Firebelly Productions "Butterflies Are Free"

Reviewed November, 15 2003

Running Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

Produced by Firebelly Productions

*** Potomac Stages Pick ***

A brisk comedy turns warmly emotional in this fine revival of a play that has been a success in professional, community and school productions for thirty years (it did well as a movie, too, with Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert). Firebelly mounts one of the most substantial looking and satisfying productions to play the year-old black box Theater on the Run just north of Shirlington. The play ran on Broadway for nearly three years which makes one wonder why it was Leonard Gershe’s only Broadway comedy. He also wrote the book for the mildly successful musical Destry Rides Again and he wrote the scripts for the films “Funny Face” and “Silk Stockings”

Storyline: A young man who is blind, sets up housekeeping in a cramped apartment in lower Manhattan in an effort to break away from his over-protective mother. A free-spirited, even younger girl moves in next door and they strike romantic sparks until Mother comes by to check up on her son. His dreams of independence, his mother’s hopes for his future and the girl’s immature view of interpersonal relationships all come to a head in one evening.

Director Kathi Gollwitzer recognizes the dual nature of the piece and guides the transition from the lightest of light comedies to touching emotional exposure with a sure sense of grace. Although the difference in tone of the first and second acts could be a disorienting jolt for audiences and performers alike, Gollwitzer carries enough tongue-in-cheek insouciance from the first act into the second to buffer the shift.

For this production, the leads David Cahill and Jenn Book carry the evening along nicely. Cahill, who was so solid in the nearly humorless role of “George” in Firebelly’s marvelous production of Of Mice and Men in this same space last August, is perfectly charming and lightly self-depreciating as the young man who has been blind for life and, thus, doesn’t think of it as a handicap (“I was eight before I found out everyone else wasn’t blind too”).  Jenn Book plays the girl next door as the prototypical hippie of the late 60’s, totally immature but good natured, sexually active but innocent to the point of naiveté, well intentioned but incapable of understanding the nature of commitment.

The character of the mother is the key to the transition from light romantic comedy (a drawing room comedy where the drawing room is also a bedroom) to something deeper. She triggers not one but two transitions in tone. Charlotte Gnessin has the unenviable task of starting out as an unsympathetic character and then having to earn the audience’s affection or at least understanding later in the play. At this she succeeds fairly well and her final scenes are touching.

© 2003 Potomac Stages

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Firebelly's "Butterflies Are Free"

By Michael Toscano

The Washington Post

Thursday, November, 13 2003; Page VA06

Butterflies may be free, but they are also short-lived. Most species live only a few weeks. The play "Butterflies Are Free," part of the sophomore season of the Firebelly Productions theater company, has the same problem.

At 34 years old, Leonard Gershe's play is hopelessly dated, a product of a long-gone, ephemeral wrinkle in culture, and it's not just overuse of the word "groovy" that makes it seem archaic. The story of a young blind man seeking independence from a caring but overbearing mother was written before disabled people made their quest for self-determination and equality a part of the national consciousness.

Gershe slogs through the concept that a blind person can be independent, which may have been unfamiliar in 1969 but now seems banal. More problematic, he demands that we find one character to be charming and quirky when her behavior would be considered pathological today.

The comedy-drama takes place in one day in 1969. Don Baker (David Cahill) is in his new Manhattan studio apartment in a rundown building. He's enjoying getting his routines down until interrupted on the telephone by his mother (Charlotte Gnessin), a domineering Scarsdale matron who has controlled his life until recently, and then by noisy next-door neighbor Jill Tanner (Jenn Book), a flighty 19-year-old who suffers from lack of control, parental or otherwise.

Don reminds his mother, who wants to visit, of their deal that she will leave him alone for two months. But Jill won't leave him alone and perkily invades his space. Slowly, it dawns on her that Don is not just a bit shy and awkward but blind. She immediately uses his blindness to initiate sex (yuck), only to be walked in on by Don's mother as the first act ends.

Jill and Mrs. Baker have a confrontation, the older woman disapproving of the younger, who chastises the mother for holding on to her son too tightly. Jill, an actress, then goes to an audition. She meets and promptly beds another guy (yuck, again), promising to live with him just hours after meeting and bedding the emotionally vulnerable Don and letting him believe they will have a relationship.

