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‘Violet Hour’ @ 7 Stages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B-
Now and always, for the living and the dead, time piles up like pages of some endless encyclopedia. But what if we had a chance to flip ahead and see how the story ended?
Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour” plays around with ideas about the dewy promise of youth, the meaning of friendship and the messy complications of history, all in the space of a single day in 1919.
A meditation on responsibility and regret, written in the effervescent prattle of Jazz Age cocktail hours, Greenberg’s play is a haunting evening of theater —- even in the uneven, bewilderingly cast new production directed by Joe Gfaller at 7 Stages.
Spun from gaiety and melancholy, this finely crafted conceit from the Tony Award-winning author of “Take Me Out” ponders the heart of a young publisher named John Pace Seavering as he decides whether to put out the voluminous first novel of his Princeton chum —- or the memoirs of his coy older mistress, a ululating peacock who seems modeled on Josephine Baker.
The stakes are raised for Seavering (Bobby Labartino) when a mysterious machine arrives at his office —- and proceeds to sputter reams of documents that are like telegrams from the future. As the century presses forward, it seems that Seavering’s circle will become grist for the mill of literary gossip and biography.
In describing the courtship of novelist Denis McCleary (Brian Crawford) and the beautiful and eccentric Rosamund Plinth (Heather Starkel), Greenberg appears inspired by the mythology of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife, Zelda. Seavering recalls Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who nurtured such dysfunctional writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
“The Violet Hour” draws its name from Denis’ first novel. As he explains to Seavering: “It’s that time —- that wonderful New York hour when the evening’s about to reward you for the day. The violet light you walk between that hastens you places.”
Crawford and Starkel make for a lovely Denis and Rosamund, so young and tender at first, so sad and tormented down the road. As Seavering’s ageless assistant, Gidger, Doyle Reynolds can’t seem to muster much in the way of laughter in those crucial opening moments, which are intended to run like the clockwork banter of Wilde and Coward. As written in uppercase bursts by Greenberg, Gidger’s dialogue has its own affected rhythm, but Reynolds’ pacing feels off, leaving you to wish he had formulated his own speed of attack.
As the moral center of the story, Labartino is a bland straight man who doesn’t have the vigor to carry the weight of this elegantly penned comedy. The performance grows on you, but it also makes you wonder what a better actor might have done with the role. As Seavering’s lover, the music doyenne Jessie Brewster, Yvonne Singh is an odd choice. Singh is a mature and commanding presence, yet she doesn’t exude the kind of smoldering sensuality that might have ignited the passion of a man half her age.
In the end, thanks to the exquisitely tailored handiwork of Crawford and Starkel, Denis and Rosamund become the shimmering and luminous core of the play.
“The Violet Hour” has been described as a time-travel story, which is not exactly accurate since characters and events don’t skip forward or backward through time. Instead, the future becomes a lens through which Seavering can see the folly and the futility of his choices. He can neither influence nor alter the outcome of providence, but in the course of an afternoon, he is forced to reckon with the turmoil and the falsehoods to come. It’s an odd puzzlement of a play, and one that gets richer in the afterglow.
Twilight, of course, is a metaphor for the consequences of youth. In the hourglass bloom of the play’s opening and closing, everyone twitters gaily while tragedy laps at the surface. As the paper-sputtering machine informs us, things will end badly. But for now, let there be cocktails and laughter and purple light and nights at the theater.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays; 2 p.m. Saturday; 6 p.m. May 9 and May 16. Through May 20. $20-$25. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org.
THE VERDICT: A better play than a production, but haunting nonetheless.
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