Theatre B’s Stories of Resilience: “Third”

Calling all hipsters, slinksters, downtown intellectuals! Go see “Third” at Theatre B. This show is for you.

Theatre B starts off Season 7: Stories of Resilience with Wendy Wasserstein’s “Third.” This production is a living testament to Theatre B’s mission: Theatre B is a non-profit organization that strives to engage regional audiences through cutting edge theatrical productions that are culturally and artistically invigorating. Theatre B’s choice of this particular text is dead on. Third is a relevant, challenging, important, sweet, and amusing play.

Dr. Laurie Jameson (Pam Straight) is a hard-hitting English professor, whom most audience members will recognize from their own forays into higher education. She is a strict educator, requiring her students to think deeply and alternatively about the literature she teaches. Jameson has fought her way to the top of the educational hierarchy at her prestigious, small New-England Liberal Arts college. At this point in her career she has written numerous, well-respected books and essentially has the freedom to teach what she wants how she wants to teach it. She has encompassed herself in a nest of learning, which she works hard to fiercely protect. Until a young student enters her life.

Known as Third (Brandon Coyle), Woodson Bull, III is a white middle-class male student attending the college on a wrestling scholarship. Third is everything most students at Jameson’s school are not: he is not liberal, he is not vegan, he does not march in protest, he does not petition. Third is simply a dude, a nice guy, a polite kid from Ohio. Jameson immediately dislikes him.

Third unwittingly challenges every ideal that Jameson reveres. The presence of this well-mannered, thoughtful, athlete is a thorn in Jameson’s side. The fact that he has the audacity to take her course and claims to understand King Lear grinds at Jameson. She can’t stop thinking about him and the unconscious ways he annoys her. Third somehow seeps into every aspect of Jameson’s life, and as her life unravels around her Jameson blames Third.

Excellently cast, Pam Straight’s Laurie Jameson is a joy to watch. For those of you who don’t know Pam, she may possibly be the best actress in the Fargo area. Her performance is detailed and absolutely believable as she adroitly maneuvers her way through this particular character’s arc. Inspiring laughter one moment and tears the next, Straight makes the audience fall in love with this self-righteous woman.

Tierney Michon plays Emily Jameson, Laurie’s daughter. Emily is seeking a life different from her mother’s. She doesn’t want a life of scholarship hidden behind the brick walls of an educational institution. This forms a rift between her and her mother. Michon’s performance is lovely to behold. Teirney delivers a sensitive, intelligent interpretation of her character, walking the fine line between disobedient child and self-aware young woman.

The rest of the ensemble, and this is a great ensemble cast in it’s truest form, is fantastic as well. Boyd Wermedahl’s portrayal of Laurie’s ailing father Jack Jameson (notice how feminist Laurie didn’t take her husband’s last name) is gut-wrenching one moment and tender the next. The audience watches the poor man vacillate between clarity and confusion as he falls ever deeper under the spell of Alzheimer’s disease. Jameson’s best friend, Dr. Nancy Gordon (Miriam Vogel), is ailing as well. After a clean bill of health, her cancer has come back. Vogel plays “sick” very intelligently; she is neither “cartoon-ish”, nor too subtle. She quickly becomes one of the audience’s favorite characters because of her insightful dialogue and humorous one-liners. Brandon Coyle is a good Third. He is the perfect Mid-Western kid, enthusiastic and kind.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a play about illness or dying—it does contain both, but simply as an aspect of life. This is a play about how we want to put people in little boxes and classify them as this or that without actually knowing them. I saw myself in Dr. Laurie Jameson. With her holier-than-thou intelligence and superior attitude, she holds up a mirror to the audience and allows us to ask, “Am I like that?” We think that because we are open and accepting of gays and lesbians or different ethnicities or religions, we are somehow above others. But sometimes, really, we are just prejudiced a$holes with expansive vocabularies.

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INFO

“Third,” by Wendy Wasserstein

September 24 - October 17, 2009

Thursdays - Saturdays @ 7:30pm

716 Main Avenue in Fargo, ND

701.729.8880, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)