8/9/2024 THE OTHER PART OF THE PICTURE Essential Theatre Play Festival
WHAT’S LEFT UNSAID
(Bias Alert – I am friends with playwright and Essential Artistic Director Peter Hardy and have worked with actors Ash Anderson and Rebecca Van Kirk and ALWAYS view all their work through approval-tinted glasses.)
It has been argued (and I agree with the argument) that the “soul” of a work of art may just be what is not in the painting, the “other part of the picture,” as it were. What exactly is causing that Mona Lisa smile? (I suspect a paint splatter on the artist’s face that looks like a {whatever makes an Italian noblewoman smile}. What phantasms of Van Gogh’s mind are just off the borders of “Starry Night?” How many dying faces were not exaggerated in “Guernica?”
Actors too revel in subtext – those thoughts and memories the playwright leaves off the page but will ALWAYS create the core of an extraordinary performance. And Peter Hardy’s The Other Part of the Picture or, Letters from the House of Fate is so full of extraordinary performances that what stuck with me the longest were the words we didn’t hear, the emotions left unexpressed, the letters we did not hear read aloud.
It is 1978. Matt (Caleb Wilkinson) is a grad student in English, specializing in Epistolary Literature. He moves into an old home (probably once owned by a University professor or administrator) that has been converted into small apartments for students. He occupies the kitchen side of what used to be a dining area.
Through a too-thin wall is the other half of the original room, now occupied by Maddie (a fiery Ash Anderson), a force of nature working on an MFA in theatre design. Maddie studies little but spends her nights drinking and carousing with (loud) forgettable one-night hookups, hook-ups that by necessity require the guy to be gone by morning. In Act One, Matt and Maddie go on with their separate lives and work, occasionally running into each other in the hall. Until the night a drunken Maddie comes into Matt’s room by accident, throws up and passes out on his bed, Matt cleans her up and makes sure she gets through the night with some dignity.
These two would be a disaster as a couple. They are oil and chalk, peanut butter and coconut, Samwise and Gollum. Yet, mainly through all they leave unsaid, a connection forms, a friendship that grows, that changes them in unexpected patterns. They each have their circle of friends – Matt has Cynthia and Roger (Iniki Roberts and Brock Kercher), Maddie has Liz (Ellie Styron), a friend in the theatre department who is her sounding board, her “Jiminy Cricket” appealing to her better angels.
At one point, Matt discovers some old letters in his room, letters written during WWII from a love-sick woman who may have been living under the thumb of a domineering father. Or brother. Or husband. She never clarifies. Act Two comes and the cast joins forces to discover the identity and “story” of “L,” the mysterious letter-writer. They are joined by Glenda (Rebecca Van Kirk), an undergraduate film buff who is able to crack ONE code embedded in the letters, and by Taylor (Tommy Sullivan-Lovett) who, despite being gayer than all my gay friends from that period, becomes Glenda’s friend and constant companion.
Of course, in keeping with the theme of this piece, any other details of back-story and plot and character will remain unspoken here. I live in deathly fear of the Spoiler Police.
This is a beautifully performed, nicely constructed and elegantly written piece about friendship, about choices, about movies, about time, and, especially, about the ineffable ephemerality of letters. Letters are variously described as “moments of life” shared with a specific person, thoughts and fears expressed in prose (or verse) and either sent out into the world or kept private; It is significant that most diaries are written as letters. Folks of a certain age (Boomers like me who were ourselves young(ish) adults in 1978) will remember (and rue the loss of) letters – the flash of elation when one arrives, the disappointing days when the mailbox came with only bills and ads and magazines. (Okay, some of the magazines – the film ones -- were welcome.)
Scenic Designer Adam Pagdon has created a bifurcated room that clearly shows the original Victorian design of the apartments and layered it with the trappings of 1970’s grad students – posters and ratty bedclothes and bookcases and sketches on the wall. And he has cleverly NOT included furnishings talked about– sideboards in Matt’s side, a mysterious locked cabinet in Maddie’s, the off-stage kitchen, anything in the hallway, ANY window providing even a modicum of light. And there are even areas of “limbo” in which one character or other breaks the fourth wall to chat with us, sometimes before they even enter the story.
What WON’T go unexpressed here is my total delight in this cast. Ash Anderson is now (and has always been) a dynamic stage presence, from my first encounter with them in 2015 in Sally and Glen at the Palace at Out of Box Theatre (another movie-geek wallow by Mr. Hardy) to my declaration of them as best performance of the year in 2017’s Ada and the Memory Engine (part of that year’s Essential Festival). They command the stage and create (in these plays) women who face trials and betrayals and victories. I will watch them in any show at any time. And this just may be the best performance of this year.
Caleb Wilkinson (last year’s The Wishing Place) strikes an elegant contrast – quiet, kind, intelligent, the quintessential Literature T.A., he creates a character who respects others enough to assume they know what an “Epistolary Novel” is without giving a lecture. He is steadfast to a fault, remaining devoted to a friend no matter how they betray and abuse him. And he commands our respect for that.
Rebecca Van Kirk’s Glenda is, basically, me at the time – liking nothing more than to talk about Ingmar Bergman, Ed Wood, and the latest Hollywood Disaster Epic with equal enthusiasm. Iniki Roberts and Brock Kercher give us a Cynthia and Roger who were eerily similar to a couple I knew at the time (and with whom I once made a Super-8 movie that got me accepted into USC’s MFA film program – but that’s a tale best left unsaid. Here.). Maybe not physically – my friend was skeleton-thin and bony and Mr. Kercher is a pleasantly stout presence -- but they spoke in the same patterns and made the same gonzo philosophical epiphanies. In the other roles, Tommy Sullivan-Lovett (Taylor) and Ellie Styron (Liz) are graceful additions and fill the ensemble with a nice harmonic that makes the music of Mr. Hardy’s dialogue mesh and mingle, that becomes a joy to the ear and to the mind when all are on stage. Carolyn Cook adds her considerable off-stage talent as the voice of the mysterious letter-writer.
So, you may ask, what am I NOT saying about this production? What are the unwritten reactions that may (or may not) place schisms between me and those friends in this show? Indeed, are there any? Would Peter hate me if I say that leaving a few more things unsaid would improve the play? (It does go on a little long.) Of course, if I say that, he’d pin me down over a glass of wine and want the details. One beautiful thing about things unseen, unsaid, is that different folks see (or hear) different things, different hidden pictures, different unsaid words, different unarticulated emotions. So, even if pressed for details, I will remain silent – if I think one scene (or another) goes on a tad too long, it just may be different scene(s) if I see this show again. And I did like it enough to see it more than once, to even read the unperformed script.
Peter Hardy’s The Other Part of the Picture or Letters from the House of Fate is an perfect piece to open this year’s Festival and it bodes great things for the remaining productions. Because of my schedule, several festival productions will (sadly) remain unseen by me. And that’s not ironic at all!
-- Brad Rudy (BKRudy@aol.com #EssentialPlayFestival2024 #OtherPartOfThePicture)
https://www.essentialtheatre.com/play/the-other-part-of-the-picture/
