Come home for the holidays with ‘The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s’ at Butler Little Theatre
Tom Dudzick’s play “The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s” drops the audience into Chet’s Bar and Grill in Buffalo, N.Y., in the middle of the deadly 1977 blizzard. The bar, which a family ran and lived above, has been sold. The matriarch, Ellen Pazinski, is moving to a condo and her adult children have gathered with a mission in mind: convince Mom that their developmentally disabled brother, George, is slipping into early dementia and needs to be institutionalized.
Stakes rise as a driving ban is put into place and family tensions come to a head. Heavy stuff, to be sure, but the Butler Little Theatre’s production intersperses moments of nostalgia and arguing with levity and love, just like a real family holiday.
Dudzick is the Paul Simon of the Rust Belt, and director Jerry Johnston focuses on the script’s family dynamics and humor.
Johnston has directed all three of Dudzick’s Buffalo trilogy of plays at BLT, using some of the same actors in all three productions over almost two decades, and he does so with a genuine love for the subject matter and characters.
The set crew, headed by Art Black, and the set decorators, headed by Kris Bearer, create an authentic sense of place in Chet’s Bar. The lighting plan is simple (with the amusing addition of a never-ending snowstorm lit by streetlights glimpsed through the bar’s window), and the tchotchkes and the sound cues (by Philip Ball and others) create a neighborhood bar that seems authentic (if a bit too clean).
The actors’ performances draw the audience into this whirlwind of a weekend. Rudy, played by Sam Thinnes, is the youngest sibling who has moved to New York City. With dreams of being a writer, he’s working at the DMV and struggling to find his voice. Thinnes plays him as a man at a crossroads who realizes that his chances are running out, so he keeps the jokes coming to avoid revealing his fears.
Ellen (Katie Moore) is a flurry of motherly energy and activity as she prepares to move with one hand while working to keep her family together with the other.
Her daughter, Annie (Deanna Sparrow) works hard to break through her mom’s busyness just to be noticed. Sparrow depicts a woman so desperate to be seen by her mother that even inconveniences and small injuries are inflated into dramatic cries for attention. Sparrow does strong work embodying a character who doesn’t seem to realize that she’s becoming like her mother even as she strives to get her mother to see her.
George, played by Matt Leslie, provides the points around which the play revolves. With few actual lines, Leslie portrays an intellectually disabled man slowly but surely slipping into early-onset dementia. An able-bodied actor playing a disabled character is fraught with the perils of stereotype and ugly buffoonery, but Leslie rises to the challenge and plays George with compassion.
Steve Kalina plays Eddie, the eldest son, as a man who feels that he must shoulder the weight of his siblings’ needs and the stress of being a father. He’s a Vietnam veteran who is resentful of his undrafted brother and a man still dealing with the trauma of coming home.
Coming home might be a perfect theme for this holiday-ish play. People return to their childhood homes during the holiday carrying the full weight of their adult loves, losses and desires, and they may find themselves smashed back down into their old family roles like shrugging on a too-tight sweater. These are characters who are itchy, scratchy, and sweaty, reminded of who they were rather than who they are, yet committed to carrying on with a brave face and quick joke.
“The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s” at the Butler Little Theatre continues through Saturday. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Tickets can be purchased at butlerlittletheatre.com. “The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s” runs approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes with a 15-minute intermission.
