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Itheater boca3/17/2023 Showing up also is very much on Marty’s mind only moments later when, in another beautifully crafted, poignantly delivered speech, he recounts for Mo, as if he were there, the joy and fulfillment he felt playing league baseball in his neighborhood as a teen his failed opportunity to become part of his beloved New York Yankees his profound disappointment that his father never showed up to see his son play “just one game, one practice even. Marty shoos Janet away when she tries to occupy Mo’s regular, now vacant, space next to Marty on a bench outside the Royal Palm’s Club. Showing up is very much on the mind of Royal Palm’s resident curmudgeon, Marty, a generally excessive Robert Zukerman (who also plays an 80-something hard-of-hearing retired rabbi who is not afraid to invoke the name of God when he cheats, in a good cause, in a highly competitive community golf tournament). It’s a sentiment that goes to the very heart of “Boca,” particularly in the second half. You have taught me the meaning of a word we all learn in kindergarten: community.” What reads like mawkish sentiment on a printed page sounds very much like revelation coming from Rupp’s mouth. It’s about people who show up for each other. “I found the women who, over the next decade, would show up for me,” Susan says, adding later on, “This place is about so much more than palm trees and fancy cars and tan lines. Instead, she tells an intensely personal story about her battle with a degenerative illness, Fuchs Syndrome, “when the cells in the clear part of your eye start to die ” her embarrassment in a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe failure at her first appearance at the condo swimming pool her recovery from a cornea transplant and the discovery when she opens her eyes after surgery of a room filled with blue balloons, her favorite color, a gesture, it turns out, from her “non-friends” at the pool. In what is easily Provenz most accomplished writing in “Boca” (I suspect because it’s her most personal), Susan disregards prepared remarks filled with boilerplate about why she is best suited to be president. Susan is running for president of the condo board. While the first act drifts, Provenz comes to the heart of her matter in the second half, beginning right from the act’s opening scene in a speech Susan is giving at a candidates’ night before residents of the Royal Palm community. She’s a compassionate, smart, human being. No deep, underlying moral lessons here, Provenz has said.Īs it happens, Provenz can’t help herself. It is a program, Provenz and “Boca” director Julianne Boyd (who also is BSC’s artistic director) have said, that is designed purely for laughs and (there certainly were laughs aplenty at “Boca’s” opening Wednesday night). Provenz was commissioned to write this evening of 12 short interrelated plays through Barrington Stage’s Sydelle Blatt New Works Commissioning Program. Susan (who is splendidly played by Rupp - more on that in just a moment) may tip her hand early in “Boca” but it’s not until the very beginning of “Boca’s” second act that she tips Provenz’s hand as well. So, Susan has decided to make Luis the prize in a winner-take-all round of Texas Hold ‘Em with her as dealer and Janet and Elaine vying for the jackpot. She wants to make sure someone will be there for him after her death. The only remaining loose end is her “hot” Latin husband. She has tied all her affairs up in neat little bundles. At this point, having survived a life-threatening illness, she has mortality on her mind. For this afternoon of poker, Susan has invited to her condo two women who also live at Royal Palm - Janet (April Ortiz), a three-time widow on the prowl for a fourth husband, and Elaine (Peggy Pharr Wilson), a widow from Long Island who shares her condo unit with some Pomeranians and is so lonely for companionship she will resort to anything - as we see later in the first act - to get a boyfriend. Noodle, from their upscale suburban Connecticut home. PITTSFIELD - Very early in Jessica Provenz’ ho-hum comedy “Boca” at Barrington Stage Company’s Production Center Tent, there is a friendly, high-stakes poker game run by a retired kindergarten teacher named Susan (Debra Jo Rupp), a nice Catholic Wellesley College alum who has moved to Royal Palm Polo Club, a gated senior community in Boca Raton, Fla., with her husband, Luis (Gilbert Cruz), and her sock puppet, Mr. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes (including one intermission) Where: Production Center Tent, 34 Laurel St., Pittsfield With: Robert Zukerman, Kenneth Tigar, Peggy Pharr Wilson, Debra Jo Rupp, April Ortiz, Gilbert Cruz
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