REVIEW: The Waverly Gallery (1st Stage)
Mind-rending conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease have always freaked me out. I mean, they should, right? Is there anything more frightening than losing personality, your memories, and basic cognition? There’s a reason it makes for common dramatic fodder: there aren’t many competitors in its impact . Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, staged in Tyson’s by 1st Stage, demonstrates a gentle understanding of the horrors of losing the things that make you you, and what that means for your relationships.
Book
Lonergan’s memory play follows Gladys, an aging art gallery owner and retired lawyer, who inches closer and closer to delusion as her mind deteriorates. Daniel, her grandson, lives in the neighboring apartment and visits her the most; they’re close. But the toll she inflicts on the family becomes less ignorable over each minute. He’s trying his best to make sure she’s aptly entertained and is safe, whereas her children (his parents) are frustrated and angry with the situation. Meanwhile, Don, an artist from Massachusetts, begins showing his work in the gallery and lives in the storage room at Gladys’ request. (I found this B-plot effectively useless, and that Don as a character only padded some interactions to extend the runtime; this could have been one act.) The rocky dialogue was divisive to me: is it realism to portray frustrated families as loudly aggressive towards a victim of disease? Or are they just being mean and should be seen as villainous? Regardless, I think some of the deliveries were received as humorous to my audience in a way that I did not at all think was warranted. This woman is losing her mind, literally, and everyone she is interacting with is made more depressed by the second. How is her forgetting her keys for the fifth time “funny”? Nothing particularly “good” happens in this piece, and art doesn’t have to be easy and fun all the time. 6/10
Acting
Gladys is an exhausting role in basically every way. To sell the increasing helplessness, you have to master the right expressions, the right twitches, the body language, and all this while constantly talking. Gladys is written as a habitual motor mouth and does not shut up during basically each scene she’s in — making it all the more important you carry the dense dialogue with personhood and interesting cadence. Catherine Flye magnificently pulls it off as she babbles her way towards the light, but joining it with moments of clarity and panic that bring the near-light-hearted moments crashing back to earth. The supporting cast is great, too. In particular, Ethan Miller’s Daniel, her grandson and the show’s narrator, is effortlessly delivered with some of the only care she receives from her family the entire play. (It barely even felt like he was acting; his control over the character is that good.) 9/10
Production
The staging leaves some detail to be desired. The openness of the space feels less like a statement related to the vision and more of a lack of ideation. There are some set pieces that seek to dispel this notion, but they come so late in the second act that they feel like afterthoughts. The lighting design was distracting, seemingly unable to decide if it wanted to illuminate the audience as well as the actors. But things aren’t all bad: the intertitle piano tunes by sound designer Ethan Balis were pensive, and Rakell Foye’s costumes gave the cast some healthy personality boosts. 4/10
Viz
The pre-show is not that telling of the material, just a largely empty office with a platform dining room in the corner of stage left. I am a big fan of the program art though, which shows a confused Gladys dissipating into nothingness. 7/10
Verdict
The Waverly Gallery is an effecting seyance into a family’s grasp of a declining matriarch that is energized with star performances. 26/40
