‘Talley's Folly’ given a tender rendering at Actors’ Summit Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, International Association of Theatre Critics Olmsted Falls-born, Catholic-raised, Actors’ Summit-based Keith Stevens sure makes a convincing Latvian Jew. He does so in Lanford Wilson’s romantic comedy "Talley's Folly,” which invites us to eavesdrop on the courtship between two thoroughly mismatched but magnetically drawn soulmates at a boathouse in rural Missouri in 1944. The play begins with Stevens, as 42-year-old Matt Friedman, directly addressing the audience and confiding in his plans for the evening’s entertainment. “If everything goes well for me tonight,” he says, “this should be a waltz… a no-holds-barred romantic story.” Stevens delivers this and all of Matt’s well-structured sentences with their multisyllabic reader’s vocabulary with the Talmudic singsong cadence, over-articulation and assertiveness of an orthodox émigré. He adds to the mix the immediately ingratiating manner of a gentle man who is scarred by a traumatic past, living in a very lonely present, and in desperate need of a more pleasant, promising future. That future is in the arms of Sally Talley, a wealthy “old maid” daughter of a bigoted Protestant textile mill owner. Sally, played with just the right touch of southern gentility and damaged-goods defensiveness by Shani Ferry, is also scarred by a traumatic past and in desperate need to break away from the toxicity of her home on the hill. But she is not at all sure if this “communist infidel” – her father’s words, not hers – or any man is her way out. “Talley’s Folly” – the second of Wilson’s trilogy (“Fifth of July” and “Talley & Son”) about the Talley Family – won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so there is no doubt that this deceptively simple story is a complex, brilliantly told piece of work. The challenge facing any performance of it is doing the foreshadowed waltz with grace and conviction. For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.