Berkeley Rep returns to stage with ‘Wintertime’
Charles L. Mee's play an insightful look at passion
Charles L. Mee is a master of absurd juxtapositions.
The playwright delights in smashing genres together in a zany theatrical collage that spins wildly from farce to tragedy. You know, sort of like life. That’s the dizzying vibe of “Wintertime.”
While Les Waters’ production in the highly-anticipated return to live performance at Berkeley Repertory Theatre struggles through a fitfully funny first act, the staging ultimately shimmers with the delicate existentialism that makes Mee so magical.
In its best moments, the sublime and the outrageous bristle to life as Mee’s insights into love, loss and longing cut to the bone.
Meet Jonathan (Micah Peoples), an artless young man who escapes to the family cabin to pop the question to his girlfriend Ariel (Carmen Berkeley). Alas, the swooning of the young and the naive is soon unbalanced by the cynicism of the old and the jaded.
Jonathan’s mom, the practical Maria (Nora el Samahy), and her clingy lover, Francois (Thomas Jay Ryan), have already shacked up at the vacation house. Not to be outdone, Jonathan’s wistful dad Frank (James Carpenter), and his gentle-hearted lover Edmund (David Ryan Smith), soon crash the party, followed by a lovingly bickering neighbor couple (astutely etched by Sharon Lockwood and Lorri Holt.)
An omniscient delivery guy named Bob (the deft Jomar Tagatac), and a lovesick doctor, Jaqueline (Sarah Nina Hayon) also make grand entrances into this romantic melee amid the snow.
Mee deconstructs the messy emotional carnage
left behind as people couple, uncouple and self-destruct. The rendezvous roller coaster unfurls upon Annie Smart’s sleek white set, a gorgeously blank canvas marked by a window through which we glimpse wafting snow. Strings of tinsel hang from the ceiling like so many kitschy icicles.
In truth, it takes some time before the rich eccentricity of the performances matches that of the set. Only in the second act, when Waters choreographs an exquisite memorial service that bristles with human nuance, does “Wintertime” truly spark.
That’s when the Obiewinning director burnishes the play’s whimsy to a high sheen. The playwright (“Big Love,” “Fêtes de la Nuit”) splices together bits of Italian opera, Greek tragedy, vaudeville and burlesque in a wildly inventive second act that invites the viewer
to muse and ponder.
At its finest, “Wintertime” generates the penetrating heat and light of distilled truths about the messiness of human bonding. These characters don’t
fall in love so much as they crash into it like an asteroid. Love pulverises them.
As Frank poignantly notes: “You think if you had your life to live over again you could make it turn out
right; but then, it turns out to be exactly the same no matter how many chances we get.”
The extended memorial service sequence is a stunner. A ballet of body language
captures the way different people react when forced to confront mortality. A bit between Lockwood and Holt involving a nap and knitting needles is sheer comic genius.
Carpenter strikes the existential mother lode in his speeches about the way a father and son are destined to both long for and fight against a lasting intimate connection.
Mee seems to suggest that just because we know that life is fleeting, doesn’t mean that we are actually capable of making the most of what we have. With that in mind, “Wintertime” seems to dare us to go exploring before the time is up.