Looking at the Comic And the Tragic in Life

A comedy about the Civil War.  Sounds contradictory, and heedless, but that describes “Butler,” a play by Richard Strand, at Barrington Stage Company’s St. Germain stage. An incident in the life of Major General Benjamin Butler in 1861, early in the Civil War, is credited with motivating President Abraham Lincoln to issue the  Emancipation Proclamation.  

The event involved three slaves who escaped a Confederate fortification 20 miles from Fort Monroe in Virginia and asked for asylum. Butler, an ordinary lawyer from Lowell, MA, was the major general in command of Monroe. He used his legal knowledge and various machinations to refuse the demands of the slaves’ owner to return his “property.”  Gradually, word spread and hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves ran away and were received by the North as “contraband.”  

Strand’s play and the direction by Joseph Discher comes off as a television sitcom. There are laughs, but they would be more telling in their context if they were witty rather than rapid-fire one-liners. If the play were a satire mocking this dreadful period in our history rather than a comic episode, the creative team would have given its audience something more substantial to consider.  

Along with the content and style of the play, redundant speeches slow the pace. The show, running longer than two hours could be tighter.

The performances, however, are creditable, starting with David Schramm as Butler — though at times he seems to be channeling Zero Mostel. But in the scenes revealing his ethical concerns, we can read his soul.

Lieutenant Kelly (Ben Cole), Butler’s adjutant, mistrusts the runaway slave, Shepard Mallory (Maurice Jones), until Kelly sees the inevitable death sentence awaiting the black man if he is returned. Mallory is the most engaging character in the play.  He is the one character who comes off as a wit instead of a joker. The Confederate representative, Major Cary (John Hickok), is actually more arrogant and obnoxious than Mallory, which creates a stereotypical villain. But he, like Butler, knows his way around legalisms and political debate.

Though the play’s conceit is questionable, there are many positive elements in the production that the opening night audience fully enjoyed.  -— Macey Levin

“Butler” runs through June 13. For reservations call 413-236-8888 or go to www.barringtonstageco.org.

It’s a few minutes before you understand that the little sweaters and T-shirts and denim pants Becca is folding in the opening scene of “Rabbit Hole” belonged to her dead son. But that’s how David Lindsay-Abaire wrote this Pulitzer-Prize winning play, feeding audiences what he needs them to know, in tiny morsels, bit by bit.

Just to divert us from the baby clothes is the dazzling Izzy (Hana Kenny), Becca’s sister, who describes, with immense pleasure, her recent bar fight and announces her pregnancy of nine weeks.

When Becca (Tamara Gardner) offers her sister the toddler clothes, Izzy says no. “It would feel weird,” and we see that though Becca keeps order and makes créme caramel and dresses like a suburban housewife in linen pants and chides her sister for living in disorder, grief has destroyed her ties to life and affection and awareness.

Izzy can’t help Becca and neither can Howie (Jonathan Slocum), her husband.

“I’m trying to make things nice,” he tells her.

“You can’t. Things aren’t nice any more . . .  Everywhere I look I see Danny.”

And by himself, Howie watches home movies of his child. 

Lindsay-Abaire gnaws away at terrible things in this small play: death and loss and grief and the terrible isolation that descends on everyone afflicted by them. Still, “Rabbit Hole” can be jaunty, even funny, as when Nat (Lael Locke), Becca and Izzie’s mother, talks about the Kennedys and all their tragedies and sorrows. “If they stayed home and watched TV, none of the bad stuff would have happened.” 

“Rabbit Hole,” which debuted on Broadway in 2006, is absorbing — like the disaster you can’t stop watching. It seems aimed at getting answers, but, of course, it cannot. It can raise possibilities, though. Among them is the notion of parallel universes which offer, as Jason (Thomas Reilly), the teenaged driver who accidentally killed Danny says, “a never-ending stream of possibilities.”

“It’s nice,” Becca tells him, dryly, “that somewhere out there I’m having a good time.”

The acting is fine and the direction by John Trainor is sharp and sometimes underplayed, which is a good thing.

And when the lights come up, people in the audience may feel a little bouyant that they are at the theater and with a friend or lover. This day.

“Rabbit Hole” runs at The Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, NY, through June 7. For tickets, call 1-518-392-6264. For information, go to www.ghentplayhouse.org.