Bittersweet Comedy at Playhouse Tracks Decline of a Creative Mind
By ARIEL ABERG-RIGER
Published: July 10, 2001
“Her mind had been smashed to pieces. The person she had been before hadn’t been around for a long time, but the pieces were still her pieces.”
At the Vineyard Playhouse this month, actors struggle to pick up such scattered pieces in The Waverly Gallery by Kenneth Lonergan. The play, directed by Joann Green Bruer, displays the painfully humorous mental deterioration of Gladys Green, the elderly owner of a gallery on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, New York city.
FINE ENSEMBLE features Bonnie Black as Ellen, Richmond Hoxie as Howard and Joan Kendall as Gladys.
The story is told through a series of scenes, as Daniel, her grandson, remembers them; they involve himself, his mother and father, Ellen and Howard Fine, and a young artist, Don Bowman, whose work is being displayed at Gladys’s gallery. To exacerbate her worsening condition, the play comes to a head when the family discovers that Gladys must vacate the gallery that has been her livelihood for more than 25 years.
BONNIE BLACK with Johnny Sparks and Chuma Hunter-Gault.
The play opens with the characters wound in a frenzied knot of a family dynamic that slowly unravels into both the past and present as the runaway train of Gladys’s Alzheimer’s barrels through their lives. As Gladys sinks deeper and deeper into a quagmire of muddy memories, we discover more and more about her past, both through stories she rattles off and memories her family shares. This reconstruction of who she was juxtaposed against the reality of who she is becoming creates an ever-widening chasm of hopelessness into which her friends and family find themselves falling.
It is in this hopelessness that the actors come together as an ensemble. In the carefully modulated tension between them, the weight and shape of their despair becomes tangible. The characters hang in the discomfort of Gladys’s inevitable decline, jumping from the mundane to the ridiculous in a way that is distinctly human.
As Gladys, Joan Kendall is convincing. Her facial expressions, punctuated by her eyes, are luminous as she peers into Gladys’s world with glazed clarity, and into the present with fierce conviction. These shifts between her dual realities are what make Ms. Kendall so believable in the role. From her childlike smirk while licking the salt off pretzels, to the anguish in her face when she wails that she doesn’t want to be in a place where “no one wants her,” her presentation of a woman in the grip of Alzheimer’s is heart-wrenching as well as heart-warming.
Daniel Reed, played by Johnny Sparks, anchors the play with his steady monologues and deadpan humor. When asked by his father if his girlfriend deals in politics, Dan quickly responds in monotone, “No, she’s involved in torture.” Dan’s open, quiet simplicity, in conjunction with an artistic design that breaks down the fourth wall (by placing some of the audience members on stage and keeping everyone in full light for the first third of the show) allows for an intimate relationship between the audience and the actors.
Together, Ellen and Howard Fine, played by Bonnie Black and Richmond Hoxie, create a hilarious couple. Through their well-established behaviors, such as Howard’s loud voice and exaggerated hand motions to communicate to the hard-of-hearing Gladys, and Ellen’s brisk, no-nonsense, take-charge demeanor, the two provide a comic yet insightful background to Gladys and Dan.
Chuma Hunter-Gault, as Don, the optimistic young artist who is slowly crushed by the realities of the city, provides a necessary, soothing counterbalance to the frenzied family.
This solid cast will continue to perform The Waverly Gallery throughout July at the Vineyard Playhouse.
