Performance

Jeff Malet • July 26, 2011

-The 60 year old Arena Stage and its Artistic Director Molly Smith have recently opened the doors to its architecturally majestic new Mead Center for American Theater to rave reviews with a revival of the great American classic, Rodger‘s and Hammersteins‘s “Oklahoma!” This has prompted my look back to the inception of an important milestone in the history and development of the American theater.

Opening night was March 31, 1943 at the St. James Theater on 44th St. It had been only 16 months since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The curtain opened to a simple scene of the American western frontier. The theater was not sold out. Success was not assured.

“Oklahoma!” was Richard Rodgers’ first collaboration without his long time partner, lyricist Lorenz (Larry) Hart. The prolific team of Rodgers and Hart had lasted a quarter of a century, giving birth to some of America’s greatest songs. But Hart was a chronic alcoholic and lately had become more difficult to work with. He would mysteriously disappear for long stretches. Hart’s lyrics for their last collaboration, “By Jupiter,” were written while he was drying out in a hospital room. His health was deteriorating. In less than a year, Larry Hart would be dead from pneumonia at the age of 48.

The initial concept for the show “Oklahoma!” came from Theresa Helburn, a co-director and founder of the Theater Guild, which was suffering financially at the time. She had known and admired Richard Rodgers since 1925, when the Guild produced the first Rodgers and Hart hit show, “The Garrick Gaieties.” The premise for “Oklahoma!” spawned from a 1931 play by Lynn Riggs, “Green Grow the Lilacs,” which had not done very well, running only 62 performances.

The play was set in the area where Riggs was born and raised, the Indian Territory of Oklahoma at the turn of the century. In July of 1940, there was a revival of the play at Westport, Connecticut. After that revival, Helburn began to promote the idea of the play as a musical. Both Rodgers and Hammerstein became interested in the idea separately.

During tryouts, there had been an air of pessimism surrounding the show. Oscar Hammerstein II at the time was at a low point in his career. He had not scored a hit in years. The new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein as a pair was untested and had trouble raising funds to get the production to Broadway. Money was scarce during the war, and few had faith in a musical based on “cowboys and farmhands.” Conventional wisdom held that a show could not be a hit if it had a murder in it. The new team had to economize, and the young cast, though talented, was made up of then relative unknowns that included Alfred Drake and Celeste Holm. Prior to that time, roles in musicals were filled with actors who could sing. Rodgers and Hammerstein operated in reverse, choosing to cast the show with singers who could act. Helburn wanted Groucho Marx for the peddler and Shirley Temple for Laurey, but RH insisted on legitimate Broadway performers.

Agnes De Mille’s choreography was one of the show’s major innovations. But she had a quarrelsome temperament and insisted on hiring dancers for their abilities, not their looks. Powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell had written that noted producer Michael Todd was overheard in the lobby during the New Haven tryout saying, “No legs. No jokes. No Chance.” (What Todd actually said used a different word for “legs” but both Winchell and I have cleaned it up for print.

When the show was trying out in New Haven it was titled “Away We Go.” Hammerstein had originally
wanted to call it “Oklahoma,” but the name was rejected because it was felt that the audience might confuse it with “Oakies” in the Grapes of Wrath. When the show arrived on Broadway, the title was changed back to “Oklahoma!” this time with an exclamation point for emphasis.

Oklahoma’s record run of five years and nine months on Broadway was unbroken until My Fair Lady, opening in 1956, finally broke it in 1961. The original production of Oklahoma ran 2,248 performances,
including over 40 special matinees for people in the armed forces. It played to nearly 5 million people during the original run, and to over 10 million in its first national road tour, which lasted from 1943 to 1954. The London show set another record. ‘Oklahoma!’ brought great financial reward and fame to the new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. In its first 10 years, it made a profit of $5 million on an initial investment of $83,000. A special Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the new team in 1944. The new partnership would last until Hammerstein’s death in 1960.

What made “Oklahoma!” a success?

The “Broadway musical” was the first major theatrical form developed in the US, but in 1943 it was caught in a stylistic rut. Prior to Oklahoma, most hit shows were essentially vehicles to showcase the talents of its stars. They had little serious to say and there was no need to integrate the songs, dances, comedy routines and the spectacular chorus girl numbers.

