‘Ice Glen’ fits nicely in Actor’s Express space
For the AJC
Monday, July 20, 2009
What a difference a new space makes. After 10 years of producing his annual play festival in various black boxes at 7 Stages, Dad’s Garage and PushPush, Essential Theatre artistic director Peter Hardy has wisely relocated this year’s event to the comparative vastness of Actor’s Express.
It’s not that Joan Ackerman’s drama “Ice Glen,” for instance, requires any big-scale production design — but there’s a lot to be said for simply giving actors a little elbow room. A couple of scenes are set around a large dining table that wouldn’t have even fit in those other venues. When the characters stroll across the stage talking of the sprawling estate where they live, it might’ve been unintentionally funny before, coming from a group of people basically huddled in a corner.
Dina Shadwell (left) and Jayson Smith in Essential Theatre’s ‘Ice Glen.’ Dany Nieves
"Ice Glen"
In repertory through Aug. 2. $15-$20. Essential Theatre Play Festival at Actor's Express, 887 W. Marietta St. (King Plow Arts Center). 404-607-7469. essentialtheatre.com
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Working on a low budget to begin with, director Ellen McQueen and scenic designer Rob Hadaway take a minimalist approach that’s quite effective nonetheless, draping the area in various sheer fabrics to suggest different windows or walls. In one memorable scene, the curtains also represent mirrors: While we’re focused on what’s happening downstage, other characters suddenly appear through two of the veils, busily preparing themselves for a pivotal dinner date.
Set in remote New England at a time when typewriters were state of the art, “Ice Glen” involves a reclusive poet (played by Dina Shadwell) and the magazine publisher (Jayson Smith) intent on rescuing her from obscurity, ready or not. For both personal and professional reasons, he wants to share her “nobility of spirit and purity of thought” with the world. Much too unassuming for that, she’d rather keep her poems to herself. “I don’t write for an audience,” she says.
But Ackerman does, and fairly well. Their ongoing debate about the creative process — her right to commune in private with nature vs. his sense of purpose to enrich the greater humanity — is thoughtful, eloquent and generally balanced. Then again, we don’t hear any of her brilliant poems. We don’t see the passion that consumes her when she writes. “Ice Glen” almost makes it too easy to side with the poet, painting her as a paragon of lofty artistic ideals, when she could use more ambiguity. (She never seems remotely selfish for withholding her work.)
Also problematic to McQueen’s Essential production, the character’s presumably free-spirited temperament doesn’t always register in Shadwell’s lackluster portrayal. Her arguments are well-spoken, as written, but there’s no appreciable fire simmering beneath her timid, guarded surface. Likewise, for his part, Smith’s performance often feels more reserved than driven.
Among the other eccentric misfits who live at the mansion, Jim Sarbh (as a dim-witted orphan) and Jo Howarth (as a gregarious housekeeper) come on a bit strong, while Spencer Stephens nicely underplays his role (as a butler and amateur archaeologist). Ann Wilson is excellent as the misguided mistress of the house, although she fails to adequately distinguish the dramatic shock of a late-breaking development in which she betrays the poet’s trust.
Still, when she comments about the “desolate palace” these characters call home, from the relative spaciousness of the stage at Actor’s Express, it makes uncommonly perfect sense.
