By Laura Kennelly
Acting, like life, is complicated at Ten Chimneys. Jeffrey Hatcher’s play, named after Alfred Lunt’s and Lynn Fontanne’s sprawling country home in Wisconsin, imagines one summer in the 1930s when the then-famous theatrical couple begins work on Chekhov’s The Seagull. As the play opens, the two are running lines, pacing around the stage and repeating the same phrases over and over, adding corrections, changing emphasis.
By the time Hatcher’s witty and insightful drama ends it’s easy to see that the whole play encapsulated in that first scene: it’s not that their marriage rests on a shared love of the stage; it’s that the stage is their marriage. They are only truly united when “the play’s the thing.” Offstage they can be easily distracted. He, by young visiting actress Uta Hagen (a charming Kelli Ruttle) and also by another, deeper friendship he tries to hide.
Fontanne (elegantly portrayed by Jordan Baker) juggles life’s daily practicalities, including the necessity of dealing with Hattie Sederholm, her rather difficult mother-in-law (brought to droll life by Mariette Hartley) who dotes on her son and tolerates [barely] his wife.
Another theatre legend, Sydney Greenstreet (Michael McCarty), also comes to visit. McCarty successfully evokes memories of “The Fat Man” made famous in film classics such as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.
Director Michael Bloom creates the illusion that we’re at the Lunts, but that for some reason they don’t notice us. The stunning new Second Stage space makes it delightfully hard to tell where reality stops and fantasy begins. The surround stage, the close seating, the decor, all make us feel we are “there.” [If you need an idea about what the set looks like, take a look at the first two pages of this newsletter from the Ten Chimneys Foundation in Wisconsin.
Opening night the illusion of “being there” was particularly true since Reuben and Dorothy Silver, Cleveland’s own longtime acting royal couple, were seated right at the edge of the stage. I half-expected them to jump up and join the Lunts rehearsing The Seagull. This spicy, bittersweet comedy tickles the fancy and brings a welcome bit of summer to Cleveland. It continues until Sun 2/5 at Playhouse Square.
[Photo: Donald Carrier and Jordan Baker in Cleveland Play House’s production of Ten Chimneys. Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni.]
Ten Chimneys, directed by Michael Bloom, runs on Second Stage at PlayhouseSquare through Sun 2/5. http://PlayhouseSquare.org.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.