Lite fare

What I Did Last Summer is a breezy entertainment

by Bill Rodriguez

Like most June vacations themselves, A.R. Gurney's What I Did Last Summer is a breezy, pleasant experience at Brown Summer Theatre (through June 28). Skimming the light-hearted surface of this excursion into adolescence and family, the genial production looks like a collaboration between J.D. Salinger and Norman Rockwell.

Fourteen-year-old Charlie is vacationing with his mother and older sister on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Dad is away at war in the Pacific in these last months before VJ Day. It's a coming-of-age tale, with Charlie fussing because he can't yet drive out of their driveway or even ride the Cyclone roller-coaster at the amusement park. But mostly he fumes because he's on the verge of becoming a man and doesn't have an inkling about who in the world that person will be.

Fortunately, it's not another story about sexual awakening. The manhood he's exploring is a wider territory than that familiar terrain. Charlie (Kent Martin) applies for a job as handyman to an eccentric woman named Anna (Marilyn Murphy Meardon). She is also known as The Pig Woman, because she used to have pig sties on her place but also because she's morally suspect -- once she was the mistress of a doctor in town. Anna is an artist first and last, and it's only Charlie's creative inner man she's hoping will emerge.

In the tradition of memory plays, the set is bare, with a few leafy branches above. Most of the props are mimed rather than trundled out, for a fitting reliance on our own imaginations. Characters address the in-the-round audience at times, mainly as they wonder whose play this is. But everything and everyone revolves around Charlie. That goes especially for his mother Grace, played with a nice balance of spunk and class by Anne Brady. His college-age sister Elsie (Christina Nicosia) collects buttons for Bundles for Britain and spends much of the rest of her time putting up with him. Things are more amiable, at first, with his Canadian friend Ted (Taylor White) and their female friend Bonny (Kate Marks, with a charming little-girl voice), until the inevitable tension and blow-up over her attentions.

The heart of the play, however, is the relationship between Charlie and Anna. She fills him brimming with odd notions to return home with. Mom and Sis have to hear all about how the lawn he's supposed to cut is decadent, and how Latin -- he promised his father to keep studying it -- is an indulgence of the leisure class. Meardon and Martin give Anna and Charlie a natural rapport, although Gurney has them converse mainly in chapter headings (such as The Necessity of Artistic Independence).

Director Rob Barron keeps the atmosphere as bright and unthreatening as a summer squall. At times too bright, since this is a tale of raging inner adolescent storms, after all. Without even a token brooding sulk leading up to it, we don't see where Charlie's coming from when he agrees to work for Anna for free. We don't see what she has awakened in him. The production's excessive niceness also extends to Charlie's mother. At a couple of points we do get a glimpse of what a hardship it must be to raise two teenagers while her husband is off being shot at. But when her son tears off his suit and refuses to go to a society dance, Grace makes a giddy carpe diem speech to Elsie about dancing till dawn anyway. There's not a hint of the long-buried anger and resentment that would ground such an unexpected reaction and make it poignant.

Gurney has spent his playwriting career charting the psychologically hazardous shoals of the sailing and trust fund set, with the likes of Love Letters and The Dining Room. To those of us who have not had to survive an upper middle-class WASP upbringing, he has brought home many lessons learned about the perils of privilege. What I Did Last Summer doesn't delve as deeply as it might in those waters, but the Brown troupe certainly makes messing about on the surface an entertaining time.

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A terrific Tempest

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