When in Doubt, Go Local
A review of “Because I Said So” by Lisa Bornstein
When in doubt, go local.
It works for restaurants, it works for shopping, and it certainly works in casting. The most recent iteration of “Stories on Stage” featured four Colorado actors to stunning effect, allowing audiences to see new shades of them (and in some cases, to see what is now a too-rare performance by them) as they channel multiple characters.
The night’s theme was “Because I Said So …,” an anthology of stories about, and usually through, the eyes of children. There was relatively little whimsy here, though, and at times the weight felt overwhelmingly pained, whether in the tale of a family clutching at straws, but doomed, or a mother trying to better her son’s life in the face of her own struggles.
Broadway Veteran Candy Brown
Fortunately, the hilarity came in big clumps of laughter through two stories read by Colorado Shakespeare Festival regular Chip Persons. In Ian Frazier’s “Lamentations of the Father,” he declaimed a set of rules and regulations: Leviticus as written by a parent (not that parent). “Of the cloven-hoofed animal, with cheese or not, you may eat,” he intoned. “But not in the living room.”
Later, he warned, “If you will dip your blocks in the milk and lick it off, you will be sent away.”
GerRee Hinshaw brought wonderment, along with the gravity of girlhood, in two lyrical stories by Sandra Cisneros: “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” and “Eleven,” both built from the meticulously observed details of childhood, the latter a beautifully told, tiny moment of wrenching childhood frustration.
The night was dominated by two almost excruciatingly sad stories. In the first, Mare Trevathan, a master of understatement, read “The Silver Bullet” by Colorado author Amanda Rea. The Silver Bullet in question was a Coors keg buried in the forest in a radio promotion and a ranching family’s last hope for (momentary) financial solvency. Trevathan leavened the tale, told through a young girl’s eyes, with wry, resolved humor and her own restrained performance married well with Rea’s spare writing.
Broadway veteran and local treasure Candy Brown anchored the second act with Alix Ohlin’s “Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student,” a tale of an impoverished boy who becomes an unlikely piano student, undeterred by the lack of a piano. Brown, too, was understated and hypnotic, her elegant fingers stroking the air in approximation of the boy’s first encounter with the keys.
Throughout the evening, stories and actors told of sorrow and frivolity, but little hope. A bit more balance would have made these compelling performances, perhaps, a bit easy for the audience to carry.
