by Geoff Hoff~

The Charm of Making is a slightly surreal play about the final generation of an upper class family in modern day Mississippi, fallen on hard times.  It is a “Southern Play” in the tradition of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner.  Although most of the people here are much more willing to talk about their peculiarities and decay in public than in plays from the golden age of Southern drama, those peculiarities and decay are right up there with best tradition of the Southern writers.  And though it has its inevitable deaths and suicides, this story ends up being a fairly positive one.  Something Williams and Faulkner probably never even considered.

Many families have a sordid history; murders, ownership of other human beings, child molestation, insanity, incest, extra-marital affairs of both men and women with both men and women and the decadence that power and wealth can and often do engender.  Few families have all of these in their past, but some must and it would be impossible to imagine or predict how you would or even could manage, being thrust into this history, especially if you were a decent and good person.  The history of a family is often like an actual being, sitting there on the couch, watching you, controlling you, condemning you.  The human reaction to that has almost always got to be extreme, to seem, from outside the dynamics of the family, insane.  Southern drama, good Southern drama, anyway, captures this dynamic marvelously and allows an audience to experience the humanity of that in a way they otherwise couldn’t.

In The Charm of Making, Elvin Randolph (Thor Edgell), his sister Morgan (Bonnie McNeil), and brother Samuel (Jon Boatwright) come from a family that had once owned slaves and have always been looked up to in their mansion with the pillars on the front porch, but they are the last generation and all of them, in their own way, are fighting against the family history.  They truly love each other (something not always present in a Southern play) but also have their own unique way of coping.

Morgan runs, often naked, through the quiet town at night and couples with her lovers on the same spot in the woods where her great-grandfather murdered a twelve-year-old girl, a girl he was sleeping with then shot because he thought she was seeing another man.  Not quite a Blanche Dubois, Morgan’s tragedy is mostly not of her own making.  Samuel has married and has become a minister in an increasingly conservative church.  Elvin goes through his life and the old house with a calm resignation and a steadfast determination not to acknowledge or come to grips with his loneliness and confused sexuality.

Elvin also has an imaginary friend, named Romeo and Juliet (played with great camp by writer Timothy McNeil), a rotund, fey spirit in whiteface and a suit that alternately consoles and taunts him with quotes from Shakespeare, Elvin’s favorite writer.

Mr. McNeil’s script is witty, catty, dark, sad and strangely charming.  The feeling it evokes of a family trying to make something, anything, worthwhile from the mess of a history they were handed is powerful.  There are some problems with it, some easy answers, family connections that were very confusing until rather late in the play and a final moment that, although requiring great courage from the actor, director and writer, seems a little unnecessary.  There is also a moment when Morgan earnestly begins chanting the charm referred to in the title without warning or any setup or foreshadowing that actually provoked unintentional laughter the night I saw the play.  This may have been a function of the direction by Milton Justice, rather than the script.

The cast is mostly excellent.  Ms. McNeil (writer Timothy McNeil’s wife) is delightful and wrenching as Morgan.  She is an intelligent actress playing an intelligent character, and doing it well.  Even when she is ripping in to her “baby brother” with snide comments and innuendo, she does it with an underpinning of love that is startling.  And it is very easy to believe that this lusty, intelligent woman would need to become slightly insane in order to cope with the restraints she has forced to endure in life.

Mr. Boatwright as Samuel is also good as the judgmental, yet (again) loving brother who always seems to do the exact wrong thing out of concern for the family’s reputation and his own bourgeoning career as a televangelist.  T. M. Rawlins as Samuel’s wife, Jenny, is wonderful.  She brings the exact right amount of repressed longing, dark humor, cattiness and compassion to the role.

May Quigley Goodman plays Lottie, the aging aunt, the last of that generation.  She is funny, if a small bit over the top, and sad as the former beauty who knows all the family skeletons and refuses to allow them the peace of the closet.  Nicholas Hargous is Cameron, the evangelical young man who comes to keep Lottie company and for whom Lottie has inappropriate feelings.

The final two members of the cast are Matthew Oliva and Alfredo J. Orrego.  Both play good men who want to be part of the family and both men are quite good doing it.

Which brings us to Mr. Edgell, who is a wonderful actor, subtle, courageous, compassionate and, unfortunately, slightly miscast here.  He seems much older than Ms. McNeil, yet everyone calls him “Baby Brother”, which might be excused as a family affectation, but we are also asked to believe that this vital, masculine man has spent his entire life repressing himself and that simply doesn’t ring true.  I imagine a slightly thinner man in his late twenties or early thirties would have worked better.  It is no fault of Mr. Edgell who handles the contradiction with aplomb.  It may have been hard to find an actor who looked like that who also had Mr. Edgell’s talent.

The set, by Alain Villeneuve, is odd.  Nothing evokes any former or faded glory that the script alludes to.  The walls are haphazardly draped with red cloth and the front porch, described as having great columns, looks like the pedestrian porch of a middle or even lower-middle class tract house rather than a grand one fallen on hard times.  There are also empty picture frames hanging everywhere.  They are meant to symbolize something, I am sure, perhaps the emptiness of the family history, perhaps the impossibility of the family continuing on into one more generation, but all they really accomplish is distraction.

The Charm of Making was directed by Milton Justice who made some odd choices, such as having most scenes played with characters sitting on the couch looking upstage.  The scene changes were also an issue, moving at the “Southern” pace of the play rather than quickly to move the play along.  At one point, two men came out to unfurl sheets and carefully cover all the furniture which seemed to take hours, only to have it all removed in the first moments of the following scene.  Might they have started that scene with the actors holding the sheets as if they’d just remove them rather than force the audience to watch the interior decorating?

Lighting was by Paige Selene Luke.  Costumes are not credited in the program.

The Charm of Making is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm through April 25, 2010.

The Stella Adler Theatre is located at 6773 Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood, just east of Highland.

Ticket prices: $20.00

Reservations online at www.Plays411.com/thecharm or by phone at (323) 960-7735.