Summerfolk is a comical update of Maxim Gorky’s 1907 play. How often have you been bewildered by a critic’s review of a play or film that doesn’t match your thoughts? I’m writing this soon after seeing Summer-folk at NoHo’s Raven Theatre. It’s a one-act no intermission play, and it features a cast of 8: Derek Medina, Marcia Moran, Chad Siebert, Janet Blake, Deborah Dir, Wesley Harris, and Claude L. Keller. It was produced by by the Ark Theater Company in association with the Swiss Arts Council.
Roger Vontobel’s adaptation introduces the audience to five characters bound together by their inability to move forward. Their over-the-top performances pull the audience into the anguish of fellow human beings struggling to find purpose in their lives. Then I read the review written by Neal Weaver in L.A. Weekly. He gave it “Pick of The Week.” What I saw were actors complain, moan, lament, reminisce, make love, squabble, sing, declaim poetry, have food fights and scream. And Weaver wrote “loneliness, despair and existential angst have never been so funny.”
I found the ranting and raving tiresome because there was no character devlopment to justify their exteme melodramatics. Weaver writes
“Vantobel has eliminated the entire external plot of Gorky’s play, reducing it to subjective encounters and rendering it abstract, yet staging it so kinetically that it vibrates with new life.”