REVIEW BY TOM MCELFRESH

Photo By Rich Sofranko

Gloria (Taylore Mahogany Scott) berates Vincent (Nick Rose) in The Gingham Dog.

That old, dark-hearted children's rhyme tells how a toy dog and a toy cat "all alone on a table sat." Left thus together overnight they conform, says the poem, to a natural enmity between their species and destroy each other, leaving only shreds and tatters to be found next morning.

Vincent. Gloria. White man. Black woman.

Playwright Lanford Wilson's early, equally dark-hearted (and relatively obscure) script, The Gingham Dog, reflects the poem's pessimism as it wraps up the season for the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF). On a Saturday afternoon, as Vincent and Gloria divide and pack up the shambles of their three-year marriage, the genuine affection they'd once felt turns into accusation and erupts in fulminating rage. Sunday daybreak reveals them severely, perhaps irreparably diminished if not actually destroyed.

Does Wilson carry this allegorical exercise to its ultimate conclusion? Is he suggesting that that his gingham man and his calico woman are of different species? Is their vicious enmity as instinctive and foregone as that exhibited by the dog and the cat? No. The play was written in 1969, setting Vincent and Gloria against the waves of well-meant, integrationist fever and the equally fervid segregationist backlash that flowed through the period. What Wilson's script and CSF's vivid production mourn is how well-meaning people can identify themselves so thoroughly with positions they've adopted that they lose track of themselves as individuals. Architect Vincent has grown defensive about the low-income high rises he is drafting. Teacher Gloria allows herself to become locked in permanent attack mode on all racial issues.

Revealing character and Wilson's deft touch with dialogue as well, Gloria says, "If I wasn't totally ingrown already, now would be a good time to retire into myself."

Vincent says that after the first year of their marriage, " ... we started getting principles -- they take a lot of maintenance. It wasn't the same."

As Vincent, CSF's artistic director, Nick Rose, gives the sort of richly varied, clearly explicated performance his many previous outings have taught Festival audiences to expect. He's a founding member of CSF, now about to celebrate both his and the company's tenth anniversary. Of equal artistic interest and similar nuance is Taylore Mahogany Scott's portrait of Gloria, grudgingly displaying the reluctant sweetness inside her soured, posy attitudes and the gathering sadness inside her righteous fury. Jeremy Aggers, an able member of CSF's apprentice company, and guest artist Jennifer Dalton lend vigorous support to the central conflict, he as the couple's gabby, supportive neighbor, she as Vincent's deeply stupid sister.

Associate artistic director Brian Isaac Phillips directed the piece, guiding clarity into the performances and keeping events simple and directly focused. When CSF's season went through a mid-season overhaul, Phillips selected the Wilson script as a season-ending bookend to the interracial Romeo and Juliet he staged as the season's opener. In each case, love's true affection is destroyed by racial tension. In his R&J, the issues were only implied in the casting and distantly echoed in the script. In the current work, affection is damaged not so much by the racial tension itself as by its vehement expression.

In Act 2, the production takes the script's admonition for whispered performances a little too closely to heart. Rose and Scott's softly spoken, casually articulated readings were barely comprehensible in the fourth row and likely inaudible at the back of the house.

Though early, far darker in its tone and far weaker in its effect, The Gingham Dog exhibits the same sort of practical, cool-handed romanticism that lit up Wilson's later, better known Hot L Baltimore, and ignited his Pulitzer winning Talley's Folly. Gingham's initial production, directed by Marshall Mason and co-produced by Hal Scott who would later spend two years as artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse, was Wilson's first Broadway production. It ran for only five performances.

E-mail Tom McElfresh

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