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Arts & Entertainment

"Rumors" Flies at Raven Theater

New season of Raven Players opens with Neil Simon comedy that makes you think - and laugh

If you're looking for something else to do on a weekend night in Healdsburg -- something local and low-key, smart but not smarty-pants -- you owe it to yourself to visit the some night between now and Sept. 4. The Raven Players' new season gets off to a witty start with ."

The play is simple but pointed, fun and, yes, a bit of a mystery. Simon is the writer of several stage classics (“The Odd Couple,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “Biloxi Blues”) and screenplays (“The Out of Towners,” “Plaza Suite,” “The Goodbye Girl”) and he knows how to create his characters, tell a good story, and make you think.

The ten-member cast is each given a chance to make their impression, and most of them do. The set is simple but far from stark – a Scandinavian Design interior appropriate to the class (upper middle), location (New York) and period (late 1980s) of the play. Simple, too, is the plot: five couples arrive for dinner, but the hosts are not around, the dinner is not made, and the servants are missing.

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What happened? Whatever it was, it’s largely off stage – and therefore, not “admissible in a court of law,” so to speak. But within minutes the wheels of speculation start spinning and the gossip begins to fly, and “Rumors” takes off.

The couples arrive gradually, two-by-two. The curtain rises too late for us to hear the gunshot or thud or whatever it was that sets off their guesswork; we don’t see the wounded Charlie with a hole in his ear lobe, we don’t see the missing wife (of course, how could we), we slowly discover other bits of the mystery as well.

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As a farce, it’s supposed to be funny, and although it does have its accumulated absurdity and occasional funny line, there’s something else going on as well. It’s a sort of rhetorical if not philosophical commentary about how quickly we leap to conclusions in everyday life, building from the barest shred of evidence a towering edifice of essentially baseless conjecture.

Eventually, the entire cast is caught up in a swirling confusion of half-truths and out-an-out falsehoods, which in act of inventing they turn into the presumptive reality of the situation: Myra left Charlie on the eve of their anniversary because she found he was having an affair – or perhaps he was. Despondent, he tried to shoot himself, and when that fails take an overdose of Valium.

Or did I just make that up? Come to think of it, that exact scenario might not ever quite be articulated, though it seems obvious enough. So there you go: even the audience is complicit in creating a shared reality from scant, even contradictory evidence.

To overlook the strength of the cast would be unfair, and veteran Bay Area state director Jon Vissman makes puts them through their paces. Rebecca Allington and Matthew Proschold take the stage first, followed by a slightly shallow Elizabeth Henry and an over-controlling Peter Warden (he seen in last year’s “,” as was Allington).

About half-way through the hour-long first act John Green and Cheri DuMay arrive with their more off-beat accents. Raven veteran Tim Shippey shows up with Terri Grill as his alternately slinky and seductive / vicious and psychotic wife, both boosting the stage energy just as it began to flag during the opening night performance.

At the end of the play, in a twist, lead confabulator Lenny (Warden, whose nervous performance is up to the opportunities of the role) tells an alternate version of the situation that is so completely unexpected it makes even the investigating policeman (Bernie Lee, a Raven newcomer, in another strong performance) accept it – though he doesn’t believe a word.

Could this alternate version of the hidden events possibly be any truer? At the play's close, we are led to believe that perhaps it is, after all.

Or is that yet another assumption we make on scant evidence?

"Rumors" is the first entry in what looks to be an interesting season at the Raven. Learn more on the Raven Players website.

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