Allan Appel Photo
Gardner and Chenot.
When Peter Chenot saw Chrissy Gardner perform her work, her utter naturalness — an ability to tell a joke mid-performance and then continue or move into the next number effortlessly — convinced him she had also to be on stage in a major part as his Mary Swenson.
Never mind that Gardner, a local singer, songwriter, pianist, and composer, had not been on the stage playing someone else in 20 years.
Mary’s the eager, wide-eyed woman new to Middletown the lyrical, even goofy, yet utterly naturalistic play of the same name by Will Eno — running at the New Haven Theater Company on Chapel Street on April 27, 28, and 29 and May 4, 5, and 6.
Company Photo
Gardner as Mary Swenson, Margaret Mann as the Librarian, and Steve Scarpa as John Dodge.
Chenot is directing the play, which is both an homage to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and what New York Times theater maven Christopher Isherwood called, when it debuted in 2014, work that reads like “Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”
In Middletown, Mary’s husband is out of town on business of some kind. Mary senses something is happening to her and wants to experience it not alone. She yearns not only to meet people, but to make a connection with where she is, which could be any place. But those connections also have to do with trying to understand her place in life, the universe, and whatever Middletowns might also be out there in space.
I should mention there’s an astronaut who gives us that perspective, a Public Speaker, very much like the Stage Manager in Our Town (which was mounted both by NHTC and Long Wharf Theater in 2014, the play’s 50th anniversary), who gives us the particulars about Middletown, a cop, a kind of peripatetic mechanic, and Mary’s neighbor who, perhaps more intensely than the others, cannot get over what Czech novelist Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being.
In a brief chat before Tuesday night’s rehearsal Chenot said this intense fragility at the heart of being alive from moment to moment is what makes the play so natural, and Gardner just right for Mary.
The play proceeds in two acts each, with several brief scenes and a coup de theatre intermission. In the second scene we first meet Mary at the library, a natural place to go when you come to a new small town.
She enters and says what any of us would say: “Good morning. I’d like to get a library card.”
I’m probably missing something in my library experience, but I’ve never met a librarian who would reply, as Eno’s does: “Good for you, dear. I think a lot people figure, ‘Why bother? I’m just going to die anyway.’ Let me just find the form.”
“It’s about watching these people and entering the world of these people. You don’t need to do more than put it on stage and let it live,” Chenot said. “Because do any of us understand birth and death? When I read it [the play], these people are quirky, they’re trying to understand what it means to be human.”
Which is why, with all the curves in speech, by turns lyrical, metaphysical, and at times alarming, Chenot wanted a performer like Gardner, along with the rest of the cast, to deliver such communication straight, always being simply “present,” as he termed it, without any heightening other than what comes from its being on a stage.
Although she’s had her hand in theater — writing music for many of the shows of A Broken Umbrella Theater Company, which she helped to found — Gardner, 39, has been for years behind the stage.
She had to think hard about the last time she was on a stage as a character other than herself. Gardner said that while she did some acting at Muhlenberg College, where she met Rachel and Ian Alderman with whom she established A Broken Umbrella, “I got the music bug,” she said.
And theater was backburnered. She did recall, when she was 19 or 20, acting in Wait Until Dark and in several of the comedies of Moliere when she was a student at Ocean County College in New Jersey.
This time around Gardner is having a more enjoyable time, she said, with the NHTC folks. The acting experience she described as more relaxed, more genuine, less ego-driven. And yet Gardner said she sensed that in coming around to the front of the stage she had forgotten some of “what it’s like to be in the moment.”
“You still have to be yourself,” Chenot said.
Gardner said she immediately connected with Mary when she read the script, so much so that she got butterflies. Still, she hit her old acting books, and they reminded her, “it’s not the character, it’s you.”
A eureka light went on in Chenot’s eyes. Yes, you’re the character out there, but you are also yourself at the same time, he said. That’s the source of being natural. “It’s the biggest epiphany an actor can have.”
And in a play like Middletown, with one of the most unique voices in American theater today, Chenot intends to keep it as beautifully matter-of-fact as possible.
Other actors featured in this ensemble work are Chaz Carmon, Megan Chenot, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Margaret Mann, Aly Miller, and Steve Scarpa. The show runs April 27, 28, and 29 and May 4, 5, and 6 at the English Building Markets at 839 Chapel St., with all performances starting at 8 p.m. Click here for tickets and more information.