A Play About Surviving And Another About Deception

“Private Eyes,” now playing at Shakespeare & Company, is Steven Dietz’s most popular play. Dietz, who has so far written 31 plays, is among the most produced American playwrights, although his work has never made it to Broadway. Regional theaters love him for his dialogue and casts of singular characters. They don’t seem to mind how contrived, even derivative many Dietz plots are, or their lack of honest emotion.

Take “Private Eyes,” Dietz’s most often-performed work. First staged in 1996, obviously influenced by Tom Stoppard, but without Stoppard’s heavy baggage of erudition and philosophizing, the play is a romantic comedy often also described as a thriller, though I think the thrills come mostly from following the continual time shifts and figuring out — or at least thinking you have figured out — the truth.

The play is about a love triangle among theater people that becomes a quadrangle when a mysterious fourth character is introduced. Lisa (Caroline Calkins) and her husband, Matthew (Luke Reed), are rehearsing a play directed by Adrian (Marcus Kearns). Lisa may or may not be having an affair with Adrian; Matthew may or may not know for sure. Another character, Cory (Elizabeth Cardaropoli), may be a private detective stalking Adrian or Lisa.

Scenes are played and replayed from Lisa’s and Matthew’s differing viewpoints and memories. What was there in one moment, is not the next. Even when a fifth character, a psychiatrist named Frank (Lori Evans) appears to “explain” infidelity to the audience, she may not be telling the truth. 

“Private Eyes” is about relationships, about the truths and fantasies that result in non-linear memories, in confusing imagined events for real ones, in deceptions and self-deceptions. Dietz insists we take each scene as it comes, believe it in that moment, then move forward or backward in time, just as memory does. Along the way there are some funny moments and lines — Lisa and Matthew’s meeting in a restaurant is played twice, through each one’s memory. It’s wonderfully constructed.

Calkins and Kearns are players comfortable with each other, since they played Romeo and Juliet together earlier this year. They are both good, though Kearns’s shoulder-length hair makes him seem older than he is and is supposed to be in Dietz’s conception. Reed, the Mercutio in “Romeo,” is boyish and winning here, projecting a nice-guy innocence masking the need for vengeance at his wife’s (maybe) infidelity. Cardaropoli and Evans are both good, too.

Jonathan Croy’s direction is taut; the sets are minimal. What is missing is the magic that filled the small Bernstein Theatre during the summer with “Shakespeare’s Will,” “Julius Caesar” and “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” “Private Eyes,” clever as it is, doesn’t grab the heart or the imagination or even the funny bone hard enough.

— Leon Graham

“Private Eyes” runs at Shakespeare & Company’s Bernstein Theatre in Lenox, MA,  weekends through Nov. 9. For tickets, call 413-637-3353. 

It’s good to see “Steel Magnolias,” the play. It makes more sense than “Steel Magnolias” the movie; it’s more pointed, and it’s more touching too, even after a meandering start.

All the action takes place in Truvy’s Beauty Shop, gorgeously rendered here in brilliant plums and fuschias except for photographs of two princesses, presumably for style inspiration, on the back wall: Grace and Diana. 

It’s a place for women because, as Truvy (Ingrid M. Smith) tells Annelle (a swoopy-coifed Devon Richtmeyer), “there’s no such thing as natural beauty. Remember that, or we are all out of a job.”

But women come to Truvy’s for more than upsweeps and streaks. It’s a place away from men who are described as errant, disgusting and thoughtless. We never see these men, but we hear a good bit about them.

“Of course he’s a gentleman,” Ouiser (a marvelously cast Eileen L. Epperson) tells her friends at Truvy’s. “I bet he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pees in it.”

One of the husbands shoots wildly into trees to scatter the birds there; another husband, a dangerous criminal, steals his wife’s car and clothes before heading for the hills, and still another impregnates his wife even though he knows it would likely kill her. But Robert Harling, who wrote both the play and the movie in the late 1980s, evidently wanted to write about his idea of the South, its culture and his sister, who died of complications of diabetes after childbirth. 

So these characters may have been real to him, but they can come off as caricatures after a while, with their stratospheric melismas and their devotions, variously, to sweets, football, dowdy hats and the color pink. 

But by midplay, something else takes hold: the idea that when life turns hard, and senseless, it’s good to find a place with people who care about you, most especially people you are not related to. 

The casting and acting are spot on with Lydia D. Babbitt as the acerbic Clairee; Jennifer Archer as Shelby, the girl who chose pink as her “signature color” and the wrong man for a mate; Lynne Wilson as M’Lynn, who survives the death of her daughter with a lot of help from her friends. In the end, one or two of the males turn out to be friends, too. And director Michael L. Bolinski steers his actors just clear of the maudlin, making “Steel Magnolias” entertaining theater.

— Marsden Epworth

“Steel Magnolias” runs at Goshen’s Old Town Hall in Goshen, CT, through Oct. 25. For tickets and information go to www.goshenplayers.org or telephone 860-491-9988 on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.