It’s always an interesting thought experiment to consider what it would have been like if historical figures from different spheres of influence met each other. What would they think of each other? What would they have to say?

That’s the premise of “Insignificance,” the new play currently running at the Campbell Theater in Martinez.

Written in 1982 by playwright Terry Johnson, the play imagines a scenario in which Marilyn Monroe (Jennifer Lynn Brown Peabody), fresh from her famous “flying skirt” photo shoot, decides to stop by the hotel room of Albert Einstein (Jerry Motta), where they spend an evening discussing fame, philosophy, and the theory of relativity.

Also hanging around are Senator Joe McCarthy (Randy Anger), who is attempting to coerce Einstein into supporting the House Un-American Activities Committee by handing over his research, and Monroe’s semi-estranged husband, retired baseball player Joe DiMaggio (Ryan Terry), hoping to get Monroe to come home with him.

The characters are never actually named, as such. Throughout they are only ever referred to by their titles – the professor, the actress, the ballplayer, and the senator.

In terms of plot, that’s about it. By and large, this isn’t a story driven by action or narrative tension. McCarthy’s machinations do eventually come to something of a climax, as do Monroe and DiMaggio’s marital problems. But those all feel like secondary interest’s to Johnson’s play.

Instead, it concerns itself mostly the inner lives of its characters – with their thoughts, their feelings, and the ways they interact with one another. As characters come and go from Einstein’s hotel room, they spar over their conflicting beliefs on a number of issues, like science, religion, sexuality and celebrity.

Throughout, each character gets to shine, both individually and in teams of two and three, bouncing of one another and displaying new sides and angles as the combinations change. There’s a lot of laughs to be had in those interactions, although director Edwin Peabody wisely chooses to keep things grounded and let the human drama come out.

Einstein is gentle and wise, exactly as you would hope the great man to be. With Monroe he is patient and encouraging. With McCarthy he is defiant and protective of both his work and his integrity. Motta plays him with a sparkle of dry wit that raises the character from interesting to truly endearing.

Motta, who has played Einstein before in another play, said that it was an interesting role to explore.

“It’s been a lot of fun just getting inside Einstein’s head,” said Motta. “Not only the philosphy and the physics, but the fun aspect of him – what he enjoys, and how he figures things out.”

Monroe is coy and seductive and smart as a whip. Over the course of the play she wrestles with her role and identity – as wife, as woman, as national icon and as an intellectual too often underestimated as just a pretty face.

Jennifer Lynn Brown Peabody said she did a fair amount of research ahead of taking on the part, and that playing such a complex and dramatic role was a new challenge for her.

“It’s a really great part. It’s a different type of part than I’ve ever had,” she said. “Normally I get cast in the comical parts, but this one has a little more meat on it, and it’s a more serious show.”

Terry’s DiMaggio is loud, angry, jealous and dumb. He’s an incredible physical presence in an otherwise fairly cerebral play, and seems to think with his fists first and his brains second, if at all. And yet there’s also a vulnerable tenderness to him, both in his desperate, sincere attempts to understand his wife and his surprising warmth towards Einstein, who he initially suspects is sleeping with Monroe.

Terry said that finding that balance for DiMaggio was both the great challenge of playing the character and what made it so interesting.

“We had to get a sense of who me and Marilyn are just being the two of us, how we are together naturally,” Terry said. “Combining that, the little tender moments, with the rest of my dialogue, which tends to be really loud and angry – I think that was the tricky part. Getting the little things that symbolize our relationship right.”

Anger plays McCarthy as an amiable thug, who manages to convey sullen menace with a bright bit of banter and a friendly smile. When he shares a scene with DiMaggio he’s smugly superior, and with Monroe he becomes flustered and erratic.

“It’s always good to get to play a bad guy,” said Anger, “especially a bad guy that’s so well known, and really has no redeeming value to the world.”

Anger added that the role was particularly enjoyable for the range he got to express as he intereacted with each of the other characters.

“I get to play a lot of different colors, which makes it a lot more fun,” he said. “It’s not Snidely Whiplash through the entire show – I’ve got little cats I’m toying with, and people that I’m manipulating, and I get to be taken down a peg. So it’s great fun, it’s really great fun.”

Director Edwin Peabody said that exploring all these intersecting relationships was central to the play.

“These people are human, and the neat challenge about this play for me – the biggest challenge – was: ‘How do we define these relationships between each other?’” Peabody said. “It’s a beautiful statement about how knowledge and truth and celebrity all meet in a spot, and the conflicts that come with that, and the triumphs that also happen as a result of that. It’s a beautiful play about the human spirit.”

Ultimately, “Insignificance” is a charming, thoughtful character piece, and is well worth the watch.

In television there is a narrative device called the “bottle episode.” Originally conceived of as a way to cut costs, a bottle episode usually involves finding a way to keep the characters in a single location and giving them little to do besides bounce off of one another. Over time, bottle episodes have come to be seen as a way to distill characters and their relationships and explore them in a more in-depth way – by trapping the characters in one place and stripping them of distractions and external influences, there is nothing for the characters to react to but each other, and no tools for them to use but themselves.

