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Vigil:
Black comedy reveals many truths
Mar 10, 2008
by FRAN SIKORSKI
Two award-winning actors, Timothy Busfield, currently executive producer and resident director of NBC-TV’s
Lipstick Jungle, and Helen Stenborn, recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Drama Desk, are featured in
Vigil, opening play of the Westport Country Playhouse 2008 season, which runs through March 16. (Ms. Stenborn is the widow of Barnard Hughes, who also received a Drama Desk Lifetime Achievement Award, and mother of Broadway director Doug Hughes. )
These two very fine actors are deliver the words of Canadian playwright Morris Panych, whose play
Vigil premiered at the Belfrey Theatre in Victoria in 1995 and won Vancouver’s Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for best play before moving on to the Edinburgh Festival and to London’s West End.
Mr. Busfield plays a self-obsessed nephew who has quit his job in a bank and returned home to care for a dying aunt (Ms. Stenborn) he hasn’t spoken to for 30 years.
Directed by Stephen DiMenna who has staged plays in New York, regionally and internationally,
Vigil is presented in a series of “snapshot length” scenes as the nephew impatiently waits for his aunt to die. After a year, he takes it upon himself to push things along, but finds he cannot do it because after months of sitting beside her bed and catering to her every need, he has bonded with his aunt and doesn’t want to harm her.
The main comedy comes when Kemp has taken things into his own hands, like poisoning his aunt’s butterscotch pudding, short-circuiting Christmas lights and placing a noose over her bed. Another big moment is the surprise of the evening.
When nothing works, Kemp declares, “Isn’t it too bad we can’t all die at the same time so that we didn’t have to watch each other die.”
Definitely not a comedic moment. Helen Stenborg has but two words to say at the end of the first act, but her eyes convey all the emotions necessary.
The season continues with Alan Ayckbourn’s
Time of My Life, April 1 to 19, with added performances from April 24 to 26, directed by John Tillinger. A sweetly comic play,
The Pavilion by Craig Wright, is scheduled May 13 through May 31 and will be directed by Chad Rabinovitz, Playhouse artistic associate.
A lively song and dance revue,
Hot 'n Cole, devised by David Armstrong, Mark Waldrop and Bruce W. Coyle, with twists on 48 Cole Porter standards, will be staged June 10 to June 28.
Playhouse playwright-in-residence David Wiltse of Weston has written a new comedy,
Scramble, which will be staged from July 8 to July 26. Tracey Brigden will direct.
A thriller,
Tryst by Karoline Leach, directed by Joe Brancato, will play Aug. 5 to Aug. 23.
The John Steinbeck masterpiece,
Of Mice and Men, Oct. 7 to 25 and Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, will be directed by Paul Newman. A December holiday production will be announced soon. For reservations, call 203-227-4177 or visit westportplayhouse.org.
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