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Friday, September 20, 2019

Jill Eikenberry Stars in FERN HILL by Michael Tucker

L-R: John Glover, Mark Linn-Baker, Ellen Parker, Jodi Long, Jill Eikenberry, and Mark Blum in FERN HILL.  Photo by Carol Rosegg. 

Fern Hill by Michael Tucker, currently enjoying its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan, is a beautifully written and brilliantly performed play about three “artsy” couples in their golden years and the relationships that exist between the partners in each of the three marriages:

Vincent (John Glover) is an established painter who will be entering the hospital for hip replacement surgery in a matter of days and who will be turning eighty in two months.  His much younger wife, Darla (Ellen Parker), is an acclaimed photographer who is about to be honored with her first one-woman exhibition in Vienna.

Jer (Mark Blum), is a respected writer and college professor who is celebrating his seventieth birthday today.  His wife, Sunny (Jill Eikenberry) is another talented painter, albeit one not nearly as well established as Vincent.  Together they own and reside in Fern Hill, a farmhouse retreat outside the city.

Billy (Mark Linn-Baker) is a stoner, a foodie and a rock-and-roll musician who will turn 60 next week.  His Asian wife, Michiko (Jodi Long), first met Billy when he was on tour years ago and she was one of his groupies; she currently works in a college’s Fine Arts Department.

The three couples have been close friends for years and now are all together at Fern Hill where they are about to celebrate the milestone birthdays for all three men: Billy’s sixtieth, Jer’s seventieth, and Vincent’s eightieth.  And to consider Sunny’s proposal that they form something of a commune and all move in together at Fern Hill to live out their final years together.

Sunny’s idea really does make a lot of sense.  Far better that they all age together and care for one another in their twilight years than that they go off to separate retirement or nursing homes to live out their final days among strangers or, worse yet, become burdens on their children.  Naturally, Vincent is all for it: he is, after all, the oldest and the frailest of the group with the shortest remaining life expectancy.  And while he loves his New York loft, the area in which it is located is rapidly becoming gentrified with “undesirable” hedge fund types and celebrities and even one of the Kennedy kids, and he doesn’t like that at all so he really won’t mind giving it up.  And that’s reason enough for Darla, his primary caregiver, to favor the idea as well.
 
And, despite their being the youngest of the three couples, it makes particular sense for Billy and Michiko for an additional financial reason: Billy’s band, Olly Golly, is no longer as popular as it once was and Billy’s and Michiko’s combined income has declined substantially (although they’re still spending as much as ever); if they move to Fern Hill, they can sell their New York apartment and live comfortably from the proceeds of the sale.  And of course Sunny loves the idea: it was her idea to begin with after all, she loves her friends – and maybe Jer is no longer quite enough for her.

Jer, however, is the lone holdout.  Yes, he loves his friends but he doubts that he would love them as much if they were around all the time.  More than any of the others, he values his privacy – as well he should.  For as it turns out, Jer has been carrying on with a young, promiscuous student – which might not fit in so well with his living a communal life with his more elderly friends at Fern Hill.

When Jer’s adulterous affair is disclosed, Sunny is understandably upset.  She considers throwing him out and perhaps she will.  But the issue of whether or not she throws him out is not really what drives the play.  Nor is the issue of whether or not the six friends actually will form a commune and live together in their final years at Fern Hill.

No, what really animates the play are the discussions among the six friends regarding their own sex lives; the distinctions they draw between sex and intimacy; their marriages; their own past indiscretions, shortcomings, and prior adulterous experiences; their perceptions of how they or their partners may have changed over the years; and their own assignments of credit or blame for whatever failures may have occurred in their relationships.

It is all very enlightening but, as Billy put it, it is also a kind of Rashomon experience in which the participants each see things in a different way.  So, for example, Jer sincerely blames Sunny for his own infidelity since she stopped “adoring” him and stopped “enjoying” their active sex lives whereas Sunny honestly believes that their sex lives had been artificial “performances” for years and that she only stopped “adoring” Jer when he stopped being “adorable.”

Tucker has a wonderful ear for language.  Billy’s rendition of his recipe for spaghetti and clam sauce, for example, might not be in a class with Hamlet’s soliloquy but it is, without doubt, the most delightful exposition of a recipe for the classic dish that I have ever heard. And Darla’s explanation of why Jer was so easily seduced by one of his students was as sharp and succinct as it could be:

“You were the man.  Men are easy, Jer.  They come with a handle.”

The entire cast of Fern Hill is absolutely terrific but two members of the cast really stood out.  Jill Eikenberry’s performance as Sunny, the betrayed and disillusioned wife, still in love with her husband but wishing that things could just go back to the way they were, was impeccably nuanced.  And Mark Linn-Baker was simply superb as Billy, the 60-year-old drug and alcohol addicted Peter Pan who never really grew up and continued to live in the past – though, all things considered, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea after all. 


Friday, September 13, 2019

ONLY YESTERDAY - A Night in the Lives of John Lennon and Paul McCartney

L-R: Tommy Crawford and Christopher Sears in ONLY YESTERDAY.  Photo by Carol Rosegg.
It was more than fifty years ago, back in 1964, that “Beatlemania” was all the rage, but to us (and many others, we are sure) it seems like it was “only yesterday.”  That year, with six number one singles under their belt and having received a rousing reception in their debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (an estimated 73 million people tuned in to watch them on their black and white TV sets), the “Fab Four” embarked on a months-long nationwide concert tour before adoring crowds across America.