Onstage Theatre’s new play at the Martinez Campbell Theater, “Camping With Henry and Tom,” is as pure and well-crafted a bottle episode as you’re likely to see.

Written by Mark St. Germain and directed by Randy Anger, the play is set during a real event that took place in 1921, when President Warren Harding (Mark Hinds) joined industrialist Henry Ford (Wayne McRice) and inventor Thomas Edison (Gary Mutz) on one of their regular well-publicized camping trips. Though the camping trip is a matter of historical record, St. Germain’s play imagines what might have happened if the three men had gone on a secret car ride in the woods and accidentally stranded themselves after hitting a deer with Ford’s car.

The entire play takes place in the clearing they find themselves in after crashing the car. As they debate how to proceed, whether to go for help or wait for it, and what to do about the injured deer, each character comes into focus.

Harding is a good man and a kind one, but perhaps too soft to be able to make the hard choices – when the three men agree to put the injured deer out of its misery, Harding goes to do the deed and then realizes he doesn’t have it in him to kill an animal.

Hinds shows his range with the roll, depicting Harding as both the friendly but distant presidential figure at the start of the play, and the more nuanced, more conflicted man who emerges from his shell later after the conversation takes a more combative turn.

Ford is brash and ambitious, and it emerges early on in the play that his entire reason for inviting the president on this trip is to coerce him into making a number of concessions, like selling the failing Muscle Shoals hydroelectric plant to Ford for pennies. While Ford is an industrialist and a capitalist, he is also an idealist, and believes that industry can – and should – be bent to the betterment of the country, and that he’s the man to do the bending.

McRice plays him as a man full of ambition and pride and empty of patience. Though he nailed the puffed-up ostentation of the character, McRice said he had a difficult time crafting the character.

“I found it pretty difficult to bring this guy to life on the stage,” said McRice. “I did the part about 25 years ago. But this time, now that I’m older, I did a lot more research, and what I discovered is: I don’t really like Henry Ford. He was not a particularly likable person. But I can’t possibly let that show through when I’m playing the character.”

Edison, meanwhile, desires staunchly to stay out of the political conversation – and indeed, most of the conversation. He’s gruff and asocial, and largely uninterested in interacting with his companions, mostly lobbing witty observations from over the top of his book.

Mutz said that he connected with the character.

“He’s one of the few characters who seem so close to me, because every time I talk about it with my wife, she says, ‘That is you, isn’t it? You just sit there, you’re curmudgeonly, and you throw out these one-liners at everybody.’”

There is not much in the way of physical action. Instead, as with most great bottle episodes, the heart of the episode is the back and forth conversational brawl. Ego grapples with ego, as does philosophies about leadership and governance, and as the play continues and deeper goals are revealed, the play becomes an exploration of the darker side of ambition and politics.

Though the play is almost entirely taken up with conversation, it never feels bogged down and is carried well by St. Germain’s dialogue, which is quick and natural and full of dry wit.

Director Randy Anger said that he understood the challenge of directing the conversation-heavy play.

“This show could be three people sitting in their chairs for two hours, and while you want to get them up and get them moving, you have to make it real.,” said Anger. “You have to make it so that when they stand up, and when they cross somewhere, and when they’re turning on someone, that it looks right and it doesn’t look like you’ve created a moment out of thin air. It’s really about motivation.”

Anger added that part of the solution was making sure the actors and their characters were very distinct. “You have to make sure that each one is very specific so you know that you don’t have three men of a certain age all acting the same and sounding the same. You have to make sure their timbre is different, you have to make sure their attitudes are clear – you have to let them play.”

There are obvious parallels between the characters on the stage and the current political climate. From Harding’s good-natured inability to get things done, to Ford’s belief as an outsider businessman that he – and only he – knows the right way to fix the country, the play is shockingly topical for something written over 20 years ago.

Mark Hinds, who originally brought the play to Onstage, said that its topicality was one of the things that interested him in putting on the play.

“It takes place a hundred years ago and yet it’s still relevant today,” said Hinds. “This is a very interesting glimpse into the past and an intriguing look at how times may change, but politics does not.”

“Camping With Henry and Tom” is a smart, funny, thoughtful character study that’s worth a watch.

By SCOTT BABA
Art and Entertainment Editor

Onstage Theater Company premiered its last play of the season at the Campbell Theater on Friday with “The Fitting Room,” a vibrant and ambitious work by local playwright Kathryn G. McCarty.

“The Fitting Room” is an intriguing piece of theater, and feels almost experimental in nature. It isn’t so much a single cohesive tale as it is a lightning-fast succession of single-act stories all set in the same place, the ladies fitting room of a trendy department store.

