If you’re a dog lover—and if you’re not, perhaps you just haven’t found the right dog yet—there’s a good chance A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia will speak to you. The character Sylvia, an energetic lab-poodle mix, will also speak to you, literally, as the pooch in this play is a played by a woman who communicates with the audience and the characters in plain English. The premise has a hokey vibe undoubtedly, but Gurney’s play is a smart, unusual piece of work that’s much more than it appears on its face.
Now on stage at Seattle Repertory Theatre through Dec. 11, Sylvia is directed by Seattle theater vet R. Hamilton Wright, who starred in the show 15 years ago when the Rep first staged it. His direction underlines the slightly off-kilter energy of the play and its alternating humorous and philosophical natures. One might expect a play ostensibly about pet ownership to possess its fair (or more than fair) share of pathos, but Sylvia rarely heads that direction.
Greg (Alban Dennis) and Kate (Mari Nelson) are a pair of new empty-nesters who have returned to living in the city after a long stint in the suburbs. She’s a successful academic; he’s a dissatisfied paper-pusher. While Kate is eager to explore a new chapter of her life, Greg is obsessed with looking back and examining what he’s done with his.
As the play opens, we see the excited Sylvia (Linda K. Morris) burst through the doors of the couple’s Manhattan apartment. Quickly it becomes apparent that this is a dog, even though there’s no dog costume—not even a sewed-on tail or a pointy-ear headband. The resulting effect isn’t so much Brechtian distancing as it is a perspective-altering look at the relational significance man has with canine—and vice versa.
Article comments
1 - Robin
The production of Sylvia at the Seattle Rep is all wrong! Hamilton Wright is a far better actor IN the play (as he did years ago at this same theater) than he is a DIRECTOR of the play now. He misses so much in this light comedy of A.R. Gurney and the liberties he has taken now with the play hurt its meaning. First, his casting choices are odd: Sylvia is to be a subtle, smallish, dog. The first production staged at the Rep had an actress who did not play the role for "camp" in an over-the-top way as the current actress does. And the physical demands and intellgence for the role are real: the actress (Sarah Jessica Parker debuted the role on Broadway by the way) is to be clever and study the animating features that help us really see this actress as dog, not human-playing-dog. This is missed entirely in Wright's directorship. In addition, the actress playing Kate, the wife, is meek in the first act and barely audible. In the casting choice here, Wright misses entirely the arch and sharp quality of Kate, choosing an actress who does not really inhabit the role and instead, plays up much too large her fatigue but not her wit and intelligence. Further, he drunken scene with her friend comes out of nowhere--we've not been introduced to her energy at all in the first portion of the play. The A.R. Gurey intention is to feature a much stronger woman in the role than how this is played in the current production. Most disappointingly, the most beautiful part of the play--the monologue about love as sharing--in Act 2 is to be delivered by the HUSBAND, not the dog. This change makes this soliloquy entirely lost for the audience. Thus, the whole experience becomes farce without the profound sweetness and optimism that A.R. Gurney intended. It is just a poorly directed play. Wright played the husband years ago and had better direction then that he remembered now. I regret that Seattle's audiences did not see a first-rate production here.