PURE Cast Sizzles in Season Opener
Sharon Graci as Sarah in “Time Stands Still”
WHEN THE CONFLUENCE of playwright, cast, director, and every production element—down to the intr’acte music—reaches the level that PURE Theatre did Friday night, an evening of theatre becomes an extraordinary experience.
Hyperbole? Hardly. A miracle of sorts took place in the company’s new performance home, the Charleston Ballet Theatre on King Street downtown, and everyone in the near-sellout crowd knew it.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Donald Margulies’ “Time Stands Still” (playing through October 14) is timeless in its exploration of relationships, timely in its setting of the Iraqi war, and revelatory in the time-honored tradition of fine drama.
Four characters represent different perceptions of morality, conflict, and what is essentially most important in the span of a life, as each makes a wholly valid argument for his point of view.
Sarah, a photojournalist, and James, a freelance journalist, have been together for eight years, traveling around the world documenting in word and picture the hottest war zones, repeatedly putting themselves in grave danger. Sharon Graci offers a sublime performance as the highly intelligent, driven Sarah who has just returned to the Brooklyn apartment she shares with James after a near-fatal accident from a roadside bomb. David Mandel gives a finely-tuned characterization of James, so traumatized by the tragedies of war that he has had to abandon her in a German hospital and return home. But what now?
Still recovering from her injuries, Sarah hobbles about, with Graci so skillfully taking on the affect of a wounded woman that we begin to wonder if the actress has experienced a real accident. James has become so overprotective, he questions Sarah’s every decision, from her drinking caffeinated coffee to, ultimately, her continuing the obsessive pursuit of her career.
Enter Richard (Mark Landis), Sarah’s friend, mentor, and her editor at a news magazine, accompanied by his latest amour, a very much younger, simple, and naïve Mandy (Katie Smith), far out of her league with these sophisticated people. “She’s a sprite!” laughs Sarah.
Yet Mandy supplies the voice of traditional values, and in her moral outrage leads Sarah to cry, her hands covering her face in a solitary moment of shame: “I’ve made a career on the suffering of others!” This guilty recognition does not last long, however, as Sarah reverts to her cynical self, feeling altogether justified in her motivations and actions. Mandy also, in her very ordinariness, provides Richard the chance for a lifestyle he realizes he wants: marriage, family, stability.
Landis draws on his extensive professional stage experience to etch an intelligent portrait of a man apparently in typical mid-life crisis who becomes honest enough to acknowledge he finds fulfillment in a conventional way. Smith, in her every word and gesture, exemplifies the ingénue who gets exactly what she wants without guile or pretense.
While the individual performances are stellar, director Randy Neale uses his uncanny ability to meld these actors into an ensemble that plays off each other like the stage veterans they are. What turns this show into an “Aha!” moment is the unfailingly natural way the players move, speak, and turn into people we know.
A multi-themed play that balances high drama with comedy, “Time Stands Still” for Sarah when she looks through the lens of her camera, determinedly unaffected by the tragedy all around her. Her job is to show the world atrocities, and James’s is to write about them, raising awareness of injustice, poverty, man’s inhumanity to man.
Yet after these two artists decide to marry, Sarah seems incapable of genuine intimacy, and James, his priorities having undergone a sea change, shortly finds a woman who meets his needs. These layers of conflict are perfectly realized in the text—and subtex—of Margulies’ words, as well as in the riveting performances.
Whatever else is happening in your world, do not miss this production.
Learn more at PURE Theatre.org.
