In a Vermont Community Center, Marty, age 55, will teach and participate in a six week class in Adult Creative Drama with five others. What they create in their circle will mirror their selves and each other. Will their group dynamic then transform them?
Theater games occupy most of each class after a requisite lying down circularly and individually spouting out numbers--realistic, if boring, preparation for repetitive activity. They play being objects, like trees. In dyads, they try to communicate feelings via unconnected words or phrases, like ack-mak. They play arousal and response. They collectively make up a story, each adding to it one word as the game goes around. Importantly, in each succeeding session, a participant tells, as if being one of the others, his or her life story. In what will be a devastating climax, each writes a secret, hard to reveal, that can’t be traced to its author. All the secrets are read aloud.
The final class projects are an imagined conversation about what happens to everyone “ten years from now” and an attempt to reconstruct a story told in the first class. “Attempt” is the operative word. Playwright Annie Baker prides herself in being realistic about how characters speak and act but imaginative, creative in using nonlinear structure, not dictating traditional exposition and denouement, and stressing (often long) silences. Of course, to anyone who knows Chekhov, De Musset, Brecht, Pinter, Handke as obvious examples, her ideas are not new but quite accessible, and her techniques--at least here--sometimes elaboration of the obvious. Whoever takes the trouble to see something with this play’s title, Circle Mirror Transformation, isn’t likely to need a lot of time to grasp at any point what’s happening in it.
At The Players Backstage what stands out is the quality of well-directed acting of, to my mind, the most interesting characters in any of Baker’s plays. Linda MacCluggage’s Marty, who always seems nice but professional and able to control the class, nonetheless hints at being uptight enough to perhaps have trouble handling something personal.
Chuck Conlon inhabits both the recently divorced, thus disoriented carpenter Schultz and later hopeful, outgoing romantic so strongly that if I saw him at a Home Show, I might mistake him for a flirtatious cabinets salesman. His interaction with the wonderfully animated Andrea Keddell is perfect. She’s the actress who’s moved from NYC after a breakup but “stars” in every game in the Center and can teach anyone how to work a hula hoop.
His looks, physical and emotive, make Joe Kerata the guy Marty so loves as her husband James. Once a lady’s man and now having problems relating to his daughter, James seems the quietest of the group. Like still waters, perhaps?
Brianna Larson plays a perplexed Lauren, who will be a high school junior and wants to act. Why, she keeps asking, isn’t the class about learning that? Yet she goes along with Marty and all. Larson delivers a stunning final scene in which Lauren’s definitely the lead.
Well-chosen props create scenic details in the backstage black box, They and the lights provide an atmosphere dark only between the six scenes. No detail, including costuming, has escaped director Kaylene McCaw’s careful attention.
