The Westport Country Playhouse has announced its 2014 season. Due to the theater’s unorthodox (in these parts anyhow) spring-to-fall scheduling scheme, the season won’t kick off until eight months from now. The anticipation is largely sweet.

The season-opener, April 29 through May 17, has already been known for a while, since it’s a co-production with Hartford Stage, which announced its own season months ago. It’s Noel Coward’s A Song at Twilight, the final play in which this eminent thespian served as both author and star. The co-produced revival is significant since this is the first show Lamos has done at Hartford Stage since he was the theater’s artistic director from the late ’70s into the mid-’90s. Interestingly, of all Noel Coward’s dozens of plays, A Song at Twilight was also chosen by Arvin Brown to direct at the Long Wharf Theater shortly before he left his post as artistic director there in the early ’90s. The play clearly has some special charm for Connecticut. It’s set in Switzerland, and concerns an aging writer (allegedly based on Somerset Maugham, with some attributes of Coward himself) who’s been covering up his homosexuality for most of his life and now confronts a visitor who calls him on the foul manner in which he treated a particular ex-lover.
The second slot, June 10-28, is yet to be announced, but whatever it is, Lamos has already attached himself to it as director. Mayhaps it’s a new work? The last couple of seasons, WCP has brought in some new plays, including the one there right now.
The July 15 through August 2 choice is inspired, for a regional theater that prizes its history as an all-star summer stock house but also wants to connect with the modern theater world. David Kennedy will direct the Frederick J. Marker/Lisa Lone Marker translation of stage/screen genius Ingmar Bergman’s late 20th century adaptation of Hendrik Ibsen’s early 20th century masterpiece A Doll’s House. Again, there’s some local precedent for such programming: two of Bergman’s own films were adapted for Yale Rep and Yale Cabaret stage productions in recent years. Doll’s House, of course, has been done all over the place forever.
Cheery Brit farce, a mainstay genre for the WCP, rears its bubbly head August 19 through September 6 with Alan Ayckbourn’s little-seen-in-the-states Thing We Do For Love, which the prolific playwright/director wrote in 1997 and which concerns sibling rivalry and relationship hijinks. There’s a neat BBC adaptation of the play which occasionally gets rerun on the BBC Radio 4 streaming radio site, which uses the 1997 song “Things We Do for Love” by 10cc as its theme song. No director or other details have been mentioned for the Westport production.
The main season ends October 7-25 with a Lynn Nottage play, Intimate Apparel. Nottage was a regional theater favorite long before she won a Pulitzer. Another strong choice in a diverse and potentially delightful season.
One reason for announcing seasons over half a year before they happen is so a theater can sell subscriptions. So subscribe: Westport Country Playhouse, (203) 227-4177, www.westportplayhouse.org

I’ve had to endure so many summers without a new Charles Paris mystery that I savored this one for weeks. It’s been well over a decade since Simon Brett last published an adventure of this professional actor/ amateur sleuth. In the meantime, the Paris character has gained new cultural cachet through a series of BBC radio adaptations of the earlier novels, with Paris played by Bill Nighy.
The new book’s title, A Decent Interval, would seem to comment on the long wait since the last time Charles Paris appeared in print. Reading it, one suspects it might have been written long before it was published. There are several references to Facebook and tweeting and cell phones and other proclivities of what Charles sees as a much younger generation. But it’s a sort of extreme cluelessness which comes off as years out of date. This is especially true when you consider that many of the earliest users of new personal communications devices, be they pagers or mobile phones or texting devices, were actors who needed to be constantly accessible in case their agents called.
Granted, Charles Paris has a lousy agent, Maurice, who seldom calls. And some quaintness is necessary in these mysteries set in fancy old theaters, in which the most villainous types tend to come from suspicious newfangled media like radio and television. (Simon Brett writes even quainter stuff in his Fethering mysteries, about elderly women sleuths in a British seaside village.) But a running gag about Paris and some of his sexist male drinking companions having to constantly remind themselves not to say “actress” anymore and refer to all members of the profession as “actors” seems beyond dated, practically Paleolithic.
The best lines in A Decent Interval aren’t, as can be said of the earliest Paris adventures, the memorably bad reviews which Paris parenthetically adds to his recollections of his past stage triumphs. Here’s a current underwhelming example:
The chauffeur ushered him into a reception area almost exactly like the hallway set of a television play in which Charles had played a young member of an Edwardian family about to be decimated by the First World War. (“Charles Paris showed about as much backbone as an overboiled piece of macaroni.”–The Spectator.)
No, the wittier asides this time around, in a series that is nearly wholly built of such asides and where the central crimes tend not to happen until a third of the book has transpired, are at the expense of Shakespeare, not Charles Paris. In the play-within-the-book this time, he’s playing Ghost and Gravedigger in an overconceptualized production of Hamlet which stars two American Idol-type TV celebs, and is overseen by a bottom-line bums-on-sears commercial producer. The cast has been filled out with reliable old-school theater types like Paris, which gives Brett the conflict he needs to create both amusing indignation and a suspenseful murder scenario.
There’s muttering of Hamlet without a prince. The set design is a detailed gigantic model of Hamlet’s brain. When the mental strain of trying to solve several crimes at once affects his performance as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he mangles Shakespeare’s phrase “wit and gifts” as “git and wifts.”
That’s where the joy of a Charles Paris novel lies, in a sheer theatricality. The most fully drawn characters tend to be theaters and plays, not the crime solvers and criminals. I often find myself immediately forgetting whodunit when I’ve finished reading a Charles Paris mystery, but with lasting memories of the stage shows in which the hapless Charles Paris has appeared.

