Middletown

Play (2010)
by Will Eno

With Gabriel Kuttner (Public Speaker, Cop, Male Doctor, Radio Host), Marianna Bassham (Mrs. Swanson), Michael Forden Walker (John Dodge), Steven Barkhimer (Mechanic, Ground Control), Paul Langton (Librarian, Attendant, Intercom), Esme Allen (Tour Guide, Attendant, Cop’s Radio), Grant MacDermott (Male Tourist, Greg, Freelancer, Landscaper, Janitor), Margaret Lamb (Female Tourist, Sweetheart, Female Doctor, Radio Host)

A cop harasses a mechanic sitting in a park. A handyman encounters a woman in the library. Tourists parade through, and an astronaut weighs in on the hidden wonders of the earth. Births, deaths and subliminal romances hover, as we look into this seemingly microscopic set of events from a slightly elevated perch.

This beautifully directed piece contains some of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s really wonderful long-time actors and some really wonderful newer ones. Everyone delivers in this passing look at a small town and its tasteful percolations on the human condition.

This is small town living with no pretense at very high drama, but extremely capable of raising up significant dramatic moments out of its smaller events.

There is, here, unlike in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (recently produced beautifully by the Huntington Theatre Company), a kind of absurdist wryness that holds the events before us with a bit of a smile.

Older Pinter plays like The Birthday Party (1957) or The Homecoming (1964) have these odd echoes in spades, and it is also present, more recently, in much of Wes Anderson’s films, most recently and vividly in Moonrise Kingdom (2012). What some might regard simply as stiltedness in speech in the hands of Pinter or Anderson is better understood as a kind of attenuated framing of language that allows us to peer into its peculiarities. That too is present here in Middletown, and its combination with the domestic romanticism of the Our Town-like treatment makes it a particularly interesting hybrid.

Marianna Bassham, a superb actress who delivered a wonderful Viola in ASP’s Twelfth Night last season and who has been featured in many of the company’s productions, plays a wonderfully rueful and wry Mrs. Swanson. She does it with reserve, but also with just enough coyness to make it fascinating.

Michael Forden Walker, another accomplished ASP actor of long standing, creates a tender and vulnerable John Dodge, adroitly conveying abbreviated expressiveness above deeply harbored feeling. Walker masterfully mixes this appearance of simplicity with the evidence of profound complexity in a compelling way.

Walker’s and Bashham’s lines, so interlaced and networked, are delivered with the subtlety of beautifully wrought musical phrases. Watching and listening to them is like listening to great chamber musicians shape passages and pass them to each other with incredible subtlety of gesture and glance.

Steven Barkhimer has a distinguished career as a great, broad clown. Here he gets to clown, but does it in a more contained, and quietly pathetic, way, yielding an endearing and poignant result. He is also a great musician and, in the second act, bearing an Indian headdress, gets to deliver a wonderful vocal number from the balcony as part of the developed scenario.

Gabriel Kuttner, who recently gave a bravura solo performance in Fully Committed, a comic tour de force at the New Repertory Theatre, does a wonderful job here in a variety of roles. At the opening, he gives an amazing, long, soliloquy, and maintains a varied series of character changes throughout, his versatility striking.

Esme Allen shone in ASP’s The Merry Wives of Windsor last season and returns here in an ebullient set of characters, showing a buoyancy that seems to hover over the unseen in a sparkling, but modeled, way.

Grand Macdermott, as the astronaut and various other things, and Margaret Lamb, as the female tourist and doctor, are also vivid, clear and compelling, fitting right in with the level of acting excellence, obviously nurtured by the extremely capable direction by Doug Lockwood throughout.

The setting and location of the audience is wonderfully conceived for the space, positioning the viewer at a vertical level between the first and second level stages, in keeping with a long tradition of ingenious settings and stagings by this very inventive and adaptable company.

– BADMan