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Gamm’s triumphant Little Voice
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
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The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
By Jim Cartwright. Directed by Judith Swift. With Casey Seymour Kim, Wendy Overly, Anthony Estrella, Alan F. Hawkridge, Tray Gearing, and Tom Oakes. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through December 12.
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Finding the fuel
Why be coy? Casey Seymour Kim is my favorite stage comedienne/character actor around here. Looking forward to what she’s going to do with a role has been almost as much fun as watching what she has come up with these past seven years, mostly in new plays at Perishable Theatre. Her surly French maid in The French Revolution: Part Deux (a new jersey play), by Jane O’Dell, conveyed her twitchy illegal alien irritability with more mood shifts per sentence than Proust has commas. As an evil sister wannabe in Mac Wellman’s Girl Gone, seeing her character Buggins grow colder as her innocence drained away was truly a chilling experience. And her half-deaf parrot in Exchange at the Café Mimosa, by Oana Maria Cajal, was a hoot. Wearing a head-hugging feathered hat and an exasperated air, Kim was compulsively repeating snatches of misunderstood conversation. The list goes on and on. Got a role too neurotic or nervous for words? Call on Kim to invest her (or him, or it) with so much character that it spills over and splashes on front-row shoes. Kim grew up outside Detroit and spent eight years in San Francisco, performing with the improv group Bay Area Theatresports and studying voice. Coming to Providence in 1997 with husband Daniel Kim, who is in the Brown University English department, she has performed in musical theater from Norwood, Massachusetts to Newport. She is a member of Providence’s Improv Jones and teaches high school drama at School One. In the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre before a performance of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice recently, Kim talked about acting. Q: So many roles you’ve done are so much fun for us. I’m curious about which have been especially enjoyable from the inside for you. A: This role is really cool because I’m glad to be singing. It’s hard to do a musical in this area. There aren’t a lot of opportunities. So this was cool. I still run into people who call me the parrot lady. That was from Cafe Mimosa, which was really one of my favorite parts . . . I had this fabulous costume and these big ridiculous glasses. I got to sit up on a perch. You couldn’t ask for a more conspicuous place on stage. And I had a mike. So if I’d had neon arrows pointing to me, it couldn’t have been better, you know. Q: You always look like you enjoy making a role your own. A: That’s what you live for . . . But in doing any role, I always go through what I call the tech week freak-out. Where I think that I’m drawing a bead on the character, but in the course of the preview week I can see a completely different way I could have been doing it. And it’s always like: "Oh my God! What to do now? Do I talk to the director, blah-blah-blah-blah!" What usually happens is that it becomes just an additional subtext and I can add color. That always happens. That’s one way, I guess, it manifests as making it my own. That I can all of a sudden say: "Oh my God! You mean Little Voice can be a femme fatale!" or whatever. That’s not what happened with this one, but yeah. Q: You mention something that must come up a lot: stage fright, anxiety, as an energy source for doing things better than you otherwise would. A: Fear of God. Yeah. When you’re under the ax, yeah. Maybe that’s the hardest part to convey, when you have anxiety: how to turn it into fuel. Because otherwise it can just shut you down. How to channel it into something productive. Q: To jump off the cliff each time saying, "I landed softly in the past, so I can again" — is it as hard to develop that trust in yourself as it looks from the outside? A: Well, I think for some people it can be difficult, but I think what helps is understanding theater as a communal experience, that the audience really wants you to succeed. And so, even if you do kind of fall, the audience actually [is there for you] . . . They aren’t there to heckle you — they really aren’t. I think that’s like your nightmare, that you’ll do something and they’ll go, "Well . . ." (Looks away in dismissive annoyance) "What was that all about? I want my money back." You have these nightmares scenarios, but for the most part the audience really wants you to succeed. That’s where the improv experience really helps, because that’s an intensely communal experience, where the audience really does participate, by giving you suggestions. Q: Is there something about your temperament that makes you gravitate toward character roles? A: Yeah, it’s a lot easier to be someone else . . . Looking at myself, at how others see me — short, freckly — for a while the only parts I had were animals and children and gender-neutral things! Like (with optimistic exasperation): "OK." If I had to play an ingénue, it would make me far more nervous . . . Wedged into an ingénue, I think I’d be far more freaked out about things like age and weight. Also, I think it’s far more creatively rewarding to play character roles. Because then you can experiment with physicality and mobile qualities more. I don’t know. I think that’s what draws me to acting anyway. I’ve always enjoyed watching the odd stuff. Even as a kid I kind of liked performance art. I had no problem with Yoko Ono. Q: Little Voice uses a talent of yours that I haven’t seen that often. Here’s an unfair question: If you were given a choice between a great singing role and a great character role, which would you tend to choose? A: Can it be a really great singing character part? — B.R.
