Production blends two great art forms

Is it dance, or is it theater?

Choreographer Kaye Weinstein Gary has teamed up with director Billy Christopher Maupin in a successful collaborative effort inspired by the essays and short plays of award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

Much like Wasserstein, Gary is drawn to the humor inherent in the ordinary and the intimacy of the theater.

"The Words of Wendy Wasserstein" opened at the Firehouse Theatre on Friday -- the third anniversary of Wasserstein's death.

Gary's work might well have begun as an explorative study of Wasserstein's questions, "What is a story? What is a valid story?" It would be easy to allow Wasserstein's powerful and poignant words to dictate the direction of the work, but Gary had something more in mind.

Sections of Wasserstein's short plays, "Medea," "Boy Meets Girl" and "Workout," as well as the longer works, "The Heidi Chronicles" and "Isn't It Romantic," the essays, "Afternoon of a Fan" and "Shiksa Goddess," and a speech delivered to an alumnae association are interspersed, blended or paired with Gary's simple, uncluttered and evocative movement on a Spartan set populated with telephones and their long, curly cords.

The cast charged with bringing Gary's vision to life included four actors and four dancers -- among them, Phillip Skaggs, a member of the Richmond Ballet, and Katherine Lynch, a retired member and now a teacher with the Richmond Ballet.

Skaggs and Lynch gave physical form, from pedestrian movements to a tango, to the words of Wasserstein as spoken by Maggie Roop and Patrick Andrews in the six-scene short play, "Boy Meets Girl," the tale of a professional, 30-something urban couple (and their psychiatrists), which was beguilingly narrated by Nico Aquino.

Wasserstein's overarching theme is the female experience, much of it drawn from her own life and the lives of her family.

But her work also has a peculiarly New York, Jewish edge to it and is not only topical but also specific to a generation that was born in the 1950s and came of age in the 1970s.

As a born New Yorker of that generation, I found much of what was said to be nostalgically familiar, but it may be alien to a younger generation or opaque to anyone not intimate with New York culture.

Not so Wasserstein's monologue on the superwoman who does it all, delivered and danced by Gary (who did both exceptionally well).

The point of "She's Exemplary and Exhausted" is as relevant today as it was a decade or two ago, and the utterances of the Greek Chorus in "Medea" are sprinkled with timeless non sequiturs (e.g., "We are so upset, we speak in unison").

Overall, the collaborative effort was virtually seamless, from the telephone-themed prologue to the answering-machine messages from "Isn't It Romantic," interspersed throughout the sections, to the interactive "Workout" that had the audience dancing in their seats.