The LINK NEWS
July 14, 2005
Theater Review By Madeline Schulman
"A Child's Guide to Innocence," by Vincent Sessa, is a beautiful
and touching play, designed to move and delight an audience. Running
at the New Jersey Repertory Company, on Broadway in Long Branch,
this family history is wonderfully acted by Catherine Eaton, Corey
Tazmania and Deborah Baum, and splendidly directed by Dana Benningfield.
An actress herself, the director brings out the nuances of the
characters as they re-live three days, but decades apart.
Eaton serves as the connecting thread, playing the same woman
at 21, 51, and 71, as she believable changes from young woman to
matron to older woman without altering makeup or costume. Her two
co-stars each cleverly morph into three very different characters,
appearing first as her sisters, then as her daughters, and finally
as her granddaughters.
The action starts in a Brooklyn grocery store in June, 1944, at
the height of the war (WWII) as sisters Francie, Catherine and
Marian wait for news of their brother Johnny, lost at sea, and
Francie, the oldest, longs for letters from her fiance, Freddy.
They vacillate between hope that Johnny has survivied and fear
that he has not.
The events of that day echo through the years in the second and
third scenes, as the years pass and we learn how that day in 1944
has affected the family's life. Throughout, the dialog is leavened
with flashes of humor - while describing the movie "Jaws" one daughter
says she would need a "horse Valium" to go swimming in the ocean
at night. A granddaughter, challenged to identify Charles Lindbergh,
mutters, "He invented the Lindy?"
One symbol throughout the play, as evocative as Laura's unicorn
in "The Glass Menagerie," is a piece of glass which dangles from
a hurricane lamp, variously described by the characters as a star
or a prism. We learn in the first scene that it is missing, but
not how or why. Just as we learn Johnny's fate and Freddy's, we
do find out the significance of the prism, and as a star or prism
should, it scatters a light on all that has gone before.
The single set serves equally well as a grocery store, Long Island
dining room, and grandmother's bedroom.
"A Child's Guide to Innocence" is highly recommended as an emotional
and intellectual pleasure. |