Parlour Song at FUSION Theatre

Everything is disappearing.....

FUSION Theatre Company is honored and thrilled to present New Mexico audiences with our latest regional premiere of a new work fresh off its successful Off-Broadway run. In yet another coup for FUSION and all of New Mexico, we will be producing this hilarious new dark comedy one month before its opening at the Almeida Theatre on London's West End. Parlour Song, by young British playwright Jez Butterworth, explores what happens when two ordinary people discover they hate who they have become. Butterworth reveals a world where all is not what it seems, when a demolitions expert suspects his wife is stealing from him. Opening February 12, the production kicks off with an opening night gala reception at 7:00 p.m., and continues through March 8 with Thursday through Saturday performances at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 2:00 p.m.

Click to view YouTube production slideshow
photos © Richard K Hogle

Dale, a successful but bored car wash entrepreneur, serves as narrator of his neighbors' marital crisis. He and his never-seen family live right next door to Joy and her husband, Ned, a demolition expert. Ned's job is the play's overriding metaphor for the emotional destruction going on in Ned and Joy's lives — lives that have taken a turn far different from their youthful hopes and expectations.

All three of these characters are forty and have different ways of reacting to what's often looked upon as a traumatic turning point. Joy has not just fallen out of love with Ned, but her every word and action indicates that she now finds him repellent. With no sign of children or evidence of an interesting job, she seems to have displaced all her mid-life disappointments onto Ned.

Ned, on the other hand, is still mad about Joy and seemingly loves his work. But his deteriorating relationship with his wife makes what might be a smooth sail into middle age impossible. Joy's coldness has an unsettling effect on his equilibrium. His efforts to lose weight and restore his long lost hair are thus all about holding on to the wife whose name has become an oxymoron in the light of the way she treats him. The nightmare that's begun to haunt him and the mystery of objects that keep disappearing all over the house are a creepy omens of the depth of this couple's problems. Are these mysteriously vanishing objects a case of Ned's becoming so discombobulated that he keeps losing things, or is he headed for a major breakdown? Could Joy have some desperate scheme up her sleeve, shades of Gaslight?

FUSION's production stars professionals Jacqueline Reid, Bruce Holmes, and Ross Kelly. It will be directed by Gil Lazier. Dr. Lazier is Dean Emeritus of the Florida State University School of Theatre, where he served as Dean from 1982 to 1999. From 2001 to 2004 he was Director of the Florida State University/Asolo MFA Conservatory for Actor Training in Sarasota, FL. He is currently Artistic Director of the Banyan Theater Company, a professional theatre in Sarasota, FL. Dr. Lazier has directed over fifty productions in the U.S. and abroad including musicals, new works and classics by such masters as Albee, Brecht, Chekhov, Coward, Ibsen, O’Neill, Pinter, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stoppard and Williams. In Moscow his production of Neil Simon’s I Ought to be in Pictures played for over ten years in Russian. He is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Jez Butterworth (born 1969 in St Albans, UK) has had major success with Mojo on stage (Royal Court, 1995) for which he won a Laurence Olivier Award, an Evening Standard Award and the George Devine Award. He wrote and directed the film of Mojo, which featured Harold Pinter (1997), and Birthday Girl (2001) which he co-wrote with brother Tom Butterworth and directed, starred Nicole Kidman. Also The Night Heron (2002, Royal Court) and The Winterling (2006, Royal Court). The upcoming film Headhunters (2008), directed by another brother, John Henry Butterworth and produced by Nicole Kidman, Ronald Bass, and Ric Schwartz, is also based on his screenplay. In May 2007 Butterworth received the E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Parlour Song is his most recent play, opening to rave reviews at the Atlantic Theatre Company, in New York City, in March 2008; his third production there, it follows Mojo in 1997 and The Night Heron in 2003.

Parlour Song continues through March 8. For tickets and information call 766-9412. Tickets are only $25 for general admission, $20 for students and seniors. Thursday performances (excluding opening night) feature a $10 student rush (with valid I.D.) and $18 actor rush (with professional resume.) Group discounts are also available. Free parking is plentiful. FUSION performs at The Cell, which is located at 700 1st St. N.W. (just west of Broadway and south of Lomas.) Click on "Location" menu item above for a map.

