Real-life couple Byron Jennings and Carolyn McCormick play real-life couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in exhilarating TEN CHIMNEYS (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 27, $65
www.thepeccadillo.com
One of the best plays of the new season is taking place off Broadway, set in a Wisconsin country home but firmly entrenched on the Great White Way. Real-life husband-and-wife acting couple Byron Jennings and Carolyn McCormick do a splendid job starring as real-life husband-and-wife acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Pecadillo Theater Company’s rollicking Ten Chimneys. It’s 1937, and Alfred and Lynn are beginning rehearsals for their upcoming Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, with Lunt playing Trigorin, Fontanne playing Arkadina, Uta Hagen (Julia Bray) as Nina, and Sydney Greenstreet (Michael McCarty) as Sorin. Also joining them at the farmhouse are Alfred’s demanding mother, Hattie (Lucy Martin); his half-sister, Louise (Charlotte Booker), who does all the cooking and cleaning (and complaining); and his half-brother, Carl (John Wernke), a handyman who moonlights as a pool shark. As they delve into the play, as well as the play within a play, jealousy breaks out in many forms — between siblings, between lovers, between parents and children, between actors, and between fictional characters, resulting in a multilayered story that is simply exhilarating.
Jeffrey Hatcher’s razor-sharp dialogue is fanciful and whip smart, wonderfully playing with theatrical conventions and revealing tantalizing secrets. Dan Wackerman’s direction is breezy and inviting, while Harry Feiner’s rustic stage design provides just the right setting for the proceedings. Ten Chimneys is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Lunt and Fontanne’s working process, particularly when Greenstreet commandingly directs the couple through one scene and when Lunt and Hagen examine another run-through that ends in a kiss. The actors’ deconstruction of The Seagull stokes the fires of Ten Chimneys, a thrilling play about the theater that celebrates itself without becoming pedantic or melodramatic. Instead, it’s great fun, romantic and insightful, a must-see for lovers of theater. Don’t be surprised if after the show, which continues at the Theatre at St. Clement’s through October 27, you see Jennings and McCormick dashing down West 46th St. and jumping into a taxi together, just as Lunt and Fontanne must have done so many times during their long careers.