Photo Credit: George Katsekes Jr.
The great challenge of any ensemble comedy is to emotionally draw-in an audience. Director Dustin J. Martin and the cast at Sunset Playhouse succeed in this beautifully with John Patrick’s The Curious Savage. The endearing 1950 play about an eccentric old woman named Ethel who is committed to a sanatorium features a lovingly-developed cast of fractured people struggling against the concerns of the outside world.
Paula Garcia plays a mystery in plain sight as Ethel. Garcia is a gracious presence onstage making the best of living with a group of people too emotionally fractured to make it on the outside. Her cold, detestable family includes Jim Stahl as her gruff politician step-son Titus and a delicately awkward Jim Mallmann as her youngest son. Becky Cofta perfectly plays the all-too-real stereotype of privileged wealth as Ethel’s middle step-child Lily Belle.
The cold dysfunction of Ethel’s family is played against the whimsical warmth of the residents at the sanitarium. A carefully modulated cast of characters rapidly becomes Ethel’s surrogate family, including an energetic Kristen Carter as a girl named Fairy May, Kerry Birmingham in the role of a fragile man who suffered the shock of an airplane crash during military service and Diane Kallas as a shattered woman who speaks only in lists.
As Ethel settles-in, things get complicated. The family’s substantial fortune has gone missing and only Ethel seems to know where it is. Martin and company carefully juggle the complexities of a missing fortune and of a woman recovering from her own misfortune in a comedy of satisfying dramatic depth.
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Through March 17 at Furlan Auditorium, 700 Wall St., Elm Grove. For tickets, call 262-782-4430 or visit sunsetplayhouse.com.
