REVIEW BY RICK PENDER

Photo By Sandy Underwood

Henny Russell plays Jill, a woman struggling with the loss of love, in the Playhouse's production of One.

One play, three actors, five characters. It seems like a simple equation to launch the Cincinnati Playhouse's 44th season on its Shelterhouse Stage, but the world premiere of local playwright Joseph McDonough's One is anything but simple. In fact, describing the plot makes it seem disjointed -- three monologues that relate tangentially. But McDonough's thoughtful writing makes for a well-integrated 90 minutes of drama that moved many audience members to tears on opening night.

Joseph P. Tilford's simple set is most prominently outfitted with four etched glass panels, from floor to ceiling, each bearing florid handwriting. They're fragments of letters written in 1862 by Civil War soldier to the woman he loved. The sloped floor is tiled with shiny black squares that form a kind of runway, bisecting the vertical glass panels to the backstage area where a lone cellist (Isaac M. Watras) sits. He's there for the entire production, playing affecting incidental music, written by Douglas Lowry, dean of UC's College-Conservatory of Music and occasionally punctuating the action with a sound effect or two. Overhanging the rear wall is a full moon, washing the set in pale blue light -- and each of the play's three personal tales hearkens to the moon and to the hours past midnight.

First we meet Emily (Anney Giobbe), a troubled young nun who's strangely obsessed with an actor starring in a TV series based on the letters of Capt. Jake Anderson, the Civil War soldier. We learn that his letters were found in the Tennessee abbey where Emily is quartered. Her spunky personality belies a troubled personality, which becomes increasingly evident as she relates a visit to a shopping mall to see the actor.

The second monologue is that of the actor, Kyle (Tim Altmeyer), an egotistical and empty man so consumed with his image that he has been unable to establish any meaningful relationship. He portrays the ghost of Anderson on the TV series (Heavenly Yankee), and even he is aware of the vast gulf between his own character and the man he portrays. His story revolves around returning to Cincinnati for a high school reunion, where he intends to sweep away Jill (Henny Russell), a girl he was infatuated with 20 years earlier.

Jill, however, does not even recognize him. But she takes home from the high school reunion a book Kyle has offered as a gift to classmates: Anderson's letters to his beloved Lorena Anne. Suffering from a trauma and loss in her own life, she resonates with the soldier's missives and is moved to a ghostly connection with him.

The ghost of Anderson haunts the play. Altmeyer drifts in and out in this role (so different from Kyle that many audience members did not recognize the same actor), although I found him less than convincing -- his New England accent seemed forced, and his wig was misfit. Nevertheless, his final appearance coincides with a magical transformation of Tilford's set, best left undescribed. It does, however, underscore the play's emotional climax in Jill's story.

McDonough's artful writing holds this piece together: Images repeat, shift and resonate from character to character. Kyle's shallowness is offset by Jill's profoundly serious nature (she's a college professor with expertise in the poems of Emily Dickinson, another loner who probably lost her one true love). And the forced good nature of Emily (surely named to presage Jill's later references to Dickinson) immediately alerts us to the fact that she's concealing issues that we're soon to learn more about.

Playhouse Producing Artistic Director Ed Stern chose to direct this piece of people caught in loneliness, and his firm hand makes it work well. We hurtle through Emily's startling story of isolation, relax during Kyle's self-absorbed portrait, only to be caught by its final poignancy, then slide into the depression of Jill and her path out. Stern has combined the elements artfully, including Tilford's set and Lowry's music.

McDonough's evocative play reminds us that one truly is the loneliest number. Grade: B+

E-mail Rick Pender

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