2005-2006 Season

Orange Flower Water

by Craig Wright
Directed by James Yost
At the Duke Power Theatre in Spirit Square
345 N. College Street in uptown Charlotte
Shows are Thurs., Fri. & Sat. at 8 p.m., April 6-22, 2006
Tickets $15 on Thursday, $20 on Friday & Saturday
Group discounts available for groups of 10 or more
For more information, call (704) 493-0196

General Seating
Call (704) 372-1000 for tickets or go on-line to www.BlumenthalCenter.org
Avoid service charges by purchasing your tickets in person at the Blumenthal box office in Founders Hall, Mon - Sat from 10 am - 6 pm, or one hour before showtime on the night of the event.
Pay What You Can on Friday, April 7 -- walk-up sales on the night of the event only; no advanced reservations for PWYC
Post-show Talk Back with the cast and director, Friday, April 7

For Better or Worse...

Married couples David and Cathy Larson and Brad and Beth Youngquist live with their children in the relatively peaceful town of Pine City, Minn. David and Beth, after years of maintaining a platonic friendship, begin an adulterous affair with disastrous consequences. Through a series of scenes which all take place on or around a single bed, we see the painfully intense real-time unraveling of both marriages and, eventually, the construction of a very fragile but authentic new beginning for everyone concerned.

This brutally honest drama from "Six Feet Under" writer Craig Wright wastes no time and pulls no punches. Join us for this powerful finale to BBTG's 2005-2006 season.

"Do not be deceived by the lyrical, gently perfumed title of Craig Wright's play... [Orange Flower Water] is at once fiercely adult, shrewdly observant, often painfully graphic and most definitely not for the meek." - Chicago Sun-Times

"Uncommonly intense and intimate ninety-minute drama…quirky, raw and nervy... But this is not another play about amoral sexual perversity in the LaBute or Mamet mold. It's a picture of marriage as a vise grip in which the best one can hope for is some velvet inside the handcuffs." - Chicago Tribune

"It's simultaneously visceral, with crackling humor, and intellectual." - Star Tribune

About the Playwright

Craig Wright has written numerous plays, including Orange Flower Water, Recent Tragic Events, Molly's Delicious, The Big Numbers, John Dory, and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Wright also wrote The Pavilion, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the American Theatre Critics' Association Best New Play Award. He has received fellowships in playwriting from both the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright is also a writer for the critically acclaimed HBO series, "Six Feet Under."

What They Said About It...

Dropkick Me, Deano

After nine seasons of guiding his theater company to acclaim and respectability, artistic director Jim Yost says BareBones is ready to embrace steroids. With their most recent production of Torches at the Sunset Grill -- and with their upcoming production of Orange Flower Water -- BareBones is shaking things up, flexing some muscle and tossing off a few fancy moves.

For the first time, Charlotte's most distinguished living guerilla theater is moving downtown to Duke Power Theatre in Spirit Square. They're paying their actors, another precedent. Brashly, they're offering a money-back guarantee to all former Charlotte Rep subscribers. And they're showcasing former Indianapolis Colts placekicker Dean Biasucci, making his Charlotte debut in one of the lead roles.

Moving away from the fringe actually made it possible for Yost and BareBones producer Anne Lambert to seriously contemplate paying actors. Faced with a rent hike at their old haunt on Rampart Street, flamboyantly named the SouthEnd Performing Arts Center, BareBones embarked on the kind of soul-searching that can result from financial scrutiny.

"We're a $65,000-a-year company," Yost explains. "We realized this only when we actually hired an accountant to figure this out! One of the things we looked at was, if it costs this much money to produce and 40 percent of that is space each month, we can take that money and reallocate it into paying our artists. We've always paid our designers, we've always paid our directors -- since we've been in the SPAC."

The Duke doesn't come cheap, but it won't be a monthly drain of $2,000 from BBTG coffers. One of the reasons that the company was able to make SPAC work was its ability to sublet the refurbished space to other companies.

Income from those companies stopped coming in, making the SPAC arithmetic-unfeasible.

"We were home to Off-Tryon for a while," Yost points out. "We were home to Actor's Gym for a while. We were home to Epic Arts for a while. We were home to The Body Chronicles. We got a lot of things going in that space. People don't realize that it was an incubator for a lot of these new companies."

Not having their own space means BBTG had to negotiate a comfy deal with the PAC for their rental at Spirit Square. As they rehearse in the Duke, they're on the clock, no longer free to pour sweat into their sets until 2am.

But they're also better positioned to attract an audience, particularly in the downtown void left by Rep's demise. It's an angle that Lambert, a former development director at Charlotte Rep, couldn't resist.

Rep and Actor's Theatre both called Duke home during their formative years. Rep made the leap from summer to year-round scheduling there, while Actor's was still incubating upstairs in a studio space long since converted into a classroom. Lambert herself has helped prove the enduring viability of the Duke, producing the City Stage fringe theater festival there for the past two summers.

