Review: Talking With by North by Northwest Production Company
by Michael Meigs
The solo monologue is one of the purest demonstrations of the art. These six women come individually to you in the intimacy and immediacy
of the City Theatre's small house. In each scene the actress takes that text with your complicity and, before your eyes, becomes the character.
"Jane Martin" is probably a pseudonym for Jon Jory, who has directed all of her ten plays. The mysterious Jane has never been seen. She twice won the American Theatre Critics' award for a new play and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. Jory simply declines to discuss the matter -- perhaps a ploy, perhaps an artist's staking out the liberty to explore his feminine side.
Because each of these characters is vividly, irrevocably female. Michelle Cheney as the actress finishing her makeup when "fifteen minutes!" to curtain time is called; Renee Brown as the housewife who escapes daily reality; Wendy Zavaleta as a daughter grieving the death of her otherwise indomitable mother; Jennifer Coy as a brash auditioner perfectly willing to use blackmail; B.J. Machalicek as a dreamer at McDonald's; and Marsha Sray as a girl explaining the meaning of baton twirling.
That's just the first act.
Martin's writing is sharp, perceptive and evocative, with each piece building to an epiphany, a turn or an insight. With the assistance of director Joni McClain these actresses have the understanding and the rhythm of the pieces; they set the hook when appropriate. When they look at you in that space, it's with the eyes of the character.
I've seen and appreciated each of them onstage, so these metamorphoses are all the more gripping for that.
Riffling through this deal of winning cards, I'm reluctant to choose among them. But we're sitting at the theatre table together, so let me give you just three.
Marsha Sray in her tights and red spangles twirls that baton with inattentive fluidity. As she speaks with her soft voice and tentative manner about training, performances, comradeship and the scorn of some, we begin to realize that it's not just a baton. Though her character wouldn't understand the metaphor, it's something like a Tibetan prayer wheel. Marsha shares that baton with us, even asking one of us to hold it, but as she tells of difficulties she realizes that she needs it back in her hands again. The final passages of her piece are transcendent both for the images in the text and her dreamy absorption in them.
Renee Brown's personalization of a well-worn, unpretentious woman rodeo rider is a rough poem to the way things used to be. In character and confiding action she reminded me strongly of the first-person pieces done by Anna Deavere-Smith at the Zach Scott last April and now acclaimed on Broadway.
Jennifer Coy's pieces display her breath-taking range. In the first act she was pushy, arrogant, self-assured and vulnerable. In the second, she becomes for us a simple, matter-of-fact young woman from Appalachia, the child of charismatic evangelical snake-handlers. Her description of the ritual, the dangers, and her own gradual transformation of faith is deeply moving, and she takes us in hand just as effectively as she handles her snakes.
These women are onstage at the City Theatre for you only this Wednesday through Saturday. They will have to vacate to make way for City's Hamlet.
Currently in Austin we're surrounded by the brash, the loud, the zany and the classics. Take an easy evening with NxNW to get back in touch with the transporting ten-minute magic of a single voice, a single character and six talented women.
Recommended!
Review by Bastion Carboni at austinist.com, October 21
EXTRA
Click to view program for Talking With by North by Northwest Theatre Company
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Talking With
by Jane Martin
North by Northwest Production Company