Barry Gaines, review, Albuquerque Journal:
"Next month, English audiences will see the European premiere of Parlour Song, British playwright Jez Butterworth's darkly comic lovers' triangle. The play opened last year in New York City, and FUSION Theatre Company is staging a second production at the Cell Theatre.

More importantly, Parlour Song is a tautly exciting and intelligent study of desperate suburbanites. In a real estate development of virtually identical homes, Ned and Dale live next door to each other and are "mates," friends.

They also have marital mates - Dale's wife Lynn, whom we never meet, and Ned's spouse Joy. After 11 years of marriage, Ned is aware of Joy's disaffection although he is unaware of its causes. Dale, confident and secure, is Ned's opposite. Ned turns to Dale for marital advice and tries such things as sexual self-help tapes, Rogaine for his baldness and an exercise regimen.

Meanwhile, a mantle of menace hangs over the characters as Ned is terrified by a recurring nightmare and upset that his possessions are disappearing. Ned's profession is symbolic - he is a demolition expert, part of a team that destroys obsolete shopping centers, buildings and towers to make way for new construction. Such demolition is done by implosion (collapsing inwardly) rather than by explosion.

Ned's marriage is also imploding. Wife Joy is as unhappy as her husband, and she too turns to Dale, who becomes her lover. I will not reveal any more of the carefully considered plot, but it is never dull.

Gil Lazier, newly arrived in Albuquerque after a long and distinguished career in academic and professional theater, skillfully directs his first show with FUSION. Richard K. Hogle's set design is simple but effective - a paneled wall at the back of the stage and a trapezoidal platform thrusting away from that wall. Images are projected on the wall, and furniture groupings glide on and off stage as needed. Actors also use the narrow space between the platform and the audience.

Three FUSION regulars provide fine performances. Ross Kelly is an ideal Dale, equally capable of comforting and cuckolding his friend without apparent compunction. Bruce Holmes, his head hairless and his belly soft, is excellent as sensitive, yet painfully clueless, Ned. The two men work well together, subtly blending humor and pathos.

Playwright Butterworth acknowledges the influence of the late Harold Pinter. It strikes me that Jacqueline Reid's performance as Joy builds on her portrayal of Ruth in Pinter's The Homecoming earlier this season. Here again she is the only woman, compelling in her sexuality yet unable to plumb her desires.

Butterworth uses the lemon tree (sweet and sour as the song says) to suggest Joy's paradox, and Reid revels in Joy's sensual description of making lemonade. Parlour Song exposes the angst and confusion hidden by the façades of the tract houses we construct."

Wally Gordon, review, The Independent (East Mountains):
"There seems to me to be a pattern of contemporary plays, movies, novels and journalism focusing on anti-heroes—shrunken beings exhibiting not villainy but small mindedness, not tragedy but pathos. Such a play is Parlour Song, which opened last week at the Cell Theater in Albuquerque. It is a comedy, gray rather than entirely black, about Scrabble, the possibilities of sex, suburbia, the limitations of sex, blowing things up, the perils of sex, washing cars, neighbors and the temptations of sex.

Most of all it is a play about the tight coils of our lives that, like the tentacles of an octopus, can squeeze the life out of us until we are so small we do not even recognize ourselves.

...Parlour Song has only three actors, who coil themselves around each other in a series of suddenly materializing and equally suddenly dissolving patterns. One man is a fitness freak who owns a successful car wash business.His next door neighbor and close friend is a bald, overweight demolition expert who travels all over the British Isles blowing up buildings. The demolition man’s wife is an interest they share....

The play interlays several ways of telling its story. Dreams play a large role, so large that it is easy to confuse the “real” lives of the characters with their dream lives. Mixed media are also employed, with still scenes and movies projected above the stage and sounds coming from an imaginary TV set. Over and over, the demolition man replays a tape of a particularly large explosion that he had set off to bring down a building.

One of the more ironic and iconic moments occurs toward the end of the play when a thousand people gather to cheer the destruction of an old shopping center that has been the fulcrum of neighborhood life. It is as if the benighted residents of this suburb are cheering the destruction of their own lives. Parlour Song is full of such unexpected moments, many of them quite funny, but almost all of them quite sad.

