Alan Ayckbourn’s 1973 comic trilogy, The Norman Conquests, observes a family reunion at an English country from the living room, dining room and garden. The three plays, Living Together, Table Manners and Round and Round the Garden, each show only what we can know from their respective settings. See all three, and you’ll see the plays’ six characters pop in and out of love scenes, squabbles and scams that you know are continued elsewhere, elsewhen.
It’s an ambitious structure, and last Saturday night’s premiere of Living Together at Northern Stage tripled down on the theme of ambition.
For starters, it was the last opening night of Northern Stage’s first season in its new home, the Barrette Center for the Arts. “Ambition” is barely adequate to describe the audacity of a regional theater company embarking on a $9-million capital campaign to fund a new theater and a secure endowment. Amazingly, Northern Stage is now just $75,000 short of its fundraising goal. What that success says about the quality of the company’s entertainment and educational programming, as well as about the generosity of the Upper Valley arts community, is a fine subject for some ambitious journalist.
The production is also the first in a performance of the entire Ayckbourn trilogy at three Vermont theaters. After Living Together closes on May 8, the Dorset Theatre Festival opens Table Manners for a June 16-July 2 run. Weston Playhouse follows through with a July 21-30 production of Round and Round the Garden. Same cast, same design team, three different directors: it’s an ambitious scheme, artistically promising and practical in its synergies, enticing us to celebrate Vermont’s sweeter seasons with a rural-stage road trip.
Ambitious production values are on display at the Barrette Center, where “the sitting room of a Victorian vicarage-type house” called for in Ayckbourn’s playscript is evoked in fabulously plummy detail, from the walls’ coffered wood paneling to the windows’ vaguely sanctimonious stained glass. Set designer David L. Arsenault and lighting designer Stuart Duke establish the environment essential to Ayckbourn’s comedy of meaningless manners.
Meaningless, because almost no one in Living Together is behaving as she or he is supposed to. Profoundly feckless Norman (Richard Gallagher) is a wolf in assistant librarian’s clothing, married to ostensibly no-nonsense businesswoman Ruth (Ashton Heyl) but having it off, as the English say, with her sister Annie (Jenni Putney), who stays at home to care for a mother who lurks offstage. Annie’s engaged to Tom (David Mason), the neighborly veterinarian, but it’s hard to see how they’ll be any more happy than her brother Reg (Mark Light-Orr), a puer aeternus henpecked by his frenetically repressed wife, Sarah (Caitlin Clouthier).
Living Together’s MacGuffin is Norman’s desire to spirit Annie away for what Brit tabloids refer to as a “dirty weekend.” The family conclave starts with a sulk, as Norman absorbs the news that Annie won’t be joining him after all. Their shared secret goes the way of all farce: doors are opened at awkward moments, liquors are unexpectedly potent, tongues ignominiously loosened. Soon everyone — including Ruth — knows all about the affair.
But does Norman care? Not a bit. That lost dirty weekend is just a passing expression of something enduringly wrong with Norman, who can’t seem to take anyone else’s feelings seriously. Accused of “stealing Annie” from Tom, Norman protests, “I wasn’t stealing her! I was borrowing her!” For Norman, conquest isn’t a matter of who, what, where, how or even why. It’s a matter of when, and when after that, and then….
Living Together’s humor centers on the mysteries of attraction. “I think other people’s marriages are invariably a source of amazement,” says Ruth, whose commitment to the chronically uncommitted Norman is a source of amazement to everyone else. The wry sorrows of relationships are offset by straightahead clowning. Most of the belly laughs are deftly delivered by Light-Orr’s man-boy, Reg, and Tom as played by David Mason.
Mason seems to be channeling the epic twittery of Monty Python’s late, great Graham Chapman. Like one of Chapman’s brainlocked country squires, Tom seems so desperately unable to cogitate that we’re afraid he’ll spontaneously decease. Whenever he attempts thought, he seems in danger of drowning in his own stupidity, like the proverbial chicken who looks up into the rain.
This production goes wholeheartedly for those big, clowning laughs, which is great fun and a bit of a shame.
Ayckbourn’s trilogy is ambitious in form, but not at all pretentious in purpose. Living Together and its fellow comic triplets are not deep-funny or wise-funny or wry-funny, but unabashedly farce-funny, from their silly sex gambits to their reliance on slammed doors and noises off.
But Ayckbourn did intend his farcical characters to have that three-dimensionality which lends pathos to even the most foolish of fools, from Nick Bottom to Aziz Ansari.
Consider Ayckbourn’s intentions for Tom: In character notes for a 1993 revival of the trilogy, he wrote, “Not quite as slow-witted as he seems, Tom’s real problem is his inability to tune in or focus properly on others. … But you should see him with an injured horse. An almost perfect communion between man and beast. If this makes him seem rather sweet and charming, yes, he is. He’s also essentially as selfish and self-interested as the day is long.”
Again, kudos to Mason for a thoroughly comic performance. His Tom can get a marvelous laugh out of a simple “No” dropped at just the right-wrong moment. But this production overcommits to utter gormlessness. We never see Tom do or say a thing to support the idea that he can be trusted with scissors, let alone with a scalpel. “Communion between man and beast”? A horse would have to talk very, very slowly to this Tom. Interestingly two-sided, “selfish and self-interested”? This Tom is a sweet idiot, and nothing more.
Mason is hardly to blame, as the entire production seems to have placed all its bets on the silly side of farce, eschewing Ayckbourn’s invitations to gamble on ambiguity. But theatergoers who wager on laughing their way through the trilogy’s three Vermont productions will likely win compounded pleasure.
William Craig is a writer, editor and professor living in Thetford Center. His website is williamcraig.com.