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Cedric Member

Registered: 02-2004
Location: Middlesbrough UK
Posts: 5797
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Hovey's 'Scotland Road' appeals to a particular taste


Few plays ask an audience to suspend its disbelief as much as Jeffrey Hatcher's "Scotland Road."
 
     At the heart of the play is a woman found on an iceberg floating several hundred miles off the coast of Iceland by a contemporary Norwegian fishing crew. She was wearing turn-of-the-century clothing, and the only word she uttered was "Titanic."
 
     If this sounds like it's straight out of a supermarket tabloid, it is. At least, the initial idea for it came from a tabloid article that Hatcher saw in a 7-11 store.
 
     While in the care of a doctor, the mystery woman is questioned by a gentleman who's trying to determine the veracity of her story. All of this takes place in an all-white, locked room that has been converted from an old gas station on the coast of Maine.
 
     This is the story that the Hovey Players, a community theater in Waltham, have undertaken as their second show of the season.
 
     The play undoubtedly will appeal to those whose imaginations have been captured by the Titanic and its tragic demise as well as those who love psychological mysteries that knock on the door of the paranormal. The story clearly appeals to the show's director, Lissi Engvall, and has led to numerous productions of the play in this country and abroad, including one at the New Repertory Theatre in Newton Highlands in 1999.
 
     But if you don't find yourself suspending your disbelief over this story, it can feel like a play with substantial flaws, in spite of noble efforts made by the Hovey cast.
 
     The most interesting character clearly is the mystery woman, known simply as The Woman, played in this production by Leigh Berry. Berry makes her feel warm, luminescent and appealing, even though her psyche is much more engaged in some other time and place, specifically the Titanic on the night it went down, than it is in the present. Achieving that combination of qualities is quite a feat.
 
     Part of the play's problem is that she doesn't speak until the end of the first act and then it's only the word "ice." That's in spite of the fact that John, her inquisitor, spends the entire first act trying to get her to talk -- turning up the heat quite literally, hoping to get her to reveal herself by muttering the contemporary term "air conditioner."
 
     The act of one person trying to get another to speak works extraordinarily well in Ingmar Bergman's film "Persona," but here there isn't enough happening emotionally between the characters. In fact, one feels that The Woman will speak when the playwright decides it's finally time for her to do so.
 
     Wayne Vargas plays John as an intense, quirky professorial type from an earlier period with an appropriately bushy mustache. It works well as an exterior identity of the character, but what's missing is the inner emotional life. This isn't entirely Vargas' fault; the play doesn't provide much of an opportunity for it.
 
     Rachel Kline as Dr. Halbrech doesn't seem to have made enough choices about who her character is as a person. As a result her performance is fairly bland. Again the character isn't written with much emotional content. The best moment between Kline and Vargas occurs when he offers her a celebratory glass of champagne that she turns down. It happens so quickly in such a subtle exchange that it draws us in as we try to read what's happening and what it means. One wishes the rest of the production made more demands on us with this kind of nuance.
 
     The second act is definitely more engaging than the first, but until the end it still works primarily on the level of trying to figure out who these people are rather than on a deeper emotional level, which would have made the drama more compelling. Phyllis Weaver plays Frances Kittle, the oldest living Titanic survivor who's brought in to try to help solve the mystery.
 
     This story feels like it would work better as a ghost story told around a campfire or in the pages of a Chris Van Allsburg picture book for children. His delightful book "The Stranger" is about a person as mysterious as The Woman. In either of those formats, a mood can be created without being threatened by the larger demands of drama. And if nothing else, "Scotland Road" is certainly about creating a mood.
 
     John MacKenzie's display of historic and underwater images of the Titanic projected onto the all-white set as the show opens are extremely effective at plunging us into this Titanic story.
 
     "Scotland Road" will be performed on Nov. 19, 20, 26 and 27 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 21 at 2 p.m. at the Abbott Theatre on 9 Spring St., Waltham. Tickets cost $15 for general admission ($13 for students and seniors) and can be reserved by calling 781-893-9171.
 
source
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/artsCulture/view.bg?articleid=83309

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