February 16, 2018 — 9:43 am EDT

Philadelphia Magazine

 

REVIEW: Time Remembered Is an Elegant French Feast

by David Fox

 

Mastery of style is everywhere in this jewel of a show that is wistful, wry, and deeply touching.

 

Style. I sometimes think it’s the rarest element in the theater, and the most precious.  Fortunately for Philadelphia, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC from here on, to spare my typing!) and its artistic director, Tina Brock, are masters of style—with a special affinity for absurdism, which they understand to be not one thing, but a spectrum.

 

Here, in Jean Anouilh’s Time Remembered, Jack Tamburri directs with verve, and Brock herself is acting—a delectable performance as the grandly eccentric Duchess of Pont-du-Bronc. But the mastery of style is everywhere, in a little jewel of an evening that is at once wistful, wry, and deeply touching. Perhaps more than anything, the play (the original title is Léocadia) is very, very French, a sensibility that IRC understands so well. After all, as Parisians especially love to remind us—without style, you’re nothing.

 

“I live in a different world altogether,” announces the Duchess early on, in what is the understatement of the evening. The entire world of Time Remembered is a highly constructed, elegant mishmash of reality and fantasy. In brief: The Duchess wants to end the heartache of her adored nephew, Prince Albert, who still pines away for a woman he barely knew (that’s Léocadia, a glamorous ballerina who died in an Isadora Duncan-ish scarf mishap). The Duchess’s complicated solution is to bring in a shop-girl, who will essentially play the role of Léocadia in a scenario and setting created to both force Prince Albert to confront his sadness, and to overcome it.

 

The particular themes here—including an aristocracy losing relevance and vitality; choosing whether to cling to an imagined past, or embrace a messy but real present; and perhaps most of all, the transformative alchemy of love—must have been especially poignant in the France of 1940, when the play was premiered. But they retain their power and charm today.

 

Still, it’s tricky to get right. Time Remembered could easily turn cloying. What’s so terrific in IRC’s wonderful production is the deft way sentiment is consistently balanced with something more bracing and piquant. It’s not an absurdist play, but true to the company’s mission, absurdist underpinnings are pointedly emphasized. The actors—Corinna Burns, Ashton Carter, Thomas-Robert Irvin, Paul McElwee, Katherine Perry, and Bob Schmidt—commit themselves fully to this vision. As for Brock herself, she should be a Barrymore shoe-in for her dazzling work here.

 

All the more impressive that this show, with its magically luxe setting, is managed in a tiny space on what I assume is a modest budget. There’s something stylishly French in that, too—true chic isn’t about unlimited resources; it’s about taste and talent. IRC displays ample amounts of both.

 

Time Remembered plays through March 4. For more information, visit the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium website.

 

February 13, 2018

WHYY.ORG - Shapiro on Theater

by Howard Shapiro 

 

REVIEW: A lovesick prince and his kooky aunt in ‘Time Remembered’ from the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium

 

We can thank the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium for giving us the opportunity to see plays – often classics – that remain otherwise unstaged by artistic directors who consider them toughies for audiences. That’s because the plays are generally absurdist – and the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Constortium lives for the absurd.

 

The stage company makes the absurd come alive in ways playwrights intended: In nonsense, we see meaning.

 

The company is currently producing Jean Anouilh’s “Time Remembered” on the Walnut’s fifth-floor stage and although the play is far from more absurd works the IRC has tackled, it’s a pretty strange comedy. In a gratifying production directed by Jack Tamburri, it’s also a meaningful look at the way memory can subvert reality and in this case, the ability to love. “Time Remembered,” which premiered in Paris in 1940, is about a prince (played by the credibly overtaken Ashton Carter) who’s spent only three days with a famous ballerina before she died Isadora Duncan-style, strangled by her long scarf. In the two years since, the prince has been inconsolable.

 

He sits or walks where they walked. Lovesick, he broods, replaying the mental tape of those days. (In fact, the more we learn about the ballerina, the more we see the way his enchantment blurs his judgment. She sounds every bit a diva.)

His aunt, a kooky duchess (and played just like that by IRC leader Tina Brock), has tried to bring the prince back to the present. She even took him on a 122-day cruise, with him “sitting in his cabin gazing at a photograph of his dear departed and me sitting in mine, gazing through the intervening keyhole … We returned home with all speed. We both needed a rest.”  The duchess tells this to a young hatmaker (Katherine Perry, handling her role with nuance) she’s snookered into coming to her estate. The hatmaker looks just like the ballerina and the duchess browbeats her into recreating those three days, perhaps to bring the prince out of his misery.

