The Play's The Thing

Sunday we go to a brunch to honor the third year class at the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.  Soon they will be going to New York as a group for auditions in front of talent scouts.  We will be saying good bye to the student we have sponsored for the last three years.  When we came to Sarasota we subscribed to the season of the Asolo Repertory Theatre, and discovered the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training which offers four plays in the winter season performed by second year students. The quality of the student productions impressed us from the start, partly because their teachers were giving them some interesting plays, a stunning and tense Machinal, for instance, and a Blue/Orange that seemed to me--maybe I’m daffy--better done than the London or New York production I had seen. Last year there was an excellent  student production of Cheryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, one of my favorite plays, and not easy to do, since it requires playing different genders in each act.  For example, an exceptionally tall lanky guy who took on the role of the planter’s wife in Africa, did a performance of a woman that was also somehow a parody of a woman that was absolutely brilliant, and another fellow after having appeared as a native house servant in the first act, reappeared triumphantly-- male body hair and all--as the tiresome little girl child of the family. By contrast the Asolo Rep seems much more cautious in their plays; after all they have to think about selling tickets to eighty year olds from the Middle West whose notion of theater is probably derived from the Eisenhower era. Sponsoring a student costs us more than we probably should be spending, but we love doing it. Besides it gives us access to observe voice, movement, and singing classes, plus the all important chance to get to know our guy, as well his young colleagues. Spending time however briefly in the company or even proximity of energetic, talented young people is a remarkably rejuvenating experience for two old geeezers.  Our student has been a wonderful new friend, and we are delighted that we can follow a bit of his future from our vantage of being Manhattan theater goers. We saw him first as Jeff, the security guard, in a moving student production of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, where he demonstrated his remarkable ability to project character through the movements of his mouth and hands.  The student actors in their third year have the chance to be cast in productions on the main stage, working with professionals, and a few weeks ago we saw him when he appeared with the look and gesture of a matinee idol in that 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play You Can’t Take It With You.   Because we know all the actors these performances are all the more interesting and thought-provoking, every time.  We are so lucky to be part of an added treat which is the occasional late night semi-staged reading of very recent pieces, last year, Dying Cities, for instance, and this year Will Eno’s New Town as well as Venus in Fur, which our student and a friend read heroically; recently some students did a staged reading of something old which was quite a very tough undertaking: the large cast revival of that 1920s Noel Coward favorite Hay Fever.   The young lady who performed with our student in Venus In Fur has a physical beauty and manner that recalls the great Hollywood film actresses of the thirties, a species of beauty and femininity no longer extant; she appeared this year as our student’s love interest in You Can’t Take It With You, and she, like him, could have stepped right out of an MGM production.  More amusing was her performance in a truncated version of Macbeth which the students took around to the local high schools.  I had never before perceived Lady Macbeth as Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth, and that was what she brought to this performance.  Because of the rehearsal schedule the students did not go home for Christmas and we asked our student and this young lady for Christmas dinner. By chance they had acted together in so many things it was a natural choice.  She sat next to me, and I have to say, it was a rare experience to sit so close to so voluptuous a beauty, whose intelligence, charm, and gracious manner was everything Santa could have wanted that day.