Robert Avila
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Shotgun Players has a way with modern classics like few other theaters its size. When the company gets it right, as not long ago with David Hare's Skylight, the production can hold its own with just about any other anywhere. Judging by a visit to two of the three plays currently up, this is again the case with the ambitious repertory run of Alan Ayckbourn's celebrated trilogy, The Norman Conquests, a shrewd and consistently hysterical sex farce about modern romance and relationships with real—but admirably understated—bite. Table Manners and Living Together feature the same brilliant cast (who also reappear in the third play, not yet reviewed, Round and Round the Garden) under astute direction by Joy Carlin and Molly Aaronson-Gelb, respectively. Each play is another vantage on the same rollicking weekend at an English country house, where our philandering hero Norman (a superlative Rich Reinholdt), alternately brooding and expansive, pitches woo with preternatural determination and consummate wit to two sisters-in-law (Zehra Berkman and Kendra Lee Oberhauser) as well as his own frosty wife (Sarah Mitchell), while a brother-in-law (Mick Mize) and a painfully shy local vet (Josiah Polhemus) move about more or less ineffectually. On a set (by Nina Ball) admirably atmospheric in its detailed solidity, the cast enchants from the first with special chemistry and exceptional chops. Reinholdt, however—with saucy beard, bounding playfulness and mischievous glint—is downright revelatory in the titular role, delivering a performance that not only gives boisterous heft to the proceedings but probes the moral dimensions of love in an age of crass individualism and lingering prudery.