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By Britin Haller
Sometimes watching a theatrical production requires your complete suspension of disbelief, meaning that one has to put aside conventional wisdom and what you know to be true, and just go with it. Such is the case for audience members attending Sylvia, produced by Curtain Call Playhouse (CCP) and now playing at the Willow Theatre.
If all of us liked the same things, it would be a truly dull world, but occasionally, like in Sylvia, you have to wonder what a playwright was thinking when they took pen to paper. Or fingertips to keyboard. And while we admit to tearing up at the inevitable happy ending, the path to get there was agonizing indeed.
Sylvia was written by A. R. (Pete to his friends) Gurney, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Love Letters. By Gurney’s own admission, this 1990s play about a found dog and her obsessed owner was rejected too many times to count, mainly for being sexist.
It is sexist, yes, but it’s also crude and profane, and are there people who find the inference of bestiality funny? Because we don’t. Sylvia comes with an R rating and a warning that it’s not suitable for children. That’s an understatement. And making Sylvia female was a choice. A somewhat creepy one unless, Sylvia was originally intended to be produced only as a farce, and if so, CCP didn’t get the memo.
Sylvia is set in a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment and tells the story of middle-
age husband Greg, his wife, Kate, and their twenty-two year marriage that is on the brink of shattering when Greg comes home one day with a dog he found in Central Park. Greg and Kate have been suffering from empty-nest syndrome, and while Kate is excelling in her career, Greg is withering away on the vine at his.
Enter canine Sylvia, who’s a mix of lab and poodle (Labradoodle), and who hangs onto Greg’s every word and body part. But here’s the rub. Sylvia (played by an actress) talks. In the beginning, it wasn’t clear if they actually hear her or not, but there’s dialogue that cannot be happening if they don’t. So we’re stuck with over two hours of a talking dog who is a drama queen with a potty mouth. The premise grows old really quick.
Kate likes order and is not interested in a home with chaos. She went through that once while raising her children and now just prefers to enjoy some peaceful me time. And as anyone who has ever brought home a new pet knows, there is initial disorder as it gets to know its new environment, and figures out the rules. So Kate and Greg fight over everything regarding Sylvia. Kate doesn’t want the dog on the couch. She doesn’t like the drooling and calls her “Saliva” to get under Greg’s skin. Sylvia pees on the floor because it’s a hostile environment. You get the picture. “She lightens my life,” Greg says. “She darkens mine,” is Kate’s reply.
At the helm of Sylvia is Carla Zackson Heller who regularly directs for CCP, is a member of the Directors Guild of America, and has decades of experience deserving of the utmost respect.
But Sylvia has problems being likeable. Plenty of them. We originally wanted to blame our dislike of Sylvia on the script, but after watching videos of both Sarah Jessica Parker as the OG Sylvia in off-Broadway’s 1995 production, and Matthew Broderick as Greg in Broadway’s 2015 version, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Sylvia can, and should, be a romantic comedy as it is billed, but due to the direction, and the miscasting, there is neither anything romantic or comedic here. We are left with nothing but a bad taste in our mouths.
Some of you may think Sylvia is a laugh riot, and that we’re no fun at parties. Perhaps we’re just not into the joke. Some of the scenes seem to drag on forever, like the first time Greg meets fellow dog-owner Tom in the park, and Tom explains how if you give a dog a woman’s name you start to think of her as a mistress. That’s our first clue this may all be going sideways quickly.
The part where Kate’s mentor, the uptight Phyllis, comes to visit is entertaining at first, but goes on and on with Kate lamenting everything she detests about Sylvia to her friend to the point where Phyllis falls off the wagon, and we wish we had a drink as well. Enter Sylvia to smell Phyllis’s crotch. This happens. And the “break-up,” where Greg tells Sylvia he has found a family in the country for her to live with, drags to the point of exhaustion. At least twenty minutes could be cut from Sylvia, and none would be the wiser.
