Coastal Disturbances by Tina Howe
Directed by Mark Nelson
With Jeremy Davidson
Postscript: July 17
Closes: July 29

"absolutely hilarious...more laughs than the Marx brothers"

July 13, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

If you have ever experienced a production of a Tina Howe play, you don’t have to be urged to attend "Costal Disturbances" now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, you undoubtedly already have secured your ticket, but if you have never encountered the character twists and dialog delights that Howe can bring to a "romantic comedy," go.

Tina Howe is an almost impossible playwright to describe. Critics have at times looked to Theatre of the Absurd, but that doesn’t quite fit. Her characters go over the edge, but are always rounded in reality. Some critics have evoked Beckett. There is angst and in this play, which takes place on a beach, a character is buried up to her neck in sand (remember Winnie in "Happy Days?") but in "Costal Disturbances" the romantic lead, Holly Dancer (Annie Parissee), a delightfully zany and jittery photographer, has a couple of reasons for getting out, even if they are conflicting ones, and still hanging in the balance at the play’s end.

Perhaps it’s the absolutely marvelous dialog Howe employs that lifts this play beyond labels. It is rapid-fire, over-lapping, self-revealing in an occasional monolog, and hilarious even though all nine characters who inhabit the mainly deserted beach North of Boston that is the setting for the entire play, experience minor disturbances.

There has been a recent drowning, a point not belabored in the play, but one accounting for the fact that the small private beach has for the first time employed a lifeguard whose tower dominates stage left and accounts for the presence of Leo Hart (Jeremy Davidson), a sun-tanned hulk of masculinity, hard for any female, depressed or otherwise, to ignore. He would never have been captured for this banal red-cross badge job had he not been recently given the blow of losing, after three years, the girl he almost got to marry, and he carries this disturbance with him.

In this play there are no catastrophes of major proportions, yet there are disturbances for all the characters.

Ariel Took (Jennifer Van Dyck) is recovering from a suicidal stay in a rest home and has been invited by her college friend Faith Bigelow (Marcia DeBonis) to stay with her in the country where their two kids, Winston Took (a hyperactive Rider Stanton) and Miranda Bigelow (a lively Victoria Aline Flower), can spend all day at the beach in yelling rivalry. (The kids are local, very professional however, and love every minute of what they are doing.)

Dr Hamilton Adams (Jack Davidson) and his wife (Patricia Connolly), both around seventy, have bickeringly yet lovingly been coming to the beach all their married life. He collects shells, she paints. And their "anniversary tent" ends the play on a note of hope. Fertility is a big in-and-out issue in this play, and their marriage has produced nine children, despite the wife's complaints of neglect.

Fertility is blatantly evident in the rotund belly of Faith Bigelow, at last pregnant after having given up and adopted Miranda; and it is woefully lacking in Ariel, four years divorced, only around forty, but beyond conception at all. But the dark side of her joking about it is explosively present in one brief moment when the lifeguard grabs her shoulder.

The big disturbance for Leo is Holly, the show’s star, and explosively in charge from the moment she bumbles onto the stage, her life out of joint, up from Manhattan, staying with her aunt, and trying to forget the gallery owner who keeps promising to show her photographs, who keeps avowing his love of her, but keeps racing off to Europe, and never getting around to divorcing his wife.

Holly and Leo are the romantic leads, who during their two weeks on the beach work up to an all night together there. It is to be quickly shattered by the unexpected appearance of gallery owner Andre Sor (Francois Giroday,) with umbrella and raincoat, and definitely the wrong shoes for the beach, but with a zany (ersatz?) memory monolog for Holly, that creates a major disturbance, especially for Leo.

In a second act scene where a dead beached whale leads the two kids on the beach into hysterical antics that have the audience a-roar, Leo suddenly explodes with a speech worth quoting:

"What’s wrong with you people? Some poor animal gets ripped apart by sharks and it’s all just a big joke to you! To be swimming along, and then BLAM - you’re blindsided out of nowhere. You don’t have a clue about real life. Not. One. Fucking Clue!”

The adults all have experienced some degree of blind-siding, even happy and pregnant Faith seems to have a husband who mainly spends time in Boston, but they all do have a clue - even if within the boundaries of the play, for most nothing is resolved.

And this is Tina Howe, absolutely hilarious, with more laughs than the Marx brothers, and yet with characters so real, despite being over the top, that you want them all to be happy.

The ending is a sort of bitter-sweet, happy one; evening and the beach deserted except for the old couple drinking champagne to their anniversary in a magnificent tent, and Leo, alone on his tower, night falling, but a slip of paper with Holly’s address in his hand as the marvelous lights go down on this meticulously written and constructed play.

As noted in the program, each act has five scenes: beginning with morning and moving gradually through daytime to night as the events in the two weeks of the playtime evolve. The lights and the clouds have been subtly backing Howe all the way.

Dan Kotlowitz gets cheers for those lights, and Bill Clarke has given the play a fantastic set with enough sand for castles, friendly burials, trip-ups for wearers of NY shoes, and a marvelous light guard tower, put to ingenious uses.

Director Mark Nelson has the right grasp of where Howe is going with her special kind of theatre. A good thing, too, because she was there in the opening night audience. This reviewer was glad to be there as well.

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