Three Viewings Review

‘Three Viewings’ a triple treat at UCCC

By KITTY MONTGOMERY
Reviewer

STONE RIDGE - Death is something most of us will experience in this life, so playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s subject matter in “Three Viewings” is not necessarily macabre and nothing out of the ordinary. What is extraordinary about these dramatic monologues offered as summer fare at Ulster County Community College are performances by three actors encouraged to explore and incarnate their characters’ interiors by director Bill Salzmann.

The setting, a funeral parlor backstage in Quimby Auditorium, represents a switch from exuberant showbiz to intimate theater at UCCC, and you would have to travel, say, to some actor’s studio in Manhattan to encounter scene work of this depth.

NO PLAYING out across the footlights, Anthony Spinelli, Stephanie Hatfield and Amy Vane draw us into the reality of private worlds. Their reflections, occasioned by the death of a loved one, treat the tragedies and loves of the living with the human comedy coincidentally celebrated. They speak to us from a tastefully appointed parlor of a funeral home somewhere in the coal country of western Pennsylvania where a bare-limbed tree, standing against a backlit blue translucent scrim, indicates a winter season or perhaps the durative winter of death.

Assistant funeral director Emil, who attends the bereaved, changing cut flowers in a vase for each viewing, is the first to share a story of love and loss in “Tell-Tale.” Spinelli, who played the beered-up, rage-filled ‘nam vet Roy in Salzmann’s production of “Lone Star” last spring, does total turnabout here as a nerdish, sweet young undertaker smitten with unrequited love for a hustling real-estate agent named Tessie.

NEVER MIND the exploitive character of this woman we know only through Emil’s eyes, she is the Dulcinea to whom he mouths, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and he is as absurdly and nobly infatuated with her as ever Don Quixote was by his fair lady. Spinelli makes us feel Emil’s ecstasy, vulnerability and ultimate grief, contained like the professional he is, even as he creates a comedic, totally realistic portrait of a repressed, compulsive geek. You will laugh at Emil and cry for him as he relates his tale.

Hatfield comes on moll tough as Mac — think Mac the Knife — in “Thief of Tears.” An ex-actress and mother turned professional robber of jewelry from the deceased, she has come east from L.A. for the funeral of her coal-baroness grandma, old as Methuselah, richer than Croesus, loved by none. Mac, it turns out, has an account to settle with the old woman, left over from an unfulfilled promise in childhood when she learned her first lesson in ruthlessness and betrayal at granny’s hands.
Mac’s character fascinates as it repels, drawing us deeper and deeper into a con artist’s life. She was married once and had two children. When relations ask about her family, she parries the question with what seems like glib dismissal: “My husband forgot to fix the kitchen door.”

A memory turn here, a truth there and a told dream bring character and audience to a moment of shattering tragic epiphany.

AFTER Hatfield’s revelations rip our hearts, Vane’s saga as the widowed Virginia make them soar. What a love story with a twist, amazing as a Guy deMaupassant tale but way nicer. Gin, as the “wise guy” who loaned money to her husband at 100 percent interest for his struggling construction business familiarly calls her, looked forward to comfortable widowhood. She would naturally miss her taciturn but loving husband, who had a series of heart attacks and went dotty at the end, but she had her house, the business assets, a clever married daughter. Minutes after his funeral, the calls come in. Her husband owes the bank half a mil, some relative another half — he’ll take her well-appointed house for his newly married son in lieu — and a whole million to the wise guy.

TO TOP all, comes a note written in pasted up newsprint threatening to tell “Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti” (the title of this monologue) unless she immediately comes up with another enormous sum. At bay, Virginia places her china and silver on the dining table, thinking they’ll scarcely make a dent in her crushing debts, then in desperation calls and tells all to a distant gossiping best friend called Toody.

Known in life as a wheeler-dealer, Carpolotti reaches from the grave — well, he prepared things ahead of time — in a last act of love. Vane relates the widow’s lament with grace and equanimity, giving up nothing as a clue to the conclusion of her plight. You will love this woman and her clever husband, both.