Shows were expensive to mount and money was scarce during the Depression, so producers became increasingly conservative and stuck largely to formulas that had driven past successes.

In “Oklahoma!” the musical found a new form. This “integrated musical” marked a revolution in American theater. “Oklahoma!” was the complete synthesis of music, libretto, lyrics, dancing and staging. The show had structure and a sense of dramatic build that until then had been present only in a straight non-musical play. Even the dance numbers became integral to moving the story and developing the characters.
Certainly the great words and music had a lot to do with the success. The score was so popular that it became the first musical to have a complete original cast album by a major label, beginning the trend of recording original cast albums. Decca’s heavy 6 record set sold over 1 million copies in its first year. Later it was one of the first recordings of a musical to be released on CD.

Oscar Hammerstein II has been called the premier poet of the American musical theater. From the beginning, Hammerstein proposed writing the lyrics before the music, allowing him to shape the overall concept of the musical. For Rodgers, this was in the reverse order from the way he had worked with Larry Hart. But Rodgers’ mastery of the genre is illustrated by this short anecdote: It had taken Oscar Hammerstein three weeks to write the lyric to “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” As the story goes, he took it to Rodgers, who was then at his home in Connecticut. To his amazement, it took Rodgers only ten minutes to write the music. Rodgers said it was almost a reflex. His musical thoughts were so conditioned by the words that it took about “as long to compose it as to play it.” It became one of the most famous of Rodgers’ songs. Julie Styne, one of the great American Songwriters, wrote, “No one ever wrote a piece of music to already written words better than Rodgers. He always made it sound as though the music was composed first.”

The time and the mood of the country were also contributing factors to the success of “Oklahoma!” The show hit a nostalgic chord with audiences just out of the Depression and into World War II. The show was a favorite date for servicemen on leave. In 1943, when the show opened, Oklahoma the state was only 36 years old. It reminded many of their pioneer past, of immigrants struggling to put down roots in a new world. America suddenly found itself at war with three fascist powers and its people longed to believe in a brighter future. “Oklahoma!” was about home, family, love, and the triumph of good over evil—precisely what Americans were fighting for.

You can enjoy “Oklahoma!” directed by Molly Smith, now thru December 26, 2010 at the Arena Stage www.arenastage.com

Gary Tischler •

-Up close, the guys who play the lead roles of Berger and Claude in the dynamic revival of “Hair,” now at the Kennedy Center through November 21, look very much like a couple of contemporary young men: relaxed, casually attractive, youthful males of the 21st Century. Mind you, their phone doesn’t go off and they’re not carrying a laptop, but they could pass.

But they’re a couple of something else’s too. Their names, look, and reason for being here identify them beyond doubt as members of the theater and performance tribe. Still, they’re also in another tribe: the large group of young actors, singers, dancers, performers who bring the emblematic musical of the hippie generation alive with such authenticity that you can’t miss getting a contact high.

Both have names that sound perfect for the theater, B movies, opera or a biker gang. And we’re talking about their real names: Steel Burkhardt, he of the thick, longish, deep black hair who plays the rowdy, can’t-tie-me-down leader of the “Hair” tribe, and Paris Remillard, who plays the sweet, doomed Claude.

21st century guys they are—guys who weren’t even born when “Hair” splashed onto Broadway and stages around the country, revolutionizing yet again the musical theater form and signaling the mainstream arrival of hippies, Aquarians, and the antiestablishment, disaffected, rock-and-rolling, dope-smoking, free-loving, biracial and multi-ethnic generation of young people.

Burkhardt and Remillard are members in good standing of the generation to whom the Internet, Facebook and texting are second nature.

“Sure, it’s very different, but I think most of us have gotten into the show and the characters,” Burkhardt, who was a serious music student at Baldwin Wallace in Ohio, said. “I think sometimes you get more affinity for how they lived than how we live. They had to connect to each other. They didn’t send e-mails, they didn’t hide, and they were out there.”

“You have to have a lot of sympathy for Claude,” Remillard said. “I don’t have any problem understanding him or the rest of the tribe. They lived in a different time, but they’re pretty real to me. And the music is pretty cool.”