Jill has a fear of commitment, having already been married and divorced as a teenager. She is an emotionally unstable mess whom the audience is supposed to accept as carefree and admirable. It's impossible not to fear what poor Don is in for if boy gets girl back at the end of the play. Mom suddenly doesn't look quite so bad.

Kathi Gollwitzer directs a cast of four, including Chris Carroll who invests Ralph, Jill's second conquest of the day, with unexpected depth and likability during his brief appearance.

As Don, Cahill expertly handles the early scenes, during which the audience knows he is blind before that fact has been established in the story. Cahill finesses the tricky task of not calling attention to Don's blindness while behaving as a blind person would in a controlled, familiar setting. It is believable that it takes time for Jill to realize that he is blind.

Book is appealing as Jill, accenting her sunny, bohemian personality while diminishing her corrupted sense of responsibility and lack of self-esteem.

The mother-son relationship is ill-defined, though, and Gnessin's performance as Mrs. Baker is mushy, lacking the flintiness that makes the woman a formidable force and gives the struggle with her son some bite. Cahill seems to enjoy insulting her too much, his face an unbecoming smirk.

But even if perfectly performed, the play has nothing eye-opening to say to a contemporary audience.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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"Butterflies Are Free"

By Matt Reville

The Sun Gazette

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Uh-oh. When the pre-curtain theatrical set-the-mood music includes self-important songs by Donovan, Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, can two hours of pretension be far behind?  While the Matt Reville Pretentious Playwrighting Alert System (patent-pending) was activated several times during Firebelly Productions' opening night of "Butterflies Are Free," this retro-Sixties romantic comedy/social drama holds up surprisingly well, with witty banter and less overarching self-absorption than many shows in the same vein. Though not a smash, it's a good evening of theater.

The year is 1969. Neil Armstrong is walking on the moon. Dick Nixon is settling in at the White House. And young Don Baker has struck out on his own, leaving his protective mama behind in Scarsdale and moving to a furnished studio in New York City.  Don's blind, but he's adapted well. At least, he keeps saying so over and over, so you're expected to believe it.  Into his life walks kooky Jill Tanner, a 19-year-old divorcée (if you count her six-day marriage three years back) who's into rebellion, but in a pragmatic sort of way. How else to explain that she has dabbled both in hippie life and served a stint as a Young Republican?  Don and Jill have found bliss, but they have a problem. It's Don's mother, who drops in on her son after he and Jill had spent a little "quality time" together. She's come to bring her son back to the safety of home, away from the wicked city and wayward women like the post-coital tart she finds half-dressed in his kitchen.

Playwright Leonard Gershe keeps most of the first act centered on the courtship of the two younger characters. Mom doesn't even make an appearance until just before intermission. The second act is devoted to harsher realities as the characters alternately turn on one another and wallow in self-pity (you can take the play out of the Sixties, but you can never fully take the Sixties out of the play).

Mercifully lacking is much of the psychobabble that is infused into many plays of the late 1960s. Instead, the dialogue remains relatively free of clichés, but you can always be sure that when young Don starts to strum his guitar, some soliloquy is going to follow.

The dialogue gives every character the chance to be alternately petty and witty. All three protagonists get their fair share of zingers, and as a result, nobody seems stereotyped.

David Cahill was impressive in Firebelly's recent production of "Lend Me a Tenor," and he does a relatively strong job here as Don, even though his character is the least interesting of the lot.  Jenn Book is suitably nutty yet wise as Jill, not quite ready for commitment but still falling in love with Don.  Charlotte Gnessin has a good turn as the uptight mother, a role which in the wrong hands could be as limp as a cardboard cut-out. She brings it off nicely.

Director Kathi Gollwitzer keeps the action moving in the first act, but things tend to ramble after intermission. The result is a two-hour, 15-minute production that will leave you competing to make your getaway with the audience for next-door Signature Theatre, whose "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" runs about the same length.

Gollwitzer also is credited with the set, which is appropriate for the era("Brady Bunch" colors, like avocado, abound).

The original Broadway production, by the way, brought a Tony Award to Blythe Danner as Jill, a role that went to Goldie Hawn in the film version. Eileen Heckart, who was the mother in the Broadway show, won an Academy Award when she reprised it on celluloid.

Has Firebelly produced a great evening of theater? Not quite.  But it is a look back at a 35-year-old show that retains a freshness most of its contemporaries now lack.  And the performances are often fetching.

© 2003 The Sun Gazette

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