"Love Is..." brims, bubbles and holds up the mirror of life
About the article
This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from June 1978.
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Coming hard on the polished heels of the Inn Theatre's "Music Hall," the current Cayman Drama Society production at the Royal Palms proves, once more, the kind of theatre most potential playgoers would prefer most often.
"Love is" is a comedy and it's a musical; it gets a bit heavy in spots, but the director always at this point employs the old comic relief, a device used most successfully by the Bard of Stratford himself. There is no script, yet there is symmetry.
There are six members in the cast, playing in white face. Waldo Parchment, Terry Murphy, Lori Keay Slack, Rosalie Lawrence, Nick Press and Camille Myers. One very definite feeling that comes across is that these people have all sort of chosen each other as playmates, since there is an unmistakable compatibility and togetherness and electricity that swirls through the evening in brimming, bubbling congeniality. There is constant "touching" as the actors often used this means of communicating with each other. The audience also "feels" these messages.
This particular dramatic form is not entirely new; it has been used successfully by dramatists as Jean Genet ("The Balcony", "The Blacks") and Samuel Beckett) "Waiting for Godot"). but in the local case special complimentary note must be made of the fact that the Drama Society did not use a formal script.
"Love is" comprises a series of brief skits which are connected only by the common theme of love. The players are all young, energetic, enterprising folk who obviously not only enjoy what they are doing, but are making a serious effort to give Cayman the kind of theatre that obviously works here.
So far as the male roles went, Terry Murphy and Nick Press were outstanding as they unconsciously grappled for top spot. It was dead heat all the way, and it might be said, as it used to be said, that if the flights of Terry were higher, Nick continued longer on the wing.
The third male in the cast, Waldo Parchment, was the sobering effect on the whole production. He was almost like a chorus which took the part of the audience, conTERRY and ROSALIE stantly filling in the empty spaces and steering the players back on course. The ladies were the perfect complements as each acted out so many of those incidents of love and familial upheavals that are part of the work-a-day life.
Director of the production is Geoff Cresswell, who now has the distinction of having guided two consecutive musicals to resounding success on the Cayman stage.
It is not an easy task commenting on "Love is..." because it is produced in an art form which, though by no means new, is largely untried.
In honesty, however, it must be said that "Love is...is not without its flaws. Chief among these is that the actors do not play to the entire audience. This is because of poor staging, whereby most of the skits are performed with the actors facing the northwest corner of the room - a strange occurence, since that's where the fewest number of the audience is sitting. This is, however, a flaw which can easily be corrected in subsequent performances, should the director take the point. Maureen Roberts and Daphne Robinson must be complimented on a set whose unobtrusive maneuverability by the players themselves gave both players and orchestra (pianist Michael Blackie) an opportunity to be functional and funny at the same time.
In a word, the costumes went a long way in completing the charade on life and love. WALDO
Tee shirts, rolled up white denims, knee socks and sneakers. Perhaps the ladies in charge of wardrobe were acutely aware that all those elements, combined, have always been the perfect breeding ground for love...
Love is never so utterly painful and beautiful, mindless and ponderous, blind and all-seeing as when it manifests itself in the young, untried, unsteady folk...just the description of the cast of Love is... There is a surprise ending...a surprise because no one in the audience knows the end has come. But that, too, is the way of love. Romantics have always spoken of "love at first sight," but none has dared venture that there may also be the end of love at the drop of a rose petal. It doesn't end, it just sort of withers itself into disuse.
Geoff Cresswell, as always, had the final rejoinder: "PS," he says in the playbill, "We're still not quite sure what love is...Do you know?" Of course not, but most of we mortals have accepted that we've been given a lifetime to find out.
