Went to Olney Theatre Center tonight to see
"Proof". It's a multiple prize winning drama about a family racked
with genius and loss and the younger of two sisters finding a better place for
herself in the midst of both. Elegantly written and beautifully performed this
evening. It's on stage through June 18th and I would urge anyone looking for a
wonderful evening of theatre in the next week to get tickets.
The anchor of the cast is Dawn Ursula as the Catherine, the
demented genius's Ggenius daughter. She works the various moods of Catherine
with an effortless commonness that immediately makes her real and compelling.
Craig Wallace plays the father, Robert, who is dead though most of the play
appearing in flashbacks and as an apparition in the first scene. I saw Craig
earlier in "Fathers Come Home from War, Parts 1, 2 & 3". It took me awhile to make this connection as he played the role of a happy dog! Great actor. Aakhu
TuahNera Freeman played Claire, the older sister. She is the responsible one,
the one who makes the hard decisions from afar or just ignores the
problem--every family knows this one well, and Aakhu plays it with a conviction
that makes the times she lets her guard down all the more poignant. And finally
the protogée, Hal, is played with tremendous sincerity and humor by Kiko
Eisen-Martin. All in all one of the best ensembles I've seen all year.
It was open-seating and shortly after I sat down on the end
of a row, a trio of African American women sat down next to me. An older women
directly to my left and two younger women beyond her. My row-mate and I soon
struck up a conversation. She was Sylvia Bryant a retired Montclaire County New
Jersey public school administrator who was a guest of her younger daughter and
her daughter's friend for the play. We soon were chatting like two old friends
about DC (She'd just moved here after her husband's death and her retirement),
Philadelphia (her husband was from there), the theatre (both the DC scene and
her life long second vocation as a dancer--and she might have been edging up to
70, but let me tell you this, the girl still had the legs for it!) She shared
her impressions of her new home here in Olney and peppered me with questions
about my job and role as a Staff Development Teacher in Montgomery Country
Public Schools. We talked about racism and some of the work her new little
church in Sandy Springs, Maryland is doing to combat it. The only thing we
didn't do was exchange phone numbers...and now, I kind of wish we had.
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