Playwright Mark Scharf has created a work as classic as its setting in his 26th annual Baltimore Playwrights Festival offering, Last Night at the Owl Bar, which continues through Sunday at the Chesapeake Arts Center Studio Theatre.
Scharf, who has 40 plays under his belt, again shows his gift for creating a uniquely appropriate and welcoming environment, natural and clever dialogue and contemporary characters with familiar human frailties - companions worth spending two hours with.
Anyone with a fondness for the Owl Bar in downtown Baltimore's Belvedere Hotel will feel at home in the Brooklyn Park theater. Set designer Michelle Datz projects a photographic slide replica of the wise speakeasy owl ("the more he saw the less he spoke") who stares above the actual bar to provide authenticity. Datz also uses props lent by the Owl Bar. She artfully defines the bar space by ending the pub's floor tiles in a broken pattern immediately beyond the tables.
One disadvantage of a pub setting is that much of the action is limited to conversations at tables, which can produce a static element. However, director Randy Dalmas does what he can to provide motion through moving waiters and patrons, and keeps the action briskly paced. Dalmas has actors enter and leave through the theater and uses the front-row space for actors to address audience members and draw them into the action.
Actors converse with the audience, as might naturally happen in a pub setting. Two actors play multiple characters that include waiters, dwellers of distant locations and ghosts of vanished spouses. Together they help to tell the story of Jonathan Caldwell, a theater director whose life needs some direction.
In an opening monologue, Jonathan welcomes the audience into the cozy setting - and his life. Self-centered and needy, Jonathan is living with a friend, Max, after separating from his wife of 20 years and losing his two children in a custody battle. Actor Steve Lichtenstein's Jonathan is equally adept at delivering stand-up comedy and relating the ups and downs of his fling with Max's ex-girlfriend, Annie.
Once a month, Jonathan meets his widowed friend Rebecca (Katzi Carver) at the Owl Bar, where they mostly discuss his problems in finding a soul mate. Rebecca knows Jonathan is better than his actions would sometimes indicate. Without self-pity Carver conveys Rebecca's sadness at losing her "beshert" husband and her loneliness at her daughter's recent move out of their home.
