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Reviewed January 14
Running time 0:40 - no intermission

Storyline: Returning to the lobby of his cheap Times Square hotel after a binge, a Broadway underworld hustler finds a new desk clerk. They slowly get to know each other as the hustler reveals just a bit about himself and the new clerk reveals even less.

Relatively new to the Potomac Region, Sean Phillip Rowe plays the hustling low life "Erie Smith" which O'Neill described simply as "a small time gambler." Precisely because he takes his time to reveal as much in his body language, gestures and inflections, his charm sneaks up on you and you find yourself caring about his past and his future, not just his current situation, even though you never really get to like the character.

Stephen Price is stiffer as the new desk clerk who begins the encounter with the hustler supremely cautious and wary, revealing as little as possible and avoiding even so much as direct eye contact. He softens in tiny, measurable stages as his character is oh-so-slowly seduced into a sort of comradeship.

As with earlier productions in this small back room of the North Chevy Chase Church, nothing prepares you for the quality of the performance to come. Comfortable, padded folding chairs on the bare linoleum floor spaced between a light pole and a speaker, a small stage with a simple set, house lights that click off because there is no dimmer. But once the show gets underway the magic of live performance and artistry takes over and casts its spell. It makes you want more.

Written by Eugene O'Neill. Directed by Karey Faulkner. Design: Katherine Pong (lights). Cast: Stephen Price, Sean Phillip Rowe.

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Reviewed May 8
Running time 2 hours
t A Potomac Stages Pick for clarity of direction and fine acting

Storyline: The twenty-five year old daughter of a famous mathematician has spent five years caring for her father as mental illness progressively incapacitated him. On the eve of his funeral she has to cope not only with his death, but with the concern of her sister, the attention of one of her father’s graduate students and the lingering presence of her father in their Chicago home. She may have inherited some of her father’s genius but she fears she may have also inherited his "tendency to instability."

Megan Townsend hits all the emotions just right as the daughter. She runs the gamut from bright and chipper to hurt, angry and scared without missing a beat or a cue. Almost matching her step for step is Greg McCay as her father's mathematics student in whom she confides and whom she comes to love. His performance suffers just a bit from the too-close spatial relationship he adopts in the confines of the small stage in which he is working but other than that he's rock sharp throughout. Haley Salyer is suitably obnoxious without overdoing it as the sister who didn't sacrifice throughout their father's decline.  Tom Neubauer seems a bit artificial to start, which may have been an intentional choice given his characters circumstance, but his final scene is tremendously affecting.

As good as the cast is, they have a script that gives them four well-defined people to portray. It is all there in the text. This is no easy task as any playwright will attest, and David Auburn got it right in his very first major play. He also came up with one of the great first-act curtain lines of recent memory. With a mathematical "proof" at the center of the story, Auburn turns his title into a double entandré. There is little actual discussion of higher mathematics, so the audience need not even know what a prime number might be in order to follow the discussions. There is only one point at which the author seems to be "talking down" to the audience or artificially keeping the discussion non-technical and it is a brief and thoroughly superflous one, a clumsy "lets go for a walk and you can tell me what this means" moment.

Good theater doesn't require fabulous sets and costumes and effects but this theater company is doing good work in the design arena as well as in the performances. All of the action of the play takes place on the porch of a home in a Chicago suburb, a reasonable facsimile of which is constructed on the small stage of the hall of the North Chevy Chase Church. They may have to click the house lights off but reasonable lighting effects including slow fades are accomplished without drawing any attention to themselves and the production is enhanced with a very good selection of incidental music for the act openers and between scenes. It is the musical equivalent of mathematical problem solving and it sets just the right tone for the production.

Written by David Auburn. Directed by Karey Faulkner. Design: Karey Faulkner (set) Kathryn Pong (lights) Isabel Church (lighting, sound, set builder and stage manager). Cast: Greg McCay, Tom Neubauer, Haley Salyer, Megan Townsend.

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Reviewed March 19
Running time 3 hours 45 minutes
t A Potomac Stages Pick for solid performances
 of a painfully honest family portrait

Storyline: Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning drama presents one hot day in the New England home of the Tyrones, haunted by their pasts and the consequences of their mistakes. The father is an aging matinee idol of an actor wracked by guilt over compromising his art for financial success. The mother is a morphine addict wracked by guilt over her own weakness. The eldest son survives on his father's fame on the stage while the youngest son is suffering from tuberculosis. These terribly unhappy and destructive people tear at each other in one long day of fighting and drinking.

This, the last of O'Neill's highly autobiographical and excruciatingly honest plays, exposes the weaknesses in a family he understood so intimately, so deeply and so thoroughly that he misses none of the pain or the blame while maintaining a familial affection that keeps the portraits from seeming mean-spirited or vindictive. They are pure and simple tragedy. (He was, in reality, the young man seen dying of "the consumption." In real life, he did recover after a year in a sanitarium but that was after the events of this one long day.)

