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Home > Blogs > Arts and Entertainment > Archives > 2009 > February > 22 > Entry
‘Taking Steps’ merely ups, downs
Sometimes seeing a play will change the way you do something, at least for a while.
“Taking Steps,” which opened Friday, Feb. 20, in Sinclair Community College’s Blair Hall Theatre, may make you think about the way you take the stairs leaving the building, or upon coming home.
Will you gallop up, or descend in tidy little mincing steps? Both extremes and everything between are used by the actors on the imaginary stairways in the play by prolific British playwright Alan Ayckbourn.
Trouble is, his farce about a leaky old mansion, a marriage on the rocks and odd British behavior may not leave you with much more than that and some widely spaced laughs.
The play’s exposition required virtually the entire 90-minute first act during the Saturday, Feb. 21, performance.
It finally began paying off in fun after intermission with situations like these:
An eccentric young attorney who fidgets like Woody Allen ends up by mistake in bed with the woman of the house and then, not quite by mistake, with her brother’s girlfriend.
The man of the house serves tumblers full of whiskey to himself and his guests, then takes a couple of sleeping pills to get some rest, which makes it seem he intends to take a permanent rest.
Some of the funniest moments provided by an all-student cast under Nelson Sheeley’s direction occur when the lawyer (Dan Foley as Tristram) and the wife’s brother (Kurtis Riley as Mark) try to get and keep the large sleeper (William Courson as Roland) up on his feet and walking it off.
Meanwhile, Mark’s girlfriend Kitty (Sarah Parsons) is trapped in a closet all night because the comatose Roland pushed his bed against it before falling asleep. And Ally Wetz, as brassy, blonde, dance-crazed but not dance-gifted Elizabeth, can’t make up her mind whether to leave Roland or not.
There are no stairs on designer Terry Stump’s nifty one-story set, which is intentional. The actors pantomime using them whenever they move around the three-story house. Despite all of the traveling, there’s no real destination for any of them.
Remaining performances are at 10 a.m. Wednesday, 7 p.m. Thursday (Downtown Dayton Night) and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 25-28, in Blair Hall Theatre, Building 2. Tickets are $7-$17 at (937) 512-2808 or www.sinclair.edu
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