SALVAGE Kicks Off the Season at Dorset Theatre Festival
It’s not necessarily about Vermont or the larger Upper Valley, but it could be.
Lena Kaminsky’s play Salvage, recently opened at the Dorset Theatre Festival, is set in a small town dump, where castoffs, both material and human, are discarded and just possibly redeemed.
Carla (Eva Kaminsky, the playwright’s sister in real life) arrives back in the small town where her mother still owns the family home. It’s a desultory return for middle-aged Carla after having lost her job. She appears, guarded, at the local transfer station with a carload of mirrors and meets Kenny (Robbie Sublett) who gives her the grand tour and peppers her with questions that are mostly unwelcome.
Nonetheless, in true small town fashion, Carla and Kenny begin to find connections between them, because the personal history of small towns is always revealed in a game of who knows whom. When a second dump employee, Elaine (Marcia DeBonis) appears, the web expands even further when the two women discover that Carla’s former high-school teacher played a significant role in both of their lives.
One standout of this production is the writing. The dialogue is true, not stylized. It reads like any ordinary conversation. The same is true of the acting. All of the characters seem to be people you have known, or know, behaving in ways that are familiar: the intonation in their voices, the gestures, the back-and-forth of misunderstandings.
The set by Christopher and Justin Swader is just about perfect. Plastics, paper, aluminum cans, each segregated into its own respective niche. And then there is the “treasures” area, where certain discarded items of possible value are free for the taking. A globe remains an unadopted treasure throughout the production, most assuredly geographically out of date. No dump is silent; the noise of cans and bottles being tossed is authentic, though from time to time the clatter managed to step on the dialogue.
Do not expect overly dramatic scenes in which the actors get to chew the scenery. The playwright is skilled at keeping a steady pace, an unrolling of the action and character development that, like the dialogue, feels natural. The characters’ lives are moving, changing, as their relationships with one another deepen. They search for and appear to find their footing, and in the end, to hold some small hope.
Because the characters, the set, and the dialog are so relatable, the play is a comedy, rooted in recognition that invites the audience to sympathize and laugh at the vicissitudes of coping with modern life. Scenes between Carla and her computer as she is trying to build a career as a specialist in essential oils are particularly funny. Lena Kaminsky states: “Much like the rural town that inspired this play, I think the themes of community and connection will resonate with the audience here, and folks will leave feeling hopeful.“
Salvage runs through July 5 at the Dorset Playhouse in Dorset, Vermont. Tickets and more information are available here.
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If you go, here are some other Dorset/Manchester area attractions: The Marble House Project, (pictured above), an artists’ retreat (so picturesque) that is currently accepting applications from artists of all kinds, and, like this blog, is unique in including culinary arts as one of the categories in its residencies; an in-town quarry swimming hole; Southern Vermont Arts Center, where you can dine, as we did, at its in-house restaurant, curATE café, while taking a gander at the construction of a new building that will house the Lyman Orton (he of Vermont Country Store fame) collection of Vermont art, previously reviewed here; Hildene, former summer home and gardens of Robert Todd Lincoln and his wife Mary Harlan Lincoln; and lastly, numerous outlet stores including Orvis, Eddie Bauer, and Eileen Fisher.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.