PUPPET MASTERS: Pontine's Gathers (left) and Mathews. |
| Home Is Heaven: 32 Poems by Ogden Nash created & performed by M. Marguerite Mathews & Gregory Gathers | Produced by Pontine Theater, in Portsmouth, NH | through February 10 | 603.436.6660 |
The poet Ogden Nash might be best known for his acute “Reflections on Icebreaking”: “Candy/is dandy/but liquor/is quicker.” A book editor, lyricist, and the foremost American poet of pithy rhymed verse, Nash was, in essence, the Dr. Seuss of the mid-century New Yorker set. On stage now at Pontine Theatre is a tribute to his light and jaunty verse, Home is Heaven, created and performed by Pontine’s co-artistic directors M. Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers.Pontine's stock-in-trade is using simple, traditional staging devices (puppets, cut-outs, shadow play) to mount explorations of local relevance. Past productions have celebrated Sarah Orne Jewett, Wallace Nutting, and the New England textile industry; this one focuses on Nash’s connection to New England: his family’s regular seaside summers at Little Boar’s Head, in North Hampton, New Hampshire.
Home is Heaven is divided into three parts, each representing a period in the family's life. Part one is young-family time, opening with young Nash and his wife seeking a summer cottage in “an Eden, or even an Arden,” and progressing through paeans to the seaside (where sculpted men expose torsos that women “adoreso”) and his two daughters (home would be “as mute as a clapperless bell” without them). Between this phase and the next, Time advances in the form of shadowplay behind a screen — birthdays pass (3, 6, 9) and children and parents play in classic silhouette. Part two chronicles afternoon naps, sniffling daughters, skipping church to sit by the sea, and the story of Poor Mr. Strawbridge, who wants a drawbridge in front of his house, to remove Route 1 motorists from his view of the Atlantic. After another round of Time and shadow-birthdays behind the magic screen (an interlude that might benefit from slightly snappier, more Nashish pacing), we launch into the realm of new sons-in-law, dying dogs, and the desire for the occasional, just-like-old-times debauch.
Mathews and Gathers act out Nash’s vacation-time verse on a set of cut-outs, including a yellow house with bright painted curtains and two stories of windows that open, puppet-theater-style, for various household scenes. Ocean eulogies unfold stage left, where they unpack cut-outs of waves and old-timey cartoon beach figures, and to the right is the bright flowered chair and bookshelf of a study, where Nash does some napping and gossiping. Among the two-dimensional cut-outs of figures populating the North Hampton household, there are also some lovely sewn dolls representing daughters and — to particularly darling effect — the pet cat, dog, mouse, and dragon of Belinda, an invention of Nash for his girls’ story-hour.
Much of this is, perhaps unavoidably, extremely sweet stuff, and Mathews and Gathers deliver it with a honeyed avidity. Even the poems that bemoan various domestic vicissitudes — mounds of bills, Nash’s status as the sole male in the household, the lament that “summertime is itchy time” — do so with a sort of clever, resigned, PG-rated blitheness. It’s actually rather Zen, in an urbane way, though theater-goers who prefer more snark might feel like they’ve wandered into a dessert buffet.
