The Cast
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Austin Campion (Matt Bayer)
came to Chicago but one year ago after graduating from Brown University with a degree in Theatre Arts. Since then he has occupied himself with the forming of improv groups, the manipulation of puppets, and the entertaining of children at Navy Pier, along with the occasional actual play. This latter category includes performing Jim in The Glass Menagerie at Oak Park Village Players and Red Angel in Durango with the Silk Road Theatre Project. He is glad to make his Apple Tree debut and very grateful to his parents, his lady, and the caprices of fate.
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Hollis Resnik (Helen Bayer) is pleased to return to Apple Tree having appeared in Tale of the Allergists Wife (Jeff nomination), Songs for a New World (Jeff award), And The World Goes ‘Round (Jeff award), and The Baker's Wife. She appeared most recently at Northwestern in Dangerous Beauty and at Court Theatre and Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in Carousel. Other credits include the national tours of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Throughly Modern Millie and Les Miz. In Chicago she has been seen at Court Theatre in Man of La Mancha, The Little Foxes, An Ideal Husband, The Chairs, The Dead, The Cherry Orchard, Travesties, and The Learned Ladies; at Marriott in Honk, Mame, and Into the Woods; at the Goodman in A Little Night Music, Wings, The Beard of Avon, and The House of Martin Guerre; at Northlight in Enter The Guardsman and The Immigrant; for Cleveland Playhouse as Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire; at the Apollo in Always, Patsy Cline; and many productions at the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse. Other credits include productions at Sante Fe Stages, Indiana Rep, The Alliance in Atlanta, Milwaukee Rep and most recently as Lane in The Clean House for Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis. She has appeared at Ravinia many times most notably as the beggar woman in Sweeney Todd. She has also sung at the Lyric Opera and for the CSO. She is the recipient of 9 Jeff awards and the Sarah Siddons Leading Lady award for Piaf . She has a CD entitled “Make Someone happy.” She appeared in the films Backdraft and Little Big Top and on TV in Crime Story, Angel Street and Cupid. Visit her at hollisresnik.com.
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Robert Allan Smith (Jerry Bayer) is most thrilled to be a part of this exciting production of Pen with Apple Tree. He has worked with Apple Tree in the past through their TYA Educational Outreach Program. Robert is happy to be back in the Windy City, having spent his summer in Door County, WI playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and LeBret in Cyrano de Bergerac for Door Shakespeare. Fans of the Bard may look for him as Brabantio in Milwaukee Shakespeare's upcoming production of Othello next Spring. Other roles include Antonio in Twelfth Night (Noble Fool), Lucius in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare's Motley Crew), and nine productions with First Folio Theatre including Trinculo in The Tempest, Tybalt in Romeo & Juliet, two productions of Midsummer , and his personal favorite as The Madman in “The Tell-Tale Heart” for their Jeff-nominated production of The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe. Other favorites are Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (TimeLine), Inventing Van Gogh (Bailiwick), Guilty Conscience (Illinois Theater Center) and as Eddie McCuen in The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940 (Orchard). Regionally, he has toured in Hamlet, King Lear, and as Malvolio in Twelfth Night with the Iowa Shakespeare Project. Recent big screen projects include “The Lake House”, “The Breakup” and the independent short “The Art of Stalking” which won Best Short Film at the Boston Film Festival.
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Press
Pioneer Press review
Copley News Service review
Chicago Tribune review
Highlights from the Pioneer Press review by Robert Loerzel
...The first half of David Marshall Grant's play is a fairly realistic depiction of dysfunctional family in 1969. Helen (Hollis Resnik) suffers from multiple sclerosis, railing against Richard Nixon from her wheelchair as she watches TV. Her son teenage son, Matt (Austin Campion), desperately wants to escape his demanding mother by going to a college far away. Matt's parents are divorced, but his father, Jerry (Robert Allan Smith), still seems to be struggling to escape Helen's orbit for good. Getting remarried to a younger woman may or may not do the trick.
Directed by Kurt Johns, "Pen" plays out well in its first act. Resnik is one of Chicago's finest actresses, and she does a superb job of making Helen seem real. In the wrong hands, Helen might come off as shrill and overbearing. At first, the character's disability may prompt feelings of sympathy, but the way she needles her son brings to mind the cruelty of the matriarch in Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County." Helen isn't quite as spiteful or mean as that character, but it's easy to see why her son is eager to fly the coop.
