Chief among social media’s benefits must be the ability to sleuth your way into a crush’s world — to discover their likes on Facebook, their tagged friends on Instagram, their jobs past and present on LinkedIn — and create an idea of a person that perfectly suits one’s imagination.
For 27-year-old Annabel in Through the Looking Screen by Anne Chmelewsky, social media is the perfect outlet for her crushing on her colleague Sebastian. “Annabelle herself is kind of shy in person,” says director Eileen Kuo. “He’s in a big crowd. So she finds herself blossoming more online, and so the show is about her discovering social networking and social media and learning about people online and having lots of friends online. So it’s through this medium that she’s really trying to get to know her crush and piece together who he is.”
The show, a production of Quark Theatre, is a one-woman operetta, with Jacquelene Cooper starring. “This role calls for somebody with an opera background, but also a musical theater background to translate a story like this,” Kuo says. “[Cooper] can do it all. Seeing what she can do on stage, she was really the perfect fit.
“It’ll be just me and her on the stage; I’ll accompany her on the piano,” the director continues. “And so it’s sort of a musical journey of her experiencing the internet, singing through her feelings and thoughts, just everything that she’s going through trying to connect online.”
While the music is classical, it is innately modern in its themes, creating an interesting juxtaposition not unlike how social media, while connective, can also be equally isolating. This show was conceived of in 2011, says Kuo, yet its relevance remains even through all of social media’s changes. “I think at that time people were just first starting to experience, ‘oh gosh, all these notifications, all these people want to connect with me,’ but that’s something we still experience today. We’re still trying to get likes. We’re still trying to get excellent social media engagement. … It’s such a current and updated story that I think a lot of people will find really relatable.
“I hope audiences walk away with just a warm, fuzzy feeling having gotten to know Annabelle as a character,” Kuo adds. “But also, I hope they walk away with some conversations about our relationships with social media.”
Quark’s production of Through the Looking Screen marks the North American premiere and Quark Theatre’s first musical. Chmelewsky, the composer, charged no licensing fee, and she and Quark instead donated what would have been the fee to Stax Music Academy.
Purchase tickets at quarktheatre.com. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. Sunday matinees.
Through the Looking Screen, TheatreSouth at First Congo, 1000 Cooper Street, Friday, September 20–October 6, $20.
Nathan McHenry and Carly Crawford (Photo: Tony Isbell)
Quark Theatre is gearing up to finish off its season in the coming weeks with the regional premiere of Constellations by Nick Payne, opening Friday, May 10th.
“I have been calling this a multiversal love story,” says director Tony Isbell. “Because it’s about two characters — Roland and Marianne — and the story is they meet, they go on a date, they hit it off, they fall in love, they break up, they get back together, and they deal with some very serious issues along the way and some very funny issues. But it’s not that straightforward: We follow their relationship through the lens of the multiverse. … It jumps to different universes and it occasionally jumps back and forwards in time as well. So there’s a lot going on.”
At just about 80 minutes, the play, Isbell says, feels like a montage sequence. “Like short scenes cut together,” he says. “But these two actors [Carly Crawford and Nathan McHenry] are phenomenal because when they switch universes there’s no technical aspect — there’s not necessarily a scene change or sound change. It’s all conveyed by the actors and just something as simple as a change of tone of voice or a change of their posture or the way they’re relating to each other. And the amazing thing is you can almost always tell when there’s a change, when they jump through the universe, not only because they end up repeating some of the same lines but just because of the nuance they bring to the characters as they move from universe to universe.
“I call it a love story because that’s really what it is. The most important thing here is the relationship between these two people and how much chemistry they have and how much the audience roots for them. Because they’re both really likable people most of the time, and in a couple of universes, they’re not so nice, but most of the time they’re really likable and the audience is really rooting for them. I think people will just really be fascinated by the show.”
