BWW Reviews: Acting Out A 'CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION'

In Annie Baker's CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION—the recent Obie Award Winner for Best New American Play—audiences are provided a glimpse into the world of the actor's studio, a bare space that comes alive with improvisation and emotional catharsis from its sometimes perplexed participants. One of last season's celebrated Off-Broadway hits, the play is remounted on the Julianne Argyros Stage at South Coast Repertory for its West Coast Premiere engagement through January 30. Sam Gold, the play's original director also returns to direct this new production in Orange County.

To wit, this intermission-less series of vignettes that follow the six-week journey of four students and their instructor at a Creative Drama class at a small Vermont community center may seem, on the outset, nonsensical and a bit too unconventional for some audiences. Admittedly, even I had a few slightly snobby reservations, mainly because of my inexperience with actor-ly exercises that forces one to leap across the room channeling a barnyard animal. Before the play even began, I wondered... Is there a plot? Does each evening's performance vary differently from the others because of its seemingly improvised nature? Are all these people just a tad too cookoo? Is something actually going to happen?

What a pleasant surprise, then—despite a rather sluggish start—that the play turned out to be quite the quirky charmer, brimming with strikingly brilliant comedy and truly endearing emotions, delivered nicely with a bevy of excellent performances from its five person cast. The play begins in an empty rehearsal studio at a non-descript community center, with curtains drawn and emblazoned with every tint and shade of beige imaginable. Designed with great detail by David Zinn, the space literally looks like a raw, unprocessed blank canvas, that only bursts with life when people—or fun inanimate objects like a hula hoop or a yoga ball—actually occupy it. Whenever the students leave for the evening, the studio literally becomes a dead space, down to the uncomfortable stark glow of low-watt institutional lighting.

Soon the emptiness spills into darkness, and as the overhead lights fade up to barely the strength of candlelight, we see five human figures all reclining on the floor in stark silence. It's both disconcerting and exciting to sit through, as the audience waits in anticipation for what they're about to do. Then as if by random happenstance, individual characters spout out a number up to the heavens. The intervals vary and add to the peculiar suspense. Sometimes hilariously, they restart the numerical sequence—in audible frustration—whenever more than one person says the next number in the sequence.

Like the activity that inspired the play's title itself, CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION presents its multiple character arcs through a series of odd, slightly absurd theater games—those improvised exercises students of this discipline practice, not only to reveal their authentic emotions, but to hone their acting chops. In the context of a play, the exercises slowly reveal every character's individual story and how they affect each other in the group. The payoff for the audience is seeing each person transform from ho-hum "nobodies" to actually interesting "somebodies" that you can genuinely care about—all by them revealing the raw, sometimes uncomfortable truths that shape their lives.

The laughs do come plentiful as the students participate in more games throughout the play, elicited mainly because it all feels a bit foreign to most of us.... like we're invisible flies on the wall observing a wacky alien race. Reactions often straddle somewhere between thoughtful awkwardness and raw, unapologetic laughter—good signs to have in a play this seemingly arbitrary. Baker, relying heavily on the boldness of her characters' imaginations, manages to pull out genuinely heartfelt stories from each individual that propel the play from just a mere collection of dramatic tomfoolery. Its freewheeling nature slowly and purposely straightens up as character arcs—and deep-rooted character trajectories—begin to mingle with each other, affecting everyone's emotional growth.

Leading the tribe as their spiritual guide is Marty (SCR favorite Linda Gehringer), the New Age-y teacher that also runs the community center. She's Maria Von Trapp if she was a hippie, excited about the center's first ever adults-only acting class where she coaxes each person to let go of personal demons through the art of self-actualized improvisation. She has convinced (or is it forced?) her husband James (Torch Song Trilogy's Brian Kerwin) to enroll in the class as well. We learn later that not only does he have an estranged daughter that refuses to speak with him, he is also willingly putting up a facade about the reality of his seemingly happy marriage.

Also enrolled in the six-week acting class are Theresa (Two And A Half Men's Marin Hinkle), an ex-actress from New York who ran away to small town life to practice acupressure; Schultz (Big Eden's Arye Gross), a recently divorced love-starved carpenter who just moved in to a lonely condo nearby; and mopey, 16-year-old Lauren (Lily Holleman), here to escape her bickering parents at home and to supercharge her acting skills to land the role of Maria in her high school's fall production of West Side Story.

Under Marty's insistence and prodding, the class participates in various acting exercises—everything from one-word, rapid-relay storytelling in-the-round to animal transformations. The audience sees each characters' layered story in bits and pieces, peeled slowly like an onion. They take turns play-acting as each other in class, some with better accuracy than others. The play-acting also encourages each acting student to dig deeper and deeper to their core, to let their real emotions spill over... at times, spilling over unexpectedly tragic revelations that I won't spoil here.

There are plenty of amusing moments in the exercises, as well as many moments that elicit difficult truth-telling—Oprah-like moments of revealing clarity, all under the guise of improvisation. Some of the play's more intimate, exposition-heavy instances also occur during "breaks" in the class (they have to pee at some point, too, right?), giving certain pairings of characters a chance to interact and reveal highly-guarded secrets.

Of all the characters, young Lauren seems to represent and mirror the audience's frustration/confusion/amusement over the events unfolding before us that, at one point that ignited the night's loudest laughs, she finally bursts with bemusement: "Are we gonna do any real acting?" Here, Lauren's youth seems to serve her well... only because the adults in the room seem way more screwed up—as they spend the play trying to climb out of the pile of their own neuroses, attempting to shatter through all those layers of protective emotional armor they've built around themselves for years. As expected, as those barriers begin to break down, everyone finally sees truth and clarity in themselves.

It's a challenging play to be sure, especially to those that strictly adhere to seeing traditional story structures and character trajectories. But in the engrossing CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION, the rewards definitely far outweigh its slightly awkward, slightly risky, unusual conceit. Buoyed by a terrific cast—especially the always-beaming Hinkle, the scene-stealing Holleman, and Gross' superbly nuanced acting choices—the play achieves genuine excitement in such minimalist staging. Patient, highly-attentive patrons in the audience will certainly be rewarded by sticking it out.

Photos from CIRCLE MIRROR TRANFORMATION by Ben Horak/SCR.
Main (from left to right): Linda Gehringer, Marin Hinkle, Brian Kerwin, and Lily Holleman.
Trio set, top: Lily Holleman and Marin Hinkle. Middle: Arye Gross and Linda Gehringer.
Bottom: Brian Kerwin and Linda Gehringer (with Lily Holleman in back).

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Performances of Annie Baker's CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION continue at South Coast Repertory through January 30, with Tuesday through Sunday evening performances at 7:45 p.m. and with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:00 p.m. Discounts are available for full-time students, patrons 25 years of age and under, educators, seniors and groups of 10 or more. There will be an ASL-interpreted performance on Saturday, January 29 at 2:00 p.m.

Tickets, priced from $20 to $66, can be purchased online at www.scr.org, by phone at (714) 708-5555 or by visiting the box office at 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa.

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