The play happens in real time with no scene breaks (except, arguably, the intermission). Over the course of it, characters come and go, try on different clothes, chat with their friends and with strangers and themselves, and basically live their lives – at least that slim portion of it that happens in a changing room.

With a couple of exceptions, the characters and their stories don’t appear more than once (though the actors do, with most of them playing four or five different characters). Each episode stands alone, and by and large are compelling enough to hold their own. The characters talk about – and sometimes live through – the problems they’re dealing with, the little tragedies that have recently befallen them, and the big things they’re planning.

Throughout the play, each little vignette that happens in the fitting room feel natural, a true slice of life.

Some of the stories are cute, like the father taking his daughter shopping for her first prom dress.

Others are poignant, like the story of the woman and her gay best friend, discussing all the people they knew who they’ve lost to AIDS.

Many aren’t even really stories, but just fun little moments, like the girl trying to force herself into a pair of pants that clealry don’t fit.

Most are edged with a bright sense of humor, and if any particular scene fails to land, the jokes and gags keep the momentum going.

McCarty, who also co-directed the production with Helen Means, originally wrote the play two decades ago. She said that her original inspiration for the play was her own experiences.

“Everything I write, no matter what the subject matter, I tend to pick something from my own life,” McCarty said, “something that bothers me or things that I want to see changed.”

McCarty added that the transformative nature of the fitting room made it an ideal setting to explore different facets of peoples lives.

“I have a thing about clothes, which I think most women do,” she said, “putting them on, changing them, trying this or that – I’m just fascinated by them, and how they change people and make people act.”

Rhonda Bowen plays Barbera, one of the few reoccuring characters, a woman using retail therapy to numb the pain of a recent life trauma. Bowen said that she enjoyed the play, and having the McCarty as one of the directors.

“I think Kathryn’s done a wonderful job,” Bowen said. “It’s been really wonderful to have the playwright also directing because it really adds something. She takes things from our characterizations and builds on it and develops it further.”

Hayley Kennen plays five different characters in the play, and said that there was an authenticity that shone through in a way that more traditional plays lacked.

“I really like it. It’s something I’ve never seen before,” Cannon said. “It’s very realistic, because it does feel like the audience is looking through a glass and looking into a fitting room to see kind of what goes on.”

Evelyn Owens also plays a number of different characters, and said that ultimately the structure of the play informed the central theme of it.

“It’s about life,” Owen said. “A lot of these character are talking about life issues in the dressing room and kind of figuring things out, wanting their friends input, wondering why the guy doesn’t call her. So just kind of all of these things that we have in our everyday life come together on the stage.”

Come see “The Fitting Room” for a fun, diverse, thoughtful mix of stories.

There’s magic on the stage at the Campbell Theater with Plotline Theater Company’s newest play, the enchanting comedic drama “Bell, Book and Candle.”

Originally penned in 1950 by John Van Druten, the play was later adapted into the well-known Academy Award nominated film of the same name, featuring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.

Randy Anger, who directed and produced the Campbell performance, said that he was originally inspired to do the play because of his love for the movie.

“Bell Book and Candle has been one of my favorite movies forever,” said Anger. “I just said, ‘I know it’s from a play,’ so I looked it up, and I went, ‘the play’s better than the movie, scriptwise.’ I mean it just focuses so much on these important characters.”

The play centers around the life of Gillian Holoryd (Anna Oglesby-Smith), the young and attractive landlady of an apartment complex, who is also a witch – literally. She and her Aunt Queeny (Jennifer Lynn Brown Peabody) and her brother Nicky (IanWilcox) are all members of a society of magic users living hidden in plain sight in 1950s New York.

Gillian has just returned from an extended trip to Mexico and has discovered, upon her return, a certain dissatisfaction with her life. She doesn’t want to visit her regular haunts or hang out with her regular friends, and can’t quite identify why. She also finds herself attracted to her new upstairs tenant, Sheperd Henderson (Edwin Peabody).

Sheperd sees her as nothing more than a landlady, although she piques his interest when she tells him she may be able to get him in contact with Sidney Redlitch (Jerry Motta), an author exploring the world of the supernatural that his publishing company wants to sign.

Gillian is a smart and careful witch, and while she would normally avoid using her magic in a flashy or impetuous way – and indeed, berates Aunt Queeny for doing so early in the play – when she discovers that Henderson is romantically involved with her college rival, she decides to make him hers, casting a spell to make him fall madly in love with her.

But while things appear to work out for her initially, magic in Van Druten’s world is not simple or straightforward. It does not upend the laws of physics or make possible that which could not have happened, and sits uneasily with human emotion. And when a literary collaboration between Sidney Redlitch and Gillian’s brother Nicky threatens to expose her witch side to Sheperd, everyone – especially Gillian – learns exactly how dangerous it is to try and blur the line between magic and love.

Throughout, the play makes copious use of both comedy and drama, with a wealth of lighthearted quips and jokes wrapped around a core of emotional depth. And though the romance starts with a magic spell, it eventually takes on a life of its own. Edwin Peabody said that the chemistry between Van Druten’s characters make the play work.