Isbell hopes this production follows the success this season has offered so far with The Wasp and The Sound Inside. “In terms of audience we’ve just done really well,” he says. “This has been our most successful season, and we’d like to continue that with this show.”
Tickets for Constellations can be purchased at quarktheatre.com. Performances run Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. with a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m., May 10th through May 26th.
Constellations, Theatre South at First Congo, 1000 Cooper St., Friday, May 10-May 26, $20.
Kim Justis and Taylor Roberts as professor and student (Photo: Tony Isbell)
The phrase “the magic of theater” most likely brings to mind a musical. Grandeur, spectacle, something larger than life. Certainly that is often true, but there are some instances where “the magic of theater” refers to the exact opposite: the small vagaries of everyday life quietly rendered to the stage. These sorts of plays can make audiences feel as though they’re pressed against a living room window, peering through a gap in the drapes to eavesdrop on the characters’ lives. When it comes to Quark Theatre’s production of The Sound Inside, audiences might receive a shock. The metaphorical front door opens, and we aren’t just acknowledged — we are invited directly in.
The Sound Inside is a one-act play with a cast of only two characters. Kim Justis plays Bella Baird, a creative writing professor at Yale who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Taylor Roberts plays Christopher Dunn, her student. Over the course of the play, the two become inadvertently close, and the line between professor and student becomes increasingly blurred.
Director Tony Isbell describes the play as an “existential mystery.” It is narrated throughout by Baird, and eventually in parts by Dunn as well. Isbell says, “The show certainly portrays the versatility of theater. It moves back and forth from direct address, where the characters talk directly to the audience, into traditional scenes between the two of them and even into meta-theatrical territory, or at least one of them acknowledges the fact that she is in a play talking to an audience. It has scenes of great pathos and emotion as well as some very funny bits, including one of the funniest monologues I’ve ever seen.”
I think I can guess which monologue Isbell is referencing, and I have to agree. Justis is superb in her delivery, so much so that my friend, local nursing student Quinlan Culver, leaned over after the monologue, gestured to her arms, and said, “I have chills.” There are ample moments that might elicit such a response from audience members, as it becomes less and less apparent just how much of what we’re watching is actually true. The concept of an unreliable narrator is familiar, but one aspect of The Sound Inside that is so fascinating is that our narrator, Bella Baird, comes across as completely, even frankly, honest. It’s Christopher Dunn who creates unsure footing for the audience. Roberts convincingly plays Dunn as a bit off somehow, in a way that’s hard to put your finger on. Dunn’s cadence of speech is strange, his mannerisms are slightly awkward, which is a stark contrast to Bella Baird’s comfortable self-assurance. The juxtaposition makes the slow crescendo of Bella’s insecurity even more compelling to watch.
This play is one that intentionally leaves many questions unanswered and up to the viewer’s interpretation. Playwright Adam Rapp seems to be drawing our attention to this by including a story within the play that ends in a similarly ambiguous way. The disparity in age between the characters leaves me wondering, “Is this simply a friendship in which age doesn’t have much importance? Is the ‘friendship’ between Dunn and Baird perpetually teetering on the edge of sexual tension?” It certainly seems the latter is true, and the actors manage to sustain that tension throughout every one of their shared scenes. The moment when Dunn begins to narrate is one that was beautifully executed by the two actors. It feels almost sweet, but at the same time, the shift in the power dynamic is almost tangible. Baird, whether she realizes it or not, has lost control, a metaphor for the entire play condensed neatly into one fleeting moment.
For Quark Theatre, Isbell says, “Our motto is ‘small plays about big ideas.’” The Sound Inside fits the bill as an intimate show that manages to explore, in its 90-minute or so run, power, feminism, truth, trust, illness, bravery, existentialism, and much more. In a simple, dressed-down black box set, Quark Theatre has managed to capture just as much allure as any big-budget musical.
Quark Theatre’s The Sound Inside runs at TheatreSouth at First Congo through March 17th.
