Folly's folly

Unrequited love, indeed

by Steve Vineberg

By Lanford Wilson. Directed by Michael Walker. Set designed by Charles F. Morgan. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. Costumes by Kristen Hubacz. With John Adair and Denise Cormier. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, Worcester, through March 26.

Lanford Wilson's 1978 romantic comedy Talley's Folly, currently at Foothills, takes place in a small town in Missouri toward the end of the Second World War. Its only characters are a persistent suitor and the obstinately resisting object of his affections. The locale is a "folly," a dilapidated boathouse in an endearingly absurd curlicued style, and at the outset of the play the suitor assures the audience that with the help of a romantic mood set by this charming arena and the honeysuckle-scented July evening he'll be able to win his lady within the intermissionless 97 minutes allowed by the playwright. And we know he will, but it's a tougher proposition than he bargained for. Matt Friedman (John Adair) is a transplanted European Jew, a middle-aged St. Louis accountant who has lived his entire life without love -- until he discovered Sally Talley (Denise Cormier) at a USO dance the previous summer. She's 31; but already, according to mid-'40s Midwestern thinking, she's an old maid, and her left-leaning politics (which Matt shares) are an embarrassment to her wealthy, conservative family. Matt has been wooing Sally all year by mail, but she hasn't responded to him, and the one time he came down to see her, at the hospital where she cares for wounded soldiers, she hid to avoid him. Yet he's convinced that she loves him, and that he can break down her defenses.

At the beginning, Matt describes the play to us as a waltz; what makes it dramatically engaging, however, is the challenge he's set himself of getting Sally to dance with him -- to kick the obstacles out of their way. And one of them is of his own devising. In Wilson's clever construction, each of the protagonists has some secret that has, up to this point, placed a lock on the possibility of love. So though the drama seems to be in Matt's gaining access to Sally's secret, first he has to reveal his own -- which he does only with considerable prodding and much difficulty. Talley's Folly is a romantic fable built on an irony -- one that no reviewer should let out of the bag, since the plotting is one of the pleasures of the play. And it is indeed an extremely pleasurable play, an entertainment with two beautifully drawn characters, the sharp-tongued but warm-hearted nurse who uses her caustic wit to keep other people at a safe remove (and to survive the indignities of living a spinster's life in her family's home) and the kindly, probing accountant whose armor is a vaudevillian, jokey persona.

It shouldn't be hard to mount a production of Talley's Folly that will enchant an audience; I've seen three or four previous productions and they've all succeeded. Yet despite the good work that scenic designer Charles F. Morgan and lighting designer Annmarie Duggan have done to create the requisite romantic mood, Michael Walker's version at Foothills sounds a false note from Matt's opening monologue. All Walker really had to do to pull this show off was to cast it adeptly, and he got it half right: Denise Cormier gives a skillful and touching performance as Sally. Sally's the trickier role, because she's so tart and resistant that the actress who plays her runs the danger of making her unlikable. Cormier never makes that mistake -- we see from the moment she appears why Matt wants her. The problem is John Adair, who doesn't come close to suggesting any of the qualities Wilson has written into Matt Friedman. He isn't warm, he isn't a clown -- his antics are stiff and awkward -- and he doesn't even demonstrate any sign of being in love with Cormier's Sally; in fact, he barely seems to be talking or listening to her. Pompous and fake, he's a perfect example of the actor who is delighted by the sound of his own voice. Yet he hasn't even bothered to work up an accent, though the text says that Matt's a Lithuanian-born German Jew who still carries around a strong vocal remnant of his dialect -- and though the syntax of many of the lines Wilson has written for him only makes sense if they're read with an accent.

Michael Walker's tenure as artistic director at Foothills has made an obvious difference in the way the company's shows look, and even though I didn't care much for either Camping with Henry and Tom or Eleemosynary, it was the scripts I reacted against, not any lack of professionalism in the productions. But Talley's Folly is a good script, and Walker screwed it up by ignoring the basic requirements for the main character -- like an accent. Here's another: at one point Matt serenades Sally with a few bars of "Mah Lindy Lou." This lovely ballad by Lily Strickland is quite well known; Paul Robeson, among others, recorded it. Yet it didn't occur to either Walker or Adair -- or, evidently, anyone else -- to take the half-hour it would have required in these days of the Internet to track down the song so that Matt might actually sing the Strickland music rather than some invented version. This is the same old lazy Foothills crap that used to make me want to tear my hair out when Marc Smith was in charge. Walker has to make up his mind whether or not he's running a professional organization.