amy's view

amy's view
By: Anne Marie Welsh - Union Tribune Theater Critic

'Toward the end of North Coast Repertory's soulful and subtle staging of "Amy's View," a fledgling actor asks his leading lady, Esme Allen, how she learned to please audiences without seeming to try.

Pausing a beat as she gazes into an invisible mirror, actor Rosina Reynolds' Esme answers simply: "You go right down to the core. And there it is."

In her stillness and intensity, Reynolds finds the deep, sad core of this moving backstage scene. Esme has lost nearly all she held dear – people, property, some of her most proudly held principles. Yet her passion for performance, like her belief in the redemptive power of art, remains undimmed.

For Reynolds, the scene caps a versatile interpretation of a role written in 1997 by British playwright David Hare for the great (and beloved) Judi Dench. I saw Dame Judi's indelible performance in "Amy's View" two years later on Broadway. The North Coast Repertory production, directed with wit and lyricism by its artistic director, David Ellenstein, compares well to Richard Eyre's more crisply directed Dench showcase; in its feeling for the ensemble, it's actually better.

In "Amy's View," director Ellenstein has reunited the incandescent Reynolds with L.A. actor Brendan Ford. He's the quietly powerful actor who played the troubled son Jamie to Reynolds' tragic Mary Tyrone in Ellenstein's heartbreaking Renaissance Theatre staging of O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

In Hare's drama, Ford plays Dominic Tyghe, an aspiring filmmaker, now a blunt-spoken TV journalist whom Esme's daughter, Amy (Amanda Sitton, persuasive as goodness incarnate), loves madly and completely. Dominic represents everything Esme loathes. Boorish, self-absorbed, addicted to pop culture fads, he's a real jerk – and a threat to Esme, not because he crudely declares her obsolete and theater itself "dead," but because young Amy has fastened her unconditional love upon this unworthy, volatile philanderer.

The play's four scenes span 15 years (and one very bad wig), from 1979 to 1994. The first three scenes are set in Esme's country home and the final one in the London theater where, after years of TV and commercial work, Esme has scored again with live audiences.With Craig Huisenga as Esme's doting neighbor, Frank, Dagmar Krause Fields as her late husband's sclerotic mother, and Tom Zohar as the young actor, the NCRT ensemble mines the play's surprising Chekhovian depths.

Marty Burnett's elegant set suggests an expansive home, its gardens lambently lit by Mike Durst to resemble Ranevskaya's threatened estate in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." Uncompromising Esme, too, will lose her home because of "progress;" fake genteel suburbs engulf her and soon she loses all with the collapse of Lloyd's of London, the company through which Frank has fed her money into high-risk syndicates. After a flamboyant first entrance, Reynolds' Esme reveals the steel beneath her witty-pretty-and-gay exterior: She engages Dominic with skeptical questions and charming asides. Yet because Ford makes Dominic's motives and moods understandable, and because Sitton's sensitively portrayed Amy argues his case so compassionately, the emotional dynamics of this family triangle pulse with real life.

Hare tends here – as in his more overtly political plays – to bediscursive and argumentative. But Ellenstein and company root even meandering debates in the sensibilities of these characters.

Reynolds, a longtime leader among San Diego actors, has gone "right down to the core." She creates many moments when laughter and tears mingle, and a final scene with Ford's chastened Dominic that in its unadorned honesty and artless technique ranks with the finest I've seen on a San Diego stage.

Back to Top

Powerful performances, direction make 'amy's view' worth seeing
by Pam Kragen- North County Times

On the surface, the issues debated in David Hare's 1997 drama "amy's view" cover well-trodden ground ---- the struggle for control between a mother and daughter, the gap between high and pop culture, the decline of modern theater and the price of pride and selfishness.

But Hare's word-heavy script is so deftly handled by director David Ellenstein, and the performances are so exquisitely natural, that these seemingly dry debates pulse with life at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

In its San Diego premiere, "amy's view" fascinates with its realistic, multidimensional characters, its pithy dialogue and its unexpected plot twists.

On the page, some of the characters in "amy's view" may read as remote and one-dimensional, but with Ellenstein's nuanced direction, these exceptional actors find layers of vulnerability that bring a human dimension to their otherwise unsympathetic roles. Unlike the title of one character's pretentious magazine, "Noir et Blanc," the figures in "amy's view" have many shades of gray.

"Amy's view" is the story of Esme Allen, a self-absorbed, middle-aged West End stage star who, in 1979, is at the tail end of an illustrious career. Esme lives in the London suburb of Pangbourne with her late husband's mother, Evelyn, and is stunned when her 22-year-old, sweet-but-plain daughter, Amy, shows up one night broke and secretly pregnant by her handsome but acid-tempered boyfriend, Dominic.
Dominic and Esme mix like fire and ice. A magazine film and television critic, Dominic says the theater's dead and Esme's backstage tales are "period kitsch." She sees him as a crass intellectual and soulless social climber, willing to use anyone (including Amy) to achieve his goal of becoming a media titan. Despite her best efforts, Dominic and the eager-to-please Amy marry for better and worse, and the play slowly hopscotches ahead through the next 15 years.