“The relationship between Gillian and Shepherd is really what drew me to this play to begin with. They really enjoy each other’s company, and you see it in the writing. ”

The cast is phenomenal, bringing the somewhat fantastical script down to earth. Motta and Jennifer Lynn Brown Peabody mostly play their characters for laughs, and earn them well. Wilcox plays Nicky as a mischievous Puck-like figure, happy to enjoy any chaos or misfortune around him as long as it amuses him.

Wilcox said he enjoyed playing the character.

“He’s a fun one, because he’s this devil-may-care flamboyant guy – he has fun with life, and that is always a pleasure to play.”

Campbell veteran Edwin Peabody is a joy to watch, first as the straight man muggle, and later as a man enchanted, groping around the outline of something being wrong, but unable to identify it.

But it is Oglesby-Smith who steals the show as Gillian, She makes Gillian and her journey of love and loss real, and character growth that could have felt two-dimensional in someone else’s hands is rich and textured in hers.

Oglesby-Smith said that Gillian’s transformation was one of the most interesting parts of the role.

“I love how layered she is; I love discovering new moments for her,” she said. “It’s challenging. It’s very difficult to do it in a way that’s subtle enough, but is also impactful enough so that you notice the difference in her between act one and act three, but it doesn’t feel abrupt.”

Ultimately, “Bell, Book and Candle” is pure magic.

By SCOTT BABA
Art and Entertainment Editor

One-person plays are always a little hectic, and “I Am My Own Wife,” Onstage Theater’s newest play at the Campbell, is no exception. Actor Randall Nott wears a single costume throughout the play, and while the set has a number of distinct locales, they shift fluidly from one to the next, sometimes from sentence to sentence.

Nott bounces from character to character and scene to scene, and for the first few minutes, before the voices have settled into distinct personalities and time and place assert themselves, it is all a little disorienting. But after a few moments the chaos retreats, and out of it emerges the fascinating story of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, the real-life antiquarian, museum curator, and one of the most celebrated transvestites of the 20th century.

Charlotte was born Lothar Berfelde in Berlin, Germany, in 1928. From a young age Charlotte felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body. Over the course of her life she managed to survive as an open transvestite under both the Nazis and the East German communists. While living under the communists, she gathered household items from bombed out houses and the belongings of those who had fled to the west, creating a historical collection of every-day items. Her collection eventually evolved into the Gründerzeit Museum, which she curated until she left Germany in 1997.

Charlotte’s life story is interesting enough in and of itself, but the play is framed as something of a story-within-a-story, with the playwright Doug Wright inserting his own experience discovering Charlotte at the Gründerzeit Museum in 1993, and his decision to write about her.

Wright – a self-professed gay man from the Bible belt – is astounded and moved by Charlotte’s history of flourishing as an LGBT outsider under the most adverse of circumstances, and telling her story becomes his obsession. But even as Wright finds himself more and more invested in Charlotte’s story, cracks begin to appear in her narrative about her own life, and Wright – both as character and writer – must wrestle with ideas of truth and trust and where the greatest value of a story lies.

The play flits between narrative styles, from written correspondence to conversational dialogue to storytelling direct from Charlotte to the audience. This mixed bag of narration allows Nott to show his range as he dances between 36 different characters in a variety of different circumstances, depicting their stories in a variety of different ways.

Of the many characters, Charlotte is the most distinct. Nott plays her with a restrained vulnerability, carefully riding the line between feminine and masculine. Wright is played as a young man, idealistic and excited. Also standout is John Marks, a world-weary journalist and mutual acquaintance between Charlotte and Wright.

Director Helen Means said that the way the play was written, it was all up to Nott to give life to all the different characters.

“You can’t use a lot of costuming or anything to separate the characters,” said Means. “It’s written for you to really use your voice, or a slight prop. Besides [Charlotte] there’s only one other costume. You have to work on the different varieties of voice, and the speed.”

Nott said working out those details was one of the most interesting parts of doing the play.

“The biggest challenge is coming up with a unique voice for each character – or at least semi unique. A lot of the soldiers and officals sort of blend together, because they’re all almost – you might even say they’re Hogans Heroes type sterotypes on those little small roles, because you just have to make a quick impression, and figuring those out and trying to keep them separate is the challenge.”

“I Am My Own Wife” won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Tony Award for Best Play, but Nott said he’d wanted to do the play before it had won any accolades.

“I’d actually seen the play on Broadway when it first moved there before all the awards came out, and I knew it was something that I wanted to attempt at some point in the future,” said Nott. “It’s just one of those actors roles that’s a real challenge. And it’s got a great story, and a lot of potential to play with it.”

Nott added that he also wanted to do the play to explore Charlotte’s story.

“I like how it deals with outsiders and how they have a voice and have survived in the most dangerous times,” said Nott.

