Jason Odell Williams’s script could benefit from some tweaking, but the pleasant romantic comedy proves a perfect fit for the company’s comfortable new 99-seat theater

By David Feldman
http://cnycafemomus.com/David_Feldman.html

Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company is closing its 20th season, the first in its new West State/Martin Luther King Street space. I couldn’t get there this year until now, but a recent visit brought good news: The new digs are a great improvement over the old Clinton House theatre, and the current production of At A Loss, a new play by Jason Odell Williams, shows the company at its best in terms both of performance and of presenting new material.

The intimate 99-seat house has a thrust stage with comfortable seating around its three sides. It’s a much more pleasant place to watch a play than the former spread-out playing area, which often stuck theater-goers a neck-craning distance away in uncomfortable seats.  

The theater’s small size has to do with Actors’ Equity and other professional contracts, by the way. There are many Equity contract variations, but essentially a professional theatre of fewer than 100 seats falls under the equivalent of an off-Off Broadway contract. That contract permits a lower pay scale for performers, production rights, etc. than larger houses. ("Off Broadway" is a theatre with 100-499 seats and "Broadway" designates larger houses; contrary to popular perception, distance from Broadway itself has nothing to do with it.)

For At A Loss, the action takes place on one set, a motel room in a rural Virginia town. As designed by Brendan Komala it looks just right: slightly tacky and never drawing our attention away from this clever (if lightweight) play and its stellar cast.  

The opening moments are as humorously jarring as you could hope to find in a romantic comedy. As the lights come up, an attractive young woman is screaming in an incomprehensible language at a thoroughly confused (and not overly bright) DHL Delivery Express driver. Soon we learn she’s Israeli, and the language is, of course, Hebrew.

It turns out that the young woman’s grandmother died the previous day while they were on an extended US trip. Worse, the truck carrying the container with the grandmother’s body has been stolen. Worse yet, the closest to anybody who can speak Hebrew here in the middle of nowhere Virginia is a man who’s half Jewish and half Catholic (when he was a kid they celebrated "Chanu-mas"). This man’s Hebrew vocabulary consists of maybe half-a-dozen words, and these are just about useless in the current situation.

This is a new script and it could use a little tweaking: How is it possible, for example, that the bright young woman ― the energetic Charlotte Cohn, who has wonderful timing in two languages (three if you count hand gestures) ― could have been traveling about the U.S. for 10 days and picked up almost no English at all? (Cohn is more than a fine comic actress, incidentally: She also did the Hebrew translations for the play).

As this is a romantic comedy, it’s less about what how things will end than how we get to that end. For this, playwright Jason Odell Williams provides us with some nice chronology and language twists. Scene 2 takes place before Scene 1. In the former, grandmother (the vivacious Norma Fire) and granddaughter deliver all the exposition we need to explain why and how they got to this small town (it’s done in English, but we know they’re actually speaking Hebrew). This happens again at the beginning of Act 2, and later the action will freeze so that Grandma, now dead of a heart attack, will return with some important points to make.

That’s about as far from standard form as the script strays. But its premises are terrific. First, there’s the dead and missing grandmother.  Second, there’s the communications gap to be overcome via very creative physical work between actress Cohn and Michael Kaplan (as Josh, the somewhat less-than-skilled interpreter). Third, there's the love interest between the two of them.

And fourth, there’s the story of the driver, played by Michael Dalto. Dalto is the only non-Equity cast member in the production, but you’d never know this thanks to a winning performance that’s slightly over-the-top in just the right way. He’s your standard yokel who has a chance to redeem what he himself recognizes as "a worthless life." If he screws up, there goes the only decent job he’s ever had or probably ever will have. So he needs the reluctant help of the man who may be his only true friend. As that friend, Michael Kaplan expertly negotiates the treacherous shoals of a part that asks him to navigate between longing for love, fear of commitment, a painful past and a thoroughly perplexing current situation.

Williams’s script rises above its clichés not only with the clever premises, but with some nice lines. When the young woman, Ayelet (mispronounced as "I yell a lot" by the local bumpkin) puts down a boyfriend who dumped her (part of the reason for this trip from Israel) as "an asshole," for instance, Grandma replies, "Yes, but he was your asshole." It’s a credit to actress Cohn’s ability to bring depth to what could be a one-dimensional character that we realize, via a mixture of sadness and relief, that the description has hit home.

Like many new plays, there are some Act 2 problems that could use a little massaging before the script moves on to its next production ― which will be in Naples, Florida in November. Ayelet is famished at one point (an important plot motivator) but never eats the food that finally arrives. And it takes a somewhat strained coincidence to bring Josh and Ayelet together. It has to do with a secret reason why Grandma took this trip to America. I’m hardly giving the plot away when I reveal that in the end, true love ― with the help of that coincidence and some offstage machinations ― conquers all. But I couldn’t help wishing it hadn’t been conquered this easily.  

The climax is, um, anticlimactic. What it needs is a next-to-the-last-moment reversal to tangle things up, a possibility that all will not end well so we will keep guessing right to the end and the script will not roll unimpeded toward that ending.

The production is gently and sensitively directed by KTC Artistic Director, Rachel Lampert. She never lets a good laugh, visual or verbal, escape her competent hands, but she also knows how and when to let go and permit us to sit back in those comfortable seats and enjoy the good times without any obvious directorial interference. In this she’s aided and expertly abetted by Lisa Boquist’s costumes and Lesley Greene’s sound design, which seems to put the right musical accents just where they need to be.

This KTC production is cute, but it's a good cute. Yes, the characters are clichés: Jewish grandmother, country oaf, lovelorn young woman who meets man badly in need of love. But who cares? We don’t go to this sort of play to learn anything new about the unfathomable depths of the human soul ― although we do get just a hint of that in this very likeable production.

DETAILS BOX:
What: At A Loss, a new play by Jason Odell Williams
Where: Kitchen Theatre Company, 417 W. State/MLK Jr. St., Ithaca
When: Through July 3.
Length of Performance: 1 hour, 50 minutes (including a 10-minute intermission)
Tickets:  $18 - 32; call 607 273-4497 or http://www.kitchentheatre.org/
Family guide: Appropriate for all audiences
Remaining performances: July 20, 21, 27, 28 (7:30 p.m.); July 21 (2 p.m.);
  July 22, 23, 29, 30 (8 p.m.); July 24, 31 (4 p.m.)