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The Post-Standard News
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February 13, 2001 'SAVAGE' HAS ATTITUDE, IMAGINATION Joan Vadeboncoeur, Entertainment Columnist The milk of human kindness flows through John Patrick's "The Curious Savage," the comedy that Appleseed Productions presented for three weekends, ending Saturday. Widow Ethel Savage has been placed in a sanitarium by her three greedy stepchildren, who claim Ethel's a nut case because she's giving the family fortune away willy-nilly. The wealthy woman arrives with attitude, but plenty of care and concern for her fellow "inmates." The motley crew is composed of a statistician who thinks he can play the violin, an introverted pianist whose war experience caused him to abandon the concert arena, a wannabe painter who doesn't speak except to chant out her pet hates, a young woman with a wildly vivid imagination, and a middle-aged one who insists the doll she possesses is her real-live daughter. Patrick's thesis is, the patients may be deemed crazy, but they are the good people working out their problems. The stepchildren are not only greedy, they are just plain shallow. It's a tenet that remains viable in the current age even if it seems more simplistically resolved in its own era of the 1950s than it would be in 2001. As Ethel, the anchor figure, Linda Ann Hill must take the lead. At Friday's performance, she was delivering a work in progress. Her work grew as the scenes rolled on and finally triumphed. Her reticence, some due to bobbling lines, caused some of the other cast members to lay back from the eccentricities, lest they seem out of whack and register as less sympathetic. One who did not was Ann Marie Gardiner as the patient with the wild imagination. She was willing to take her character over the top, and it worked. The actress also found nuances in her character that the others did not. Copyright (c) 2001 The Herald Company |
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