Nott also said he thought it was important that the play explored the more complicated side of Charlotte’s history.

“When Doug Wright was writing it, he basically got halfway into writing this play, and he had this whole plot line in his head about Charlotte as a hero,” said Nott. But when the darker aspects of Charlotte’s story came out, “he suddenly realized that life is pretty complex. And we should show that too. And that’s [a theme] he talks about too, how things should be preserved how they are. And that’s life.”

Ultimately Nott’s myriad performances combine with Charlotte’s strange uplifting empowering discomfiting life story, creating a memorable and powerful performance well worth watching.

“White Guy On the Bus,” the new play being produced by Women of Words Productions at the Campbell Theater, is probably best described as “complex.” Unabashedly racially and politically charged, the play is in turns thought-provoking, insightful, and infuriating, depending on your point of view and political leaning. But regardless of how you feel about it, it is certainly an engaging piece of theater.

Written by Bruce Graham (you may recall his gentle and poignant “Outgoing Tide” that was produced at the Campbell by Edwin Peabody a couple of years ago), the play spirals around the life of Ray (Avi Jacboson), a well-to-do financial adviser married to Roz (Lisa Luttinger), a teacher who works with underprivileged children of color in the inner city. They spend much of their time with Christopher (Moses Kaplan), a young semi-adopted friend of the family working on his dissertation about the imagery of black men in the media, and his new wife Molly (Lauren Kelley), herself an educator at a school of well-off, predominantly white children. It is probably worth mentioning that all of these characters are white.

In the beginning, the play devotes much of its time bouncing these upper-class white people off of each other as they hold a number of conversations about race, privilege, bias, and the value (or lack thereof) of political correctness. The play especially pits the jaded and cynical (and sometimes crass) Roz against the more liberal, idealistic (and, the play argues, naïve) Molly.

As the play progresses, these philosophical discussions begin to be interspersed with seemingly innocuous scenes of Ray riding the bus in an inner city neighborhood, striking up a friendship over the course of weeks with Shatique (Chelsea Bearce), a black nurse trying desperately to make ends meet in order to provide for her son.

The gentle, almost conversational tone of the play is shattered midway through when racial violence intrudes on Ray’s idyllic life, and the story takes a turn into territory that is much darker, much uglier, and much more engrossing.

To reveal more would spoil the powerful and discomfiting second act, but sufficed to say that much of the intellectual theories discussed earlier in the play are put into brutal practice later on.

Theresa Deed and Gwendolyn Sampson, the founders of the Women of Words theater company, produced the play. Deed and Sampson are both African-Americans, and said that one of the reasons they chose to stage “White Guy On the Bus” was to spark a conversation about race.

“Most of our dramas – especially the ones in February, because it’s Black History Month – we always do something that’s for everyone,” said Deed. “Even though it’s about black people or the things that we’re facing or the things that we’ve dealt with or our accomplishments, I want the audience to leave where there’s a dialogue – there’s communication. I want people that don’t look like me to understand our people. I want them to know that we have true struggles.”

Sampson said she hoped the audience would be able to engage with the characters, even in their darkest moments.

“I think with this play, at least we’ll get people thinking, and hopefully – our hope – is the communication,” Sampson said. “People get to talking, they think about it, they go home, maybe they marinade on it a little bit, and think about, ‘What would I do?’”

Sampson added that she knew people would react strongly to the play. “It’s pretty edgy. It’s not for the fainthearted. I don’t think it’s politically correct at all. I think it’s really in your face, and it’s going to make you do some self-reflecting.”

Directors Kevin Kennedy and Carol Bower-Foote agreed that engaging the audience was a large part of what made the play interesting.

“We want to have a talkback session at some point along the way during the run of this show just to see what really hit these people,” said Kennedy. “We know it’s going to provoke questions – it may provoke anger, it may even provoke some people walking out. I don’t know what to expect. That’s going to be the challenge, but kind of the fun of doing it.”

Story aside, the production itself is a masterpiece. Directors Kevin Kennedy and Carol Bower-Foote make deft use of lighting and placement to fit seven separate locations onto one relatively small stage without cramping or distracting one space from the next.

This comes in handy as the “White Guy On the Bus” is something of a memory play, weaving fluidly in and out of different moments in Ray’s life, not always in a linear way. The tight staging allows for a minimum of scene breaks, letting the moments to slip together naturally, and keeping the momentum building throughout.

The acting is also excellent throughout. Luttinger’s Roz rides a fine line between callousness and vulnerability. Kelley as Molly exudes well-meaning naivete, and Kaplan’s Christopher displays a love for the other characters that is bright and infectious. Bearce as Shatique is probably the most grounded character, more interested in getting through the day than having complicated conversations about race, and her world weariness feels real.

But it is Jacobson who steals the show as Ray, a man who is loving, patient, and even wise – until he isn’t. The transformation of his character over the course of the play could have played as schizophrenic, but in Jacobson’s hands the change instead feels natural and revelatory, like turning over a stone and finding the wet darkness that was always underneath.

