#HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS CHARACTER SO EASILY TRANSITION BETWEEN TEETERING ON THE LINE BETWEEN LIGHT AND DARK

[larryland]

by Gail M. Burns

From his perch in 1986, Neil Simon looked back to 1947 and wrote a play about the future. All the characters in Broadway Bound, the final installment in his quasi-autobiographical trilogy of plays about the Jerome family, is teetering on the verge of the precipice of change. The young people, sons Eugene (Anthony J. Ingargiola) and Stanley (Robbie Rescigno), are reaching eagerly for their future, filled with the promise of romance, adventure, and success as comedy writers. Their father, Jack (Jason Asprey), is about to leave his wife and family, something their mother, Kate (Sarah Corey), knows and may or may not be ready for. And Kate’s father, Ben (Richard Howe), is clinging to his life in Brooklyn as his wife prepares to move to a retirement community in Florida.

It is a joy to see Ingargiola return to the Oldcastle stage after his thoroughly winning portrayal of Huck Finn in last season’s musical Big River. His Eugene is kind and caring. He has a believable brotherly bond with Rescigno’s much more aggressively ambitious Stanley, and a truly warm rapport with Corey as his mother. The scene late in the play where Kate recounts her teenage adventure of running off to the Paradise Ballroom (when she should be sitting shiva) in order to dance with movie star George Raft requires Ingargiola to listen with love and wonder as he gains a deeper understanding of Kate as more than just his mother. That is not an easy trick to do. And when they dance – Eugene says later that he couldn’t hold his mother close because the moment was just too intimate – there is magic on the stage.

Which brings us to the delicate subject of casting. Corey is a fine actress and she gives a wonderful performance, but she is too young to play Kate. There is a time to play a role like Kate, and you need to live a while to earn that right. It took me about half an hour to be able to put this problem out of my mind and accept her as the 50-something matriarch. That I did accept her and was able to move past the age issue is a tribute to her talent and commitment to this role, but there are so many fine actresses of the right age – Oldcastle regular Christine Decker springs instantly to mind – for whom meaty roles like this are hard to find, that I still question director Eric Peterson’s choice.

Asprey, however, is perfectly cast. His portrayal of the genuinely tortured Jack is haunting and powerful. There are no laughs in this role. Jack is a man who sees his future clearly, and he hates it, but he knows it is inevitable. He will leave. He must leave. And he knows that it will hurt Kate and Stanley and Eugene, and him. That hurt will shape all of their future paths in life. The second act scene between Jack and his sons is frightening and heart-breaking as Asprey takes all of Jack’s self-loathing out on his sons, ruining their moment of triumph and leaving them reeling.

The role of Ben offers a little bit of the comic relief that Simon provides so easily through his older characters – most notably in The Sunshine Boys – but Ben is not an aging cantankerous comic. He is a man who has worked hard and done his best by his wife, his daughters, and his grandchildren and has come to a point where he is scared of what comes next. Moving to Florida is one step closer to…what comes after retirement? What comes after your 70s? Maybe your 80s, maybe not. Howe gives a solid performance offering real insights into a character who could just be a geriatric punch line.

Rescigno provides the real comic energy in the play. Stanley is well past the age when he wants to be living at home with Mom and Pop. He knows he has talent and ambition, but Simon makes it clear that even while he can’t wait to get to his future, he finds the prospect of change as daunting as the rest of the family. Rescigno carries the frenetic scenes where Eugene and Stanley struggle to come up with their audition sketch for their big break in radio.

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There is a sixth character, Kate’s sister, Ben’s other daughter, Blanche (Amy Gaither Hayes), whose second husband has surprised everyone by becoming quite rich and installing Blanche and her two daughters on Park Avenue. Blanche is the one who is ready and financially able to move her parents down to Florida, a climate that will be beneficial to her mother’s health, and Ben’s refusal to accept her “charity” and join his wife perplexes her.

Blanche and her daughters are key characters in Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first play in this trilogy, which is also set in Jack and Kate’s home, and I understand Simon’s interest in completing their story arcs, but unless you have a chance to see these two plays in close proximity, those aspects of her scene are awkward.

Set designer Carl Sprague has cleverly reworked his set for Oldcastle’s production of A Comedy of Tenors, which ran immediately before this production, and it works surprisingly well. There are well defined areas for the living room, the dining room, and Eugene and Stanley’s bedrooms upstairs. …Tenors is a six door farce which leaves the Jerome’s dealing with about two doors too many in their house, but Peterson, Sprague, and the actors make it work.

Ursula McCarty has crafted another fine set of costumes. Except for Blanche’s Park Avenue finery, the Jerome’s are not a stylish bunch, and her costumes clearly define the period and the socio-economic strata of the household.

Creating clearly audible sound that emanates from a radio and synchs with on stage dialogue is not easy and Cory Wheat’s sound design executes it well. My only problem with David V. Groupé’s lighting design was the jarring transitions when Eugene broke the fourth wall to act as narrator. Something much more subtle and less blinding would have been more effective.

I see a lot of plays – many of them very well written and many much more innovative in style and structure than Broadway Bound – but I have to say that it is a pleasure to attend the work of a playwright who just knows how to do it. Who knows how to create three-dimensional characters you care about, who knows how to structure scenes and advance plot, and who writes in clear, lucid language that flows. This is what is called a Well-Made Play, and with this fine cast it is just a joy to behold.

