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Contemporary playwrights are most often celebrated for their use of language and cinematic images. But hang out in the lobby and you'll hear a counterrevolutionary rumble of discontent: amid the jump-cuts, there's a downright hankering for the nostalgic pleasures of the well-made play. Where, you can hear audiences sigh, are those juicy, old-fashioned dramas with star parts?
At Ensemble Theatre you can see playwright Horton Foote's answer to this conundrum. His 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "The Young Man from Atlanta", set in 1950 Houston, could almost have been written that same year. It overflows with the stuff of 1950's drawing room drama: a patriarch under siege, a fluttering mother, a sensitive son, business and financial reversals, illness, and a barrelful of family secrets.
And even though there are places where the dramaturgy fairly creaks under their combined weight, the payoff is still considerable. For it delivers the role of a lifetime to actor Bernard Canepari, who dominates the evening as the blustering, embattled father Will Kidder.
We meet Will, a 64-year-old salesman, just before the playwright pulls the plug on his prosperity and illusions. He has recently built a $200,000 house for his cossetted wife Lily Dale, and is about to buy her a new car when he is downsized by his boss Ted, Jr. (Michael G. Regnier), who thinks he's "lost his edge" after 38 years. Their new home (beautifully realized by scenic designer Ron Newell and light designer Laura McLaughlin) is shrouded by a different sorrow: the couple has recently lost their only son in a drowning which is most likely a suicide. Lily Dale, against her husband's express orders, has been finding comfort by secretly spending time and considerable money on the eponymous "young man from Atlanta", her son's mysterious friend. When Will asks for that money to start his new business, the tacit agreements underlying their marriage are rent asunder.
As a nod to the "don't ask, don't tell" 1950's, Foote cannily keeps the "young man" offstage. He -- like their son -- remains a shadowy enigma to parents who have not had the heart to face the realities of their son's life and death.
Canepari's layered, physical performance is what fuels the heart of Lucia Colombi's production. You can trace the impact of the play's multiple revelations by how the actor's weathered face and large body absorbs them. Impotent with fury, he paces in the living room like a toothless lion.
Marji Dodrill plays Lily Dale as a breathless, frantic chatterer. It's a choice that gives her both comic and affecting moments, and reveals the hunger to connect that drives the play to its heartbreaking final scene. But the verbal style also made her vulnerable to distracting line bobbles, which weren't helped by the dialogue's looping repetitions.
Glenn Colerider is an absolute delight as Lily Dale's stepfather Pete, full of priceless groans and double-takes as he is mustered into the unhappy role of middleman. The rest of the supporting cast is fairly colorless: Most of them seemed to be one-dimensional carriers of the playwright's clunky exposition rather than realized characters. An exception is Norma Powell as their elderly former maid Etta Doris, whose loving childhood memory of their son inadvertently rips the final scab off their pain.
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