Community theater is alive and well in Carrboro. Curtain Up!'s current productions feature all the hallmarks of small-town American dramatic art: spare, suggestive sets, local actors and close-to-the-audience drama. The company is currently presenting two one-acts, Edward Albee's break-through play The Zoo Story and Durham playwright Sheryle Criswell's Mourning the Marigolds, at the Carrboro ArtsCenter.
From the beginning, Mourning the Marigolds (directed by Alan Criswell), is a simple memory play. It never reaches too deeply into unexplored emotional territory, and that's a good thing. It begins in a London park when a matronly Bessie Levinson (Sharlene Thomas) sits down next to Charlie (Michael O'Foghludha) and starts talking about her marigolds and the "squir-rels" (in an American accent) that are always in them.
Soon, in absurd Albee-esque fashion, Charlie is drawn in a conversation with her, which is rather uninterestingly interrupted by the introduction of two other characters who sit across the park-the priest Frank (Harvey Sage) and Julie (Jenifer Crowell), a young female family friend. And then, voila! the inevitable, inexorable flashback.
We learn that a younger Bessie, a failing actress and American expatriate hoping to make it big in London, once fell in love with a young Frank, the priest who is, by the way, already taken. It's a formula for heartache and mediocre drama à la The Thornbirds. And with lines like, "You must have been thinking about the past, Bessie. You've got that far-away look of people when they're thinking about a long time ago," you really begin to wonder if it ever needed to be said again.
While the writing and thinking that undergird this one-act are less than spectacular, the acting is for the most part competent, with Thomas particularly well-suited for her role. With her impeccable timing she can move even the harshest cynic to appreciate the sentimentalism of the play.
As much as the writing of Marigolds can't conceal some fine acting, the direction and acting in Curtain Up!'s production of The Zoo Story (directed by Phil Holmes), can't conceal the genius of playwright Edward Albee, the master of the American wing of the Theater of the Absurd.
This production chooses, for reasons not quite clear, to cast a young Laura Christopherson in the role of Jerry, the young man who accosts Peter, an older married man, on a park bench in Central Park. Confused? Not to sound misogynistic, but with a playwright like Albee, who famously focused on exactitude and precision in each and every line, it's hard to ignore the ham-fisted efforts of this rewrite to accommodate a woman. In this production Jerry is not a "H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L" but rather a "L-E-S-B-I-A-N."
When this Peppermint Patty look-alike jumps on the stage and introduces her pathetic life by saying "I've been to the zoo," you want to say, "Yeah, honey. Riiiight..." Albee's writing is clearly meant as a dialogue between two unsatisfied males-one because he is a loner and the other because he is a family man with "one wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets" rather than the sons and dog he desired. The tension between these characters can only be achieved with proper casting that allows the audience in on what becomes an intimate homosocial conversation.
But other than this one small and irksome feature, the production is a rare opportunity to see an Albee work on the stage. Because of his paucity of characters and the range of emotions required of his actors, Albee is rarely performed, and any company that takes him on deserves praise.
It's entirely possible that if you're not familiar with Albee you'll be satisfied by a viewing of this play. The Zoo Story certainly represents a virtuoso piece for both actors, even if they are unfortunately miscast.
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