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Thursday, November 15, 2007
‘Christmas at Sweet Apple’ @ Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. B-
Celestine Sibley interviewed Hollywood royalty, hobnobbed with poet laureates and counted Ralph McGill and Margaret Mitchell as peers.
But her heart belonged to the common folk — the scruffy jailbirds, drunks and lonelyhearts she encountered on the streets of downtown Atlanta, where she worked as a reporter and columnist for The Journal-Constitution from 1944 until her death in 1999.
Sibley’s endless generosity made her a hopeless seeker of the spirit of Christmas. Every year, the tall lady with the Southern drawl gave bags of groceries and toys to the needy, then dragged them off to her Sweet Apple cabin to sip punch and talk turkey.
With the world premiere of Theatre in the Square’s “Christmas at Sweet Apple,” playwright Phillip DePoy imagines Sibley’s circuitous quest for what she called a “Christmas moment.” It’s 1959, and before Santa can hoist himself down the chimney, Sibley will pen a feature story about a crusty apple farmer named Patience, spring a jewel thief out of the pokey and invite a couple of not-very-merry Peachtree stragglers over for Christmas cheer.
As Sibley (Erin Considine) hustles and bustles, her zany hangers-on relate their holiday memories in flashback form. It’s kind of a miracle the way DePoy strings the disparate stories onto a single thread that’s as precious and bumpy as an old chinaberry necklace.
Jumping back and forth between the real time of the story and the characters’ reveries can be a little abrupt and confusing at times. But director Jay Freer and his company of hams revel so in the ridiculousness of the situations that “Christmas at Sweet Apple” sometimes feels like an Amy and David Sedaris skit, as seen through the eyes of Celestine Sibley and Phillip DePoy.
Guitar-playing, whiskey-sipping Dave (Rob Lawhon) had a snake handler for a mother (Holly Stevenson), and the memories of his youth still sting. Beth (Abby Parker) — who is married to no-good PeeWee (Lawhon) — was raised by her grandfather (Allen O’Reilly) on Snout Island, and nearly hauled off by a couple of snoopy interlopers who were shocked to discover the young girl’s illiteracy. Celestine’s friend Oliver Reeves (O’Reilly) is the poet laureate of Georgia, but he has a nagging inferiority complex about Conrad Aiken.
Considine captures Celestine’s matronly, authoritative air — and hints at the sadness underneath the gayety. Lawhon and O’Reilly are “tolerable clever” in a variety of male roles. But it’s rubber-jawed Stevenson who steals every scene she’s in. Her Patience is puckered like an old apple. Her Mrs. Jarvis is a delightful caricature of the nosey-neighbor stock character from the Golden Age of TV. And her snake-handling Flossie is wonderfully over-the-top.
Because Sibley is remembered for her homespun musings, “Christmas at Sweet Apple” has a tone that may surprise you. The overall flavor is more like hard cider than bubbly champagne, more digressively absurd than straightforwardly corny.
Sibley believed that Christmas could be expressed in humble gifts: a bite of cheese toast, a branch of pine needles, a pithy insight that flickers momentarily, then fades away. Sometimes you don’t know you’ve had it until it’s gone. That’s the sweet-tart essence of a Sweet Apple Christmas.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. $25-$35. Theater in the Square, Alley Stage, 11 Whitlock Ave, Marietta. 770-422-8369, theatreinthesquare.com
BOTTOM LINE: Celestine Sibley and her zany circle find that the joy of Christmas is brief, bittersweet — and often quite ridiculous.
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‘Gee’s Bend’ @ Theatrical Outfit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: A -
Before the quilts of Gee’s Bend became celebrated by the art world, they were mere objects of necessity and love, stitched by a group of Alabama women who were trying to live off the land and care for their families the only way they knew how: through hard work and nimble spirits.
When playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder set about researching her Alabama Shakespeare Festival commission “Gee’s Bend,” she traveled to the isolated riverside community near her hometown of Mobile and listened to the ladies’ stories. Employing the quilter’s composite technique, she created a piercingly original play that is loosely based on the scraps of lore, memory and anecdote she collected.
“Gee’s Bend,” as Wilder points out in her notes for Theatrical Outfit’s new production, is not about quilts, but about the rips and tears in the lives of their creators, who struggled with issues of family and marriage, even as the Civil Rights movement raged around them.
Though envisioned as an intimate, intermissionless 90-minute play, “Gee’s Bend” has been re-situated here by director Gary Yates as a two-act saga, so that the tale of sisters Sadie and Nella gets an airing that feels richly textured and timeswept — more like a flowing symphony than a tightly knit chamber piece.
It’s a smart programming choice from a theater that uses Southern storytelling to frame its mission and operates out of a former restaurant that made history by voluntarily desegregating during the turbulent ’60s.
Remarkably acted and handsomely designed, “Gee’s Bend” ought to be required theater-going for students of the South’s vanishing traditions. It’s a moving testament to the human impulse to find safety, warmth and strength in the cold, dark corners of the night.
Sadie (Michele McCullough) gets pregnant and marries young, and her husband, Macon (Eric J. Little), makes it hard for her to balance her homemaking duties with her political conscience. After Sadie ventures out to hear Martin Luther King Jr., march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and drink water from a whites-only fountain, Macon slams the door in her face.
Cheeky, irreverent Nella (Shontelle Thrash) takes a different approach, never cottoning to quilt-making and never finding a man. Eventually, time takes a toll on Nella that is heartbreaking, and Thrash nearly stops the show with her portrayal of the shuffling old woman. Donna Biscoe gets to play the bookended roles of the mother, Alice, and Sadie’s daughter, Asia, a character who is losing touch with the old ways.
One of my few quibbles with the show was that Biscoe at first seemed to invest granddaughter Asia with a few too many of grandma Alice’s old-lady mannerisms. If the very first scene felt a little chirpy and self-conscious on opening night, the actresses soon settled comfortably into themselves, and the arrival of Little’s Macon was a welcome shot of adrenalin.
Set designer R. Paul Thomason uses little more than wood to sketch the elegant austerity of an Alabama country house. Joanna Schmink’s costumes are lovely to look at, but perhaps a tad too pretty for the characters’ humble circumstances.
In “Gee’s Bend,” Wilder embroiders a gloriously textured account of a little known swatch of Americana. She listened to what the real-life women of Gee’s Bend had to say, then wove it into an imaginatively crafted piece of literary handiwork — finely spun and 100 percent true to the human heart.
THE 411: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. $25. Theatrical Outfit, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Downtown. 678-528-1500, theatricaloutfit.org
BOTTOM LINE: A play that’s as emotionally arresting as the famous Alabama quilts.
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