[NEohioPAL] Review of "The Pitmen Painters" at Beck Center for the Arts

[Bob Abelman]

Beck Center's 'Pitmen Painters' digs deep but misses the mother lode

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review will appear in the News-Herald on 6/7/13

 

 

The National Endowment for the Arts recently reported that arts attendance in the United States and abroad has hit a new low.  Low attendance results in a limited appreciation of the arts, limited enrichment from the arts, and limited financial support for the arts.

 

As if in response to this disturbing trend, many playwrights have created works specifically designed to foster fine art appreciation while still attempting to attract and entertain a performing arts audience.  Last season, for example, the Cleveland Play House gave us the 2010 Tony Award-winning one-act drama "Red" by John Logan.  The play is about abstract painter Mark Rothko, but it is also an intriguing tutorial on the creation and comprehension of art.  

 

Even more assertive in its efforts to educate the culturally unwashed is Lee Hall's "The Pitmen Painters," currently on stage at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood.

 

The play was inspired by William Feaver's book about an actual group of Northumberland coal miners who, in 1934, come together in a state-supported adult education class on art appreciation.  They emerge as accomplished and renowned painters.  

 

The play - which was first presented at Newcastle Upon Tyne in 2007, transferred to the more prestigious National Theater in London, and was then imported to Broadway for a limited run in 2010 - takes us inside the classroom as instructor Robert Lyon and his five reluctant students dissect, discuss and, later, debate the merits of classic and class-generated paintings.  

 

It is written by the same fellow who penned "Billy Elliot" - a feel-good movie and musical about a boy from northern England who discovers himself through ballet.  Following suit, "The Pitmen Painters" also has lovable working class characters imbued with Geordie-glazed charm and endowed with blue-collar resilience.  

 

Its story about overcoming the oppression of a cultural glass ceiling through education and application offers uplifting testimony to the power of the human spirit.  This comes across most effectively in a remarkable scene that ends the first act, where these men - who left school for the mines at age 11 and have never stepped foot inside a museum - share their insights into the wonders of art with astounding eloquence, passion and poetry.  

 

Such poetic moments are rare, however, for much of the dialogue in "The Pitmen Painters" is singularly didactic and frequently lapses into lecture.  In the play's New York production, which featured the original London cast, the performers' rich characterizations, brilliant comic timing, and ability to soft-sell the play's more overtly instructive moments made even the peachiness pleasurable.  

 

This is not the case with the Beck Center production, where some of the performances are stellar while others are not.  This inconsistency allows the play's blemishes to surface, undermines director Sarah May's efforts to create a cohesive and complementary unit among the miners, and keeps the audience from fully engaging in the production.

 

Bob Goddard is brilliant as George, the bureaucratic union representative.  George's temperament and dialect are fully formed from the play's opening moments, and his eventual transformation from no-nonsense naysayer to art aficionado is subtle and quite beautiful.  

 

Christopher Bohan as Oliver, the group's most promising painter, also turns in a wonderful performance.  In fact, Oliver's scenes with Helen Sutherland, a wealthy patron of the arts played perfectly by Mary Alice Beck, showcases Bohan's marvelous depiction of Oliver's debilitating class consciousness as well as his desperate desire to reinvent himself and escape the mines.  

 

Brett Radke as George's unemployed nephew, James Alexander Rankin as the artist Ben Nicholson, and Katie Nabors as nude model Susan Parks all find interesting ways to make their characters come alive.

 

In contrast, John Busser and Patrick Carroll tend to rely on one go-to trait to define their characters.  On opening night, they are so unsuccessfully fixated on maintaining a consistent Northumberland accent that they miss comedic opportunities in the script and never quite fit into the rhythm of the group.  

 

Dana Hart, as teacher Robert Lyon, works hard to fill the void in the group dynamic, but this overcompensation calls attention to itself and detracts from an otherwise fine performance.

 

Tad A Burns' clean and simple set and lighting design for the make-shift hut that houses the play's activity keeps the focus on the acting.  Sound designer Richard B. Ingraham brings vibrancy to the period film footage shown during scene changes that helps establish a sense of time, place and circumstance. 

 

As this play suggests, the best way to appreciate art is to be exposed to great work rather than be lectured about it.  This Beck Center production comes close but does not quite live up to this prescription.

 

"The Pitmen Painters" continues through July 7 in the Studio Theater at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood.    For tickets, which range from $12 to $28, call 216-521-2540 x10 or visit www.beckcenter.org.
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