The closing production of the Ensemble Theatre Co.’s 40th anniversary season, Mark St. Germain’s Dancing Lessons, captures with only two actors the core issues of contemporary interpersonal life. And under Saundra McClain’s direction, it does so tenderly, with wit and at a steady clip (with no intermission).
Separated by two floors in their Manhattan apartment building, two neighbors reluctantly find each other across vast apparent differences.
A dancer with an injury that may end her career finds, behind an unexpected knock on her door, a professor on the autism spectrum who needs her help. An academic seeking a tutor to help him survive a required dance at an awards ceremony finds a person willing to look beyond the surface.
Trevor Peterson returns to the New Vic stage as geoscientist Ever Montgomery, having played Biff in Death of a Salesman earlier this season.
Peterson’s tight articulation and geometric physicality perfectly express commonly held perceptions about adults with Asperger syndrome. His timing and posture are expressive. When an actor makes you laugh with a simple pause, it’s just good.
Leilani Smith, who won an NAACP Theatre Award in 2016 and was nominated for another just this month, and who performed with ETC in Intimate Apparel in 2015, plays sidelined modern dancer Senga Quinn.
Smith delights from the opening scene, when we find her at home alone, in a leg brace, washing her pain pill down with wine and dramatically lip-syncing to music on the radio. When she barely audibly chokes back a sob later in the show, her subtlety of expression is just as powerful.
During the course of 90 minutes (that felt like 40), the two encounter unexpected realities about themselves and each other. Early interactions lay out disparities between autistic and neurotypical modes of processing, but as the story unfolds, their relationship morphs into an exploration of truth, trust and imagination.
Ever’s autistic candor, at first portrayed as a disability, provides many instances of humor. Faced with a tricky conversation, he asks for something stronger than wine: “Autistics can be successful alcoholics just like anyone else.” And as the two move toward intimacy, he says, “This is so wonderful and painful … When you kissed me it felt like a fish hook in my stomach was pulling it out through my nose.”
That same unfiltered frankness eventually provides the impetus for the artist Senga to examine her own challenges around honesty, fear and risk.
Eventually, each character confronts his or her own limitations and softens in the face of the other’s.
Despite its title, the play contains spare literal dancing but is rich in the dance of relationship and personal growth. In a culminating moment of unfettered grace between Ever and Senga, we’re privy to the beauty of possibility, of metaphor, of the reality below the surface, expressed in movement.
The lighting in Senga’s struggling-artist apartment evokes time and mood — the brightness or moonlight outside her windows, twinkle lights at the back of the stage, table lamps and wall sconces.
The sound design — including music from R.E.M. to Miles Davis and Billie Holiday to a swirling waltz — captures the characters’ internal experience, sounds of life in the city and memory in voices on an answering machine.
Dancing Lessons takes us on a journey of insight that is 100 percent enjoyable, with depth and humor, gravity and lift. It runs through June 30. Click here for tickets, or call 805.965.5400.
ETC invites the public to its 40th birthday cabaret on July 7. Click here for tickets, or call 805.965.5400 x104.
— Judith Smith-Meyer is a local freelance writer.