 

The play had a healthy run in the 1957-58 season on Broadway, where Helen Hayes won a Tony Award for her duchess. Like the current Idiopathic Ridiculopathy production, that one used an English translation from the French that’s become standard, by the late Patricia Moyes, a British mystery writer and an editor at Vogue. The translation – and probably Anouilh’s original – sometimes feels stilted, but that’s also a result of some of the play’s absurd dialogue. I bring this up because in the end, the production’s jaunty cadence always overcomes the script’s. It swings happily from scene to scene, richly outfitted by Erica Hoelscher’s costumes (she also did the set) and brightly lit in Maria Shaplin’s design.

The supporting cast – Corinna Burns, Paul McElwee, Bob Schmidt, and Thomas-Robert Irvin — is responsible for many of the lightest moments and Irvin supplies clarion saxophone riffs that take this production up another notch.

—

“Time Remembered,” produced by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, runs through March 4 in the 5th-floor studio at Walnut Street Theatre, on Walnut Street between Eighth and Ninth Streets. 215-285-0472 or  IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org.  The show is a part of Philly Theatre Week, which runs through the first part of the show’s run. Discount tickets may be available here.

 

February 12, 2018

Broad Street Review.com

by Mark Cofta 

 

Review:  Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presents Jean Anouilh’s ‘Time Remembered (Leocadia)’

 

The past suits our present

 

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has championed neglected absurdist playwrights Eugene Ionesco and Jean Giraudoux. They've explored the absurdism in works by Tennessee Williams and even George Bernard Shaw. Now, in their 12th season, they have discovered Jean Anouilh. Their enchanting production of the Frenchman's Time Remembered (Leocadia) offers hope that they'll soon treat us to more of his 27 plays.

 

Director Jack Tamburri captures the play's wistful tone as adapted by Patricia Moyes, and Erica Hoelscher's whimsical set and costume designs ably assist. Six red trellises frame the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5 stage, with a gold curtain upstage suggesting nobility. The green Astroturf flooring and cartoon chandelier, candelabras, and statue, as well as quick, clever scene changes and character-defining outfits, emphasize the script's fantastical aspects. Maria Shaplin works subtle magic with the space's limited lighting opportunities.

 

Love lost

 

Tina Brock's delightfully manic Duchess summons Amanda the Milliner (Katherine Perry) to her chateau. Amanda thinks she'll make hats, but the Duchess has selected her for an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole adventure; Amanda will impersonate Leocadia, with whom Prince Albert (Ashton Carter) enjoyed a three-day whirlwind romance before her untimely death.

 

Albert has reassembled the locations, props, and people of those three magical days: a taxi with driver (Thomas-Robert Irvin), an ice-cream stand and attendant (Paul McElwee), and more. These living souvenirs sit unused, poking Albert's sore heart.

 

The Duchess hopes to fool Albert into feeling again. Albert sees only the effort’s futility but convinces Amanda to stay because "I'm on the verge of forgetting." He instructs her to be Leocadia, not herself.

 

Amanda has other plans, however, and that's when Time Remembered transforms from its sad fairy-tale beginning to a spirited struggle for Albert's soul. "You ought to try to live and be happy and forget the past," she advises, but he resists. Will he hold onto the past, or can she entice him into the present?

 

Sad comedy

 

IRC's Time Remembered works so well because of its comedic moments. The Duchess teaches Amanda to walk like Leocadia, who, a waiter says, walked like, "A mad dog! A demented Borzoi!"

 

More often, the play's humor strikes a melancholy note, as when the Duchess and Lord Hector (Bob Schmidt) hunt birds but celebrate when their shots miss, or when McElwee wields bee puppets that flit around and frighten Albert. A key scene in the Blue Danube Nightclub — conjured by Irwin as a saxophone player, Corinna Burns as a nightclub singer, and McElwee and Schmidt as hapless waiters — perfectly captures the scenario's bittersweet tone. This fine cast gets it.

 

It isn't easy. 1812 Productions staged American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation in 2013, and the all-comedy company didn't achieve the delicate warmth of IRC's version. Playing Time Remembered as farce flattens its fragility, and playing its characters too realistically raises multiple mundane questions, such as "what do they do all day while waiting for Albert to revisit his three days of passion?"

