THE SEA HORSE
Fortunately Quando Productions’ The Sea Horse, despite a rocky first act, verifies the power of committed acting to imbue any material with emotional truth and dramatic power. Anne Reifsteck as barkeep Gertrude Blum pulls out all the stops, allowing the last 20 minutes of this play to devastate her; she dives into an emotional chasm from which she has hardly emerged even after her second curtain call.
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Three moments from Reifsteck’s performance simply make the show, all of them near the end of the second act. After spending most of the play at once desperately in need of the seaman Harry Bales and terrified of real intimacy with him, Gertrude finally reveals an episode from her past: she suddenly shoots across the stage and recounts witnessing her father’s murder at the hands of a couple of thugs. What makes this potentially strained theatrical confession and catharsis so powerful is that Gertrude tells her story to the wall. Director Buff Lee places Gertrude as far from Harry as possible at this moment, yet she speaks as if he were next to her. Or as if someone were next to her–the someone she so desperately needs to trust but whom she can’t find in Harry. The speech is powerfully sad, especially since Reifsteck delivers it almost matter-of-factly.
John Braun as Harry Bales is in a way an apt foil for Reifsteck’s Gertrude. Reifsteck is clearly working very hard onstage. When her effort is apparent, as it is through most of the first act, Gertrude rings false. But when Reifsteck stops working and simply allows the work to affect her, Gertrude becomes fully real. Bales, on the other hand, seems to hardly work at all. He is utterly unself-conscious from start to finish, and also unaffected by anything emotionally. Certainly he has some range, but Braun seems to have chosen not to go very deep in his exploration of Harry. He keeps himself distant from the character, not fully embodying him but rather suggesting certain aspects of him.
