PhillyTablet Inquirer Daily News
Mobile
Home Delivery
philly.com
email
font size
options
 
Friday, September 2, 2011

Review: A Paper Garden

By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The treasure of new plants discovered in colonial America gives inspiration to this piece, which purposely mixes time and place to bring together gardening enthusiast Josephine Bonaparte, botanical explorer André Michaux, and his assistant Pierre-Paul Saunier — all real-life characters who had much to do with plants, discovery and, in their own ways, adventure.

The play, commissioned by the American Philosophical Society to accompany an exhibition there, is the sort of theater you’d expect from a museum or similar institution: entertaining but not boldly so, full of facts but mixed nicely with theatrical fancy, and short (about 40 minutes).

What you might not expect is its cast, three busy local theater artists usually seen in big-production enterprises, not in the confines of the philosophical society’s patio off Fifth and Chestnut Streets, where the bustle and din of city life sometimes overpowered their words at Friday’s noon opening.

The cast is Mary Tuomanen as the explorer, Geneviève Perrier as the Empress Bonaparte, and Aaron Cromie as the beleaguered assistant (and the show’s director and plant constructor). Cromie and Tuomanen wrote the script, which the cast performs well, and the music and lyrics, which they do not.

Free. 1 and 3 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, and 9/10, 11 and 17; noon and 6 p.m. 9/9 and 16. Jefferson Garden, 104 S. 5th St.
Posted by Howard Shapiro @ 7:59 PM  Permalink | Post a comment
Comments   


0 comments
About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

Advertise Here