REVIEW: The Weekend, A Stockbridge Story is a Delightful 90s Era Meet-Cute
Through 10/12 @ Barrington Stage, Pittsfield MA
“The storytelling, characters and my enjoyment produced a very warm feeling of engagement with this play.”
The Weekend, A Stockbridge Story at Barrington Stage through 10/12 is an appealing romantic comedy that may remind you of several meet-cute movies and will definitely tickle your ears with its many local references. It also moves in surprising ways and has some cogent things to say about the leisure class.
After a beautiful drive through the Berkshires to get to downtown Pittsfield, we were greeted with a raised platform on the St. Germain stage (set design by Wilson Chin, lighting by Amina Alexander) ringed with facsimiles of the trees which are a major attraction in these parts at this time of year. Ben Rosenfield as Allan enters, opens his laptop and the play begins.
The play is very writerly in that you watch Allan write the story as the other three great actors enter and leave the space quickly (expertly paced by Director Alan Paul) at his beckoning and all address the audience at some point wrestling their point of view and perspective into the story, effectively writing their own.
Allan is the unattached younger brother of the new law partner Tom (a winning Bill Army) who brings him along to the Stockbridge weekend home on Lake Mahkeenac owned by his wife Beth (lovely Molly Jobe). When they arrive for their idyllic weekend, Allan is shocked to be next door to the love of his life, Jordan (thrillingly vivacious Sasha Diamond) who he hasn’t seen in over five years.
The characters are enormously appealing and their easy interplay and comfort with each other invites the audience into this story. Besides the frequent references to Price Chopper, Taft Farms and the bookstore in Lenox, there is a pointed conversation that turns testy between Tom and Jordan about the care and stewardship of Stockbridge and the contributions of the weekenders. You could take it a step further, maybe in a post-show discussion, and ask why a year round theatre is unsupportable in the Berkshires.
The playwright Ben Diskant (new to me) is an unabashed romantic, setting his play in the 1990s because, as he says in the program, “cell phones make everything unromantic” and it demands a distance and finality to separations. Letters are written, goodbyes have more weight and when Jordan enforces a five year moratorium on her relationship with Allan it feels positively Victorian. All to the good. The storytelling, characters and my enjoyment produced a very warm feeling of engagement with this play.
My serious question with the play is Allan working in the basement of Tom’s law firm as a paralegal for five years without writing. Where did his artistry go?
The play flew by comfortably, enjoyed with a lovely Berkshire audience that could make you feel all is right with the world even when things don’t always work out happily. The magic of theater.
The Weekend, A Stockbridge Story plays through 10/12 at the St. Germain Stage of Barrington Stage Company. Tickets: www.barringtonstageco.org