 

A broken-hearted prince wallows in sadness until challenged by an ordinary young woman. It sounds like a fairy tale, and so it is. Time Remembered is a fairy tale for adults, a gentle respite from the real world that, like all the best fairy tales, teaches us something important about life.

 

February 12, 2018 

The Philadelphia Inquirer

by Toby Zinman 

 

Time Remembered, Jean Anouilh’s charming play being performed through March 4 by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, is about that particularly French literary obsession, the past, which Beckett called in his essay on Proust “the calamity of yesterday.”  But although this play is about the calamity of l’amour perdu, it is, oddly, also a comedy about l’amour found.

 

There is a duchess (the pitch-perfect Tina Brock), an “extremely influential old woman and ludicrously rich” who still who talks to her husband the duke although he’s been dead for 15 years. She dotes on her nephew, Price Albert (Ashley Carter), who has never recovered from falling in love with a ballerina named Léocadia, who died, Isadora Duncan-style, by scarf. He is suicidally miserable. The duchess, to cheer him up (the logic is bizarre, but never mind) has had all the places of their romance reconstructed on her vast estate.

 

To complete the illusion, she hires a Parisian milliner, Amanda (Katherine Perry) to impersonate the dancer. Amanda discovers that everyone who works on the estate has been hired as a “souvenir,” enacting the prince’s past. Although this charade does not exactly rescue Albert from the sadness of the past, it does provide him with a happy present as he discovers the living woman in front of him.

 

If we keep in mind that the play was written in 1940, when France was occupied by the Nazis, the exchange between Amanda and the taxi driver (“Are you free?” “Of course I am free, am I not a Frenchman?”) takes on resonance. We should realize, all these years later, that this seemingly frothy play must have had pointed political overtones. Along the way, we meet a variety of characters, some servants, some aristocracy, played with a variety of costumes and hairdos and accents by Corinna Burns, Thomas-Robert Irvin, Paul McElwee, and Bob Schmidt.

 

Jack Tamburri directs. The costumes and set (designed by Erica Hoelscher) remind us not only of the long-ago past but also, as somebody carries onto the stage a plant made of a painted piece of wood, of the fraudulence of theater.

 

Best dialogue in the show: “Are you mute?” “Yes.”

 

February 9, 2018 

delcoculturevultures.com 

by Margaret Darby

 

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s ‘Time Remembered’ Is The Perfect Cure For The Winter Blues

 

As the audience takes their seats, an impatient young lady (Katherine Perry) is fidgeting in a luxurious salon in the home of La Duchesse du Pont-au-Bronc. Her cardboard suitcase is on the floor beside her and she is fiddling with her hat. She continues her impatient vigil until the lights go down.

 

Suddenly, a tiny tornado in heels rushes in. It is the Duchess (Tina Brock), dressed in a costume which could only be described as something between fantaisiste and farfelu: harem pants covered by a luxurious brocade top and high heels which she describes as Louis Quinze in the French version, which you can hear read by playwright Jean Anouilh himself by clicking this link.  

 

The Duchess has kidnapped Amanda because she is the ‘living portrait’ of her nephew’s dearly departed lover. Kidnapping Amanda completes the Duchess’ efforts to recreate the three days that she thinks her nephew the Prince can never forget. 

 

She is dead wrong. Her nephew has already forgotten his lost lover! He tries to remember her voice, her gestures, but that memory is fading. He knows his aunt, the Duchess, is trying everything she can to help him, so he plays along, going to the inn, the café, the ice cream stand, and the taxi that she has also hired so that he can live those three days over and over whenever he wants. Ashton Carter plays the Prince with delicate naiveté and keeps it right where it belongs without exaggeration. When he walks by our Amanda, posted in the park so he cannot miss her, and she says, in French, no less: “Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the sea?” her voice becomes the one he ‘remembers’.  

 

Costume and set designer Erica Hoelscher has brilliantly used every inch of space to create the chateau, the inn, the taxi, the ice cream stand, the café, the park, by providing a single set with a dais in the back and six wings of trellis providing room for the props which the actors bring out in a rhythmic and entertaining dance for every change of scene. (No mean feat of coordination and planning by stage manager/props man Mark Williams.)

