Sylvia

A.R. Gurney, Dir. By Alan Bailey
Commonweal Theatre (July 11, 2011)

The premise of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia is pretty simple: A middle-aged man whose kids have moved off to college and whose job has lost its purpose and whose wife has filled her life with a new profession finds a stray dog in Central Park and falls terribly in love with it, placing stress on the relationship with his wife.

It’s always dangerous to bring either kids or animals on stage because the audience can move into the oh cute mode. In fact, when a picture of a real dog is displayed at the end of the play, the audience gives a collective “oh cute.” But Sylvia largely stays above this emotive realm by representing Sylvia as a human being, not a person in a dog suit.

Adrienne Sweeney and Phil Losacker in the Commonweal’s Sylvia
(Photo by Jason Underferth as seen in American Theatre)

Adrienne Sweeney handles the role of the stray dog, and it is her performance that makes the play stay on the right side of the oh cute line. Sweeney plays the role on two feet and largely as a human being. Yet, she offers enough subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) moves that anyone who has spent any time with animals would see her as a dog. In fact, by the end of the play, Sweeney has become the dog. When that picture of the real dog is displayed at the final scene of the play, I think the audience is a little surprised to see an actual dog and not Sweeney in the portrait.

Sylvia speaks, in English. In fact, the dog has the first lines of the play. If having an animal on stage risks pushing a play over the edge, an anthropomorphic animal—a Snoopy or Garfield—could doom a play. But somehow, Sweeney and her surrogate family, Greg (played by Phil Losacker) and Kate (played by Laura Depta the night I saw the play) are able to keep the conceit working: Sweeney is still the dog. The play’s notes suggest Gurney’s strategy for the talking dog: the dog speaks largely what the people around her expect her to say and sometimes what the people around her are thinking. While this may not always be the case, the talking dog motif works because the dog does seem to reflect what the people feel and what people expect the dog to feel. And this seems to be one of Gurney’s main observations: people interact with their pets with a both a frankness and affection that is therapeutic.

This therapeutic effectiveness of pet ownership is contrasted with the three advice-offering characters that Scott Dixon plays in Sylvia. (This seems to be a recurrent talent of Scott Dixon—playing a large number of the supporting characters in a play. I’m not sure if this is written into the play as it was in Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation of Turn of the Screw last fall or if this is a Commonweal invention. But it is fun to watch). Dixon plays the recurring role of Tom, a New York tough who is strangely in touch with the complex relationship between man and dog and husband and wife. (Tom’s dog is named Buster, a much safer name for a man’s dog than the gendered Sylvia, he warns.) In each appearance, Tom has read another pop psychology book and has another insight into the relationship between a man and his wife and a man and his dog. Greg seems to find Tom’s insights helpful, but mostly his accidental meetings with Tom give Greg the opportunity to talk openly about his relationship with his dog. Tom’s thinking certainly is more substantial than the other two characters Dixon plays: Kate’s former college classmate and self-proclaimed expert on New York society and Kate’s androgynous and self-obsessed therapist, Leslie.

While Dixon plays these two cross-dressing roles effectively and to many of the play’s biggest laughs, these two characters move the play outside of what an audience can accept as real. This is a bit of irony: the anthropomorphic dog plays like realism while the socialite driven to the scotch decanter by an over-friendly dog plays like a bad sitcom; the pet seems a living character while the therapist languishes as a caricature.

The strength of Gurney’s play, and the strength of this production, lies with the ability to make Sweeney’s character feel like a living character—a dog. A human playing a dog is certainly a comedic element, but I find it a satisfyingly comedic element rich in its subtly and physicality. I’m not as satisfied with the play’s willingness to embrace the cheap laugh, the laugh that seems to be the staple of all too many summer comedies. Of course, this type of comedy wouldn’t be used if it did not resonate with play-goers. On the way out of the theater, people were talking about Sylvia, about their own pets, but mostly about Dixon’s portrayal of Leslie the therapist. One fellow patron declared that his favorite character in the play was the therapist.

Sylvia plays in repertory with Little Shop of Horrors through August 19.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre (www.commonwealtheatre.org)