Arts & Events

"All I'm saying is that people know more than they think they know."

Anton's Well's Bay Area premiere of Melissa James Gibson's 'What Rhymes with America' will end with the same tableau, days later, the mainspring just about run all the way down.  

The scenes, the vignettes of 'What Rhymes ... ' take place mostly in equally transitional, somewhat out-of-the-way places: the hospital ward where Marlene volunteers, a dressing room where Hank and his fellow opera supernumerary Sheryl (Alexandrai Bond) chew the fat over all the dislocations in both their lives between acts, decked out for 'Aida' or 'Die Walkure.' After a little demonstration of encouragement by Sheryl, Hank decides to enter into a romance with Lydia (Jody Christian), a middle-aged writer, editor and despairing virgin, who he's just rubbed elbows with after her aged father, in the care of Marlene, dies in hospital, and again over a chance encounter grabbing some coffee, where they bond over their mutual dislike of certain institutional cliches in punctuation: Re: and Vis a vis ...

Ben confesses his wife kicked him out for frittering away her retirement nut on bad investments--and further peccadillos both agonize over spill out.

"If you could take back all those things, what would you be left with?"

The sadness that oozes from the comic round dance these lonely, half-desperate characters perform, over and over, comes to the fore with Hank and Lydia's date, awkward and very funny, played with deadpan abandon by two actors skilled in both physical comedy and in articulating inarticulateness any way they can ... There's a sense of indirection here, doubly odd in what seems so straightforward a set-up, with its two love-starved principals talking around and about everything, seeming to come out of and flee back into their shells all in the same motion, without the audience catching the trick they've performed.

And Sheryl phones Hank just to let him know she's broken the code of the extra to upstage a diva and exit the profession with hilarious hauteur.

Given Robert Estes' patient, observant direction, and a suitably stark set that leaves much to the actors' skill and the audience's imagination, the cast works it out with the amplitude of a little ensemble. Jody Christian, Alexandrai Bond and Ben Ortega, all memorable comic actors, play out the story of these strangely interlocked characters with a kind of mordant grace, from Jody's hopeful peering through her unsmiling mask, to Ben's awkward eagerness to Alexandrai's buoyantly cynical show of overconfidence ... and Anna Smith's almost hopeless essays at coping, punctuated with folksongs she sings in the cracks between the others' actions.

The playwright's West Coast Canadian, which maybe gives her a more astringent, lower-key view to American suburban malaise ... The dialogue can be pointed and funny, sometimes too glib, but it's the work of a playwright in transition, too ... just a few years after the play's premiere, Melissa Gibson has just been named showrunner for the Kevin Spacey-Robin Wright TV hit, 'House of Cards.'

Anton's Well, one of those small local companies--and there're just a few--knowing how to stage its productions to its own scale, will be back at the City Club this Fall to stage another play and other events.