Actors Lend Depth to Comedic ‘Art Room’

As the curtain fell on the first act of “The Art Room,” the HRDC’s latest production in the Loeb Experimental Theatre, one mental patient was stalking across the stage clutching a doll, another was embracing the weeping nurse, and anyone who’d seen a comedy of errors knew where things were going. Although the coincidences unfolding on stage were unsurprising, the actors made “The Art Room” a dynamic and thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Billy Aronson’s play, produced by Kelley D. McKinney ’09 and Davone J. Tines ’09,  is a romantic comedy about a day in the life of four mental patients, their nurse, and one patient’s husband. Watching it, one can almost see the playwright standing in the wings, waiting for the audience to realize the story’s central message: the characters’ respective neuroses may make their romantic entanglements more absurd, but their thought processes are exactly like those of any “normal” person.

Although beautiful moments occasionally flickered across the stage in “The Art Room,” they—like the sketches illustrating characters’ thoughts, that were projected on the back wall during the show—were generally too brief, too pale, or too weak to make a forceful artistic statement. This is partly due to Aronson, who adapted the play from a farce by Georges Feydeau, and his efforts to cram social commentary into a coincidence-driven comedy. The lack of proper comedic timing on the part of director Renée L. Pastel ’09, who often rushed funny moments, was also responsible.

Luckily, the actors’ superb body language surmounted the script to skillfully convey each patient’s individual insanity. For instance, the painfully long smiles of depressed nurse Norma (Christine K.L. Bendorf ’10) and her fluid movements in the opening monologue presaged the abrupt jumps from one emotion to another that would occur throughout the play. Unfortunately, Bendorf sometimes delivered her lines with a nagging rhythm that reduced their effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the dialogues of patient Madeline (Eneniziaogochukwu “Zia” A. Okocha ’08 with her husband Art (Michael Finnerty) clicked perfectly, breathing life into the script’s pointed game of word-association. Okocha’s regal poise made the poeticism of her breezy babble credible. What’s more, she achieved an entrancing sensuality despite her character’s propensity to doze off at inopportune times. As Madeline’s emotionally absent and unfaithful husband, Art took breaks from his cell phone only to dictate business-related thoughts to a tape recorder. Finnerty managed to maintain an impressive degree of egotism and self-absorbed blather in the role even as another patient, Thomas (Benjamin C. Cosgrove ’10), hopped about begging him for attention.

Cosgrove was a lovably naïve Thomas. He frolicked about making full use of the absurdist set (designed by Todd Weekley), often slamming and whirling its four doors, all with different heights and configurations of knobs and mounted in stark white and green walls. Although he was dressed in a red onesie, and spoke often of an imaginary princess, Cosgrove’s childishness was never overwrought. And as he frantically paced the stage, his tie flapping, patient Jon (Michael R. Wolfe ’09) successfully encapsulated the caricature of a businessman, a stumbling sycophant, and a poignant romantic in one character. Wolfe’s contorting arms seemed to spin his elaborate lies into being, while the fits of lock-jawed trembling that overtook him when he tried to reach out to the women he loved were free of affectation. He was credibly, hilariously, uncomfortably crazy.

But the most believably insane character, and clearly the one into whom the actor had most deeply sunk her claws, was the obsessive-compulsive patient Jackie, played by Sarah A. Sherman ’09. Her scuttling, screaming, cuddling, and lucid outbursts put one on edge. While her colleagues occasionally clowned for laughs, Sherman would not let us forget that her character was deeply troubled, if also somewhat sweet and silly.

The entangled romantic interactions between Jackie and Jon, the most fully realized of the play’s two characters, made “The Art Room” more than a comedy that also happened to feature the screams and flashing lights expected of psychological dramas. If you missed the embrace that Jackie and Jon shared at a key point in the play, you missed a moment that simultaneously conveyed feelings of fear, inadequacy, love, lust, and attachment—even insanity. While “The Art Room” struggled to find an identity between comedy and drama, the actors expertly realized their characters’ range of emotion.