Kim Justis and Taylor Roberts star
in The Sound Inside. (Photo: Courtesy Tony Isbell)
On Friday, March 1st, Quark Theatre will stage Adam Rapp’s Tony-nominated The Sound Inside,directed by Tony Isbell.
The play, starring Kim Justis and Taylor Roberts, revolves around two characters, an isolated creative writing professor and her enigmatic student. “The play is about how the two of them get entwined in each other’s lives,” says Isbell. “They develop a relationship, not a romantic relationship, and — this is the part I can’t give away — Bella [the professor] makes a request of the young man, and we don’t know if he’ll be able to do it or not. And at the same time the young man is telling her the story of the novel he’s writing, and the audience is not sure whether what he’s telling is just a novel he’s writing, or if this actually happened to him. And there is some mystery about it and a little bit of suspense about it.”
Isbell continues, “It’s the kind of play that I love. It has some real emotion in it, but it also has some comedy. In fact, it has one of the funniest monologues I’ve ever heard in a play. Some of it is amusing. Some of it is, like I said, mysterious, and it’s something that people will be trying to figure out exactly if what you’re seeing is true or not. You could say that both of these characters are unreliable narrators.”
This will be the regional premiere of The Sound Inside. “We look for plays that are newer, that haven’t been done in Memphis, that are unique in some way or another,” Isbell says of Quark. “We tend to like small casts and shows that don’t require a lot in the way of set or special costumes because that’s just our aesthetic, a kind of minimalist aesthetic.”
This season, the theater company has already put on the American premiere of The Wasp to a sold-out run, and they’ll also be putting on another regional premiere with Constellations by Nick Payne in May. As of right now, Isbell says, opening night of The Sound Inside only has eight tickets left.
Tickets for the 90-minute-long show with no intermission can be purchased at quarktheatre.com. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. through March 17th. A pay-what-you-can performance will be on Monday, March 11th, at 8 p.m.
The Sound Inside, TheatreSouth, First Congo Church, 1000 S. Cooper, Performances March 1-March 17, $20.
From left: Mary Hollis Inboden, Tony Isbell, Meghan Lisi Lewis (Photo: Quark Theatre via Facebook)
Thanks to Quark Theatre, Memphis is about to be home to the American debut of The Wasp, the critically acclaimed play written by London native Morgan Lloyd Malcolm in 2015.
“As crazy as this sounds, we have been told that no other theater company in the United States has done this play,” says director Tony Isbell, who founded Quark Theatre with Louisa Koeppel and Adam Remsen in 2015. “I just sort of stumbled across it. When I read the script for the first time, I lost count of the number of times I was taken by surprise because there are so many twists and turns. Usually, especially if you do theater a lot, you can read a script and kind of get an idea of where it’s going. But I will admit I did not see where this one was going. Even up until the very last page, I did not see where it was going.”
A psychological thriller, The Wasp unravels the relationship between once-childhood friends Heather and Carla, who have lost touch since school where a bully incident tore the two apart. At the start of the play, the women reunite 20 years later over tea at a cafe, where one offers the other a significant amount of cash and an unexpected proposition. What ensues is a dark exploration of how trauma shapes us.
“I highly recommend you don’t do your research,” Isbell says. “Spoilers. Don’t watch the previews. Just let us take you on a ride.”
As with most Quark productions, the cast of the play is small — just two women: Meghan Lisi Lewis, who was most recently in Theatre Memphis’ The Play That Goes Wrong, and Mary Hollis Inboden, a University of Memphis alum, whom you might you might remember from a number of Memphis productions before she moved to work in television, most recently on shows like Kevin Can F**ck Himself and The Righteous Gemstones.
So far, more than 50 percent of tickets to The Wasp performances have been sold, and Isbell predicts the show will sell out. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at quarktheatre.com. Performances will run September 22nd through October 8th, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. with Sunday matinées at 2 p.m., at First Congo Theater in Cooper-Young.