As Dominic's fortunes rise, Esme's take a disastrous fall, with the self-sacrificing Amy caught hopelessly in the middle. (The play's title, spelled in all lower-case letters, perhaps signifies how little Amy's feelings are considered by her husband and mother.)

Dominic's myopic quest for power and Esme's blind devotion to both her fading career (she eventually stoops for a part in a bad TV soap opera) and her love-besotted neighbor Frank (who callously funnels her life savings into a risky insurance syndicate) keep them both too busy to notice Amy's gradual disintegration. Eventually their blinders are removed and Esme and Dominic learn they must find a way ---- amy's way --- to reach out to each other.

Dame Judi Dench won a Tony Award in the role of Esme Allen, and England-born San Diego actress Rosina Reynolds gives Dench a run for the money. Reynolds' wrenching performance as Esme evokes a woman whose set chin and tight lips portray a cool hyper-controlled exterior, but her flashing, dewy eyes betray a boiling turmoil inside. And Reynolds isn't afraid to make Esme ugly on the inside.
Brendan Ford is electric and charismatic as the cruel, cocky Dominic. His is an entirely unsympathetic character, but Ford's ability to reveal Dominic's vulnerable underbelly (a desperate need for approval caused by his childhood abandonment at an orphanage), he manages to redeem his unlikable character in the final scenes.
And Amanda Sitton is a pincushion of raw emotions as the tempest-tossed Amy. One can watch her physically wither as her mother and husband perpetually battle for the high moral ground.

Craig Huisenga's Frank is gentle and supportive, but also covert and manipulative. Dagmar Krause Fields shows a sad dementia-fueled decline as Esme's once-witty mother-in-law, Evelyn. And Tom Zohar is fresh and innocent as Esme's onstage child Toby, the boyish young stage actor who idolizes her.

Marty Burnett's country home set is one of his best, and it's lit beautifully by Mike Durst and dressed by Bonnie Durben. Jeanne Reith created the costumes, Dick Emmett is dramaturge and Danielle Hill is stage manager.

"Amy's view" runs two hours, 20 minutes, with intermission, which may sound long, but it's a mesmerizing journey that surprises at every turn. It closes North Coast Rep's second season in the gifted Ellenstein's hands, and it promises good things for the company's future.

Back to Top

'amy's view'
by Rob Hopper - San Diego Playbill

amy’s view began as a neighborhood newsletter published by a young Amy Thomas, but as Amy grew into a young woman, amy’s view has become a philosophy – that love conquers all and everyone should get along. Unfortunately she has trouble convincing her family to make her view a reality when she marries a man who is the antagonist of her mother.

David Hare’s drama explores several conflicts in society and the arts, while delving most heavily into the debate between live theatre and film as seen through the lens of Amy’s view as her life gets torn apart by the struggle between her mother and husband. 

Her mother Esmie is one of the more popular stage stars in England, while her young husband Brendan Ford is a critic who believes theatre is dead (or should be), made irrelevant by the advent of film. He considers live theatre to be the domain of elitists, while film is the art of the masses that will topple the elitists like the masses toppled the aristocracy of France. Yet money and fame, or the lack of, along with a deep and abiding sense of selfishness, drive both their destinies. Not love, as Amy had hoped.

North Coast Repertory Theatre’s well-staged production is directed by David Ellenstein who keeps the focus squarely on the characters and their conflicting relationships, which are brought out nicely by the cast. Amanda Sitton is terrific as Amy, a sensitive, youthfully idealistic young woman who doesn’t know how to handle the bitter hatred between her mother and her spouse. The always-sensational Rosina Reynolds is the mother Esme, trying to covertly and not-so-covertly pry Amy away from the man who so clearly hates Esme’s art and values system, eventually transforming from a proud and successful matriarch to an exhausted and dispirited woman in the process. Brendan Ford is the husband who speaks of idealism, but who is certainly no less blinded by greed, power or dogma than are the institutions he rails against. The character might have worked better if there was something in his personality to really like about him, but he still acts as a strong adversary to the mother.

The cast is rounded out by Dagmar Krause Fields as an amusingly critical, tell-it-like-she-sees-it grandmother, Craig Huisenga as Esme’s loyal but irresponsible suitor, and Tom Zohar as a young actor in awe of the great Esme. Marty Burnett creates an English cottage interior with a simple elegance to it – a gentle and harmonious setting in steep contrast to the splintering of the family living within.

Back to Top