Review: Gardenalia by Coldtowne Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Since spontanaeity is a large part of the attraction of improv performance, repeated or long-run stagings at improv locales may beg the question. Is this or that clever turn of plot or wisecrack really straight out of the ether, or is the performer flourishing it again like a Derringer kept up the cuff, a reliable old whoopee cushion, or the cascade of cards for 52-Card Pickup? The occasional traveler in Improv World cannot know but can grin, yelp and applaud along with the rest of the excited room.
Gardenalia, running Saturday evenings until May 7 at 8:30 p.m. at the Coldtowne Theatre on Airport Road, offers a premise apt to snag that traveler. The ancient annual celebration of Dionysus, recorded and fictionalized 2400 years ago by Euripides in The Bacchae, is the lure. That work illustrates the conflict between exalted passion and rationality, and it culminates with the chorus of female devotees of the wine god tearing uber-rational King Pentheus limb from limb. Kristin Henn and her cast create the modern equivalent, a group of women friends who gather at a remote estate to celebrate pleasure of the grape and of one another's company. Who could resist?
The Coldtowne lobby area and the parking area with wooden picnic tables are gathering spaces for cheerful groups of friends out to enjoy a Saturday night. Coldtowne sells a modest variety of snacks and drinks and no booze, but the staff weren't monitoring consumption of BYOB, either brought in by audience members or gifted from one to another. A cheerful hubbub reigned until they opened the theatre at the announced hour.
Coldtowne is compact, a playing space only about eight feet deep across one side of the roughly square space and chairs for the audience sufficient to seat perhaps forty persons. Surging rock music contrasted with surprising scenes being projected at the back of the playing space: murky silent-movie sequences that included some pseudo-ancient epics, a spooky sequence of possessed nuns in a Swedish convent and a Mack Sennett sequence from some Hollywood drama of the 1920s. A Sennett placard evoked Euripides but in straightforward and purely non-classical fashion:
The leader of the evening and imagined host of the remote country estate welcomed us, set the scene quickly and assured us that everything we were about to see would be improvised. A charming young girl came to center stage for an earnest and somewhat quavering solo of a music hall song; the leader congratulated her. "And that's all," she said, producing a pair of heavy duty earphones and applying them to the girl's head. "She won't be allowed to hear anything else!" The youngster retired obediently to stage right, where she remained with earphones for the rest of the hour's performance.
The lights faded and then came up again upon a tableau in white. These were hostess and guests, stationed about the stage. The audience, very much engaged, yelled and applauded approval.
Hesitantly at first the participants chatted, their remarks sketching out the situation -- the remote estate, the annual gathering, a mysterious deep pit dug near the entrance -- and their own characters: a published novelist, a good witch, a cattle lover who tended her beasts in the back yard of a Brooklyn brownstone, and more. Audience members listened keenly to the exchanges, applauded and urged them on.
After the opening static presentation the cast disappeared behind the curtained areas on either side of the playing area. In no obvious sequence women would emerge from one side or the other and encounter one another in duos or trios. Bantering exchanges resembled friendly duels, quick parries and ripostes as participants responded to one another and spun the fragile emerging threads into denser story fabric. One guest was enthusiastic about becoming the roommate of the hostess; the good witch (seated at center above) insisted that she should be the most beloved of all; the women created an entire sequence of novel titles for their authoress, who eventually confessed, abashed, that she was actually completely illiterate. It went forward at good pace and in a spirit of fun, especially as the initial awkwardness of the situation passed with the encouragement from the spectators.
In guise of a finale the music cranked up loud for a series of black-outs and tableaus, each revealed scene created in stop-motion as the crowd of mostly white-garbed women participants contorted themselves into funny or dramatic poses. The crowd went wild. After the last freeze-frame the young girl from stage right came back to the center and solemnly repeated her song.
Segue to curtain call.
After finishing the modest beaker of red wine kindly offered by the company, I slipped away into the night to assimilate the experience. No, it wasn't narrative theatre, at least not the sort that this website usually covers. The great pleasure of the evening was not the script or text that emerged from the encounters but rather the feeling that we were gaining a knowledge both of the fictitious characters and of the actors who were creating them. In that short time they'd befriended us random spectators, in addition to the collection of their other friends who were there to enjoy their ingenuity, creativity and absurdity. The stage doors opened directly to the pavement outside where those picnic tables were located, and the last glimpse I caught was one of the women in white surrounded by enthusiastic friends and aquaintances. I'm sure that some of them were being enticed to take up the invitation at curtain call from the lady hostess of this Dionysium: "Give it a try! It's a lot of fun!"
Gardenalia
by ensemble directed by Kristin Henn
Coldtowne Theatre
April 02 - May 07, 2016
Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., April 2 - May 7, 2016
Buy tickets on-line -- $10 & $12 plus handling charges