Both of them auditioned to be a part of the show, started in the background, and moved on up, eventually garnering the main roles for the tour. “This is about family,” Burkhardt said. “We all share in it. On the road, that’s what we are: family. A big family.”

Both of them understand the dilemma and the urges of their characters. “This was Viet Nam,” Remillard said. “Guys were having to deal with getting drafted, going to Viet Nam, getting killed. They didn’t have a choice. We don’t have a draft today, so I don’t think a lot of guys our age or younger understand what’s involved in something like that.”

“My dad was a marine,” Remillard said. “He understands. And my parents really support me in this. My dad doesn’t necessarily have knee-jerk reactions to things. He said that if there were a draft and I had gotten drafted, he would have helped me get to Canada.”

The two are obvious friends and have an easy banter between each other. Listen to them talk about music, about the special feeling that exists with each and every performance. “I don’t think my folks were part of all that,” Burkhardt said. “But I think they’re sort of hippie wannabees.”

“Do I ever get bored?” Burkhardt says. “Are you kidding me? There’s no way. Every night is like a fresh start, new audience, and new atmosphere. And we get out there a lot, you know, we interact, and it’s pretty spontaneous. You never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get. And then there’s the stuff at the end of the show when people can go on the stage and join in. I’m always surprised how many people do, and how exciting that is. I don’t know, it’s a celebration. And when I get face-to-face with people in the audience, it’s always different.”

Burkhardt is easily the charisma guy of the bunch with his energy, his looks, that bad boy rep of the character. You’d think he gets a lot of attention from fans. “Naw,” he says. “Not at the moment.”

Remillard laughs. “He gets a lot of attention,” he says

There is also the tradition of the show that cast members—some, most, sometimes all—get naked near the conclusion of the first act. “Nobody has to do it,” Remillard said.

“Yeah,” Burkhardt said, “but when we first joined the cast, it was at Lincoln Center and it was supposed to be a limited run, and finally I thought, what the hell, I may never get the chance to do it, so I did it and you know, it was kinda fun. It’s liberating.”

They’ve toured England, and new and local cast members joined the cast, and everybody’s betting when they get naked. And they proceeded to talk about Irish and Scottish male and female performers in a sweetly crass way.

Remillard doesn’t have long hair—he looks a distance from being a hippie—but he has an affinity for Claude and the tribe. “You know, it’s not that far removed. We live differently. We don’t have that kind of personal contact that the people in the show do.”

There’s a bit on YouTube if you Google their names—it’s an informal rendition with audience by the two of them in street clothes, singing “Hair.” They jump, they dance, they run, they shake their HAIR! Like crazy people full of glee, goofin’ but stirring nonetheless.

Glee. There’s a thought. The music of Hair, starring two 21st century guys named Paris and Stone doing Claude and Berger.

Gary Tischler •

-One thing you can say about jazz, even if you don’t know a heck of a lot about jazz: it’s not static.

“You have to move on and keep on becoming who you are as a person, as a musician, and in terms of the kind of music you’re playing,” says Ravi Coltrane, the highly regarded saxophonist who comes with his quartet to the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington, November 20 at 8 p.m.

Coltrane knows a little something about that, which is why he’s been steadily carving out his own sound, his own music. Most recently, he’s signed on with Blue Note Records, with an album coming out next year, a legendary label that celebrated its 70th anniversary last year. To further the connection, in 2008 he became a part of The Blue Not 7, a septet formed specifically for the anniversary celebration.

Lots of lines—personal, musical, and legend, crisscross the life of tenor and soprano sax player Ravi Coltrane.

He has a pretty clear idea of who he is, and isn’t. “I’m not my dad,” he said. “I appreciate and revere my father’s work, but you have to carve your own image, your own style. And sure, there are influences. But I don’t think I came to this because I’m my father’s son.”

He’ll tell you that he didn’t start out being interested in jazz. “I played the flute in school, I was in the band,” he said. “And initially, I was interested in composing film scores, that kind of thing. So I did not come to jazz out of the chute, so to speak.”

And yet, lineage, legend, and the naming of names, working out a kind of apprenticeship in an age where jazz has changed tremendously, play out in a man’s life.

Coltrane, now in his 40s, is, after all, the son of the jazz giant John Coltrane, who also played tenor and soprano saxophone. And the saxophone itself is the instrument of choice of the some of the most dramatic tortured genius-types in jazz history, most prominently Charlie Parker, the late and lamented king of improvisational jazz—the often lyrical free-flying “Bird”.

