Monday, June 19, 2000
'Side Man' rifts on disharmony
Like a burning jazz solo, Warren Leight's Side Man pulses with heartbreak, mourning, celebration and echoes of a long-shattered innocence.
Broadway's Tony Award-winning best play of 1999 is now at GableStage, where director Joseph Adler and seven actors find their own ways of riffing on Leight's themes of familial disharmony and transcendent musicianship. And though it has plenty of warmth and humor, Side Man is often discomfiting to watch as Leight probes those recesses of memory where pain played out so vividly, much like Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie or Eugene O'Neill in Long Day's Journey into Night.
Part memoir and part exorcism, Side Man is told from the perspective of Clifford (Oscar Isaac), a 29-year-old artist who was parenting his deeply dysfunctional parents by the time he was 10.
His mother, Terry (Judith Delgado), called "Crazy Terry" even when she was young and relatively "innocent" (though always quick with an obscenity), has become an abusive alcoholic who blames her unrelenting sorrow on her trumpeter-husband, Gene (Mark Shannon), who is fully alive and engaged only when he's playing.
Otherwise, Gene specializes in forgetfulness, denial, avoidance -- a man who observes but can't connect with his wife's pain or his son's loss of a childhood.
Moving fluidly from 1953 to 1985, Side Man also chronicles the family's relationship with Gene's lively musician pals -- Al (John Trapani), a Romeo with an obvious rug; Ziggy (Kevin Reilly), a guy with a way of turning the letter "s" into slush; and Jonesy (George Schiavone), an addict who lost an eye because he'd run out of other places to shoot up -- as well as Patsy (Ellen Rae Littman), a cheery waitress who indulges in serial romances with musicians.
Through Jeff Quinn's sprawling set and dramatic lighting, sound designer M. Anthony Reimer's carefully placed jazz solos and Daniela Schwimmer's cool-cat costumes, the GableStage production evokes a world where these anonymous musicians lived to swing, a world forever changed by Elvis, the Beatles and the obliterating influence of rock and roll.
The best work in the cast comes from its youngest actor, Isaac -- director Adler got a wonderful performance from him in the theater's earlier production of This Is Our Youth, and the two dig even deeper here. Isaac frames and guides us through Side Man with a kind of forgiving tolerance, an affection that precludes judgment. His final speech, a Clifford solo modulated by pain and love, leaves actor and audience with glistening eyes.
Delgado, her voice heavy with a smoker's rasp, is better as the older, gone-to-hell Terry, as the woman whose rages are the only way of expressing a lifetime of disappointment. Her younger Terry is full of feigned naiveté (some of that is Leight's fault), of trying to suggest what she was like before world-weariness set in.
Shannon's Gene is perhaps a little too engaged and engaging, but his childlike inability to function except with a trumpet pressed to his lips is ultimately quite moving.
And so, in all of its tenderness and lamentation, is Side Man.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Posted June 19, 2000
Kinda blue?
The GableStage's Side Man explores dark shadows of jazz
By Jack Zink, Sun-Sentinel Theater Writer
Warren Leight's Side Man, now playing at the GableStage theater, is one long, slow, bluesy dirge of a play. It doesn't suck you into its universe like most dramas do. Instead, it seeps out from the stage to envelop you in its sometimes twisted, sometimes exquisite pain - like a great jazz/blues concert.
Side Man, Broadway's Tony Award-winning best play last year, tells a story about jazz and the people who inhabit its world but don't function well in ours. Leight's script plays like the blues without a melody. Specifically, it's about a trumpet player named Gene (Mark Shannon), a nice guy who never hears a thing when opportunity knocks, his deeply frustrated wife Terry (Judith Delgado) and their son Clifford (Oscar Isaac), seemingly born for the purpose of caring for his dysfunctional parents.
A side man in musicians' lingo is a band player who's not the star. Here's how Gene compares himself to a "front" man: "Stu's a lead player. Great chops, but he can only work the big bands. But I'm a true side man - I can solo, back up a singer - and harmony, three-part, four-part. I'm a jack of all trades."
In the play, Gene runs out of words and wife Terry has to finish the sentence for him. Gene is always short on words, ideas and money. Terry isn't any better in the ideas and money departments but she's never at a loss for words. Her frustration with the musician's life turns to disappointment, resentment and bitterness. Daffy in her youth, she spins out of control over 30 years and becomes an alcoholic, witless harpy.