"So I know it's an investment," says Lambert, acknowledging the risk, "but I really think it will pay off, because I think audiences will find us. We just wanted to say to the Rep folks, give us a try. We don't want there to be any barrier to checking it out. I'll tell you, I think this is some of the best acting you're going to see this year."

Along with the money-back challenge to former Rep subscribers, Biasucci's presence is a nice PR powder horn to be firing off.

As it turns out, the veteran of 11 NFL seasons is no acting novice. While attracting the notice of pro scouts on the gridiron at Western Carolina, Biasucci was a theater major. During his first three off-seasons, he landed roles at Indiana Rep, an Equity company, in some heavy-duty dramas, including Julius Caesar and Six Characters in Search of an Author. After that, he summered in New York for three years studying acting.

After hanging 'em up, Biasucci was fairly successful in LA for the next 10 years, landing roles in Jerry Maguire, ER and The West Wing. But the grind of constantly looking for new acting gigs grew old. Back to Carolina he came, where he had already begun investing in real estate. After settling his family, Biasucci felt the urge to get involved in the local theater scene.

Yes, he realizes that there's a PR whirlwind swirling around him as BareBones fights for survival, but Biasucci is unfazed. Focused on the basics.

"There was some pressure when I came in to kick a 40-yarder to win or lose a game," he admits, "but I'm not really feeling any pressure about acting. The only reason I do theater is because I like doing it. Nobody is forcing me to be here, you know? They don't call it a 'workbill,' they call it a playbill. I'm here because I like to play."

Also in the lineup is playwright Craig Wright, who has garnered more attention since Yost noticed Orange Flower Water among a group of plays anthologized in the best of 2002. Now Wright's better known for his work on HBO's Six Feet Under.

Like Yost, Biasucci was impressed with Wright's taut drama before he learned about the playwright's Emmy nomination. At the vortex of this intense, real-time unraveling of two marriages, Biasucci is Brad.

"He's got a lot of anger," Biasucci reveals. "I think he's an honest guy. He's different from the other characters in the play. This guy could give a shit about what people think, and I like that. There's some positive qualities in this character, and he's tremendously flawed, and he'll be fun to play."

Count Kim Robards as another artist coming back home to Charlotte after decades of establishing herself in another time zone. Kim Robards Dance is doing more than completing a three-week residency at CPCC this week, climaxed with public performances at Halton Theater on Friday and Saturday.

Robards is setting the stage for creating a permanent second home for her company, based in Denver since 1987. She and her 11-member troupe will be back this summer for a two-week residency in late July.

But after involving some Charlotte talent in Kim Gym Megalomania, specially reconfigured for the Halton performances, she'll be spiriting away three of our most prominent dancers to Denver: Sarah Emery and Bridget Morris from Moving Poets, and Audrey Ipapo from Queen City Jazz Company.

That's a lot of commuting back and forth from the Mile High City.

"They're coming out to Denver to dance with us in our final performance there in June," Robards acknowledges. "So obviously, we're going to need an airline sponsor!"

We can be thankful for a monumental musical work that flies us around the universe and drops us off at that sunlit spot where mankind and womankind are innocent, amazed and enfolded in the first human love there ever was. Yes, it was refreshing to see the mighty Oratorio Singers of Charlotte leading the charge for Haydn's The Creation in its debut at Belk Theater last week. Charlotte Symphony hadn't performed it anywhere in nearly 25 years.

The yearning to return to Adamic innocence and make a fresh start as stewards of the Earth surely reached its zenith in the upswell of American romanticism voiced by Thoreau and Whitman. By contrast, Haydn's evocations of creation and paradise are thoroughly classical: God brings light to the universal darkness and imposes order upon chaos in a virtuosic burst of plenitude. Our superiority over all other life forms is quaintly axiomatic -- like Adam's dominion over Eve. We're all eternally God's blessed gardeners if we remember our place in the grand scheme of things.

Wielding the baton, maestro Christof Perick kept the hierarchies in pleasing balance, pruning his orchestral forces so that the Oreos' salvos -- representing the heavenly host -- prevailed over the instrumental music. Wafting over the orchestra, the richly textured choral pronouncements were the very breath of God in the narrative. Or the angels singing his hallelujahs at the end of each momentous Day. Nothing encouraged us more irresistibly to regress to our own childhood innocence as we reexperienced the birth of the world.

Perick's parsimony in double-casting the bass and soprano roles, however, turned out to be hit-and-miss. Guido Jentjens and Ute Selbig as Adam and Eve were as delightful as the bright stars and murmuring streams they extolled. Neither was quite as relaxed earlier in the story when Jentjens was the angel Raphael and Selbig was Gabriel. Selbig's tension was easier to understand, since Gabe's tessitura now lies above her reach.

As Uriel, tenor Tilman Lichdi made an auspicious US debut that Perick is likely to be proud of decades from now. The voice is velvet, and his effortless range and sure intonation were upstaged only by his lively, earnest expressiveness. Too bad we didn't get more of him.

