There are days of doing this when I just get to gush. Today is one of those days.
I have had the pleasure this past year of witnessing some of the best theatre of my life. VA Rep’s Primary Trust floored me. Richmond Shakespeare continued their epic run of hits with The Importance of Being Earnest, Macbeth and As You Like It. Richmond Triangle Players made I Love You Because sing.
But it was, and without a single ounce of nepotism, Richmond’s homegrown play Witchduck by Cadence and Firehouse Theatre, that made me gasp in awe for the mastery of the art in front of me. We get to add a gem to the Richmond theatre diadem today. If I had to rank, and I really don’t have to (but it’s kinda fun), Dog Mom is in a photo finish with Eva DeVirgilis’ blockbuster as the best thing to hit a Richmond stage in the last five years, IM(not so)HO. I’d reckon longer than that, but I wasn’t here to know.
Where Witchduck took on the responsibility of satirizing historic injustices, Dog Mom brings us back to the home fires of the heart, demanding we examine the nature of love, bliss, devotion, and loss. It creates an allegory within a story that is so good on its face, subtext is just extra credit. But that extra credit is enough to complete a PhD.
The show opens with a just-divorced woman finding herself again in the familiar Brooklyn climes of her younger, more energetic years. Eager to start over with some connective tissue to her past, she uses the liquidation of her recent life to fund a gap year of growth.
Just as she moves into her new place, though, she finds a clueless stray golden retriever destined for disaster and takes it home until she can find it a forever family.
I have to segue here for a second, because this is the first moment the show’s brilliance kicks in. Literally in the first scene. She’s not a dog person, but she’s a good person. She has no space for a dog, but she can’t ignore the space in her heart for its fate. While on a fruitless phone call to animal control, the whole show is laid out for the audience. Something she’ll never forget begins right there. She’s just met the love of her life. She just doesn’t know it yet.
That’s as much of the story I’m going to give you. The thing is, it’s not hard to tell where the inevitable resides, but like life, the journey is the thing. Sometimes it’s the only thing that really matters.
Dog Mom relies heavily on the near-universal reverence humans have for our relationships with dogs. It has some things to say about cats too, but that bit is too funny to ruin in a review.
Go back 40,000 years or so, when our canine companions would rush out to the woods and bring us good sticks for our fires and small animals to cook on them. They’d guard our children at night against threats we couldn’t smell or see. They’d comfort us when all else failed, sharing our pains even when they couldn’t understand them. All for the scraps we’d share, the warmth of our late Pleistocene camps, and, of course, the scritches and hugs.
They still do these things, and most of us don’t even remember why. Their love is in their DNA, and their gifts just keep on coming, whether you need a stick/terrified squirrel or not.
Think on the depth of a love story that could possibly engender the devotion our dogs show us. This romance is ancient, wholesome, and hermetically bound to our human experience. We’ve been told so many times that we don’t deserve them, but don’t tell them that. Our dogs think we’re the best. No matter what.
The respect this show puts on this dynamic is palpable and is also the lever that will control your tears for the hour-and-a-half performance.
The playwright, VCU grad Tate Elizabeth Hanyock, found inspiration for the show the same way a lot of us writers do, when we’re not supposed to. During the Writers Strike, when it was pencils down for everyone in the trade, her creative hearth glowed, waiting for the starting gun of the union negotiator.
During the Q&A after the show, she had much to say about the power of the idling creative mind. Her career had taken her to screenwriting for film and television in Los Angeles, where she resides today. She would describe the process of getting a film you’ve written made as taking five to ten years, with little chance of being made the way you’ve written it. She found a new freedom in developing a story for the theatre, as it is one of the last few places the title of writer still engenders much respect. She has written for HBO and Hulu and performed on The Office, Shameless, Superstore, The Mentalist, and opposite Steve Carell in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. By all accounts, she’s had a more than respectable run of successes on the West Coast.
Dog Mom is her first play, though. It is currently on a rolling premiere tour via the National New Play Network through several cities, including LA, London, and, yes, Richmond.