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Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, by Jim Cartwright, is what it is not. It isn’t dripping with pathos, although the story of a reclusive woman and her firestorm of a mother offers every opportunity. Sorting through impressions is harder in the Gamm production. From individual performances to directing and production design, the show is a theatrical feast. Even the indoor-caravan-park set design by William P. Wieters and the cheap-vinyl-raincoat-as-overcoat costume design by David T. Howard are delicious. The story takes place in northern England, in a town large enough to have a nightclub, which as we know from The Full Monty is as vital to the community as a church hall in Dubuque. The accents all stick fast, and the characters sound close enough to Manchester to be cousins of Frasier’s Daphne Moon and behave madly enough to be auditioning for the Brit TV show Absolutely Fabulous. Jane Horrocks, Bubbles on the latter comedy series, played LV in the 1998 film, alongside Brenda Blethyn and Michael Caine. Well, the Pawtucket cast may be speed-walking in fast company, but nobody who has seen the movie is likely to judge this troupe as outpaced. A loud, bullying force of nature that passes for a mother, Mari Hoff (Wendy Overly) could cow a bull quiet, never mind a shy adult daughter. LV is so timid (as in intimidated) that she’s always been known as Little Voice (Casey Seymour Kim). Mari works in a factory down the street and LV rarely leaves the house, instead playing over and over the old LPs of show tunes and such that her late father left her. Mari is as unaware as she is brazen, not noticing that she keeps close to her only passive people who let her do their living for them. That was so for LV’s dead father, whom Mari dismisses as a poof because of his love of Judy Garland and company. It’s also so for pliant Sadie (Tray Gearing) from the flat next door, who often comes by for a cup of sugar with a spot of tea in it, which Mari begrudges her. She is a mute sounding board for Mari’s fulmination-of-the-moment, a ready "Okay" virtually her only conversational contribution. Ray Say (Alan F. Hawkridge) is an exception to Mari’s unacknowledged rule of avoiding assertive people. She is, after all, over the hill in her attention-getting garb, which runs to leopard prints. He is her last chance, her "Ray of hope," as she teases him. But Ray, played with hearty momentum by Hawkridge, is just up for a little slap-and-tickle, sticking around past that only because he is stopped in his tracks by a lovely, uncanny sound coming out of the upstairs bedroom. The recently minted talent manager is hearing the sound of money. LV is singing "Over the Rainbow." We catch our breath too. Kim not only sings Garland beautifully, achingly well, she stops time as Liza’s mommy could. And she can top that. If her Billie Holiday doesn’t run a chill through you, the Gamm heat is cranked too high. Kim’s Edith Piaff could use more saliva, but her Marilyn Monroe doing "Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend" has just enough breathy sass. The courage of LV to sing before people for the first time doesn’t come from thin air. Billy (Anthony Estrella) is a telephone repairman who makes a repair call and is smitten by her vulnerability. This shy loner keeps returning to climb the pole next to her bedroom window. Adorable. Estrella makes sure to give him enough enthusiastic character for us to see Billy’s potential as LV does. Roles that seem to be made for an actor can be curses, of course, inviting reliance on habitual tics that audiences have bought. Kim has developed a specialty, as both a comedienne and a dramatic actor, in merging nervous uncertainty (and what role doesn’t harbor some of that?) with perplexed forging ahead. If that isn’t an existential amalgam for our age, nothing is. In Little Voice, Kim skillfully navigates between the Scylla of meek vulnerability and the Charybdis of implausible assertiveness. The first trait is where the pathos lies, but its tension with her potentially standing up for herself is what keeps us on the edge of our seat. Cartwright’s plot isn’t so schematic as to just give us a culminating confrontation scene with Mum. We get some ebb and flow as things work out and don’t. Ray convinces a sleazy nightclub owner, Mr. Boo (Tom Oakes), to book the shut-in for a mimicry act tryout. Under director Judith Swift’s nuanced guidance, mother and daughter battle over LV’s reluctance, with no assured result apparent. The play is by turns funny — Mari shouts, "Are you agoraphobical? ’Cause if you are, you can just get out!" — and moving. Overly may very well have the trickier task, making this dragon lady someone we care about while rooting against her selfishness. But the playwright puts the emotional survival of both at stake, so their conflict is ours. The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre has done it again.
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