Comedy is so much harder to get right than tragedy: making an audience laugh is more difficult than making them cry. The veteran actress Karen Allen, in her directorial debut at Berkshire Theatre Festival, gave herself a formidable challenge: to resurrect Moonchildren, a 40-year-old comedy about Vietnam era youth culture, and make it feel important and alive. Allen's production of Michael Weller's seminal Moonchildren (Clive Barnes likened it to The Cherry Orchard in his 1972 Times review) is so carefully calibrated and constructed that you would think that Allen had spent years under the tutelage of comic masters like James L. Brooks or Jerry Zaks. She has a gift for staging and giving actors the exactly right things to do at any moment, so that every scene is fully realized. Allen's Moonchildren is absorbing, relevant and irresistibly funny.
"It's like an episode of Friends set in the 1960s," said my friend the sitcom aficionado as we sat laughing in the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. He meant that as the highest compliment. Moonchildren is the story of a group of college students (think: Doonesbury) who share an off campus apartment in the early (pre-Nixon, pre-Woodstock, pre-Stonewall) days of the anti-war movement. They aren't beatniks or hippies, but they're the generation that saw all the rules change during their four years of college. It was the time before everyone talked about their feelings, a time when someone might keep his mother's dying of cancer a secret from his best friends. It was the time when college students majored in philosophy and literature and did not obsess about planning their careers before graduation. It was the era that led to the "Me Decade," when everybody began to be self-actualized and to talk openly about everything (see Weller's 1979 play Loose Ends.) Allen has a assembled a stunning cast of young actors (and a few older ones as well) and you could imagine several of them as members of the Saturday Night Live troupe. In the intimacy of the Unicorn, you can study their facial expressions and how skillfully they mine the comic potential of every scene. It's a treat to see fine actors up close, especially Joe Paulik (Mike) and Matt Harrington (Cootie) who have a wonderfully antic chemistry; Hale Appleman ("good old Bob"), Aaron Costa Ganis (Dick) and Carter Gill (Norman) who make their mildly nutty characters seem authentic and sympathetic; Samantha Richert who threatens to steal the show with her portrayal of the kooky Shelly who's most comfortable when she is sitting under a table (on an evocatively ramshackle set by John Traub.) It's hard to imagine a better revival anywhere of Moonchildren. And it's easy to imagine that Karen Allen has an exciting new career as a theatre director. Moonchildren at Berkshire Theatre FestivalStockbridge, MA Through July 16
