Sasha Bratt

Maria's Choice

Review of The Revisionist, Playhouse on Park

By pairing David, a twenty-something author from New York, with Maria, a Holocaust survivor in contemporary Poland, Jesse Eisenberg’s The Revisionist guarantees itself a certain relevance. At a time when those who lived through the Holocaust are dying off and a younger generation is growing up largely ignorant of what actually happened, the play keeps alive what could be called a necessary historical sense. With its intergenerational dynamic, The Revisionist successfully dramatizes how difficult communicating can be between those born in the first half of the twentieth century and those, born in the second half, who have come of age in the twenty-first century.

Maria (Cecelia Riddett), David (Carl Howell) (photos by Curt Henderson)

Maria (Cecelia Riddett), David (Carl Howell) (photos by Curt Henderson)

For too much of its running time, that seems to be the play’s entire point, a comic mismatch of intentions that aren’t quite funny or disorienting enough to justify their belaboring. In the later scenes, the revelation we’ve been waiting for arrives to make a stronger point—about family and remembrance and debt—that gives the play an uneasy resolution. The play’s dramatic arc, while not always as well-developed as it might be, mostly works, and Sasha Bratt’s production at Playhouse on Park maintains a quizzical and bemused tone that keeps us interested.

Maria (Cecelia Riddett) is an elderly Polish woman living in an apartment she treats as a shrine to her family, many dead and gone, others—like David’s grandfather—relatives who escaped to America. David (Carl Powell), Maria’s second cousin, is the author of a reasonably successful Young Adult novel (a political allegory that got reviewed, though not favorably, in the New York Times), who is trying to revise his latest manuscript for publication. He has come to her apartment in Poland as a last ditch refuge from his distracting life in New York. He needs a writer’s retreat, and finds instead a lonely relative poised to smother him with attention and chatter.

As an actor, Eisenberg is best-known in movies for playing somewhat quirky young men, intense with intelligence and often misguided. In the initial production of The Revisionist, he played David himself, paired with Vanessa Redgrave in a performance that earned raves. The performances in the Playhouse on Park production are strong and well-matched. As neither character is entirely likeable, we expect some development that will firmly tip the scales one way or the other, or that will lead to a happy rapprochement. We may warm to either, both, or neither character, but we do come to understand them better, whether or not they ever really understand each other.

David (Carl Howell), Maria (Cecelia Riddett)

David (Carl Howell), Maria (Cecelia Riddett)

Cecelia Riddett’s Maria is the more readily likeable, but she isn’t someone easy to be with, if only because her expectations are so high. She lives a quiet life, mostly punctuated by watching CNN and answering the phone—it’s always a telemarketer. Her right-hand man is a taxi driver named Zenon, nicely played as both easy-going and scary by Sebastian Buczyk, who drives her, carries her groceries, and, in one scene, tends her in a more intimate manner. Maria lets David use her own bedroom, while assuming a connection that, she believes, family members should have even if they’ve barely met (she saw David when he was a child; he doesn’t remember it). Her effort to coddle him is the kind of thing that would drive away someone his age, even if they had more of a family backstory.

Zenon (Sebastian Buczyk), David (Carl Howell)

Zenon (Sebastian Buczyk), David (Carl Howell)

David, for his part, is the epitome of the guest who is only there to suit himself. Bratt and Powell wisely don’t make David an Eisenberg clone, but rather play him as a youthful and insecure success, in a tone that perfectly suits his demographic. He’s used to taking himself seriously and knowingly descends to Maria’s level when his curiosity gets the best of him. He’s a chronic pot-smoker but never shows the stoner’s typical bursts of hilarity and depth. David is more of a latter day Woody Allen character, apt to feel put-upon and unappreciated, expecting consideration simply for the difficulty of being himself. Scenes in which the play seems to call for broad situation comedy—as when David walks in on Zenon shaving Maria’s legs, or when David gets his jollies having Zenon misuse American expletives—tend to be low key, here, as if the production knows such moments fall flat without a laugh-track.

And that’s the weakest aspect of the play: it has only a scatter-shot idea of how to make the situation amusing, so that much of what we see is simply working its way toward the Big Reveal. That aspect, full of the backstory of Maria’s life under the Nazis and just after, makes sense of her assertive effort to claim kin, and, in its outcome, takes aim at the worst of David right about the time we’ve come to accept him. The way people often do with family.

A prickly comedy aiming at deeper themes, The Revisionist works best as a cautionary tale about the ways to abuse a host and mislead a guest, and how sharing confidences is not a heart-to-heart if the hearts concerned never quite align.

