Vanity Fair - Underground Railway Theater

Photo Credit: Nile Scott Studios. Pictured: Josephine Moshiri Elwood, Debra Wise and Malikah McHerrin-Cobb

Vanity Fair – Underground Railway Theater

Review by James Wilkinson

This piece also ran on Edge Media Network, Here

Vanity Fair is presented by Underground Railway Theater. Written by Kate Hamill. From the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Directed by David R. Gammons. Scenic Design: David R. Gammons. Costume Designer: Leslie Held. Lighting Designer: Jeff Adelberg. Sound Designer: David Wilson. Fight Director: Victor Ventricelli.

Children, the word of the day is: Excess. Underground Railway Theatre’s production of Vanity Fair is positively dripping with it. Good lord. Just about every moment of this thing is packed with so much stuff that regardless of how you might feel about the final product, you have to sit back in awe of it. You look at it the way I’m guessing you look at Mount Rushmore when you see it in person, eyes focused right at it with your head half-cocked as you say, “Huh…Now how’d they do that?” In the case of Vanity Fair, I don’t know how they did do that, but wow…What a ride. The play by Kate Hamill is based on the 19th century novel by William Makepeace Thackeray and here, is directed by David R. Gammons. I’m going to confess that when I first walked into the theater and got a taste of what was going to be pelted at me for the next few hours, my first thought was a grimaced, “Oh God, there’s no way in hell that this thing is going to work.” The production seemed like an unholy marriage of contrasting artistic sensibilities that would speed towards disaster. And yet the extremes of all of the various elements manage to balance each other out and the marriage stays strong. Shows what I know. It ends up being a wild and enjoyable evening of populist theatrical fun.

I’ve never gotten around to cracking open Thackeray’s original novel, (though I’m running to the bookstore this weekend, because I’m damn curious), so I can’t really speak to how accurately Kate Hamill’s adaptation is. I’m guessing that it more or less sticks pretty close to the novel’s plot. In the early years of the 19th century, Becky Sharpe (Josephine Moshiri Elwood) and Amelia Sedley (Malikah McHerrin-Cobb), graduate from school and go off to make their way in the world. Though friends, the two women are very different in terms of their morals, attitudes and methods for getting what they want. We’ll watch the fortunes of both rise and fall as the they play the hands they’re dealt in the game that is English high society.

At least, that’s the story as Thackeray told it. Here on stage, we’re getting the tale told through a high-camp pop culture lens. When Beckey Sharpe bursts through the door to make her entrance, it’s with a guitar case in tow and a leather jacket across her shoulders. She’s James Dean, rebel without a cause, (or maybe Brando is the better comparison). And it’s howlingly funny. Some of that comes from the wit supplied by Hamill’s script, but much of it comes from the way the production’s slapstick modern sensibilities rub up against the 19th century story. The production exists in a strange nether world where the setting of a high-class drawing room is established with a beer clock and a plug-in fire. You can’t take anything seriously. You’re always slightly chuckling.

I haven’t always been the biggest fan of the plays that David R. Gammons has helmed. I thought that the sensibilities that he brought to Speakeasy productions like Hand to God and The Whale bristled up against the plays in a way that prevented the final product from gelling. Here, I think his everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-mentality is exactly Kate Hamill’s script needs. Because Hamill is trying to hit so many plot points and keep so many characters in play, a kind of rigid formality sets in to the dialogue. Certain characters feel designed to deliver exposition and nothing else. Two misjudged moments have characters directly addressing the audience in a way that falls dramatically flat. If we were to get this play as a historically correct period piece, it’s very likely that we’d find it funny in parts but overall, a bit dull. Gammon’s sensibility blows the piece out and frees it up.

This is perhaps the kind of production that Fellini would have made had he started doing stage work. There’s a fascination with the decadence the characters are indulging in and in the awareness that their behavior is all an act. The set design (also by Gammons) gives us a long row dressing rooms that the actors will pop in and out of. The walls are missing, leaving only the framing, so that we can peak into those private spaces and get hints of what these actors are doing behind closed doors. At every opportunity, the grotesque natures of the characters are stretched out for us to view. One long sequence is basically an extended fart joke. (Let it never be said that we were ever above such delightfully low humor.) And although the production is interested in the characters, and occasionally aligns us with them, I think there’s also a healthy disdain for the kind of moneyed world that they live in. The lighting design by Jeff Adelberg blasts the actors from below with harsh colors keeping the characters from ever looking completely human.

I haven’t specifically mentioned the actors yet and dear God, let me correct that because they’re the gears that make this monster work. Elwood and McHerrin-Cobb are both great in their roles. Elwood is clearly having a ball indulging in Becky Sharpe’s wheeling and dealings while McHeerin-Cobb gets to play softer notes as the gentler Amelia. But this is one of those casts where everyone on stage is pushing as hard as they can proving that comedic acting is a team sport and an extreme one at that. Watching them work the way they do inspires a certain amount of stress and anxiety in the viewer. As the play rounds into the home stretch of its third hour with no sign of slowing down, you can’t help but think that there’s no way they’re going to be able to keep this up. Surely, they have to stumble. They have to fall. Don’t they? And yet, through gumption, grit or maybe just sheer force of will they manage to bring this behemoth across the finish line and make you laugh every step of the way. What a feat. And speaking of accomplishments, a word should also be said for the brilliant costume design by Leslie Held. With all of the costume changes that we witness across the evening, (seven actors playing seventeen characters across a ten-year period), what Held pulls off is nothing short of a technical miracle.

And what does this all come to? That’s the question of Vanity Fair. The wheel of fate keeps turning and you’ll have to see for itself where it all lands. Buckle in.

Vanity Fair is presented by Underground Railway Theater at Central Square Theater January 23-February 23, 2020.

For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.centralsquaretheater.org

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