“White Guy On the Bus” will make you examine your own opinions about race. It will not be gentle in doing so. It will make you uncomfortable. And maybe that’s necessary. Maybe that’s the best reason of all to go see it.

Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker,” now playing at the Campball Theater in Martinez, defies simple definition.

It would be completely fair to label the play as a farce – it is, after all, extraordinarily farcical, with slapstick, confused identities, ridiculously unlikely coincidences and a brief moment of low-grade accidental crossdressing.

The play is a classic comedy, too, with snappy dialogue, clever situational bits, and zinging one-liners.

It could also be classified as a romance, as there is romance in abundance. And not just a single story about falling in love, but many – all of them exploring different reasons and circumstances and perspectives on why and how affection might bloom.

If you’re looking for social commentary you will find it here, with a quiet but biting exploration of economic distress and personal worth and the place and power of women.

In the end, these labels are all inadequate to contain the many myriad elements of this play, which combine to form a delightful whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Though popular in its day – its original Broadway performance ran for over a year and netted two Tony awards – “The Matchmaker” has since come to be eclipsed by its well-known musical remake “Hello, Dolly!” as well as Wilder’s more critically acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning plays “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

First premiering in 1954, it was already old on its first night, being a rewrite of Wilder’s 1938 play “The Merchant of Yonkers” – itself an adaptation of an 1835 one-act farce.

Set in the early 20th century, the play follows an ensemble of characters whose lives orbit Horace Vandergelder (John Blytt), an ornery miser who has made his fortune as a goods merchant in Yonkers, New York.

Vandergelder’s niece and ward Ermengarde (Anne Baker) is in love with the artist Ambrose Kemper (Nick Sears), but Vandergelder believes that an artist would be incapable of supporting a wife and has refused to consider the match and plans to send Ermengarde away to New York City to separate the couple.

Vandergelder has also planned his own trip to New York with his new apprentice Malachai Stack (Brian Hulse) to explore the possibility of finding a wife for himself, something he desires more for economic reasons than romantic ones.

His quest is being facilitated by the eponymous matchmaker, Dolly Levi (Jeanine Perasso), who has her fingers in everyone’s business and appears to have ulterior motives for everything she says and does.

At the top of Vandergelder’s list is Irene Malloy (Marissa Clarke-Howard), a young widow who works in the hat shop she owns with her assistant Minne Fay (Melissa Momboisse). Malloy is tired of her business and her lifestyle both, and is willing to consider any means of escape, even Vandergelder.

When Levi stumbles on Ermengarde and Kemper debating a possible elopement, she convinces them to leave for New York together, but to hold off on the marriage until she can arrange to get them Vandergelder’s unlikely blessing.

Added to the mix is Cornelius Hackl (Matthew R. King), Vandergelder’s chief clerk (recently promoted from chief clerk with no increase in wages, benefits, or time off), who is frustrated with his humble clerk life and takes advantage of Vandergelder’s absence to drag fellow clerk Barnaby Tucker (Thomas Spadini) to the city so that they can have at least one night of adventure in their dreary lives.

Before long everyone is in New York, and as the evening wears on their lives bounce and tangle and weave together with rising and hilarious improbability, nudged along occasionally by the mischievous Dolly Levi.

Though a period piece (doubly so, in a way, considering it was set 50 years before it was written, over 50 years ago), the language is surprisingly fresh and modern, and the jokes still land well (“Do you want to earn five dollars?” Vandergelder asks a cabbie. “I don’t know,” replies the cabbie, “I’ve never tried.”).

What makes the play shine, however, is the characters themselves, who are all both flawed and brimming with hope and potential. Watching as they spin and scramble and try to fly, it is almost impossible not to cheer for them.

Spadini said that the fumbling antics of the characters felt very real to him.

“I think that there’s a lot going on in this play that reflects what’s going on in our society today,” Spadini said, “with questions like: are you worth what you’re making or is there something more to you? Is your life just the collection of money that you have or is it the company you keep? Is it the love that you have accrued over the years?”

Director Kim Doppe said that the richness of the characters is something that drew her so strongly to the play.

“That was one of the things that was very important to me – to be able to start out with sort of these strong caricatures, but then have these very solid humans underneath it,” said Doppe, “where they’re flawed but also wonderful all the way through.”

Clarke-Howard agreed, and said that the way all the characters played off of each other was one of her favorite aspects of the play.

“I love the interactions,” she said. “I love how we get to just grow as characters together, and find comfort in each other.”

The performances bringing these characters to life are also excellent.

King makes Hackl believable as mouse of a man who thinks a night on the town is a last desperate chance to snatch the life he’s always wanted from the jaws of mediocrity – and then makes it so. King said Hackl was an enjoyable character to find.

“He’s a little bit nervous – I have a little bit of that, that’s helpful to bring out,” King said. “I love that he loves; his love is a strong one and a pure one so I find that interesting to pull forth because I have a little darkness in me and he has none.”

