Two Plays at Lenox

David Begelman

            Question: what do Joe Penthal’s Blue/Orange and Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing have in common as dramas? Answer: nothing much. The former is a serious play about two psychiatrists who clash over the treatment of a mental patient; the latter is a comedy about a group of zany theater people who, aboard a steamer with its share of nautical kinks, squabble over the production of a musical. The ship is a heaving vessel forcing passengers to retain their precarious balance on it by careening to and fro on deck in order to avoid falling flat on their faces.

On the other hand, both plays utilize the considerable talents of three actors: Jason Asprey, who plays a fledgling psychiatrist in one play (Bruce), and a hilariously wry playwright with a proclivity for the well-timed quip in another (Alex); Malcolm Ingram, who plays a smug and nerdy supervising physician in one play (Robert), and a haughty actor exuding pseudo-suavity in another (Ivor); and LeRoy McClain, an agitated psychiatric patient in one play (Christopher), and in the other, an off balance waiter with a genius for script writing and an appetite for slugging down cognacs on the slightest pretext (Dvorncheck).

The surprise is that you’d never know each of these actors performed in both plays. This speaks volumes about the individual talents of the three, and there is something to be said about acting skill as the degree to which an audience fails to realize that it is the same person in separate roles. Mr. McClain in particular may be extremely funny wobbling across the deck in Rough Crossing, tray in hand; he was stunningly charismatic in Blue/Orange as a black psychiatric patient whose problems are compounded by the conflict between his two supervisors. Mr. McClain’s performance oozed reality out of every pore. For this reviewer, his was not only a memorable portrayal, but possibly the finest one of the entire season at Lenox.

            Other actors in Rough Crossing included Bill Barclay (who designed the sound for this season’s Antony and Cleopatra, and is a multi-talented resource for the company) playing Adam Adam, a composer who has one hell of a time avoiding pratfalls and getting a sentence out past a stutter that seems to last forever before giving up; Elizabeth Aspenlieder, in the role of a somewhat dotty and histrionic actress no one could possibly confuse with Greta Garbo because of her thick Slavic accent (she also does double duty as Public Relations Director for Shakespeare & Company); and especially Jonathan Croy, who turned in a jewel of a portrayal as another playwright whose exasperated appeals to his performers to get it right sends him into paroxysms of frustration. All performers in Tom Stoppard’s play delighted an audience that greeted the comic moments on stage with belly laughs and standing ovations at the exuberant curtain call. Sheer hilarity. So much for the immensely talented casts. What about the plays themselves?

            Mr. Penthall’s Blue/Orange deserves to be seen because of the importance of the issues it broaches. The writing on occasion becomes a bit talky or preachy, especially when characters make forays into psychiatric philosophy. Despite this, the play does confront issues that are profound and multi-layered. They include ethical questions arising over treatment approaches to patients; the problem of racism in psychiatry; and the problem of ascertaining truth. Momentous to be sure, such issues cannot be digested en masse without spreading oneself too thinly. Mr. Penthall’s play accordingly runs the risk of biting off more than it can chew.  It contrasts with the sharpened focus we find in plays about the treatment of black persons by Anthol Fugard, the masterful South African playwright. All the same, the theatergoer would benefit from exposure to Mr. Penthall’s spin on some fairly controversial topics.

            The two British psychiatrists in Blue/Orange, sometimes seem lost in a time-warp. They both have diagnosed their patient Christopher as “schizophrenic” and as having “borderline personality disorder,” apparently unaware that these two diagnoses are inconsistent for the same set of symptoms. And practitioners today might insist that the first order of business in a case of a patient who, like Christopher, sees oranges as blue (an image borrowed by Mr. Penthall from the French surrealist, Paul Eluard) is a neurological, not psychiatric determination. Possible brain malfunction of a diagnosable kind should be ruled out before a psychiatric disorder is even considered. And for someone suspected of “loose associations,” Christopher certainly has one hell of a set of dialectical skills keeping his shrinks off balance.

            Contrary to both Mr. Penthall’s  psychiatrists, being delusional does not by itself make Christopher “schizophrenic,” and his agitated behavior and grandiose thinking (he imagines he is the son of the tyrant of Uganda, Idi Amin) may be an expression of bipolar disorder. Ironically, in the past it was British, not American psychiatry, which retreated from overdiagnosing schizophrenia, a fad on this side of the Atlantic.         

Robert insists that “delusions” are created only through a cultural filter that biases our treatment of others, including black patients. The viewpoint has a sixtyish flavor. While cultural biases exist, they are hardly a basis for a wholesale rejection of the reality of a psychiatric disorder. Nor does the difficulty of determining a defendant’s guilt in court mean there is no such thing as murder. Finally, “neurosis” is a term that is currently bereft of any diagnostic utility, included though it is in the glossary of terms in the playbill that figure importantly in the play.

Rough Crossing is a playwriting escapade that is a sea change from Tom Stoppard’s mesmerizing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The writing gets rougher toward the end of the play when the shenanigans on board the steamer betray a glimmer of tedium, and the humor starts to trade a delightful Noel Coward/Cole Porter-style repartee (even the set could double for a production of Anything Goes) for the slapstick antics familiar in the farces of Georges Feydeau. Even so, the comedy has the audience at Shakespeare & Company’s Founder’s Theater virtually falling off its seats. Especially noteworthy are several of the song and dance numbers, culminating in a rollicking piece involving all cast members at curtain call.

All in all, if a playgoer were afoot for experiences that were intellectually challenging and side-splitting fun, then Blue/Orange and Rough Crossing fit the bill extraordinarily well. This reviewer had the pleasure of seeing them both in one day, in his opinion a satisfying recipe for taking the wind out of the sails of customary griping over daily tribulations.

Blue/Orange runs from July 5 through September 2; Rough Crossing from May 25 through September 2  at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240. Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at (413)-637-1199.