After the play, which opens Friday, you can reflect on the superb direction of the live read production of this challenging drama.
Cast of the Bare Stage production of “Scenes from an “American Life”. Photo: Bare Stage
By: Patrick O’Heffernan
A.R. Gurney was one of America’s prolific playwrights. Over his career he wrote over 50 plays, many winning multiple awards. He was also a challenging playwright – challenging to actors, directors, and audiences in their complexity and layers. His play “The Dining Room”, set in a single room, requires 18 set changes – a stage manager’s nightmare. But it pales in comparison to the challenge presented by Scenes From American Life which introduces100 characters in 40 scenes that randomly appear over 5 decades, all played by a handful of actors.
The Bare Stage and director Rosann Balbontin took on this challenge and they succeeded, producing a striking display of extraordinary acting, subtle but on-target directing, and logistical brilliance that delivers 90 minutes of entertaining and fascinating – if not always easily understandable – theater.
“Scenes from American Life,” which opens Friday June 24 at the Bare Stage Theater in Riberas del Pilar, was written as dramatic comedy by A.R. Gurney uses a series of random vignettes that span 50 years but focused on one family to hilariously skewer the upper classes in Buffalo, New York, and by extension, everywhere. But despite the many witty barbs and cultural references Gurney loads the work with, it was actually written to show off the talents of the actors, and Balbontin took full advantage of it.
The play was originally written for 8 actors who must portray a wide assortment of characters and situations in time periods, ranging from 1930 to 1990s. Each actor has to go from tragic to comic, from oblivious to angry, from youth to old age, from one character to another in the blink of an eye. And they do it flawlessly for the most part.
Just to make it a little more challenging, Bare Stage is presenting the play with 6 actors (probably all they could fit on the stage) , not the 8 called for by Gurney, meaning each actor has a few extra characters to portray. On stage were Mark Donaldson, Sharon Jarvis, Kathleen Morris, Roxanne Rosenblatt, Tony Wilshere, and Ken Yakiwchuk , all of whom not only moved from character to character like shapeshifters in Star Trek, but also were in the right place with the right lines for the right character through all 40 scenes. I don’t know how they did it – kudos to Director Rosann Balbontin for putting this puzzle together.
There is no plot; there are a couple of common elements in most of the scenes, but they are hard to follow, so I don’t recommend it. Otherwise you would have to sit in the audience with a scorecard or spreadsheet to figure where each scene fits into the play’s trajectory; just go with the flow.
A few scenes are likely to be jarring to a modern audience because they foreshadow situations in the US that never materialized. Just accept that the play debuted in 1970 when there were anti-Vietnam War activists and Nixon was spying on them. Watergate was still 2 years away. However, there are some scenes that resonate today, although in ways the playwright could not imagine.
This is a complex play but it really invites you to not overthink it. Just take each bit as it comes and laugh along the way. Watching the acting is pure joy; you can think about what it all means later.
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