No Rest for Rip Van Winkle

Some people spend Labor Day weekend barbecuing, spending time with family, and generally taking in the last rays of Summer before heading back to school and/or preparing for the upcoming Winter months. I, however, do not have that luxury, as I work in a store where the busy season does not run from November into January, but rather July into September, culminating in a Labor Day final push. My Labor Day weekend, literally, has been spent with almost every waking moment at my store. However, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, as I had the pleasure of attending the final performance of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s 2018 Season which happened to be Rip Van Winkle, Or Cut the Old Moon Into Stars, adapted specifically for HVSF by Seth Bockley.

Anyone who has grown up in our area (And across the country really, but especially this area since Irving set all of his stories locally to here) had to read Rip Van Winkle (Or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but that is not the story of the moment) in school, so most of us are familiar with the plot. On the surface, it is a sad story with little substance. Rip Van Winkle, a lazy drunk who rarely gets his work done, wanders into the mountains after a fight with his wife. After encountering some demons in the woods, he accepts a drink from them and falls into an enchanted sleep. Upon waking up, twenty years have passed. He attempts to return to the life that he left in his own yesterday, only to find that life has moved on without him and that his daughter – only four years old when he left – is now a grown woman who has had to grow up without a father.

When one digs deeper, however, it is clear that there are actually many layers to the story, which this production challenged the audience to find. Sara Van Winkle – played by Maribel Martinez – even starts the show by saying that her interpretation of the story’s moral is trying to figure out how to allow someone back into your life after they (Seemingly) walked out of it. This production challenged the audience throughout the course of the play to find their own moral to the story, sporadically throwing out ideas and encouraging us as the audience to think a little bit digger and ask ourselves what we believe it is.

The acting was strong in this production. Maribel Martinez was delightful as the whimsical Sara, who did not play to the stereotype of a female character who is ahead of her time and longs for adventure instead of a husband. Liam Craig was extremely lovable as the very lost Rip, and not once did I lose interest in his portrayal of a character who could have gotten very annoying very quickly. Robyn Kerr played the stressed and disappointed Geertje Van Winkle with just enough humor and quiet strength for the audience to feel both her frustrations and her resilience. Bringing up the cast of principals was Dante DeLeo, who played the stuck in logic Dolph Heyliger and was a perfect contrast to Martinez’s Sara. Playing smaller roles were Alison Anthoine, Adam Auslander, Jim Cairl, Philip Condyles, Gretchen Craig, Alex Danilov, Bernadette Humphrey-Nicol, Suzanne Johnson, Christine Kelly, Lourdes Laifer, John Lane, William Lemanski, Jess Lyke, Brody Marcus, Sean McNall, and Sarah Ristine. The cast was filled out by an energetic ensemble including Roger Acevedo, Nani Bridgewater, Laura Danilov, Yudy Gomez, Michele Humphrey-Nicol, David Kupras, Lindsey Marcus, Joseph Merriam, Emma Myers, Ellen O’Neill, James O’Neill, Celia Reissig, Scarlett Ricker, Melissa Shawcross, Sally Sirota, Julie Smith, Christian Urbina, and Tara Vamos.

All in all, this was a great production to see after an extremely long weekend at work. The morals I got from it? That everything can be taken away in an instant, and that sometimes, in order to figure out what you have, you need to lose everything. I congratulate HVSF on a job well done, and I look forward to seeing what they have in store for next year.

www.HVShakespeare.org