Cuddly Homewreckers

If you've spent any quality time with Six Feet Under, the acclaimed HBO series, you've already deduced that playwright/screenwriter Craig Wright is virulently averse to stereotypes. His morticians are far from moribund, and old folks aren't blandly retiring.

Peep in at Duke Power Theater, where Wright's Orange Flower Water plays through April 22, and you may be surprised to find that eccentricity isn't running riot. Instead, you will see the normal course of romance and marriage, intimately and realistically played out. Judging by reactions at Friday night's audience talkback, I'd say that was bizarre, provocative and disturbing enough.

One bed fits all in this distinctively theatrical piece. It's the hotel room where pharmacist David Calhoun and Beth Youngquist meet in a romantic tryst and cement their secret relationship. Then it becomes the bedrooms where they sever their marital ties.

Brad tries force and threats after Beth packs her bag on sudden impulse. Cathy tries an opposite tack.

Like the bed, the interknit couples are ever-present, withdrawing to upstage chairs when they'd normally exit to the wings. Everything that happens on or around this bed during the swap-out has a profound impact on all four principals. Yet the never-seen children of these broken marriages must be counted among the two primary factors that impel the action of this very adult drama.

Even here, Wright is never formulaic. Cathy confronts Beth at a soccer field, where their kids are on the same team, and winds up using David's sperm count as an argument for ending the affair.

Artistic director James Yost and his fellow BareBones Theatre Group guerillas have made previous downtown incursions, participating in the PAC's City Stage fringe fests during the past two summers. The edgy material that beckons to BBTG's core audience is continuing to attract strong actors to the cause as the company moves to Spirit Square more emphatically.

All those whom we've seen before -- Lee Thomas as David, Laurelei Ballard as Beth and Elise Wilkinson as Cathy -- turn in performances that equal or surpass anything they've previously done in Charlotte. I'd credit Wright nearly as much as Yost: There's a fascinating intricacy to all of his characters, peppered with fierce passion.

Thomas zealously adheres to David's selfish instincts while Ballard mopes with inward torment -- from religion, family obligations and making a life-changing decision -- until she tosses her qualms aside. Wilkinson nicely balances Cathy's pathetic clinging and desperation with her sudden upsurges of dignity and resentment.

Ironically, it was newcomer Dean Biasucci as Brad who seemed to impart the steadying influence at Duke Power last Friday. Brad is a bullying pig, only fractionally redeemed by his self-knowledge and appreciation for Beth. While Biasucci may strip Brad of his roughest edges, he totally inhabits this brash, bright douche bag.

Of course, the adulterers will also arouse their fair share of aversion. Compounded by their cuddliness.

Families unravel in 'Orange'

An illicit coupling three years in the making nearly misfires when the woman asks the burning question: Is there a God?

A wife demands sex from the man about to abandon her and their children.

Two soccer moms -- one has just run off with the other woman's husband -- huddle on the sideline of their sons' game, sharing an umbrella and a bag of Sour Skittles.

"Orange Flower Water," Craig Wright's flawed but moving drama of marital disintegration, is full of scenes like this: encounters so improbable, but so sharply observed, they strike us as unmistakably true.

The cast now at Spirit Square performs them beautifully.

BareBones Theatre Group director James Yost and his four actors bring admirable psychological realism to the story of Beth and David and the families they destroy in pursuit of happiness.

Lee Thomas and Laurelei Ballard are the friends-turned-lovers; Elise Wilkinson and Dean Biasucci are the wronged (but far from innocent) spouses, Cathy and Brad. We never see the kids, but they're all over Wright's script, both as pawns in the couples' emotional warfare and totems of all Beth and David must sacrifice to be together. Even the play's aromatic title refers to Beth's dream of an idyllic new life with David and their hypothetical baby.

The actors make the so-called grown-ups in "Orange Flower Water" more sympathetic than Wright probably intends. (Where's the achievement in making viewers see themselves in people whose behavior is defensible?)

Wilkinson, for instance, puts too much tenderness into Cathy's opening monologue, a detailed child-care directive to David before a weekend away. The speech should be clinical and rapid-fire, an ironic contrast to the monologue that ends the play. This later note, David's heartfelt confession to his youngest daughter, gets a fine reading by Thomas; but Thomas is too likable to convey the darker moments of guilt and frustration.

Biasucci, meanwhile, is a powerful actor with an irresistible, predatory gleam in his eye, but he needs to find a deeper seat for the rage that drives Brad to expose the affair. And Ballard never quite persuades us that Beth would surrender custody of her boys to a man as hateful, even violent, as Brad seems to be. Wright's explanation -- Brad has a better lawyer -- doesn't wash.

Designer Chris Timmons might have provided a more handsome backdrop for the play's often hideous interactions; that braided orange area rug might make desperate housewives out of any of us. But the set's simplicity -- a bed, a nightstand and two observation platforms from which the off-duty actors watch their characters' lives unravel -- suits Yost's economical direction. Michelle Featherstone's brooding pop incidental music gives us a retreat between scenes.

For these unhappy people, though, there's no escape -- except in a whiff of hope that love might fulfill its costly promise.

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