“I was two when my father died,” Coltrane said. “It’s not like he figures so strongly in personal memory. The difficulty becomes in being your own man while loving my dad’s music. No doubt it’s had some effect.”

The saxophone first appeared in his life as a Christmas gift. It wasn’t exactly a hint, but there it was, and eventually he took it up. “I don’t think it was something that was meant to push me into a certain direction,” he said. For him, it was like finding money in the road. You can pick it up, but you choose how you use it and spend it.

If you look at his bio, the story begins in 1991. His active jazz career begins at age 26, a late start by some standards. But when you’re the son of a legend whose memory is still strong, and whose music is still around, and when you have a mother equally gifted and legendary—the great jazz pianist Alice Coltrane—and when you’re named after Ravi Shankar, the influential Indian Sitar player, there are no doubt some pressures to find your own way.

He did it by paying his dues, playing as a sideman with the likes of McCoy Tyner, Pharaoh Sanders, Kenny Barron, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, Branford Marsalis, Geri Allen and others. By 1997, he was ready to go on his own, recording his first album, “Moving Pictures.” He built several groups, but since 2005 he has worked with is quartet, with bassist Drew Gress, pianist Luis Perdomo and drummer E.J. Strickland.

A 2005 concert trip to India to raise HIV awareness seemed almost a homecoming. He eventually met his namesake.

“Jazz has changed,” he says. “The audience is bigger, but also more diverse. There are all kinds of new influences, from Latin to Asian, and jazz has really spread. But the result has been that there are not quite the dominating, influential figures like Monk, Miles, Satchmo, Parker and so on. It’s a whole new world in some ways.”

He’s part of the vanguard of that new world, not the old guard, in spite of all the history that trails behind him, always evolving, moving on ahead, playing his music, expanding its horizons, improvising and energizing.

Gary Tischler •

-That mother-ship construction project people have been noting at the site of the old Arena Stage near the Southwest waterfront is finally set to open its pearly gates to the public. After two and a half years of construction, Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater will have a ribbon cutting ceremony and Homecoming Grand Opening Celebration on Saturday, October 23, lasting almost all day long from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Arena will showcase the celebration at the Mead Center with performances and activities staged in multiple venues. Live theatrical performances, children’s activities and other events will occur in the Fichandler Stage, the Kreeger Theater and the Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle as well as an outdoor stage, a rehearsal hall, the lobby and a classroom.

The celebration will also showcase the Mead’s café, operated by Jose Andres Catering along with Ridgewell’s.

Be on the look for these offerings: slam poetry, the “Glee” Battle of the choirs, jazz bands and a performance by the cast of “Oklahoma,” the musical slated to kick off the new season. Tickets are free but are require for the events. Tickets will be available exclusively online beginning October 8. They may be reserved at www.arenastage.org.

There will also be a Gala Celebration held on October 25th to commemorate the inaugural season. As indicated, the season kicks off with Molly Smith’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” on October 22nd.

Gary Tischler •

-The eminently successful playwright Ken Ludwig insists that no one has ever called him a dinosaur.

“My kids maybe sometimes,” he said. “But as far as I remember, no one has said that to my face or in print.”

Well, there’s always a first time. Ken Ludwig is something of a dinosaur. And I mean that entirely
as a compliment.

In the theater world, Ludwig is like one of these environmentalists that runs all over the world trying to save species of animals from extinction.

In Ludwig’s case, he’s almost single-handedly kept alive such genres as the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, stage adaptations of young people’s literature, plays that can be called farce, star-studded (or not) comedies about theater, movie and show business folk, and the oft-remembered but rarely sighted “well-made play.”

I don’t mean to suggest now that he’s re-staged, produced or mounted new productions of old plays—otherwise known as revivals—no sir. He has written well over a dozen plays that are basically examples of all of these genres, as authored not by George Kaufman, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse,
or anybody else you can name now tap dancing in show biz heaven, but by himself.

“I’m not a dinosaur,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way, let’s put it that way. I write and create plays that are in the form or genre of plays that I’ve loved, or forms of entertainment that I love. Most of them are comedies, which are, as you know, are serious business.”

