Lemonade

Winterizing The Summer House

In Search of Red River Dog

A Child's Guide To Innocence

Songs of Grendelyn

The Laramie Project

Cabin Fever (North Fork)

 
Drama depicts three ages of 'Innocence'
Published in the Asbury Park Press 07/13/05

BY TOM CHESEK
CORRESPONDENT

(STAFF PHOTO: MICHAEL SYPNIEWSKI)
Corey Tazmania (left), Catherine Eaton (center) and Deborah Baum star in "A Child's Guide to Innocence" at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.
"Something is happening to us somewhere — but not here," intones first-generation Italian-American Francie (Catherine Eaton) at more than one point during Vincent Sessa's "A Child's Guide to Innocence," the drama now in its world-premiere engagement at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.

Francie (or Frances or even Francesca, as she's variously branded throughout) could be commenting upon the fact that the dramatic peaks of her family's history — the births, the deaths, the challenges of forging a new life in a strange place — mostly occur offstage, or in a time frame separate from that in which the characters are interacting.

Unseen, too, are the men who figure prominently in Francie's life — her husband, her neighborhood grocer Papa, her seaman brother Johnny — although these absent characters are vividly invoked at times through reminiscence and a bit of playful imitation.

As it turns out, much of "A Child's Guide" revolves around what's not there — the missing persons, misplaced objects and unspoken secrets taking center-stage prominence over the more mundane details of what at first glance appears to be a largely uneventful life. What we do have on display (in a production directed by NJ Rep regular Dana Benningfield) are snapshots of a 50-year span in the life of a woman who's spent a lot of time "praying that God doesn't lose interest in me" — a woman who comes late to the realization that it's impossible to make it through the present while living in the past.

The Brooklyn-born Sessa's script opens in the wartime summer of 1944, with Francie and her sisters Catherine (Corey Tazmania) and Marion (Deborah Baum) in tentative mourning over brother Johnny, gone missing from the naval vessel on which he was stationed. Adding to the anxiety is the fact that Francie's beau also is off to fight the good war — and assuming a bizarre prominence is the apparent loss of a glass crystal decoration from a table lamp, an object variously described as a "prism" and a "star."

Then again, certain objects take on a special significance in this play, tinged as it is with a realism that's distinctly more magical than matter-of-fact. The family dinner table is said to possess a soul, celery plays a recurring role in the proceedings and the eventual rediscovery of the glass "star" treats the bargain-store bauble with the deference normally granted some talisman out of Tolkien.

A saga of bonds

In fact, you'd do well to check all preconceptions of what this play is all about at the door. Playwright Sessa has cited the script as "autobiographical" in its origin with his own Italian-American family members, but if you're anticipating a lot of caricature "fuhgeddaboutit" accents and expecting the action to be punctuated by busy kitchen scenes, then get thee instead to a venue that's showing "The Godfather's Meshuggenah Wedding." While the actresses occasionally affect a Lawn Guyland inflection or two and Papa Luigi hovers just this side of tangibility, it's first and foremost a saga of bonds that can never be severed — of words and deeds that resonate across time, of ordinary lives that have a profound influence.

What it's not is a true ensemble piece. While Tazmania and Baum lend solid support in their triple-duty roles as sisters, daughters and grandchildren, it's indisputably Francie's story. Eaton, onstage for every moment of this no-intermission production, fixes her pale blues toward the audience and conjures things from V-E Day in Times Square to the fate of her sailor brother — as "unstuck in time" as Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, with the Great War every bit as much at the center of her being.

Carrie Mossman's set design — a slightly surreal amalgam of 1944 store, 1975 dining room and 1995 bedroom — suggests as well that it's Francie's head we're looking into, appropriate to a show that captures the liquid flow of time and memory (and reminds us that very few people in this life are afforded an "intermission" to change into their future selves). Company veterans Jeff Knapp and Jill Nagle provide a music-and-lighting environment that's smoothly cinematic and fitting with the often dreamlike quality of the production — although a climactic oooh-aaah effect is arguably not a necessity.

Director Benningfield has been quoted to the effect of having taken a less-is-more approach to Sessa's play, trimming expository lines and pitching the material as "more universal than just the Italian-American experience." With her first full-length professional production, Benningfield makes some intriguing choices — and reminds us that New Jersey Repertory remains a laboratory in which new works come to evolve, often right before our eyes.

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.

 

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