Woody’s [rating: 4]
Director Mike Nichols’ death saddens me.
His eclectic work ranks high on my all-time favorites’ list, especially the Monty Python musical “Spamalot” and a pair of films, “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
Three disparate entertainments indeed.
At the pinnacle is “Virginia Woolf,” the Edward Albee masterwork that ripped the veneer off the institution of marriage.
No director ever pulled more out of Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton.
I distinctly remember, too, that Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill had blown me away in the original “Virginia Woolf” on Broadway in 1963.
All that history bounced around in my mind as I walked into the College of Marin’s Studio Theater to watch two cerebral but passionate one-act Albee plays, 1959’s “The Zoo Story” and 1961’s “The American Dream.”
Despite having seen thousands of theater pieces, somehow I’d never seen either.
To be sure, these were campus performances, yet both were equal to the professionalism of any Bay Area community theater — and, in fact, to some of the top nearby stages.
Funny. Intense.
Absurd.
W. Allen Taylor, whose directorial chops leave nothing to be desired here, notes in the program that, although neither play rings “a rational bell,” both clearly address Albee’s “dissatisfaction with [the American emphasis] on material and consumer-driven values.”
“The Zoo Story,” in which human beings eventually mirror a vicious dog and other animals, slowly builds on a foundation of isolation, loneliness, dysfunctionality and non-communication.
The two-man park bench encounter tragically ends in violence.
Supposedly penned in less than three weeks, “The Zoo Story,” which triggered Albee’s reputation as a pioneer of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, was the playwright’s first major drama. Its West Berlin debut was half a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.”
Its power — and a stunning performance of Skylar Collins as Jerry, a “permanent transient” — actually made me shudder at its climax.
“The American Dream,” in sharp contrast, made me laugh aloud — numerous times.
Despite it dealing with real or imagined adoption, mutilation and murder.
With a spartan set and tasteful costuming appropriately limited to shades of ultra-neutral beige, the background blandness helps exaggerate the perma-smiles plastered onto the faces of flesh-and-blood wind-up dolls, Mommy and Daddy, and their haughty socialite visitor, Mrs. Barker.
Melanie Macri, Jon Demegillo and Isabel Heaviside, respectively, nail the satire with over-the-top looks that pinpoint their faux sincerity and politeness (even to the point of partially disrobing when requested).
And Keara Reardon goes them one better as an absent-minded yet crafty Grandma.
Albee, an 86-year-old, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has peppered the play with wondrously insightful one-liners.
Such as: “I can live off you because I married you.”
He has said “The American Dream” is “a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything [in the United States] …is peachy-keen.”
On the College of Marin stage, though, because of the supreme skills of playwright, director and actors, everything is peachy-keen.
“The American Dream” and “The Zoo Story” will run at the College of Marin’s Studio Theater, 835 College Ave. (corner of Sir Francis Drake and Laurel Avenue), Kentfield, through Dec. 7. Night performances, Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information and tickets: 585-9385 or www.marin.edu/performingarts/drama/contact.html
Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his new blog at www.vitalitypress.com/
