To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday

In 1983, Michael Brady’s touching drama To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday generated a landslide of critical praise, marking Brady as a promising new playwright. Over a dozen years later, the play was adapted for a film, which bombed critically and financially. The play is still produced, but probably not as much as it deserves. The story itself may not be all that impressive, but the script impressively compensates for the plot: the dialogue is crisp, clever and inventive, and the characters carry a strikingly vivid depth. One of the quietest companies in town, Soulstice Theatre, has opened a thoroughly entertaining production of the drama that runs through the end of the month.

Randall T. Anderson plays a semi-retired teacher named David who leads a reclusive life on his island home. He is having difficulty moving on from the death of his wife Gillian, a situation which is complicated by his nightly conversations with the memory of her (played with a great deal of emotional magnetism by Ana DeLorme). Anderson delivers David’s intellectual charm in a deeply articulate performance.

Brady populates the rest of the play with interesting characters memorably represented by Soulstice’s cast. Hannah Richtman, a high school junior, plays David’s daughter Rachel. Rachel, concerned about her father’s inability to move on after her mother’s death while still coping with her own sense of loss, has a remarkable amount of intellectual and emotional maturity, which Richtman gracefully and admirably brings to the stage. Ellen Sommers plays her friend Cindy, who stargazes with David and Rachel at the beginning of the play. Richtman and Sommers work well together, which goes a long way toward grounding the play’s social center. They are soon joined by Rachel’s aunt Esther (Jillian Smith) and uncle Paul (Jeffrey S. Berens) who bring an old student of David’s (Amber Page) to his island home in an effort to motivate him to be less solitary.

Soulstice performs the play in the Marian Center’s Academy Studio Theatre, which will be familiar to anyone who saw Dramatists Theatre show last season. It’s an intimate theatre to begin with, but Soulstice’s use of the space for this production amplifies its intimacy considerably. A stairway bisects the seating area that directly faces the stage. Those in the seats flanking the stairway are extremely close to the action. The Boulevard Theatre is known for bringing its actors close enough to touch, but Soulstice’s blocking for this production is closer to the audience than anything that I’ve seen in half a decade of covering theatre in Milwaukee.

Director Char Manny places some of the most emotionally intense scenes right next to the staircase. Sit in one of those first two seats flanking the staircase and you’re only barely further away from the actors than they are from each other, imparting the feeling of almost being directly involved in some of the most intense conversations in the play. If you were any closer, you’d be in the production. The acting might not perfectly live up to the kind of scrutiny that comes from an audience that close, but Manny’s cast performs with gusto under some of the most challenging conditions possible in studio theatre. VS

Soulstice Theatre’s production of To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday runs though May 24th at the Academy Studio Theatre at the Marian Center for Nonprofits. For more information, visit the Soulstice Theatre online.