Perfect Arrangement (from 2017)


Here's another one I never posted on here. It's from April 2017 about a show called Perfect Arrangement, produced by ReAct Theatre. I did a little light editing.


My review of Perfect Arrangement

“It’s complicated.” So says Julia Beers in one of the funnier and more knowing lines she delivers as Millie Martindale in ReAct Theatre’s Perfect Arrangement, playing now at 12th Avenue Arts. And complicated it is. The show is part farce, part melodrama and part spy thriller, appropriate for a show set in 1950.
Millie and her husband Bob (Jedidiah Mathre) live in a Georgetown, Washington, DC, apartment next door to another couple, Norma and Jim Baxter (Zandi Carlson and Parker Kennedy.) And they share more than a common wall. They share secrets. The straight marriages are a cover for the real relationships. Millie loves Norma and Jim loves Bob. But it’s 1950 and they can’t be who they are.
Further complicating things, as the show begins, Bob, who works in personnel for the State Department, is tasked by his boss, Theodore Sunderson (John Coons) with ferreting out “deviants.” This is Senator McCarthy’s DC and Bob plays along like his life depends on it.
We know it can’t last. Soon the past catches up to Millie. A former college writing instructor, Barbara Grant (Steph Sola) turns up. Secrets threaten to spill. New plots are hatched. Stories begin to grow transparent. This provides both comic irony and dramatic tension throughout.
When things get too tense, Casey Floresca does the comic relief brilliantly. If you said she steals the show with her portrayal of Kitty Sunderson, Theodore’s wife, I would not argue. She’s dippy and sweet and finally, it turns out, wise.
The show’s most powerful dramatic moments are when Millie and Norma are alone looking at photos of themselves together, talking about where they have been, where they are going and what it means -- and might cost -- to be free. Later the photos reappear and it’s unbearably poignant.
In the end, Bob stands alone in the ruins of what he has set in motion. So really, in addition to whatever else the show is, it’s a tragedy.
Perfect Arrangement is written by Topher Payne and directed by Rachel Rene and runs through April 15.

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