REVIEW: Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars Brightens the stage
Through 09/14 @ Shadowland Stages, Ellenville
Photos by Jeremy Johnson
“The stakes have been raised markedly and all are facing greater challenges and real life consequences.”
The new Fall Season of theater has begun and I am very lucky to have seen a new work by a major dramatist working in a completely different key in the first week with John Cariani’s Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville through 9/14.
Cariani is an accomplished actor who was in the original Broadway cast of Something Rotten, but he is best known for being the playwright of Almost Maine, a ubiquitous play in community theaters that is frequently the most produced play in high schools since its publication in 2004.
Darker the Night shares many things with Almost Maine from its setting in remote northern Maine, to its fixation with an astrological event (this time the Perseid Meteor Shower), to its structure of several short two-hander plays performed by a young cast of four.
Where it differs from Almost Maine (which is very quirky and determinedly off-beat to a fault) is announced very early in the evening when a teenage park attendant shoos his former babysitter from the docks — the park now closes at dusk due to an overdose by a teenager which happened in the park the previous summer. This couple Shay (Hannah Daly) and Teddy (Aidan Lawrence) will show up three more times through the course of the evening as we follow them to a safe place to view the meteor shower.
There were no overdoses in Almost Maine. Perhaps this shows a more serious intent on the author to go deeper and darker into the psychology of his young rural Mainers. As the evening goes on, there’s characters struggling with poverty, homosexuality, being transgender, and suddenly limited future prospects. There are many serious issues facing these charming, smart, young go-getters, but it’s never a dirge. Frequently, as audience members we are cheering their promotion to manager of the Dollar Store or worried for their deployment. What could be darker than enlisting in the army today?
All of the couples in the eight vignettes have romantic possibilities that either blossom or are redirected through surprise revelations. The cast is superb and it is another scheduling coup for Shadowland Stages to get the playwright John Cariani to direct his own work in its second production after its premiere in Portland, Maine. No one can make it shine as he does. His overlapping dialogue and competitive bickering is a great charge to the ear.
Aidan Lawrence plays a great, excitable naïf up for anything while Shawn Denegre-Vaught is more sensitive, soulful and deliberate. Hannah Daly comes on strong with her I ME T-shirt and doesn’t back down all night. All four actors are exceptionally versatile and present great variations, but Emily Verla is a shape-shifter who can give her face a different composition based on her powerful thoughts and intentions. She is enormously flexible, transmits feelings effortlessly and rides the emotional wave of a scene with grace making her compulsively watchable. You couldn’t wish for a better quartet of actors.
Occasionally, there was a lag as costumes (handsomely designed by Chris English) were changed and the previous scene’s character is forced to drag his heels lost in thought as they shuffle off stage. Thankfully there’s original music (which reminded me of John Mayer) by composer Julian Fleisher. Jeremy Johnson did the lighting design which tried everything including a sound assist from Jeff Knapp to present the meteors. The closing images place a nice note of grace on the night.
Unfortunately, Cariani’s structure of short scenes robs his material of some of its impact. There are only so many times in the course of a play you can watch a character’s shocking reveal mid-scene without it somewhat trivializing all that comes with it. “Oh, this is the gay one, the pregnant one, the drunk one…”
I would be very excited to see this play replace Almost Maine as the most popularly produced high school play as I feel the characters are deeper and richer. The stakes have been raised markedly and all are facing greater challenges and real life consequences. Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars is a change of pace that I greatly appreciated. I’m looking forward to a great season!
Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars is at Shadowland Stages through 9/14. Tickets: www.shadowlandstages.org
