2nd Story Theatre tackles domestic abuse with offbeat Fuddy Meers

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 8, 2008

By Channing Gray

Journal Arts Writer

Paula Faber digs deep during rehearsal for the comedy Fuddy Meers, which opens May 9 at Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre.

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The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

Paula Faber might as well be speaking a foreign language. In 2nd Story Theatre’s soon-to-open production of Fuddy Meers, Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s offbeat take on domestic abuse, Faber plays a stroke victim suffering from aphasia, a condition that has left her speech garbled.

Her words come out twisted and broken. In a typical moment, Faber’s Gertie says, “Dusha riddle dimsum da my hempoo.”

Faber’s fellow cast members know what that means, because a translation has been provided at the back of the script for the actors. What Gertie was trying to say was, “Just a little something that might help you.”

But the audience won’t have the benefit of a translation. So it’s up to Faber to get the meaning of her distorted phrases across through things like inflection, intonation and the occasional discreet gesture, like pointing to a door. Trying to act out situations like a game of charades would be far too heavy handed.

“It’s been a huge challenge,” said Faber, who met with a speech pathologist and a couple of psychiatrists to prepare for the role.

The first challenge for Faber was just memorizing Gertie’s scrambled utterances. That took extra hours, as she said the lines over and over to her dogs. But just learning the phonetic sound of the words has not been enough, Faber has found. She has had to learn to show the frustration and anger someone like Gertie must feel.

“I spent a lot of time learning my lines as they are written out,” said Faber, who has been acting with 2nd Story since the theater opened in Warren in 2001, “and that has almost been a problem. Now it’s a matter of not making them so accurate and precise. I have to make them sound more realistic.

“Now the challenge is to make it more difficult, so these words are not just flowing out. For Gertie, everything is a struggle.”

That process was addressed last week in rehearsal, as Gertie called the police and tried to alert them that an escaped convict was holed up in her house.

“Isis Geht Maso,” she whispers into the phone, as she tries to say, “This is Gertie Mason.” “Fee cape” (“Philip escaped”). “Eesh ina hiss” (“He’s in the house”).

But her delivery was too straightforward, too much like someone rattling off phrases in another language. Director Ed Shea wanted her to convey more of the struggle and frustration she must feel, as she tried to communicate with people who can’t understand her. He wanted her to chew on the words more, to make the whole process seem more arduous.

Faber said that by the end of rehearsal she was ready to throw the phone down on the floor.

“I can feel my center being given over to that struggle,” said Shea.

“You get right in there with her, and your stomach tightens, your breath quickens and you work with her.”

The trick with portraying Gertie is that she can’t appear “ditzy,” said Shea. This is a woman with her mental faculties intact, but whose speech has been affected.

“She’s not unaware at all,” said Shea. “Halfway through the play, she says I wish I could have said some things when I could, which is a very sweet moment.”

Fuddy Meers (it means “funny mirrors,” as in the body-distorting kind found in funhouses) is Lindsay-Abaire’s first play, written while a protégé of Christopher Durang at Juilliard. His assignment was to bring in 10 pages a week, so he wrote the play like a serialized Dickens novel, leaving cliff-hangers along the way.

It debuted in 1999 at the Manhattan Theatre Club to sold-out audiences and mostly positive critical responses. And it helped establish the playwright as someone with a keen eye for people with extreme afflictions who have had their lives upended.

In Kimberly Akimbo, a teenager suffering from premature aging looks like a 70-year-old woman. Her dad is an alcoholic who works in a gas station, her mother is a pregnant hypochondriac with a foul mouth. In the play, an elderly actress engages in a budding romance with a 16-year-old boy.

Lindsay-Abaire won the Pulitzer last year for Rabbit Hole, which is about a couple grieving the death of their four-year-old son, who was struck by a car.

While it may seem odd, maybe even a little cruel to write a comedy about someone suffering from the effects of a stroke, Lindsay-Abaire sort of specializes in plays in which we find ourselves embarrassed to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but can’t quite help ourselves.

