D’Arcy Dersham (center) and (l to r in the mirror) Jackie Scholl, Winsloe Corbett, Robin Bloodworth, and Robert Kropf.
Photo: Justin Lahue
Review by Rebecca M. Alvin
Circle Mirror Transformation is a strangely compelling play. Nothing really happens in it and most of the action involves adult students at a community center playing theater games in a creative drama class. And yet, somehow, the audience is completely wrapped up in it. It’s a testament to the performers in this ensemble piece—Robert Kropf as Schultz, Jackie Sholl as Lauren, Winslow Corbett as Theresa, D’Arcy Dersham as the instructor, Marty, and Robin Bloddworth as her husband James—but also to writer Annie Baker, who has managed to draw us in and keep us there without the usual paint-by-numbers narrative structure we’re used to.
Two scenes into the play, when a child in the audience whispered to his father that he was completely lost, he was not alone. The play unfolds in such a way that one has to give credit to its timing as written and performed, a testament to director Jonathan Fielding’s skill.
The performers portray actors portraying their fellow actors in theater games designed to evoke empathy as well as self-awareness. In fact, the play is really about acting and theater as a reflective practice that is performed and received as something of a mirror. But it’s also about time and our ability to be in the moment as it happens. At one point Marty (Dersham) explains that acting is not necessarily about being in a particular play or performing a role; it’s about responding in the moment and putting aside all the other moments, past and future, as there is only the present. It’s an interesting idea, as what is “the present” is over before you can even acknowledge its existence, and so the advice of Buddhists and mindfulness trainers to “be present” is kind of a trick, something you can’t ever live up up to, as the present is the past as soon as you name it.
The bare-bones set (Justin Lahue) contributes to this theme, as the play is so reliant upon quite ordinary characters in a quite ordinary setting who somehow transcend the needs of dramatic manipulation. By just being, they reveal themselves to each other and to us, but never enough to create entire origin stories. And so they are just people who meet in an acting class who never completely transform as the title would suggest. Rather, they continue living moment by moment. They are not fundamentally changed, which is maybe not the point, even as hundreds of writing coaches will tell you characters must be transformed by the end.
Circle Mirror Transformation is not for those seeking ordinary theater and cookie-cutter plots. It is for those who want to slow down, who have patience, who want to see what it’s actually like to be present in a moment and not require any transformation to validate the experience.
Circle Mirror Transformation is performed Wednesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. and Sundays, 5 p.m. at Harbor Stage, 15 Kendrick Ave., Wellfleet. There is a Pay-What-You-Can night on Friday, August 15. For tickets ($28 – $54) and information call 508.349.6800 or visit harborstage.org.
