Season 49: Success marred by tragedy

In our 49th sea­son, we opened in New York with “Lost in Yonkers,” moved to Maine for “The Whales of August,” fol­lowed by the French Riv­iera for “The Boy Friend,” back to the USA for “All My Sons,” and then the world itself became our stage for Kan­der and Ebb’s “The World Goes Round.”

Once again, I have too much to share about sea­son 49. So I will write about the first three shows today and save the last two for the next column.

Steve Brown of The Chron­i­cle wrote, “Work­shop Play­ers opened its 49th sea­son with a pow­er­ful ren­di­tion of Neil Simon’s ‘Lost in Yonkers’.”

Pam Pick­worth directed and wel­comed these new actors mak­ing their Work­shop debuts: Charles Dere­mer, Diana Ralph, Dirk Male­se­vic and Jonathan O’Toole. Bev Sperry and Charles Dere­mer were both rec­og­nized by the audi­ence with Best Actor Awards for the qual­ity of their per­for­mances in this show. Pam’s mar­velous set design cre­ated an envi­ron­ment that our founder, Valerie Ger­sten­berger, called, “comfy, real­is­tic, and down­right homelike.”

Bill Brumfield’s set design for “Whales of August” gar­nered him the 1996-97 Audi­ence Award for best set. He com­bined a skele­ton of a beach­front house with a gor­geous wall mural painted by Susan Schauer. The mural cov­ered the south and west walls and cre­ated a vista of the coast­line and the sea sur­round­ing the Maine island where the story takes place.

Brum­field also cast five top-notch Work­shop vet­er­ans in this show: Jim­mie Looney, Har­riet Michaels, Becky Presti, Ted Michaels, and Don Dickens.

The suc­cess of this show was marred by a tragedy.

In my arti­cle about sea­son 32, 1979-80, I wrote about Dick Beal work­ing on com­mu­nity the­ater right up to the week before his death. Pat Lindley-Brumfield reminded me that Don Dick­ens cut it even more closely with “The Whales of August.”

Lindley-Brumfield wrote, “When you asked the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, ‘Which mem­ber worked on com­mu­nity the­ater right up to days before his death?’ I thought imme­di­ately of Don Dick­ens. Don acted in and directed sev­eral plays at Work­shop. In Novem­ber 1996, Don per­formed in ‘The Whales of August.’ The show closed on Sun­day after­noon, the cast struck the set, and Don went home and died that night of a heart attack. It was a shock to every­one, but as Bill Brum­field said later, ‘Don would have found the tim­ing appropriate.’”

The irony here, is that last fall we lost Pat Lind­ley Brum­field as well, prov­ing once again that life is full of its own drama.

In the win­ter of 1996-97, Bill Reis­ing and Jayne Bartish-Kacik directed that old-fashioned musi­cal “The Boy Friend” by Sandi Wilson.

Steve Brown noted in his review, “With more than half of the cast under 21 years of age, there is a refresh­ing mix of youth­ful enthu­si­asm and energy that per­me­ates this production.”

Mak­ing their Work­shop act­ing debuts with this show were Jas­mine Ray, Katie Pfrogner, Chris­tine Adkins, Jen­nifer Pfrogner, Heather Bockey, Dustin Jasin­ski, Mark Mears, James Dar­vas, Betty Kaye, Jay Tur­ton, Tim McHenry, Michael Molek, JoAn Miranda, and Greg Dziama, who also did chore­og­ra­phy for the show.

One of the few Work­shop vet­er­ans in the show was Claude Coller, who returned to our stage after a 17-year absence. Coller explains, “The long gap in my Work­shop par­tic­i­pa­tion came about because after my daugh­ter, Sharon, was born in 1979, I was find­ing it harder and harder to make time for fam­ily, school and out­side inter­ests — so good-bye out­side inter­ests. I retired in 1995 and had done LCMT in 1996. I don’t know if the role of Percy in ‘The Boyfriend’ had not been cast or if some­one had left the show, but I got a call from Jenny and Katie Pfrogner ask­ing if I would be inter­ested in try­ing out. I went to the the­ater think­ing I was audi­tion­ing and after read­ing some lines with the rest of the cast in a rehearsal set­ting the direc­tor told me I was in the show!

“This was per­fect for me because I missed the con­tact I had had with my stu­dents and the cast was largely high school age actors. What a great bunch. They were so tal­ented and so full of energy it really lifted me out of the dumps. It was a plea­sure to watch them learn their roles and gain con­fi­dence. I feel Work­shop has done a lot to encour­age younger actors which is very worth­while. I had a won­der­ful time in that show.”

Coller is cor­rect about Work­shop mak­ing it a habit to encour­age young per­form­ers. Of the folks men­tioned here, Katie Pfrogner, Tur­ton and Dar­vas are all work­ing pro­fes­sion­ally today; Pfrogner and Tur­ton based on the east coast and Dar­vas out west. And Jonathan O’Toole has acted pro­fes­sion­ally in the Cleve­land area.

Work­shop Play­ers is very proud of all our alumni who are work­ing professionally.

Posted by Dave Cotton on Jul 28 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.