In anticipation of Lewis and Inboden’s performance, the Flyer spoke with the two actors to learn more.
Mary Hollis InbodenMeghan Lisi Lewis
Memphis Flyer: What interested you in this play?
Meghan Lisi Lewis: You just don’t often get the opportunity to do a two-woman show. So for me, that is a gift. I was hooked by this script from jump. It’s a smart, smart script. And it really takes the audience on a ride, and I was really excited to go on that ride myself as a reader and audience member. It’s also a really big stretch for me. I’ve been in the Memphis theater scene for a long time, but I rarely get to dive into roles that are this far outside of who I really am.
Mary Hollis Inboden: I’ve spent the last 10 years doing exclusively television, and this is a great opportunity for me to make sure that I’ve still got it while we [the Screen Actors Guild] strike. It’s been 17 years since I’ve been on stage in Memphis, and a chance encounter brought me into the space of Meghan, who was talking about having just auditioned for this play. She actually asked if I’d be interested in coming and doing this two-hander play. And of course, I was terrified. It is a challenging piece, and it’s also a show that features two women, and only two women. And, in a way I feel like only women can, the show touches on empathy, and love and support and understanding and also cruelty and violence and how we hold resentment. And it’s so completely well-rounded the way they kind of get at these really hard topics. Of course, I’m always drawn to women, female characters, especially who can behave badly, but also have a full scope of their existence and world. So that was exciting for me, and quite frankly, the reason why I took it on.
Meghan, you mentioned that part of the reason you took on this role is that you’re not like your character. As actors, how do you approach characters that are so outside of who you are?
MLL: The way that these women are written is so complex. So while the lived experience of my character Carla is nothing like my own lived experience, I think in ways universal experiences come through. We all either know these people [like our characters], interacted with these people, or have bits and pieces of them in ourselves. And so I think the challenge that’s been so interesting to me is to find where our humanity does align and how I can bring truth to her through my own lived experiences or the experiences of my friends and loved ones and also through the relationship that Mary Hollis and I have built, both as individuals and then through the relationships we’re building in the play. It’s like the characters are both far away from us and very close.
MHI: I would piggyback on that, fully agreeing that we’re always using our experience to bring these characters to life. And I do associate with my character. While I wasn’t a victim of bullying, I am a victim of a mass shooting [the 1998 Westside Middle School shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas] and have grown up with that sort of trauma in my past. The shooting, while it was so very tragic, and I really wish that it hadn’t happened to me or my classmates, in some ways, it propelled me forward. I understood immediately how precious life is and wanted to get at that. And so I would be wrong if I said that there wasn’t a little part of what I feel like is my success that is kind of overcoming that tragedy every day.
Mary Hollis, what’s it been like being back on stage in Memphis?
MHI: Being back on stage in Memphis, it has turned out to be the very, very right choice for me because I get to be in the room with Tony and Meghan. I mean, they’re just so fantastic and so talented, and they are a great representation of Memphis theater as I remember it. We’ve all grown up a little bit, but coming back, I am taking it back to brass tacks and learning so much again. So, as a working actor, it’s been a really, really great exercise, performing alongside and with Meghan and under Tony who has like the lightest touch. It feels very free in the rehearsal space to kind of make big decisions. While I’m so grateful for my jobs in TV, you can sort of feel, especially in some of those smaller roles on TV, that it’s not super creative all the time. [Theater] really forces you to have imagination and really express yourself and give everything that you have so that the live beating heartbeat of the theater is felt, and especially in a company like Quark that’s so small, and just about two chairs and two actors, it’s a real turn on. So I hope that once out of the strike, which will be resolved and hopefully in the favor of labor and actors, I can make some time and remember how productive it feels to do a live show, especially with creatives like Tony and Meghan who are just really filling my cup.
Meghan, though this is your first Quark production, you’ve been involved in the Memphis theater scene for a while now, right?
