Here I am, finally back to the blog. Those of you who have worked in the theatre already know how utterly obsessed/distracted one can become in the week before a show opens. Guilty. But now we’re open, and audiences are loving the show. The Valley News published their review of the play yesterday, and it was overall very positive. She loved the production, was thrilled with the acting but not a big fan of the script.
“One of the pleasures of watching Shaker Bridge Theatre’s current production of Mauritius is seeing how well the director Bill Coons has matched actors to parts. In previous Shaker Bridge productions, Coons has demonstrated the same skill, and it’s what makes his productions engrossing, even when the play isn’t as good as the actors or the direction.”
This is written by someone who apparently doesn’t know what a director does. I don’t pick the perfect people and set them loose. I pick really good people and find ways to turn them into truthful characters trying to function in distressing situations. If it were simply about “matching actors to parts,” theatre would be created by casting agents.
“The play, which was produced in New York in 2007, is lively, the pacing is fast, and the acting is first-rate. You have to commend Coons for consistently bringing to the Upper Valley not just new work, but plays by women. (Three of the five plays produced this season at Shaker Bridge are written by female playwrights.)”
When I picked this season, I picked five plays that I wanted to spend most of my life with over a nine month period. The fact that three of the five are written by women has less to do with my conscious choice to promote female playwrights and more to do with promoting really good playwrights. It’s a great comment on the state of modern writing that so many of the best new writers are women.
“In style, in plot and in execution, Mauritius is so close to the work of David Mamet that you feel as if the old bait-and-switch con has been pulled - not by Shaker Bridge or Coons, but by Rebeck.”
Theresa Rebeck, in an interview with WNTC in New York, said she was really surprised that people compared this play of hers to Mamet’s American Buffalo. Sure, there are three guys trying to pull of a heist of sorts, and yes - there is a similar feel for “underworld” speech patterns, but that’s where it ends. There are lots of plays that fit that description. She doesn’t find the comparison very accurate because, as she said: “Mamet’s play is a tragedy, mine is a comedy.”
“Rebeck does incorporate a lacerating rivalry between two sisters, which is a signal departure from Mamet, who rarely writes substantial roles for women.”
I hope that the reviewer will get a chance to see our next production - Boston Marriage. It is written by David Mamet, and all three of the characters are women. Enough said about that observation.
“Mamet doesn’t hold a trademark on this style or these kinds of characters, of course, and Rebeck isn’t a mere imitator. Her dialogue has flair and bite, and she knows how to keep a play moving forward. The bubbling familial resentments would have the feel of real life if they’d been explored more deeply. But at several points during the play there are holes large enough to drive a truck through.”
There are hints in the play about what happened to this family in the past, but they’re never allowed to come out into the open. It’s not a weakness of the script that guards these terrible secrets, but rather some very real human fears on the part of several of these characters. Jackie never tells about her past, but we see her try to leave it behind in a number of ways. Talking about her mother, her father, that plastic bag with duct tape - they’re all buried in the refuse bin where she’d like to leave them when she sprouts those bug wings. No, it’s never explained openly. (I know that if you were to ask Christine - who plays Jackie - she could get very specific about what happened. But she won’t.)
“The play’s premise, the bell that sends it leaping out of the starting gate, is that Jackie, who desperately needs money, doesn’t know how valuable her stamps are. When she visits the dealer, the gears of the play are set in motion. That might work if the play were set in the 1970s or ‘80s. But this is the Google era: It’s not credible that a character as canny and as interested in profit as Jackie would bring potentially valuable merchandise to a dealer without knowing what she had, particularly when the answers can be found as easily as clicking a mouse or depressing a key on a computer keyboard.”
The play’s reality is somewhat different. She knows (literally) nothing about stamps, and asks someone if this collection is worth anything. When she has reason to believe that there may be some financial value to this collection, she goes directly to internet research. But she is “canny” enough to know how untrustworthy and inapplicable that research is. In a letter to the Valley News, Steve Swayne says: “Perhaps modern families spend time after a parent’s passing to value an estate by trolling the internet. Many, however, still turn to human experts, which is Rebeck’s opening gambit in this play.” He’s right.
The rest of her review “applauds” the actors. So do I.
I’ll post some photos from the production soon.
