It's a long hot summer in 1945 and, with his father sent off to war, a restless 14-year-old boy cooped up in a lakeside house with his stressed mother and a prissy older sister, and well, things are bound to happen. More important, a few lessons are learned in What I Did Last Summer as playwright A.R Gurney looks back at his own coming-of-age summer of '45.
Teenaged Charlie (Noah Galvin) is spending his summer on the Canadian side of Lake Erie in Rose Hill, a privileged Wasp community. He is itchy and bored, trying to avoid his mother, Grace (Carolyn McCormick), always nagging at him to help out with chores and study his Latin. His older sister, Elsie (Kate McGonigle), is busy reading, complaining about the irresponsible Charlie and generally bored.
With abundant teenage energy and no direction, Charlie decides to get a job and answers an ad posted by Anna Trumbull, locally called the "Pig Woman," played by Kristine Nielsen in hippie gear and long gray braids. It's a controversial move. Everyone knows that Anna has a past. The community gossips about her long-ago affair with a successful doctor who died and left her the house, an old pig farm near the lake. Anna was once a blue-blood herself but has turned to a life of creative rebellion. She is charismatic, part Tuscarora Indian, an artist manqué, which means ”she gives art lessons, but nobody takes them,” says Bonny (Juliet Brett), Charlie's wannabe girlfriend.
Charlie, however, is fascinated by this controversial bohemian who convinces him that he has artistic potential. He agrees to let her help him find his talent through art. While he tries his hand at painting and sculpting, potential is not there. Interestingly, his mother once studied briefly with Anna. Toward the end of this summer, a confrontation brings the two women together once again vying for control over Charlie, his potential and his life.
McCormick and Nielson both portray well-crafted women who have taken different roads. Anna follows her own drumbeat, and Grace is a button-down traditionalist, yet both reveal personal needs not met and troubles in choices they made.
Other cast members include Pico Alexander, a slightly older boy and Brett as Bonny, who is on the road to a traditional life but still willful enough to break rules for a little fun. McGonigle convincingly makes her off-Broadway debut as the proper sister, Elsie, but these supporting cast members are not as fully nuanced as Grace and Anna.
Noah Galvin is a charmer to watch as Charlie, as long as you're not his mother dealing with his wise-guy energy. Galvin portrays the gawky self-absorbed teenage boy that Gurney seems to remember so well. Charlie has learned something from his relationship with Anna. We see that while his future does not lie in artistic creativity, his coming-of-age lessons provide substance for a career writing plays. With projections by John Narun and Michael Yeargan's minimalist stage, director Jim Simpson's production at the Signature Theater is led by words being typed out on the backdrop. To one side, a drummer (Dan Weiner) keeps time with the typing, accenting sounds of car doors and splashes in the lake. On the one hand, this is innovative staging, but it is also feels contrived even with the undeniable nostalgia of clackety-clack typing sounds and occasional music of Bing Crosby singing, "Swinging on a Star."
Like a strawberry ice cream cone on a hot August afternoon, What I Did Last Summer is a pleasant memory shared by A.R. Gurney.