Example one, and the latest: the world premiere of “A Fox on the Fairway,” now at the Signature Theater in Shirlington through November 14. It’s a comedy—farcical, no doubt—about golf.

“Specifically, it’s about two American country clubs and some of its members competing for an annual trophy,” Ludwig said. “From there, you can just imagine.”

Now think for a moment, who made a literary sideline of writing wry comedic books and stories
about golf, besides American sportswriter Dan Jenkins?

It’s none other than the great comedic British stylist P.G. Wodehouse, the man who gave the world “Jeeves,” the impeccable, perfect literary butler.

“Exactly,” Ludwig said. “I love comedy, and Wodehouse is an example of a certain kind of style of writing comedy. Writing comedy in book form is terrifically hard. So is writing comedy for the stage. To my mind, it’s the most difficult art form in literature because, first and foremost you have to make people laugh—out loud, preferably—chuckle, smile. In the theater, you don’t want silence during a comedy. It’s a kind of homage to Wodehouse, yes, but it’s very American also.

“I loved Wodehouse. I loved his golf stories. I loved Jeeves. I love J.B. Priestley, whose writing
has a little more edge. They’re both great stylists.”

So ‘A Fox on the Fairway,’ you can be sure, is going to be funny. “We heard good things during performances for preview audiences,” Ludwig said.

There are other things Ludwig loves—besides his family. He loves old movies, you guess. He loves show tunes and the great composers of the American songbook like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. He loves comedy. He loves classic and popular literature and stories, like those by Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. He loves show biz people, of which clan he is now a certifiable and certified member.

He says what he tries to do with his plays is to look at them in a fresh way, to make them come alive for contemporary audiences. That’s probably true, but there is a greater force at work here. Put simply: it is love.

Ludwig brings a first-love quality to his work, the boyhood crush you never get over, the grateful
love for whomever gave you that first kiss that was really stupefying, the first movie you ever saw that made an indelible impression, the love you still feel for all the lyrics you can’t get out of your head like “Summertime,” “Porgy” or any Gershwin and Porter tune, the love you feel for the great clowns and their pratfalls and that moment during a comedy when there are three people hiding in closets and three people coming through the door.

All of this stuff sounds old fashioned—dinosaur-like if you will—except for one thing: it works for him and for us. He doesn’t do revivals, but his own plays are continually being revived and performed on Broadway (“Lend Me a Tenor” most recently) and in just about every regional and local theater in the country and around the world.

Consider that his very first produced play, the aforementioned “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a side-splitting comedy about the world of opera and was produced by none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber, a gentleman with a fairly decent show biz track record who once wrote a musical called “Jeeves.” Or consider “Crazy for You”, the 1990s musical that he wrote in the mode of Gershwin’s original musical which won a Tony for him (He also pulled off a similar epic with a production of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”). Consider the stage versions of “Treasure Island” and “Tom Sawyer” and “The Three Musketeers,” geared toward young audiences and the family trade. Consider one of my personal favorites, that of “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” a grand, affectionate comedy about the making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Warner Brothers Studio in 1930s Hollywood. Consider “Moon over Buffalo,” already revived and an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “The Beaux’ Stratagem” or “Leading Ladies.”

Now take a look at Ludwig’s website and check out where Ludwig plays are, or have been playing. Why, they are just about everywhere: Aurora, Ohio, Broadway, the Crested Butte Mountain Theater, The Minstrel Players, the Villainous University Theater, the Scarborough Theater in Ontario, Canada, “Moon Over Buffalo” in Moldova, The Three Musketeers, in London, “Crazy for You” in Melbourne.

High-minded critics haven’t always been crazy for Ludwig. But theatergoers have. Those plays live on, in much the same way that the forms, writers and shows that Ludwig loves so much live on in his mind. In a way, he’s returning a favor of happiness found, happiness returned.

“As somebody said: tragedy is easy, comedy is hard,” Ludwig said. Actors like Barry Nelson, Hal Holbrook, Carol Burnett, Joan Collins and the late Dixie Carter have shown that.

