Retired Cornell Professor of English Debra Fried tells you what you need to know!
Rosa and Blanca at The Cherry is fantastic fun. As performed by Ithaca’s top theater talent, it’s an unmissable wild ride into a new grove in a familiar woods — radically weird, smart, unpredictable, liberating, Grinch-spirited yet playful and shrewdly faux-whimsical. “Fractured Fairy Tales” on acid! — a hard play to get right in tone, but Samuel Buggeln’s cast nails it. From the moment a sprightly grass-loving forest-dweller (Sylvie Yntema, the Cherry’s sparkling Rosalind two summers ago) bounded across the turf, I was drawn into this absurdist, forest-dark comedy with its prickly and tough-minded silliness, and admired how The Cherry handled its challenges at every level, from casting and Elissa Martin’s costumes to Rosalina Maassen’s cartoon-perfect sound cues. You won’t have lately seen anything quite this goofball-intelligent and snarky-serious and Grimm-ly grim. It’s what live theater is for – the only medium in which one can imagine playwright Rebekka Kricheldorf’s cracked dystopian episode being told. Two plucky, early-teen sisters Rosa (Erica Steinhagen) and Blanca (Darcy Rose) escape the city to go live in the woods. That’s the comic premise, but you won’t be able to predict from that how deep into the forest of your own expectations the story — innocent but for grown-ups — will take you, or how funny the trip will be.
Outstanding work by everyone in the show, but one can single out, for gleeful approach to the script’s demands, Dean Robinson as a surprise groovy visitor who comes dancing into Rosa and Blanca’s grove — a hilariously meaty performance for a ‘vegetarian’ — as well as Steinhagen’s bouncy Rosa and Robin Guiver as a pesky, potty-mouthed neighbor. A feather in the cap, in a small role, for G-Quan Booker who wins mutterings from fellow woodland tea-party friends for always raising a toast to ‘world peace’ — go to the show to see why. This joke was one of my favorite moments of this one-act’s swift ninety minutes, spent happily in director-designer Buggeln’s disenchanted grassy grove, like a retro-disco playground popped up out of the turf.
Rosa and Blanca is a serious comedy with turbulent undercurrents but no preaching — instead, a fair share of bleating and baa-ing, grumbling and sister-sibling rivalry, not to mention basketball free throws and a gurgling, hidden swamp. Somewhere not far away is the city from which Mother (Susannah Berryman) visits, urging her daughters to return to the cocktail-parties-in-skyscrapers world they escaped. Will the girls return? What will happen to young nature-loving sisters Rosa and Blanca? What lies in store for their friends and rivals in the grassy-green woods?
No spoilers, except to say that the picture of our shared fate the play leaves you with might not be rosy, but The Cherry’s Rosa and Blanca will leave you glad you got the news from this notable theatrical talent from Germany, in a translation by Neil Blackadder.
What’s not to like about Kricheldorf’s twisted brand of bitter-sweet, loopy, insanely irreverent and freshly bold sanity? What’s not to celebrate about the theater artists at The Cherry, who take risks with new European plays and bring to Ithaca audiences an edgy fairy fancy and fearsome frolic like Rosa and Blanca? Go visit the woods at The Cherry soon, and see who drops by.
Debra Fried, Nov. 11, 2024