Maria (Cecelia Riddett), David (Carl Howell)

Maria (Cecelia Riddett), David (Carl Howell)

 

The Revisionist
By Jesse Eisenberg
Directed by Sasha Bratt

Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Scenic Designer: Emily Nichols; Costume Designer: Kate Bunce; Lighting Designer: Marcus Abbott; Stage Manager: Corin Killins; Dialect and Language Coach: Sebastian Buczyk; Properties and Set Dressing: Pamela Lang & Eileen O’Connor

Cast: Sebastian Buczyk, Carl Howell, Cecelia Riddett

Playhouse on Park
April 11-29, 2018

Life Lessons

Review of Tuesdays with Morrie at Playhouse on Park

A play about friendship and dying is bound to be affecting, but for such a play to give viewers a renewed sense of vitality takes some doing. And that’s what Tuesdays with Morrie, directed by Sasha Brätt at West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park achieves, and that effect is mostly the result of excellent acting and the show’s well-paced presentation.

Based on a best-selling memoir by Mitch Ablom, the celebrated sportswriter, Tuesdays with Morrie could easily retread the simplistic “wisdom literature” the memoir aims for. But Brätt’s approach to the theater adaptation, by Ablom and Jeffrey Hatcher, makes some decisions that help bring the friendship between Mitch and his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz to life. First of all, as portrayed by Chris Richards, Mitch isn’t particularly likeable. As a student, he’s just an average guy whom, in part because of his piano playing, his teacher has taken a shine to. That makes for a nice parting upon graduation but with no sense, on Mitch’s part, that anything deeper will be forthcoming between them. Secondly, there’s Gannon McHale as Morrie, played with a winning sense of how to finesse fatality that never becomes maudlin.

Gannon McHale (Morrie), Chris Richards (Mitch)

Gannon McHale (Morrie), Chris Richards (Mitch)

As a successful sports columnist in Detroit, Mitch is the kind of guy who knows his stuff, is consumed by his career, and quite content with himself. He stresses that he cut-off any memory of Brandeis, where he went to college, and ignored anything that would call that time back to his mind. That is until he happens to see an interview with Schwartz on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. Schwartz has been diagnosed with Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (aka, Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which is fatal, and reflects about his life on the air. Mitch travels east to Massachusetts to pay his respects. And there he finds himself once again under the spell of his old mentor.

Morrie Schwartz is a canny character, the type who knows how to ingratiate himself, and also how to be needy and giving at the same time. It’s a wonderful role and McHale does it full justice. His Morrie is clearly the kind of person who feels useless alone, who lives and shines for others. And to have Mitch back in his life—after the younger man suggests, almost in spite of himself, visiting Morrie weekly, as he did during the professor's office hours in college—is to have again a purpose for living, even as he’s dying. In promising to be there to the end, Mitch gives Morrie a weekly reason to rally.

Chris Richards (Mitch), Gannon McHale (Morrie)

Chris Richards (Mitch), Gannon McHale (Morrie)

Because the weekly encounters between the two, which Mitch tapes, sometimes take the form of question and answer, the nature of their relationship remains structured by their roles in each other’s lives: teacher and student. Mitch’s success in his chosen field says nothing about how well he thinks or how much he feels. And that’s what his old professor is testing him on.

The tensions between them have to do, first, with the unpleasant facts of Morrie’s condition and Mitch’s effort to treat them as less pressing than they are (along those lines is his weekly delivery of a bag of food to Morrie, as though bringing him care packages that should sustain him, regardless of how advanced the disease is). Then there’s the tension of Mitch’s defensiveness when Morrie’s reflections on life begin to make Mitch see how shallow his own successful life is. It’s not a question of thinking he should have done something else with his life so much as a question of how he should be. Like any good humanist philosopher, Morrie’s lesson is not about having more or doing something better (Mitch has plenty and does quite well), it’s about being more human, not flinching from the “touchy-feely” aspects of life that make Mitch cringe.

The interplay between the two, because of these tensions—to which is added Morrie’s manner of winning a visit from Mitch’s wife—makes for involving theater defined by dialogue and narration. We’re privy to what Mitch wants us to see and he wants us to see how valuable knowing Morrie has been for him. And to see its value for ourselves.

Gannon McHale (Morrie), Chris Richards (Mitch)

Gannon McHale (Morrie), Chris Richards (Mitch)

And in that, Tuesdays with Morrie is a lesson to us all. If we have interacted with the infirm and the dying, we can still be reminded of what that experience meant; and if we haven’t, the play makes the reality of such vigils very palpable. The play, in the end, almost inevitably evokes tears if only because we have come to know and love Morrie. McHale lets us view the full humanity of this man in a way that we may not find so easily matched in reality. And Richards, surprisingly, is not overshadowed. Much as we might favor the elder role, there’s a certain sensibleness wielded by a person in the midst of life that Mitch retains, and Richards is quite adept at confiding in his audience, knowing that we will share at least some of his squeamishness or embarrassment or selfishness.

Richly rewarding in its grasp of the fleeting connections in our busy lives and of the deep presence of persons, Tuesdays with Morrie at Playhouse on Park offers a great way to pass some time in good company.

 

Tuesdays with Morrie
By Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Ablom
Based on the book by Mitch Ablom
Directed by Sasha Brätt

Scenic Designer: Christopher Hoyt; Lighting Designer: Aaron Hochheiser; Costume Designer: Lisa Steier; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott

Playhouse on Park
September 30-October 18, 2015