Comic relief

Trinity Rep's Chemistry class

by Bill Rodriguez

Set in southern California of the late '50s, The Chemistry of Change presents the bizarre characters of a carnival sideshow and the lickety-split entertainment of a three-ring circus. Featured by Trinity Repertory Company in the second Providence New Play Festival, the world premiere of Marlane Meyer's play (running April 3-26) may very well set new standards for dysfunctional families.

Matriarch Lee (Judith Roberts) has made a family business of marriage -- and divorce settlements -- to support her four misfit adult children. Into her life enters a carnival barker named Smokey (Paul O'Brien), and by unblinking straight-talk he challenges them all to get their acts together.

Trinity company members Cynthia Strickland and Janice Duclos are joined by Trinity Rep Conservatory students Mauro Hantman and Eric Tucker in filling out the cast, along with Jamison Selby.

This is the fifth world premiere staged by the 42-year-old New York-based Constance Grappo. The director has also done her own adaptation of Hair for the Connecticut Repertory Theatre and worldwide tours of Little Shop of Horrors. She sat down during a break in rehearsal to talk about how, as John Barrymore observed on his deathbed, dying is easy but comedy is hard.

Q: What proportion of comedies have you directed?

A: Well, I'd say probably the majority of plays I've directed have been comedies. I directed Little Shop of Horrors, The Philanthropist, by Christopher Hampton, Waiting for Godot -- some see it as a comedy and some don't, I did. I found it very funny. I'd say it's at least 50 percent or more.

Q: Is directing comedies as hard on the director as it is on the actors?

A: It is a challenge but I prefer it. I do. I'd rather laugh -- that's what it comes down to. The work is the work. You do the same kind of work no matter what the play is. Comedy lets me, sometimes, embrace our frailty and my own frailties and it exposes them in ways that I really appreciate. Whereas sometimes heavy drama doesn't seem to necessarily love and forgive our frailties the way comedies do.

Q: So "dramedies" have the opportunity to explore a fuller spectrum of human experience?

A: I think that they really do. They always feel like there is more truth even, as you call them, dramedies. What is comedy? Because even if you take a really straight comedy like School for Wives -- a Moliere play that's a pretty straight farce -- there is so much human passion, so much humanity that is revealed. I like the way comedy really makes us look in the mirror. I feel that if material doesn't also have a sense of humor about the human condition, then it hasn't fully acknowledged it, hasn't fully embraced it.

I always find that in comedy when I'm laughing, what makes me laugh is recognition. I recognize myself, I recognize my own experience, I recognize people that I know. If it makes me laugh it's probably like: "Oh, yeah! There I am! My god! There we are! That's what we do!"

Q: What are your greatest concerns in directing comedy, in what you try to get across to actors and audiences?

A: There are two sets of concerns. One is the purely technical, because comedy does take a lot of time. Comedy takes, I think, longer to stage then straight drama. Because you still have to go through all the same steps that you do with drama, but then you have to make it funny.

One thing that isn't a successful route for me is to go looking for the laughs. You've got to look for what is the human experience of what's going on up there, and you fully explore that. And sometimes there's a period when what's going on is not funny. It might be heartbreaking. Then you have to find what makes us able to laugh at this instead of making us feel sad or depressed or pity at that person up there. Is it in that character's owned blindness to their condition? Is it simply a matter of timing -- is it purely a technical concern? There are just so many things that will make something funny, and you can't just intellectualize it. For me, the only way that I know something is funny is if I laugh. I'm the surrogate audience member.

And it's delicate. The actors when they first make it funny may not have any idea why people are laughing. Then they have to learn how they made it funny so that they can repeat it without destroying it. It's a fragile thing as well. Sometimes when somebody knows why they're funny they can't repeat it. Sometimes it's just about leaving it alone. Knowing when to say . . . nothing. Say, "I'm not going to touch that moment, just leave it alone." Sometimes the actors can continue to bring that up every night, and sometimes they lose it because they don't really know how it happened. And then you have to go back in and find what the elements are. It's chemistry -- just like the title of this play.

Q: On the page, Chemistry of Change is hilarious, from the exchanges and the incongruities. Since so much is in the script, did that free you and the actors to go more for subtext than you otherwise might have?

I think that's what the big challenge of this play was, to get underneath the comedy. Marlane Meyer and I came up here to hear a reading of the play. They just did, basically, a cold reading of the play around the table, and it was hilarious. It was just sort of a laugh a minute. And Marlane felt very strongly that that isn't all she wrote. She really felt strongly that she wanted the play to be about the ideas and the humanity, which is very difficult in this play. Getting under that stuff, under some of that sillier, funny dialogue, once you start scratching the surface and cracking it open and getting inside of it, it's not terribly funny. There are a lot of very painful truths in this play that the playwright wants the audience to come in contact with. So our job is balancing that while still preserving the comedy. It's the sweetener to make the rest of it go down.