Just got a call from David Pilot. I know him as a participant in the Get to the Point! storytelling/spoken word series I host at Café Nine. Newish to town, David’s directed for some small theaters in the area, including Theater 4.

David Pilot is producing a script by one of my favorite local playwrights, Steve Bellwood. It’s one of Bellwood’s more realistic dramas, called Collateral Damage. The production will be directed by James Leaf.

But first they have to cast it.

There’s an actual scheduled audition, TONIGHT (July 23) from 6 to 9 p.m. at 45 Nash Street. But the process of looking for appropriate actors for this fiery social satire will continue.

If you’re intrigued, contact David Pilot at eastrockensemble@gmail.com

I applaud the state of Connecticut’s decision to give four million bucks to New Haven’s Shubert for renovations and other stuff. State Rep. Pat Dillon requested the funds from the Bonding Commission, and was instrumental in making the case for the historic, nearly century-old Shubert.

There have been plans to expand and renovate the theater for a while now, and this makes them real. The millions are for “bond funds” and also to transition the Shubert away from its dependence on city subsidies.

Those of us who remember what it was like on College Street at night in the early ’80s, when the Shubert was dark, or—a more recent example—who recall how dead downtown was in late June prior to the creation of the Arts & Ideas festival, have no problem seeing arts as a major economic stimulator.

Have a couple of quibbles with Dillon’s press release, however. The one-paragraph description of the Shubert reads as follows:

The Shubert Theater opened on December 11, 1914. Known as the Birthplace of the Nation’s Greatest Hits, the theater launched Al Jolson, Marlon Brando, many of Richard Rogers’ shows including South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I and The Sound of Music.

The release gets the Shubert’s opening date right, but Jolson and was already a big star before he played the Shubert. By 1914, Jolson had been in several consecutive Broadway hits and was making the then-astronomical salary of $2000 a week. So “launched” ain’t quite the right verb. The Shubert has plenty to crow about without taking credit for launching actors who were doing just fine already.

(As for Brando, you might think the release is referring to the pre-Broadway try-out of A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Shubert in 1951. But the theater actually truly launched Brando’s career seven years before that, with his first Broadway role, in the huge hit I Remember Mama.)

The other quibble: composer (and I Remember Mama co-producer) Richard Rodgers’ surname has an “d” in it.

My Friend’s Story

Presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas “in collaboration with the Yale School of Music and the Yale Office of the Provost, with the support of the Yale School of Drama.” 8 p.m. June 19 & 20 at Yale’s Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. www.artidea.org

Music by Martin Bresnick. Libretto by J.D. McClatchy. Directed by David Chambers. Conducted by Julian Pellicano. Prodcued by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Performed by Jonathan Hays (Narrator), Abigail Nims (Milena), Ryan Allen (Jacob) and Claire Coolen (Hannah).

For a modern-music, modern-dress, scaled-down new work by a maverick multi-styled composer and a pithy American poet, given a robust and theatrical staging, My Friend’s Story is startlingly and wonderfully old-school. Clear and accessible and lovely, gentle yet powerful, with a suspense romantic plotline that’s both realistic and lush, My Friend’s Story reminds you what opera is good for.

Composer Martin Bresnick, librettist J.D. McClatchy and director David Chambers (all of whom happen to be longtime faculty members at Yale) aren’t slavishly following the accepted rules of the opera art form here. If you’ve followed their respective careers you know this is not in their nature. But by following their own astute artistic instincts, and bringing in personal passions such as lyrical narrative devices, Russian theater practices and jazz music, they’ve constructed a surehanded, confident and rousing romantic drama.

When these intense yet credibly real-world characters burst into song, they have important things to convey. They tell stories, they share secrets, they express worry about strange intruders who enter the story.

