Amy Spanger, Tyne Daly, and Marylouise Burke in David Hyde Pierce's version of "The Importance of Being Earnest" at Williamstown Theatre Festival.The Importance of Being Earnest may be the most perfect comedy written in the English language, so it can withstand some directorial tinkering. In the current Williamstown Theatre Festival production, David Hyde Pierce, of Frasier fame, has changed the time of the original from the late Victorian period to the 1930s and the characters to American gangster expatriates living on the lam in London and Shropshire. Although I still can’t figure out how and why, it all worked: the staccato rhythms of the American toughs were a good match for playwright Oscar Wilde’s exquisitely hilarious patter. Tyne Daly takes the role of Lady Bracknell and successfully turns her into a Ma Barker type (she reminded me most of her own performance as Mama Rose in Gypsy). In addition to Daly, my favorite American changelings were Amy Spanger’s Gwendolen, Lady Bracknells’s now Jean Hagen-ish sounding daughter, and Marylouise Burke as Miss Prism, an authentically scattered-brained American equivalent to Dame Margaret Rutherford.
Despite the casually inserted dramatic conflict of a much-missed late husband/father (which has the not especially helpful tinge of reality to it), there isn’t much depth in The Blue Deep, also at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. But there is Blythe Danner and Jack Gilpin in particular, plus a lot of good comic observation by playwright Lucy Boyle and droll direction by one of my faves, the actor/director Bob Balaban, elements that make this comedy about a haute bourgeois mother and child, set in contemporary Sag Harbor, more than worth a viewing. When else will you get a chance to see the still gorgeous Danner suspended in a neoprene suit above a swimming pool doing a version of pilates called Poolaties? Becky Ann Baker and Finn Whitrock, in particular, are delightful as a family friend and gardener interloper, respectively.
As the program to the Powerhouse Theatre production of Roberto Aguire-Sacasa’s play, Abigail/1702, notes, it’s ten years after the events of the Salem Witch Trials, and all is going swimmingly. Just kidding. As you might have predicted, or at least inferred upon first seeing the impressively bleak set of bare tree limbs by Antje Ellermann, things suck. In addition to exigent problems such as sustenance living and small pox epidemics, Abigail is feeling a lot of guilt about what she herself set in motion and survived ten years previously, much of which we recall from Arthur Miller's imcomparable drama The Crucible, to which this work is an obvious epilogue. The performances by Chloë Sevigny, Patrick Heusinger (both above, left), and Laila Robins, one of the finest unsung actresses of the common era, are fascinating to watch and worth listening to Abigail's penance for. But it can't be denied that when Abigail demands that the buff Heusinger put his shirt back on in her presence, there is a palpable feeling of disappointment from a large portion of the audience. —Scott Baldinger
