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“Living Together”
By Gwen Kingston August 20, 2010 | 10:43 pm
The Daily Californian

This week the “Norman Conquests” trilogy is back, and Sarah, Reg, Annie, Tom, Ruth and Norman can be found once again tearing up the Ashby stage. In this second installment, “Living Together,” directed by Molly Aaronson-Gelb we move into the living room of our English country house setting. Each of the three plays inhabits a different room of the same house over the same three days, allowing the audience to slowly sketch in the complete events of this very eventful weekend.

In the living room the characters give full reign to all the frankness and frustration that was apparently not appropriate for the dinner table in last week’s “Table Manners.” The comparative restraint of those dinner time scenes becomes retrospectively even more comical in light of the full-scale blowouts we now know were going on in the next room.

Remarkably, each play in Alan Ayckbourn’s cycle tells its own story. They are each completely cohesive without the other two, and yet fit together seamlessly upon consecutive viewing. As before, the primary conflicts turn on relationships and personality friction.

The truly amazing thing about the title character, Norman (played by Richard Reinholdt), is his bizarre likability. His childlike appetite for affection and disregard of propriety or consideration carry the day once again, as he determinedly flirts both with his wife’s sister and sister in law. Though he offends every civilized impulse we have, still we laugh at his jokes and root for his wife to take him back. This is partly due to the fact that he is not a smooth, calculating womanizer who manipulates his innocent victims. He is unflinchingly frank in his attentions, and there is a spark of genuine affection in every one of his advances.

Despite this, one cannot help but feel sympathy for his long-suffering wife Ruth, whose rye humor seems to be her last defense against her husband’s blatant infidelity. The hard shell of wit behind which she hides for nearly all of “Table Manners” cracks open in “Living Together” to reveal a real vulnerability with which the audience immediately empathizes. Sarah Mitchell continues to surprise in her multifaceted approach to this character.

It is worth the return trips to Ashby Stage to see all three of these charmingly hilarious plays. Each has something new to offer its audience, and affection for these characters only deepens with time. “Table Manners,” “Living Together” and “Round and Round the Garden” form a delightful puzzle of comedy, which it is the audience’s pleasure to unravel.

 

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