In growing numbers, San Diego area theatergoers support a handful of professional theaters that produce extraordinary ensemble work. These theaters draw from a teeming pool of fine local actors and designers.
Two current examples are musicals. In Coronado, Lamb’s Players Theatre (www.lambsplayers.org) producing artistic director Robert Smyth stages an excellent production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” through March 26; and in the College area, Cygnet Theatre (www.cygnettheatre.com) artistic director Sean Murray stages and stars in a hit production of “My Fair Lady.” It is selling out every performance and continues through April 23.
Saturday, March 11 these extraordinary ensemble pieces were joined by New Village Arts’ remarkable production of John M. Synge’s dark, 1907 comedy, “The Playboy of the Western World.” Synge’s riot-causing work was the harbinger of things to come, among them, notably and currently, the work of recent Oscar-winner (“Six Shooter”) Martin McDonagh, who is known these days on stages worldwide for darkly comic and grisly plays, among them “The Pillowman,” “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” and “A Skull in Connemara.”
The Irish have been spinning macabre tales for centuries. Kudos to New Village Arts for returning to “Playboy,” a modern Irish classic, in which a lad named Christy Mahon (Joshua Everett Johnson), after wandering for 11 days, comes into Flaherty’s Pub. He receives drink and sustenance from Flaherty’s comely daughter Pegeen (Jessica John) and becomes a hero and darling of all the locals, including the widow Quin (Kristianne Kurner) and spinsters (Rachael VanWormer, Aurora RuPert, Monique Fleming and Grace Delaney), when he tells all he has murdered his abusive father by cracking his skull open with a shovel.
Never mind that Pegeen is engaged to Shawn (Brandon Walker); she falls head over heels for the appealing Christy and he for her. Some of the most real and affecting moments live in the eyes of these two fine young actors, co-directed by New Village Arts founders Kurner and her husband, Francis Gercke.
Flaherty (ebullient veteran actor Tim West) and his cohorts Jimmy and Philly (Pat Moran and Jack Missett) depart for a wake in a neighboring village. Pegeen makes the “heroic” Christy a bed on the window ledge. Just when things are going swimmingly, the bloody but not-dead Old Mahon (a brilliant turn by Gercke) puts in an appearance.
As Pegeen says, ¦a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but”¦there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.” Christy is hero no more. Uproariously there’s another murder, a near lynching, and a poignant ending to Synge’s strange, hysterically funny and loving play. If one perceives it a happy ending, it’s because Christy has discovered his power and manhood, and the forever-changed Pegeen has asserted her will.
Don’t miss this bit of comedic blarney. The production is exemplary of New Village Arts’ genius for ensemble work and likely among the best to be seen all season.
Now in its sixth season, New Village Arts, which currently performs at the Jazzercize corporate headquarters, received San Diego Critics Circle Craig Noel awards for best ensemble three years in a row, in 2005 for “Curse of the Starving Class,” in 2004 for “A Lie of the Mind” and in 2003 for “Orphans.”
Prior to curtain, Gercke and Kurner announced that the City of Carlsbad has just granted New Village Arts a five-year lease on space located off Palomar Airport Road at El Camino Real and Farady. They expect to open the new theater in October. It will be a co-production (with Backyard Productions) of Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.”
“Playboy of the Western World” continues through April 1 in the Studio Space at Jazzercise Inc., 3560 Impala Drive, Carlsbad, at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets ($18-$20) are available by visiting www.newvillagearts.org or by calling (760) 433-3245.
