Arts Listings

A young boy looks out from a picture frame hung askew, calling out for his mother, who is herself surrounded by a frame, in the throes of a bad dream, finally waking up and running out into the countryside. 

It’s the 1870s, outside Paris, and in Virago Theatre Co.’s new production of Heather McDonald’s Dream of a Common Language at Rhythmix Cultural Center in Alameda, a painter and his wife (Steve Budd as Victor, Angela Dant as Clovis), whom he met at the Academy, are living simply. Victor is painting Clovis’ portrait, though Clovis’ dreams and her anguish—partly over an accident at first just referred to, and even more from a sense of being out of place as a woman who wanted to paint—absent her from the house as she rambles outside. Their son Mylo (Hank Smith) is cared for by Dolores (Adrienne Krug), a woman who seems to have no past, to be drifting through life herself. 

When another old classmate, Pola (Laura Lundy-Paine), arrives from her life of riding her bicycle and painting flowers from nature, more of the unease and resentments of the women are expressed—especially when other male artist friends, including Marc (Michael Cappelli), who seems wistful when Clovis is near, come for dinner and a meeting about exhibiting, expecting the women to wait on them but not be part of the meal or the discussion. 

There are a number of ripe moments, besides the staging of the opening: Victor painting Clovis nude, while she keeps verbally probing him; the women holding their own dinner “backstage” from the men’s meeting, declaring “the sopranos must sing louder!”; the women playing games together from their childhood memories—and other fertile moments. Especially at such moments, it’s an attractive cast, which clearly revels in collaboration with Rachel LePell, the first director in Virago’s history from outside the fold. 

These moments aren’t played out, though, at least not in the script, which relies a great deal on exposition in an arch, sometimes cloying idiom, which seems to be a version of the “Lust for Life” syndrome, when Anglo-Saxon misconceptions of anything Gallic miss even the purple prose of the era in question. Skill and the best of intentions notwithstanding, the actors sometimes seem as if they’ve got kid gloves on, at other times seems a little over the top, as if to emphasize the real passions over the stilted expression.  

There’s plenty of great, leading material about painters and that general period, too, from the letters and stories about Cézanne and Van Gogh, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt (who seem to be referred to familiarly in the play, as “Mary” and “Bertha”) and Jean Renoir’s great trove of a book about the Belle Epoque, Renoir, My Father. Morisot and Cassatt figured in the recent Legion of Honor exhibit, The Women Impressionists; Virago has a docent from that show coming to talk to its audience before one of the performances. 

Dream of a Common Language 

Through Nov. 22 at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda. $15 advance, $20 at the door ($12-15 students, seniors, TBA members).  

865-6237. viragotheatre.org.