Water, water, everywhere
The play had just started and the audience was already on the edge of their seats.
Part of the reason: they were leaning forward to adjust their rain ponchos. Or they were squirming to avoid sitting on the damp part of their seat cushions.
Nate Burris and Phoebe González in APT’s Fallen Angels. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
But it was also due to what was happening onstage at last Saturday’s American Players Theatre production of Fallen Angels. It had been raining steadily for 20 minutes and by showtime the props and stage furniture were soaked and the stage was slick with water. But the show must go on, and here were Nate Burger and Phoebe González spinning and swinging their way around the ice-rink-like stage with nary a stumble or wobble: an opening dance number to set the buoyant and blithe mood of Noel Coward's comedy.
After the dance the play continued and so did the rain. Burger and González traded arch quips over breakfast: she trying to read an already sodden newspaper and he nibbling on a mushy piece of toast. The maid entered (Colleen Madden), and made some heavily brogued inquiries. But after a few more lines, the gods (otherwise known as the stage managers) intervened and announced a pause to assess the weather situation.
The dance steps were precarious, but the real miracle here was happening on the other side of the stage edge. Hundreds of APT fans sat patiently through the rain, some opening umbrellas during the pause and a few moving to more sheltered areas. When the stage manager announced that the rain wasn't letting up and the show was cancelled, there was an audible groan, but people quietly rose and began the walk back to their cars.
As they were leaving, Madden—a beloved member of APT’s company for 25 years—returned to the stage, blowing kisses to the audience and shouting thanks to them for sticking with the APT company through thick and thin. Or, I suppose, rain or shine.
The American Players Theatre 2025 Core Company. Photo by Hannah Jo Anderson.
And so they have, in a love affair as unlikely as the wackiest screwball comedy. Miles from any major city, embracing an acting company model abandoned by most American theaters as impossible, and performing a repertory of classic plays that wouldn't be out of place on a theater history syllabus, APT has flourished for 45 years and appears to be on solid ground in these fragile times for arts groups in America.
Light and Dark
The Winter's Tale is tricky. Perhaps that’s why it’s not a staple of the repertory (nor is it a rarity—it’s riches are too tempting). One of Shakespeare’s late “romances,” it balances light and dark as if the two are perched on the scales of justice. The light does triumph in the end, but director Shana Cooper throws in a little coup d’theatre in the last moments that throws a bit of shade on the sunny ending.
“Too hot, too hot!” Nate Burger, La Shawn Banks and Laura Rook in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Michael Brosilow
The play’s first half is a orgy of cascading jealousy. We first see King Leontes as a loving friend and husband, but actor Nate Burger has the daunting task of transforming this kind soul into a furnace of jealousy in a matter of minutes. He suspects his best friend, Polixenes (La Shawn Banks) of an ongoing dalliance with his queen, Hermione (Laura Rook). Members of his court protest, but his irrational rage escalates. He accuses Polixenes of fathering the couple’s young son and child-to-be, his fury leading to exile and, eventually, the death of his son and heir, Mamillius (Elijah Quigley). Mark Van Doren likens his mind to a nest of "maggots, swarming and increasing with every moment of his thought."
But after your intermission cocktail, you return to find the stage and mood transformed. It is sixteen years later, and we are in Bohemia, Polixenes's home turf, as soft and woolly (there's a sheep-shearing in the offing!) as Leontes's Sicilian court is gilded and cold. There's tomfoolery and romance afoot, and Cooper wisely modernizes the mood with rollicking, modern songs led by the charming town scallywag, Autolycus (Marcus Truschinski). Raquel Baretto’s brilliantly wacky costumes are a feast for the eye.
APT’s The Winter’s Tale. Party on, Autolycus! Photo by Michael Brosilow.
In between the moments of revelry, the plot thickens, as the offspring of Leontes and Polixenes find each other in a typically Shakespearean kismet. We return to the gloomy palace in Sicilia, where Leontes has been mourning his fateful and rash behavior. There, Shakespeare’s glorious magic lights up the palace. The dead come to life, the lost are found. But director Cooper’s deft addition in the play’s final moments—the ghostly appearance of Mamillius—reminds us that not everyone is privy to Shakespeare’s dramatic resurrection.
Tribes
Tribes at American Players Theatre. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
There are two hearing-impaired characters in Nina Raine's Tribes, but to call her play an "issue" drama would be to sell it way short. True, one of the central conflicts in the play is the struggle of Billy (Joshua M. Castille), deaf from birth, to find his way in a family that insists he not learn American Sign Language. But within this palpable tension, Raine finds an opportunity to pose profound questions about language itself and its relationship to the flesh and blood world.
Billy’s imperious father, Christopher (James DeVita) is an academic who believes in the primacy of spoken language. For him ASL is essentially diluted, imperfect communication. When Billy’s new girlfriend, Sylvia (Lindsay Welliver), teaches him to sign, sparks fly as she and Christopher debate the nature of language and communication itself.
The ideas are the stuff of graduate philosophy seminars (even the esoteric theorist Jacques Lacan gets name checked) but Raine brings them down from the white tower and gives them a lived-in heft in the lives and conflicts of her characters.
APT’s Tribes. Joshua M. Castille and Casey Hoekstra. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
The arena for these debates owe a lot to Eugene O’Neill and his simmering revelations of family dysfunction. Much of Tribes takes place in the arena of the family dinner table, where Christopher holds forth and family members slowly unveil their crumbling sense of selves (as Billy’s brother Daniel, Casey Hoekstra delivers a notably harrowing descent. Director John Langs orchestrates the unravelling with a sure sense of pace, allowing the audience to occasionally catch its breath with moments of humor and meditative pathos (as when Sylvia plays Debussy’s Clair de Lune on the piano and Jason Fassl’s projections offer a visual version of the tender melody). APT’s Tribes is one of those rare plays of both intellectual and emotional heft. It shouldn’t be missed.
Nor Any Drop to Drink
It has been a soggy summer. In my neighborhood, piles of basement detritus are lining many curbs. As if to counter the images of flooded football fields and bloated rivers, Oceanographic Magazine has just released its list of finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year. You can read about the finalists on the magazine website. Here’s a sample.
R.I.P. Francis Davis
Francis Davis
We lost a great writer earlier this year. He wrote about Seinfeld and Sinatra, Johnny Cash and Pauline Kael. But he primarily wrote about jazz and the blues. You can read about him in his New York Times obituary or listen to a lovely tribute from his wife, Fresh Air host Terry Gross. Here’s a sample of his writing from a profile of the little-known blues musician, Blind Willie Johnson:
“He had few equals as a slide guitarist. He used a pocketknife in lieu of a bottleneck. Johnson's music was charred with purgatorial fire. More than 60 years later, you can still smell the smoke on it. He was a man of God, perhaps even a religious fanatic, but he ranted like a man possessed by demons. His life was tragic, even by the cruel standards of the day. He died in 1947, long after his brief recording career had come to an end. He made his living by playing on Texas street corners, a blind man with a guitar and a tin cup, shaking the faith of passers by with the absolute certainty of his.”
Have a good week.