Broadway Bound by Neil Simon, directed by Eric Peterson, runs September 29 – October 15, 2017, at the Oldcastle Theatre Company, 331 Main Street in Bennington, VT. Set design by Carl Sprague; lighting design by David V. Groupé; sound design by Cory Wheat; and costume design by Ursula McCarty. Stage Manager Gary Allan Poe. CAST: Sarah Corey as Kate, Richard Howe as Ben, Anthony J. Ingargiola as Eugene, Robbie Rescigno as Stanley, and Jason Asprey as Jack. Radio voices provided by Gary Allan Poe, Timothy Foley, and Jody June Schade. The show runs two and a half hours with one intermission. For tickets and more information visit http://oldcastletheatre.org/ or call 802-447-0564.

REVIEW: “Broadway Bound” at Oldcastle by Gail M. Burns From his perch in 1986, Neil Simon looked back to 1947 and wrote a play about the future.

[horrible-monstrosity]

In preparation for a future bitch series, today I bitch about shows I ain't even watched

Watching E;R's videos on Korra I'm struck by... well, I'm stuck by a lotta (things including that old airbender guy is as shit a teacher as Korra is a student and no one seems to care), but mostly I'm struck by what seems to be a particular problem with the writing... in particular, the dialogue. It's... something.

On the one hand it's teetering on the edge of being "totally radical"- not to the point of peppering everything with asdfisms, but nearly every line seems needlessly... cheeky. It's cringy. Every character sounds the same. I think I remember the original Avatar being a bit like this but Korra seems... worse.

And on the other hand... Hey, let's talk about basic writing-ing. So, how do you write characters, you guys? You wanna think about what's going on in their heads, behind their eyes, that eventually churns its way out and makes them say that thing, right?

I... I think these writers have even failed at that. A lot of it feels like they just slapped down whatever line fufills the intended purpose without "tuning" it at all to work with the character or what's happening. It doesn't feel like a cohesive whole of characters interacting in an environment, more like a bunch of colorful story-piece legos stuck together and then the writers just sit back and look at their creation and go "eh, good enough!" This probably also contributes to the characters all sounding the same.

Also also, it really seems to lean heavily on telling over showing. Which you know also speaks to the writing being poorly thought out and just slapped down bit by bit.

Let's just look at a few examples-

"An you gotta deal with it!" Now apparently this line has reached some memetic status as the earliest and most definite indicator that this was gonna be a shitshow, but eyyyy Maybe I'm missing some context here, but to start off with there's nothing prompting Korra to introduce herself as the Avatar in the context of "you gotta deal with it!!". Why, why would they need to be told they have to deal with it? Are they seen by Korra to be expecting someone else? Maybe something like, the old guys come in searching for the avatar but before they can even ask in comes Korra assuming they're intruders and in a blaze of childish bravado she shouts out her identity and acts like she can take them out with pebbles, embers and little teeny splashes of water. They think for a moment she's just some bratty waterbender kid but then realise she's using two other elements too. There, you get her character across and it's no longer retarded.

"My name is Wan, and I will show you how I became the first avatar." - "Hey c'mere man lemme exposit to you how I'm gonna be expositorying to you!!" No. Bad. Stop. How about, "The answer to that (Rava, whatever the fuck it's called) lies in the story of how I became the first avatar." Still expositoritificatial, but more smoothly transitions between the one thing and the other rather than just plunking it down on us in chunky chunks.

"Ah feel greeeat, whazzin dis waddgerr" Please, no. Aside from Wang inexplicably sounding like he's asking "oh man what's in this drink??", unless a character has been shown to be particularly chill or observant (which Wang, you know, ain't) they would not be this calm or observant in this situation. He's waking up after having the shit beat out of him or whatever the fuck it was, to find himself submerged in water and surrounded by those wacky spirit things that hate humans and that kicked him out last time he showed up, why the fuck does he care about how the water makes him feel? More likely what you'd see is Wang tries to get up and the monkey fellow tells him "don't move, moron, the water's healing you" look gys exposition that fits at least somewhat naturally into the dialogue it's a miracle

And finally, this isn't dialogue but its problems seem to run on the same principles- the first time(?) Wang start fucking dying because the power of all the elements is too much for him, he immediately jumps to "no I must keep doing it because it do what right !!" This is... weird. Like, first off, all he's doing is stopping the humans and spirits from beating each other up, but he's acting like it's the most important thing. Is this seriously the hill you want to die on? Shouldn't you save that shit for the fucking final battle or something? And secondly... this is apparently the first time he has such a bad reaction to using all the elements. But he immediately processes it and You can't say "I'll fight through this suffering for doing the good!" if you have no idea what suffering you're going through. So basically the writers just wanted to press the "he did him an heroic" button and call it a day even though it doesn't fit. g

Finally, hitting a new level of wanking about things I've never watched with a gifset of a scene I haven't actually seen in scene form. There's a scene where Bolo (whatever his name is, the fat one) is gushing on about Korra without mentioning her being le Avatar and she's immediately like "oh wow no one's ever said that about me, no one's ever liked me for anything but being the avatar" and that's it. Yeah, i- if feeling inadequate outside of being born the Avatar is a major part of her character this really shouldn't've been done and finished so easily. If nothing else it's just really... underwhelming. But hey look we press the "she have a porblem " buton we did it redit yay

but eh literally what the fuck do I know

Bonus round, at about five minutes an increeeeedibly similar bout of terrible dialogue from a certain memetically terrible game... what is this plague?