Page 12 HIGH GEAR MAY 1981
ENTERTAINMENT
In killer play at Play House
New GEAR coffee house
Together has it together
By R. Woodward
Judging by its opening at the GEAR Center, on Saturday, April 18th, The Together Coffeehouse is something that the local gay community very much wants and very much needs.
Greeting the folk singing act of Victor Brooks and Wesley Malone was a full house that was both friendly and responsive.
Most of the audience stuck around until the two singers were completely finished for the evening.
Differences as to age, gender, and race did not keep individual audience members from relaxing and sharing with each other sev-
Viet Nam involvement evoked
By R. Woodward Judging by the production on view at the Cleveland Play House Brooks Theatre through May 17, How I Got That Story by Amlin Gray is the most successful and most interesting dramatic work that has yet been written about America's involvement in Viet Nam.
The play is a series of short scenes, many of which play as brief comedy skits, dealing with a naive young journalist who gets more and more involved with the country he has been sent to cover, and cannot handle the involvement.
Says a line in the play about those like him, “They go to cover a country and the country covers them."
The entire cast of the production is two actors.
Si Osborne plays the young reporter fresh from Dubuque. Getting across the reckless nnocence, the eagerness, the
increasing.confusion, and finally the despair of the young reporter, Osborne brings to his straight forward acting great depth of feeling. He manages with no apparent strain the difficult feat of keeping the audience from seeing the character only as he is seen by the other characters in the play--as a harmfully meddling intruder.
Osborne keeps in clear focus the young man's sincerity and depth of feeling, things which the people he encounters have no time or energy to attend to, being all but overwhelmed by their own
concerns.
Ken Albers, the other member of the cast, plays The Historical Event.
As the historical event Albers handles 17 different characterizations, managing to keep them clear and distinct, with a minimum of props.
Albers' voice even provides the
off-stage sound effects, including exploding grenades, machine-gun fire, and the sounds of flying helicopters.
Albers' tour de force is successful enough to not seem gimmicky at all
Even more amazing than all of the ground he covers throughout the play is how compelling he makes the individual roles emotionally.
His characterizations range from killing satire to depictions of stark tragedy, and they are so persuasive that it is only after the play is over that you are able to fully grasp how much his artistry has controlled your sense of what is incongruous and what is not.
Three satirical characterizations are particularly unforgetable.
There was much shrieking of glee to be heard on opening
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night as Albers depicted a somewhat befuddled lieutenant trying to give a pep talk to the men he is about to lead into battle and tries to use all of the obscenity that being in the army has taught him.
Wearing a pair of dangling earrings and sporting bright red nail polish, Albers manages to make a Dragon Lady characterization (obviously based on Madame Nhu) sinister and genuinely scary, as well as funny.
Very funny despite (or perhaps because of) the sickness of what is being depicted, is Albers
depicting a crazy, gung-ho photographer too caught up in being close to where the action is to get the shots to be bothered by losing limbs. The character chuckles while relating his having stepped on a land mine, and cheerfully tells of how interesting it looked when his left arm went flying off.
Albers not only keeps control over the audience when it is time for it to laugh, but also keeps control over it when it's time for it to take something dead seriously.
In playing a nun in a Viet Nam orphanage and in depicting a Vietnamese prostitute that the distraught young man asks to marry, the main emphasis of the scenes stays on the sincerity of the young man's emotions.
Director Peter Sander has somehow kept all of the high powered doings from seeming excessive and he manages to make them all seem like various parts of an inexorable progression without ever seeming to be forcing anything along.
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eral hours of amiable ambience. Before the start of the second set, Victor Brooks complimented Brian DeWitt on his organizing of the various efforts involved in launching together. Brooks made a comment which no one present appeared to disagree with.
It was not funds collected up front which had launched The Together Coffeehouse, said Brooks, but everybody's "sheer desire" for its existence. The performers
As singers and as guitar players, Victor Brooks and Wesley Malone filled the evening with solid and steady musicianship.
Not all of the songs sung were as enthralling as they were supposed to be--some of the lyrics sounded too much like ordinary talk being sung--but the delivery of the two singers always showed good voices being used by individuals with good musical taste.
None of the emotions being expressed ever had to be
strained after.
As performers, Victor Brooks and Wesley Malone complement each other very well.
Brooks, who evidently regards himself as being the intellectual half of the act, told the audience that he does not regard the act as being a mere entertainment, that he really means serious business with it. While saying so, he looked so calm and serene that
the statement did not sound at all forbidding or at all pretentious. He seemed to simply be confiding in you about a fact about himself.
Malone leaves the cheerful intellectualizing to Brooks and concentrates on getting across the heavier emotions. He is the throbbing soul of the act.
He is the sort of performer who never has to fake any deep feelings. Everything he does with his voice seems to give some deep lying reason. Hollow theatricalism is something that his performing is very far away from.
With the musicianship in top shape and the performing coming off as being 100% genuine, the duo now needs to give more attention to organizing the material that it presents.
The song sets tended to taper off, rather than build to any climaxes, and the impressions made by individual songs tended, to blur into each other because several songs conveying the same mood would follow one right after another rather than being carefully spread out.
Most of the work that the act needs involves carefully studying and considering the responses of audiences.
in presenting Victor Brooks and Wesley Malone, The Together Coffeehouse is seen doing what it should be doing. It is locating solid talents and giving them a responsive audience to work in front of so that they can further develop their acts and work off rough edges.