“Bobby….Bobby” At first this melodic motif is a gentle, multi-voiced echo that later recurs throughout Sondheim’s Company, even as a cello-alto sax duet, and in all cases it is hauntingly ambiguous. We sense affection, to be sure, yet also a delicate persecution of a single stud among married couples who can’t seem to tolerate his ease with interchangeable sexual partners whose names he can’t get right. At times, for all their supportive involvement in his life, these friends seem as unrelenting in their torment of their Bobby as crows in Van Gogh’s field. Or they seem like a mother scolding a young child to behave.
Company precedes Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage by several years and, if it doesn’t take the route of ripping emotional skin off its players, Company is a theatrical masterwork that often subtly explores why couples are simultaneously sorry and grateful that they are wed. Folks in this world may declare “I’m ready” but they never are and never have been as they unite in bonds of submission and compromise, sacrifice and self-realization, accumulated annoyances and even marital war where love, ironically, has been declared. As these marrieds drive each other nuts, they also wear each other down into deeper love. They find happiness as it is through one another and in spite of one another. They also demand the same for their single friends and Amy advises Bobby, “Want something.”
Sondheim’s Company is a perfectly tuned creation for theatre, one that expertly achieves finely developed variations on its theme of relationships. It is clever and carefully proportioned in applying or suggesting its compassion in this cityscape of wounded, lived-in faces. It subtly negotiates each frenzied subconscious with patience and dips easily into poignancy without being maudlin. If Sartre might declare “Hell is the Other” Sondheim might retort, “Well, yes and no.” In Sondheim’s Company people don’t have answers about others and they don’t really know the right questions to ask to find them. They don’t really know each other that well, or themselves. They are always alone and always together. Their world of marriage, relationships, and sexuality is potently undefined as they try to find themselves through others. And always, as each pair or trio works out their lives, the rest of the cast sits at tables –watching.
Company, if intended in its pre-musical form as a group of short plays for Kim Stanley, is here in this production, with no exceptions, implicitly dramatic, freshly entertaining, and deeply touching throughout. With director Gary Griffin’s knack for economical suggestion and precise effect and with a group of actors who, in vocal nuance or minute gestures, find intense individual riches of character in passing textual brevities, we have from Theatre 20 a genuinely memorable production. For one, the friendships feel real, be they bitchy or goofy or quietly confrontational or faux buoyant or suggestive of untested connections with others. Each character is a performer in a vaudeville of life, psychological thespians even up close to others or even down deep within. Blink for a second and you miss a character-revealing touch. And through Marc Kimelman’s rousing choreography, the production vibrates with New York energy.
One of cinema’s greatest directors, Yasujiro Ozu, once pointed out the difficulty in achieving the everydayness of people’s lives without recourse to stereotype and other anticipated exaggeration, and this is perhaps the key to the high quality of acting here. Give one of these actors a few lines and you get an implied lifetime that is present in each intensely focused moment of daily reality. Thus W. Joe Matheson as Larry briefly summarizes a whole marital relationship in which he lovingly abides Joanne’s pain and its resultant nastiness. David Keeley as Peter, with his tentative reach into bisexuality, and wife Susan played upper and bright by Eliza-Jane Scott , who feel “more married now” after their divorce, become tempting mysteries for speculation beyond their brief lines. Steven Sutcliffe’s David with a juicy smile full of innuendo can turn controlling cold to claim back his stoned wife Jenny, played with vulnerable spontaneity by Nia Vardalos, as she looks about with eyes like commanding yet playful orbs of light that in turn take their cue to fall into marital darkness from David’s frown.
Every marriage needs a wife taking karate classes and through Nora McLellan’s Sarah a feisty joie de vivre survives in part through her oozing pleasantly defiant rejection of those who would control her while, now and then, oozing her verbal control of them. As hubby Harry, Brent Carver gives this long married guy a loving persona but also the suggestion of an eternal wanderer in his own private thoughts. If Jeff Lillico’s Paul is bright, clean, and unreachably okay, his fiancée in Carly Street’s Amy is wired to bursting inside as an unsure bride to be who is facially contorted with psychological realities that have no other way to make themselves clear. The show’s best known number The Ladies Who Lunch belongs to Louise Pitre’s Joanne, an ironically cynical and passionately unresolved woman whose social schtick is bitterness as she points to her embittered self through others. Her eyes seem a sob of futility even as her voice broadly condemns everything in sight.
Meanwhile, Dan Chameroy’s Robert is attractive, vulnerable if sometimes wilfully, stylishly adaptable to others, undefined by relationships and defined by not having a marriage. He talks the talk of relationships –“You’re a very special girl and not just overnight”- and does pre-bedding push up preps like Fellini’s Casanova. He seems happily free when he doesn’t seem somewhat rudderless, and is regarded as a “good person” by those who obviously love him. Three who do are Bobby’s luscious young babe friends, all compactly realized: fleshy Marta who categorizes New Yorkers by a-hole diameters, a fleshy stewardess April via Marisa McIntyre who is given to wide-eyed declarations like “I’m so boring”, and Lindsay Frazier’s gymnastically sensual Kathy who contorts with quiet elegance and leaves much unspoken.
These are all concise characterizations that imply human essences and also suggest concealed and unaddressed human qualities. Sondheim works splendidly here due in equal part to actors who, even briefly, make solid his intentions with their unobtrusive expertise and no ostentation. Each scene is thus a “big scene” of living and not merely a theatrical exercise designed to pretend meaning. Like life itself, each scene also engages, as with Carly Street’s “what the fuck” take on her impending marriage to her “own Jew,” at the end of which she declares “I don’t love you enough” and the resultant silence is gripping. And there’s the communal toking up that goes from quite high to very low in marital disconnect. And there’s Jenny and David feeling sorry for “poor Bobby” while flossing and brushing their teeth. And Bobby’s big “Being Alive” number when we sense that, like all humans, he hasn’t changed much and probably never will. And what about the speeding ticket enunciation of Carly Street and Cleopatra Williams? Or those many revealing glances or gentle touches of another’s arm here and there?
It takes substantial smarts on the part of a theatrical team to make art breathe in and exhale like life, to have a creation effectively go for both the heart and the gut of an audience and discover its soul, and to have this creation be realized in fullness so as to send an audience back into their own lives, not with hope perhaps but with less loneliness. And that’s what this fine production does. An audience sees it, but the production also sees them and doesn’t leave them to be alone. Highly recommended.