Is This Real Life?

Local playwright delivers a rollicking masterpiece with “Roman à Clef” at the Firehouse.

Ardent ambition often leads to impressive achievements but isn’t usually very funny. The race to land a human on the moon was an amazing effort but didn’t generate a lot of laughs.

The comic drama “Roman à Clef,” a world premiere production now playing at Firehouse Theatre, is extremely ambitious. Penned by local playwright Chandler Hubbard, the play starts out as a knowing lampoon of the theater world, takes a second act swerve into family drama, then culminates in a turbulent fusion of fact, fiction and memory.

This mash-up of theatrical forms could have been daunting or worse, dull. Instead, it is consistently and sometimes riotously funny in a way that reinforces the emotional resonance.

Thanks to Hubbard’s brilliant script, the direction of Sharon Ott and the superlative performances of a top-notch cast, “Roman à Clef” emerges as a dazzling high-wire act where the intermingling of reality and the depiction of reality serve to clarify the characters’ struggles rather than confuse them.

As the play begins, an unseen Jack (Andrew Bryce) is heard directing a cast of actors rehearsing a play, the pretentiously titled, “Apple, Tree: Far From, Not.” Among the cast members are a number of familiar theater types.

(From left) Kelly Kennedy, Andrew Bryce and Landon Nagel in Firehouse Theatre’s “Roman à Clef.” Photos by Bill Sigafoos

There is a self-centered, older actor (Landon Nagel) who thinks the plot revolves around his character and who is also not too subtly perving on the production’s young ingénue (Reese Bucher). A slightly confused leading lady (Tippi Hart) can’t keep up with the changes being made to the script. And while two cast members (Keaton Hillman and Tatjana Shields) play unobservant siblings in the play, they’re shown as all too knowing when it comes to theater world politics.

We soon find out that Jack has written the show that he’s directing and that it’s based on his childhood. We meet Jack’s real-life siblings, Mike and Fiona (Alex Harris and Donna Marie Miller), as well as his frail mother, Lois (Kelly Kennedy), who are not pleased with being represented in Jack’s art.

In the final act, the play-within-a-play is performed but with the “real” characters sometimes taking over for, or duplicating the actions of, the actors. If it sounds like a lot to take in, it is. But it is also a glorious and impactful maelstrom that Ott manages to let rage without it careening off the rails.

Much of the humor comes from Hubbard’s acerbic insight into theater dynamics, like when one character calls Jack a “true artist” while another simultaneously says “true asshole.” The inclusion of actual Richmond-area references makes some quips particularly delightful. The line “Fuck Nathaniel Shaw!”, who happens to be the Firehouse’s producing artistic director, got a hearty laugh on the night I attended.

While Hubbard could have settled for creating a satisfying backstage satire, he’s employed his ample gifts to show how collapsing the different worlds of the play help Jack understand and process the confusing, sometimes violent, aspects of his childhood. And while the resolution is mostly centered on Jack, we also find out how his siblings coped, or didn’t, with their own experiences.

The play manages to be a true ensemble effort with each actor making a stellar contribution. That makes picking out any performance as a singular achievement impossible. But watching Kennedy, who has been too often underutilized, do her magic with meaty material is especially refreshing. Bryce, who has not appeared often on local stages, has the difficult job of making a self-serious bore in the first act empathetic by the show’s end and succeeds spectacularly.

Landon Nagel and Tatjana Shields.

The technical strength of the production rests on the creation of two distinct but compatible styles in representing the “play” world versus the “real” world. The exceptional work of scenic designer Chris Raintree and costume designer Cora Delbridge achieves a perfect matter / antimatter connection and contrast between the worlds.

The ambition of the  play comes with some costs. So many thematic strands are woven together that their unwinding makes the third act a little overlong. But that feels a little like complaining about too much fine wine.

All told, Hubbard and the team at the Firehouse have created an exuberant triumph, proof that something artistically ambitious can challenge the mind while also satisfying the soul.

“Roman à Clef” is playing through May 26 at Firehouse Theatre, 1609 West Broad St. Tickets and more information available at https://www.firehousetheatre.org/

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