Insufficiently rehearsed at the preview performance I attended, the performance will, I imagine, deepen as the run progresses. (It’s hard to reach into the depths of yourself when you’re reaching for lines.) Under Eric C. Engel’s direction, the two-hander unfolds on a set by Jenna McFarland Lord that morphs easily from Gage’s patrician lair, with its high windows overlooking suburban greenery, to more rickety African arrangements. The staging is simple but no more static than the play’s tea-time chess-games mandate. Parker wraps the erect and bright-plumed N’Kame in a stony yet sometimes mischievous dignity. And she nails the character’s vivid second-act monologue describing the painful crucible of mother love. Crouse, who summers in Annisquam, appears at Gloucester Stage for the second season in a row; but here she isn’t diminished by the shadow Julie Harris will forever cast over The Belle of Amherst. She is, in fact, terrific, imbuing the coolly anguished doctor, who makes a tidy-life-altering choice of personal revenge and complex humane concern over the Hippocratic oath, with a facial nakedness and angular intensity that burn right through Blessing’s well-stitched political tea cozy.
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“History,” Winston Churchill told us, “is written by the victors.”
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Cinderella has been making her way around New England stages, and whether she had fairy or gold dust in her eyes depended on where you caught up with her.
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Theater
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