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A CurtainUp New Jersey Review
The Summer House
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No no Kennedy. Your parents did enough for me when they came together to make you — Chip
I don't know how much of a coming-together it was. Truly, I can hardly recall how it happened. But you're absolutely right. Kennedy is the best mistake I ever made. — Sandy
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In Kain's play, the mother is acutely aware of a daughter's unhealthy attachment to her father. Psychoanalysts who have thrown up their hands trying to explain Bowles' more illusive play, they should have no trouble deciphering the psychological causes and personality permutations that serve to engine Kain's take on misguided parental attention. Although The Summer House takes a rather straight and even predictable path toward its resolution, it is the sudden twists in the characters' motivations that keep us involved.
Kennedy Sommers (Krystel Lucas) is a pretty, aspiring 27 year-old graphic artist who has focused on writing "mangas." Moderately introverted, she still lives with her well-to-do parents in a swank upper-East Side apartment. Currently her attention is primarily fixed on marrying Chip Saunders (Scott Price), a young man she met in an internet chat room. They have known each other for 18 months. Chip is white and Kennedy's family is black, so guess who's been invited for dinner, well, at least, invited to go out with Kennedy and her parents Bill (Gerard Catus) and Sandy (Marie Thomas) to a restaurant? Back at their apartment Chip— relaxed, personable and eagerly conciliatory to his fiancée— reveals to Bill and Sandy that he grew up in foster care in Hanover, New Hampshire. A former marine, he has plans to start a business selling outdoor recreation equipment. Does anyone believe him? And doesn't anyone notice Kennedy's fleeting and inconsistent affection for Chip?
With measured civility and humor, Bill and Sandy appear to be strangely receptive to Kennedy and Chip's impulsive plan to marry. The black and white factor is not the issue, but rather whether Bill and Sandy will go along with Kennedy's suggestion that her parents join them on their honeymoon at the family's upstate country home.
The balance of the play takes place at the summer house following the wedding where a psychological mystery unfolds. It involves an apparent suicide by a young girl, a haunted greenhouse, the unmasking of a con artist cum identity thief, the dangers of filial obsession, a mother's infidelity, and an attempted murder. That these all serve to expose deeply suppressed truths is only the half of it, as they also serve as an unlikely catalyst for Sandy's belated singing career. All a bit melodramatic and the play narrowly misses being pure hokum.
Under the quality control of director Jade King Carroll, The Summer House is well acted. The burly Catus is quite fine as Bill, whose intense bond with his daughter has unwittingly created an insurmountable emotional wall between him and Sandy. Thomas is terrific as the still attractive, always smartly attired Sandy, who ultimately finds that she cannot compete with the relationship that has developed incrementally over the years between Bill and Kennedy. An insightful scene late in the play finds Sandy singing the blues with sultry aplomb. Lucas makes a good if pathetic case for the emotionally damaged Kennedy who is prone to unexplained seizures and an inscrutable resistance to her fiancée's attention. Price is right (no pun intended)-on as Chip, whose fate would appear to be sealed almost from the minute he walks into the Sommers' lives.
The dialogue throughout is crisp with the acerbic Sandy getting the best lines, or at least Thomas is resourceful enough to make every bon mot or line count and get a laugh on such asides as these. ("Kennedy is going to put our family on the map (pause) as soon as she finishes something," and "We've got a handful of country homes and a little hedge fund,"). Although handsome enough in its simplicity, the set design by Lara Fabian forces an extra intermission (that's two intermissions) on the play, the first coming only twenty minutes from the start. Surely the moveable parts of the skeletal set and the changing of a slip cover on one sofa could be executed with more fluidity. Dennis Parichy's expert lighting and Karen Perry's haute couture fashions, particularly Kennedy's white ballerina-style wedding dress, are a plus. The Summer House is neatly calculated to be both mystifying and satisfying.
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The Summer House By Amber Kain Directed by Jade King Carroll Cast: Gerard Catus, Krystel Lucas, Scott Price, Marie Thomas Set Design: Lara Fabian Lighting Design: Dennis Parichy Costume Design: Karen Perry Sound Design: Ryan Bacidore Running Time: 2 hours including 2 intermissions Passage Theatre Company at the Mill Hill Playhouse, 205 E. Front Street, Trenton. (609) 392 - 0766 Tickets: $25 - $30 Performances Thurs. – Sat. 8 PM. Matinees second, third and fourth Sat. 2 PM; Sun. 3 PM Opened 10/30/08 Ends 11/23/08 Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 11/01/08 |
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