Excelsior: Stage Review - Circle Mirror Transformation

Love, Life and Loss at Your Local Community Center

A bland room and five strangers in sweatpants: A nondescript community center in New England is the setting of “Circle Mirror Transformation.” They are there for a so-called creative acting class: There’s the aspiring pretty actress who has hit 30 without a big break in sight; there’s the bitter new divorcé who loves making chairs; there’s the insecure teenage girl who doesn’t yet know who she is but dreams of being an actress; there’s the new age instructor who insists on everyone’s expressing their feelings but keeps her own buried deep down; and there’s her husband who struggles with his marriage and the relationship with his daughter.

This unlikely quintet is thrown together by chance, and together, they go on a journey – a journey that is sometimes plain ridiculous and funny, and sometimes deeply emotional. We follow them through the six weeks of their summer acting class, see them interact and slowly get to know them, maybe on a more personal level than is comfortable. Tensions arise, lips are locked and promises are broken; unexpected secrets are revealed.

The beginning of the play is decidedly light-hearted. Anyone who has ever attended an improv class will recognize the exercises that supposedly help the characters free themselves up to be creative. Seeing them acted out on stage makes them laugh-out-loud funny. In a way, you end up laughing at yourself. Deirdre O’Connell does a superb job as the community center acting teacher who has never actually been an actress but instead is determined to release everyone’s inner self. She catches the spirit of a middle-aged spiritual coach who takes the acting class to be more about self exploration than about, well, acting, and is hilarious, but never over the top.
A lot of the humor is derived from human insecurity and awkwardness. When two of the participants end up alone in the room with each other during a break, a halting conversation about their lives unfolds. Hasn’t everyone found themselves making senseless small talk after their first class of the semester? This familiar element of “Circle Mirror Transformation” manages to make the play funny and profound at the same time without ever ridiculing its characters.

Over the course of the story, more serious tones creep in. The seemingly silly games, designed to get the creative juices flowing, turn out to reveal more about the characters than they might have been willing to reveal. When they do a round of family constellations – an exercise in which one person asks others to represent her family members and places them in a way she feels appropriate – we realize that there are all kinds of monsters in these people’s past.

At the same time, personal relationships develop between the characters. Although we only see a brief glimpse of their lives – the weekly acting class – we get a strong sense of who those people are and where they stand in relation to each other. The excellent cast succeeds in letting the subtle lines of dialogues come to life in a gripping and sometimes chilling way.

And as we get to know these people better and better, the intensity of their emotions becomes more and more urgent. We understand them, we know what they want and where they are coming from. This charged environment culminates in one last exercise: Each member of the group anonymously reveals a secret about themselves. And yet, we, and probably they themselves, know whose secret is whose. Everything they have been through together has led up to those revelations, a catharsis of sorts.

Circle Mirror Transformation, at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street, between 9th and 10th Aves), playing through November 1. Performance times: Tues-Fri at 7:30 pm, Sat at 2:00 & 7:30 pm, and Sun at 2:00 & 7:00 pm. Tickets: www.playwrightshorizons.org