“You’ll laugh your head off,” said Shea, “and then say, ‘I really shouldn’t be laughing at this.’ ”

Gertie is not the only person in this wacky comedy suffering from a medical condition, either. There is Gertie’s daughter Claire, who has a rare form of amnesia. Each morning she wakes as a blank slate, and has to read a book her husband has prepared outlining the high points of her life.

Before long, Claire is kidnapped by a half-blind, half-deaf limping man with a pronounced lisp, who has just escaped from prison and tells Claire that her husband is trying to kill her. He takes her to Gertie’s house along with fellow prisoner Millet, a weirdo with a puppet.

Claire’s husband, Richard, and her drug-addict son, Kenny, eventually show up, along with Heidi, a prison cook who is masquerading as a cop. What follows are moments of mayhem and a raft of revelations.

The play is something of a mystery. It’s only in dribs and drabs that we learn what has happened to these battered and impaired characters. There is a point at which Gertie explains all the sordid details of their lives to Claire, but her speech is so muddled that Claire, who understands most of what her mother says, can’t make it out — nor can the audience. And that’s because at that point in the play, we’re not supposed to know all that’s going on, said Shea. We have to wait to learn Claire’s secret.

Nevertheless, Shea feels the audience will understand most of what Gertie says.

“Very slowly, your ear becomes attuned to that language,” he said, “and you start to understand it. By the end of the play you start to get it.”

Fuddy Meers opens in previews tomorrow and runs through June 8 at 2nd Story Theatre, 28 Market St., Warren. Tickets are $10 for previews (May 9-10), and $25 for all other performances. Call (401) 247-4200.

MORE REVIEWS of what’s playing at area stages: Projo.com/theater

Review: 'Fuddy Meers" at 2nd Story Theater

sunday, May 18, 2008; Posted: 6:51 PM - by Randy Rice

Related Links 2nd Story Theatre

There is a lot to like about this production of Fuddy Meers, directed by 2nd Story’s Artistic Director Ed Shea.

There is David Lindsay-Abaire’s outrageous story, with as many twists and turns as there are lines to speak. I am tempted to say that it has everything but the kitchen sink…but…it has a kitchen sink. With a running time of an hour and fifteen minutes, the playwright tempers the over-the-top storytelling with brevity. It is a combination that seems rare. It works very well here.

Claire (Barbara McElroy) is a psychogenic amnesiac. Each evening as she goes to sleep her mind becomes a blank slate. Claire is married to Richard (Wayne Kneeland), a micromanaging martyr who revels in the co-dependent relationship. She has a teenage son named Kenny (Christopher O'Brien); complete with angst.

On this morning, like every other morning for the past two years, Claire is gently awakened by her husband, who patiently helps her sift through her confusion. That is where the similarities to ordinary days (if there are ordinary days) end. A Limping Man (F. William Oakes), wearing a mask, enters her bedroom and tells her that he is her brother and that she is in grave danger. He convinces her to leave with him and he spirits her away to her mother Gertie’s (Paula Faber) house.

The Limping Man has a dim-witted sidekick, Millet (Jonathon Jacobs) who constantly argues with his sock-puppet dog. As they arrive at her mother Gertie’s home, Claire is welcomed with open arms. Claire is naturally surprised to learn that her mother recently suffered a stroke, which has left her with terrible aphasia.

There is a cop (Amy Thompson) chase involving Claire’s husband and son, as they go looking for her. There are mistaken identities and mayhem. It is all completely improbable and beyond absurd but very entertaining.

Paula Faber turns in a tremendous and notable performance as Gertie. Faber grasps and conveys Gertie’s indomitable spirit and her not-so-quiet dignity. It is the finest performance I have seen Faber give.

Actually, there are strong performances from the entire cast. Director Ed Shea has successfully kept the performers on the same level. No performance is broader or more absurd than the other. You might say that each character is equally absurd and each performance entertaining.

Fuddy Meers runs through June 8th at 2nd Story Theatre in Warren, RI .

Tickets are $25.00 each and can be purchased at the 2nd Story Theatre Box Office at 28 Market St., Warren, RI or by calling 401-247-4200.

For more information visit www.2ndStoryTheatre.com.

