“The Decorator” / Theater Barn

AUDIENCES ENTERING THE THEATER BARN to see “The Decorator” are met with a deliberately ugly stage. There is a room with lavender-pinkish walls that were probably fine until the designer (on purpose!) put dirtyish earth-green drapes on the window and filled center stage with an antagonistic bluish-green sofa and matching chair. Some may hope that the title’s “decorator” will ply his trade before the end of the evening.

The decorator (played by Mark “Monk” Schane-Lydon) enters and prepares to paint walls. He seems a bit goofy. Perhaps he is going to be a character of questionable intelligence. Then he tunes his radio to a Mozart horn concerto and listens happily, so one can’t be sure.

When a nice-looking, possibly upper-class woman appears, first in a towel and then in a dowdy plaid skirt, with blouse hanging from under an appalling black-speckled jacket, hope for design and color-candy on the stage is squashed. Read more…

“Lillian” / Taconic Stage Company

A ONE- OR TWO-PERSON PLAY is a good fit for the beautiful little structure atop a hill in Copake Falls. At the Church of St. John in the Wilderness, artistic director of Taconic Stage Company, Carl Ritchie, has found a warm and elegant home for his smaller productions. This summer it is “Lillian,” a monologue-summary of the life of playwright Lillian Hellman, author of “Toys In the Attic,” “The Little Foxes,” “The Children’s Hour,” et al.

The author of “Lillian” is William Luce, who has attracted some of the century’s most interesting actors to his work: Julie Harris (twice), Zoe Caldwell, George C. Scott, Christopher Plummer, Eva Marie Saint, Geraldine Page. In Copake Falls his Lillian is Diedre Bollinger, a local favorite. They are all more than he may deserve.

Among other good things, Diedre Bollinger has voice. That probably doesn’t sound like radical praise, but because voice is the main vehicle for all the hard-fought reality that actors seek, it is radical praise. Bollinger’s voice, laced with meaning, does the exact amount of decibels for the space. She has clarity of diction—I should say “dictions,” as she goes all over the map with pitch, regionalisms, rhythms, and accents, making quick, easy transitions among the characters in Hellman’s life and carrying the story. Read more…

“Homebody/Kabul” / Ancram Opera House

PLAYWRIGHT TONY KUSHNER and actor Danielle Skraastad say it at least twice in his play, “Homebody/Kabul”: “I love the world!”

There is a spare yet generous look to the stage at Ancram Opera House. There are books and more books in piles tall and short. There is a cozy corner for the woman at home in London. (Her monologue is coming.) At the end of the play, there is an up-stage group of nicely lit, gray-sandy walls that summon up Kabul’s beauty and its dry, modern threat of non-life.

Watching Skraastad is like becoming an attentive therapist who listens to the outpourings of a patient’s teeming mind. The mind is not just neurotic; it is brilliant, funny, pathetic, informed, passionate, peripatetic, and, above all, world-loving. Read more…