MLL: I’ve spent most of my decade or more on Memphis stages, mostly at Theatre Memphis. I most recently just did The Play That Goes Wrong there. So that’s sort of my home base. One of the things that is the most special about the Memphis theater scene is that 90-plus percent of the shows that you see in Memphis, outside of the Orpheum Theatre, are all done by volunteers. They’re volunteer actors, volunteer directors, and volunteer stagehands. And there is something truly magical about people who follow their passions and give up their time. And the Memphis theater community specifically has the most deep and generous pool of über-talented people that I have ever run into in all of my days. I’ve lived in L.A., I’ve lived in New York, I’ve been all over the world, and this theater scene is one to pay attention to. It’s important for audiences to come out and pay attention to all the theaters here because they’re getting things that you don’t get everywhere. And I think sometimes we’re spoiled for that.
Quark Theatre’s show opening this weekend isn’t exactly opening this week. It opened a while back but has been on something of a hiatus. For two and a half years.
The show — what happens to the hope at the end of the evening — had its Memphis debut in March of 2020. It was performed twice before Covid-19 shut it down.
“We thought we’d be back to finish the run in two or three months,” said Tony Isbell, director of the production and a founder of Quark. “Well, two or three months turned into almost two and a half years, but here we are, we are finishing the run.”
The pandemic was an effective crash course in the virtues of patience. Quark, being small and able to quickly adapt, bided its time until it could get back to its mission of doing “small shows about big ideas.”
“We try to produce shows that no other theater in Memphis would produce,” Isbell said. “Not because they’re bad shows, but because people maybe haven’t heard of them or they could not guarantee that they would be able to get enough of an audience to make a profit. Quark doesn’t have to worry about that.”
Isbell got to do this unconventional show in an unconventional way.
“I found the playwright’s email address,” he said. “I emailed him and said, ‘Do you ever license your shows for other people to do?’ He said yes and sent me the script, and I said that we wanted to do it.”
There are actually two playwrights. Isbell had communicated with Tim Crouch, who has had a long involvement with the other writer, Andy Smith.
“Smith writes very kind of cerebral, intellectual, presentational plays where he talks directly to the audience and he invites them to think about what theater is and how it can affect the lives of people who see it,” Isbell said. “Crouch’s plays are more about how people can become involved in the theatrical process.”
The two characters in the play reflect the two playwrights and their approaches. Marques Brown plays Andy and Isbell’s character is known only as Friend. And the plot is pretty simple, dealing with two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a few years.
“They reunite and they find out that each of them has gone in different directions, and neither of them could have expected what the other one is doing,” Isbell said.
But don’t be fooled by that somewhat conventional description.
“The thing that I found really interesting about it was that it’s also about two different styles of theater,” Isbell said. “Andy is a character based on a real person. He sits, literally sits, on a stool on one side of the stage. He reads all of his lines from the script — he doesn’t act them in the traditional sense. My character comes into this world and wants to have what we consider a ‘realistic’ encounter. As the play goes on, my character says several times, ‘Come join me. Come over here, be with me.’ And Andy’s character keeps saying, ‘I’m fine. I don’t want to come over there. I don’t want to get involved.’ It leads to whole lot of humor because there are these clashes between these two different kinds of theater, the kind of abstract intellectual presentational and the very emotional, active kind of wound-up theater.”
The show, Isbell said, is funny, very poignant, and kind of sad.
“It’s like many Quark shows,” he says. “We want people to come and be entertained. We also want them to think about what they’ve seen and think about the ideas in each show that we do.”
In August, Quark came back on the scene with a remount of its 2019 production of Wakey, Wakey with Adam Remsen. That recent production, as well as this one of what happens, are on the stage at Germantown Community Theatre. But Quark’s usual home is TheatreSouth at the First Congo Church and it will stage two more shows there this season, one in January and another in April.