Photo: Gertie (Paula Faber, left) teaches the puppet a lesson as Millet (Jonathan Jacobs, right) breaks down.

Photo Credit: 2ndStoryTheatre/Richard W. Dionne, Jr.

The Musical Mystery

Music is so ubiquitous and ancient in the human species—so integral to our nature—that we must be born to respond to it: there must be a music instinct. Just as we naturally take to language, as a matter of our innate endowment, so must music have a specific genetic basis, and be part of the very structure of the human brain.

An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music—and other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us. Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky.[1] Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.

Losing, Finding Language: Audience will be inside injured woman's head as she struggles

Emily Stilson once walked on airplane wings - while the airplane was flying. But long after the barnstorming days of her youth, she suffered a stroke. Now, she grapples with what has happened to her.

Wings, Wake Forest University Theatre’s season-opener, is an exploration of Stilson’s journey - from inside her own thinking and her attempts to understand.

Arthur Kopit, a three-time Tony Award nominee, has described his play as “an adventure, a quest, a mystery.”

Cindy Gendrich, an associate professor of theater at WFU and the play’s director, said, “It’s not a tragedy.” She likes Kopit’s own definition - an adventure.

doonesbury

Rabbit Hole is darker and deeper than advertised

Rabbit Hole
Manbites Dog Theater
After great pain, a formal feeling

Through Dec. 22



(Left to right) Marcia Edmundson, Derrick Ivey and Katja Hill in Rabbit Hole
Photo by Alan Dehmer
We can understand why Rabbit Hole won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. Much like the Orphean myth alluded to in one of its closing sequences, the play follows a married couple, Becca and Howie, through the emotional underworld of grief, some eight months after the accidental death of their small child, Danny.

The veritas of their icy, brittle exchanges, with mooky or boorish relatives and each other, convincingly conveys the formal feeling that Emily Dickinson once wrote of as coming after death; a dynamic that artistic director Jeff Storer fully explores in this Manbites Dog Theater production with noted actors Katja Hill and Derrick Ivey. All in all, these qualities make this a show worthy of superlatives—but one also requiring a consumers' advisory as well along the way.

By now, regional theater-goers have come to associate playwright David Lindsay-Abaire with a series of screwball comedies, largely predicated on medical quirks or psychological disabilities. In Manbites Dog's rewarding 2001 production of Fuddy Meers, the playwright found improbably appealing slapstick in characters with aphasia and psychogenic amnesia while, a couple of years after, Actors Comedy Lab's Wonder of the World hinged on an outlandish sexual dysfunction or two. Though Kimberly Akimbo has not been produced locally, its world premiere during the 2000 National Critics Institute completely disarmed an audience of hard-nosed theater insiders as it explored the dysfunctions of a family dealing with a daughter with progeria, the accelerated aging disease. Need we note that none of these situations provides the most easily minable terrain for comedy?

Milky Way Liberation Front

After receiving strong word of mouth at this year’s Pusan International Film Festival, Seong-ho Yoon’s “Milky Way Liberation Front” opened in theatres on November 29, 2007 in South Korea. The movie offers a unique premise of a filmmaker suffering from writer’s block, but having a vague idea for a story revolving around a man afflicted with aphasia. In a ironic twist of fate, the filmmaker in the movie travels to the Pusan International Film Festival, where the actual movie had its world premiere. The movie was shot entirely in HD and features many unconventional moments (actors laughing over their lines, etc). Looks promising indeed.
Program Note from Pusan International Film Festival : Director Yoon Seongho has been representing a new style and ideas of the digital generation through many digital shorts. The lead character Young-jae, who resembles the director, hopes to become a movie director. However, he breaks up with his girlfriend Eun-ha, so the script doesn’t progress, and the fund situation isn’t too bright. On top of all these obstacles, he suffers from aphasia. Fortunately, his ventriloquist actor helps him in a crisis, but even so the situation turns for the worse and gets out of control. Director Yoon Seongho has often mixed love affairs with the allegory of contemporary society in his previous films. This film also exhibits the same structure and adds authentic humor and dialogue in each scene. His unique talent for light-hearted humor makes us look forward to his future works.