By C.B. AdamsContributing WriterAct Inc.’s family-friendly production of Leaving Iowa, written by the multi-talented team of Tim Clue and Spike Morgan, feels like an adaptation of a personal essay. You know, the kind that appears around Father’s Day in the New York Times‘s Sunday Review with a title like, “Me and My Old Man.”

John Steinbeck took to the highways with his dog and ended up with a book called Travels With Charlie. Leaving Iowa, a memory play that weaves past and present, could just as well be titled Travels With My Dad — a mildly ironic title perhaps, given that the narrator of this play is carrying around his father’s memory and his burial ashes. 

Befitting its authors’ professional achievements as motivational speakers and improv/stand-up comedians, Leaving Iowa offers snappy, quick-paced and engaging dialogue that is well timed and sprinkled liberally with one-liners and other comedic accoutrements.

As an entertainment, it shares much with a good-quality sitcom in the vicinity of Home Improvement. It’s approach and themes are milder versions of those in A Christmas Story(movie or musical version), which was itself a softer version of humorist Jean Shepard’s novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Photo by John LambLeaving Iowa can feature as many as 27 performers by casting multiple character parts separately. Director Lori Renna nicely pared this production to just six by making use of the quick-changing talents of CeCe Day and John Emery.

Part of the fun of this production was anticipating whom Day and Emery would be playing the next time they emerged from the wings of the in-the-round stage at the Black Box Theater in Lindenwood’s J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts.The four other parts, played by John Reidy as Dad, Colleen Heneghan as Mom, Hunter Frederick as Don Browning and Amanda Brasher as Sis, also required the actors to portray their characters in the present and past. Hunter and Brasher delightfully transformed from young backseat nattering chatterboxes to their more mature but no less competitive adult counterparts. The play is projected through the lens of the son, Don Browning. Hunter’s likeable, identifiable and approachable portrayal of a son running the gamut of fond remembrances, regret and contrition hit his mark with ease every time.

Heneghan and Reidy as Mom and Dad respectively provided a solid base from which the rest of the play revolves. After all, doesn’t it seem like our parents never change? This was especially true as veteran actor Reidy play Dad both as a real live character as well as a tingle-inducing memory-ghost in some scenes.

As the actors bopped from scene to scene along the play’s extended time line, their efforts were well supported by the staging provided by Lori Potts, scene design by Tim Grumich, lighting design by Michael Sullivan , costume design by Jane Sullivan and sound design by Kaitlynn Ferris. To this team’s credit, all of these elements  were quietly woven into the play and provided just the right of effect to convey each scene. Sometimes, as in this case, not standing out is outstanding — and the right directorial choice.More than once, the family in Leaving Iowa piles into an imaginary car and hits a road that is sometimes metaphorical and sometimes actual. As the play ends, with Don finally finding an appropriate resting place for his father’s ashes, its resolution leaves the audience with a feeling both wistful, amused, satisfied, and…well, happy. You know that look a dog has with its head sticking out the window of a moving car, as if its smiling?Yeah, Leaving Iowa leaves you like that. 

Photo by John LambAct Inc. presents “Leaving Iowa” June 14 through June 22. Performances June 21-22 are Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Emerson Black Box Theatre at J. Scheidegger Cener for the Arts on the Lindenwood campus in St. Charles. For more information or tickets, visit www.actincstl.com

By CB AdamsContributing Writer

“Travels With My Aunt,” a 1969 novel by Graham Greene and adapted into this play by Scotsman Giles Havergal, is 10 pounds of story stuffed into an evening clutch bag. The micro-synopsis of the globe-trotting plot is that it involves the tentacled way a flamboyant octogenarian aunt tractor-beams her nephew, a stuffy retired banker with a penchant for raising dahlias, into the intrigue of her nefarious-but-not-really shenanigans.

It’s a farcical, preposterously picaresque and broad play with too much set up and a rushed conclusion. The Brits (think Monty Python to Benny Hill), have a special knack for this kind of silly comedy – the kind that breezes along asking for little of the audience, aims for titters rather than guffaws, and reveals English culture for all its myopic, stiff-upper-lip foibles.

Photo by John Lamb

It’s also the type of script that actors and directors find irresistible. And who can blame them — the men, anyway? The four-man ensemble gets to practice (and practice and practice) their British accents (plus a few other world dialects) while quick-changing into the play’s 25 male and female characters at the drop of hat, or a wig or a mustache or fedora, as required. No wonder Greene’s story has been adapted into this play, a radio play, a movie (directed by George Cukor, no less) and a musical a few years back. If he were still alive, “Travels” would have made a terrific one-man show starring Robin Williams at his maniacal, hyperactive best.

Lindenwood University’s summer repertory theatre, ACT INC’s
production of “Travels With My Aunt,” directed by Emily Jones, provides a
theater experience with a dutiful, earnest exuberance comprising one part “the
old college try” and one part “hey kids, let’s put on a show!” This manly ensemble
adroitly transitions among the play’s characters while keeping the action
moving breezily along.

The strength of this production is in this ensemble, rather
than the four individual actors – Anthony Wininger, Ted Drury, Jake Blonstein
and Timothy Patrick Grumich – who are (to their credit) interchangeable. This
interchangeability at its best is fun to watch, and requires an impressive
range of physicality and improv-like energy. The biggest laugh of the night was
the creation of a men’s restroom, complete with two urinals, using two stacks
of suitcases. At its worst, this interchangeability leaves one with a
linguistic hangover that sounds like four bland, generic degrees of Dame Edna
Everage.

Staging this relatively short one-act in the round was certainly
a highlight. The compass-like octagonal stage was a clear and effective way to
anchor each actor with his trunk filled with props, and enabled each to move
about as the action demanded. The minimal lighting was unobtrusive in the best possible
way and put the emphasis of each scene on the actors’ abilities. Likewise, the
sound design was restrained and tasteful.

Unlike the aunt in the title, this play isn’t aging well or
all that interestingly, which begs the question of why ACT INC has revisited
this script. The jokes about marijuana and sexual promiscuity (and even the
occasional profane language) land rather like quaint quips instead of the edgy bon
mots that they may have been in 1969. Some timing misfires and line flubs
notwithstanding, the obvious talents within ACT INC deserve a better vehicle.
To coin an old advertising slogan, this isn’t Greene done right, it’s merely a
trifle – Greene done “lite.”

Photo by John Lamb “Travels With My Aunt” continues at the J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts, Lindenwood University, June 22-23.