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The Wonder is Wonderful
by Michael Bettencourt
The Wonder reviewed March 2, 2010
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| Abbi Hawk as Violante and Virginia Baeta as Don Felix |
| Photo Credit:Bob Pileggi |
| Written in 1714, Susanna Centlivre's The Wonder had a long life during the 18th century, even playing New York City in 1768, according to director Rebecca Patterson. The all-female cast of The Queen's Company (with a mission of creating "innovative productions of classical plays featuring all-female ethnically diverse casts") brings it back for an encore performance in a production that captures its bawdy and comedic thrust but doesn't quite tap into the darker undertones of Centlivre's story of two women seeking freedom for themselves in a patriarchal society.
Kip Marsh's clean-lined and open set and Miriam Crowe's soft-touch lighting provide just the right ambience for the playful mechanics of secret-keeping, misunderstanding lovers, the japes of servants, and the imperious bullheadedness of single fathers. At the center of this farcical maelstrom set in Lisbon, Portugal, are Violante (daughter of Don Lopez) and Isabella (daughter of Don Pedro). Violante loves Felix, Isabella's brother, but Felix wounds a man in a duel and has to flee Lisbon. When he finds out that the man will live and no charges will be brought against him, he returns to pursue his Violante, only to find her (he thinks) in love with another man.
She isn't, but Felix's perception comes about because Violante is helping Isabella to escape a marriage arranged by her father and find her true love, one Colonel Britton from Scotland, each of whom has captured the other's heart. Her iron-clad promise to keep Isabella's secret and act as her go-between makes her look as if she's cheating on Felix, who in turn sets out on his own quest to find the truth, acting with great highhandedness on exactly the wrong information.
Weaving through these upper-class intrigues are the servants' plottings, with Lissardo, Felix's man, angling to get as much ripe flesh as he can, especially from Flora, Violante's serving woman, and Inis, Isabella's serving woman (preferably at the same time, if he can manage it). Gibby, Colonel Britton's aide, is trying to satisfy his master's desire to find Isabella, but being a garbled-mouthed Scotsman in a Portuguese city, he has a rough time of it, led astray by the likes of Lissardo.
And so on and so on until all is unraveled, revealed, and tightly re-woven at the end of the play, with Violante getting Felix, Isabella getting Colonel Britton, and the servants making do with what they can get away with.
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| Amy Driesler (kneeling), Maryam Benganga, Valerie Redd, Annie Paul, Abbi Hawk, and Virginia Baeta |
| Photo Credit:Bob Pileggi |
| The performances are all done with great aplomb and verve. Abbi Hawk makes Violante a shrewd but not shrewish operator, a flexible diplomat in the masculine world who, nevertheless, never loses an iron resolve to live her life as she desires to live it. Valerie Redd's Isabella, though more dreamy and romantic than Violante, also has a spine that will not yield, and Ms. Redd nimbly walks the line between being a marshmallow and a hard-ass (exactly the qualities that draw Colonel Britton to her, suavely portrayed by Maryam Benganga).
On the servant side, Annie Paul's Flora channels a bit of Gracie Allen in her vocals and timing, and she almost steals the show with her lip-synching of Tina Turner's "When The Heartache Is Over" as she rejects a marriage proposal by Lissardo (played in full smarm by Amy Driesler). But Ms. Paul also has stiff competition in the "steal the show" department from Natalie Lebert. A "stocky lass," as her Scottish character Gibby might say, Ms. Lebert switches deftly from a demure serving wench (Inis) to the stern Alguazil (a Lisbon police officer) to a priest performing a double wedding to Gibby, the Colonel's manservant, who speaks in a Scottish so garbled that it could have used subtitles (think Robert Carlyle in Trainspotting).
The men's roles came off suitably masculine, with Virginia Baeta's Felix dreamy but fierce, and the two fathers (Julia Campanelli as Don Lopez and Jacqueline Poplar as Don Pedro) stern and blindered and casually unkind.
However, in a play as much about the malice of men as about the stubborn strength of women, it felt to me that having women play the male roles kept the production from accessing that level of Centlivre's work. The men in this play are cruel, none more so than Violante's father, who is willing to stick her away in a nunnery in order to steal money left in trust to her. But when Ms. Poplar says those words, they come across as just words -- forcefully said, to be sure, and articulate but not embodied in a way that makes us feel the cruelty, not just register it in our ears.
But this is an aesthetic discussion for another time. The Wonder is a wonder to behold, and it is wonderful to see Centlivre's work live again in our fair city.
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Kirk Theater (Theater Row)
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Category: Comedy
Written by: Susanna Centlivre
Directed by: Rebecca Patterson
Produced by: The Queen’s Company
Opened: February 26, 2010
Closed: March 14, 2010
Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with intermission)
Theater: Kirk Theater (Theater Row)
Address: 410 W 42nd St
New York, NY 10036
Yahoo! Maps Directions
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Tickets: $18.00
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Creative Team
Produced by: The Queen's Company
Written by: Susanna Centlivre
Directed by: Rebecca Patterson
Costume Design: Jeanette Aultz Look
Lighting Design by: Miriam Crowe
Sound Design by: Jane Shaw
Set Design by: Kip Marsh
Cast
Virginia Baeta as Vasquez/Felix/English Man
Maryam Benganga as Colonel Britton
Julia Campanelli as Don Lopez
Amy Driesler as Lissardo
Abbi Hawk as Violante
Natalie Lebert as Gibby/Inis/Alguazil
Annie Paul as Flora
Jacquelyn Poplar as Frederick/Don Pedro
Valerie Redd as Isabella/Servant
Crew
Stage Manager: Jeanne E. Travis
Scenic Technical Director: Andrew Kerr-Thompson
Assistant Costume Design by: Megan Q. Dudley
Fight Choreographer: Jill Ahrold
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