An Ovation for the 2024 Perlberg Festival of New Plays at Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

 

It was nearly ten years ago that Palm Beach Dramaworks’ Producing Artistic Director, Bill Hayes, implemented their visionary Dramaworkshop, dedicated to providing resources and support for playwrights to develop scripts.  The logic was if not-for-profit theatres don’t do it, who will?  Broadway no longer takes such chances.  It was a bold move as regional theatres typically suffer under some economic adversity and Dramaworks had just settled into their new theatre on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach.

 

Then came Covid, yet another strong headwind.  Fortunately, PBD had the financial reserves to wait out the storm, and has come back stronger than ever and, with an endowment gift from Diane and Mark Perlberg, their commitment to new plays has been secured for years to come.  The Dramaworkshop is under direction of PBD’s Bruce Linser, a gifted actor and director, and his enthusiasm for the program is infectious.  He and his committee sift through hundreds of submissions each year, winnow them down to five, workshop them, and those become dramatic readings as part of the renamed Perlberg Festival of New Plays.

 

It is hoped that one or two of the plays presented in the festival will make it to the main stage to join the classic plays presented each season.  Last month’s production of the highly acclaimed The Messenger by Jenny Connell Davis emerged from last year’s festival.  2024’s festival just successfully concluded and because of the Perlbergs’ gift the five new plays were also prefaced by interviews with two theatre luminaries, actor Estelle Parsons and playwright Mark St. Germain.  

Parsons appeared at PBD in My Old Lady (2014) and has originated numerous roles in new plays over her decades-long career.  PBD helped develop St. Germain’s script for Freud’s Last Session and produced its Southeastern premiere (2011).  A feature film based on the play, starring Anthony Hopkins, was recently released.

 

Parsons was interviewed by Bill Hayes on Jan 3, a great kick off to the festival.  They are not only theatre colleagues, but are now old friends and it was amusing to watch how Parsons, a veteran of six decades in the theatre, now 96 years old but feisty, sharp, and a take charge kind of person, just go her way with the interview, while Hayes was left holding his interview outline (although he did manage to hit his high points).  It was a friendly, even loving, give and take.  Parsons is also a director and when asked the question of what is the main role of the director, it was “to find the truth.”  Hopefully the video that was being taken of the interview will be made available in the future.  It was a “don’t miss” beginning to the festival and Parsons attended each and every performance in the ensuing days.

 

The following day Hayes interviewed Mark St. Germain.  Again, both have a long association.  This time, Hayes was on script and like his plays, St. Germain was thoughtful and passionate about ideas.  Many of his plays are a form of historical fiction and focus on single characters, or small casts.  They are intimate and cerebral.  He talked to an extent about bringing his material to film but with some regret because of the loss of control.  It was a memorable interview and St. Germain was also in attendance for all the new plays that followed.

 

So the first two days were these landmark interviews, then five new plays in three days (brief descriptions provided by PBD):

 

PROXIMITY

by Harrison David Rivers 

Newly divorced and sheltering at home with her two children at the height of the pandemic, Ezra hasn't been touched by another adult in eight months. At a virtual PTA meeting, she is introduced to the charismatic Irie, another single parent, and their immediate attraction causes Ezra to reconsider the limits of her Covid bubble.

 

STOCKADE

by Andrew Rosendorf  

Five years after the end of WWII, a group of gay soldiers gathers for a reunion on Fire Island. They are met by an outsider with a surprise that will cause them to question whether history is best left in the past. At a time when “security risk” is government code for “homosexual,” it will take courage for them to step out of the shadows and confront their present and future.

 

COLOR BLIND

by Oren Safdie   

In 2009, a jury was tasked with selecting an architect to design the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. This play is a fictionalized account of how that panel of diverse people and ideas may have come together – or been pulled apart – in making its decision, and in so doing, challenges the audience to consider the state of our current civil discord.

 

EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL HAPPENS AT NIGHT

by Ted Malawer  

Ezra is a successful children’s book writer. Nancy is his longtime editor. They are always on the same page, until someone new threatens to disrupt their friendship and influence Ezra’s next book. Set in 1980s Manhattan, this play explores the legacy of an artist, the meaning of intimacy, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

 

LITTLE ROW BOAT

by Kirsten Greenidge  

When 14-year-old Sally Hemings travels to Paris as nursemaid to her half-sister’s young daughter, the world appears to have opened much wider than Thomas Jefferson’s post-revolutionary Virginia plantation on which she was born. It is not until Sally’s brother James, also in France as he trains to be a chef de cuisine, points out the peculiarities of their circumstances that Sally begins to question the kindnesses their “master” has extended to them.