(Which brings up a cautionary note. Terry is foul-mouthed, and she's not the only character who is. Side Man is a first-rate drama that includes, as part of its streetwise framework, much profanity.)
Shannon and Delgado are absolutely convincing in their roles, whether soloing or backing up one another. Their styles are direct and forceful, without injecting personal riffs or ornamentals into their characters. This turns Side Man, which already is dark drama, into an emotional heavyweight.
The play works efficiently under those terms. But like jazz music itself, improvisation (finesse, if you will) is expected around Leight's text and becomes noticeable by its absence. Delgado's Terry, nicknamed Crazy Terry in the play, draws so much attention that we don't grasp soon enough just how disconnected Gene is from reality. Without that realization, many of the play's other subtleties also go unrecognized.
Yet the approach by director Joe Adler, dictated in part by the casting of Delgado and Shannon, finds its way home by this more visceral route. Isaac benefits most. He floats in and out of the story in the role of the son, at times participating in the action and at others commenting upon it as a narrator. Isaac delivers the most natural, personable performance, a characterization sure to stand up as one of the season's best.
The story ranges from 1953 - when the Big Bands were breaking up and rock 'n' roll was about to redraw popular music's boundaries - to 1985. That's a long skid for the jazz musicians dedicated to their art and one another, who never coveted stardom (just as well), and never attained job security.
Along with Gene himself, Side Man follows three of his best friends and fellow musicians: Al (John Trapani), a slick ladies man; Ziggy (Kevin Reilly), a nerd with a charming speech impediment; and Jonesy (George Schiavone), a drug addict who conceals his habit by shooting up in odd places all over his body, including his eyeball. They gather often in a lounge where their favorite cocktail waitress, Patsy (Ellen Rae Littman), makes her romantic rounds among most of the band members. All are carefully honed performances that build up the shoulders of the main story and then become part of it.
Much of what makes the GableStage's Side Man so evocative is its production design. M. Anthony Reimer's sound design carefully mixes in the tracks of several classic jazz recordings, and cleverly stages a flute/trumpet duet between Delgado and Shannon. The small theater's wide stage is filled with a set and lighting by Jeff Quinn that surprises the viewer whenever the play heads off in an unexpected direction. Quinn depicts Gene and Terry's apartment and bedroom within a stage proscenium, behind a golden curtain, as if to tell us this is where the real show takes place.
A booth and well-stocked bar occupy the other side of the stage, hauntingly lit for Isaac's dialogue solos and a few poignant moments with Littman as they describe for us who those jazz musicians were: "Men who mastered their obsession, who ignored or didn't even notice anything else."
Entertainment Review
June 23, 2000
Glorious trumpets for a side man.
By Dave Knight
Sound the Trumpets.
Side Man, playing at GableStage, is better than the Tony Award winning production playing in New York. Actors are better. Direction is better. Sets and lighting better. It should win numerous Carbonell Award nominations this fall. I like it very much, or did you guess that?
Smoothly gliding between present and past, Side Man tells the story of a pre-Elvis time when jazzmen were as heroic as ball players, and there was no shortage of Saturday night gigs. Followed by the post-Elvis period when guitars replaced brass. It's about a man whose life was his music and a sober look at his family left in the wake of that passion as narrated by his son deftly played by Oscar Isaac a young actor who undoubtedly has an outstanding career ahead of him. He has the difficult task of holding the story together and moving it along. He does so with the skill and talent of a seasoned professional. His mother, beautifully played by Carbonell-winning Judith Delgado, goes from a timid young girl just arrived from the country to a frustrated raging hag whose life has passed her by. Seasoned actor Mark Shannon, recently moved here from New York, portrays the trumpet-playing father. New York's loss is our gain. Mark beautifully plays the musician oblivious to the pain he causes his family. These three give Carbonell-worthy performances and are well sustained by the professional supporting cast. Ellen Rae Littman is the lovable waitress. Kevin Reilly, George Schiavone and John Trapani are the other members of the Jazz Quartet.
Director Joe Adler has drawn out the best from these fine performers and each character is portrayed to perfection. Side Man moves back and forth in time and from scene to scene. Joe Adler is perhaps the only South Florida director who could have made this complex play flow so seamlessly. Credit for its superiority to the New York production goes largely to his direction and Oscar Isaac's fine performance, helped by Jeff Quinn's outstanding set and lighting design. |