Bresnick’s sweetly shifting score has moments of pure songcraft, jazz interludes (with sax and bass solos), dramatic build-ups and a drawn-out tension. The singers don’t sell themselves short on their arias, or on some extraordinary duets and trios, but they also know how to act, and to underplay scenes so they convey realism and not melodrama. This is a chamber opera that’s actually set mostly in a chamber—a parlor, to be precise. It’s staged intimately. The musicians are situated behind a backdrop of mismatched windows. That metaphorical windows-of-the-soul, with music wafting from beyond, is ideal for such an ethereal drama.

This is a touching, in-the-moment, classy and credible new musical theater piece about real characters with real emotions that are best expressed through transcendent classical singing. My Friend’s Story works so well because it respects tradition yet exists in the present-day world of naturalism, shorter attention spans and new musical expressions.

This confident work not only serves its source material, a story by the genius writer Chekhov, it also is well suited to the aims of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The festival has long supported new classical works, especially those with theatrical trappings and strong narrative elements. Opening night of My Friend’s Story, which is technically a “preview” run as the work undergoes further development, was sold out. There were sincere ovations and gasps of admiration heard throughout the performance, and the sort of curtain-call reception which any theater creator would hope for. You felt part of something special just by showing up. Among friends, you could say.

The Quiet Volume is not a calming experience. It infers things about reading habits, then turns those internal habits inside out by commenting on them and making the reader—you—hyperconscious of them.

The performance piece, concocted by Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells (who are not present at the local performances, and do not need to be) would play very differently in the reading room of, say, the New Haven Free Public Library, which is more of a community gathering space, and where sott0 voce conversations, chess matches and the sounds of books being shifted around on open stacks are commonplace. There’s an austerity to the Beinecke which pervades anything you do there, whether it’s a Dada theater recreation I saw there over 20 years ago or a reception for cartoonist Garry Trudeau as was held there a couple years back or a classical choral concert or just wandering its glass-case displays, which is how most of us non-Yalies know the place.

The concept of using the Beinecke as something other than a place to store rare books is not unusual. The Quiet Volume, however, doesn’t just use the space as an intriguing environment for an event which might benefit from its rigidly calming persona. The piece actively comments on the act of reading in a public area.

The hour-long piece is designed for an audience of two people, sitting side-by-side at a table in Beinecke’s lower-level reading room. These two people are active participants in an interactive performance that is geared to the calm and solitude of a library. They are guided through a series of readings, thought processes and gestures by cues either given to them audibly via headphones or through written prompts contained in the books and papers on the table. The arrangement is immaculate. Rules must be observed that are as severe as any which the Beinecke itself demands of Reading Room occupants. Quietness, naturally. But also: no foreign objects are allowed on the table, just the setting of three books and a notebook provided for you. You must be 16 or older to attend. The nature of the performance does not allow you leeway to get up, move about, stop the recording, converse with your fellow audience member or otherwise interrupt the sequence of events.

I attended The Quiet Volume with a friend, so we were able to compare notes following our mutual “performance.” The actions decreed by the disembodied voice in the headphones are staggered so that the two audience members do some similar things, but at different times. You are directed to read a prepared text in a notebook, then passages from published volumes by Kazuo Ishiguro, Agota Kristof and José Saramago. The audio narrative occasionally messes with your head by paraphrasing or actively rewriting the passages which you are in the process of reading from the books.

I’m uncomfortable being told what to do for too long a time, and I felt myself getting actively annoyed during parts of The Quiet Volume. I’m not new to performance pieces which involve pre-recorded directives—the Festival of Arts & Ideas has hosted a few over the years, and I remember when such concepts were all the rage back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s at the dawn of personal listening devices and cell phones.

I realize my own lack of patience with the procedure may not be the norm for The Quiet Volume’s two-at-a-time crowds. I studied a lot of Structuralism and other literary theories in my youth, about multiplicities of texts and The Art of Seeing and the essence of reading and comprehension, etc. The Quiet Volume makes some useful observations, and asks some provocative questions. But I think it goes a little far afield when it starts drawing you into shared themes in the books on that table. The themes include physical wounds and scarred psyches. Rewarding, but it seemed like the show had shifted from form to content without warning or reason. In a directed reading room situation, such randomness is jarring.

The Quiet Volume is best when it makes you aware of what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, and who’s around you. The directives to show the person seated next to you what you’re reading are instructive in such a gentle, meaningful manner. This is a piece that demands, and deserves concentration on par with the most intensive study sessions, but instead of feeding your mind it reflects it.

When this subtle, textual show really gets on the same page with you and your tablemate, it can speak volumes about human nature, intellectual behavior and the rewards of a good book. When it loses its place, there’s no way to bookmark it and pick up later.