Often it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Perhaps if Alex Gomez played Greg as a sweet, gentle, and clueless nerd, we’d feel differently. Or if Isadelle Mercedes played Kate as Julie White did, as a spouse more annoyed than angry, but still in love, or in like at least, with her husband.
Or if Rachel Prokopius as Sylvia toned down the sexuality she oozes from every pore to a bare minimum, and gave us a cute, silly creature definitely devoted to Greg, but not one sexy enough that Greg would literally want to jump her bones. Pardon the pun, but Prokopius even poses as a sex kitten in pre-show publicity shots.
On more than one occasion, we wondered if Greg was seriously considering Sylvia as a sexual partner. There are places you just don’t go, and bestiality played for (hopefully) laughs is one of them. Maybe if our own personal South Florida veterinarian didn’t just get sentenced to twenty-one years in federal prison for child pornography and bestiality, it might be funny, but still likely not.
We don’t like Greg much, but we don’t like Kate or Sylvia either. Given the character of Kate teaches Shakespeare, we have to wonder if Isadelle Mercedes plays Kate as a shrew so in the end, she (and Sylvia) can be tamed. We feel no good will towards Kate because she is just so unlikable from the beginning. Instead of feeling a pang of sympathy toward Kate for having her peaceful home invaded by a slobbering blob who sheds on the furniture, we feel like she’s getting what she deserves because she’s so nasty.
We get the feeling that if it wasn’t a dog that Kate was nagging Greg about, it would be something else, and this may be the only time in his life’s he’s spoken up, or fought back on something. This is beyond simple jealousy over an animal, this is more a woman who resents her husband and doesn’t want him to be happy. We see that when she is offered the opportunity to go to London on a grant for six months. Kate insists Greg come with her even though that would make him miserable. No wonder Sylvia is a godsend for him, finally someone to look at him again with puppy dog eyes, if Kate ever even had those for Greg to begin with, that is.
Sylvia is a master manipulator using Greg’s desire for love and companionship to secure her place in his home and in his life. In her professional debut, Prokopius likely sleeps well at night from this role that’s so physically demanding she needs knee pads. She’s constantly moving whether scratching her ears, scooting her rear end along the floor, or humping the nearest warm body. Prokopius is a beautiful woman who is made to look like a dog, sort of, pigtails to resemble floppy ears and a fuzzy sweater for fur. Her spaying surgery leads to an entertaining bit where she has to wear every dog’s dreaded nightmare, the cone of shame.
Sylvia is a dog at heart, and as such has pure animal instincts no matter how obedient she may be. We get that. But when Greg is making comments to the marriage counselor about how deep Sylvia’s eyes are to look into, and how cute Sylvia’s butt is when she sashays down the street, we should feel that he doesn’t understand the double entendre of what he’s saying, and therein lies the joke. Not like Alex Gomez’s Greg where we want to take an immediate shower just to get the ick off. Gomez, who played the victim in CCP’s recent production of The Butler Did It should be careful so as to not get typecast as the slimeball.
Gomez’s Greg just sounds like every romantic partner who has made empty promises about what being together will be like, and in the scene when Sylvia puts her tail between her legs and heads toward the door to leave, all we’re left with is an extremely uncomfortable “love triangle” between a man, his wife, and his bitch.
One of the pitfalls in having the same actor play multiple characters is forgetting their individual names as was the case when Kate called her therapist (Leslie) Phyllis by mistake, and then later corrected herself. Not sure why exactly, but Gurney’s script intentionally calls for one actor to play three supporting characters, and John Hernandez does a fine job. We first see Hernandez in the park as Tom, a former tough-guy Marine with an equally tough dog named Bowser who becomes Sylvia’s paramour when she goes into heat; then as Phyllis, a pearl-wearing socialite who is on the wrong end of Sylvia’s excitement; and finally, as Leslie, a Truman Capote-sounding intentionally androgenous therapist who becomes understandably unhinged at the thought of Greg’s possible sexual interest in Sylvia. Kate tells Leslie she wishes Greg was physical with Sylvia because then it would just be an affair. Say what, now?
