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SportsNeither rain, nor bugs nor screech of owl
Hard Bargain Players trip the boards again
Friday, May 2, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by GARY SMITH
Matt Friedman, played by Doug Baughman, right, is sure that he can persuade Sally Talley, played by Suzanne Donohoe, to marry him. The pair are performing Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson’s ‘‘Talley’s Folly” in the Hard Bargain Players’ season opener at the amphitheater in Accokeek.
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That’s the tag line for the first show of the season in the Hard Bargain amphitheater in Accokeek.
‘‘Talley’s Folly” is the title and the setting of the two-person, one-act production directed by Juliet Kelsey Chagnon and starring Doug Graupman and Suzanne Donohoe.
The folly, built by Sally Talley’s grandfather before she was born 31 years earlier, was built already falling down. It was one of a series of buildings Grandfather Talley built all over town, to the dismay of the town fathers who often protested the man’s free will building of gazebos, boathouses and such but for which they eventually found a use.
This she tells the 40-plus Matt Friedman one summer night when they meet secretly in the boathouse.
You might think they have been doing so – meeting secretly, that is – for some time, but you would be wrong. They spent a week seeing each other more than a year earlier, much to the disapproval of Sally’s family - with one exception.
Then Matt returned to his accountant’s job in St. Louis while Sally continued to live and work as a nurse in the hospital in Lebanon, Mo. That was the end of the story for Sally, but not for Matt. He began to write nearly every day.
‘‘It clears my head to begin every morning writing to you,” he tells her.
She never wrote back, except once to tell him to stop writing to her, a directive he ignored.
Matt loves Sally. He is convinced she loves him.
Sally hates Matt. Of this she, too, is convinced. She is determined to remain an old maid, nursing the World War II wounded soldiers who have come to her hospital. She wants out of her restrictive household, where she lives with her parents, aunts and brother.
On this particular evening, Matt has driven down from St. Louis to see her. She comes to the boathouse after having run into a maelstrom of discontent and threats from most of her staunch conservative, Midwestern Methodist family.
Matt, unwelcome because he is German, Jewish, older and not wealthy, had actually come to see her father – with no apparent success. The brick wall he ran into in the form of Sally’s ignorant brother Buddy, fish-face Aunt Olive and angry mother rather curtailed the encounter.
She knew, however, that he would not have left, partly because his car was still up at the house and partly because she knew that he would be waiting in the boathouse. Some things never change.
Graupman, who has appeared in Tantallon Theatre productions at Harmony Hall Regional Center in Fort Washington and, most recently, with the Port Tobacco Players in ‘‘Hotbed Hotel,” brings a kind of loving gentleness to the role of Matt.
This he does despite the fact that when he told people he was appearing with Donohoe he became a bit nervous. Donohoe, who has been on the local scene for many years despite her youth and is currently the artistic director of Hard Bargain Players, has an impressive reputation which was emphatically expressed by fellow thespians when he told them of his new role.
Donohoe brings a winsome stubbornness to Sally. She inwardly pines for what has been and will not be, something about which Matt knows nothing. Protecting her emotions, she puts up a defiant front that Matt knows is there.
It’s an intimate tale that will perfectly fit the outdoor setting in the amphitheater at Hard Bargain, where reality sometimes enhances – or exacerbates – the conflicts already inherent in the play. Rehearsals are sometimes tests of endurance and nerves.
On Monday night, when the rehearsal should have been held on the stage in the woods, players and critic were huddled in the director’s living room – in the dry comfort of a soft couch and the happy attentive company of two cats and a dog.
The weather was a challenge, as it always is for outdoor events, and there was no relying on the rains to have stopped. Even more challenging, though, were the technical things that needed doing.
‘‘We’ll play in the rain, but I’m more worried with the threat of thunderstorms tonight about my light person working with metal lights on a metal platform standing on a metal ladder,” Chagnon said. ‘‘Not a good combination.”
There is, though, something wonderful that happens in the amphitheater. I have seen a few plays that were set indoors performed at Hard Bargain, but the bulk of them have been set outside, the vagaries of the weather notwithstanding. And the external sound effects and occasional curious and friendly neighborhood canine add character to the performances.
If there’s screaming, it’s supposed to be in front of you. Otherwise it’s most likely the screech owl overhead who nearly scared the life out of the troupe Sunday night.
When you head for a performance, you will be advised to bring bug spray, perhaps a hand fan and occasionally your own Macintosh. The shows will go on in the rain – this I know for a fact – but they will not take place when the performers are going to be upstaged by the weather.
Having said that, the plays are performed between May and October when the weather is usually most pleasant, and are planned to draw those who appreciate small theater and edgy stories. Religion, greed, sexuality, racism and domestic conflicts are plot norms.
So are Pulitzer Prize winners, like Lanford Wilson’s ‘‘Talley’s Folly” and classics like Arthur Miller’s ‘‘The Crucible” and Edgar Lee Master’s ‘‘Spoon River Anthology.”
This remaining season performances are slated to be ‘‘Bash,” written by Neil LaBute and directed by Randy Tusing, June 13-28; ‘‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” writtenĘby Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by David Thomas, Aug. 22-Sept. 6; and ‘‘The Weir,” writtenĘby Conor McPherson and directed by Brooke Howells, Oct. 3-18.
‘‘Talley’s Folly” is suited for nearly every age because even though the characters have conflicts, it’s a sweet little romance.
Rated PG-YWLLATFITHBW: You Will Love Love at the Folly In The Hard Bargain Woods.