 

Tina Brock is her usual dynamo of boundless energy – full of the spirit of Anouilh’s gentle mockery and perfect in her timing. Thomas-Robert Irvin fills the show with interludes of very credible saxophone music which Director Jack Tamburri exploits to the fullest in the café scenes: when the courtship warms up, the music stops and the dialogue takes the forefront.  When things go awry, Ferdinand (one of Paul McElwee’s many fabulous comic roles in the play) snaps his fingers and the saxophonist (Thomas-Robert Irvin) and singer (Corinna Burns) play on in a hilariously mechanical style.

 

Amanda (Katherine Perry) is quite funny as she warms up to her role as lover, which is most convincing. She needs a bit more French-style indignation at the beginning, but her role as the simple and modest milliner shines through in the final scene. 

 

Corinna Burns is fantastic as the dry and unfeeling butler, the sly innkeeper, and she is stupendous as the bored café singer.  Paul McElwee, Bob Schmidt, and Thomas-Robert Irvin delight in their many comedic roles and I feel sure that Jean Anouilh, who had Francis Poulenc write incidental music for his play, would have loved the addition of Irvin’s saxophone.   

 

IRC’s Time Remembered, a lively and comic search for meaning and love, is a delightful way to forget whatever is weighing on you. 

 

Time Remembered is on stage at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5,  825 Walnut Street, Philadelphia through March 4, 2018. Tickets $15-$25.  Order online; for more information, visit www.idiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org.

 

February 13, 2018

Phindie.com 

by Julius Ferarro 

 

In a lot of ways, the set for the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s production of TIME REMEMBERED, which opened last weekend, looks like a lot of their other sets. Hand-made, hand-painted, relatively simple and with a lot of tricks in store. As we enter the space Katherine Perry is sitting and waiting onstage, trying to hold down her frustration.

TIME REMEMBERED is about a poor young hat-maker (Perry) who is scooped up into a wealthy man’s dreamland. HIs aunt has transformed her estate into a living museum of his three-day romance with a ballerina named Leocatia, all the way down to relocating entire bars and their staff. Leocatia died at the end of the three days, and so now Prince relives those days on repeat, until our hatmaker arrives, snaps him out of it, and becomes his living lover.

 

French playwright Jean Anouilh wrote TIME REMEMBERED, an oddly elegiac affirmation of love’s ability to transcend illusion, class, trauma, and memory, in 1949. Compared some of Anouilh’s other works, TIME REMEMBERED can feel like a bit of fluff; for instance, Restless Heart, written a decade earlier, is a strikingly modern declaration of the insurmountability of class divides, pointing out the insuperable barriers between rich and the poor which are still fervent a topic of conversation today. TIME REMEMBERED, in contrast, could be cast as a slightly creepy proto-romcom.

 

Memory and loss are obsessions of Anouilh’s, but the timing of the gentle (if somewhat goofy) TIME REMEMBERED gives us another clue as to its relative gooeyness: it’s 1949, just four years after the end of WWII, the second time in two generations that France lost almost everything to invading forces. France is feverish and sore and trying to forget its own horrific past, including the grotesqueries of the Vichy regime. Anouilh offers up a lovely alternative reality.

 

So I wanted to see how the IRC handles TIME REMEMBERED, and try and figure out why they picked it for performance today, in 2018. It is, in fact, more interesting than a standard romantic comedy, and fortunately the IRC confronts this complexity. The whole play centers on a pair of questions. While everyone in the play wants Amanda to pretend to be Leocatia in order to assuage Albert’s love-wound:, she is critical: she asks, was Leocatia truly in love with Prince Albert, and was Albert in love with her? And if not, what did they actually feel for one another? And what is the true nature of his melancholia?

 

Tina Brock’s opens the play with a madcap energy as the Duchess. She darts on- and off-stage, throwing one-liners at Perry, the half-insane and invulnerable royal warden. The first half of the play is dominated by wackiness, in Brock and in the supporting cast of waiters, butlers, and taxi drivers, all brought to the Duchess’ estate to remake the Prince’s fatal three days.

 

Act two begins on a calmer note, balanced out by Ashton Carter’s performance as Prince Albert. If the big question in this play is what did Albert actually feel for his dead girlfriend, Carter refuses to give us an easy answer. His Albert is courteous, reserved, and obviously loveable in his princely poise. Rather than foaming at the mouth in devastated love, Carter chooses a subtler kind of attraction: his tone is more one of ownership than obsession, but we can paint our own idea of his inner life onto this inscrutable surface.

