A Child's Guide To Innocence |
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THE New Jersey Repertory Company may never win the Tony Award for regional theater, but it deserves some kind of prize for sheer unpredictability. Its last show here, ''Ten Percent of Molly Snyder,'' was as whacked-out a comedy as New Jersey is likely to see this year. But its new show, ''A Child's Guide to Innocence'' by Vincent Sessa, is as delicate and nuanced a drama as you'll find, its three actresses telling a sublime intergenerational tale beautifully. At the center of it is Catherine Eaton as Frances, whom we first meet in Brooklyn in 1944. She is the oldest of three sisters, and of course it is wartime and there is a brother overseas. Corey Tazmania and Deborah Baum play Frances' sisters in the opening vignette, but by the final segment of Mr. Sessa's intriguingly structured triptych they are playing her grandchildren, and it is 1995. We don't see much of Frances' life over this 51-year span -- the play's middle segment is set in 1975 -- but somehow by the end we know a lot about her, and about those she loved and lost. Mr. Sessa's inspired stroke is to tackle almost nothing head-on. Indeed, it takes a while in the opening segment for a story to catch hold -- the sisters are so chirpy (far chirpier, in fact, than any real sisters would be) that they're hard to listen to. Gradually, though, it sinks in that their brother is missing in action and what we're seeing is their collective defense mechanism; each copes with the news differently. Even so, though, Mr. Sessa stays away from anything overt; the first segment remains a collection of fragments. It's a deliberate device and an effective one; not until 31 years later, in a harrowing, heartbreaking monologue by Ms. Eaton midway through the play, does he let all the pieces coalesce, and the waiting makes the moment all the more powerful. ''A Child's Guide'' becomes irritatingly New Age-y at times (''I think a table has a soul when a family sits at it''), and the final segment, with its ''greatest generation'' references and Frances in a coma, feels a bit shopworn. But in general Mr. Sessa shows great restraint, as does the director, Dana Benningfield; they don't try to do too much with the story, and thereby do quite a lot. It's a lovely portrait of how ordinary lives can be defined by a few pivotal moments, of how the world's great events can have a profound impact at a very small, personal level. ''A Child's Guide to Innocence'' continues through Aug. 14 at the New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch, (732)229-3166, www.njrep.org. |
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Drama
depicts three ages of 'Innocence'
Published in the Asbury Park Press 07/13/05BY TOM CHESEK
Francie (or Frances or even Francesca, as she's variously branded throughout) could be commenting upon the fact that the dramatic peaks of her family's history — the births, the deaths, the challenges of forging a new life in a strange place — mostly occur offstage, or in a time frame separate from that in which the characters are interacting. Unseen, too, are the men who figure prominently in Francie's life — her husband, her neighborhood grocer Papa, her seaman brother Johnny — although these absent characters are vividly invoked at times through reminiscence and a bit of playful imitation. As it turns out, much of "A Child's Guide" revolves around what's not there — the missing persons, misplaced objects and unspoken secrets taking center-stage prominence over the more mundane details of what at first glance appears to be a largely uneventful life. What we do have on display (in a production directed by NJ Rep regular Dana Benningfield) are snapshots of a 50-year span in the life of a woman who's spent a lot of time "praying that God doesn't lose interest in me" — a woman who comes late to the realization that it's impossible to make it through the present while living in the past. The Brooklyn-born Sessa's script opens in the wartime summer of 1944, with Francie and her sisters Catherine (Corey Tazmania) and Marion (Deborah Baum) in tentative mourning over brother Johnny, gone missing from the naval vessel on which he was stationed. Adding to the anxiety is the fact that Francie's beau also is off to fight the good war — and assuming a bizarre prominence is the apparent loss of a glass crystal decoration from a table lamp, an object variously described as a "prism" and a "star." Then again, certain objects take on a special significance in this play, tinged as it is with a realism that's distinctly more magical than matter-of-fact. The family dinner table is said to possess a soul, celery plays a recurring role in the proceedings and the eventual rediscovery of the glass "star" treats the bargain-store bauble with the deference normally granted some talisman out of Tolkien. A saga of bonds In fact, you'd do well to check all preconceptions of what this
play is all about at the door. Playwright Sessa has cited the script
as "autobiographical" in its origin with his own Italian-American
family members, but if you're anticipating a lot of caricature "fuhgeddaboutit" accents
and expecting the action to be punctuated by busy kitchen scenes,
then get thee instead to a venue that's showing "The Godfather's
Meshuggenah Wedding." While the actresses occasionally affect a
Lawn Guyland inflection or two and Papa Luigi hovers just this
side of tangibility, it's first and foremost a saga of bonds that
can never be severed — of words and deeds that resonate across
time, of ordinary lives that have a profound influence. |
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The LINK NEWS Theater Review By Madeline Schulman "A Child's Guide to Innocence," by Vincent Sessa, is a beautiful and touching play, designed to move and delight an audience. Running at the New Jersey Repertory Company, on Broadway in Long Branch, this family history is wonderfully acted by Catherine Eaton, Corey Tazmania and Deborah Baum, and splendidly directed by Dana Benningfield. An actress herself, the director brings out the nuances of the characters as they re-live three days, but decades apart. Eaton serves as the connecting thread, playing the same woman at 21, 51, and 71, as she believable changes from young woman to matron to older woman without altering makeup or costume. Her two co-stars each cleverly morph into three very different characters, appearing first as her sisters, then as her daughters, and finally as her granddaughters. The action starts in a Brooklyn grocery store in June, 1944, at the height of the war (WWII) as sisters Francie, Catherine and Marian wait for news of their brother Johnny, lost at sea, and Francie, the oldest, longs for letters from her fiance, Freddy. They vacillate between hope that Johnny has survivied and fear that he has not. The events of that day echo through the years in the second and third scenes, as the years pass and we learn how that day in 1944 has affected the family's life. Throughout, the dialog is leavened with flashes of humor - while describing the movie "Jaws" one daughter says she would need a "horse Valium" to go swimming in the ocean at night. A granddaughter, challenged to identify Charles Lindbergh, mutters, "He invented the Lindy?" One symbol throughout the play, as evocative as Laura's unicorn in "The Glass Menagerie," is a piece of glass which dangles from a hurricane lamp, variously described by the characters as a star or a prism. We learn in the first scene that it is missing, but not how or why. Just as we learn Johnny's fate and Freddy's, we do find out the significance of the prism, and as a star or prism should, it scatters a light on all that has gone before. The single set serves equally well as a grocery store, Long Island dining room, and grandmother's bedroom. "A Child's Guide to Innocence" is highly recommended as an emotional and intellectual pleasure. |