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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > January > 12
Monday, January 12, 2009
Review: ‘The Last Five Years’
It’s a little early in the year to be calling out bests, but Penfold Theatre’s production of “The Last Five Years” will undoubtedly be on my list by the time all things are said and done.
In fact, I was close to that point in the first few minutes when Annika Johannsson’s Cathy draws her leg up to sit on a chair and read the goodbye letter left by David Gallagher’s Jamie to the first strains of a violin melody. It’s a simple, sad moment, and if you don’t get goose bumps, something’s broken.
The five years in the title are the whole of Jamie and Cathy’s relationship. As the only characters in the story, you get to know them well, but never together. Writer and composer Jason Robert Brown puts them at odds both in love and in time. We see Cathy’s story work backwards from the moment she finds Jamie’s wedding ring on the kitchen table to end on their first date while Jamie’s moves forward.
While the two share the stage with melting chemistry, they rarely interact. It’s part of the written chronology, but stage and musical director Michael McKelvey uses it to great effect. Jamie, a wunderkind novelist, sings a holiday fable while Cathy, a Christmas or two ahead of him, sits idly at the table. She then sings about coming home from her unsuccessful musical auditions to a loving home while staring straight past an unaffected Jamie. The staging tweaks the already heartbreaking performances with bittersweet irony.
In fact, the only duet comes when couples time lines converge at their wedding. It’s clear that life is moving in opposite directions. The only question is whether, in those rare and beautiful moments, when it synchs up, everything becomes worth it. The only other bit of shared song at the end when each says goodbye to the other, Cathy until their second date and Jamie forever, leaves that open to both optimistic hope and pessimistic hindsight.
That the distance between Jamie and Cathy is so palpable is surprising in the tiny Larry L. King theater. With audience seating surrounding the stage on two sides and the scaled down orchestra, lacking nothing with Steve Saugey on the keyboard and Amy Harris violin, on the third, it’s easy for us to feel closer to the characters than they are to each other.
In that small space, warmly appointed by set designer David Utley as a New York artist’s apartment, Johansson and Gallagher excel. At close range every moment of pain, love, and humor is broadcast at almost overwhelming force without losing any nuance. With no amplification between their voices and our ears, Gallagher’s energetic rendition of the bouncy tunes and Johansson’s riveting, emotional takes on Cathy’s loss are even stronger.
Forgive me for gushing, but this is the sort of production that audiences are lucky to see: unique, intimate, beautiful, painful and wonderful.
(“The Last Five Years” continues Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m, Sunday, Jan. 18, at 5 and 8 p.m., Jan. 24, at 2 and 10:30 p.m., and Jan. 25, at 8 p.m. at the Austin Playhouse, Larry L. King Theatre, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C. $10-$20. 476-0084, penfoldtheatre.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Review: ‘Miss Witherspoon’
For all its status on the short list for the Pulitzer in 2006, Christopher Durang’s “Miss Witherspoon” is a shambling, rambling mess of a comedy, now getting a production by Different Stages. It has its moments of meaning and, more frequently, humor, but for the most part it feels like “It’s A Wonderful Life” for Generation Irony.
Miss Witherspoon herself, nicknamed after that grouchy type of character nobody likes in Agatha Christie novels, commits suicide sometime in the ‘90s. Her death, which begins the play, is a belated reaction to Skylab’s crashdown on Earth, itself only the last straw in a life spent wondering what else could go wrong. Unfortunately, the powers that be in this afterlife, which include Gandalf, Christ and an Indian spirit figure named Maryamma, want her to go back for her own karmic adjustment and the betterment of the world.
This leads to a lot of didactic arguments that are occasionally funny, but often too slow paced to engage. The problem with Witherspoon, played by Jennifer Underwood, is that her “brown tweed aura” just isn’t that compelling when left to simply bicker back and forth with spiritual leaders. Fortunately, to some degree, Durang has always been better at writing one-joke sketches, often very well, than scenes that build to a plot.
That’s where Different Stages’ new production has a chance to shine. While Underwood manages arch quips against Suzanne Balling’s serenely effervescent Maryamma, it’s hard to feel involved. When she’s finally cast back to Earth, though, her permanently crabbed expression finds new life as a baby to suburban yuppies, tragic child to white trash burnouts, and even a dog.
Each vignette gives the cast a chance to break out of the debate format, though, and inject some life into the production. Rotating through a range of parental figures are Derek Jones and Camille Latour, both funny as both the pampering Connecticut parents and, more bleakly, as the OD’ing abusers.
While the emphasis on most of Witherspoon’s lives is ironic, dark humor, as Underwood grows up in the rundown home, she finds some real pathos as well. Watching the older Underwood who last shone as the gleeful Duchess in Rubber Repertory’s “The Casket of Passing Fancy” descend into sullen adolescence brings the play to an emotional, if brutal, turning point.
Unfortunately, we’re quickly brought back to mildly absurd, tiring spiritual debates that rob the production of a satisfying close. Instead of a life as an example, we’re given rapidly aging pop culture quips and pedantic talking heads. As Miss Witherspoon might ask, “Why bother?”
(“Miss Witherspoon” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 1 at the City Theatre, 3823 Airport, Suite D. $15-$30. 474-8497, main.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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