When their tour was temporarily stalled by a hurricane in Florida, however, they were forced to put everything on hold for a day or two, making an unscheduled stop in Key West before continuing on to Jacksonville.  And so it was that John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both in their early 20’s, found themselves holed up together for the night in a cheap hotel room in Key West with little to do but drink and talk.  Which is just what they did.  Until they also cried.
Or at least that’s pretty much what Paul said happened when he was interviewed more than four decades later.  It was on a radio broadcast in 2011 that he recalled that night in 1964 when he and John drank, talked and cried together for reasons he could no longer be certain of but which he thought probably related to the deaths of both of their mothers when they were in their early teens - and the emotional toll it took on them.

This was really all that the playwright Bob Stevens had to go on when he wrote Only Yesterday, a slight but charming one act play, currently enjoying its New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan.  In Only Yesterday, we are treated to Stevens’ imagining of what might have transpired on that night in 1964 as John Lennon (Christopher Sears) and Paul McCartney (Tommy Crawford) not only drank and talked – and, yes, cried – but also engaged in good humored horseplay from Monopoly to pillow-fighting, jammed on their guitars, half-heartedly attempted to write some songs, and even delivered a blow for integration by refusing to perform before a segregated audience in Jacksonville.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the show is light on the Beatles’ own music but it does include tunes by Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry - and remarkably entertaining impersonations of Bob Dylan (by Crawford) and of Elvis Presley (by Sears).  Indeed, the Presley impersonation was a real show-stopper and, if nothing else, it alone is sure to leave you smiling for days to come.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Traveling Through Time with TECH SUPPORT at 59E59 Theaters

L-R: Margot White, Mark Lotito, Leanne Cabrera, Ryan Avalos, and Lauriel Friedman in TECH SUPPORT.  Photo by Russ Rowland. 

Tech Support by Debra Whitfield, currently premiering at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan, is one for the ages – but not in a good way.  It is a trite rom-com, dependent upon a preposterous time-travel premise, in which Pamela Stark (Margot White), a middle-aged rare book dealer living in Manhattan in 2020, inadvertently embarks on a series of journeys to random years in the twentieth century: 1919, 1946, and 1978.

Pamela is in the throes of a divorce and something of a Luddite, capable of adjusting a pop-up toaster or opening a Tupperware container, but not much more.  She perceives herself as “an analogue girl in a digital world.”  And so, when her computer’s printer acts up, she is forced to telephone “tech support” for assistance but when she presses the wrong button on her phone, she somehow finds herself back in the year 1919.  It is there that she meets Charlie Blackwell (Mark Lotito), the kindly proprietor of Mrs. Blackwell’s Boarding House; Grace (Lauriel Friedman), an intelligent and politically ambitious women’s suffragette; Maisie (Leanne Cabrera), a much milder, fragile and old-fashioned – albeit pregnant - suffragette; and Chip (Ryan Avalos), a decent, handsome young man who, unbeknownst to him, is responsible for Maisie’s pregnancy.

(Pamela’s subsequent time travels are predicated on even sillier contrivances: she fiddles with the dials on a Victrola and a radio, pushes the wrong door buzzer, and provides a Lyft driver with a house number but no street name.)

But back to 1919.  Pamela prevails upon Maisie not to undergo an abortion, not because Pamela herself is pro-life (indeed, she actually professes to being pro-choice) but only because abortions in 1919, unlike in 2020, are really dangerous.  In fact, Pamela admits to once having had an abortion herself, although she also allows that

“I had a lot of sleepless nights and if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure I’d make the same decision.  But I’m glad I had the choice!”

Anyway, Maisie doesn’t get an abortion and gives birth to Chip Jr. (Ryan Avalos), the spitting image of his father, wouldn’t you know, and it’s a good thing for Pamela that she did because when Pamela lands in 1946 (right after the end of World War II), she meets Chip Jr. and they fall in love.  (Wasn’t so great for Maisie, though, who died in childbirth, which is simply glossed over.  Maybe an abortion illegally performed by a doctor in 1919 might actually have been safer for Maisie than giving birth that year, but we’ll never know and won’t really bother to think about.)

And this is what is wrong with the play.  The playwright consistently attempts to have things both ways, without actually dealing with serious issues in any depth.  And so, in similar fashion, when Grace’s subsequent marriage to Charlie is teetering on the brink of collapse because her successful political career is interfering with what her husband really wants -  a wife who will stay home, cook, clean and darn his socks - we are treated to this banal exchange:

Grace: You know that I love my job and I feel that I’m just now starting to make a difference.  But I love you more.  What does it matter how many men and women I help, if the one who means the most to me isn’t there?  I want to come home.  If it means resigning my office, so be it.

Charlie: I don’t know what to say.  I’m flabbergasted.

Grace: You don’t have to say anything except “welcome home.”

Charlie: Oh Gracie….I love you so much.  I guess all I really wanted to hear you say you loved me enough to give it all up –

Grace: I don’t understand –

Charlie: You don’t have to quit.  I won’t let you quit – you’re doing a lot of good for the city and I want you to know that you have my “full support.”  Just hire another assistant, so we can have dinner together, every once in a while.

The play is also insufferably knee jerk pretentious.  According to Pamela, for example,

“…for some women it’s [abortion’s} become more dangerous because of antediluvian laws passed by old white men –“

and according to Grace

“There are forward-thinking men and women here {New York] but I’m not so sure about the rest of the country – especially in the hinterlands.”.

And there you have it: Tech Support is a hodgepodge of homilies and its audience is trapped in this time warp for 85 minutes.  But I feel sorrier for the play’s cast of five, all of whom are consummate professionals who will be trapped in this time warp for the next several weeks (the play is scheduled to run through September 21).  All five actors should be commended for performing exceptionally well, especially in light of the material they have been given to work with.