The Understudy

When a dream goes unrealized, sometimes knowing that you would have succeeded has to be sufficient. And for a performer, it feels like the bulk of the job. Williamston Theatre offers a backstage pass to the agonizing love affair of an actor, his craft, and the business that hates him in The Understudy, by Theresa Rebeck. In this densely comic production, director Rob Roznowski does more than sneer at a flawed system, instead sounding out the basest joy of invention that resonates with every artist.

For this behind-the-scenes tale, the conventional spectator-performer divide is ingeniously revamped by one orienting backdrop: overlooking an expanse of empty theater seats, we’re suddenly right onstage. Designer Bartley Bauer opens up every square of Williamston’s fluid playing area to nuts-and-bolts adornment; from unrefined backs of set pieces to thick wires running up walls to the complex semaphore of spike-tape marks, he spares no loving detail of theatrical miscellany. Similarly, Alex Gay’s lighting scheme uses the conspicuous noise of shifting color gels to preserve the no-illusions onstage feel. Lest the production being rehearsed slide into afterthought, sound designer Julia Garlotte unleashes great unsubtle music cues, which support the parallel stresses of the rehearsal in progress while also providing some overt commentary about the underlying pretension of the current project. What little is shown is the comically overproduced stuff of nightmares: a star-studded Broadway production of a three-hour Franz Kafka play.

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Nunsense

A sweet little gem of an impromptu premise brought creator (and writer and composer and lyricist) Dan Goggin’s Nunsense into being, fully formed. Folded into nearly every moment of the franchise-spawning musical is the suggestion that the nuns onstage are not professional entertainers, but were rather compelled by disastrous circumstances to throw together a spur-of-the-moment revue. Essentially, forgivable is written into the show’s DNA, excusing gaffes in less-experienced companies and keeping the supposedly unrehearsed content feeling fresh. Even so, keeping the seasoned performer in sight behind the amateur character is critical, which is made unfortunately evident by its absence in the current production at the Encore Musical Theatre Company.

The play’s framework is predicated on a macabre event: the deadly poisoning of the majority of the Little Sisters of Hoboken, and the dearth of money to bury the last four, who are waiting patiently in the convent freezer. Frequently mined for effective gallows humor, the regrettable, half-reverent situation is somehow even more ridiculous than it sounds. In desperation, a handful of the surviving sisters decide to throw a talent show–like fundraiser to hasten the final internments, which is how the audience winds up looking at the Mount Saint Helen's School auditorium stage dressed up for a high-school production of Grease: the play isn’t merely about the event, it is the event. The craftsmanship of the design is exceedingly well-masked; set designer Leo Babcock outfits his dud of a backdrop with secretly interactive mobile components, whereas Daniel Walker’s lighting scheme starts with impersonal fluorescence and sidles into more theatrical effects. Costumer Sharon Larkey Urick dives into the layering humor of women whose thematic accessories must work around their cumbersome habits, supplementing Goggin’s ample word play with visual jokes that mesh well with the predominating low-budget enthusiasm.

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The Cemetery Club

There’s no denying the benefits of a thorough warmup. The opening scenes of The Cemetery Club make for a goofy, dramatically languid romp, in which playwright Ivan Menchell gives his characters ample time to stretch as comic plots develop. In the Tipping Point Theatre’s final production of the season, director Beth Torrey guides the fluffy early humor with fond patience, gamely preparing a well-conditioned cast to open up into a triumphant emotional sprint. It’s a feat worth waiting for.

Three women face a sea change in their longtime friendship: once occupied with couples’ activities, each of the trio is since widowed, and their primary group pursuit now is a standing monthly appointment to visit the cemetery. Designer Gwen Lindsay, tasked with making a cozy living room and a green expanse of burial ground coexist in the same set, bisects the realms with a simple raised platform. Most of the details are found near ground level, which permits lighting designer Joel Klain to cleanly divide and define the spheres with top-down specificity, keeping the unused parts of the stage well out of mind. Quintessa Gallinat interweaves instantly recognizable classic tunes with gently inoffensive musings on love, a soundtrack that reflects the safety established in the characters’ harmless early tiffs.

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The Divine Sister

Biting wit Charles Busch sinks his satirical fangs into The Divine Sister, citing the many nuns that have dotted pop culture over the last half-century or so. Yet in this telling, whether the collective brides of Christ have a cultural imprint strong enough to make this skewering feel like long-deserved comeuppance remains unconfirmed. Director Jamie Richards approaches this gotta-nuke-something Ringwald Theatre comedy with reigning silliness, skipping daintily over patchy references to mine the moments and characters for their brash, irreverent comedic potential.

The play’s single act borrows from just about every nun source you could name, plus several you probably couldn’t, or maybe heard about once, or barely remember. Alongside ponderous dramatic Agnes of God models — exploring the line between disturbed, possessed, and miraculous — are peppy Sound of Music types with a song always on their lips, brought to intentionally cloying fruition by music director Jeremy Ryan Mossman. Busch lines up his types and scatters story arcs among them: the driving plot is that old chestnut, The Convent Needs Money, Let’s Get Some Money, How Will We Ever Get The Money?; however, numerous other pots are stirred and hints dropped, from the return of one lifetime-ago romance to a literally underground scheme rife with nefarious DaVinci Code secrecy. Bogged down by development after murky, half-baked development, the show falters by the playwright’s hand; Busch’s degeneracy is universally stronger than his cleverness, so the energy expended on loose ends hauled together into a crash-landing resolution feels like it’s elbowing out the superior raunchy-profane material.

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M. Butterfly

Playwright David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly takes dual inspiration from a real-life love affair of mistaken identity and from Puccini’s classic Madama Butterfly to piece together a haunting and tragic romance, the truth of which can never be extricated from the weakness of wistful recollection. As directed by Arthur Beer, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre production is romantic indeed, a heady epic that overindulges a bit in its own stately mystique and polished grace.

The introductory scene establishes that protagonist Rene Gallimard (Glen Allen Pruett) is in a French prison, a laughingstock, and of dubious mental faculties. He fell in love with a devoted, feminine beauty that was not as she seemed, and the revelation and attendant shame has cast doubt on his judgment and sanity. Yet he wants nothing more than to retreat back into that fiction, and is eager to show the viewer why. His tale luxuriates in fond reminiscence of time-tested love with opera singer Song Liling (Tae Hoon Yoo), a Chinese national he met while serving as a diplomat in that country in the 1960s. Sarah Tanner’s scenic design is the China of Rene’s mind, a convertible triptych whose moving parts make abrupt scenic transitions as easygoing as an underhand lob (with seamless assistance by AeJay Mitchell and Chin Yang, whose understated presence is in keeping with the traditional Japanese stagehand role of Kurogo). Lights by Jon Weaver play with the negative space of considerable darkness, upon which isolated illuminations and primary-colored backgrounds provide dazzling contrast and variation. Rapid-shifting focal points are always kept clear, highlighted by a visually striking range of costumes and properties (by Mary Copenhagen and Chelsea Burke, respectively) that neatly bisect West and East. Matt Lira layers a phenomenal sound scheme under and throughout the action, cinematically underscoring scenes with ambient fullness and the operatic grandeur of swelling instrumentals. China is Rene’s exotic paradise, in which his influence as a white European man is considerable, power that plays forcefully into his wooing and eventual possession of Song. Yet the woman he believes to be an awed native willing to become his own personal Butterfly — just like his favorite tragic opera — is in fact a man, a fact of which Rene remains assiduously ignorant across the years and continents of their partnership.

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