Love for Fools

Ah, so great to be back home in my little seat in the theater; this season I've moved up one day and over one seat with my new subscription for the Round House.

Also new at Round House is the digital version of the production program--e.g., Fool for Love now playing. Though I'm a known program collector, lots of people leave theirs behind in the recycle/reuse basket on the way out, and having the digital version available for reference is useful both before and after the show. (It's nice, for example, to know in advance that the play is performed without an intermission; it's also nice, after the show, when writing about it, to be able to look up spellings of people's names.)

It's also great to be back with "old friends" of my theater experience, including the ferociously fragile Katie deBuys ("May") and master of the hangdog drawl Marty Lodge ("Old Man"), previously paired in RHT's Seminar. Joining the cast of familiars is Tim Getman ("Martin"), who I'd just seen in Synetic's Three Men in a Boat, and new-to-me Thomas Keegan ("Eddie").

Playwright Sam Shepard is, of course, best known to me as the iconic actor portraying iconic test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. I hadn't seen any of his plays, so I was expecting tough, gritty realism. Instead, Fool for Love mixes fantasies and memories with the volatile, violent yearning that fools call love. (It isn't. Passion, yes. Lust, yes. Love? Not by my definition.)

The choice of this play is in line with the current "despicable people you don't want to spend time with" artistic direction at RHT, but the performances and production are so mesmerizing, I forgive the play. Katie's May, especially, pulls and pushes on the audience's sympathy even as she pulls and pushes at Keegan's Eddie, sometimes to comic effect.

Thomas Keegan, Katie deBuys, rehearsal photo via RHT Facebook

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard
Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland, September 3-27, 2014
Directed by Ryan Rilette

Cast:
May: Katie deBuys
Eddie: Thomas Keegan
Martin: Tim Getman
Old Man: Marty Lodge

Production credits:
Scenic and costume designer: Meghan Raham
Lighting designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner
Composer/sound designer: Eric Shimelonis
Fight choreographer: Casey Kaleba
Props manager: Andrea Moore
Dramaturg: Brent Stansell

Writers Get Schooled

Would-be writers have a lot to learn about the realities of writing and publishing and getting read, and a lot of those lessons are up for interpretation, as documented in the Round House Theatre's production of Theresa Rebeck's Seminar.

This is the kind of play that should either be right up my alley or too in-your-face close to home and off-putting. While I certainly could relate to the writing and editing and hoping to be published aspects of the story, I personally lack the ambition that put the would-be writers into the room with their well-paid but dismissive and abusive tutor. At my point in my career, I could relate best to the tutor (hopefully I'm not that dismissive and abusive!), whose promising writing career had been thwarted and redirected to editing and tutoring.

Anyway, it was relatively easy for me to create the distance I needed from my parallelling life and enjoy the language, the actors' interactions, the rhythms, and all that make productions worth producing. It's an adult comedy, hitting many of the same notes as RHT's This earlier this season.

What I was looking forward to most was seeing three of my favorite local actors playing together: The adorably goofy Tom Story (as Douglas), of course, plus Marty Lodge (Leonard), who first captured my attention in the old RHT's round space as the ghetto hotel manager in Problem Child, and the breathtakingly versatile Katie deBuys (Kate), whose previous Shakespearean work (Henry V at Folger and Measure for Measure at STC) I have noted as chameleon-like. It was great to see more of her in a contemporary role.

Marty Lodge and Katie deBuys. Photo by Danisha Crosby for Round House Theatre 

(L-R): Laura C. Harris, Tom Story, Katie deBuys, Alexander Strain. Round House Theatre via Facebook

A play about writing that doesn't show much of the writing under review--just the characters' reactions to the writing and to each other's reactions--is naturally going to be (as my companion noted, without irony) talky. In the care of such good actors, though, the talk has its own musicality. As the cynical, misogynistic tutor, Marty Lodge tears down the student work in monologues that are positively Homerian.

I've also seen Alexander Strain (Martin) and Laura C. Harris (Izzy) in other productions--Strain was RHT's Asher Lev, for instance, and one of the highlights of Glengarry Glen Ross, and Harris was a delightfully feisty Marian in RHT's Young Robin Hood--so it was nice to see them shine in this tight ensemble.

Speaking of careers evolving from writing to something less glamorous (but no less honorable), I see Lloyd Rose, a former drama critic for the Washington Post, served as dramaturg for this production. She's apparently been doing this sort of thing for a while. I still don't know what dramaturgs do, but I think, like editors, they make other writers' writing better. Well done.

Seminar

Written by Theresa Rebeck

Directed by Jerry Whiddon

Round House Theatre, Bethesda, MD ~ February 5 – March 2, 2014

Cast

Leonard: Marty Lodge

Kate: Katie deBuys

Martin: Alexander Strain

Douglas: Tom Story

Izzy: Laura C. Harris

scenic designer: James Kronzer 

costume designer: Ivania Stack

lighting designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner 

original score/arrangements/sound design: Eric Shimelonis