If there are several things wrong with Now Circa Then, the charming relationship play at Ybor City’s Silver Meteor Gallery, there are also a few things that are definitely right. First among these is the acting of the delightful Marlene Peralta, who plays Margie, a complex, perhaps neurotic young Dominican immigrant trying to make ends meet in New York City. Peralta’s work in this part is so convincingly effortless, I have difficulty believing that the actress and the role aren’t one and the same. Whether she’s secretly sleeping in her place of business, cautiously attempting to understand her working partner, or jumping his bones like some famished animal finally come to the oasis, this actress puts on a magically persuasive show and never once falters. Her counterpart, Nick Hoop, is also solidly credible, but his character Gideon has less to do, and a straighter transit over two acts: Where Peralta is a revelation, he’s merely likable. The other strength of Now Circa Then is author Carly Mensch’s psychologizing: She seems to understand precisely what can happen when a sexually assertive but troubled young woman meets a sincere and horny but inexperienced young man.
One small clue: Things move pretty quickly. And it’s the guy who’d better hold on to the handrail.
Peralta’s acting is so special, it buoys the whole production.
Detracting from these virtues are a few confusions and failings, some of them the playwright’s, some of them the designers’. To begin with, the writer: Mensch would have us believe that Margie and Gideon’s job is to act the part, in a museum, of an immigrant couple on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1890s. So at various times the two performers address the audience as “Julian and Josephine Glockner,” Prussian newcomers to America who can tell us about how much things cost 120 years ago (a sack of potatoes for 10 cents), or how marriages were arranged and livelihoods earned. Problem is, “Julian” and “Josephine” keep stepping out of character, often in ways so extreme, it’s unthinkable that they’d keep their jobs for days, much less months. Next is the unlikeliness of a recognizably Hispanic woman with no acting background being hired, in a city full of job-seeking thespians, to play a Germanic woman in a museum dedicated to the immigrant experience. It’s equally unlikely that she would have a shot at an assistant curator’s job, as the script clearly suggests. A related and larger problem is the disconnect between the Margie and Gideon scenes and the Glockner segments: The juxtaposition of the two tends to suggest exactly nothing, as if playwright Mensch were unaware of all the opportunities her own conception was granting her. The result is that eventually we focus on the contemporary couple almost exclusively, and learn to treat the Glockner story as a nearly meaningless distraction.
If there are defects in the play, they’re exacerbated by flaws in the design. For example, there’s the pre-curtain music (sound designer uncredited in my program) which features Jewish klezmer tunes having nothing to do with the four non-Jewish characters (well, I suppose Gideon could be Jewish) portrayed by the two actors. Next, Michael A. Murphy’s set is dominated by a sizable, pricy-looking Oriental rug that the impecunious Glockners could surely not afford, but that we’re supposed to accept along with their homely sewing machine, pot-belly stove, and other indices of a strapped life in a tenement apartment. Fortunately, Ryan Bernier’s costume design is unobjectionable, and his direction is generally sharp and kinetic. But how can he allow Hoop-as-Gideon to say twice that he’s planning to grow a beard, when he already has one and we’re looking at it? And does he really expect us to believe that Gideon’s exceptionally exaggerated coughing fits as Julian Glockner wouldn’t lead to complaints from the museum’s visitors?
These problems are genuine, but whenever the relationship between Gideon and Margie is centerstage, you can almost forget them. For that matter, Peralta’s acting is so special, it buoys the whole production. See her register the information when Gideon confides that she reminds him of his late, lamented mother. Watch her say that she has no sexual interest in Gideon while she throws her body at him in a forceful but still somehow unconscious seduction. Then watch her face when Gideon wants to know a little about her last boyfriend, and she’ll only offer: “Whatever.” The fact is, author Mensch knows this character and so does actress Peralta. Together, they put the real in realism; and make Now Circa Then worth seeing.
Now Circa Then
Three of five stars
Silver Meteor Gallery, 2213 E. Sixth Ave., Ybor City. Through Aug. 22: Fri.-Mon., 8 p.m.
$15.
813-300-3585. Event page on Facebook.
This article appears in Aug 18-25, 2016.
