Table Manner: Norms, or Norman??
by Lily Janiak
Thursday, August 19, 2010
San
Francisco Bay Times
Great theatre directors exercise a jurisprudence of
balance. They approach their characters with infinite
mercy but unyielding justice, respecting the needs and
claims of the individual but reserving their highest
veneration for the conflicts that those needs and claims
produce.
They do not champion, but juxtapose; not endorse, but moderate. In directing Table Manners — currently running Shotgun Players production of Alan Ayckbourn’s British satire — Joy Carlin epitomizes this jurisprudence of balance. For her, however, the great success is not that she successfully weighs the competing needs of two leads (a rare enough accomplishment), but that she does so among six.
Table Manners is the first play in The Norman Conquests, a trilogy of plays that all take place at the same time (July 1970s weekend) and in the same place (a house in the English countryside). But each play tells the story from a different room. In other words, a character who walks out of one room walks into another play. Table Manners, fittingly enough, covers events in the kitchen. But throughout August, you can catch what happens in the rest of the house as Shotgun Players mounts all three shows.
What makes the trilogy a satire is title character Norman (Richard Reinholdt), a lothario so undiscriminating as to violate both his sister-in-law Annie (Zehra Berkman) and (worse!) the very norms his other in-laws most cherish. Because of him, Reg (Mick Mize) and Sarah (Kendra Lee Oberhauser) must confront the debauchery their regimented domesticity most rejects; Norman’s wife Ruth (Sarah Mitchell) must defend the professional ambition that is her life’s focus; even neighbor Tom (Josiah Polhemus) must assert a claim to love when, for him, pleasantries would more than do. Even as characters hold fast to their beliefs, what does it say, Ayckbourn suggests, if Norman still outsmarts all the men and wins over all the women?
Director Carlin distinguishes the different worlds from which her characters hail with audacious physical choices. Each actor pumps up his character’s quirks with an exaggerated, but unique, physicality. As Annie, Berkman fidgets like a diffident schoolgirl, bunching her sweater into knots when she’s nervous — a perfect match for Polhemus’s Tom, whose “aw, shucks” posture makes his large stature less imposing than clumsy. Mitchell’s Ruth is a praying (or preying?) mantis; Mize’s Reg, a rodent. And Valera Coble’s costume designs further accentuate these differences: the clashing pastels of Sarah’s dresses only amplify her screeching; the neutral shades of Tom’s sweaters only further mute his virility.
The one character who defies easy direction, design or classification is Norman. He is at once brazen in his advances and craven in his marriage. He could easily have a good time elsewhere, yet he spends his entire weekend in this house. Why? Does he crave his family’s attention, or does he relish the opportunity to ridicule? Whatever his motivations (and, for better or worse, Reinholdt expertly keeps us guessing), Norman is the only character in this self-involved family capable of listening to and engaging with another human being. When societal norms don’t allow real connection, what you need, Ayckbourn seems to say, is a Norman.
