Dan's Papers - June 22, 2007 - review: the night season

British playwright Rebecca Lenkewicz' comic drama The Night Season is having its first U.S. production now at Sag Harbor's Bay Street Theatre. Set near the coast of Sligo, Ireland, it overflows with the poetry, music and drink associated with Irish souls.

The unspoken center of the play is the rejection each member of a family experiences after the mother abandons them and moves to London, and how they cope in different ways with loss. The maternal grandmother Lily (Katherine Helmond) misses her daughter terribly but is in poor health and sliding into senility. Her son-in-law Patrick (David Patrick Kelly) has a wicked way with words and whiskey but he rarely ventures out except to the local pub.

Three young adult daughters complete the working-class household. Judith (Kellie Overbey) is a librarian, Rose (Ana Reeder) is looking for a better job, and Maud (Rosie Benton) is a university student. Into this family group comes John Eastman (Richard Short), a British actor wanting to live in local digs to soak up the atmosphere while portraying poet William Butler Yeats in a movie. (Yeats grew up in this part of Ireland.)

The actor has his own demons, which he tries to assuage by befriending Lily and having a sexual relationship with Rose. The playwright seems influenced by Yeats who, in his published letters wrote, "I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood -sex and the dead.")

There is laughter and love and caring, fueled by liquor and tea, in the hearts of these characters. The father, Patrick, first introduces himself to actor John as being like King Lear with three daughters, later drunkenly shouting, "People should live in isolation rooms," but he later asks Judith to forgive him for being a bad father. The entire family, plus John, and Judith's beau Gary are quite protective of grandmother Lily.

All players are introduced in the first act. They reveal their inner pain and find some solace in the second act. The tone is beautifully captured in an Act II scene where the father, alone in his bed, sings a sad and wistful ballad based on Yeats' poem "Down by the Salley Gardens": "She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; but I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears." The two other male characters are on stage, dimly lit at different locales, probably having similar thoughts.

The Night Season is Rebecca Lenkewicz's second play. It was produced by Britain's National Theatre in London in 2004 to great critical acclaim. Lenkewicz won the Critics Circle Most Promising Playwright Award that year and now writes under commission for the National Theatre. She writes sharp, incisive dialogue.

All the actors in this production work as a seamless ensemble to make this play a gleaming whole. Katherine Helmond is alternately funny and touching as grandmother Lily, dreamy and childlike but with a will of steel. David Patrick Kelly embraces the abandoned, embittered father Patrick and finds the love, poetry and humanity buried in his soul. Kellie Overbey is poignant as the eldest daughter Judith, always reining herself in to keep the family together but finally getting in touch with her inner feelings in separate encounters with her parents.

Ana Reeder is emotionally pure as Rose, the middle daughter who tries to squash her interior hurts with her sexuality. Rosie Benton is both humorous and heartbraking as the youngest daughter who never really knew her mother but longs for a mother's love.

Richard Short is attractive and controlled as the British actor who becomes an emotional catalyst affecting all family members. Michael O'Keefe, as Judith's beau Gary Malone, is an island of calm and sanity helping the audience navigate the rough waters of this family.

Director Lonny Price does an outstanding job knitting seven characters' stories into whole cloth. He is abetted by Jim Noone's wonderfully versatile set which serves as the Kennedy home, the local pub, Rose's room, Gary's apartment, the beach and more. Kirk Bookman's lighting and Tony Smolenski's sound are an integral part of the play, heightening the emotional feeling in each scene. Amelia Baksic's costumes are mostly dark and dreary, a key to the drab lives of these characters.

Performances at Bay Street Theatre are Tuesday through Sunday evenings with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday.

The Night Season plays through July 1, and tickets are sold at the box office (731-725-9500) or online at www.baystreet.org.