Theater Review—

Current Offering At Ridgefield

Is Crazy Good

By Julie Stern

RIDGEFIELD — Once again Ridgefield Theater Barn has demonstrated its power to stage a gripping production of a serious play, masterfully directed by veteran Sherry Asch, and beautifully acted by a large cast assembled from communities across the Connecticut-New York State area.

In this case the play is Nuts by Tom Topor, which opened on Broadway back in 1980 and ran for nearly 100 performances and won numerous award nominations for its actors at the time. I can’t imagine that those players were any better than the ones on stage in Ridgefield today.

Based on a real life event, Nuts is a courtroom drama set in a Bellevue Hospital hearing room, where a judge must decide whether Claudia Faith Draper, a white, middle class, well educated call girl, is sane enough to stand trial for the murder of a violent client, or, as her parents, the prosecutor, and a court appointed psychiatrist claim, she is mentally incompetent, and needs to be admitted to an institution for treatment, rather than be sent to jail.

As in the actual legal-psychiatric system, the real issue here is one of power.

“Don’t you trust anyone here, Ms Draper?!” prosecutor Franklin MacMillan asks, with disingenuous astonishment.

Clad in the standard issue Johnny coat and cotton bathrobe afforded to patients, a resentful Ms Draper, beautifully played by Julie Bell Petrak, sprawls back in the witness chair, thinks for a moment, and points to the timid little bailiff who administers the oath.

“Him.  I trust Harry [the bailiff]. Everyone else here has the power to hurt me —  and some of you will!”  And of course she is right.

Claudia knows the intricacies of the penal code. Once she is certified as needing treatment, the hospital, as personified by the psychiatrist Dr Herbert Rosenthal, can recommit her each year, until the 25-year term that constitutes a manslaughter sentence is up (and even longer than that if she is declared still incompetent). And all this would be without ever being tried for the crime, one for which she is sure she will be acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

Pompous and arrogant, Marc Hartog as the doctor is insufferable, and, as is clear to Claudia, her lawyer, and especially the audience, he is also insensitive and humorless. He is incapable of distinguishing between bitter sarcasm and paranoid delusion. However, he is the expert, and his confident diagnosis that Claudia suffers from paranoid schizophrenia can be enough to doom her to oblivion in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the New York State System.

Claudia’s mother and stepfather, Rose and Arthur Kirk, profess their undying love for their daughter. They also, however, share their conviction that she is mentally unstable, and has been since her teen years when she became distant and defiant. Prosecutor MacMillan uses their testimony as well as that of the doctor, to reinforce his insistence that she is unfit for trial.

Only Louise Kaminer as Claudia’s grandmotherly lawyer is on her side, cozying up to the witnesses with Columbo-like diffidence, and then deftly exposing their limitations and duplicities. (Boy if I ever need a lawyer, would I want her!)

If there is one weakness in the plot it lies in the fact that it is pretty apparent to the audience that there is something unhealthy in Art Kirk’s attachment to his stepdaughter, but Will Jeffries’ performance in the role is so nuanced and ambivalent that it is not the revelation that matters so much as it is the way in which this bluff,  responsible citizen slowly disintegrates over the course of the evening.

Philip Schaefer as the judge has a role whose speaking lines are mainly perfunctory, but he uses his body language and facial expressions to convey a whole range of feeling, from impatience to concern to confusion to indignation. In fact the whole cast is, to use a sports metaphor, playing without the ball, their movements and looks indicating how deeply engaged each person is in the unfolding drama.

As Claudia, Ms Petrak is surely the star of the show,  ranging from surly to sultry to plaintive, to hard boiled analytical skewering, as she fights for dignity and recognition of who she is, as opposed to the dismissive way the others portray her.

But the strength of the production comes from the dynamic way this ensemble of players fit together, in a seamless whole, right down to Jeff Rossman as Officer Harry, timidly slipping Claudia a light for her cigarette, or listening in shy astonishment to her X-rated rant about what her professional life entailed.

(Performances continue weekends until June 23 at Ridgefield Theater Barn.

See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for performance, ticket and other details.)