Shelter
Reviewed by Brad Hathaway
Running time 1:00 - no
intermission
The product of a play building exercise using the story of two young people
in WW II German
The company faced a dilemma. One cast member for the play they had scheduled became unavailable. They wanted to save that play for later when she would be available, but what to do for the slot in the schedule at Theatre on the Run? Artistic Director Kathi Gollwitzer hit on an idea - two ideas, in fact. The first idea was to undertake one of those acting exercises often found at drama schools in which the acting ensemble starts from scratch and builds a play. If they built one and then performed it they would have something interesting to offer audiences and it would also give the company another way to fulfill their mission of giving young adult performers professional opportunities. The other idea Gollwitzer had was a topic for the play. She had an image in her head of a scene. She assembled her cast of two and an editor/co-director to form a team to develop a play based on that image. The result is an interesting hour of theater.
Storyline: A young woman named Marta and a young German soldier named Kurt take shelter from an air raid as Berlin falls to the Allies at the end of World War II. A series of flashbacks reveal the history of their contacts over the course of the war.
The image Gollwitzer presented to her team to start the play building was of a soldier, a child, an old man and a woman in a confined space where the tension was high. She had hoped to find a young actor for the part of the child but couldn't get one on the short notice the team had before opening the show. She also felt that, without a child, the presence of the old man unbalanced the picture. So she settled on just the soldier and the woman. With Kirsten Benjamin as the woman and Patrick Flannery as the soldier (Flannery being the younger of the two, having recently graduated from high school and here making his professional debut), they started the process of bringing the image alive. The team thought the soldier could be a Nazi and the confined space a bomb shelter so they began researching time and place to give life to the story. The result was the story of these two young people.
As the piece is presented, both performers do a good job. Benjamin takes her character from the stress caused by being underneath an air raid to the even greater stress of having the secret she has so assiduously protected for years revealed. In the process, she also contributes charm and a certain hint of romance to the interaction with the soldier. Flannery doesn't quite capture the maturing that his callow youth would probably have undergone in a military career that took him from his homeland to the frozen battleground of Russia and then to the staff of a well placed officer on the homefront. He does, however, give a believable portrait of just how young the combatants on both sides of that war often were. He also shows the strain of the conflict between his sense of duty and his sense of compassion and humanity.
As is befitting a play building exercise, the physical design for the production is bare bones. But that doesn't mean it is not effective. Performed on a bare stage with just a roll-on upright piano for the "music room" scene and a wooden box for the bomb shelter, time and mood are enhanced by Andrew Griffin's lighting design which illuminates different scenes differently but ties it all together with a striking change in intensity and color for the moments between memories. Add Christopher Rothgeb's loud effects of droning aircraft overhead and explosions all around, and the closeness of disaster is clearly in the air. Benjamin wears a tailored outfit and a hairdo appropriate to both time and character. Flannery is decked out in a German military uniform a bit too fresh and ill-fitting to seem correct, but, then, would an enlisted man at the end of the war been very concerned over sartorial issues?
Created by Kirsten Benjamin, Patrick Flannery, Kathi Gollwitzer, Ali Miller. Directed by Kathy Gollwitzer and Ali Miller. Design: Andrew F. Griffin (lights) Christopher Rothgeb (sound) Ray Gniewek (photography) Meg Glassco (stage manager). Cast: Kirsten Benjamin, Patrick Flannery and the voice of John Collins.