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Shirley Timmreck’s ladies in retirement
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Circles of Time
By Shirley Timmreck. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Set by Brynna Bloomfield. Lighting by Scott Pinkney. Costumes by Janet Bobcean. Sound by Dewey Dellay. Choreography by Carl Thomsen. With June Lewin, Robbie McCauley, George Pendleton III, Sydelle Pittas, Patricia Pellows, Alice Duffy, Lynne Moulton, and Eliza Rose Fichter. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through August 23.
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Shirley Timmreck’s Circles of Time is a fragile exercise in mystic time travel. Set in a Baton Rouge retirement home in the early 1980s, the play centers on an amiable little old lady blessed with the ability to "re-enter," in an almost out-of-body way, earlier, more vivid times of her life. At first these episodes — which may find her in terror of a rising river or waiting for an elder sister to fetch her from school — are alarming, or at least puzzling, to her fellow "guests" and the staff at Twin Oaks Retirement Home. But eventually Louisa passes on her gift — which may look a little wacko to you and me, but that’s just the packaging — to the other residents. Hands to the heart and a little concentration are all that’s required for them to be dreaming of old loves while dancing all night long, leaving a mysteriously scuffed floor in the morning. It’s a little like The Twelve Dancing Princesses, except that all the princesses are as old as Princess Margaret. Timmreck, who is also a painter, wrote the play, she has said, to suggest that senility is not such a bad place to be. Although a resident of Alaska since 1982, the octogenarian playwright set the piece in her native Louisiana and based the central character, Louisa, on an aunt she used to visit who, though not well-attuned to present reality, seemed nonetheless as happy as a clam and as gracious as Eudora Welty. Indeed, another motivation for the play may be to be to commemorate the eccentric gentility of Southern ladies of a certain age — though for some reason one of the quartet of retirees at Twin Oaks is an English war widow. Louisa, however, is a true lady of the levee, with more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Martha is a no-nonsense spinster retired from the LSU English department. And gauzily clad ex-milliner Mabelle appears every day in a different homemade hat, the last a little Peter Pan number sporting what looks like a bird’s nest. As for the "Twin Oaks," they would be African-American retainers Clarice, who narrates Circles of Time, and her kindly salt-of-the-earth husband, Carter. They keep the place operating while director Miss Muller keeps one eye on the bottom line and the other on the television. A difficulty with the play is that most everyone is so damn nice, you long for more tartness from Martha, the last to fall to the youth-channeling charms of Louisa, and some out-and-out villainy from Miss Muller, who wants to move Louisa on to a nursing home. The crucial problem, though, is that, for all the tinkly contributions of soundman Dewey Dellay and the dapply Impressionist effects painted by lighting designer Scott Pinkney, the play’s depiction of glorious retreat at the end of life is less delicate than limp and cliché’d. Also, since she’s listed in the program as a character, despite being dead, you know from the get-go that sister Emilie will be comin’ for to carry Louisa home. Why she comes in the eerily lighted form of a pretty teenager, despite having gotten old enough to teach third grade, is unclear. Circles of Time, which Timmreck has evidently labored on for years, began life as a musical. Indeed, a few songs might help it to the magic realism it seems to reach for, its age-unburdened ladies happily reliving their youths as elements of individual memory leak mysteriously into the common air. As is, the play is pretty toothless. And when the accomplished if amusingly reproving Martha admits that all she ever really yearned for was to be pretty, you want to vomit. Moreover, the work seems unbalanced, with the first act, except for a couple of awkward outbursts, essentially undramatic and the second, longer one crammed with each character’s diminutive, not very original drama. Daniel Gidron directs, bringing some sweetness but not much bristle to the piece, which is the inaugural effort of a new production company headed by award-winning playwright Ed Bullins and Mort Kaplan. It can at least be said that there are parts here for some of Boston’s reliable, older actresses, with June Lewin a graceful, ethereal Louisa and Alice Duffy having glowery fun with exasperatable Martha before she turns soggy. Presiding over the story as narrator/housekeeper Clarice, the assured Robbie McCauley mixes some salt into the sugar. But as the empathetic Amy Rockwell-Jones, who wants to touch base with the husband who died before their son was born, Sydelle Pittas seems to have left her English accent at home. Or, perhaps, in some other circle of time.
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