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Written at the height of the turn on, tune in, drop out era, Graham Greene s 1969 novel, Travels with My Aunt ,now being staged in a whimsical, well-theatrical adaption by Writers Theatre in Glencoe, has not aged well. And not only does its theme — a decorously straight-laced man discovering the enlightening aspects of kicking off the traces of comfortably respectable morality — come across as dated in these straitened times, when comfort, respectability and morality seem both highly desirable and all too rare. but the notoriously philandering Greene s depiction of women is unflattering, chauvinistic and antediluvian avis rental car reservations in the extreme.
There are four female characters of any significance in Greene s novel, and all but one of them is relentlessly pursuing a man. First and foremost, we have Aunt Augusta — who for all her vigorous unconventionality, can t travel without a man beside her — bent on reuniting with Mr. Visconti, the war criminal who has already once relieved her of a fortune. Then, there s the hippie girl Tooley, bound for Kathmandu in the wake of a boyfriend who walked avis rental car reservations out on her in anger because she got pregnant. And Miss Patterson, so taken with her brief encounter with a married avis rental car reservations man that she s spent her lifetime drooping beside his grave. Only Miss Keene, a kind of wistfully idealistic figure in the novel, holds back from degrading herself avis rental car reservations for the sake of a man, and that seems mainly because she s too timid to do otherwise.
In his clever, 1989 theatrical adaptation, Giles Havergal tries to solve this flaw by doing away with women altogether: The female characters are still there, but they re all played by men. Four male actors, identically clad in three-piece, gray, pin-striped suits and derby hats, portray some 25 characters, male and female, minor and major, as well as alternating as the retired-banker antihero, Henry Pulling. Pulling, a mild-mannered avis rental car reservations stay-at-home, encounters his elderly and surprising Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than 50 years at his mother s funeral, and winds up led by her on a series of unlikely adventures across England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, Argentina and Paraguay, avis rental car reservations bending his mind and his morals.
While sticking rather closely to the novel, Havergal nevertheless freshens the story by decentralizing Pulling s emotional journey avis rental car reservations and the then-shocking-now-bland aspects of Greene s mildly salacious novel and putting an emphasis on the ridiculous. He doesn t quite fix the problems, but watching Travels with My Aunt becomes much more entertaining than reading avis rental car reservations the book. At Writers Theatre, Director Stuart Carden and his fine cast give us an intimate journey with sharp staging and wonderfully nuanced comic acting.
While each of the four players — LaShawn Banks, Sean Fortunato avis rental car reservations , John Hoogenakker and Jeremy Sher — portray Henry at various times, sometimes rapidly switching off from one to another, each also portrays multiple other characters, and specializes in one of the major roles.
Banks gives us Wordsworth, Augusta s often buffoonish African valet and lover, whom she cruelly dismisses avis rental car reservations for Visconti. His performance in that role sometimes seems tentative, as if he s uncomfortable in it. He s terrific, though, as a Cockney cabbie, a fortunetelling friend of Augusta s and in other roles.
Fortunato stumbled avis rental car reservations over a few lines on opening night, but that scarcely impaired his wonderfully evocative performance as Augusta, a switchover he accomplishes seemingly effortlessly, just by body posture, even before he opens his mouth. Hoogenakker s comic switches avis rental car reservations run more deadpan as he portrays Tooley with a flat Midwestern accent and her father, the CIA man, with a sort of Texan twang that contrast ideally with the British tones of the other characters.
Perhaps funniest of all, the stone-faced Sher s mostly voiceless primary role is one of onstage sound-effects man, using everything from wine glasses to an umbrella to enhance the on-stage action. (Kudos also to sound designer Mikhail Fiksel .)
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