Ivory

Ivory, written by local playwright John Crutchfield and produced by Corpus Theatre Collective, recently debuted at the BeBe Theatre. In his director’s notes, Crutchfield states, “Though the characters are not based on real people, they are meant to seem realistic. In other words, it is important to believe that such people and situations could exist, and somewhere in some permutation they certainly do.” I believe Crutchfield achieves this goal in the creation of his characters, but I question the uniqueness of this goal. Isn’t virtually all realistic fiction intended to seem... realistic? That aside, there are a lot of very good things happening in this work, and a few things that didn’t quite hit for me.

Crutchfield has a tremendous ear and talent for crafting dialogue and giving life to three-dimensional characters. I also find that he can write extraordinary scenes, though I’m not sure the scenes are sewn together into a progression of events quite perfectly. I almost wanted this to be a television series rather than a play, as some occurrences felt a little rushed, and the passage of time wasn’t always terribly clear. I understand that this sort of thing can just be the nature of the beast of theatre in general; it wasn't really a staggering issue in this case, but it was something I noticed a few times. (One thing I did like very much about the pacing, though, was the seamless transition from scene to scene, as actors literally walk out of one scene immediately into the next with a brief lighting shift at most to indicate the new place and time.) The second act in particular was very short and felt truncated, and I desperately wanted to rework the structure of the last couple of scenes to give the ending the oomph I think it needed/wanted. I also didn’t quite get the feel for the high stakes that Crutchfield seems to be aiming for according to the Mountain Xpress article about the play by Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt (http://www.mountainx.com/ae/2008/060408the_high_cost_of_morality). I think the microcosm of graduate school maybe doesn’t have quite enough universality to translate to crises the general audience will be able to find as important as do the characters of this play. That could well be intentional in the effort to affect verisimilitude in the characters and their concerns, and on that level it does work.

The performances are excellent across the board. Vivian Smith stood out to me the most, in an exceptional, somewhat Bancroft-ian performance of the “predatory and unscrupulous” (to quote the aforementioned MX article) professor, Barbara. To this end, I started to have a little difficulty with some of the casting, not because of quality of acting, but purely because of appearance. The first small trouble I had was casting Jonathan Frappier as her protégé. Again, please don’t mistake me: I thought he, too, gave a great performance. However, with this sort of The Graduate dynamic present, it was a little odd for him to clearly be around the same age as her. I don’t mean to suggest that the same age difference as the film would be necessary here, but with lines such as, “I was just remembering how young you are,” (I am paraphrasing), the balance was thrown a little. The other strange casting, age-wise, was Anne-Marie Welty as nervous new grad student Ellen. The fact that she seemed a little too old in the role is, in large part, a testament to both Crutchfield’s writing and, perhaps ironically, her strong acting ability. Her character, to me, had a very clear voice based on her cadence of speech, emotional life, word choices, and general demeanor, and that voice hit me at around age 25. Of course anyone could be that nervous and insecure about school and somewhat awkward in relationships at any age, but then that to me becomes another issue that would need to be addressed as part of the story, and it seems to me more natural for her to be a little more freshly out of undergrad. To compound the (perceived) issue, there seemed to be a choice to dress her “younger” as well, as though the director (James Ostholthoff) perhaps agreed with a lot of what I’ve just said and cast against type anyway. Yet again, absolutely no complaints from me about the performances, and if I have to suspend my disbelief a hair to have this caliber of acting, I’ll take it.

--Jamie Shell