For a season of harmony and balance, nurture and compassion, Circle Mirror Transformation seems an odd choice, especially as the kick-starter for said season. Annie Baker’s esoteric theatrical exercise-come-stage-play is now appearing at Spotlighters Theatre through October 1st 2023 under the direction of Nick Cherone.
The play itself is deeply problematic— not because it hits on any hot-button issues or is outdated/outmoded or offensive but rather because it feels unfinished. There’s sort of a beginning, middle, and end, but Baker’s work is awash in existential confusion. You never really get enough of the characters’ stories to make the audience want to care about what’s happening to them or why— there’s no deep background, dynamism, or complex emotional structures that accompany these five characters to the stage. Okay— an audience can live with that if the concept of the play, in this case, the exercises actors undergo to hone their craft while in a metaphorical way reflecting what is happening in their lives through this ‘Circle, Mirror, Transformation.’ Only Baker doesn’t really make that a focal point either. You do get five characters on stage, in glimpses. And you do acting exercises, including the ‘CMT’ that inspired the title, also on stage. But neither hold strong enough on their own to create something exciting or interesting for the audiences’ overall engagement with the show. And the show’s narrative and overall existence is left drifting in the flotsam of a storyline that isn’t quite sure what it’s trying to be.
Director Nick Cherone seems to have taken the script as written and plopped it onto the stage. He makes good use of the intimate spacing, particularly when they’re doing the wandering exercise, but otherwise there doesn’t feel like there is a signature of Cherone’s that would make the piece stand out as his vision. Spotlighters’ new lighting grid is prominently on display, proving how effective it is at dropping quick fades and rising up on scenes, but that isn’t enough to draw this show together. One of the things that stands out as an impediment to the show’s success is the frequency of costume change. There are lengthy moments in darkness between scenes or ‘weeks’ (as the show is meant to take place over the course of a six-week acting class at a community center in Vermont) so that the characters can dip backstage and change their costumes. Your audience will readily disregard the fact that your actors show up to class wearing the same thing week after week, especially as they bring on a stage hand to wipe down the dry-erase board and change the number of the week to show forward progression. This is particularly true if it means cutting out those lengthy moments in subdued darkness while we wait for actors to change clothes.
Lighting and Sound Designer Michael Lentz has some missed opportunities to be contending with as well. While Lentz has put the new lighting grid to the test, again showcasing its value and capabilities, there’s a sincere lack of sound design in the performance. If there was music, of any variety, during these moments of waiting for actors to change costumes, they might be more tolerable. Director Nick Cherone seems to miss opportunities as well, though this may be an intentional choice to just play the script as written. The little moments of exercise and outside-of-class-interaction are so brief and shallow that you find yourself craving more something, even if you don’t know what that something is. Maybe more silent, pantomime-style interactions instead of dim-downs and snap dark-outs? Or interpretive movement, literally anything to tie this semi-linear-blinking-vignettes together. Annie Baker’s play exists like a half-finished skeleton, waiting for muscles, skin, and clothes to be dressed for presentation and Cherone puts the actors on stage to play it simply as written. It feels underwhelming as a whole.
The performers themselves do decent work (several of them have been reviewed by this reviewer and this publication in other productions and to solid acclaim, so it substantiates the fact that they re impressive performers, just perhaps in this case not given solid source material or a strong, cohesive vision to execute.) Each of them have little moments where they shine, though often times in the grander scheme of the play’s timeline, it all feels ‘too little too late.’ This is particularly true for the Marty character (played by Kathryne Falcone), who is the teacher-leader of the acting workshop. Aloof and distant, though not without some attentively reactive facial expressions, you get this one harrowingly beautiful moment of emotional combustion toward the very end of the performance, where she’s trying to keep her emotions in check. It’s striking but it doesn’t feel like enough of a compensatory reward for having the audience have to wait until the very end of the show to receive it. This isn’t Falcone’s fault, somewhat Cherone’s fault but only the sense that he didn’t have a solidified and unique vision to lay over this somewhat middling and muddled script.
The other four performers— James (Brian Ruff), Lauren (Elinor Bower), Schultz (William Darden), and Theresa (Shelbi Nelson)— have similar struggles that they come up against, not having enough depth to explore within the brief context of their characters, and not having enough focus put on the acting exercises themselves to have the audience want to really engage with what’s happening on stage. Each of the five performers— Falcone, Ruff, Bower, Darden, Nelson— do find little moments that set their characters apart, little sparks of intrigue for the audience to glom onto throughout the course of the performance.
For Falcone it’s both that emotional combustion moment at the end and her ‘mothering’ moments. There are a few scenes where she’s trying to oversee one of the exercises and one of the other actors has pouted or stormed off and she keeps throwing maternal, caring glances in their direction. For Bower, as the youngest student in the class, it’s her petulant moody teenaged-ness. It’s particularly humorous, and perfectly in the vein of what we suppose the character of Lauren is meant to be, when she pops up and asks point blank, “what’s the point?” throwing accusations of the class not living up to her expectations of ‘real acting.’ Bower, like Falcone, does a fine job of presenting this aloof, detached character, even if you only ever get to skim the surface of these characters.
William Darden, as Schultz, and Shelbi Nelson, as Theresa, have a few more of the dynamic outbursts during the show, as their characters have a tangled written through-line. You really get a sense of Nelson’s command of stage presence when she’s engaging in the “I need to leave/I want you to stay” exercise. And Darden has some expressive moodier moments as well, particularly when going off like a verbal geyser about how whatever it was he and the Theresa character were having impacted him and made him feel. Nelson and Darden also do an excellent job of cultivating silent tension between the pair, sometimes even not-so-silent, that carries into their actor-exercises quite well. You get the most from Brian Ruff as James when he’s having a seemingly innocuous conversation with the Theresa character, and again towards the end when he has his emotional outpouring at and with Marty. One thing to be said for all five of their performances is that you can feel the frustration that they share when they keep failing at the ‘counting-presence’ exercise. It becomes a palpable energy in the room that sort of overrides into a frustration of wishing there was either more to these characters or more depth to the acting exercises and what they’re achieving by doing them.
It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, especially as the script leaves much to be desired both in the depth and purpose department, and the direction is a straightforward mounting of the script. But there are moments that feel visceral, there are moments that feel intense, and there are glimpses of what these actors could showcase given a different script to work with.
Running Time: 2 hours and 10 minutes with one intermission
Circle Mirror Transformation plays through October 1st 2023 at The Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre— 817 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD. For tickets call the box office at (410) 752-1225 or purchase them online.