Performances of what happens to the hope at the end of the evening are September 29th and 30th, October 1stand 2nd; and then the following week on October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. The 6 p.m. performance on October 9th is pay what you can. Tickets are available at quarktheatre.com.
After a pandemic-prompted hiatus, Quark Theatre is back and ready to start its fourth season with Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno.
This is not the first time Quark is putting on Wakey, Wakey, having performed it back in October 2019, but, as Quark co-founder Adam Remsen says, “A lot of it seems a lot more personally relevant. It’s such a layered script. And counting both of the productions we’ve done, I’ve probably gone through that script a hundred times now, and I continue to find new things that I have not noticed before.”
The play opens with a presumably terminally ill Guy, rousing from a nap and asking, “Is it now? I thought I had more time.” For the next hour of the play, Remsen, who will reprise his part as the protagonist, explains, “It’s this sort of meandering monologue, where he talks about all different things — a lot about love and life and death. Though, that makes it sounds very serious, and it’s a very funny play. For something that deals with such heavy subjects, I’m always amazed at how lightly it keeps moving along. It’s so well-written.”
Interestingly, the playwright Will Eno went beyond providing the script, Remsen says. “When we did the show for the first time, we applied for the rights and we got them and got an email that Will likes to be personally involved in productions of his play.” So the group emailed with Eno, asking questions and receiving long, detailed, and personable responses. “It’s unheard of. I have literally never heard of another playwright doing that,” Remsen continues. “There were some points in the play that were confusing, and it helped us kind of figure out what was going on with those and what we were going to do. He was also very clear … that he understands that every production is different and the goal is to make this your production.
“It’s such a personal play, and it actually specifies in the script that when the play ends that in the lobby there are food and snacks and drinks provided and everyone should come out in the lobby including the cast and have a little small reception or party.” This intimacy, Remsen adds, will also be afforded in the size of the space being lent by Germantown Community Theatre. “It’s a small theater; it’s a hundred seats. … We want people to be as close as possible to the stage.”
As such, this play is within Quark’s affinity for simple, nuanced performances. “[Co-founder and director Tony Isbell] and I enjoy theater that takes out anything extraneous,” Remsen says, “where it’s just the actors, a script, and an audience. … We stick to fairly small shows, fairly new shows usually, and the kind of shows that we do are the kind no one is going to do in Memphis if we don’t do them.”
Wakey, Wakey will run through July 17th, Thursday-Sunday, but Quark isn’t stopping there this season. Unlike seasons past, this season will have four productions, not two. Up next is What Happens to Hope at the End of the Evening, which Quark put on in March 2020, having to cancel its run after two performances.
Wakey, Wakey, Germantown Community Theatre, 3037 Forest Hill Irene Road, opens July 7, 8 p.m., $20.
Quark Theatre’s slogan is “small plays about big ideas,” to which fans will readily concur. If you go and are not provoked in some way, if you don’t squirm, if you don’t talk about it afterward with your companion, then you probably weren’t there.
Quark’s next show is Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno, an acclaimed playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Tony Isbell, one of Quark’s founders, directs Adam Remsen (another Quark founder) and Sarah Solarez. Sound design is by Eric Sefton, with original music by Eileen Kuo, and lighting design by Louisa Koeppel (also a Quark founder).
The play runs 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through October 6th. It’s at TheatreSouth, 1000 Cooper St., southwest corner of the building. Tickets are $20. Here’s the website.
Isbell spoke to us about Quark’s philosophy and the production:
Quark’s plays aren’t particularly traditional. I suppose that’s true with Wakey, Wakey?
Sometimes I call it an experience because it’s not really a typical play in some ways. It’s kind of like an eccentric TED talk. It involves the use of quite a few projections and recorded sound while the protagonist talks directly to the audience. There is an aspect that’s more a traditional play with another character, but there’s a good bit of it that’s a direct address to the audience.
