Five Stars for Third

THE BASICS: This comedy-drama by Wendy Wasserstein, her last completed work, is receiving its WNY premiere at the Kavinoky Theatre, under the direction of Peter Palmisano. THIRD plays weekends through February 6th, and runs nearly two hours with its single intermission.

THUMBNAIL SKETCH: The action unfolds at a small, prestigious New England college during the 2002-3 academic year. Laurie Jameson, a "star" professor in the English department, is not enjoying her life, and is beginning to fall apart at the seams. Her husband and daughters, not meeting her high expectations, have distanced themselves, her demented father is failing rapidly, and her best friend at the college has recurrent cancer. Menopause isn't being kind to her, either. She spends all her free time with CNN, seething as Bush/Cheney and company trade our domestic liberties for a specious security. When underclassman Woodson Bull III hands in a sophisticated psycho-sexual analysis of KING LEAR for her lit class, Jameson assumes that this "overprivileged preppy jock" has copped it from the internet. She even presses charges against him with the university, to make an example of a student she has summarily dismissed as a "walking red state". But things are not always as they seem, or as we expect them to be, and Prof. Jameson has some lessons of her own to learn before the final curtain.

CAST AND PRODUCTION: Eileen Dugan is in top form here as the complex central character. She manages to both infuriate us and engender our sympathy, no mean feat! Patrick Cameron is pleasant and fully believable as the starry-eyed undergrad, whose feelings for the great professor change greatly during the course of their interaction. Saul Elkin is spot on as the doddering Dad, a real life Lear for Jameson's real life Cordelia. (Wasserstein is not at all subtle about this parallelism, but hey, it works.) Colleen Gaughan as the wise, multiply wounded Professor Gordon, and Anne Roaldi as Jameson's put-off younger daughter round out a first rate cast. Director Palmisano strikes a nice balance between the comic and dramatic elements, and keeps what could be a very static, talky show from ever feeling that way. My only serious quibble is with David King's stark, simple set, which looks like it was left over from an old SDP production of JULIUS CAESAR. It doesn't properly suggest academia, and it doesn't function well as a one-size-fits-all backdrop for the play's various settings.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Playwright Wasserstein hits a home run on her tragic last at-bat. And it obviously took some courage to point out that prejudice, profiling, and glib assumptions are as unbecoming of liberals as they are of conservatives! The Kav production, headed by the outstanding Ms. Dugan, is pretty much all that you could wish.