Big Big Sky at Chester Theatre

We enjoyed another Friday matinee in Chester for the world premiere of Tom Well’s “Big Big Sky” yesterday, the third and final summer production for the company’s 35th year of producing top-quality theater in this small town.

‘Big Big Sky’ takes place in Angie’s Cafe in Yorkshire, England that’s about to close for good. The owner with a heart of gold, Angie (Meghan Maureen McDonough) is conflicted yet excited about her next phase of life, and her young waitress Lauren (Hero Marguerite) has a new love interest (Ed, Abuzar Farrukh) who just wandered into the cafe. Lauren finds out that Ed will also be living in her old bedroom after dad Dennis (Joel Ripka, understudy for James Barry) rented it out. She’s moved out,  you see, so it’s time to move on, as Dad explains.

Hero was in the CTC 2023 production of Circle Mirror Transformation where she played a high schooler, here she isn’t as much fun, she seems tighter, and the romance isn’t that believable between her and Ed.

Everyone in this small English town is wild about birdwatching.

Dad seems a bit blocked, emotionally, he’s not feeling great about renting the room and is reluctant to even show Ed the room. But we all know it’s time to move on, and so Airbnb it is. It takes about 25 minutes to come out but we learn that both dad and daughter have suffered from the loss of their wife and mother. And Angie, too, has loss in her past.

Everyone in this town, it seems, likes keeping track of the various bird species they spot and they even write them down on a sign in the cafe.  Dennis decides that he, too, is a birdwatcher, although he’s lived here his whole life and never cared about our feathered friends before.  But suddenly, he wants to enter a photography contest to try and capture the ultimate bird photo.  He’s never used a digital camera so he’s working old school, a camera with film.  We’ll see how that goes.

It took me a while to get into this play, there were not as many clear signs about the back story, and I didn’t follow the plot easily.  Lauren’s character seemed stiff, and Ed was, as they are saying ‘just weird.’   I liked a few of the foreshadowing techniques Wells used, but I wanted more of these backstory hints to get a fuller picture of the characters.

Angie (Meghan McDonough) stands out for her empathic portrayal of the cafe owner, she has a long professional acting resume and convincingly played her role of the nurturer in chief. It was a challenge for me to have James Barry’s lead role played by Joel Ripka, who needed to read the script for his lines. Next week Barry will return to the stage. Ripka did a good job fleshing out the salty sad character despite this.

The character of Ed (Abuzar Farrukh) was familiar, the UMass grad was in Chester’s 2023 production of ‘Guards at the Taj’. When he first came on stage, I was somewhat put off by his character, he kept throwing out “LOLs” and OBVs, abbreviations used by Millenials that sounded funny coming from him. He also had some awkward lines about being a vegan, and requesting peppermint tea, but when Ed is trying to explain his job protecting the terns by the seashore this part of the show dragged a bit for me. Yes, we know you’re a vegan. Come on.

Angie’s Cafe is the local for all of town, and the folding outdoor Angie’s sign is toted in and out to denote whether the cafe is open. But it doesn’t matter if they’re closed because old Dennis always comes ’round about closing time and Angie generously feeds him the last of the beans. He’s a regular, and now, he’s a birder all right, yup, he’s got his Wellies on and now he’s borrowed a big old digital camera from big shot birder Neil, the guy who puts on those country line dancing shows that Angie fancies so much.

Ed Check’s scenic design deserves mention, for his interesting twist. His cafe set is at an angle instead of straight on.  We see the rectangle of the wall, which brings the audience into the cafe, and the lighting too, at the different times of the day helped create each scene’s ambiance and tone.

So a plot was hatched, yes he’s gonna try to replace those dud shots he got with film with a whirlwind snap-a-thon of all of the birds he can spot in the nearby marsh…just in time for the photo contest.

But what is a photo? Why do we need it?  Later in the play, the characters explore the value of seeing a certain bird…but is that enough just to see it?

Yes.

‘Big Big Sky’ at Chester Theatre. August 11, 15, 16, 17, 2024 Chester Town Hall. Directed by James Warwick. Tickets