The Pentacle Theatre’s 70th season hasn’t started as planned, with ice delaying opening night of Brighton Beach Memoirs, but that hasn’t stopped the cast and crew.
With last weekend’s scheduled performances canceled, they’ve been rehearsing over Zoom, said director Jo Dodge. They hope that the show will go on this weekend if road conditions on the steel hill leading up to the theater and parking lot allow.
“The tragedy of the first weekend, that was a new one in my experience,” Dodge said. “It was obviously so difficult for us all, we were so ready for opening night and then there was none.”
Brighton Beach Memoirs, written by Neil Simon, is an autobiographical and comedic look at his life as a teenager in Brooklyn in 1937. The narrator, Eugene Morris Jerome, is Jewish and the son of Polish immigrants, and the family feels the pressure of tough economic times and the looming threat of war. It’s the first play in a trilogy by Simon, with later installments showing his time in World War II.
“Neil Simon, in my opinion, was one of the most effective playwrights ever,” Dodge said. “If we learn his script word for word, it almost has a rhythm to it. That is amazing for comedy especially, but also for more serious times. It just is so complete.”
Beverly Freitas is playing Eugene’s mother Kate, and said in a joint phone call with Dodge that she’s enjoyed being able to practice with the cast over Zoom as opposed to reading the lines alone while waiting for the ice to thaw.
It’s her first acting role since being in Romeo and Juliet around the 5th grade. Inspired by her son and his fiancée who work as actors in Chicago, she took one of Dodge’s acting and improv workshop classes on a whim in 2019. She fell in love with it, and started volunteering with the theater working backstage and doing lights and sound.
“If all my college professors taught class like Jo Dodge does, I would have been much more successful in college than I was,” she said.
Dodge said that in the audition stage, she hires by gut instinct. Freitas was up against several other people, but Dodge had seen Freitas’ potential in the classroom. The entire cast has varying levels of experience, and Eugene is played by 15-year-old Porter DeBacker, a South Salem student who Dodge said is so talented he must have fallen from “actor’s heaven.”
“They’re all amazing,” she said, and that she was stunned by the actors’ work together.
The play had successful special community and student shows last week, but with fewer in attendance than usual because of the incoming storm. Freitas got to enjoy the difference between how jokes play during a rehearsal versus to a crowd.
The play takes place over three days, and each character has three different costumes. Dodge said costumes for period pieces are more difficult, but that Karen McCarty did a wonderful job researching to assemble the wardrobe.
The play has a two-story set of the home, built by the Pentacle’s Technical Director Chris Benham. It includes a downstairs with a living room, bedrooms upstairs and the outside of the home and yard.
“In our small theater, it’s not an easy thing to do. But he did it, and it’s lovely,” Dodge said.
Dodge said the backstage people are just as important as the actors, with an “insane” number of props moving on and off the stage including dishes and silverware for an entire dining room.
Dodge has been at the Pentacle since 1979, and directed her first play in 1980, and Brighton Beach Memoirs is her 50th.
“I’ve been there so long that it’s comical,” she said.
When Dodge first arrived, the Pentacle was celebrating its 25th year. She’s watched kids grow up on stage. Though the 70th season is off to an unconventional start, she’s amazed by the theater’s milestone.
“I am so fortunate that I’ve been able to be there that long, and to see these people. And it kind of is like a family. Once you do a show together with people, it never goes away. There’s always that cluster of memories and love that happen, and keeps happening every year,” she said.
Freitas described the theater’s impact as the ripples from a rock dropped in a still lake.
“You’re embraced by the entire community, and welcomed with open arms, which I have been,” she said. “It’s truly a thing you don’t see very often in the world.”
Her son visited from Chicago over Christmas, and “got to do something that I know Jo Dodge does not give permission to do very often.” He got to see the show during the rehearsal stage, if he promised to be quiet and sit in the back.
“I said, ‘All I want to know is: was I believable, and did you like the show?’” she recalled. He said she was. And he added one other thing.
“‘He says, ‘You have great instincts,’” Freitas said, and she and Dodge laughed.
The Pentacle Theatre is located at 324 52nd Ave. N.W.
The theater will post weather closure updates on its website and on its Facebook page. Ticket holders for canceled shows can call the box office to reschedule.
Tickets are available online or by calling the box office at 503-485-4300, and range from $22 to $48. Students and Oregon Trail Card holders are eligible for half-off prices in select seating areas. Tickets can also be purchased at the downtown Salem box office the day of performances, at 197 Liberty St. S.E.
Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251.
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Abbey McDonald joined the Salem Reporter in 2022. She previously worked as the business reporter at The Astorian, where she covered labor issues, health care and social services. A University of Oregon grad, she has also reported for the Malheur Enterprise, The News-Review and Willamette Week.
