John in Now or Later
Photos by www.simpatika.com
Photos by www.simpatika.com