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Ten Chimneys photos by Michael Brosilow |
Early in the Milwaukee Rep’s sparkling and thoughtful Ten Chimneys, we see the legendary American actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at work. The play is Chekhov’s The Seagull, and the scene is between the Arkadina and her lover, Trigorin. They are working on the patio of their Wisconsin home-away-from-home, Ten Chimneys, and Sidney Greenstreet is looking on as a sort of rehearsal director.
As directed by Joseph Hanreddy, it’s a piece of exquisite music, with the actors repeating the same few lines again and again while moving about the stage in a dance of energetic stage business and creative commentary about the acting process.
The scene sets the stage for the rest of the play’s fun-house mirror cleverness: Chekhov’s characters (one of them an actor herself) performed by Fontanne and Lunt (as imagined by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher), who are in turn embodied by Hanreddy’s actors, Grant Goodman and Wendi Weber. As anyone who has seen his other plays knows, it’s a satisfying Hatcher trademark – the world and the stage playing hide-and-seek. But in Ten Chimneys, it serves the play’s rather serious idea brilliantly – that theater is the pursuit of truth through lies.
For there are plenty of lies in the Lunt’s world, some of which are revealed as we spend time at their Genessee Depot estate. And eventually, many in the audience will come to agree with one of the play’s many laugh lines: “We need less drama in our lives.” But the players at Ten Chimneys play on, believing, perhaps, that enacting the comic foibles of Chekhov’s characters will somehow reveal the path to a life lived with truth and honesty. No such luck.
Instead, family and romantic resentments simmer and occasionally boil over, egos wreak their havoc and dreams quietly crumble. It’s the great stuff of comedy, and Hatcher structures the unfolding with expert timing and peppers it with just the kind of bon mots you’d expect to hear in the company of the theatrical wits that frequented Ten Chimneys in its heyday. “She loves to cry,” Alfred says of Fontanne, “She’s a Vesuvius of mucus.”
Hanreddy orchestrates the punch lines and the more serious revelations with a great sense of pace and drama. And has a terrific ensemble to work with, including Linda Stephens as Alfred’s regal mother, who delivers several withering barbs with the snap of her parasol. And Robert Brueler as an amiable Sidney Greenstreet. As Alfred, Grant Goodman has the panache of Broadway and the earthiness of the dairy state.
But the show really belongs to Wendi Weber as Fontanne, who presides over the world like a czarina with only a glimpse of occasional vulnerability. It’s an essential glimpse, though, for Ten Chimneys is all about the urgent humanity that is always pushing against (and always escaping) the bounds of our carefully considered, self-possessed “characters.”
