‘Harry Clarke’: Faking it to make it
One-man play tells story of Indiana native passing himself off as British
The standing ovation and shouts of approval that greeted the conclusion of Sunday night’s opening performance of the play “Harry Clarke” were in part for Mark H. Dold’s star turn in the one-man show that finally launched Barrington Stage Company’s summer season, more than 10 weeks after it was supposed to have begun.
Dold’s performance, as an insecure Midwesterner who reinvents himself as an assured, alluring Brit in Manhattan, deserved the claps and hollers of acclaim. But a similar, albeit briefer reaction also welcomed BSC’S founder and artistic director,
Julianne Boyd, simply for stepping on the stage before the performance started. Starved for live theater in a world where it hasn’t been permitted since mid-march, the audience was grateful to be seated before a stage again. They were also eager for the lights to go down and to be entertained and challenged by what precedent promised would be supremely accomplished acting from BSC veteran Dold and expert
production direction by Boyd. They got both.
And, as audiences who have been paying attention knew, they were about to be part of only the second production in the entire nation to be given approval by Actors’ Equity Association since the pandemic shutdown irrevocably altered 2020 theater, canceling much of it. The other production, as it happens, is Berkshire Theatre Group’s “Godspell,” which opened just two days earlier and just a few blocks away, also under a tent in a parking lot in downtown Pittsfield.
While most arts institutions in the Berkshires and greater Capital Region called off their entire summer seasons, Boyd and her Barrington Stage staff are to be commended for their commitment to finding a way to safely perform and their perseverance in the face of changing mandates and delayed permissions. As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved and its duration became more evident, the company first modified and postponed its season, then announced physical changes to its Boyd-quinson Mainstage to allow for social distancing, then, with barely two weeks’ notice, moved “Harry Clarke” from that stage to a parking lot after governmental approval for indoor performances didn’t materialize as expected.
The tent is commodious, the chairs well-spaced, the ushers adamant about masks for everyone at all times and the greeters deft with their deployment of touchless thermometers for temperature readings. (I got 97.5 degrees.) Street sounds can occasionally be intrusive, though Dold handled it with aplomb, sometimes pausing and glaring at wailing emergency vehicles or belching motorcycles as they passed and at one point ad-libbing about the noise of city life.
It isn’t especially distracting, and it often fits in with the play, much of which is set in New York City. Performed on a simple set with an Adirondack chair and a backdrop changed by lighting, the story follows a man who, at age 8 in Indiana, starts his transformation
from mild-mannered but big-dreaming Philip Brugglestein into British-accented Harry Clarke. Tyrannized by a verbally demeaning and physically abusive father, undefended by a mother who feels equally trapped, Philip makes his escape after both parents die while he is in his teens.
Sustained in New York at least initially by proceeds from their modest estate and the sale of the family home, Philip becomes Harry Clarke, the persona he’s been developing since childhood. Glib, confident and equally charming to women and men, Harry ingratiates himself with many. Central among them is the wealthy Schmidt family, with whom his flexible personality and fluid sexuality allow him to appeal to family members according to their individual needs.
While Dold embodies and delineates the characters brilliantly, allowing for a performance as free and expansive as any I’ve yet seen him give, this story of a chameleonic loner as social magnet, though different in its specifics, nonetheless feels familiar. As in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” or “Six Degrees of Separation,” an individual with a soul hollowed by a traumatic past uses self-invention for escape and self-fulfillment. But you can never find yourself if you’re being always being someone else.