Eugene weekly., January 13, 2011, Page 32, Image 32

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theater
BY SUZI STEFFEN
PHOTO COURTESY OF LORD LEEBRICK THEATRE COMPANY
traveling soon?
Rebecca Nachison
and Nancy Hopps in Circle Mirror
That One Time,
at Drama Class
Secrets and lies in Circle Mirror Transformation
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Lord Leebrick Theatre Company Presents
a new comedy by
Annie Baker
January 7 to January 29
Tickets: 541-465-1506
www.lordleebrick.com
Sponsored by :
Winter Theater Classes Registering Now
Beginning Acting • Playwriting • Advanced Acting
Playshop for Kids • Classes start January 16th
32 JANUARY 13, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
et people in small groups, get ’em
talking, and see what happens:
one of the classic ways to advance
a fi ctional narrative. If the writer creates
characters who ping off of each other,
challenge the leader, interact with each
other offstage, so much the better for those
reading or watching the narrative play out.
In Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror
Transformation, now running at the Lord
Leebrick Theatre, fi ve Vermonters get
to know each other during six weeks of
an adult community drama class. Their
in-class interactions form the entire
110-minute, no-intermission comedy.
The sharply written script also baldly
addresses betrayal, sadness and loss and
the ways humans fool themselves as if
they’re actors performing for an audience.
Amy Dunn’s set design, with the intimacy
of the Leebrick’s tiny current space,
includes a mirror that refl ects a fair portion
of the seats. This refl ection, a clear way
to connect the people onstage with the
people off, implicates the viewers in this
piece about middle-class artsy people
living in and through small discoveries that
reverberate for years.
Painfully funny moments in the play
pop out between James (Peter Holden) and
his wife, Martha (Rebecca Nachison), the
teacher of the class, and between eager,
blunt Schultz (David Mort) and fl irty,
careless Theresa (Nancy Hopps). Not
as painful but still funny is 16-year-old
Lauren (Lacy Allen), who looks scornfully
and fearfully at the adults — is she going
to be a failure, the way she thinks most of
them are? Is she going to learn anything
from them? Why did she even take this
class?
That’s a good question for all four
students, not to mention the instructor.
Martha seems to be teaching this group
as a way to earn a little extra income and
possibly as a way to experiment with some
teaching ideas. But her plans blow open
long-held beliefs and understandings,
leading in some cases to healing and some
to harm.
One frustratingly diffi cult theater
exercise turns the audience into a
suspenseful, silent cheering squad for the
characters. As anyone who’s ever been
in a theater (dance, yoga, art, alternative
spirituality, etc.) class can probably attest,
it’s a pitch-perfect example of the absurd/
useful exercises that go on in those classes.
You have your goofy trust exercises,
your story-telling, your exercises meant
to deepen one’s relationship with others
in the class, all of which appear crazy
but somehow help create and cement
a performing community. But each
community’s binding falls apart eventually,
and in Circle Mirror, the deepening and
opening up of self quickly arrives at the
third rail of group dynamics: sex.
Theresa’s fl owing garments and pelvic-
rotation hula hooping defi ne her way of
connecting with her body. Hopps plays her
as a half-innocent, seducing everyone in the
class away from Martha just by her wide-
eyed, fl exible-bodied existence, but some of
her actions tell a competing story. This sort
of confl icting narrative plays out for most of
the characters: Schultz acts a bit dense, but
he’s a tender guy who’s both much angrier
and much smarter than his early words and
some of his halting speech might indicate.
James, a type of person Eugeneans may
understand all too well — he seems open
to learning, but that’s in the service of an
aging hippie macking on any woman in
sight — sweetly portrays his wife talking
about herself just after the play opens.
Allen (who was superb in last year’s
The Highest Tide at the UO) makes Lauren
look so whiny and vacuous early on that
her perspicacity in her fi nal scene with
Schultz, which neatly encapsulates both
the playwright’s plans for her characters
and some of Lauren’s own projections,
emerges as a surprise. The play’s funny,
hard, sad, a fair refl ection of middle-class
people awkwardly and tentatively picking
up the pieces of broken lives — or breaking
lives in a heedless pursuit of feeling.
The humor provides delights of one
kind; the undercutting secrets and lies
goose the characters with a necessary
spur of pain. Playwright Baker crafts a
world that’s about telling stories, about the
stories we tell ourselves and the stories we
tell each other, not to mention the stories
we tell about each other. The stories zip
with amusement and fl icker with hurt, but
they’re what we have. Maybe, she seems
to suggest with delicate generosity at the
conclusion of the play, that’s enough. ew
Circle Mirror Transformation runs through Jan. 29 at the
Lord Leebrick Theatre. Tix at lordleebrick.com or 541-465-
1506.
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