Blytt’s Vandergelder is enjoyable grumpy. Blytt said that playing Vandergelder has been a longtime dream.

“I’ve wanted to play Horace for a long time,” B lytt said. “I wanted to play him in Hello Dolly for years and years, but then this came along and he’s really a much better character in this as he has lots more to do. I don’t get to yell at people in real life, so this is my chance.”

The cornerstone of the play, of course, is the matchmaker Dolly Levi, a woman who is part con artist, part puppetmaster, part fairy godmother. Though Vandergelder thinks that he’s in control, it’s her machinations that drive much of the story, and her gentle pushes that brings everything together.

Perasso said that Dolly was an interesting juxtaposition to play.

“I like the way that she’s a mixture of management and serendipity mixed together,” Perasso said. “It makes her almost magical, like Mary Poppins, where things just happen, and yet she also works her way around into making sure things go in the way she wants them to.”

Ultimately, Levi – and all the characters – bring home a smart, funny, surprisingly tender and deeply human exploration of what it means to take a chance and pursue one’s happiness.

“The Matchmaker” should not be missed.

By SCOTT BABA
Art and Entertainment Editor

Women of Words premiered its sixth show at the Campbell Theater this weekend, opening “Dearly Departed” on Friday, a goofy southern comedy about life, death, and family.

Written by David Dean Bottrell and Jessie Jones, “Dearly Departed” premiered in New Haven Connecticut in 1991, and that same year gained critical acclaim for an off broadway production in New York. Bottrell and Jones quickly adapted their play for the big, and wrote a script for the film adaptation “Kingdom Come,” which came out in 2001.

Set in a town that is unnamed but, according to the authors, “somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line,” the play explores the troubles of life after death – for those left behind to pick up the pieces.

In many ways, the play is rooted in Bud Turpin (Jeff Sloan), the grumpy, impersonal, uncommunicative father of three – although Bud is only on stage for about five minutes before he abruptly keels over dead mid-breakfast. What follows is two hours of charming farce, as the entire squabbling Turpin clan comes together, trying to put together the funeral of a man nobody had an easy relationship with.

Bud’s widow Raynelle (Lisa Luttinger), for example, has spent much of the past 30 years unhappily married to him, and when asked by the Pastor to describe him for the eulogy, sums him up simply as “mean and ornery.”

Marguerite (Cecelia Warick), Bud’s sister, is a devout Christian, the kind who is judmental and overbearing, who will brook no taking of the Lord’s name in vain and who sings hymns down the phone at her wayward son Royce (Moses Kaplan) in hope that it will somehow reform him. Bud’s apathy towards religion and lack of a dedicated church has been a point of contention between them for years, and now, at the event of his death, she finds herself worried about the state of his immortal soul.

Bud’s children appear to remember him with a little more fondness, but they have problems of their own. His daughter Delightful (Kaitlyn McCoy) is taciturn and unresponsive to those around her. His son Junior (Tony Rocha) has lost everything on an unsuccessful business venture, and, partly due to that, his marriage with wife Suzanne (Alicia Rydman) has hit an extremely rough patch. Bud’s other son, Ray-Bud (Scott Poitras), is a recovering alcoholic who is stressed out by the death of his father and the financial burden of the funeral, which nobody else seems bothered by, because nobody else will be paying for it. Ray-Bud’s wife Lucille (April Wright-Hickerson) is the most grounded member of the whole family, trying her best to hold everything and everyone together through the conclusion of the funeral. But her good-natured sensibility is itself a mask to hider her own long-standing pain.

Writers Bottrell and Jones keep a light hand on the narrative tiller, never forcing the plot hard in any particular direction. Instead they spend much of the play relying on the characters themselves to do the heavy lifting in small intimate – often intensely funny – scenes, telling the story in these individual moments between husband and wife, mother and son, brother and brother.

The cast does a fine job with these interactions, breathing life into the characters and making real both their dysfunction and love for one another.

Director Clinton Vidal said that these family interactions were the heart of the play, despite its outward appearance of being about death.

“The funeral is just the backdrop for the family getting together to take care of the arrangements, but it’s not done in a way that’s morose or sad – it has all of these other things going on – the inter-family dynamics,” Vidal said. “These people all love each other despite their little foibles. So it’s got a nice theme of love conquering all.”

Producers Gwendolyn Sampson and Theresa Deed agreed, and argued that in fact the family and funereal elements of the play dovetailed nicely.

“The comedy about a funeral is pretty funny in the quirky way it’s being presented,” said Sampson. “I think all families go through something like this in funerals – maybe not to the same degree, but I think everybody can relate to something in this play.”

“At the end of the day, they love each other,” added Deeds, “But, I mean, what family isn’t dysfunctional, right?”

Ultimately, “Dearly Departed” is a fun comedy for anyone who has ever needed a reminder about why they love the ones they love.