 

TIME REMEMBERED rests on a bit of a fault line: it’s possible that Anouilh doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say, whether he wants to write a farce or a celebration or a critique of love. The romcom fantasy of a poor woman made rich by love is somewhat tempered by Amanda’s intellectual superiority and the subtle questioning of the concept of “true love.” Anyone playing Amanda has to be able to straddle these worlds and offer a foil to each, and Katherine Perry manages to glide gracefully between them. She is first the straight-woman to the Duchess’ nonsense, then the critical eye on Albert’s musings, and, critically, still somewhat vulnerable in the face of it all.

 

While it’s hard to say that this production gives TIME REMEMBERED a new relevance, it’s a well-handled, well-performed, interesting evening at the theater. The IRC, and director Jack Tamburri, prove once again that they are able to pluck strange fruits out of theatrical history and serve them up ably.

 

[Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street] February 6-March 4, 2018; idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org

 

February 7, 2018

Broad Street Review.com

by Mark Cofta

 

Mark Cofta’s theater picks: Anne Frank, Anouilh, Marie, and more

 

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s annual winter show is their first by underappreciated Frenchman Jean Anouilh (1910-1987).  Time Remembered (Leocadia) runs February 6 through March 4 at the Walnut’s Studio 5, and director Jack Tamburri has a fresh interpretation for this exquisitely textured, absurdity-laced bittersweet romance (in an English version by Patricia Moyes). IRC artistic director Tina Brock stars with Corinna Burns and Ashton Carter.

 

People’s Light revisits The Diary of Anne Frank (February 21 through March 31). Expect this production to differ wildly from director David Bradley’s 2001 staging of Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s 1955 script. Given today’s political climate, Bradley’s multiracial casting should inspire debate: will actors of Asian and African descent playing Dutch Jews diffuse the play's message, or will their talents illuminate the true story’s universal themes?

 

Marie Antoinette, taxidermy, and white guilt

 

David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette (February 14 through March 10) reimagines the “let them eat cake” queen in brilliant director Brenna Geffers’s debut with Curio Theatre Company. Jennifer Summerfield plays the title role, with the always excellent Brian McCann as King Louis and scenic wizard Paul Kuhn designing.

 

Inis Nua Theatre Company’s Love, Lies and Taxidermy (February 14 through March 4)  introduces Welsh playwright Alan Harris’s romantic comedy about unrequited teenage love, an ice-cream truck, and unusual taxidermy in a small town. Francesca Piccioni, Seth Reichgott, and Joseph Teti each play multiple roles.

 

David Jacobi’s Ready Steady Yeti Go (February 21 through March 11) continues Azuka Theatre’s season of premieres by local playwrights. We last saw Jacobi’s work in the hilarious spoof of actor training, These Terrible Things (here’s my review) in the 2017 Fringe Festival, which he penned with the Beserker Residents for their University of the Arts residency. Yeti explores a “white guilt perfect storm” in a suburban high school.

 

Back to school

 

Villanova University is the second area theater to mount Mr. Burns, a post-electric play (February 6 through 18), Anne Washburn’s acclaimed dark comedy, with rock music about postapocalyptic survivors performing an iconic episode of The Simpsons from memory. Jill Harrison, founder of Directors Gathering, is in charge. Those who enjoy multiple interpretations should note that Bryn Mawr College’s Theatre Department will also stage Mr. Burns (April 11 through 21), directed by Catharine Slusar.

 

At UArts, Ira Brind School of Theatre Arts events include the annual Equinox New Play Festival (February 8 through 11), featuring new plays produced, written, directed, designed, stage-managed, and performed by students. For the regular season, two plays featuring murder will play in rotation: Jean Genet’s disturbing The Maids (February 16 through 17) and Caryl Churchill’s eerie Icecream (February 15 through 18).

 

At Temple University, Max Frisch’s dark comedy The Arsonists (February 9 through 11), a free show in conjunction with Philly Theatre Week, lights up the Side Stage at Randall Theater, while Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (February 28 through March 18) fills the big Tomlinson Theater.

 

Arcadia University’s Theater Department provides the first opportunity to see Sensitive Guys, MJ Kaufman’s play about sexual assault on a college campus, performed by and for actual college students (February 8 through 18). InterAct recently premiered Sensitive Guys to tepid reviews (here’s my BSR take) and less controversy than they anticipated, but the play’s issues are so thorny and timely that it deserves a second look.