Not bad for a guy who’s also a certified lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School, family man, husband to wife Adrienne (also a lawyer), and father of Olivia and Jack, resident not of Hollywood or New York, but of Northwest Washington. And he just keeps on rolling because, well, the game’s afoot. Oh wait, that’s the title of his next play (subtitled “Holmes for the Holiday”) about William Gillette, the great actor who made a career of playing Sherlock Holmes on stage.

Gary Tischler •

-David Muse makes his official debut as the new artistic director of the Studio Theater (he succeeds founder and long-time A-D Joy Zinoman) by directing “Circle Mirror Transformation.”

This is not a debut accompanied by trumpets blaring, and neither is Annie Baker’s muted but ingratiating play about a group of people who are part of an acting class in a small community in Vermont. But the play and the production send out several promising signals about the future,
each in their own way.

“Circle Mirror Transformation” signals a new voice, for one thing, in playwright Annie Baker, who’s made it a point to transform the often inarticulate way we speak and communicate today into a kind of music and poetry — a revelatory method that leads, like acting, to a kind of truth.

It’s an understated play with a little bit of this and a little of bit that. It has soap opera elements, theater stuff, acting stuff, and it’s both contemporary and naturalistic in its look and sound and old-fashioned in its dramatic elements. Baker seems to suggest that acting arrives at difficult truths by way of artful, hard-learned artifice, much in the same way that literature arrives at the same destination by way of fiction.

While the production often seems loosey-goosey and unformed, Muse’s direction and Baker’s writing keep things directionally focused: “We and the folks at the acting class are going somewhere here, and the road and destination seem uncomfortably familiar.”

In the program, Baker says that “the way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. Speaking is a kind of misery.”

You can see that observation in action in “Circle Mirror Transformation.” This is especially true for the three students: Schultz, a yearning, confused, recently divorced man full of inarticulate, shiny wounds; Theresa, the bright-eyed, sexy former actress and especially Lauren, the quiet, painfully shy teenager who wears her hoodie like a turtle wears its shell.

The school is run by the insistent, work-it, risk-taking Marty and her husband James, who’s middle-aged, phlegmatic, and a walking disappointment.

We see all of them right at the beginning, lying in a circle at the studio, which is lightly cluttered with a mirror. They’re doing an exercise, an acting exercise, in which they try to count to ten one at a time without anyone counting at the same time, interrupting, or jumping in. In other words, it’s a clean, nearly-impossible exercise in team-work and empathy.

Throughout the play, which is preformed without interruption for nearly two hours, you get exercises which resemble a kind of group therapy, as opposed to anything to do with the theater. The group takes turns “being” each other, hence the initially startling appearance of Jim talking about “my husband.” They try telling stories along a string that is taking a story word by word from one place to another. Interspersed are moments of reality, where the characters interact and relate, and those interactions reverberate in the exercises and vice versa.

That’s especially true of Theresa, played with almost anything-goes, playful energy by Kathleen McElfresh. She’s bounding, bouncy, mobile, and uses every part of herself — the flouncy hair, the long legs, arms, fingers, body — to become a kind of focus point, a magnet for the two men and wary distance for the other two females.

Things happen that probably shouldn’t, but the process itself is what counts. There’s a five-point build-up to the play as we do what they do: at first we keep following Theresa around, then Schultz’s plaintiff voice makes itself heard, and then we note the tensions and old hurts that are part of James and Marty’s marriage. We barely register Lauren’s goth-ish, quiet ten and her voice, barely audible at first. She’s closed in.

But it’s with the final two exercises — a risky write a secret on a piece of paper, then pick out of a hat and read it, and an imagination of what happens after – that we realize that it’s Lauren who’s been paying attention the most, not the least of which was an earlier comment asking, “when do we start acting?”

If MacKenzie Meehan, who plays Lauren with thorough, skinny-teen authenticity and stops-and-starts, is a stellar surprise, Jennifer Mendenhall as Marty is the play’s elastic but tough glue — it’s center and heart and soul. She holds everyone together, even when she comes close to falling apart. We’ve known and seen Mendenhall a long time, especially at the Studio and the Woolly Mammoth, and we’re always struck by her particular brand of guileless, sexy and open-faced naturalness. She doesn’t hide much and can therefore wound you at the oddest moments.

For Muse, it’s a solid start — a bid for a long relationship with the audience worth building. (“Circle Mirror Transformation” runs at the Studio Theater through October 17.)