REVIEWS ...
Thursday, January 18, 2001
'The Real Thing' masks tension at GableStage
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Though GableStage's offstage drama has been all the buzz the past two months, the spotlight shifts back to what the playhouse does best -- presenting provocative drama -- when Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing opens at 8 p.m. Saturday.
The 1982 play is a meditation on love, deceit, yearning, betrayal and the theater itself. Given its cerebral British author, it is unsurprisingly clever and multilayered, glorious in its use of language -- and yet, for Stoppard, uncommonly accessible and emotional.
"I've always loved Stoppard," says Joe Adler, GableStage's producing artistic director. "I think he's the greatest English playwright. I love his language, and the fact that this requires the audience to do some work. It's rich with things that resonate.
"It's funny, sexy, eloquent, elegant and accessible. It's thought-provoking, and it pays off infinitely."
And on a personal level, it has pulled Adler back from his ongoing efforts to keep his company at the Biltmore Hotel to the thing he loves most, directing plays.
"When I started reading The Real Thing with seven wonderful actors -- I mean, how can you be depressed?" he said.
Adler's cast includes three Carbonell Award-winning actors: Stephen G. Anthony as Henry, a playwright (and Stoppard's alter ego); Pamela Roza as Annie, an actress who's an idealist and a romantic; and GableStage regular Paul Tei as Brodie, a Scottish prisoner who arouses Annie's activism.
Barbara Sloan plays Henry's wife, Charlotte, with Heath Kelts as Annie's husband, Max, Jennifer Lehr as Henry and Charlotte's daughter Debbie, and Jason Allen as a young actor named Billy.
Working with Adler is a process of shaping, said Roza, whom Adler directed in her Carbonell-winning performance in Killer Joe last season.
"He lets you go, then he'll say no. He'll listen," she said. "Or, he'll tell you to do something. As it goes on, he does more and more shaping."
"He's very intelligent, and it's always nice to work with intelligent directors," added Sloan. They're less fearful and more trusting."
Anthony, who won his Carbonells for his multicharacter work in both Sylvia and I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, gets to burrow into a single, cerebral Stoppardian character in The Real Thing. Henry is a playwright who loves, but has trouble expressing it -- both in his plays and in his own life. A self-absorbed intellectual, he finds more emotional truth in the banal lyrics of the pop songs he adores.
"It's a challenge to sound so absolutely natural while doing this very highbrow dialogue," Anthony said.
"Last night, I dreamed about it. I find parallels between situations in the play and things I've lived, because it's about theater, about artistic people.
"When I first read the play, I wondered why Joe considered me [for Henry]. Then people said to me, 'This is you.'"
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
GableStage's 'The Real Thing' truly is
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Tom Stoppard's language hits with the precision of a laser beam.
By turns brilliant, witty and devastating, his dialogue is a challenge for both actors and audiences, but the payoff of his plays is a theatrical experience that is both rich and uncommonly provocative.
GableStage delivers both The Real Thing and the real thing -- a drama full of deep emotional resonance -- in its new production of Stoppard's 1982 play about love, betrayal and theater itself.
Though the production isn't flawless, the acting is so strong and director Joseph Adler's vision so assured that The Real Thing becomes yet another of those memorable, intensely pleasurable theatrical experiences that GableStage seems to deliver so routinely.
What is most sublime about the production is Stephen G. Anthony's performance as Henry, a playwright and Stoppard's dramatic stand-in.
Brainy and clever to a fault, Henry has much more trouble when it comes to expressing feeling. He becomes both the betrayer and the betrayed, abandoning his actress-wife Charlotte (Barbara Sloan) for the sultry Annie (Pamela Roza), who down the line wounds Henry with a near-lethal betrayal of her own.
Anthony is demonstrably a fine actor -- he has two Carbonell Awards to his credit and is incredibly versatile -- but Henry is his most quietly dazzling performance to date.
He radiates intelligence, desire, devastation. He makes Henry's words (and accent) sound utterly natural, and he's a hoot as he reads the parts of a Scottish lout and a British woman in a very bad play within a play (that versatility again). Anthony's performance alone makes The Real Thing must-see theater.
He is, however, in very good company. Roza, another Carbonell winner, adds to her string of memorable performances with her sensuous, restless Annie. Sloan is quite effective as a woman who finds her husband endlessly self-absorbed and frequently irritating (though her accent is the auditory equivalent of an Achilles' heel).
Heath Kelts, as Annie's soon-to-be former husband Max, beautifully differentiates the artifice and reality of betrayal. Jason Allen is a frisky Billy, the young actor who would tempt Annie from her adored and adoring Henry. Jennifer Lehr is all jitters and witticisms as Henry and Charlotte's daughter Debbie (though, like her stage mum, her accent's weak). And GableStage regular Paul Tei has a brooding, funny cameo as the play's accidental activist.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