Onstage Theater closes out its 40th season this month with “A Funny Little Thing Called Love” at the Campbell Theater, a series of one-act plays written by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten, the writing trio that is sometimes collectively know as Jones Hope Wooten.

Jones Hope Wooten are some of the most prolific writers in modern theater, and their work is no stranger to Martinez.

Campbell regulars may recognize the punchy, fast-paced, quip-filled style of writing in “A Funny Little Thing Called Love” as similar to other plays put on locally, like “Christmas Belles,” Onstage Theater’s semi-regular end-of-the-year holiday production.

“A Funny Little Thing Called Love” contains five standalone one-act comedies with a wildly diverse range of settings and characters.

In the quick introductory tale, “Love Is On the Air,” a newsroom reports on the beautiful full moon shining down, and its enchanting magic which is said to bring lovers together.

In “The Lone Star Ladies’ Justice Brigade,” a man’s evening goes sideways when he is suddenly brought face to face with the consequences of his romantic adventurism.

A newlywed couple find their relationship under strain when their Hawaiian honeymoon is unexpectedly interrupted in “A Hono-lulu of a Honeymoon.”

In “A Little Brit of Romance,” a quiet evening at a rooftop cafe in London is interrupted by the turbulent relationship troubles of an Oklahoman woman and her fiance, which draws in everyone present as unwilling participants.

The final play, “Upper West Side Story,” is a delightful escalation comedy as one man’s attempt to prepare the perfect evening to propose spirals inexorably out of control.

The nature of the multi-play format means that there are a wide variety of stories, styles, and characters, and some of the individual one-acts can be hit and miss, depending on personal preference.

But if not every play is for every audience member, the selection is also wide enough here that everyone will definitely be able to find something they enjoy. And Jones Hope Wooten, who got their start in sitcoms, keep the quips, jokes and physical gags flowing well enough that, should any particular narrative fall flat, the comedy still remains constant.

Actor Randall Nott said that the fast pace and humor of “A Funny Little Thing Called Love” was an interesting stylistic choice.

“It is very much TV style comedy, sitcom stuff, setups for one-liners and character bits we know,” Nott said. “It’s classic in many ways, I guess – cheap in many others. It’s kind of going back and forth, rides the line between them.”

Nott said that the tone matched the lighthearted series of stories well.

“The silliness of it seems to be an ongoing theme – that you can just let that go and have fun with it,” he said.

Throughout the play, common themes and symbols weave the five distinct tales into a cohesive whole. Every story revolves around love and relationships in some fashion, although usually in a roundabout way that subverts classic tropes and expectations of the romance genre.

“A Hono-lulu of a Honeymoon,” for example, sidesteps the courtship phase entirely, and begins after the wedding, choosing instead to explore the “after” in “happily ever after,” and the learning curve required to reconcile two previously separate lives into one new whole.

Another surprising rejection of traditional romance in “A Funny Little Thing Called Love” is the age of its characters. Nobody in the play represents the usual “young lovers” archetype. Instead, most of the characters are apparently well into their middle age. Many of them have been married before, some multiple times. Everyone seems a little bit battered by life, and little bit broken. There’s a vulnerability to these characters, a knowledge of what it’s like to have been burned before, and a willingness to face the flames again anyway. It’s an aspect of the play that’s surprisingly refreshing, and which makes the romance all the sweeter.

Director Edwin Peabody said that the age and experience of the characters was something that drew him to the play, and something he wanted to share.

“I thought it was important to kind of realize that a lot of people this age, 40s and 50s, are experiencing these things as well,” said Peabody. “And it is a funny little thing called love, especially when you’re older. Because you have a history and you have a past, but at the same time, each of these characters that fall in love, they enter into it really honestly, versus some kind of comic way to get in.”

Peabody added, “It’s like people are realizing – through comedy, or through all this craziness – that they all just want to be together, not alone.”

The cast pulls double and triple duty throughout the performance. Other productions of the play have fielded as many as 30 different actors, but Onstage chose to take a more minimalist approach, with only ten actors playing all the parts, everyone weaving deftly between the many stories and characters.

Jennifer Lynn Brown Peabody, who plays four different characters, said that switching between everything was complex, but fun. “I think it’s hilarious. It’s fun because I get to play four different people,” she said. “I have to figure out which one I’m going to be next. It’s like multiple personalities.”

Delaney Duquesne, who also plays four different characters, said that it took some time to develop each unique character.

“In the beginning I found that I was very one-note,” she said. “But now that I’ve worked with them so much, I find that it’s a lot easier to access them.”

Meanwhile, Remington Stone, who plays three different characters (including two of the romantic leads), said he was just happy to be here.

“I usually play villains, so this is a complete departure for me,” Stone said. “Playing normal, wholesome people, kissing people on stage – that never happens.”

Though the narratives can be a little uneven from one play to the next, there’s definitely something for everyone in this fun, funny, heartwarming collection of comedies currently playing at the Campbell Theater.