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| Deborah Hedwall and Patrick Clear. Photo by T. Charles Erickson |
Sometimes you can gather the best
of ingredients and follow a tried and true recipe and still, for some reason,
the meal just doesn’t turn out right. Such is the case with Christopher Shinn’s
An Opening in Time, which is having
its world premiere at Hartford Stage. Directed at something of a snail’s pace
by Oliver Butler, this slice of suburban Connecticut
life seems to drag on for longer than its actual two hours, with the main plot
somewhat under-spiced and the secondary plots served underdone.
The show’s program goes on at great
length via an interview with Shinn about the setting being Connecticut , but it really doesn’t matter.
It could be set in any wealthy suburban town in America -- you’d just have to
change some street names. Into this town comes Anne (Deborah Hedwall), recently
widowed and searching for…well, that remains to be seen. You see, she moved
away years ago to live on a farm with her husband, leaving behind a very
frustrated Ron (Patrick Clear), who believes that they once almost had a thing
going on, or so he tells Frank (Bill Christ), his diner-dining buddy, while
they are being served by Anetta (Kati Brazda), a Polish waitress who has eyes
for Ron. But there’s more to Anne’s move than meets the eye, for she has also
relocated to be close to her son Sam (Karl Miller), who has gotten into trouble
by romancing a teenage girl.
Ah, but there’s still more, for
Anne has purchased a house next door to a family that has fostered two brothers
– one who has left, succumbing to a world of crime and drugs, and the other,
George (Brandon Smalls) who is in the process of finding himself in terms of
sexual identity. Anne soon befriends George and she, being an ex-high school
teacher, naturally loans him a copy of Hemingway’s short stories, a surefire
ice-breaker for a young twenty-first century adolescent male. George’s foster
mother, Kim (Molly Camp) is somewhat edgy (in a fidgety, hyper-suburban
housewife manner) with this relationship, especially after someone breaks one
of Anne’s windows, which brings a police detective (Mike Keller) on the scene
to investigate.
So all of the ingredients are on
the table – actually, they are on or at a lot of tables, which keep popping up
as if to show off some of the renovations the Stage has undergone. Diner tables
and pizza parlor tables and even a table from a Denny’s restaurant rise up onto
the stage as if they are majestic thrones – the first appearance of the diner
counter, with Frank and Ron contentedly munching away, elicited some laughter
from the audience, surely not scenic designer Antje Ellermann’s intention. Such
over-production suggests that Ellermann and Butler simply didn’t trust the audience to
fill in the scenic blanks.
In any event, the main set, upper
stage left, is the interior of Anne’s house – specifically her kitchen. Anne
doesn’t spend much time in the kitchen and when she does the semi-enclosed room
seems to muffle dialogue. There’s a second house stage right, but it’s never
made clear who lives in this house or why it’s even there, but that seems to go
hand-in-hand with An Opening in Time’s
major problem: why are most of these characters introduced and how do they
relate?
If you’re interested in what’s
nagging at neighbor Kim, well don’t hold your breath. Do you want to know who
is breaking Anne’s windows? Wait for the sequel. Hoping for some resolution of
Anne’s relationship with George? You can eavesdrop on a phone conversation and
gather what information you may. Wonder where the hell Ron went? Sorry. Perhaps
he ran off with Anetta.
There is, however, a resolution of
sorts, and it provides the only sparks this play offers. Anne and Ron have to
work out what really happened between them 30 years ago, and Hedwall and Clear
suddenly to come to life, as does the play, in the middle of the second act as
their characters confront each other about their interpretations of the past.
The argument and subsequent resolution at, of course, a table, provide the only
dramatic satisfaction the play offers, though it is pretty weak satisfaction at
that. We’re not talking Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf here – it’s more along the lines of Love Story.
Most of the other scenes in the
play seem to unfold in slow motion, with a lot of air inserted into the
dialogue. One scene that is especially drawn out is the awkward meeting between
Anne and Sam at the aforementioned Denny’s. The main point of the scene is that
the wounded mother-son relationship can’t be healed in just one meeting, but it
takes a long time to establish this fact, and Miller’s channeling of James Dean
doesn’t help matters – the idea here is that intransigence can be conveyed
through broken sentences punctuated by a lot of silence. In fact, extended
silences appear to be the primary mode of emotional communication between many
of the characters.
If you’re intrigued by pop-up
tables and moved by the sounds of silence, then An Opening in Time may be just your dish. For the rest of the
theater-going public, there’s not much there to satisfy. You’ll come away
hungry for a four-course meal that, from soup to nuts, pleases the palate and
is served with a sense of immediacy.
An
Opening in Time runs through October 11. For tickets or more information
call 860-527-5151 or go to www.hartfordtsage.org.
