The one-act plays “The Bear” and “The Yalta Game” are decidedly minor accomplishments in the grand career scheme of the world-renowned Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), whose enduring masterpieces include such long-form classics as “The Three Sisters,” “Uncle Vanya” and “The Cherry Orchard.”
The same could be said about the celebrated Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-2015), too. He isn’t most widely regarded for his adaptations of those two Chekhov shorts, but rather for his full-length original works “Dancing at Lughnasa,” “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” and “Translations.”
Indeed, Friel’s versions of “The Bear” and “The Yalta Game” might be better described as mere translations, as opposed to legitimate adaptations. The settings and characters remain Russian; only their accents have changed, now featuring the likes of Grigory Stepanovitch Smirnov or Anna Sergeyevna waxing about their 19th-century Russian lives with Irish brogues instead.
In a double bill called “The Friel Deal,” Aris Theatre, a plucky Celtic-oriented company founded in 2014, combines the one-acts in an economical production continuing through Sunday in the small studio space at 7 Stages. The nominal stars of the show are its two directors, both of whom have long and distinguished resumes on the local scene (primarily as actors, and notably with the late Georgia Shakespeare): Kathleen McManus and Tim McDonough.
McManus helms the broadly comedic “Bear,” in which an independent-minded widow (played by Erin Greenway), still grieving the death of her philandering husband after a year, is set upon by a bombastic, vodka-swilling debt collector (Tamil Periasamy). In true rom-com fashion, opposites attract as the pre-feminist widow and the misogynistic “bear” prepare for a battle of the sexes in the form of an actual duel before their mutual desires prevail.
Trifling at best, the highly physical action is handled with ample spirit by the co-stars, as are their Irish accents—to the extent that it’s sometimes hard to comprehend everything they’re saying, especially as the conversations become more heated—and they receive funny support from Chris Schulz (donning a blatantly ill-fitting skull cap as her exasperated manservant).
McDonough’s staging of the introspective and eloquently written “Yalta Game” (based on the Chekhov short story “The Lady with the Dog”) is more satisfying on the whole, thanks in large part to the graceful performance of Christina Leidel as a vacationing young wife who reluctantly embarks on an illicit love affair with an older married man, torn between “restoring” herself or simply accepting what she has “settled for” in her unhappy life back home.
Despite touches of gray makeup in his hair and beard, Eric Lang is too youthful to be fully believed as the man allegedly old enough to be her father. He’s a capable actor, but somehow his age-inappropriate casting also undermines the character’s melancholy wisdom and poignant observations about life’s deceptively “dreamy pleasures” and its potentially lingering regrets.
Had Friel transplanted the stories from Russia to Ireland, or perhaps updated the time period, or tweaked it in any way at all, frankly, “The Friel Deal” may have felt more purposeful. Alas, just as the show rates as lesser Chekhov and lesser Friel, compared to the production values of the company’s earlier full-scale efforts (“The Playboy of the Western World,” Friel’s “Philadelphia…”), so is it lesser Aris.
THEATER REVIEW
“The Friel Deal”
Through June 23. 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday. $10-$25. 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave. NE (in Little Five Points), Atlanta. 404-892-0053, aristheatre.org.
Bottom line: Modest adaptations of modest source material, modestly presented.
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