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Ancestral Voices
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Auberjonois, Savage, Helmond
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By T.H. McCulloh
Several years ago, in an interview at his Manhattan flat, playwright A.R.
Gurney stated that he was aiming purposefully toward "minimalism." His The
Dining Room, he mentioned, had already spun numerous generations around a
single dining table. His Love Letters had reduced his actors to two, and
one generation, sitting at one table reading letters. Now, in his latest
attempt to erase theatricality from his theater, he has gone even further.
Ancestral Voices, in its west coast premiere at Burbank's Falcon
Theatre, does utilize five actors, but the table is gone, replaced by five
stools and music stands. It looks vaguely like the First Drama Quartette's
(Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke) 1951
music stand staging of Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell." But the Quartette moved
away from the music stands once the conceit was established. These ancestral
voices never even stand up.
Narrator Eddie (Fred Savage) announces at the beginning that the piece
started as a real play, then was tried as a novel, and finally found life as
just a plain old reading. You could even close your eyes and just listen to
it, but then you'd miss the tender glances and visual admonitions of Eddie's
parents (Mariette Hartley, Robert Foxworth), the sly facial tics of his
grandfather Ed (Rene Auberjonois, who also plays homewrecker Uncle Roger), or
the delightfully warm smiles and affectionate nods of his grandmother
(Katherine Helmond).
What Eddie spends the evening describing is pretty minimal itself.
Covering a period from just before to just after World War II, Eddie recalls
his beloved grandparents splitting after many happy years of marriage. She
has fallen in love with an old family chum, whom she insists the children
call "Uncle Roger." This leaves Grandpa distraught and lost. It also leaves
Grandma at the mercy of the sniggering town ladies, and eventually to wish
she was still with Grandpa.
We hear (not see) the whole thing through Eddie's eyes, and Savage
resurrects much of his television era cuteness as Eddie ages from eight to 12
during the proceedings, notwithstanding a touching and affecting performance
as a witness too young to really understand the events he's watching. We
imagine his parents, grandparents, and Uncle Roger as simplistically as Eddie
would see them, but the writing contains much of Gurney's affectionate recall
of his favorite territory, the northeastern WASP country of his youth.
Although the dramatic thrust of the evening is about as minimal as the
rest, Hartley, Foxworth, Helmond and Auberjonois, in wonderful performances
across the board, provide enough interesting detail and subtext to their
characters to make Gurney's words glimmer like a fall day, almost like the
sweet Valentine this is to a place and an era that permeates the best of
Gurney's work.
Ancestral Voices," Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank.
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 26. $25-$35. (818)
955-8101. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
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