CRUEL & BARBAROUS TREATMENT

Fatal Attractions (With Humor)

The set, with a gorgeous 1930’s dressing table, promises sophistication. The source, a Mary McCarthy short story, promises wit. The actress, in a fur coat, an oversize silk scarf and sunglasses, delivers. As Meg Sargeant, Adrianna Dufay strips to a black bra, girdle and stockings to perform the monologue that is the title piece of“Cruel & Barbarous Treatment.”
“I couldn’t really love a man if everybody didn’t think he was wonderful,” says Meg, who is preparing for her trip to Reno after a thrilling extramarital affair. In her lingerie, she confesses, and as she dresses again, she covers up her feelings, too, in a noirish staging by director Rob Urbinati that is almost cinematic.

The Culture Project’s skillfully directed production, three short acts based on three marvelous short stories, is somewhere between a reading and a fullblown play. The characters sometimes recite narration, referring to themselves in the third person (“He put his clothes back on”); one act also has a narrator (Brett Cramp) who does radio-style sound effects. It’s the ideal balance, preserving the authors’ language and bringing the characters fully to life. Meg returns in the third act, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” also by McCarthy, and directed by Erik Sniedze, in which she has a few drinks on the train and gets to know a married traveling salesman from Cleveland better than she intended. In between, “The 5:48” by John
Cheever, directed by Will Pomerantz, reveals itself as the original “Fatal Attraction” (but with humor). On his commuter train to Shady Hill, Blake (J. Christopher O’Connor) encounters Miss Dent (Annie McAdams), a dowdy young woman who whispers that she has a gun inside her purse and will use it unless he follows instructions. Miss Dent, with whom he had a onenight stand, does seem a little disturbed, making comments like “I haven’t left the house for two weeks” and “I’ve been
thinking about devils.” The moral is never to hire a woman with peculiar handwriting and a list of psychiatric hospitals on her resume.

Anita Gates, New York Times
Saturday, March 27, 1999

Deft Staging Keeps Bite in 3 Stories

Intricate and arresting sound and lighting smooth the transition from page to stage in the trio of intense plays based on short stories running at the Gloucester Stage under the banner "Cruel & Barbarous Treatement."
A legal term originally coined in divorce cases, the title is taken from the Mary McCarthy story adapted in the first work, a monologue in which a callous wife details the diabolically calculated way she conducted the affair that destroyed her marriage...All three plays are affecting, and and the staging is detailed, dynamic and exceptionally evocative.
Originally mounted off-Broadway by Allan Buchman's Culture Project, "Cruel & Barbarous Treatment" would surely come off as flat and bookish without expert staging. All three plays flaunt their literary lineage, with scripts that require the four performers to deliver narration as well as character portrayals...Adrianna Dufay, Brett Cramp, J. Christopher O'Connor and Christina Kirk all display the crack timing and steady stage presence such double duty demands.
Excellent acting, however, isn't enough to separate these stories from their bindings, as directors Will Pomerantz, Rob Urbinati and Erik Sniedze clearly discern. Music and sound combine with John-Paul Szczepanski's simple but precise lighting to bring these stories to the stage...The acting, stylized of necessity but also by careful design, is integrated with the effects to create a compelling whole.

Anne Marie Donahue, The Boston Globe
June 2000

Stories by Mary McCarthy and John Cheever translate into exquisite theater in Gloucester

Three short plays adapted from stories by Mary McCarthy and John Cheever, at the Gloucester otage Company, Gloucester, Mass., through June 18.

When Israel Horowitz saw "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" in New York last spring, he immediately wanted to bring this program of three one act plays to the Glouc­ester Stage Company. He was said to have called it the best show he saw in New York all last year.

Certainly this trio of one-act adaptations of stories by Mary McCarthy and John Cheever is something to see: smart, funny, and best of all, true to their source materials. Seeing these impeccably mounted one-acts may leave you searching Borders for copies of these authors' works, which is probably the nicest compliment that can be paid to its production team.

The title of the evening comes from a short story from "The Company She Keeps," the collection of autobiographical short stories that McCarthy published, to modest success, in 1942. It comprises the first play. McCarthy wrote the story as a stinging monologue in which a 30ish woman speaks of her adulterous affair with a younger man and how it led to her divorce, mostly from her own experiences. "I felt terrible failing in love with another man." McCarthy told an interviewer later in life, "but I must have wanted something to put an end to the marriage."

In the adaptation, a woman named Meg Sargent tells the audience about her affair and how it put into play the inevitable down­fall of her marriage as she dresses in her bedroom. Speaking with cool objectivity of her newfound status in New York society as a "femme fatale," her story is a snapshot of a social world as coded of that of Edith Wharton.

What actress Adrianna Dufay (who plays Meg) and director Rob Urbinati do in their adaptation is emphasize the ironic subtext. Meg is all show and her sardonic speech is just a pretense to hide her true emotions, which are revealed, just briefly, when she breaks down. Dufay's cool reading and her striking-physicality bring much to making this brief play memorable. (I have to admit that I've known the director for some time and know first-hand of his great love for McCarthy's work, which is realized here.)

John Cheever's chilling "The Five-Forty-Five" makes for the striking centerpiece of this program. Adapted and directed by Will Pomerantz, it tells the story of a somewhat unbalanced young woman who holds a businessman hostage on a train as it makes it way out of Manhattan to one of the more tended suburbs. She had once worked for the man, they slept together, and he had her fired; and now she's exacting a curious revenge.