 

These are rehearsed presentations by professional actors, most Actors Equity members.  Although they have a podium for their scripts, there is no scenery, special lighting, movement, all the elements endemic to theatre.  Yet, the actors are emotive and draw the audience into the production; we, in our imagination, supply the rest.  While we are watching the playwrights’ work, they are watching the audience as these readings provide valuable clues as to what further developmental work might be needed, clarity, cutting, or maybe more humor, or laughter at the wrong spot?  After the play, there is a Q&A skillfully managed by Linser, encouraging the audience to give their true reactions. 

 

No doubt one of these, at least, will appear on a fully developed main stage production in the future.  I would hate to be on the “jury” to make those decisions as all have merit and as their descriptions indicate a special relevancy to our present times.  The arts are not a competition and to make such decisions more difficult is the fact that a reading is threadbare of staging.

 

Each of the plays presented touched me in some way but I’ll mention a few; and these are very personal observations, unique to my own theatre experiences and background.  So no intended judgment of the ones I fail to mention.

 

Color Blind reminded me in some ways of Tracey Letts’ The Minutes.  Although the latter is about a bickering City Council meeting turning into something very ugly about the town secret, Oren Safdie’s Color Blind uses a similar technique, projecting architectural designs as kind of Rorschach test for bringing out societal issues and the personalities of the jury.

 

Because I have a background in publishing, the relationship between editor and author as portrayed in Everything Beautiful Happens at Night rang true, playwright Ted Malawer exploring larger themes of loneliness, shame, and love.  That reading had two of South Florida’s premier actors, Tom Wahl and Laura Turnbull, which helped make it especially touching.

 

Although entitled “Little” Row Boat, it made a big impression on me because it was so challenging, with lots of symbolism and dramatic contrivances that could be highly effective in a fully realized stage production.  In a narrow sense the story is about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but the macrocosm is about slavery leaving an indelible imprint on our nation.  I can imagine if Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was workshopped, there would have been similar difficulties (in my mind, Kirsten Greenidge’s Little Row Boat has a similar feeling and complexity).  It is certainly theatre to think about.

 

After the festival there was a Champagne toast to all who made the festival possible.  The collective energy that goes into staging this festival is monumental by very talented people.  Hopefully, it’s success represents an emphatic statement that theatre is back!  And maybe some mighty oaks will grow from these readings.

 

 

“Ghost of the Future, I fear you more than any spectre I have seen”

 

I borrow from Dickens to express a foreboding, in particular one that will culminate with this year’s Presidential election.

 

The December 5, 2023 New York Times carried a front-page article, “Second Term Could Unleash Darker Trump.”  I fired off a brief letter to the Editor to add my opinion and was surprised it was immediately published online and then in print under the rubric “Trump Unbound: An Autocrat in Waiting?”

 

To the Editor:

 

A second Trump presidency not only would be more radical, but also seems inevitable. Donald Trump and his handlers have learned to exploit every weakness in our democratic system of government.

 

Our founders must have assumed that those who gravitate to government service would essentially be people of good faith, and the rotten apples would be winnowed by our system of checks and balances. But here we are less than a year away from the election, and while Mr. Trump’s transgressions have drawn 91 criminal charges, there has been no justice yet.

 

He has proved to have a serpentine instinct to capitalize on weak links ranging from the Electoral College to our justice system, gathering strength every time he flouts the rule of law.

 

Perhaps the Times published my laconic letter as it encapsulates a sad truth: our form of government was never designed for the unthinkable. The greatest existential threat to us is, well, us. 

 

It’s simplistic to blame Trump for all of this, but he taps into popular discontent like none other before.  His brand of anti-intellectualism and affinity for reality TV and social media are in perfect sync with his minions.  Those "attributes," and his ability to exploit the weakness of our justice system, are a perfect storm for 2024.

 

Since I wrote that letter there have been further key developments, with certain States trying to keep him off the primary ballots, citing the 14^th amendment (lots of luck with that) and SCOTUS rebuffing special counsel Jack Smith’s request for an expedited ruling on whether Trump can claim presidential immunity from prosecution for crimes “allegedly” committed on January 6.

 

We all saw it -- suggested, aided and abetted by him --  and here it is three years later!  It should not be a presidential immunity issue but one of special presidential culpability.

 

A handful of States will again determine the 2024 Presidential election and Democrats are still making arguments about what has been accomplished, as if that reality will decide the forthcoming election.  President Biden, who has done what he intended, deserves our gratitude, should now be thinking of the greater good, and recognize his age and undeserved lack of popularity should be major factors in deciding whether he should run.  He could be the first incumbent president to substantially win the popular vote but lose the election by a few Electoral College votes (yet another seriously flawed factor in our Democratic system). 

