Upstart's 'The Violet Hour' mixes literary virtuosity and big laughs

by Lawson Taitte

Dallas Morning News

April 1, 2011

Dallas has now had two productions of Richard Greenberg’s extraordinary comedy The Violet Hour, at Dallas Theater Center six years ago and currently at Upstart Productions — both far more satisfying than the 2003 Broadway version.

Susan Sargeant directed the one at Upstart, which opened Wednesday. Her interpretation emphasizes the play’s literary virtuosity — entirely appropriate for a play about a fledgling publisher, John Pace Seavering (Marcus Stimac), who can’t decide which book to launch first with his seed capital. Should it be the novel by his friend Denis (Austin Tindle), whose prolixity is modeled on Thomas Wolfe’s and whose love life is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s? Or the memoirs of his secret paramour, Jessie (Candy Williams), whose charms combine those of Josephine Baker and Billie Holliday?

Stimac sets the pace and tone of the show with his manly, measured delivery of Seavering’s formal rhetoric. You believe him as the spoiled rich kid whose outlook on life changed irreversibly in the Great War. The impulsive Denis is a good fit for Tindle, and Williams projects Jessie’s sexual mystique and tragic undercurrents. Unfortunately, Tindle and Williams suffer most from the often ill-fitting costumes. They also don’t quite make us believe in their doomed genius.

Barrett Nash plays Rosamund Plinth, the beautiful but troubled heiress Denis wants to marry. We know that the character, like Zelda Fitzgerald, is not going to end well. Nash shows us Rosamund’s instability in subtle ways that get downright creepy. She’s the most darling, and most fatal, of femmes fatales...(Read more at www.dallasnews.com)