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Last-minute reunion
When Proof went poof for American Stage, director Wendy Leigh had to switch from math and madness to The Pavilion's high school sweethearts meeting again 20 years later.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 19, 2002
[Photo: Columbia Pictures]
Jody Foster monitors the movement outside of the Panic Room.
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Tampa director Wendy Leigh remembers going to the 10th and 15th reunions of her high school class in Delaware. "It was fun," she says. "The first time we went in a limousine, me and a bunch of girlfriends, the limousine of a friend whose brother owned a funeral parlor. We were trying to be really classy."
Leigh, 44, drew on her experience when directing The Pavilion, the play by Craig Wright that opens the American Stage main stage season Friday.
Set in the Minnesota small town of Pine City, it follows Peter and Kari, the cutest couple in the high school class of 1981. Now, at their 20-year reunion, they meet for the first time since he took off for college, leaving her without saying goodbye. Peter (played by Christopher Swan) is a therapist who has had a string of bad relationships; Kari (Robin O'Dell) is stuck in an unhappy marriage.
There's another, more personal, high school angle to Leigh's production. Kevin Jones, who plays the Our Town-like Narrator, was her student 20 years ago when she taught theater at Tampa's Chamberlain High School.
"The Narrator has to be charismatic and passionate, and he plays 16 characters," Leigh says. "Kevin loves the language of the play, and you need somebody comfortable with that language. To play 16 different characters -- nine men and seven women -- you've got to have an enormous vocal range and a lot of tricks up your sleeve to make them clear."
The Pavilion is part of a Pine City trilogy by Wright, who recently moved from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Los Angeles to join the writing staff of HBO's drama series Six Feet Under. His latest play, Recent Tragic Events, about the aftermath of last year's terrorist attacks, is now receiving its premiere by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington.
"I'm not really focusing on the Minnesota angle," Leigh says of her approach to The Pavilion. "I'm trying to focus on the fact that everybody who's been to a class reunion can relate to this. It's everybody's play. It happens to be in Minnesota, but it's no more about Minnesota than The Music Man is about Iowa. It's about the people; it's about the experience."
With the play taking place in a lakeside dance hall, Leigh decided to stage it in unorthodox fashion for American Stage. "I'm doing it in the round, which I don't think they've ever done there," she says. "I just wanted people to see the space in a new way, to give American Stage audiences a different theatrical experience. I have a feeling they may do more shows that way. The space is more versatile than perhaps they give it credit for."
Leigh, who directed Camping with Henry and Tom at American Stage last spring, was hired to direct Proof to open this season. But the theater lost rights to the Broadway hit to Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre, where it opens in December, and switched to The Pavilion.
"I had nothing to do with choosing it," Leigh says. "They sent me the script just a few weeks before we started rehearsals. I probably have quirkier tastes, but I like it."
She had several actors in mind for Proof, then had to change gears for the Wright play. "There's a different age range in the two plays," she says. "Three of the four characters in Proof are in their 20s. These characters are all in their late 30s."
But, as Leigh says, a freelance director has to be pragmatic and flexible.
"I look at plays like building a house. It's just a matter of the architecture. The logistics are the same. So if you are a good director, you have the same tools, and it's the same process; it's just a matter of the style of the house."
THEATER PREVIEW
The Pavilion, by Craig Wright, opens Friday and runs through Oct. 13 at American Stage, 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. Tickets: $20-$28. (727) 823-7529.
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