Review: THE COUNTRY HOUSE Mourns a Fiction at The Cell

From now until the end of the month, FUSION's professional theater family will be inhabiting The Country House, Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Marguilies' latest play about a family of actors and directors coping with the recent death of their beloved sister/daughter/wife/mother (and famous actress), Kathy. This melancholy premise is a fitting frame for self-involved character reflections, but not for dramatic energy-especially because the manner of Kathy's death (lung cancer) is totally unrelated to the characters's lives (she didn't even smoke). Instead of being a source of intrigue, Kathy becomes a flat idol with flawless skin, indisputable fame, and unassailable integrity. This dead perfection is a false North Star, (dis)orienting all the characters and the action of the play. But Marguiles doesn't seem to acknowledge this falseness; he sincerely drives his entire play into the nostalgic void of an unrealistic symbol.
Though the script is disoriented and pointless, the play is not a disaster. This is a nice night of theater: In classical style, with hip and current flavor-like if Chekov shopped at Whole Foods, or if O'Neill smoked pot, an effervescent tonic of stimulating cultural sensibilities: The famous T.V. star building schools in Africa, the aging starlet cast to stodgy Summer-stock G.B. Shaw, the idealistic vegetarian liberal-arts college student. It's nice to have a window into the lives of the rich and famous-and with more thoughtful commentary about their privileged angst than we see in reality television. But unless you're personally invested in the institution of Broadway, or the mental health of soap opera stars, or the soul of the movie producer, you're not going to relate.
Should I be concerned about the fate of the Broadway Star, given the name of this website? Well, I'm not; I know theater is going to survive beyond any possible collapse of that pricy gaudy street. After all, my last article was about FUSION's upcoming expansion; yes, this expansion is near Albuquerque's Broadway Street, but FUSION's potential has more to do with the railroad and Route 66, than pretentious New York namesakes.
The lonely longing of the play's characters was fulfilled from the very beginning--not by the script, but in the ensemble: A genuine community of quality actors, stage designers, and directors who made the most of their roles to break above the mundanity of the play's content. Yes, Laurie Thomas' and Bruce Holmes' performances, in their search for a natural tone for their overwrought characters, became dizzy with fluctuations. Even so, the flux did not tip the boat-because the ensemble supported one another. This support was also transformative, turning Paul Blott's and Rhiannon Frazier's easily-unlikable characters into resonant beacons of no-nonsense charisma. Not excluded from this ensemble embrace was the perfect verisimilitude of Bobbie Marquez' set, the fine-tuned chaos of director Gil Lazier's staging, and the receptive full house of FUSION subscribers.
So, this show was perplexing--a night of living theater, mourning the death of theater.

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