By James V. Ruocco
A fascinating storyline mixed with the right amount of conversation, flair, approach, sponsorship and encounter gives Kristen Palmer's new play "Mentors" a powerful voice that stings, entices, questions and leads to an impactful, effective climax.
This is a production - a fine one at that - that is handled with care, with liberation, with volume and with a savvy interest that allows the material to breathe, to resonate, to march, to pitch and to explore with personal, smartly plotted and executed passion.
As theatre, "Mentors" also thrusts its audience into the pending action of the storytelling with characters and dialogue that not only get the pulses racing but prompt immediate curiosity about what exactly Palmer has hidden up her sleeve.
What's right? What's wrong?
Who's telling the truth? Who's lying?
What secrets are about to be uncovered?
Will there be heated drama - the kind prevalent in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "August: Osage County," "Death and the Maiden" and "Long Day's Journey into Night?" Or is Palmer, just toying with one's senses?
Or simply traveling down a very different narrative path?
That imagined belt and tilt gives Backyard Theater Ensemble's maverick staging of "Mentors" a compelling, potent inventiveness that is expressed and positioned with a mindset that stirs, provokes and unravels with takeaway merit, ambition and stand-alone guile and honesty.
And rightly, so.
As scripted by Palmer, "Mentors" finds expectant parents, Jenna and Brian, a hard-working, educated, independent-minded married couple face-to-face with David, their former arts department college professor whose life they discover - over dinner and drinks - has been turned upside down via an ongoing investigation of sexual misconduct at the university.
Is he guilty?
Is he a sexual predator?
As onetime students of David, what exactly do Jenna and Brian remember about their years of working side-by-side at the college with their ex-professor?
Are they too victims of his artistic impulses or sexual desires?
Like most important dramas, "Mentors" pulls you into its web of spiraling conversations, accusations and remembrances with tremendous, observed acumen that prompts immediate attention almost immediately after the play begins. It's very much in the here and now, swept up in the debate of timely storytelling devices that are navigated with organic concern and effect by Palmer while addressing everything from academia, artistic expression and environmental issues to woke, child rearing, sexual harassment, mentoring, influence and freedom of speech.
As storyteller, Palmer writes from the heart, clearly communicating the necessary information, essential to a particular scene, a particular character and a particular part of her story arc. Here, her choice of dialogue and situation is natural and free flowing, smartly advancing the plot through pivotal moments and situations that add resonance and heartbeat to her persuasive, important, involved dramatic material.
More importantly, there's an in-the-moment feel to the piece sparked by language, details and circumstances that bring out the human side of Palmer's dancing ideas, thoughts, revelations and theories.
Staging "Mentors," director Teresa Langston - "A Number," "Barbeque," "The Devils," "Uncommon Women and Others" - crafts a work of artfully arranged intelligence that arms its audience with just the right amount of information, believability and artifice to make it catch fire, thrill, dance and excite. Directorially, she digs deep and like Palmer, accentuates the play's inquisitive humanism, its engaged emotionalism and its abundant awareness with clear-cut measure, equality, intrigue and playful swottiness.
There's lots of clever clogs here but Langston takes her time with it all, thus allowing the play to breathe, gesticulate and smolder without any form of rushness, calculation or let's race to finish and drop an atomic bomb and shock the hell out of everyone.
You'll find none of that here.
Here, as in "A Number" and "Barbeque," Langston, creative auteur that she is, allows "Mentors" to progress with united strains of directorial melody that is confident, assured and unleashed with steady, delicate, natural fluidity. Blocking is minimal as well it should be given the play's conversational ingredients, properties, chemicals, compounds, dueling and theorizing.
To have actor's continually moving about Evan Ev Seide's lived-in, smartly designed atmospheric set (a small, framed poster of Jonathan Larson's "Rent" musical immediately caught my eye) would derail the intimacy of the piece, its central playing ground and its rich concentration of wordplay. So, in staging it, Langston suffuses "Mentors" with minimal action and movement which works most advantageously throughout the play's one-hour-and-twenty-five-minute allotted running time (including a 15-minute interval) and validates the accuracy, emotion and certainty of Palmer's character study and its definitive proprietorship.
"Mentors" stars Tina Parziale as Jenna, Tony Palmieri as Brian and Rick Malone as David.
The character of Jenna, as portrayed by Parziale, is drawn with powerful, fiery, soft and delicate strokes that set the role ablaze with fruition and recognition that blossoms into a brilliant performance of edge, pathos, exchange and vulnerability. Palmieri's Brian hits all the right notes with well defined, unleashed sweeps and crescendos that thrust his character into the spotlight with influence, spark and drama. There's also a delightful bit of well-orchestrated humor that comes halfway through Act II when he and Parziale find themselves sharing a pint of tasty, nearly melted ice cream (the after-dinner dessert was accidentally left in the car by David) in a comforting, husband-and-wife moment warmly intertwined under Langston's sweet-and-sentimental direction.
As David, Malone crafts an inspirational, heavy-handed performance of high-level mystery and wit, combined with the necessary heat and involvement of an educator whose taste for fun and games in and out of the classroom often knows no boundaries.
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