The core group of residents at Placid Pines Senior Care Center in the Adirondacks may identify with the fish in an aquarium swimming around and around, nothing much new of any given day, except a compatriot going belly up only to be soon forgotten.
However, they actually are a gang of wits not unlike the members of the Algonquin Round Table—Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Tallulah Bankhead, among other literati luminaries of the 1920s who met regularly for lunch at the famed New York hotel.
This is the paradox of aging that is captured exquisitely in “A Jukebox for the Algonquin”, a new play written and directed by Paul Stroili, currently in production at Farmers Alley Theatre in Kalamazoo.
Anxious, bleeding-heart, nearly-blind, Irish-Catholic Annie (Elizabeth Terrel); Dennis, the well-read, gay quadriplegic (Lauren McCormack); recent divorcée Peg, who has never lived alone; and Johnny from the Bronx who has every health ailment except diabetes (Rico Bruce Wade), may be hurtling toward the end of their lives in bodies that defy them, but they’re every bit as wonderfully human as they were when they were younger. “I hate my younger self,” Annie says, but quickly thinks better of it. “I just really envy her tits.”
They’re smart, irreverent, bawdy, and scheming; they thwart the institutional rules established by Josefina (Dwandra Nickole Lampkin) and enforced by maintenance crew Chuck (Kevin Theis), a thoughtful ex-con in his second career, and Tyler (Charlie Vivrito), a reggae-loving 20-something.
The play is constructed in a series of tightly-crafted, short scenes, each representing a day in the life of the home between July and August of 2003. The dialogue is so clever you hardly realize how long it takes for the plot to develop, and the pacing is so quick there’s never a dull moment between the set up and payoff—and amid the witty banter there are some truly poignant scenes that show depth and emotional complexity. Death and real hardship are always looming, and that’s part of what gives the show its stakes beyond the prima facie conflict of how they’re going to raise the funds to buy a jukebox, and makes this show so wonderfully funny and life affirming.
And this production is top notch. The ensemble of seven work together beautifully in the round with four exits and entrances; they literally keep the story moving around the table center stage, with only a few chairs as other set pieces. Each character is vivid and distinct as well as fully embodied, and every zingy one-liner really lands. Snort laughs from the audience abound and are earned, seemingly effortlessly.
Carter John Rice’s sound, Joe Larkin’s lights, and Savannah Draper’s props delineate time and space on Larkin’s sparse but effective set, and Molly Lewis’s costumes feel real and effectively age the actors who are all younger than the characters they’re playing.
Director and playwright Paul Stroili reveals in his program note that the fictionalized characters and story emerged from his experience working summers in the 1980s in a “nursing home” not unlike Placid Pines. As a teenager, he had dreaded being stuck around“old people”, but quickly came to realize what they were was “people who had just lived longer.”
And “A Jukebox for the Algonquin” at Farmers Alley is shot through with his curiosity, interest, and understanding of these wonderful people, and the realness of the characters, heightened for comedy, make this a very special, delightful show, indeed.
A Jukebox for the Algonquin
Farmers Alley Theatre
April 3-27 (Extended run!)
https://www.farmersalleytheatre.com/shows/a-jukebox-for-the-algonquin