You’ve had the rare experience of talking with the playwright as you were putting this together, right?
When we applied for the rights to this show last year, we got an email from the company that handles the rights. It said that Will likes to be involved in local productions of his plays and here’s his email. So, when we started to work on it, we contacted him. I thought that was pretty cool since he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama for a previous work. He replied within 20 minutes and we’ve emailed back and forth a few times and each time, he answered right back.
He seems to be as super nice human. We talked about our approach and our limitations because we have basically zero budget for our show. He was fine with that and much of our approach. Sometimes he’d suggest we try something instead, but never been anything less than enthusiastic and supportive and friendly.
So that must have given you confidence going in?
Yeah, because this is different. All of his plays might be described as eccentric. He’s previously been described as the Samuel Beckett for the millennial generation or something like that. He’s really not, that’s really not quite accurate, but I can certainly see it in him and his writing. This play in particular is what you might call a miniature or a chamber piece.
There isn’t a whole lot of plot. There are two characters, one a man named Guy and a young woman named Lisa. Guy spends part of the show talking directly to the audience. He talks about matters of life and death, and how to deal with life when you are facing extreme situations and it’s very funny and kinda out of left field. But it’s also very moving.
I’ve seen it dozens of times and I still tear up at certain places because it just captures the humor and the joy and the sorrow of being alive. And it reminds me, in some ways, of Our Town though it’s not in any way similar to what’s happened in Grover’s Corners. You kind of get that we all just try to do the best we can and we’re all here together and shouldn’t we all be doing our best to make things easier for other people instead of more difficult? It’s a play that I think has kind of a therapeutic or healing dimension to it. I think people will come out of this show feeling very uplifted and very centered. It ranges from goofy to profound.
How do you choose the scripts that you produce?
Adam and I have tried to produce things that haven’t been done in Memphis, or that Memphis isn’t going to produce because they don’t really fit the mold of what other theaters might want to produce. We deliberately look for things that are challenging and thought provoking, whether that’s the intent of the script or the manner in which it’s produced. Secondary factors: that they are one-act shows that can be produced without big, detailed sets or costumes. This show is our biggest exception to that because it does require a great deal of video and still images and the sound and projection.
Barefoot in the Park at GCT
Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park is playing at Germantown Community Theatre (GCT) through September 29th. The rom-com has fun with newlyweds (he’s uptight, she’s a free spirit) in their 5th-floor walkup apartment as they deal with neighbors, relatives, stairs, and Manhattan. Get tickets here.
On Golden Pond at Playhouse on the Square
Opening Friday at Playhouse on the Square is On Golden Pond, which is kind of like a geriatric Barefoot in the Park: Couple in love working out their differences while family members and people from the neighborhood keep showing up. In this one, Norman and Ethel Thayer are at the family lake house instead of Manhattan. Through October 6th. (And there’s one more connection: Jane Fonda was in both movie versions). Score your tickets here.
Tony Isbell, director of The Humans at Circuit Playhouse.
Tony Isbell is drawn to certain kinds of plays, those, he says, with natural, honest, and truthful dialogue — and relationships that are “juicy.” So when Michael Detroit, executive producer at Playhouse on the Square, asked him to direct The Humans, Isbell said he’d give it a read. “I immediately fell in love with it. Playwright Stephen Karam has a way with dialogue that is maybe the most naturalistic that I’ve ever read or dealt with.”
The play runs at Circuit Playhouse through September 8th and has lured a remarkable cast.
Jo Lynne Palmer, Christina Wellford Scott, Barclay Roberts, Lena Wallace Black, Brooke Papritz, and Steven Burk tell the story of a family that has gathered for Thanksgiving. It’s a common storytelling device, but the execution of it is far from typical, Isbell says.