 

Can democracy survive while Justice is further postponed?  Or will Justice be foregone by fiat in 2024?

 

This is not my first New Year’s message of cheer.  It is remarkable to read the New Years’ entries from 2021 and 2022 while we were all mostly COVID bound. It’s like mirrors in mirrors in mirrors: 

 

Saturday, January 9, 2021

The Revoltingly Horrid Year Continues….

 

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

A Ground Hog Day New Year

 

And so, with a little editing, as Tiny Tim observed, “God HELP Us, Every One!”

 

World Premiere of ‘The Messenger’ Boldly Probes the Complicity of Silence

 

Attention must be paid as one enters the Palm Beach Dramaworks theatre.  A stark white angular platform is set atop the stage with one sharp corner pointing directly towards the audience.  The entire set is bathed in white, a tabula rasa on which will be written the message of The Messenger.  PBD’s new Resident Stage Designer, Anne Mundell, has populated a corner with books and files, randomly placed and chaotically spilling onto the floor.  It is edgy, perplexing, inviting. 

 

PBD has always been known as a home for serious classic works, but Producing Artistic Director William Hayes has been moving the theatre towards innovative new plays with the logic that if regional theatres don’t produce such works, who will?  The Messenger was incubated in its Dramaworkshop.  Hayes has said he believes this is the “most important play ever produced at PBD and at the most appropriate time.”

 

Indeed, what transpires in the intermission-less 90 minutes bears out that statement, from the opening moment when a monolithic section of the wall opens bathed in bright light with ominous, deep musical tones (perhaps a hat tip to Kubrick’s 2001?) as the characters emerge representing the past, present, and possibilities of the future.

 

Although this is not a holocaust play per se, it finds its gravitas from the life of Georgia Gabor, a holocaust survivor, who immigrated to the US and later taught math in the San Marino Unified School District for two decades.  The persecution she suffered in her adopted community was a terrible addendum to her life, as well as its implications for society.  The Messenger pulls us into the central overarching issue, man’s inhumanity to man.  It is a play about persecution and how history seems destined to repeat itself.  It is about the consequences of being silent, especially in this social-network polluted world where those who “scream” loudest are generally those who perpetuate ethnic and racial persecution.

 

While it is a four-character play, Gabor’s story, played by PBD veteran Margery Lowe, is the only one based on a real person, with much of her dialogue coming from Gabor’s memoir My Destiny.  

 

Jenny Connell Davis, PBD new Resident Playwright imaginatively creates the other three characters from facts of different eras and designates years as their names to clarify where they place in the panoptic vision of the play.  All are women.  It is remarkable that she has been able to create characters that grow more and more real, ones the audience empathizes with, in a play which is essentially surreal and symbolic.

 

They are 1969, a curator at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California; 1993, the mother of one of Gabor’s students; and 2020, a high school student and former volunteer at The Huntington.  Off stage character, Miley, a friend of 2020’s, shares this story as well.

 

Their episodic stories materialize out of time sequence and are kaleidoscopically woven into the fabric of Gabor’s experience. The actors pour their hearts into these stories, making poignant connections between then and now.

 

Angela Gulner, Gracie Winchester, Margery Lowe, Annie Fang; Photo by Alicia Donelan

The success of this world premiere is in large part due to Margery Lowe’s experience in appearing in new plays, especially at PBD.  It takes a special sensibility playing the lead where no one has gone before, to make the character interpretation one’s own.  Lowe has a special advantage playing Georgia Gabor as both are diminutive in stature but lions in spirit.  Lowe also had the advantage of being able to study Gabor when she was interviewed in 1984 by The 1939 Society. 

 

Lowe perfectly captures her character, and triumphs with Gabor’s words from her memoir although her Hungarian accent takes some acclimation to clearly understand.  Nevertheless, Lowe has reincarnated Georgia Gabor with her flirtatious mannerisms, her dynamic personality and stalwart resolve to tell her painful story over and over.

 

But it is what she experienced afterwards – again becoming a victim of anti Semitism in the wealthy community of San Marino CA. -- where Lowe’s performance provides a strong catalyst in moving the arc of the story.  The other characters’ develop into real people under her watchful eye, the ripple effects washing over the audience. 

 

Bill Hayes directs The Messenger.  His vision and his labor of love underscore his belief in the play and are borne out by this production.  His talented assistant director, Jessica Chen, whose background is in dance brings her eye for fluidity to the stage.  

