Ninety-seven minutes of love
What do Shakespeare’s Richard III and Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager have in common? They both make speeches directly to the audience at the beginning of the plays in which they appear, and so does the St. Louis accountant, Matt Friedman, in Lanford Wilson’s 1979 Pulitzer prize winning comedy/romance, Talley’s Folly, now at Aurora Theatre’s intimate 49-seat venue, Harry’s UpStage, on Addison Street.
The two-person play is one third of Wilson’s Talley Trilogy of loosely connected dramas, which Aurora is honoring with this production of Talley’s Folly, followed by Fifth of July on its main stage and a staged reading of Talley & Son next month.
Friedman is a bearded, forty-ish guy with a soft-spoken deliberate manner. In his opening address, he tells us that the play will last exactly ninety-seven minutes and that we should expect from it “a waltz,” by which he seems to mean a graceful courtship partnering.
The waltz turns out to be pretty halting at first. Set in a rundown boathouse on the Talley property in Lebanon, Missouri in 1944, (the setting is the “folly” of the title), it brings together Friedman and 31-year-old Sally Talley, whom he met a year ago and fell for and to whom he’s written once a day since then, though she’s replied to him, not encouragingly, only once. Nonetheless he’s convinced they belong together, and he’s shown up to persuade her he’s right.
She battles him for a long time–one reason is that her conservative Protestant family will never welcome a Jew–and at first the play is more like a siege than a dance, but never fear. I’m giving little away in cluing you that it has a happy ending.
My theater companion liked the production, and I heard murmurs of approval from other audience members after the actors had taken their bows, but I was less taken with it. Rolf Saxon plays Matt and Lauren English plays Sally. They’re attractive, capable and pleasant but they’re also rather unexciting, and they don’t bring to the play the smart comic timing it needs. Several moments that ought to have drawn laughs fell flat, leaving the actors and the audience stranded. Saxon and English keep gamely at it, but the pace of their encounter, directed by Joy Carlin, is too measured, too steady, too low-key. I longed for more spark and wit, but the production is like a murmured reading of the play rather than a full-fleshed version, and I rarely felt any real emotional connection between the protagonists.
Talley’s Folly features a fine set and lighting by Jon Tracy, smart costumes by Antonia Gunnarson, and subtle sound design by Chris Houston. It plays until June 7th, followed by Fifth of July on April 17th. Aurora closes its 23rd season with Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit in June. For tickets/information call 843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org.
–ROBERT HALL