THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 1, 1996 TAG: 9603010056
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, THEATER CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
IN THE BEST Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney tradition of ``let's put on a show,'' the backers of The Actors' Theater have taken up hammer and nail and turned a former men's clothing store into a theater. It represents, in the best sense, the determination of this troupe to keep on the boards.
The group, which actually PAYS its actors, performed at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts for its first two seasons. It tried one show at a recreation center before finding a new home at Pembroke Mall. It's a great idea.
The best thing about the new location is its visibility. In a modern America in which malls have largely replaced downtowns as the center of community life, it's appropriate that live theater should be an ingredient. Pembroke Mall's managers are smart in adopting the group. More than just an example of ``community backing,'' the theater can serve the mall well by luring in mall holdouts. (Because I was at the mall for the show, I bought a copy of the collected works of George Burns, which I would not have otherwise seen, or bought.)
On the minus side, the ``theater'' is a tiny, shoebox space that is cramped both on stage and in the seating. Since the theater itself is very much a work in progress, there is hope that imaginative architects, or just plain hard workers, will be able to do wonders with this limited space. Wonders will be needed.
Also on the minus side is the rather weak and hackneyed comedy, ``Social Security,'' which is the opening production at the new location.
The Andrew Bergman comedy is a stereotyped family comedy that smacks of TV's ``Golden Girls.''
As a vehicle for Marlo Thomas, it had a modest run on Broadway. It has the kind of would-be wisecracks aimed at the New York matinee crowd who didn't notice that the crackling noise of their shopping bags drowned out some lines. With an abundance of ethnic jokes, it is nothing if not obvious.
The paper-thin plot involves the question of what to do with mother. She's 75 and she's feisty. She's been staying with the stuffy, plain sister in suburban New York for years. Now, stuffy sister's daughter is missing from her college dorm and reportedly living with not one, but two, men in (gasp!) some variation of sin. Rushing to the rescue, the stuffy sister and her stuffy husband drop off Mom at the ``sophisticated'' sister's chic apartment on New York's East Side. This, of course, produces problems.
The cast, under the direction of Jonathan Marten, has to work hard to breathe much life into this limited situation. For the most part, they play it broadly.
Lesa Azimi scores best as the perplexed city sister, who is an art dealer. She brings some semblance of New York frustration to the part - a consciousness of ``position'' that amounts to turning her back on her family background.
Charles Burgess escapes unbowed in his assignment to play a 95-year-old artist who is remarkably famous and rich. He even brings a suggestion of loneliness and grand authority that would make an affair with the 75-year-old mother both believable and poignant. (Didn't Neil Simon create a much funnier, but almost identical, Geritol couple in the play ``Barefoot in the Park''?)
Given the most overwritten role, Jeanne Foster suggests little of actual age or flamboyance in the role of Sophie, the old lady who creates all the trouble.
Foster is either a good sport or an exhibitionist; one scene has her sporting something like a Madonna-style cone bra, plus the requisite girdle.
Kelly Klaers and Joel Ladd manage no more than the expected double takes as the stuffy couple. Joseph Mahler, a local theater veteran workhorse, does about all that could be done, which isn't much, with the role of sophisticated sister's wisecracking husband.
It is unfortunate that the script makes so much of the fact that the setting is the home of chic art collectors because the budget, and the space, only allow for extremely sparse furnishings (including a threadbare curtain that obviously doesn't hide a window). The lighting problems haven't yet been solved, but obviously will be. The costuming, however, reportedly with the aid of retail neighbors in the mall, is quite spiffy.
The possibilities of the Actors' Theater's new home are limitless. This, after all, is a beginning. If nothing else, the move now allows us to again find this energetic and hard-working group of actors. Their new location makes them extremely accessible.
Now, they must give us something worth seeing. ILLUSTRATION: THEATER REVIEW
What: ``Social Security,'' the comedy by Andrew Bergman
Where: The Actors' Theater, Pembroke Mall, Virginia Beach
Who: Directed by Jonathan Marten, featuring Lesa Azimi, Joseph
Mahler, Jeanne Foster, Kelly Klaers, Joel Ladd, Charles Burgess
When: Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.
through March 17
Tickets: $10; $8 seniors, military and fulltime students; $5
children under 12.
Call: 422-6694
by CNB