RIP
Carole Osterink
ccSCOOP Review
04-19-09 - Stageworks Hudson opened its 2009 season last Friday with—appropriately for the Quadricentennial year—a cleverly done dramatic version of the Washington Irving story “Rip Van Winkle” written by Lucile Lichtblau and performed by two actors—Fred Fishberg and David Tass—who were required quite literally to wear many different hats.
The premise of the production, explained in an introductory bit performed by Stageworks Producing Associate Jennifer Schilansky, is that the “Royal Coxsackie Repertory Company” was supposed to perform a fully staged dramatization of “Rip Van Winkle,” with sets, period costumes, and dozens of actors, but the trucks carrying the costumes and sets and presumably also the actors have gone astray somewhere near Buffalo.
|
|
David Tass as Rip Van Winkle |
But since the show must go on, two stagehands who fancy themselves actors—apparently the vanguard of the theater company—offer to perform the play, portraying all the characters themselves and signaling character changes not only with voice and mannerism but by wearing a hat that bears the character’s name. Often this bit of business is done by donning a whole stack of hats and then removing the hats one by one to reveal different character names.
In this adaptation, the character of Rip Van Winkle, portrayed by David Tass, comes off as more of a clueless lout than the easygoing, henpecked husband of the original story, liked by women, children, and dogs and always “ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own.” But character development isn’t a big concern in this theatrical piece, which in both its writing and its delivery was, as the friend who accompanied me to the performance suggested, a bit like a college revue.
There were good bits and jokes that elicited hearty laughs. Fishberg’s portrayal of Rip's dog, Wolfie, definitely merits mention. Also worthy of note was the rapid-fire exchange among the village gossips, all played by Tass and Fishberg and given every “Van” name the author could think of—Van Deusen, Van Horner, Van Bummel—and some she made up for comic effect. As the actors switch hats and characters, an account of a scolding Rip gets from his domineering wife escalates into the report that Mrs. Van Winkle has killed her husband and his loyal dog. The celebration that ensues when it is discovered that Rip and Wolfie aren’t really dead inspires the line that brought perhaps the biggest laugh from the play's literate audience, when a townsman declares that Rip is a “legend in this sleepy hollow.”
The author takes literary license and geographic license with the story of Rip Van Winkle. The literary license is interjecting into Rip’s twenty-year nap a dream in which—as befitting the Quadricentennial—Henry Hudson himself appears. The geographic license is making the City of Hudson the village in the story, with no thought of how Rip manages to get across the river before or after his nap in the mountains.
I remember in graduate school a Shakespeare professor reminding us, after we had all witnessed a performance of King Lear in which the “special effects” were particularly amateurish and obvious, that Coleridge called drama “the willing suspension of disbelief.” RIP required not that so much as a willing suspension of being “too cool for school.” If you were prepared to relax and have fun—and make thunder and lightning noises when called upon to do so—RIP delivered a very enjoyable forty minutes in the theater and a cautionary moral that could stand you in good stead the next time you’re across the river hiking in the Catskills accompanied only by your dog: “Never take a drink from a short guy during a thunderstorm.”
|
