After an impressive inaugural season, Serenbe Playhouse begins its second summer in the pebbly courtyard of the southside community with Adam Gwon’s “Ordinary Days,” a chamber musical about four young New Yorkers who are so motivated by their grandiose ambitions that they can’t appreciate the tiny miracles of the moment.
Directed by Justin Anderson, “Ordinary Days” makes creative use of a Serenbe rarity — an urban corner at the edge of this idyllic Chattahoochee Hills hamlet. Situated behind the town storefronts, the nicely sung production uses a fountain, a balcony and a projection screen tucked into a stagelike alcove to suggest the subways, taxis and museum of Manhattan, even as the night creatures of Serenbe make their own music.
With no indoor space, Serenbe Playhouse’s inventive response to the existing landscape is part of its charm. Indeed, there’s a festival-like atmosphere at play here, thanks to the development’s scattering of shops, restaurants, cafes and nearby inn.
In “Ordinary Days,” aspiring artist Warren (Serenbe founder Brian Clowdus) finds a notebook that belongs to graduate student Deb (Laura Floyd) and contains all her thesis research on the English novelist Virginia Woolf. The pair meet in front of a Monet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the same ordinary day that bickering couple Jason (Dustin Lewis) and Claire (Christy Baggett) are visiting the picture gallery. As the sung-through story unfolds in one 80-minute act, all four characters will have epiphanies about the evanescent nature of life, in all its randomness and harmony.
As the nerdy, obsessive, perpetually bow-tied Warren, Clowdus is the comedic backbone of the piece and a lovely singer, too. Laura Floyd is wonderful as the exasperated and dismissive Deb, who thinks oddball Warren is something of a stalker. Lewis and Baggett are slightly less assured, vocally, though it is not their fault that they are playing characters who aren’t as strongly sketched as the other members of the quartet.
In fact, I’m not completely convinced that “Ordinary Days” comes together as a fully nuanced work of art. Heartfelt though it may be, this “Sunday in the Park with George” meets “Avenue Q” means well but feels emotionally thin— like some of the messages that Warren has been papering the city with.
As he did with last year’s “John & Jen,” Clowdus has picked a streamlined musical that is economical to produce. (Music director Will Shuler, on keyboards, makes for the only band member.) The results are admirable but uneven. And yet, Clowdus is building a company of young actors, designers and technicians who clearly find joy in the natural possibilities of this environmental laboratory. Next up, the playhouse will collaborate with Brooks & Company Dance to bring a modern adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” to a lakeside stage (July 2-Aug. 28). If “Ugly Duckling” is anywhere near as inspired as last summer’s site-specific “Jungle Book,” perched beside a treehouse deep in the woods of Serenbe, it will be quack-tacular.
Theater review
“Ordinary Days”
Grade: B-
8:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Through June 25. $15-$20. Serenbe Playhouse. Staged in the courtyard behind The Blue-Eyed Daisy, 9065 Selborne Lane
Chattahoochee Hills. 770-463-1110, serenbeplayhouse.com
Bottom line: An admirable but uneven chamber musical, staged outdoors at Serenbe.
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