From L to R Michael Patten, Anastasia Higham, Peter A. Jacobs, Elizabeth Raetz and Gretchen Krich in Circle Mirror Transformation. Photo by Chris Bennion
Seattle Rep’s production of Annie Baker’s play, Circle Mirror Transformation has charm, wit and five great actors…but it ain’t perfect. Set in a mirrored classroom in a small town Vermont community center, the play takes place over a six week period during a beginning acting class led by Marty, (Gretchen Krich) a fiftysomething New Age-y acting teacher with only four students: Theresa, (Elizabeth Raetz) a charming and somewhat neurotic actress/recent transplant from NYC and a disastrous relationship; Schultz, (Michael Patten) an endearing and slightly bumbling and recently divorced furniture maker; Lauren, (Anastasia Higham) a quiet and moody high school student; and James, (Peter A. Jacobs) Marty’s college professor husband who’s been reluctantly drafted into taking the class. Each week of the class is featured with black out scenes depicting events taking place during each week as the students participate in acting and trust bonding exercises and gradually relationships begin to form…and, unravel.
I went to Circle Mirror Transformation on opening night which naturally featured many friends and family members of the cast and crew, as well as many local theater people and they seem to very much enjoyed “CMT” which is not unusual or surprising. Opening nights aren’t always the purest way to experience a new production; the house is stacked with “ringers” who naturally want to support the production, and in the case of “CMT”, it’s a play about an acting class so it’s not a surprise that the theater folks in the audience appreciated the “in jokes” so prevalent in the play. Many of them had taken similar classes and participated in such exercises.
Part of me would like to see Circle Mirror Transformation again, with a “civilian” audience…I’m curious to see how non-theater people relate to it. I’ve taken acting classes and while I appreciated many of the jokes about the exercises in those classes, it also brought home to me the things I disliked about some of the exercises. “CMT” is one of those plays that had scenes I very much liked, followed by scenes I found irritating and cloying, most of them featuring extreme examples of acting class techniques. Many of the class moments did advance the story of the play, but others seemed forced and overly cute if not trite.
I also had issue with some of the relationships between the characters and the rather forced ending of the play. Two characters pair up and other relationships fall apart and that’s fine, but the proceedings do get a little soap opera-y at times, and some of the characters don’t get much character development. Lauren, the teen girl doesn’t get a whole lot to do in this play, other than mope and be “teen-y” and James, the class teacher’s husband has one decent scene but not much else to do except turn stupid in the final moments of the play which felt flat for me. I won’t be a “spoiler” but the final class exercise is a forced bit of playwriting on the part of Ms Baker. It ties things up rather neatly, but it doesn’t make much sense when a character who’s been established as being intelligent, makes a sudden turn and does something very stupid and unlikely. (Some will argue, this character acted this way on purpose; perhaps that was the intent of the author, but it still seems unlikely that an intelligent person would be that intentionally cruel.) The very final moments of the play are nicely played, and staged by director Andrea Allen and somewhat make up for the scene that preceded it, but Circle Mirror Transformation, charming though it might be at times, with strong acting from all five actors and excellent design and technical work from the team at Seattle Rep, never coalesced into a solid night of theater for me. It’s just a little too cute for its own good. (And, nearly two hours without an intermission is a bit rough on the average subscriber’s bladder.)
