Word: wohl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
McCullers intended the play to be a tragi-comedy, but her attempt to blend genres results in an unsteady pace and mood, and leaves the audience unsure how to react. The play begins as a romantic comedy, featuring sappy dialogue between the lovers Mollie (Bess Wohl) and John (J.P. Anderson). Their pasts, however, are anything but sweet; John's wife left him, and Mollie married and divorced the same abusive husband twice. Then enter Mollie's ex's mother, Mother Lovejoy (Jill Weitzner), the Southern playwright's requisite aging Southern belle, and her dowdy daughter Loreena (Tanya Krohn). But even...
...clearly the attitudes of this pushy ex-belle who's main concern is to seem "aristocratic." Krohn's Loreena is lovably nerdy and woebegone, and her characterization is strongest not when Loreena is speaking but when she is listening, nearly forgotten, as the others sort out their tangled lives. Wohl delicately and subtly evokes Mollie's transformation from vulnerability to strength and back again...
...audience through his feline motions, tantalizingly deliberate diction, and tense pacing. Perhaps the weakest link in the cast is J.P. Anderson's portrayal of John, the love struck architect who wanders into this muddle of familial relationships. Anderson is tentative and unable to hold the stage beside Levitt or Wohl; he is capable of handling the romantic parts of the role but not the tenser moments. Yet Anderson is stronger in the scenes with Krohn and Terrio, when his quiet charm creates an air of intimacy in which the audience--for once--feels included...
Yvonne Roemer as Ada plays the role with powerful spite, and as the initiator of most of the action, prods the other characters into deeper levels of hatred. She is vehement. The three post-teeny boppers, played by Jessica Yager, Bess Wohl, and Rashida Jones, are bubbly and keep effervescing until the climax leaves them flat. The two widows, played by Rebecca A. Murray and Jenni Paredes, provide timely comic relief; their speech oscillates between keen observation of the way things used to be and transparent example-setting for why they must change...
...acting throughout the play is almost uniformly excellent. Even the supporting cast is funny--Colin Stokes, in particular, is fantastic as Gavin, a drug counselor just discovering the wonder of controlled substances. Bess Wohl, as T.V. reporter Corinne Le Mans, is irritating in her best scenes, flapping around the stage like a bird about to take flight, but gives the single funniest performance of the entire play after meeting "Lucy...