New is risky for a theater. It’s usually the dependable classics, not plays by local and emerging playwrights, that fill up those houses. But of the Seacoast theaters, Portsmouth’s Players’ Ring devotes a strikingly high ratio of its season to new and local work — in its 2006-7 season, six of its fifteen regular season shows were original plays or adaptations. As part of its commitment to the new, it sponsors the annual F. Gary Newton Competition, named for a Ring founder, which awards full production to the work of a playwright who lives within a sixty-mile radius of Portsmouth. This year’s winning script, a slightly down-tempo but quirky farce, is Eugene Shear’s Beneath the Moon, directed by Stan Zabecki.
Shear’s comedy concerns the family Davis, a clan that maintains the wealth and legacy of a forbear who invented the pacifier. As the play opens, siblings Susan (the measured Sarah Pietlicki), Abbie (Greg Gaskell, as agile and elastic as a cartoon), and Tania (Kate Betton, with an expressive face) all happen to bring their fiancés home, over the same weekend, to meet Mom Davis (Stefanie Diamond). Susan and Tania are fairly normal, Abbie is a frenetic but good-natured inventor, and Mom is the real wacko of the family. She adopts the personas of the famous (Annie Oakley, Gypsy Rose Lee, and others), and at the time of the visit, she is Queen Elizabeth I.
In addition to all the bowing and regalese the kids and their partners must thus scramble to learn, Mrs. Davis has also initiated a complicated and economically-driven courtship trial: in order for the couples to collect the Davis kids’ dowry (a million bucks, collectively) fiancés Derek (Tobin Moss), a sax player, and Steve (Ed Hinton), handsome, nice, and well-dressed, but apparently not the sharpest knife in the drawer, must each perform an act of caring. Fiancée Bridget (Carolyne Gallo), a sweet and uninhibited child-care worker, must perform an act of daring. Plus, all the suitors have to make dinner without any Davis assistance.
That’s already a lot of stuff and personalities at play, but because this is farce, the conflict is further revved by subterfuge. Lithe and great at dissembling, Tania wants to get rid of the other suitors, so as to claim the whole dowry for herself. Conveniently, there’s a secret past between two parties, and Tania hastens to capitalize on it in between dinners and Her Majesty’s amusing “interviews” with the suitors.
The machinations and twists that ensue could be paced with a little more speed and tautness (and actors should beware the occasional line-burial), but this production features some engaging performances. Betton’s ever-shifting face conveys both her nice-girl front and her inner deviousness, without ever turning Tania into a hammy villain. Gaskell’s Abbie has a manic energy and volume that is perfectly keyed for farce, and Gallo brings convincing, visceral warmth to her Bridget. And Diamond, as the kooky royal mum, is great fun to watch as she wields a modern acuity within her costumed affect and phrasing.
Hinton’s Steve talks with an abrupt, half-wit nasal timbre that would seem to bear a little more reaction from everybody; he and his blank, posed beam are rather enigmatic. At the other end of things, the straighter characters of Susan and Derek could stand a bit more definition in both script and direction, but are thoughtfully performed by Pietlicki and Moss.
