All-star cast gives 'Ashley' a powerful voice

Author: Emily Feldman

Anyone who has experienced American society during the last 20 years has been affected by and possibly inundated with representations of our cultural obsession with sex, violence and celebrity.

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In her darkly comic play "After Ashley," which opened Thursday, Dec. 16th in the Hepburn Zoo, playwright Gina Gionfriddo addresses the extent to which modern media juxtaposes private and public spheres of existence and creates popular entertainment by manipulating dark realities to emphasize their inherent theatricality. The play was presented as the senior work of Himali Soin '08 and MacLeod Andrews '07.5. Under Soin's insightful and deliberate direction, the cast of "After Ashley" explored the story of a father, Alden Hammond, and his son Justin, played with precision and sensitivity by Alec Strum '08 and Andrews respectively, as they navigate a media frenzy in the wake of Justin's mother's violent murder.

While the narrative of the play is simple and linear, many of the characters Gionfriddo presents are markedly nuanced. In a witty and well-paced opening scene, Judith Dry's '09 portrayal of Justin's Mother, Ashley - an emotionally-isolated talk show therapist (Schuyler Beeman '10) disciple who admittedly enjoys marijuana and hates children, set the ironic tone that reverberated through the remaining two hours of the play. Ashley energetically confides in fourteen-year-old Justin with an anxious, teenage sensibility that stands in contrast to Justin's rationality and pronounced maturity. Things begin to take a turn for the satirical when Alden arrives home with the introduction of a homeless person he has hired as a handyman, who later becomes Ashley's murderer. The earnest performances in the opening scene, however, grounded the play in a naturalism that prevented its essence from slipping into complete satirical parody.

Justin comes of age with a strong sense of sarcasm as well as a recalcitrant bitterness towards his father, who encouraged by a sycophantic, manipulative TV personality (played with terrifying straightness by John Glouchevitch '10.5), capitalizes on the buzz the murder creates. Andrews seemed wholly at home in his role as the play's the most consistent character, struggling against a landscape filled with hypocrites and aggressive exploiters. Only Julie (Justine Katzenbach '08.5) and Ashley, the two female characters, come close to matching Justin's naturalistic believability.

"I wanted [all of] the characters to believe in their objectives, so that it is in this earnestness that the satire lays, rather than the characters themselves being the satire," Soin said.

Indeed, the tone of the action and diction, especially in the second half of the play, straddles the fine line between realism and parody. As the play progresses, the distinctions in ways characters present themselves in the media and in "real" life become increasingly murky. Directorial choices, such as marking spatial distinctions between off camera and on camera worlds, were helpful in shaping the audience's perception of the humanity beneath a persona, or in the case of certain characters, the lack there of.

Carefully crafted design elements highlighted by a brilliantly mixed recording of a rap-song incorporating Justin's infamous "911" call (sound designed by Thompson Davis '08) as well as a smoke-filled, green hued, "reenactment" of Ashley's attack (lighting designed by Ross Bell '10) fostered a sense of American popular culture that felt strangely organic to the increasingly fantastical world of the play.

Andrews first encountered "After Ashley" at the 2003 Actor's Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival of New American Plays, where Jessie Hooker '02 originated the role of Justin.

"Having just been accepted at Middlebury, I arranged to meet Jesse after the show for a chat. By way of him, this was my first experience of Middlebury Theatre, and it feels right for it to bookend my time here," notes Andrews.

"After Ashley" may end on an ambiguous emotional note, and it may not be sure of its place in the vast realm between drama and farce, but there is something uniquely exciting about young, talented actors, directors and designers examining together a text that deals exclusively in contemporary references to a world that they have all experienced firsthand. The success of this production was measured in the sometimes stifled and sometimes deeply articulated guffaws emanating from the Hepburn Zoo as audiences reacted to a meticulously crafted stage world representing tenets of American popular culture extended to logical extremes. Or is that what we would like to think?