Curtain call: Engaging ‘View’

An abstract linear stage designed and lighted with additional projection design by Daniel C. Walker creates an amorphous platform, which is embellished with splashes of pictures by projectionist Shawn Buitendorp. Images of Brunelleschi’s Dome and of the interiors of the city of Florence’s art museums invite the imagination to picture this earlier time.

Costumes designed by Kate Hudson Koskinen and sewn by a crew of seven seamstresses add to the period’s ambience. Additinally, Callis’ careful use of musical selections by Beethoven and Edward Elgar complete the mood and sense of this long ago century.

There are more than two dozen actors in this piece and several stand out with deep characterizations and clearly spoken words. Heading up this group in the lead roles of Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, the repressed lovers-to-be, are Sally Hecksel and Michael Boxleitner. Hecksel is carefully and conventionally restrained throughout most of the play, relying on occasional asides to the audience to reveal some of the inner workings of her thoughts. Boxleitner, only slightly more expressive, manages to convey an inner exuberance waiting to bubble up and out.

Callis has brought in veteran actors Rick Dethelfsen in a supporting role to play George’s father, while Sandy Hudson Thomasson plays the spinsterish Miss Catherine Alan. Dethlefsen brings nuances of aged wisdom to this role, and Thomasson is a treasure to watch, both elegant and articulate.

Other actors in the play are not quite as engagingly articulate. While all of the student actors have mastered the tongue-twisting ancient rapidfire, bird-chirpy affected speech patterns of this era, they are almost completely undone by the sound-swallowing echo chamber of the Dart’s acoustics. Sitting in the front row, there were moments when whole lines of dialogue went by this critic without a hint of knowing what was actually being said.

Devin Fraught, in the role of Lucy Honeychurch’s soon to be rejected fiancée Cecil Vyse, was a distant scholarly twit in the best sense of the word. A nude scene of three young men frolicking in a woodland pond provided comic relief. Characters named only “Italian Driver” and “Italian Girl” played by Zachery Riley and Ann Szabo got great laughs with exaggerated animation and the longest lip-locked kissing scene in the history of Lansing theatre.

“A Room with a View”

Lansing Community College Performing Arts 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14-Saturday, Nov. 15; 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16 $15/10 seniors/$5 students Dart Auditorium, 500 N. Capitol Ave., Lansing (517) 483-1488, lcc.edu/ showinfo