{"id":36013,"date":"2025-08-01T13:51:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T20:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/?p=36013"},"modified":"2025-08-06T19:05:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T02:05:38","slug":"the-understudy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/2025\/08\/the-understudy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Understudy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Play (2007)
\nby Theresa Rebeck
\nDirected by Paula Plum
\nHub Theatre Company of Boston<\/a>
\nClub Caf\u00e9
\nColumbus Avenue, South End, Boston
\nJuly 19 – August 2, 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n

With Kevin Paquette (Harry), Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia (Jake), Lauren Elias (Roxanne)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Kevin<\/a>
Kevin Paquette as Harry
in “The Understudy”
Photo: Courtesy of Hub Theatre Company of Boston<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
A comedy about the travails of an understudy, a film star, and a stage manager who have to rehearse a newly discovered play by Kafka.<\/div>\n

Harry (Kevin Paquette) is the understudy for Jake (Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia), a semi-biggish action film star, in a newly discovered (but not actual) play, The Castle<\/em>, by Franz Kafka, while Jake, also in the play as another character, is the understudy for the unseen Bruce, a big-big action film star who is the lead of the current production. Consequently, responsibilities are knotted up and overlapping, and even though the setup of this intricate understudy network is quite funny, the Kafka play itself is not meant to be. Underlying the poignant humor about the rehearsal, is a secondary tragicomedy, the realization that Harry and Roxanne (Lauren Elias), the stage manager who is tasked with rehearsing the understudies, had been engaged to be married before Harry walked out on Roxanne without any explanation. Jake is a semi-big-deal film star, but not quite as big as the unseen Bruce. That adds drama to the mix, since Harry is just a lowly stage actor who has to contend with the big shot film guys and does not feel so great about being a serious stage actor who has to duck under to lame film actors however famous. This is a triangle, and the interactions among the players becomes interesting and occasionally passionate, with an errant kiss or two embellishing the goings on mid-rehearsal.<\/p>\n

Theresa Rebeck has created an interesting intrigue among these three characters, allowing us to peer inside the resentments and insecurities of an ordinary stage actor confronting the intrusion of showbiz talent into his arena. It’s understandable that Harry is off-balance, and when we learn that he and Roxanne had been a serious item, it doesn’t take a huge amount of imagining to guess why he flew the coop, though it might have made the play a little more interesting to get some of that story filled out. Instead, Rebeck leaves it as it is, with the existential bluntness of Harry’s flight simply rebounding in the space he must inhabit during this rehearsal with the film star, with his ex-fianc\u00e9e for whom he still has serious attraction, and with the regret he holds for leaving her.<\/p>\n

\"Lauren<\/a>
Lauren Elias as Roxanne
Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia as Jake
in “The Understudy”
Photo: Courtesy of Hub Theatre Company of Boston<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This small intense triangle is a perfect setup for the intimate Club Caf\u00e9 setting in which the Hub Theatre situates itself this summer, not requiring much in the way of sets – perfectly apropos of the depicted rehearsal.<\/p>\n

The actors all do a fine job, with Kevin Paquette, in the title role, giving Harry an interesting complexity, firing off his lines with a thespian’s flair while commanding asides meant to disparage the what-are-they-doing-here film actors. There is a solo riff right at the beginning of the show in which Harry straddles these two narratives, and Paquette pulls it off very well, juggling the interleaved lines of dialogue with panache.<\/p>\n

As the film star Jake, Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia pulls off enough blathering attempt at cachet to make it convincing, somewhat oblivious to the deep envy and resentment that Harry bears him and his ilk. And, as the stage manager, Lauren Elias, producing artistic director of Hub Theatre, does a lovely frazzled job, running hither and thither and exhorting with varied levels of frustration and amazement that she has been saddled not only with a difficult to manage understudy but with her ex-lover. Ouch! Elias is very funny in the role, exasperated and breathless and bringing a supercharged kinetic frenzy to the emotionally complicated mess. Director Paula Plum has capably brought this earnestly opposed trio into a poignantly humorous mix and provided some solid amusements within the context of an ironic frame.<\/p>\n

For those interested in the theme of resentment between actors of different stations is also interestingly exercised with comedic abandon in The Shark is Broken<\/em> (2019), a dramatic comedy by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, an account of the embattled engagement between Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, stars of Jaws<\/em> (1975), the early but highly celebrated Steven Spielberg film. <\/p>\n

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Play (2007)
\nby Theresa Rebeck
\nDirected by Paula Plum
\nHub Theatre Company of Boston<\/a>
\nClub Caf\u00e9
\nColumbus Avenue, South End, Boston
\nJuly 19 – August 2, 2025<\/strong>
\nA comedy about the travails of an understudy, a film star, and a stage manager who have to rehearse a newly discovered play by Kafka.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-plays","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36013"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36028,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36013\/revisions\/36028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}