 

Gracie Winchester plays 1969, capturing youth’s wide eyed wonder of working in the august Huntington Library, where possibly becoming a curator comes into conflict with her discovery that the Library harbors a dark secret, the original copy of the Nuremberg Laws, which was designed to deprive Jews of basic rights, signed by Hitler himself.  How did they come to the Huntington and why were they filed away, never displayed, forgotten?  1969 has to make a choice to reveal the facts, but perhaps at the expense of a cherished career.  Winchester makes you feel her character’s dilemma as well as her outrage, and sad capitulation, the playwright connecting the dots with 1969 appearing as a regretful old lady with a parasol in 2020’s era at “the Hunt.”

 

Angela Gulner makes her PBD debut as 1993, and gives a bravura performance of someone thinking she is doing the right thing as the antagonist, organizing a partition objecting to Gabor’s teaching.  As a parent we all know how we will go to extremes to guard one’s child.  But did she cross a line when she is the one that takes action to stop Gabor for inviting children to hear her survivorship stories after school (not a requirement)?  Gulner protests (“her history is not OUR history”).  She’s a math teacher!  She has no right to teach what should be left to historians!  Yet her moving performance elicits sympathy as well as being reminded of current events in our schools right now. 

 

Annie Fang, also making her PBD debut as 2020, deals with some of the emotional highlights of the play, particularly her relationship with the off stage Miley, who is a math genius, is certainly destined for a top school (the community’s raison d’être), and yet is more interested in art.  They are Asian Americans and during Covid were called “Chinks” while volunteering at the Huntington by the same kind of people who might hurl Jewish invectives at Gabor.

 

The incident blows up in social media, today’s ubiquitous Petri dish for scapegoating and persecution and 2020 tries to distance herself from the widely circulated video of Miley confronting her tormentor. Ultimately Miley suffers the ultimate consequence of silence.  As we can only see and feel Miley through 2020, Fang’s performance is particularly noteworthy.

 

It is an ingeniously written play by Jenny Connell Davis and director William Hayes manages the actors on the stage as they tell their overlapping stories, moving from shadows to light.  Portions reminded me of a Sondheim duet where counterpoint is featured.

 

As an abstract play, where characters may be moving from point A to B, more along a surrealistic path, Resident Lighting Designer, Kirk Bookman has challenging transitions, essential ones to keep the audience engaged.  Much of the time shadows are as important as lights up, as all characters are on stage throughout even if not engaged in their own particular part.

 

Bookman works in concert with Video Designer Adam J. Thompson.  Parts of the play are filled with projected videos, some falling on the actors themselves but mostly on the white walls, in particular videos of artistic compositions by Miley, and very moving to see them being created in real time.  Other projected images are disturbing though, such as the bombed out Ghettos which Gabor “lived in,” and symbols of hate that both Gabor and 2020 had to endure.  Overall, the video and the lighting of the show are even more integral than the typical play and kudos to Mr. Thompson and Mr. Bookman.

 

Sound design by Roger Arnold is portending, even startling at times (gunshots), boot steps of the Hungarian Nazi sympathetic Arrow Cross Party, all in keeping with the dystopian theme of what Gabor endured, during the war.

 

Against a white-washed stage Costume Designer Brian O’Keefe’s choices were endless (except white!) and here he creates costumes not only appropriate for the different eras of the characters, clearly distinguishing each, while still sharing certain earth tone palettes. O’Keefe is a stickler for the details.  They are award winning visions, and I loved 1993’s wide legged pants and sunglasses pushed up in her blond hair.  It tells a lot about the sought after community where helicopter parents landed with their kids.

 

O’Keefe brilliantly designed the swirling dress with the ubiquitous stretchy belt cinching in Ms. Lowe’s tiny waist which not only showed off her diminutive figure to perfection but allowed the actress to swish about in her more flirtatious moments.  The dirt-red sweater thrown about her shoulders added the final perfect touch.

 

The execution of the complex staging of this play warrants kudos to PBD’s Stage Manager, Kent James Collins.  Opening night went as smoothly as if the play had been in previews for weeks (vs. the reality of two days).

 

The Messenger is not only a world premiere, it is also the first production in a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere series and regional theatres in Texas and Minneapolis are already committed to producing it.  Fittingly Mrs. Roberta Golub, Georgia Gabor’s daughter, is the executive producer of The Messenger. 

 

At the end, Fang, who plays 2020, has the temerity to begin to “step outside the box” (full lighting for this dramatic effect).  Can the future learn from the past?  Isn’t it incumbent on all to become activists, to become messengers of The Messenger?  That is the ultimate question of this imaginative new play.