The staging of the play by director Gil Lazier, a newcomer to the FUSION and Albuquerque from Florida State University, is smooth and effective. Against a single backdrop, furniture such as a bed or a sofa slides effortlessly onto and off the stage to suggest various rooms. The cast consists of FUSION veterans—Bruce Holmes, Ross Kelly and Jacqueline Reid—who have worked together often and feel comfortable with each other. This collaborative experience is evident on stage.

The young but experienced British playwright Jez Butterworth has crafted a kind of bitter comedy whose literal realism is deceptively simple. At the end, after all the scrambling, the demolition, and the disappearance of objects and hopes and desires, the question seems to be,“ Is this all there is?” And the answer is a sad,“Yes.”"

Ben Brantley, review, New York Times:
"...Parlour Song separates the men from the boys — and the women from the gossip girls — through its awareness of that kick-your-breath-away point in life when the world becomes a darker, starker place than youth could ever allow. It’s the moment when you look around and realize, as one of the play’s three characters puts it, “Everything is disappearing.”"

Joe Dziemianowicz, review, New York Daily News:
"Butterworth has created engrossing characters and scripted scenes so sharp and carefully crafted that they become stand-alone micro-dramas. An 11th-hour revelation is as eerie as it is beautiful."

Jacqueline Reid	JACQUELINE REID* is a founding member of FUSION. Most recently at FUSION, she was "Ruth" in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. She directed FUSION’s world premiere of Mad Hattr, as well as this season's Death of a Salesman and last season's Doubt and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. She appeared and directed in several works in last season's The Seven: New Works. Previously, she played "June" in JT Rogers' Madagascar, “Beth” in Craig Wright’s Orange Flower Water, “Vera” in The Fat Man's Wife, “Catherine” in Suddenly Last Summer, “Amanda” in Private Lives, the title role in Hedda Gabler, “Laura” in The Glass Menagerie, “Stella” in A Streetcar Named Desire, “Dancer” in The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, “Kate” in The Taming of the Shrew, “Zelda Fitzgerald” in Bye, Bye Blackbird, “Anna” in Closer, “Elizabeth” in The Art of Dining, and “Maggie” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Regional lead roles include Romeo & Juliet, Agnes of God, and Crimes of the Heart. Recent television credits include the series In Plain Sight, Unsolved Mysteries and True Confessions, in which she starred with Adam Arkin. She is a BFA graduate of The North Carolina School of the Arts.
Bruce Holmes	BRUCE HOLMES* appeared with FUSION this season in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming and in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Previously, he appeared in Jen Silverman's award-winning The Education of Macoloco as part of The Seven: New Works. He made his debut here last season as "Christy" in Martin McDonaugh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore. In Seattle, he worked at A.C.T., Center Stage, AHA!, N.W. Shakespeare Ensemble, and The Empty Space Theatre. Favorite roles at The Space include “Pat” in The True History of Coca-Cola in Mexico, “Jess” in The Complete Wrks of Wilm Shakespeare Abridged, “Horace” in The School for Wives, “Bertozzo” in Accidental Death of an Anarchist and “Sgt. Match” in What the Butler Saw. In Idaho, Bruce performed with The Idaho Repertory Theatre as “Leon” in Voice of the Prairie, “Max” in Lend Me a Tenor, “Trevor” in Bedroom Farce, and as “Andrew” in I Hate Hamlet. In Washington D.C., he appeared as a longshoreman in Arena Stage’s Anna Christie, and “Pee-Wee” in Orpheus Descending. At the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, he appeared as “Sampson” in Romeo & Juliet. In Virginia, Bruce appeared as “The Narrator” in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again at The Metro Stage Theatre. He received his B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico and his M.F.A. from the Professional Actor’s Training Program at the University of Washington.
Ross Kelly	ROSS KELLY* is a local actor, writer and director with many memorable roles to his credit at FUSION. This season, he was "Biff" in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Last season, he starred in The Lieutenant of Inishmore and the acclaimed production of Doubt, directed by Jacqueline Reid. Notable performances include Hip-Hop Prophets, an official selection of the Washington, D.C. Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2003; The Amy Biehl Story, in which he appeared opposite Academy Award winner Alan Arkin. He can also be seen in the films Save Me with Judith Light, Trade starring Kevin Kline and a recurring role in the ABC Family television show Wildfire. He recently completed filming on Love'n' Dancing with Betty White and The War Boys with Peter Gallagher. Ross is a proud father and a graduate of The University of New Mexico.
	* member Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States