The opening lines of Adam Gwon’s All the World’s a Stage, playing at Arlington’s Signature Theatre through Dec. 20, seem designed to ferret out the former theater kids in the audience.
“There’s a poster out front for the latest production and posters from last year they never took down,” the ensemble sings. “There are seats with red cushions/ Long tattered and worn/ A curtain hung slightly askew/ And on Saturday night in this small auditorium/ There is you.” Can you see it? Can you smell it? Are you 16 and scared again? Closeted math teacher Ricky Alleman (Kyle Sherman) can and is, though he doesn’t yet know that the drama is about to flood over the footlights and into his life.
Joining the staff of a rural Pennsylvania high school in fall 1996, Ricky leans on secretary Dede Rozenel (Erin Driscoll) to get his bearings. She’s eager to become his friend, but her association with a conservative evangelical congregation makes him cautious, and he conceals his sexuality from her. While supervising detention one day, he meets Sam Bucknam (Deema Turkomani), a bullied student who recognizes Ricky from attending other school’s productions and asks for his help preparing a monologue for a scholarship competition. They abandon their initial work on William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” etc.) in favor of a piece from Tony Kushner’s gay epic Angels in America, which draws the ire of the church. As he tries to keep Dede and the community at a healthy distance, struggles to support Sam as the walls close in, and negotiates a budding romance with out and proud bookseller Michael Hallett (Callum Francis), Ricky must confront the disparate roles he plays at work and home, and decide which of them he really wants to be.
Gwon’s score is lilting and memorable, with lyrics so specific and evocative one wishes music director Marika Countouris might slow the band down to let them sink deeper. What begins with the wide-eyed waltz “Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium” melts into the pensive “Pieces, Together,” where Ricky catalogs the little markers of standardization he must adopt to blend into his surroundings. In “Dinner,” Michael coaxes Ricky into a date by cheekily eschewing romantic cliches. And Sam’s ballad, “Other Lives,” juxtaposes the adventures of a delusional mother with the feelings her child is experiencing of being stuck.
Sherman proves a tender, sensitive surrogate for Ricky, and the line he draws between the “Mr. Alleman” and the “Ricky” sides of his character is thoughtful and moving. Francis provides a well-balanced counterpart in Michael, and makes the most of a randy, but digressive solo turn, “I’m Your Man.” As Sam, Turkomani perfectly captures the hunger for independence and validation that teenagers grapple with, and makes easy work of the character’s duets with Ricky, first as the primary driver of “Typecast” and later as a harmonic partner in “Mirrors.” And Driscoll nicely brings out the repressed ambivalence within Dede that she sees reflected back in Ricky.
With four performers, five musicians, one act, and a staging in Signature’s smaller ARK Theatre, All the World’s a Stage seems to exist in miniature, though director Matthew Gardiner works hard with his designers to expand the whole. Like Gwon in his score, scenic designer Paige Hathaway dresses the cubby holes and lockers that fill the space with exacting detail, tucking away 1990s easter eggs like a Beanie Baby and a boombox, or a lava lamp and a D.A.R.E. poster (naturally, Ricky’s wardrobe, by costume designer Shahrzad Mazaheri, is replete with pleats). In as close to a production number as the small musical offers, “The Show Must Go On,” Gardiner spreads the cast wide across the stage as lighting designer Max Doolittle twinkles string lights for pizzazz.
But when the music stops and the lights reset, one can see the stage—like the scenes that string the songs together—is not nearly as deep as it is wide. Gwon flirts with political commentary, but mostly keeps the story’s foes (a pastor, teenage vandals, Sam’s father) offstage to avoid real confrontation. It’s a surprising strategy considering how firmly he’s hitched this wagon to Kushner’s ultrapolitical and thrillingly combative Angels in America. Aside from a school principal who is played variously by Turkomani, Francis, and Driscoll, Dede is the closest we come to meeting the book-banning neighbors, though she takes lengths to separate herself from them and is largely supportive of Ricky. Ironically, the title of her eleven o’clock number, “I Don’t Ask,” hints sheepishly at the defunct “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” mandatory closeting military policy enacted in 1994. And though 1995 was the high-water mark of AIDS-related deaths in the United States, Gwon skirts around it, making only passing mention in relation to Angels’ themes. Though it only premiered last year, All the World’s a Stage glides on the feeling of look-how-far-we’ve-come accomplishment that was especially prevalent after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. Its odd sense of nostalgia is hard to square, and its naivete difficult to ignore, considering Gallup’s findings this summer that public support for LGBTQIA rights is falling, and the recurring instances of national leaders disparaging soldiers, civilians, and political opponents via slurs and homophobic innuendo.
Still, All the World’s a Stage redeems itself by turning the spotlight toward the drama teachers, who, like Ricky, sacrifice their precious after-school hours to create art with young people too green to know how good they have it. They are heroes, and if Alleman sounds strikingly similar to everyman, you’re right; he’s a proper proxy for them, who stand in the dark at the back of the auditorium, supporting students despite shoestring budgets, disinterested administrators, and prudish neighbors. If you were lucky enough to come of age with one such teacher in your corner—Jasmine Bucher was in mine—and old enough now to know how lucky you were, pack a tissue in your pocket. Gwon reminds us that they shaped the characters we play offstage as much as the ones we played onstage, and glorifies them fittingly.
“Tomorrow this feeling of wonder will pass, this memory will fade out of view. But on Saturday night in a small auditorium, there was you.”
All the World’s a Stage, a musical by Adam Gwon, directed by Matthew Gardiner, runs through Dec. 20 at Signature Theatre. sigtheatre.org. $47–$117.
