The Violet Hour

 

Richard Greenberg is one of America’s best young writers whose plays are being produced on Broadway and in regional theatres across the land.  One of his latest plays making the rounds is The Violet Hour a new production of which is now playing at the Theatre Tribe Theatre.  The Theatre Tribe is a company of actors under the guidance of Stuart Rogers who also teaches classes and is the director of the current production on The Violet Hour.

The plot involves a young publisher (Thomas Burr as John-Pace Seavering) who must choose which of two books he will publish. The one( The Violet Hour) is by his dear friend Denis McCleary played by Jeff Kerr McGivney, and the other is an autobiography by Seavering’s mistress Jessie Brewster (Angelle Brooks. McCleary must publish his book that takes up three boxes, in order to marry the rich woman he loves Rosamund Plinth (Elizabeth O’Brick). Meanwhile Seavering’s camp clerk (Kyle Colerider-Krugh) carries in a mysterious printing press that starts to spew forth pages that turn out to be pages from the future where he learns what happens to everyone concerned. Seavering attempts to change the future but to no avail so he decides to go with the flow of time. As is often the case with Greenberg’s plays his characters reference persons that actually lived, in this case Josephine Baker and the Fitzeralds, Zelda and F. Scott.

It has been said that a bad play can be saved by good actors, Sadly to say the performances I saw were perhaps fit for television but lacked any sense of theatrical truth and size. Thomas Burr delivered most of his lines in a dreary monotone. In contrast you had Colerider-Krugh’s way over- the- top performance which, at least for the first half, he shouted. The women fared better though Brooks was in danger of being upstaged by a hat but she had a nice scene in the second act that showed some chops. O’Brick had a harder time of it because her character was unstable (Zelda Fitzgerald) and sometimes I couldn’t hear her lines. McGivney was weak in the first act but did rather nicely in the second, more dramatic act. I wonder why Rogers chose this play that demands high style and energy when his actors weren’t up to it. But this is a company and he probably wants to expand their reach. and give them exposure to one of America’s leading playwrights. This production just doesn’t make it but he proved that sometimes gambles pay off as in  last Ovation-winning The Long Christmas Ride Home, which combined puppets and live action. Until April 19 at The Theatre Tribe.