This one-act evening begins with a jewel of a bonus: Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. I was impressed to see Lally Cadeau in a virtual walk-on playing the Bastard's mother in the all-star King John, but Cocteau's mini-masterpiece monologue is more worthy of that exquisite actress. It's just a woman posing, pretending, pleading, and promising on the telephone with the lover who has broken up with her. She has no melodramatic action or excessive expression. She doesn't leave her bedroom. She just talks on the phone. And the piece is revealing, rewarding, and challenging enough to have drawn such actresses as Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman to attempt it. Cadeau is mesmerizing and lovely in it.
Set up by that gem, we move on in the intimate Studio Theater to Nicolas Billon's The Elephant Song. Initially, this clever one-acter seems formulaic in its game-playing, as a psychiatrist/chief of institution interrogates a mental patient who was the last person to see his missing analyst. The young man is too bright and playful and wants to talk about elephants, not the missing doctor.
We learn that his mother is an opera singer and has never loved him. A woman who assists the missing doctor seems concerned about him but may be merely controlling or antagonistic. And the device of Dr. Greenberg's not having looked at the boy's folder before interviewing him will become startlingly important without ever being entirely natural-seeming.
It's like a finger exercise that has a seductive melody. In fact, in this case, the melody is the popular "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi, which the mother shows up in full concert drag to sing onstage. But the characters get more interesting and winning as they go, the surprise ending is rather endearingly juvenile in its melodrama, and the whole experience is rather pleasing if transitory, like the Cocteau vignette.
It wouldn't work, of course, unless perfectly paced and played. Stephen Ouimette is so understated and real as Dr. Greenberg, it's hard to see how skillfully he is working. Maria Vacratsis is misleadingly abrasive, then motherly as Miss Peterson, the nurse. And a new young actor, Mac Fyfe, is charismatic and absolutely convincing as the brilliant, disturbed young man. Barbara Dunn-Prosser looks beautiful and sings beautifully for her walk-on aria.
