Old Creamery - I’ll admit I had never been to dinner theater at the Ox Yoke Inn before, but having of course eaten there on occasion I couldn’t figure out where they were possibly going to stage a play. I didn’t know what to expect, and when I was directed downstairs into a smallish room appointed something like a living room I thought for a brief moment that we the audience were to sit in a waiting room for a bit before going in to the performance space.Of course, I quickly realized that I was in the performance space. As I said, the room seemed small and was lined on all sides by chairs for the audience. In the center, close enough for the audience to reach out and touch, was the set itself which consisted of a couple of desks and chairs, a couple of small bookshelves, and a settee. So, theater in the round then. But not just any kind of theater in the round, this was clearly going to be a very intimate sort of show, where the small audience was going to be practically sitting with the characters.
Actually, the size of the space is a little deceptive…I counted about 45 people in the audience and there was room for more, which at $40 a seat is not a bad set of numbers. The $40 includes a full meal of your choice at the Ox Yoke Inn, so it’s a fairly reasonable price for a full evening of entertainment. But what sort of entertainment are we talking about?
Educating Rita is not a plot-driven show. What little plot it has is beside the point. This is a character study, the sort of script where dialogue is the engine which drives it from beginning to end and you learn the details of these character’s lives as they learn them from each other. There are only two characters in the entire show- Frank Bryant, a borderline alcoholic professor of English at a small British college; and the eponymous Rita, a lower class hairdresser who has decided to try to broaden her horizons by taking a few classes at the college in her spare time.
In essence, this show is sort of a reverse Pygmalion. Instead of a highly educated professor trying to take an unwilling lower class student and mold her into a different woman, you have a lower class student who is trying to educate herself at the behest of an unwilling professor who doesn’t want to change her. There are other familiar elements as well, enough so that you have a pretty good idea of where this is going from the very beginning, and there aren’t a lot of surprises.
However, since as I said before this show is not about the plot, that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the characters. And since there are only two characters, an actor who wants to take on this script better be well prepared for a challenge.
Deborah Kennedy, who plays Rita, is a veteran actress who certainly is capable of stepping up to the plate. She throws herself in to this role entirely, from her blonde dyed hair to her street-level London accent. In order for this play to work, the audience has to care about Rita, and she is definitely adept at making that happen. She also has great comic instincts and timing. There is no satire, absurdism, or irony in this show, but there are lots of lines which are meant to be funny. A lesser actor might not be able to evoke the humor in them. Kennedy had the audience laughing quite regularly. The only complaint I could make about her as Rita is really the fact that Rita is quite obviously meant to be played by a younger actress. Rita is expressly stated as being 26 years old, and I thought there was a certain youthful energy level, difficult to quantify, that Rita was supposed to have but seemed missing somehow.
Tom Milligan plays the other half of this duet, Frank Bryant. It was a bit more difficult for me to get a grasp on his character. Milligan did not make any attempt to use an English accent, so at first it was a bit confusing even figuring out who was supposed to be the foreigner in which country. It becomes apparent that both characters are meant to be British in Britain, especially later on when Frank refers to himself directly as an "English poet." This makes the choice of not using an accent more puzzling.
However, his Frank is quite likeable. At times I wondered if maybe he was too likeable. Given the fact that he is an alcoholic who has essentially given up on life and retreated into safe obscurity as a tenured professor, I felt maybe he was meant to be more gruff and reticent. Milligan played him with a sort of wide eyed innocence that belied his world weariness, but on the other hand made him very endearing to the audience. He was soft spoken to Kennedy’s loud brashness, but he never let her overwhelm him on the stage.
I actually think the playwright was rather abusive to his actors. Not only did he write a fairly long play (nearly 2 ½ hours) in which just two actors were expected to carry the show entirely on dialogue, but he wrote it in about a dozen or so different scenes, each of which took place on different days. This meant that the actors had to change costumes for every single scene, and do it quickly. By necessity, they basically had to make a simple change such as throwing on a different shirt or jacket before charging on into the next scene. The set had to remain completely unchanged…whatever state it was left in was the state it started the next scene in. Fortunately there wasn’t much change that was required…the staging was fairly static.
Despite this, they made the costumes work. They were kept pretty simple and casual, the way these characters would dress. I thought the costumes for Rita were particularly well chosen. They had a sense of style which definitely fit her brash character and lower class origins.
As you can imagine, in such a small space with no stage to speak of, there was little of note as far as lighting and sound (although at one point one of the directional lights which was aimed at the center of the room sort of swiveled on its own accord so it was pointed directly down at a poor audience member). There was music between every scene to cover the quick changes that needed to be made. Some of it I found strange and wasn’t sure why it was chosen or how it fit in, although the choice of The Smith’s “Hairdresser on Fire” was incredibly apropos.
The set had a great deal of character. There were all kinds of books, papers, files, bottles, knick-knacks, and other details on the set. It had an old, homelike look to it. It was exactly the sort of place you would expect a professor who has grown complacent in his tenure to have nested in for 20 years or so.
So there was definitely thought put into the design of this show, but I found myself wondering who had directed it. No director was listed in the program, and I rather suspect this show was self directed by the actors. The reason I suspect this is because the way the show was staged looked to me like nobody was watching it from the outside when it was being blocked. Nearly every scene began the same way, with Frank sitting at his desk doing some kind of business with papers and files. And many of them ended the same way as well, with Frank standing at the door looking puzzlingly after the just departed Rita. There was also less dynamic movement within the scenes themselves than one might expect. I can speak from experience that often as an actor on stage you can think that something feels natural to do (or not do), but usually a director will force you to change things up on a regular basis because he sees it from the audience’s perspective.
I think that, overall, the type of audience who would go to dinner theater would enjoy this show. It is incredibly sincere theater; small, intimate, done with an aim to please and a joy in its simplicity. As I was there as a critic I may have found fault where others would find none (such as the fact that this play has an overly long first act and no real ending, not to mention leaving a strongly hinted romantic subplot unfulfilled), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make for a fine evening’s entertainment. If you like character, dialogue, and the drama and comedy you find in every day life, you will like this show.
Brad Quinn is a veteran of the local theater scene, and has worked with all of the local community theaters both onstage and backstage in various capacities.
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