By: centraljersey.com
Princeton University’s all-student troupe Theatre Intime has assembled a fresh cast for their first offering of the season, mostly new faces to me. (In typical undergrad fashion, the playbill biographies are not for the enlightenment of theatergoers, but for inside jokes among cast and crew.) To judge by the results, we’re in for some good times ahead.
A trained violist, Hollinger composes his plays like pieces of music. As he said in a 2007 interview for an Iowa festival of his work, "Characters are instruments, scenes are movements; tempo, rhythm and dynamics are critical; and melody and counterpoint are always set in relief by rests – beats, pauses, the spaces in between."
That’s certainly evident in this play, which consists of many short, rapidly developed scenes, often quickly paced, but interspersed with pregnant (literally in one case) pauses. There’s also counterpoint in a scene that is split on opposite sides of the stage, juxtaposing one couple against another. The scenes are inter-cut with clips of period-correct pop music – and lots of it.
Is there a plot in this madness? The story is set in 1950s America, when the H-Bomb was developed and anti-communist hysteria was gripping the country. The McCarthy hearings were TV fodder. Set against this, the stories of three relationships intertwine in such a knot, it’s sometimes hard to untangle them, which is part of the fun. Coincidences, mistaken identities, secrets revealed, all the ingredients of classic farce are here in abundance – over-larded with them, in fact.
Police detective Maggie Pelletier (Taylor Mallory) and FBI agent Frank Keller (Patrick Morton) are an amorous couple who step on each other’s toes while investigating a Russian spy, Andrei Borchevsky (Sebastian Franco). A body is found – is it Borchevsky’s? There has been a switcheroo when Mrs. Kravitz (Jenna Devine), the wife of Borchevsky’s American contact, kills her husband to be with her lover, Borchevsky, who is working undercover as a herring fisherman. To disguise the crime, she forces the Russian to pose as her husband when the investigators close in. To cover his accent, Mrs. Kravitz pretends that he is mute, so he must communicate through a private system of ridiculous body gestures. Also in the mix are nuclear physicist James Appel (Bradley Wilson), who is dating Joe McCarthy’s daughter Lynn (Carolyn Vasko), each of whom has secrets that threaten to upset the apple cart.
Looming over the small set on the Hamilton Murray Theatre stage is a "billboard" backdrop of a Winslow Homer painting, "The Herring Net," advertising Ogilvy’s Herring, one of the play’s leitmotifs. The dory in the painting serves as the metaphor for marriage. With one partner of each couple trying to push the other into commitment, the point is made: Marriage is like a leaking dory – if someone doesn’t keep bailing, it will sink.
The actors (each of whom appears as several other characters with costume changes) are uniformly quite good. Among the standouts is Vasko, especially hilarious as Lynn and as a marriage bureau clerk who is sour on the institution of marriage. Franco has three very humorous turns, with different accents: as Borchevsky, as a British rocket scientist, and as a hen-pecked husband. And Mallory does a convincing interpretation of the fast-talking dame (though a little too fast-talking for my ears in the first scene).
Directed (or should I say conducted?) by Cara Liuzzi, the play moves along at a sprightly and very amusing clip.
Red Herring continues at the Hamilton Murray Theater on the campus of Princeton University, Oct. 7-9, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $12, $10 seniors/faculty/staff; $8 students; 609-258-1742; www.princeton.edu/utickets
‘Dr. Jekyll and Hyde’
WHAT could be more appropriate for the coming Halloween season than the bone-chilling tale of Jekyll and Hyde, two names that are now as familiar together as ham and eggs or blood and guts? Jeffrey Hatcher’s stage adaptation of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale (the novel’s full title is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is the first in Bristol Riverside Theatre’s "season of classics and adaptation of classics." Its tagline is "Unleash your desires."
Everyone, so this suggests, harbors within him- or herself animal instincts that are kept under a civilized veneer. Bristol advertises its production of the play as "a new and shocking version" of the classic tale. "Jeffrey Hatcher’s sexy and steamy drama," the production notes continue, "honors the original but gives a more complex interpretation of mankind’s dual relationship with good and evil."
The complexity is in the portrayal of Hyde, Dr. Jekyll’s demented alter ego. He is a shape shifter in the body of anyone, and so is no single person – not even a single manifestation of Jekyll himself. Director Keith Baker writes in the playbill, "We shuffled the deck in terms of what Hyde does. There is a degree of ambiguity and complexity in these two characters who, after all, are part of the same thing."
Hyde’s "a sensualist and villain free to commit the sins Jekyll is too civilized to comprehend." As the familiar tale goes, Jekyll was fascinated by the duality of human nature. He tried to separate out the human from the evil side, mixing tinctures and potions to work himself in and out of his morally responsible skin. This is a classic portrait of the split personality. But it’s not only a matter of everyone being both good and evil in this play. It’s also a matter of degrees. And most importantly for the story, it’s a matter of which shall be master.
The tale has been re-imagined for generations, but Hatcher’s goes further. The actor who portrays the erudite, incorruptible Dr. Jekyll (Michael Sharon) does not transform himself into Hyde (think of Spenser Tracy in the 1941 film). Instead, each of four other actors plays several characters, including different Hydes. Hatcher has written: "Doesn’t it make sense… that sometimes Jekyll would swallow the tincture and come up with a vile version of Hyde, and other times… a more silky one, or a more seductive version, or a more pathetic one?"
From the opening scene, when Gabriel Utterson (Robert Ian MacKenzie) and Richard Enfield (Sean Gormley) walk the streets of London, the tale turns to a mysterious, rough Mr. Hyde (MacKenzie), who has knocked down a woman in the street. Pressed to pay for her pains, Hyde grudgingly presents a check, drawn on the account of a respectable gentleman. It’s discovered that Jekyll is a benefactor of Hyde.
Getting to the bottom of Hyde’s identity and his connection with several crimes is like peeling an onion. When characters annoy Jekyll or sense the truth (e.g., Sir Danvers Carew – played amusingly by Ezra Barnes), they wind up brutally murdered. The set design by Roman Tatarowicz, including dim streetlamps, Jekyll’s Victorian laboratory, and bodies on gurneys, conveys a somber atmosphere of impending, and actual, dread.
Rounding out the marvelous cast are two female actors: Debra Whitfield, who plays Jekyll’s obedient, unquestioning butler, Pool, as well as a surgical student, a police doctor and a maid. She, too, plays a version of Hyde. Elizabeth Jelkes, a street woman who has fallen in love with the seductively evil Hyde, is played by Eileen Ward, who also plays an old woman (but who does not portray Hyde in any form).
The different versions of Hyde are easily identified when the character throws on a black top hat (Jekyll’s clothing is lighter earth tones). In some scenes, several Hydes appear together and mouth lines along with Jekyll. The costumes by Linda Bee Stockton are lush, Victorian creations that stand out richly against the darkened backdrops, occasionally pierced by projected images of a brick wall, or words. The sound design by William Neal includes synthesizer music (melodramatic, but lacking the verve of real musicians).

