A spontaneous review of ‘Sandra’ at TheaterWorks that Bob Carr said he just had to write after experiencing the actor’s ‘spectacular’ performance.
By Bob Carr
“Wow, Wow,” the gentleman next to me exclaimed, after the house lights came up, I said, “Yeah, that may have been the best play I have ever seen.” Which was how I felt at that moment.
I have been to hundreds of plays since seeing “Grease” on Broadway in the mid 1970s. I have seen plays performed in barns, old churches, in every venue in Hartford and New Haven. It wasn’t the play, which is written well enough, or the inspired multimedia stage set that was so amazing, it was the performance by the actor, Felicia Curry. A single actor playing the multiple roles flawlessly with the only prop being a single chair. Felicia Curry controlled the stage. The performance brought the audience to its feet, with a spontaneous ovation and roar that I have rarely ever been part of outside of a rock concert.
Part of the joy of seeing a play in an intimate venue such as TheaterWorks is that the theater itself is part of the show. Even at the back of the theater the actors on stage are living-room-close. That intimacy certainly added to the audience response. If it was just the “theater” that created the emotional response then I would feel that every play in a small space held “the best performance ever” and that is just not the case.
“Sandra” is a well-told but a somewhat predictable mystery where Sandra is in search of a friend that has gone missing. She travels multiple times from New York City to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, where her friend Ethan was last seen. She is recently separated from her husband and initially she is only interested in finding Ethan. On a subsequent trip she meets a charming, handsome, Italian named Luca who she falls for.
In Puerta Vallarta we are introduced to a cast of characters – Buford an older gay man Sandra meets at an outdoor café and shares a drink with, her friends from New York who she stumbles upon in a bar where she meets Luca, –all the characters played with aplomb by Felicia Curry.
The multiple transitions from Sandra’s New York apartment or the café she owns back and forth to multiple settings in Mexico are achieved by images projected onto the four-sided open box that Sandra occupies throughout the performance. The changing stage settings are generally subtle and unintrusive and are the perfect use of modern imagery for a sparce stage.
Sandra has all the elements of a modern Noir – sexual tension, fatalism, alcohol, good cop-bad cop, and a reluctant hero seeking the truth.
I do not profess to any ability or desire to review plays. I go to the theater to enjoy the show. I have seen great plays performed poorly, luckily only very rarely, and I could not bring myself, ever, to write a bad review. In my lifetime I have seen truly great performers, and performances – James Earl Jones in “Fences,” Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon,” Derek Jacobi as Uncle Vanya, Holland Taylor as Ann Richards, Frank Gorshin as George Burns, Yul Brynner as the King of Siam.
Commanding the stage and holding an audience for 90 minutes needs to be celebrated and Felica Curry, playing Sandra, and every other role, at TheaterWorks in Hartford deserves that recognition. She should be seen before the show ends.
“Sandra” is playing at TheaterWorks through June 23, 2024. More information about the show can be found here.
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