The entire cast of five is simply superb. Most impressive, however, is Lois Sanders as the drug addicted, guilt stricken mother who alternates between anger, frustration and denial. A measure of her success is the fact that her most affecting moments are the few where she has no lines at all, just her posture and expression expose her emotions at the end of searing scenes. John Porter's portrayal of the thespian father seems at first a bit mechanical and even wooden until it becomes clear that this is a character who can't stop acting even when he's at home with his family. Both Greg McCay and James Keegan take over the stage completely for their big explosion scenes as the two sons, and even the smaller part of the maid is given a marvelous touch in her tippling scene where she consumes quite a bit of her employers' whiskey.

Not only has director Karey Faulkner assembled a fine cast, she has guided them into an ensemble effort of note. Every one of the cast does a fine job delivering their lines but the sense of reality that pervades the scenes is created by the way they react to each other, the way thoughts seem to bubble up from within and the honesty of their physical responses to the outbursts of the others. The pace, too, is just right. It must be tempting to try to tighten up a piece that can take nearly four hours to perform. But she and her cast resist that temptation, trusting the material to be rich enough and fascinating enough to keep the audience engrossed. It works. Faulkner is also credited with set design although it was essentially a furnishing exercise rather than a set design because the stage at the hall at the rear of North Chevy Chase Church has no wings, no flies and no room behind the playing space. The furnishings (apparently all provided by Gloria Capron Interior Design) nicely establish place, time and mood.

Written by Eugene O'Neill. Directed by Karey Faulkner. Design: Karey Faulkner (set) Lee McKenna (properties) Andrea Hartranft (lights) J. Matthew Miller (stage manager). Cast Amy Flanagan, James Keegan, Greg McCay, John Porter, Lois Sanders.   

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Reviewed July 8
Running time 2 hours 40 minutes

Establishing a new theater company is, by definition, an ambitious undertaking. Starting up a “professional” company with a 3-play schedule in just over a month in a 900-seat hall that local theatergoers aren’t in the practice of frequenting? Well, that may border on hubris. Still, based solely on the artistic merit of the first play out of the box, we can only say “Welcome to the Potomac Region - Much success to you!” This production of a terribly difficult play to pull off is a thoroughly satisfying one with an enviable ratio of positives to negatives.
 

Storyline: A psychiatrist with a few psychological problems of his own is assigned the case of a teenager arrested after having blinded five horses at the riding academy where he worked as a stable boy. The psychiatrist establishes a level of trust with the boy as he also obtains information from the boy’s parents and his employer. A picture emerges of just why the boy would do what he did.

The play by Peter Shaffer, author of such divergent material as the penetrating study of genius,Amadeus, and the comedy Lettice and Lovage, is a fascinating piece of work that builds two simultaneous psychological portraits; that of the boy and that of the doctor. The boy is played here with a range from sullen intensity to extreme rage by the same Michael Ryan Scott who so impressed with small roles in The Arlington Players’ Plaza Suite earlier this year. The Doctor is given a smooth progression from nearly complacent professional to deeply troubled mentor and finally to a man tormented by jealousy and a sense of duty by Phillip Hylton.

The supporting cast offer briefer portrayals. Tom Neubauer is satisfying as the boy’s atheist father and Sarah Toppins has some fine moments as his devoutly religious mother. Five actors play the horses, wearing wire mesh horse-head masks and wire hoofs that create a haunting sound when they walk or stomp. Chief among them is Alex Bastani who endows the boy’s favorite horse with a real personality. Kari Ginsburg manages to make an extended nude scene more about plot than about body which serves Scott well as he has to extend that scene well beyond her exit without benefit of costume. He, too, makes it a scene more memorable for its emotional impact than for mere exposure.

Director Karey Faulkner and her chief designer Stephen Gray have chosen to mount the production with a minimum of scenery (just a few fence pieces, benches, a table and bleachers) placing most of the action way back on the enormous stage -- which also of course sometimes makes it difficult to hear -- before the enormous banks of seats which could not be expected to be filled for an inaugural outing during the summer doldrums. It heightens the distance, almost eschewing any sense of intimacy and, thus, placing the emphasis on the intellectual rather than emotional content of Shaffer’s script. The effect serves to highlight the Doctor’s dilemma as he develops a sense of admiration for the boy’s ability to feel passion. The doctor’s admiration grows to a level of jealousy which causes him real pain when he has to “cure” his patient.  It produces a number of questions theatergoers may debate on their way home.

Written by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Karey Faulkner. Design: Stephen Gray (set, lights and stage manager). Cast: Rick Andersen, Alex Bastani, Amy Flanagan, Kerry Ginsburg, D. Scott Graham, Lenny Granger, Tony Greenberg, Phillip Hylton, Tom Neubauer, Matthew Pauli, Michael Ryan Scott, Mike Spara, Sarah Toppins.