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Pierrot le Quin

nytheatre.com review by Josh Chambers
August 15, 2005

Pierrot le Quin is a charming one-act by Sylvia Manning, based on the story “Pierrot” by Guy de Maupassant. It is co-directed and co-produced by Leecia Manning and Joseph Franchini. The play, set in Normandy in the 1800s, tells the story of Madam Lafevre (Michele Tauber), Rose (Dawn McGee), and their pilfered onion garden. Heeding the advice of a neighbor (billed as The Artist, and played by Franchini), Lafevre decides to acquire a guard dog to protect the imperiled patch. After an attempt to acquire a costly canine fails, The Baker (also Franchini) delivers an abandoned pooch to their doorstep free of charge.The dog in question is the titular Pierrot (played energetically by David Carta). Things go swimmingly until the arrival of a government man (again, Franchini) who demands a dog tax. Pierrot is then quarantined to a hole in the ground, and destined to co-exist with a menagerie of orphaned mutts whose owners can’t swing the levy. When Rose and Lafevre continue to feed Pierrot through the hole, they realize that his share is being taken by the bigger dogs, and the play ends with the bittersweet assertion that they can’t feed all abandoned animals and must let Pierrot perish. The final image of the production is of the Artist pulling a pen from his coat to record the tale of Pierrot and the women.The tone of this production is one that delights in unabashed fakery. It exalts artifice at every turn, and finds heart in a riot of hand fans, hats, purses, and faux moustachery. The sets (brilliantly conceived by Michael Wehner) are a collection of gingerbread house flats, papier-mache onions, and windows and gift boxes that reveal severed heads and rabid dogs in the play’s more nightmarish sequences. The direction is smart throughout—most of the play’s transactions are in the medium of the Dumb Show, where plot points are traversed using no dialogue and a highly illustrative physical acting style, all to the accompaniment of a crack band of musicians, (Jeremy Lang, harmonica; Scott Neagle, clarinet; and Lars Potteiger, accordion). Some of the finest moments in this production are when the band, lights (moodily designed by Ethan Kaplan), actors, and text conspire to deliver moments of dramatic collision, as when the silent screams of Tauber are subversively carried by Neagle’s wailing clarinet.The play traffics in the emotional shorthand of fairy tales, where plot is inherently arousing and the audience is required to fill in characterization with archetypes acquired through memory and direct experience with tragedy. I found moments of revelation in the juxtaposition of the fake and visceral, such as when Franchini is crying tears over the fate of Pierrot at the end of the play. The tears are very real and yet he is spilling them over the drapery of a very large and very obviously pasted on moustache. Incongruities such as this elevate Pierrot le Quin from a quaint crowd-pleaser to a more expansive piece of theatrical commentary.David Carta has the hardest acting job, and his characterization of the dog Pierrot is the play’s only true directorial misstep. It is my belief that he should have been allowed to flourish in the realm of the false, or in the crammed iconography of the rest of the play, rather than be asked to laboriously mimic the specific physicality of an actual canine. The dog in the first transaction between Rose, Leferve, and the Artist is represented by a stuffed Coney Island-type prize, which to me, sings beautifully in the appropriate key of this touching and accomplished production.