This review has been reposted courtesy of the League of Cincinnati Theatres. For more LCT reviews click here to visit their reviews page.
The more theatre I experience, the more I realize how important basic sound design is to a production. If an audience cannot hear the actors during a performance, than the performance does not exist.
This is the case of DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, produced by the Diogenes Theatre Company at the Jarson-Kaplan Theater at the Aronoff. I wish the playbill talked more about Diogenes, a new theatre company in town, but unfortunately the group seems indiscernable in the program despite highlighting the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s Brian Isaac Phillips and a back cover with the CSC Season 21 schedule.
Annie Fitzpatrick as Paulina Salas & Michael G. Bath as Gerardo Escobar. Photo by Mikki Schaffner.
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN is set in a beach house in Chile after a long period of dictatorship. The set design on the massive stage consisted of a few boxes to simulate furniture, a chair, a table set in front of several vertical, fan-blown, opaque, gauzy strips of cloth that filled in for the ocean. An annoying ocean wave sound that got worse the farther you sat from the stage further interfered from hearing the un-miked action on stage.
Michael G. Bath plays Gerardo Escobar, who has just been assigned to a very important committee looking into human rights violations during the recent dictatorship. Anne Fitzpatrick is Paulina Salas, Gerardo’s wife, who happens to be a little insane and seriously off-kilter as she is suffering from a torture and rape experience by secret police working for the dictator. Giles Davies is Roberto Miranda, and he is the only cast member who remotely looks Chilean.
It so happens that Miranda rescues a stranded Escobar – he had a flat tire – and he ends up returning to Escobar’s later that night. He begins to ask very detailed questions about the commission (at least the ones I could hear). He stays the night by sleeping on the three boxes under a flimsy blanket—this is a bare-bones set.
In the morning, crazy Paulina is sure that Miranda is one of the dictator’s doctors who defiled her 15 years ago. She attacks the sleeping man, ties him to a chair, and in what is one of the best scenes I’ve experienced this year as an LCT panelist, removes her nylons, stuffs them in Miranda’s mouth, and then duct tapes it shut! Fitzpatrick plays her role in over-the-top fashion as she points a gun at the sniveling man.
She demands that Miranda confess to the crime and bullies her husband to assist. Unfortunately, much of the tense dialogue was reduced to whispers and turned-to-the-back-of-the-stage readings. Many plot points were lost. [As a further note, the audience is barred from sitting in the first four rows of this production, and the twelve or so ushers made sure of that.]
This production should have been in the Black Box space on the other side of the Aronoff. The big size of this little theater space swallowed the action on stage. These are great local actors, but their talent was not used to full effect. The high union cost to stage a show at the Aronoff apparently limited this production. The director, Lindsey A. Mercer, just didn’t get the basics done.
For more information on the production, click here.
Behind the Curtain Cincinnati 