Word: chumley
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...acting is completely gimmicky, but with fast and clever gimmicks. Chumley has mastered an idiot grin, and cartwheels admirably across the stage. Miss Bush and her counterpart Dame Chat (Joan Tolentino) scream too much, but their grimaces and multicolor petticoats (Lewis Smith's costuming is superb) more than compensate. In smaller parts, David Dunton as a myopic curate is the only actor to read, rather than chant his lines, and his care pays off in laughs. Ed Jay, Jr., as a sleepy Linus-figure with a patchwork blanket, is trapped in his one sight gag, but is pleasant enough...
...plot, as much as one cares, is about the strange disappearance of Dame Gurton's sewing needle (Raye Bush is Gammer, not the needle). We eventually find it in the britches of her man Hodge (Dan Chumley), an acrobatic archetypal simpleton, but not until Diccon the Bedlam (Dan Deitch) has thrown everyone at each other's throats and chickens...
...Chumley's Bertram, on the other hand, is a puzzlement. Thoughtless and rash Bertram may be, but it is difficult to see how he can be the whining child that Chumley would have him in the first two acts. And when he reappears later on, sporting a silky little mustache, he displays a bluff heartiness that keeps ringing false. We are not prepared for Bertram's last petulant falsehoods and final acceptance of Helen in the last act simply because we do not get a real sense of his growing maturity...
...expert, he marshaled an impressive array of abilities. He had good taste, an educated sensibility, an unusual breadth and warmth of appreciation, a scrupulous fairness. Recalling some of his critiques, his colleagues chose as one of their favorites a passage from a story on Painter John Chumley's work: "A painting of three children's swings, hanging empty from a leafless tree, is filled with yesterday's laughter. And the open window of an abandoned house fills one canvas with mystery, like a mouth that has much to tell but cannot speak...
...pair of empty boots crumpled on a chair. In one scene a young man stands silhouetted against a Gothic-American bay window in the empty parlor of an abandoned house. It would have been merely stagy were it not for its brooding strength; and for all their beauty. Chumley's houses and barns would be flat were it not for his lyric brush and the moods it evokes. A painting of three children's swings, hanging empty from a leafless tree, is filled with yesterday's laughter...