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Stage Review: 4x5 finale a clever emotional tangle
Saturday, February 03, 2001 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
The works in City Theatre's monthlong 4x5 Festival have all been ambitious, but nothing has matched the intellectual reach of the finale, Jeanne Drennan's "Wrong Side Out." Starting as a wry comedy of academic ego, it weaves more complex patterns, suddenly darkens into tragedy and cools off into an ambiguous ending.
That's a lot of emotional and stylistic terrain for Drennan and her actors, not to mention the audience, to navigate. But to measure her chutzpah more fully, get this: All along, she's going one-on-one with Shakespeare himself.
Her central characters are Brian and Julia. He's a smug English lit prof whose freshman lecture course on Shakespeare is such a popular favorite that it attracts an overflow audience. She's his teaching assistant, a grad student who quickly becomes infatuated with his glib line in Shakespearean passion.
You can see Brian enticing Julia with his careless intimacy, but his real interest is her pretty roommate, Valerie. This triangle broadens into a pentagon with the addition of Julia's fiance, Michael, a med student, and Brian's wife of 10 years, Colleen, she of three small children and an unfinished master's thesis on, of course, Shakespeare.
The growing emotional tangle is briskly intercut with Brian's lectures and Julia's recitations, with every scene shot through with Shakespearean allusions. Brian makes a specialty of performing Shakespeare's songs, and Drennan uses them for emotional counterpoint. The play almost serves as a quick refresher course on major cruxes of six or eight plays.
Julia, of course, is the central betrayed lover in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," though this Julia seems to feature herself more as Viola in "Twelfth Night." At the climax, Colleen manages to turn everyone persuasively into King Lear, his three daughters and the Fool.
Since I teach Shakespeare myself, you may not believe me when I say I think the emotional developments are clear even if you don't get all the allusions -- but they certainly extend its implications. A few caveats: Brian mislocates the gallery on the Elizabethan stage and misuses "notoriety"; when you have one TA, she teaches more than one recitation; and deans don't notice grad students.
"Wrong Side Out" suffers from overabundance. From the hindsight of its dark climax, it takes too long to get going, then undercuts its achievement with a flip ending mixed into the curtain call. But the emotional payoff is powerful. Drennan's comedy is clever, but she's even better at building parallels (watch how Michael's emergency room dovetails with Shakespeare, for example) and manages themes of passion, betrayal and self-knowledge with skill.
Beth Hersey is impressive as Julia, balancing Shakespeare, Brian and all. She has a nice way with the humor of being go-between for the adulterers. John Yost's Brian is a mixed bag: He's pretty convincing dealing with Shakespeare (and I'm a tough audience), but it's hard to tell how much of his smug conceit is in the script.
Karen Baum does well with the less-dimensional Valerie and Kath Donnelly surprises with the assurance with which she handles the embarrassing but persistent Colleen. The most spot-on performance of all is Joshua Longo's sweet Michael.
Drennan and director David Maslow move things briskly along, making interesting (if peripheral) use of a stage-side musician. That and Chris Howard's set design of manuscript and books seem more appropriate to the comedy that "Wrong Side Out" doesn't really turn out to be.
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Where: Hamburg Studio, Bingham and 13th, South Side.