A few slams on the Humane Society are supposed to be funny, but only make us irate. Obviously, no animal wants to go there as a last resort, but as an organization, the Humane World for Animals (as they’re now known) provides communities with much-needed resources. The political jokes also aren’t funny, and having Kate compare her husband to Hitler is just gross. Who knew we could dislike her more than we already do?
At one point, Sylvia says to Kate “You called, massa?” which is made especially horrendous as the actor, Isadelle Mercedes, is a person of color. It’s 2025. Why is this still in the script? Why was it ever there, for that matter?
We never find out where Sylvia came from, even though she has a tag and is wearing a jeweled collar when found so someone had her. Supposedly it’s her first heat, but she’s doesn’t appear as a puppy.
A park scene where Sylvia sees her first cat is supposed to be humorous. Maybe if we hadn’t just had a loose neighborhood dog barge into our house and try to attack one of our cats, it might be. But this is not just a war between dog and cat lovers. Any warm feelings for Sylvia dissipate during her extremely profane rant at the street cat. It’s graphic and nasty dialogue.
The dogs having sex in the park is cute up to a bit. What’s not cute is Sylvia provocatively wagging her rear end to Greg and to the audience, and when Greg calls her a promiscuous slut, Sylvia’s first instinct is tell him he’s jealous. But instead of it being jealous that she’s getting some, and he isn’t, which would be clever, it comes across as Greg is jealous because he wishes he was her lover, instead of Tom’s burly dog, Bowser.
For some reason, Kate periodically breaks away and quotes Shakespeare to us in soliloquies that seem marginally fitting. She blames Sylvia for her missing copy of All’s Well That Ends Well, and when Sylvia finally returns it, slightly chewed on, but still intact, Kate’s heart melts a little, and the pathway is cleared for the inevitable, now free of even the slightest hint of bestiality, ending. Because all’s well that ends well, and that’s supposedly all that matters.
If you get past all the thorns, there’s a rose, and every production has one. In Sylvia, it’s a lovely airport scene near the end of Act One, one that should have been the actual end of that act, in our humble opinion. Kate is leaving for a conference, and Greg is waiting with her. We see Sylvia at home (on the sofa, of course), waiting for her master. The juxtaposition is lovely, and we are treated to the only musical piece in the show, other than the jazz during scene changes, Cole Porter’s terrific torch song “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”
CCP’s Artistic Director and founder Kris Coffelt, created the costumes and dressed the set that was designed and built by her husband, Jack Coffelt, with an assist by Bob Sharkey on set crew. Between the lighting and props also from Zackson Heller, sound design and projections from her assistant director and husband, Bill Heller, and a stage manager, Kim Richter, who doesn’t miss giving a cue, production qualities were great.
Our hat is off to Kris Coffelt and Curtain Call Playhouse for winning both a Remy Award for their Outstanding Contribution to Community Theatre and a cultural arts award from the city of Pompano Beach this year. CCP is celebrating their thirtieth season, and make no bones about it, Kris Coffelt deserves every accolade for successfully holding her theatrical company together through difficult times and producing hit show after hit show.
Sadly, Sylvia isn’t one of them.
Sylvia from Curtain Call Playhouse runs through this Sunday at the Willow Theatre at the Sugar Sand Park Community Center, 300 S. Military Trail, Boca Raton; 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Running time approx. 140 minutes includes a 15-minute intermission. Tickets $25, or $20 for a group of four or more. Call the box office at 561-347-3948 or visit curtaincallplayhouse.com.
Britin Haller is a freelance author and an editor for Turner Publishing. Her latest short story “So Many Shores in Crookland” can be read in the 150th issue of Black Cat Weekly. Britin’s latest edit, a cozy mystery novel called Dumpster Dying is by Michelle Bennington and available where books are sold. Find Britin across social media.
