Dazzling Performance

The Actor’s Repertory Theatre will give Spokane audiences a look at one of New York’s hottest new playwrights with “The Dazzle,” a story of two eccentric brothers. Playwright Richard Greenberg has had two straight smash successes with “Take Me Out” and “A Naked Girl on the Appian Way.” Before that, he dazzled off-Broadway with 2002’s “The Dazzle,” the story of the real-life Collyer brothers, famous New York eccentrics.

Homer and Langley Collyer became the stuff of legend in 1947, when they were discovered in their Fifth Avenue brownstone, crushed beneath accumulated junk – mountains of old newspapers, a Model T chassis and 14 grand pianos.

“The Dazzle” is Greenberg’s attempt to imagine how these two brothers arrived at that bizarre juncture, although he admits that the story is highly fictionalized. His author’s note says the play is “based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know almost nothing.”

In Greenberg’s story, Langley is an accomplished pianist, yet the kind of abstracted genius who can lapse into hours of silent reverie. Homer is a lawyer, and more grounded in reality.

The arrival of Milly, an heiress with dreams of the Bohemian life, upsets their carefully preserved insularity.

Greenberg takes the brothers from their relatively elegant younger years through their increasingly obsessive middle years and finally into their hermit-like older years.

New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the original New York production “as eccentric, obsessive and ultimately messy as the Collyers themselves.”

Brantley also credited Greenberg’s script with “flashes of a daring originality that is hardly the common coin of the New York theater these days.”

Donald Lyons of the New York Post was completely won over, calling it an “amazing new play.”

And Michael Feingold of the Village Voice raved about “Greenberg’s elegantly turned writing, with its wonderfully shimmering mix of passion and philosophic epigram.”

The ARt production is directed by artistic director Michael Weaver. The two brothers are played by two ARt veterans: Tralen Doler, who is originally from Spokane and now is a New York actor, director and choreographer; and Matthew Ahrens, who recently appeared in the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

Playing Milly is Julie Zimmer, who most recently appeared as Mary Magdalene in a Florida production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and who is making her ARt debut.