Being ushered into their seats, the audiences of Wallace Shaw’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” this weekend at the ’92 suddenly realized that the show had begun without them. There before them was a fragile woman. It was Lemon- wrapping her shawl tightly around herself, smiling brightly as they took their seats among their now-awkward clamor. Once all were seated, she launched into a recollection of her parents’ conversations with her Aunt Dan. During the nighttime talks between Lemon’s British mother, American father, and her father’s best friend Aunt Dan, Dan would flashback to events of her younger years, stories of sex, love, politics, murder, and of a particularly memorable friend of hers named Mindy. It was from these conversations that Lemon learned the most important life lessons, which she humbly, in one and a half hour’s time, tried to recount to the audience.
The performance actually began in the production program, with an insert written by Shaw himself. The essay, titled “Notes on the Justification of Putting the Audience Through a Difficult Evening,” rationalizes what Shaw has identified as the basic human potential to do evil. Shaw skillfully uses a sympathetic view of Hitler as a base for his perception of the nature of theater: that plays are created in order to supply a brief objective look at a group of people, enabling us – the theatergoers – to react accordingly. With the essay, Shaw both justifies the major themes of the play and excuses himself from the persecution of the audience for allowing the main character to say such things as “The Nazi’s are no different from anyone else.” The whole essay – although an enriching read – comes off as self-deprecating and wholly unnecessary.
Director Hallie Cooper-Novack ’07 did a fine job capturing the spirit with which Shaw originally scripted the play. I left the theater asking, “Could I actually kill a person? Would I like it, even a little?” I applauded Shaw’s sense of reason. I wondered if I could be truly mature until I, too, could appreciate the righteous responsibility of those who willingly submit themselves to the clutches of evil-doing (i.e. the Nazi armies, or perhaps Henry Kissinger). Cooper-Novack’s staging echoed the ubiquity of Shaw’s themes; the actors drifted onto the stage, found their way into the next scene as the current one finished up, as though simultaneously existing within and outside of the play, on multiple planes of time and space.
In choosing a piece like “Aunt Dan & Lemon,” Cooper-Novack – consciously or not – took on the grim burden of discovering how to make one and a half hours of contemplation not only engaging, but effective. The play, until the last few scenes, consists mainly of long dialogues addressing moral, social and political dilemmas, or hefty monologues recollecting these dialogues. These scenes carry the themes of the play, and are integral to the success of the story. The way these particular scenes were presented (that is, focusing entirely on the dialogue as opposed to the action), made it difficult to extract a consistent message being delivered throughout.
The actors were faced with a multitude of particularly difficult tasks, including remembering mammoth speeches and convincingly executing several different accents. Emily Dreyfuss ’06 (Aunt Dan) commanded all of her scenes, much as the vociferous Aunt Dan probably would. Her obvious strength and – eventually – subtle decay demand that the audience emotionally identify with a character that they, most likely, could not intellectually identify with.
For example, Dreyfuss was convincingly passionate about her support and admiration of Henry Kissinger, as was Halley Feiffer ’07 (Lemon) in her sympathy with the both Nazi armies and the Holocaust victims.
Feiffer, complementing the force of her co-star with distinct subtlety, offered an equally solid performance. She managed to capture the innocence of Lemon, as well as her welcoming heart and unique world-view. Stewart Miller ’05 (Father/Jasper/Freddie) gave a specifically nuanced performance as Lemon’s father that won the audience over immediately. Elena Schilder ’07 (Mother/June/Flora, and perhaps the recipient of the “Most Convincing British Accent” award) was particularly unabashed in her portrayal of such contrasting characters, with a genuine subtlety echoing Feiffer’s. Though her character remained vague until the last few scenes, Lauren Stossel ’07 (Mindy) remained consistently cold, culminating in the shockingly unemotional murder of Raimondo (Jonas Carpignano ’06), who was somehow able to make choking look exactly like being struck by a thousand bolts of lightning, and still make sense. Paul McElfresh ’06 (Andy/Marty), although a bit showy, established his character successfully as the street-savvy smooth-talker.
The set designed by Ashley May ’07 agreed with the universality of Shaw’s humanistic assertions: transcending boundaries of time and space, suggesting several scenes occurring simultaneously in disparate settings, effectively operating on all levels of the space – including a bed raked such that the audience was given a nearly full view of the bed’s surface, immediately inviting the audience’s eye to witness the secret intimacies of the story world, the human instinct of which Shaw references. The overall brightness of the set, however, was a bit distracting. Perhaps this was a specific choice to subvert the somewhat darker themes of the play, but overall the fluorescent glasses and flowerbed were a bit misleading.
Much to Cooper-Novack’s credit, the performance was captivating and enriching. The major themes, however, were lost somewhere in the overall lack of specificity. The big “point” didn’t manifest until the final scenes of the play, until suddenly the audience realized what they had been watching: a welcoming of the potential for human evil.
Wallace Shaw’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” was: Director – Hallie Cooper-Novack ’07; Cast – Halley Feiffer ’07 (Lemon), Elena Schilder ’07 (Mother/June/Flora), Stewart Miller ’05 (Father/Jasper/Freddie), Emily Dreyfuss ’06 (Aunt Dan), Lauren Stossel ’07 (Mindy), Jonas Carpignano ’06 (Raimondo), Paul McElfresh ’06 (Andy/Marty); Stage Manager/Assistant Director – Zaheed Essack ’05; Set Design – Ashley May ’07; Costume Design – Daisy Holman ’07; Lighting Design – Gavin Robb ’07; Properties/Assistant Costume Design – Sidney Russel ’07; Assistant Stage Manager/Sound – Cristabel Tan ’08; Lightboard Operator – David Haan ’06.
Leave a Reply