THEATER REVIEW: Losing the Shore @ the Adrienne

Bckseet Productions is running Catherine Rush's Losing the Shore, a play offering a cache of themes both historical and personal. Set on a cruise ship in 1953, a career politician, newspaper baroness, despondent divorcee and tentative future nun are all rubbed together to see if a fire starts.

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THEATER REVIEW: Losing the Shore @ the Adrienne

POSTED: Friday, March 18, 2011, 3:30 PM

(JM Szczepaniak-Gillece)

Bckseet Productions is running Catherine Rush’s Losing the Shore, a play offering a cache of themes both historical and personal. Set on a cruise ship in 1953, a career politician, newspaper baroness, despondent divorcee and tentative future nun are all rubbed together to see if a fire starts.

I am reminded of the Lewis Mumford quote: "Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

For a young audience member several generations removed from the Rosenberg trials, Losing the Shore rests squarely on its actors. Not that these themes are meaningless, but the play is effective in showing the differences in the generations: The greatest generation is concerned with something greater than itself (its country), and subsequent generations — for better or worse — become increasingly more self involved.

And indeed, I identified more thoroughly with the conflicts of the 28-year-olds, Ruth Goodwin, Hortense Portier and Stuyvesant Baird (played by Megan Slater, Kate Brennan, and Nathan Edmonson, respectively) than the older folks. I’m not very proud that I fell into young whipper snapper A.D.D. stereotypes, but I admire Rush and director Andrew Borthwick-Leslie for hijacking my emotional responsiveness for the greater relevance of their story.

In addition to self-involvement, younger generations get more nihilistic, more hedonistic. And sure enough, I was less interested in the more substantial elements of the narrative than the energy fields created by the cast. The intoxicating dynamic between Ruth and Hortense. The freewheeling wit of energetic Stuyvesant, whose actor Edmonson is an improv coach and member of Philly’s Rare Bird Show improv team.

This is not to leave Michael Byrne (playing Adlai Stevenson) and Catherine Palfenier (Alicia Patterson Guggenheim) in the lurch. Byrne’s aging politician, and Palfenier’s ethically distraught newspaper magnate handle their business wonderfully and with all the heft of the early fifties.

Says Rush about her players, “There’s a lot of emotional realness here, partially because I knew the actors and wrote somewhat for their emotional truth. So I’m pleased with everybody.”

The stage, located on the third floor of the Adrienne (2300 Sansom St.), is a raised wood floor with the audience seated on the south and west. Changes between scenes are done by cruise ship staff to the atmospheric din of down-tempo jazz. On the theatre space, director Borthwick-Leslie says, “One of the things that I really like about it is that you can arrange the audience and the set in a way that you couldn't in a proscenium space. I have the audience surrounding the actors a bit. On some level, the characters are trying to get away from their lives, but the dramatic irony is that it’s not possible. If you get on a boat, you might get away from land, but you don’t get away from people. You’re actually stuck with people. This set has a sense of floating isolation.“

Losing the Shore runs through April 2. Click HERE for information on tickets and showtimes.

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