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Lacking
Poetry
By
James Yeara
First
Love
By
Charles Mee, directed by Laura Margolis
StageWorks/Hudson,
through Nov. 21
StageWorks/Hudson’s regional premiere of Charles Mee’s First
Love should be lauded for what it is not: trite and tired
theater. This poetic play about two senior citizens meeting,
wooing, screwing, fighting, and re-
uniting won’t be seen on other area stages—not until it’s
familiar enough to allow for connect-the-dots or cookie-cutter
productions to be done. No troupe does theater the way StageWorks/Hudson
does, consistently challenging its audience, not pandering
to its subscribers.
StageWorks/Hudson’s regional premiere of Charles Mee’s First
Love should be castigated for what it is not: a poetic
production. Done before Brian Prather’s surreal set—blue sky
and white clouds painted on flats and over the door upleft,
with an irregular cut-out revealing a cyclorama with a full
moon gobo upcenter; boxes and platforms scattered downleft
and right, with a stylized water garden downcenter, complete
with floating green apples—it doesn’t preserve the poetry
that should inform the two elderly characters, Edith (Mary
Foskett) and Harold (Ted Pugh). These two should speak as
if their lines were heartbeats or breaths. Too often, though,
they clunk as if wearing someone else’s shoes or speak as
if someone else’s tongue were in their mouths, and that person
had neglected to floss.
First
Love centers on the rough wooing of the red-haired Edith
and the
silver-haired Harold: “Shove up” is the first thing that she
says to him, trying to move him from his bench, where he’s
trying to sleep. “You want peace, go someplace else,” she
screeches to him. “I did go some place else. This is where
I went,” Harold reasons. The play doesn’t stint on the sexiness
of senior-citizen love: bondage, discipline, roleplaying,
toe sucking, all get full play and display here. Those looking
for Love Letters should look elsewhere.
The play follows the physical vagaries of love and the vignettes
of intimacy between these two (including a clunky scene where
Edith is supposed to be throwing china plates that fluttered
like paper when she accidentally dropped them). There’s also
a nicely symbolic turn by Bethany Caputo as the Woman—variously
garbed as a gum-snapping waitress, a chanteuse in a red satin
dress, and a spandex temptress—who acts as a muse for the
pair.
The playwright has said, “I like plays that are not too neat,
too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged,
filled with sharp edges.”
First Love could be that, but
StageWorks/Hudson has dulled the sharp edges, polished the
finish, straightened the mess, and thus has cut the poetic
heart out of the play. Though a red Cupid in satin or silk
or velvet with gossamer wings sings and dances and rollerblades
around the lovers, the production is too full of prose, and
misses too often Mee’s poetry—but at least Edith and Harold
never play cards or engage in the other cliches subscriber
panderings too often do.
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