“On the surface it seems maybe familiar, like something we’ve seen before,” he says. “It’s like one of those slice of life dramas where we see a family get together and spend time together. There’s a grandmother, parents, grown daughters, and one of the daughter’s new boyfriend. But this is not one of those plays where there’s a big astounding revelation that people then spend the next hour fighting over. There are a lot of smaller revelations that people deal with, like people do in real life.”
For Isbell, this is the heart of the production, the relationships among characters. “I am less interested as a director in a spectacle and you know, cool sets and costumes. I mean, yeah, I like all those things, but I try to provide the best possible ground for actors to really shine and really dig their teeth into something. And these people do.”
They’re a blue collar, lower middle class family, recognizably Irish American Catholic hard-working stock. And there are pressures: an ailing parent, financial stresses, children who have strayed a bit from the church. “The most important thing about this play in one way is the fact that these characters all love each other,” Isbell says. “They have some conflicts, they resolve them, they love each other, they make fun of each other, they laugh with each other, they occasionally cry with each other.”
To know Isbell is to appreciate his passion for theater. He is a co-founder of Quark Theatre (its slogan is “Small Plays About Big Ideas”) and as it embarks on its fourth year, it continues with its mission to get under the skin and make viewers feel and think and react. So while The Humans is not Quark fare, it is very much in that spirit. And you won’t have to wait long for Quark’s first show of the season. The Memphis premiere of Wakey Wakey by Will Eno opens September 20th at TheatreSouth.
For Isbell, having shows bunching up like this is next to normal. “I’ve averaged about three shows a year over the last 40 years,” he says, “which seems unbelievable, but that’s kind of what I’ve done.” That’s a long commitment to directing and acting at venues all around the area, and his devotion was noted last year when he was honored with the Eugart Yerian Lifetime Achievement Award at the Ostrander ceremonies. He is quick to point out that he’s not the only lifetime achiever in The Humans. Jo Lynne Palmer received the award a few years ago and Christina Wellford Scott will take it home this Sunday from this year’s Ostrander ceremonies.
So Isbell is confident that audiences will be drawn in to the play and will take something home. “It will probably leave you questioning some things and will probably have you discussing it with your companion saying, ‘I think this was like this’ and then ‘No, I think it was like this.’ It’ll be that kind of thing.”
The Humans
8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. The Circuit Playhouse, 51 South Cooper Street. Call 901 726-4656 or visit the website.
Michelle Gregory, Lena Wallace Black, Chase Ring in ‘Radiant Vermin’
Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin is a comedy about a newlywed couple discovering the dream-home they’ve always wanted can be theirs, if they’re willing to do what it takes. What it takes is both awful and potentially in the service of some grander, even more awful agenda. Think Whose Line Is It Anyway? meets American Psycho (but British), all rolled up in a gloriously ham-fisted metaphor for a related set of familiar urban plagues.
Storytelling techniques eliminate the need for sets and costumes. Shocking events are shared directly with the audience via light narration and flashbacks, with three actors taking on all roles. Things come to a head in a climactic garden party from hell, when neighbors who’ve all recently moved into the almost mysteriously trendy area converge. With its terrific cast leading the way, Quark Theatre’s creative team plays every note in this darkly comic aria perfectly, delivering surprise laughter and even more surprising flashes of tenderness.
Michelle Gregory, Lena Wallace Black, and Chase Ring make up the tightest ensemble in town. They pull off an energetic balancing act that threatens to soar too far over the top, but stays just grounded enough for the human stakes to matter.
What’s the worst thing you ever did for security? Comfort? Luxury? Did you even know you were doing it? And who are the real rats? These are some of the questions at the core Radiant Vermin, a show that gets in its audience’s face bit, while spoofing some contemporary British problems that sound awfully American.
Radiant Vermin is a kind of Macbeth for moderns exploring creature comforts, and how they help us manage guilt and other unpleasant feelings. It asks us who the real rats are.
Radiant Vermin is at Theatre South through March 31. I cannot recommend it enough. More details are available here.
Jon W. Sparks 
