If Norm Foster’s laugh-heavy stage romp Halfway There—now at
Footlights Theatre in Falmouth through June 3—ends up reminding you of
legendary playwright Neil Simon, there’ll be a very good reason.
Foster, billed as the most prolific playwright in Canada with more than 50 plays to his credit, employs the same rapid-fire narrative technique as Simon did in The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, and more than 30 other award-winning plays—a light-hearted barrage of snappy one-liners, delivered with the elemental force and happy predictability of a collapsing line of dominos.
There are gobs and gobs of laughs in this show. Much fine acting, too. And about the set: it’s really quite spectacular!
The setting for Halfway There is Moose River, Maine, a town in which there’s “no such thing as a secret.” The local gossips—Vi, Rita, Mary Ellen, and Janine—meet there every day for coffee, and as playwright Foster immediately makes clear to his audience, these women know everybody’s business.
In general, life in Moose River is as quiet as a nest of field mice. But when Sean, a handsome but heartbroken doctor, moves in to take a temporary job at the clinic, he unwittingly ignites a firestorm of small-town innuendos and self-revelations worthy of a dime store novel.
For me as a reviewer, this play presented a unique challenge. To be sure, Foster’s dialogue in Halfway There was always and understandably fast-moving, just as Simon’s dialogue was in the plays he penned. But sometimes there were moments when the playwright’s dialogue was so hyperactive that, as I saw it, it upstaged the actors.
And yet what choice did the actors I saw on Opening Night really have but to come along for the playwright’s ride—to deliver their assigned lines with the same fierce rapidity that the script was asking them to do?
My suggestion is that the actors in this production would be wise to trust the conversational heat of their lines as the playwright intended them to be, then cool themselves down, wherever necessary, to avoid upstaging the playwright. Like Simon before him, Foster—at least in Halfway There— has created a dialogue so fast-moving and intense that it almost teases the actors into over-acting. It’s then that the stage action becomes a stand-off —another way of saying that neither the playwright nor the troupe has a fighting chance to emerge victorious under the circumstances.
As I saw it, every one of the actors in this production—Victoria Machado as Jean, Jason Iannone as Sean, Jessica Chaples-Graffam as Mary Ellen, Morgan Gavaletz Lamontagne as Rita, and Pam Mutty as Vi—finally came across with the goods—especially after they shed their Opening Night jitters and took their roles into their own hands.
And bravo to them, for on Opening Night the audience was relatively quiet—not because they didn’t enjoy the performance, but because it was clear they did—and because they were generally slow to sense when it was time for scene-by-scene applause.
When an audience knows from experience whether it’s time to clap or not to clap, actors are doubly energized. Why? Because actors are children at heart, and as with children everywhere, applause is like a lit match; it sets them on fire, and that affirmation lights up the audience. That sharing —that magical moment when a performance truly comes alive—is also the moment when live theatre becomes the art form we all love so much.
— Ross Alan Bachelder www.artsaplenty.ME May 19, 2023
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Footlights Theatre, only minutes from downtown Portland, is on 190 US-1, Falmouth, Maine. For tickets and show times for HALFWAY THERE—and for information about future Footlights performances and special events—go to www.thefootlightstheatre.com or Call the Footlights Box Office, 24/7, at (207) 747-5434.