Family fair

Missed notes in I Never Sang for My Father

by Steve Vineberg

I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER By Robert Anderson. Directed by Elizabeth Hodgen. Lighting designed by Mike Sweeney. With David A. Nestelbaum, Michael K. St. Onge, Joan Labonte, and Tammy Cote. At Barre Players Theater, Barre, through October 27.

So many kinds of things can go wrong with a production that what a reviewer looks for in amateur theater is, of necessity, different from what he expects to find in professional theater. I don't mean to be condescending: good acting can be found anywhere, and it's no less galvanizing on Broadway or in the movies than it is in a small, embattled community house. But an ebullient spirit can spark a non-Equity show, can infect the audience, and enliven a script so you'd never dream of going back to see it performed again in a professional setting (the Mount Wachusett Summer Theatre's Peter Pan last summer is an excellent example); and the power of that spirit can outweigh a thousand imperfections, even make them seem trivial. Similarly, it would be mean-spirited to blast a small theater for its inability to get the best of a terrible script, which is why I so often focus my reviews on the flaws in the text and try to go gentle on the problems in a production that's hitched itself to that text.

In the case of Barre Players' I Never Sang for My Father, however, there is no way to avoid saying that the show never gets off the ground, and that the problem isn't the script. The play is a 1967 offering by Robert Anderson, a second-tier American playwright who won a small measure of fame in the '50s for writing Tea and Sympathy -- a melodrama about a boarding-school teenager whose life is ruined when he's branded a homosexual. None of Anderson's subsequent plays drew much attention, but I Never Sang for My Father, which is about a man's relationship with the impossible, aging dad he's been struggling to love his entire life, has a sweetness and an honesty that transcend the banality of the writing. In fact, you might say that the banality is the play's hidden strength, because the familiarity of the situation and the characters -- the widowed son trying to make a new life for himself but still stuck in the old grooves of his life as an obedient child; the irascible, narcissistic father; the perceptive, fragile mother; the estranged sister, cut off from her father's affections when she married a Jew, toughened and made cynical by her bitter experiences -- exerts an irresistible pull on an audience. Hal Holbrook and Alan Webb performed the two central roles in the original production (with the ineffable Lillian Gish as the mother), and there was a touching movie version in 1970, with Gene Hackman and Melvyn Douglas.

Small-scale, realist (except for the son's brief speeches to the audience, the equivalent of a voice-over in a film), with easily identifiable roles, I Never Sang for My Father would seem to be the kind of play a community theater could mount memorably. But Elizabeth Hodgen's production for Barre Players is stodgy, unshaped, and poorly acted. The scenes don't build, individually or as a whole, and the staging is so awkward that the actors appear to be wandering aimlessly. Realism is a boon for untrained performers because it gives them a solid grounding, but it requires a sharp attention to physical detail and to creating an accurate environment, and in this show I never got a feel for any of the locations, or the sense that the actors were playing off elements they recognized in the characters.

Acting is the process of illuminating the subtext, of animating the lines by working out which actions -- which needs and desires -- they mask. It isn't just a matter of reading the surface of a line; that's playacting. No one in I Never Sang for My Father gets below that surface. This is particularly a problem for David A. Nestelbaum (who also seems miscast) and Michael K. St. Onge, the son and father in this production, because they're on stage for so much of the play and because their exasperating exchanges constitute its backbone. Nestelbaum's character, Gene, tells us how furious he is at his father, but there's no way you can see from the performance how the old man makes the professor son feel. Most of the time he smiles indulgently at his dad, the way you might at a naughty pet; he doesn't suggest the anger that's boiling up inside him, so when he finally releases it, the explosion comes out of nowhere. And St. Onge just pouts or else shouts at the top of his lungs. The shouting is an assault on the audience, especially in a house the size of the Barre Players Theater. Hodgen should have anticipated what it would be like for theatergoers to sit and listen to an actor bellowing for three or four minutes at a stretch. Bellowing isn't the same as acting, and putting a play on the stage isn't the same as directing it. Both acting and directing take a little skill, whether at the professional or the amateur level.