She is reunited with her old colleagues, including Rick St. Peter as director, Robbie Winston, and Jerold Solomon, all three powerhouses of talent locally and abroad. Dog Mom is rounded out by the additions of Grey Garrett, Rachel Marrs, and Cadence Theatre’s own matriarch, Laine Satterfield.
I cannot impress upon you the casting gold this is without comparing them to a nerdy fixation like a superhero team. I would too, if I didn’t have a lot of other things to say first.
The cast is grouped in three sections. Grey Garrett as Dog, with Rachel Marrs as the titular Dog Mom. Laine as neighbor, and Robbie as said neighbor’s dog. Jerold is literally everyone else these four come into contact with throughout the story.
Rachel stands as the centerpiece of the work. I know she was nominated for Witchduck, but has made a case for double consideration here. Her take on Liz is vulnerable, but stoic. She’s an everywoman with a nice smile and a desire to live up to her own ideals. Doing the right thing doesn’t seem to be a contest of desires, just the Occam’s razor to self-respect.
Rachel Marrs disappears into Liz astoundingly. It is uncanny how she makes acting look just like, well, being. This is a star-making performance. If it weren’t for the rest of the incredible cast, I’d say seeing her in this role is worth the admission price itself.
But then there’s Laine Satterfield as the kinda nosy but well-meaning neighbor, Nell. A little older, a little wiser, and an enthusiastic dog mom with her own problems. Loneliness is a theme that pops up a lot in the play, and Laine weaves a realistic character that is wounded, yet not defined, by its burden. Laine is a veteran of stages internationally, and her craft is scientifically precise.
Jerold, oh my shit. He plays about half a dozen individually crafted roles (of his own creation, unlimited by Director St. Peter in his depictions of them) that either bring down the house in laughter, infuse pathos to the plot, or initiate epic fight scenes. Yes, fight scenes.
Jerold Solomon is a staple of Richmond theatre, usually cast as an imposing, dominant force of presence. He’s tall, broad, and doesn’t look like he suffers fools. According to him and his colleagues, though, that exterior betrays the inexhaustible silliness in his soul. This is the first time I’ve seen him do comedy, and I sincerely hope it’s not the last. He plays the best cat not written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, no, including those cats.
Oh my god, omigod, omigod, the DOGS. There are so many ways dogs have been depicted on stage since the invention of stages. We’ve gotten adventurous and musical in Snoopy of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, verbose and erudite like Sylvia of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, and completely idiotic in Crab of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.
What Grey and Robbie bring to the two dogs here is a first for me. They act like real dogs. The two actors have found a way to channel the primal simplicity of their specific breeds, while conveying, as Robbie would put it, the expectation and sharing of joy that the purest soul could muster. They also embody the protection of joy in confrontation of threats to it.
They mirror abject devotion and steadfast love, including the richer, more nuanced mini-strokes of companionship Tate writes into them. Their interactions with each other and their humans are funny, deep, revealing, and, in a couple scenes, transcendent. They talk and are understood in the nearly magical way we understand our pets without syntax, definitely language without grammar. Nearly telepathic. Both of them clear the bar for stunningly fresh takes on the trope.
Rick St. Peter, by his own admission, trusted the script to pave the path, and his actors to dance on it. He gives so much generosity of control in what ends up on the stage. He is an Actor’s Director. I can’t imagine a better case for leadership in a production. Affirmed by his cast, they were able to make decisions that affected the pacing and development of the final product most thespians dream of. And holy snap, it pays off. The show is immaculate.
I was trying to bring to bear my appreciation for the technical beauty of Dog Mom, but to do so would be to telegraph some of the best things about the show. Go see for yourself. Trust me, it does not disappoint.
If it is not already obvious, I am demanding you witness this production. There will be an “I was there when” moment when this show breaks big that you don’t want to miss including yourself in. This is theatre at its best, here or anywhere else.
Main photo by Jason Collins
Buy tickets HERE
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