Resnik doesn't downplay Helen's cruel side, but she also finds the sympathetic person inside. As we watch Helen smiling through her pain and struggling to find a way of dealing with her son, "Pen" makes us think about the way coping with physical disabilities can change someone.
Despite this potentially grim subject matter, there's a good amount of natural humor in the lively sparring between Helen and her son. Campion plays Matt with a palpable sense of youthful frustration. And the likable Smith succeeds in making Helen's psychiatrist ex-husband seem like an affable man who is belatedly coming to an understanding of his family.
The first act climaxes with a riveting, emotionally painful scene. And then comes the peculiar second act [mild spoiler alert!], featuring a role reversal that might be some sort of magic realism. Or is the whole thing a dream? A metaphysical twist by the playwright? An alternate universe? Somehow it all revolves around a zero-gravity pen -- the sort of pen astronauts write with.
...Even if you find yourself scratching your head at the end, you may enjoy watching this talented cast bringing these characters to life.
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Highlights from the Copley News Service review by Dan Zeff
...The 2006 off Broadway play by David Marshall Grant provides the usual abundance of bickering, backbiting, and around nastiness that sustains this kind of play, but the author adds a fantasy element in the second act that offers some relief from the relentless kvetching of the first act.
...The pen of the play's title has a couple of meanings. First, it refers to a to a zero-gravity writing instrument Helen can use to work crossword puzzles on her back without the writing instrument running dry. Then there is a pen as an enclosure, symbolic of Helen trying to confine Matt to their suburban New York home instead of him allowing him to follow his father to California. The actual pen also has a magical property that turns the second act on its head. It would be improper to divulge the reversal apparently instigated by the pen, but the plot device will be recognized by audiences familiar with the Craig Lucas play "Prelude to a Kiss."
PEN has its moments of intensity and its moments of humor, mostly emerging from Helen's barbed wisecracks. She gets in some nice zingers about the country's political situation during the Nixon era.
...The performances under Kurt Johns' directing all serve the play well enough. Hollis Resnik is excellent as the verbally barbed Helen. A newcomer young actor named Austin Campion is impressive as Matt, a lad turned into a loser by the psychological buffeting he's taking from the fractured marriage of his parents. Robert Allan Smith is soft and confused as Jerry, a man in this production a little overmatched by the belligerence of his wife and the rebellion of his son.
Tim Morrison designed the minimal set, Elizabeth Wislar the costumes, David Ferguson the lighting, and Steve Ptacek the video and sound.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
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Highlights from the Chicago Tribune review by Kerry Reid
...the dynamic between Resnik's fearsome yet vulnerable matriarch and Campion's confused and resentful Matt makes for some wonderfully absorbing moments - the latter, new to Chicago, is a name to look out for.
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Photos
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Director's Notes
One could easily say that PEN is about a writing instrument and mother-son co-dependency. While this is true in a sense, I hearken back to the author, David Marshall Grant who quoted Karl Marx in the play's forward. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Grant, now a writer for ABC's “Brothers and Sisters”, has said that the play deals with “the struggle between what we need and what we owe to others.” PEN asks the hardest of questions about the nature of family, what it is to be human and what it is to be an adult.
Grant has also said that one of his inspirations for writing PEN is how families deal with disabilities, having experienced this in his own family. Many years ago one of my best friends lost an entire leg to cancer. Anita is sometimes referred to as “disabled.” She wears no prosthesis and she gets around with what we “old schoolers” call “polio crutches”. She parents, partners, acts, teaches, directs, writes, performs and navigates Manhattan faster than a speeding bullet. She is one of the most able people I know. I admire her and her family greatly. I think that there are all kinds of disabilities. Some are real and some are not. Some are apparent and some are not. This play is not just about the obvious disability.
So what about the pen? A pen is indeed a writing instrument but by definition it is also a place of confinement. Here, I think the word pen is symbolic of both the confinement of one's disability and the key to escape it. I hope you find PEN thought provoking and enjoyable. I thank the Apple Tree for putting it and me in this season.
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