New Repertory Group Offers Another Choice For Live Theater Enthusiasts

By Shannon Hicks

Last year Newtown became the newest location to be included in Play With Your Food’s play readings. The Fairfield County theater group has been offering lunchtime theater offerings to lower Fairfield County since 2003. Events begin with lunch, followed by the featured performance, and most attendees can return to work having enjoyed a slightly longer than usual lunch break.

In December 2009, Play With Your Food, working with Newtown Cultural Arts Commission, debuted at Edmond Town Hall’s Alexandria Room with a reading of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory (adapted by Russell Vandenbroucke). Thirty minutes was set aside for lunch, and then an hour was devoted to the performance and a Talk-Back session with the performers.

December, and each subsequent reading during that 2009-10 run, offered a very good play reading. Actors obviously put time in during their rehearsals and did brilliant readings with minimal props, eliciting great laughs and applause.

“Every time I drive home from one of these events I wonder ‘Why aren’t we doing this here?’” Newtown resident and Play With Your Food regular performer Kate Katcher said during that December 2009 program while introducing the performance.

Play With Your Food (PWYF) offered three amazing play readings last season — in addition to December there were also programs in February and April — but audiences were not as large as organizers had hoped. It remains to be seen whether the success PWYF has had in lower Fairfield County (a running string of sold-out shows in Fairfield and Westport) will be reached in Newtown or whether the series, which is on hiatus this season, will even return to Main Street Newtown.

“The [Newtown] Cultural Arts Commission sponsored Play With Your Food, and they had to pay a fee to bring it up here. Because they didn’t make enough money to cover their expenses, they just couldn’t afford to continue it,” Ms Katcher said this week. “Maybe it’s something I will do later on, but I really thought that getting an evening audience was the way to go with this.”

Ms Katcher, a writer, director and actor (who debuted on Broadway opposite Zero Mostel as Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof), has launched her own repertory company. Stray Kats Theatre Company is her new project, “a regional repertory company with the many wonderful, professional actors I’ve come to know and love who just happen to live in Connecticut and my native home [state], New York.”

Stray Kats debuted in December with a reading of George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came To Dinner. For that first reading, Ms Katcher served as the show’s artistic director over a cast that included familiar names seen in the Play With Your Food readings earlier in the year, Tom Zingarelli, Joan Grant, and Nadine Willig among them.

The evening’s layout is also similar to PWYF programs: play, talk-back time, refreshments. This time, however, the production is no longer under the umbrella of PWYF or Newtown Cultural Arts Commission (NCAC).

“Other than the fact that we know a lot of the same people, Stray Kats is its own nonprofit organization,” Ms Katcher clarified. “I happen to work for JIB Productions, which does Play With Your Food. We’re all good friends. There is no conflict.”

Ms Katcher is also very much involved with NCAC.

“I attend the meetings and they are very supportive of the [Stray Kats] project,” she said, “but this [new series] is strictly my thing.”

And what a good thing it is.

‘Radio Days,’ Friday Night

While union and nonunion actors were invited to the auditions for Stray Kats Theatre when they were offered in October, it was a cast of Actors Equity Association card holders who entertained the 30 or so attendees last Friday night for the second offering of Ms Katcher’s new endeavor. Radio Days: The Bickersons featured Ms Katcher as Blanche Bickerson and Mr Zingarelli as radio husband John Bickerson, bringing back to life the roles made famous on NBC and then CBS Radio by Frances Langford and Don Ameche from 1946 until 1951.

While it was labeled a staged reading, there were just enough props to set the scene on The Alexandria Room’s stage. A large piece of wood had the words ON THE AIR attached to it, each actor had a microphone and music stand to hold their notes in front of them, and a table at the back of the stage served as the sound director’s area.

Jimmy DeVivo served as the evening’s sound director, not only keeping the audio system at an appropriate level for the room, but also delivering the appropriate background noises whether it was an old-fashioned phone being dialed (and a few minutes later, the earpiece being slammed back into its cradle) or a squeaky door as Blanche and a friend enter a curio shop to sell a Venus de Milo knockoff that had been converted into a clock, which was in turn (unbeknown to his wife until the worst possible time to find out) purchased by John Bickerson to give as a wedding gift.

Ms Katcher and Mr Zingarelli personified the Bickerson sketches, at least a half dozen of them, beginning with a conversation just past midnight of an early wedding anniversary and continuing with conversations a few years later, before and after a cousin’s wedding, and even a miserable cruise after the wedding of Cousin Eunice (one of a few roles covered by Jill Gureasko).

Chilton Ryan portrayed Marvin Miller, the announcer who introduced the Bickerson sketches and also led into commercials for Old Gold Cigarettes and The Phillip Morris Company. He also appeared as a doctor who listens to Mr Bickerson’s snoring one morning at 3 am (the time Blanche typically decided to interrupt John’s terrible snoring, leading to the inevitable squabble), which leads to a misunderstanding when John finally does wake up only to find Blanche missing from her bed.

Don Striano played comedian Frank Morgan for a few between-sketch breaks (including one that caught the announcer Mr Miller square in a verbal trap Mr Morgan had set for him), as well as a random cigarette smoker from Russia to complement Patrick Kearney’s pitch for Phillip Morris smokes. Mr Kearney also read as Richard Neutra, one of Modernism’s most important architects, who did not impress Mr Striano’s bumbling Frank Morgan.

Not speaking but equally important on stage January 14 was Jennifer Rogers, an NCAC member who had the important task of occasionally carting out the Applause sign for the “radio audience” — the evening’s attendees, who enthusiastically responded to each cue.

The inaugural Stray Kats season will continue with performances for the next four months. A schedule change to note: Arthur Miller’s The Place will now be presented on February 11, and the previously announced “new work” will now be In The Middle of Nowhere, recently penned by the Westport playwright Kent R. Brown.

The season will continue with Fibber McGee & Molly on April 8 and then conclude on May 6 with Christopher Demos Brown’s Our Lady of Allapattah.

Down the road it is very likely that Stray Kats will expand to full productions, perhaps as early as next season.

“My primary goal is to introduce Stray Kats to the community, for the community to become familiar with Stray Kats, and to understand that it is a symbol of quality,” Ms Katcher said. “I’m hoping to do full productions as soon as we can afford them. My goal is not to run before we walk.”

Right now, however, it is a very good series of staged readings (and baked goods from Andrea’s Pastry Shop) that audiences can expect.

Yes, they are Friday nights that Stray Kats Theatre is offering performances on and yes, it’s winter, when many of us would like to get in and stay in early. But an early dinner and a night out in one of the loveliest rooms in Newtown, with talented actors who make us smile, is a great way to start any weekend.