In his adaptation Pomerantz neatly parses out Cheever's narration amongst three characters. Blake, the businessman. Miss Dent, the woman, and a narrator, who speaks in hushed tones. The beauty of this approach is how the tone of cool objectivity is maintained, even as the drama becomes more and more tense. It builds to a climax of real power. Pomerantz's staging, using chairs that pivot to a right angle about midway through, is masterful throughout. And there's quite a riveting turn from Christina Kirk as the possessed Miss Dent and a most believable one from J. Christopher O'Connor as the put upon Bent.

The final sequence returns to McCarthy and one of her best-known stories: "The Man In the Brooks Brothers Shirt." It picks up where "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" left off, that is, catching Meg on the train to Reno to get her divorce. Enroute she meets a rather ordinary and not very attractive businessman, to whom she is strangely attracted. They drink and sleep together; at first she's appalled at herself, then comes to realize that the man's affection touches her in unexpected ways. The cold surface breaks down and Meg is capable of emotion.

Here the story, adapted by Adrianna Dufay, Annie McAdams, J. Christopher O'Connor and Brick Sniedze, and directed by Sniedze, again captures the dazzling surface of McCarthy's writing, its witty deconstruction of what appears to be little more than a sordid sexual encounter. Dufay again appears as Meg, this time showing more range as she runs through a gamut of emotions; O'Connor is entirely believable as the Cleveland busi­nessman who becomes obsessed with her; and there's good comic work from Brent Cramp and Christina Kirk in smaller roles.

In many ways this evening of plays re­sembles the work of the Beau Jesle Theater Company, whose innovative, collaborative approach to the material strikes a similar chord. Like their work, it is clever, intelligent, and sharp. (It would be great to see what they would do with these stories.)

Literary adaptations can sometimes be a real snooze; not so here: "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" is in such perfect pitch with its source material that it soars with an inven­tiveness that's exhilarating. Little wonder Horowitz wanted to bring it to Gloucester.

Robert Nesti, Bay Windows
June 21,2000

Cruel & Barbarous Treatment is a delight. That might sound strange, but the Gloucester Stage Company's visiting production is so sleek and elegantly balanced , we are charmed even as we watch dissolute characters disintegrate before our eyes

The evening is composed of three stories - two by Mary McCarthy (best known for her novel "The Group") and one by John Cheever (best known for his novel "The Wapshot Scandal") - that have been adapted for the stage. The adapters' skill comes from their ability to capture McCarthy and Cheever's acidic eyes toward the privileged and pompous while also finding their vulnerabilities. The short plays also showcase three talented directors, each finding unique ways to dramatize internal monologues and bring the tales to life.

The first piece, "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment," is one woman's monologue about her brittle, empty life. Adapted and performed by Adrianna Dufay, who tells the story while she dresses, "Cruel" outlines the private drama society matron Meg Sargeant has created to amuse herself. Since her marriage has become boring, she provides herself with an air of mystery among her set by taking on a lover. "The theatrical adventure of deception gave me feelings of superiority over others," she explains.

But as she plays out her scenes to their logical conclusion, she discovers she's no longer the talk of the town, and is left alone, without an audience. Director Rob Urbinati has give his and Dufay's adaptation a luxurious pace. While Meg performs her toilette, the process goes from pampering to preening to protecting to preparing herself for the harsh world of reality...

Terry Byrne, Boston Herald
June 2000

Story hour

McCarthy meets Cheever in Gloucester

CRUEL AND BARBAROUS TREATMENT, "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment," by Mary McCarthy. Adapted by Adrianna Dufay and Rob Urbinati. Directed by Urbinati. With Dufay. "The Five-Forty-Eight," by John Cheever. Adapted and directed by Will Pomerantz. With Brett Cramp, J. Christopher O'Connor, and Christina Kirk. "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," by Mary McCarthy. Adapted by Adrianna Dufay, Annie McAdams, J. Christopher O'Connor, and Erik Sniedze. Directed by Sniedze. With Dufay, O'Connor, Cramp, and Kirk. Lighting by John-Paul Szczepanski. At Gloucester Stage Company through June 18.

Narrative itself comes to life in Cruel and Barbarous Treatment, a suite of short plays that makes a sandwich of Mary McCarthy and John Cheever. Two of McCarthy's Meg Sargent stories, from The Company She Keeps, have been wrapped around Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" in a way that establishes a subtle connection. All three tales are about calculated, cruel, if ultimately charity-tinged human interaction. But what really makes the page-to-stage transfer work is the way the adapters get the prose itself pinging around the stage, along with the characters…

In his introduction to The Stories of John Cheever, the author writes: "These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." Indeed, this Two Tomatoes Productions staging -- imported by Gloucester Stage Company following its New York run -- conjures a world of chain smoking and highball consumption and train riding, when women measured their power, or lack thereof, through their interactions with men.

In the title tale, McCarthy's first published story, a young woman coolly covers the arc of the affair she has used to end her marriage -- and to attract society's attention. In "The Five-Forty-Eight," a secretary -- seduced, spurned, and unstable -- makes her way onto a commuter train and pulls a gun on the employer who screwed and then sacked her. And in one of McCarthy's most admired yarns, "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," the divorce-bound woman of the first story (now less a lady who lunches than a liberal, bohemian journalist) picks up a traveling salesman on the train to Reno and gets more than she bargained for.

"Cruel and Barbarous Treatment" is simply put into the first person and confided as a monologue by the cold-blooded and disarmingly candid divorcée-to-be, who's played with delicious sangfroid by Adrianna Dufay…Moreover, the performers prove so good at telling, as well as enacting, their stories that the plays…are seamless.

Carolyn Clay, Boston Phoenix