October 15, 2018
Bedlam Theatre has established itself as a specialist in presenting classics in miniature and minimalism, with reduced casts, deft multiple casting, bare essentials scenery and a lot of heart. This season, they decided to experiment: Rather than present two classics in repertory, they’ve decided to present two classics simultaneously. Yes, a mashup.
What has been mashed and somewhat mushed are Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (in a contemporary colloquial adaptation by Kimerly Pau), which provides the framework, with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which kind of bubbles up from within at posited points of plot and relationship overlap, for the mashing mushily titled Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet. Which is to say, the plays don’t alternate—they’ve been conflated, and there are times when our orientation moves from reality to surrealism and back again.
This is the kind of evening that almost never exists: the kind where you say, Maybe it’ll get better in Act Two, or more accurately in the case of URVJ (since they don’t ever really deliver badly), maybe they’ll do something to demonstrate the point of the exercise, and indeed they do. It’s an essay on passion, alternately expressed and thwarted; and in the second act, we finally see alchemical simultaneity as, for example, the point where Vanya and Romeo are indistinguishable within the breakdown of the actor playing both as one. But it’s a long time in coming, and for me…again, hyperbole is the enemy here; I was on the verge of typing it wasn’t worth the wait, but by the lights of a director friend of mine in attendance, it was—so your mileage may vary; and I myself can’t truly say I felt that getting to the endgame didn’t merit my patience…the best I can say is that it answered the question: Why are we here? Working backwards from the end sequence, you can understand the intended (if not quite realized) thematic goal. But despite the cathartic behavior onstage, it didn’t strike me as that cathartic to witness. My sense of satisfaction was only academic.
Decently enough directed, though, in the round (the rectangle, really) by Eric Tucker, and performed with admirable conviction and technique by him, Edmund Lewis, Susannah Millonzi, Randolph Curtis Rand, and the untraditionally but effectively cast Zuzanna Szadkowski.
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