William Borden

Don't Dance Me Outside won the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival and had staged readings in Allendale and Grand Rapids, MI, and was a finalist in the Sonoma County, CA, Repertory SCRipts Festival; Ukiah, CA, Players Theatre New American Comedy Festival; New Hope, PA, Performing Arts Festival Play Competition; and Charlotte, NC, Repertory Theatre Festival of New Plays. Optioned for film.

REVIEWS

RADIO REVIEW OF “DON’T DANCE ME OUTSIDE” PRESENTED BY PLAYWRIGHTS PREMIERE THEATRE by Edgar Loessin

Hello, I’m Edgar Loessin with Loessin at large. What’s real and not real, what’s true and not true are often deliberately subject to change in this fascinating, refreshingly original, romantic comedy. An ordinary looking, middle-aged couple are in bed in a cheap hotel. They’ve just completed a highly successful one afternoon stand. They’re married but not to each other. She, Ardis, played with stand up comic sharpness and timing by Phyllis Wright, is an architect. He, Butch, given interesting dimension by Julian Bailey, is a writer. The two actors work very well together. They bounce playwright William Borden’s dialogue back and forth like a tennis ball.

They met at a book signing for his latest novel, entitled “No More Love”. Via some pillow talk we learn that he’s searching for a life that rises above the delusions of love. She points out that they each have a family and basically good lives. Not enough for Butch. He wants passion, not just a relationship. “All right,” says Ardis, “I’ll give you passion!” at the end of Act One. Act II is another hotel but a posh one. She is paying. “You can’t have passion with out a price,” she tells him. Act One was the heat of the moment. Now we’re in the real, day-to-day world. We learn what is true about the characters, what is fantasy, and through a clever jump in time and a kind of role-playing, what could happen. There are a lot of “what ifs” to avoid “what is”, and yet it’s the “what is” that ultimately clarifies – and I think, enriches their lives. They’re happy at the end and so is the audience.

Peter Moore’s direction is just right all the time. Lausanne Davis-Carpenter’s sets and Todd Cooke’s lighting are most effective. Three comely lasses make the set changes a charming ballet. Don’t miss this one! This is Edgar Loessin with “Loessin at Large” and I’ll see you at the next opening.


Bruno Koch, “Portfolio Weekly”

Those harboring the notion that sexual passion and/​or spontaneous love are the exclusive purview of the young, will swiftly be converted to the contrary when seeing William Borden’s romantic-comedy “Don’t Dance Me Outside,” presented by the Playwrights Premiere Theatre of Williamsburg.

A middle-aged novelist (Butch) and a middle-aged architect (Ardis), both married for over twenty years and with children, venture upon one another at a book-signing in a mall. Their eyes meet, the pulse accelerates, and we see them the next day in a hotel room in bed, recounting in a tantalizingly cryptic fashion--apart from the usual queries and assurances--some excursions into territories previously unvisited.

It is a felicitous opening, corralling the audience, either via moralistic shock or pleasant memory, into Borden’s inventory of the lives of two upper middle-class contemporaries. Along the way he takes an unsentimental look at some generally familiar aspects of American culture.

The protagonists do scarcely match the physical ideal of Hollywood’s romantic lovers. Mother nature, together with the effects of inordinate caloric intake and lack of exercise, have left their marks.

With varying degrees of depth and clarity, Borden paints a social landscape in which, to some degree or other, we can recognize ourselves. Initial love in marriage gradually transmutes into habit, comfort, and indifference. Passion and romance, the kind that once inspired Tristan and Isolde, have become “relationships,” which the playwright characterizes as boats “full of uncles and aunts.” Fidelity has worn thin in the wake of the sexual revolution, the effects of self-actualization, and the scattered attempts of redefining the very fabric of marriage.

Borden assaults with considerable vigor the consumerism that straddles our lives and sprawls in the numbing linearity of malls (Ardis aspires to design a revolutionary template of the 21st-century mall). Growing insularity, spawned in the glare of television and the shadows of corporate existence, breeds passivity. The routines of our lives and mental convenience have us irretrievably drift into the complacencies of an unbending bourgeois mentality.

Self-deception rears its head in the person of Butch, who struggles to write best sellers under titles such as “No More Love,” and “Love Sucks,” while fancying himself to be an adamant seeker of “truth.” There are times when our minds run on separate tracks with the result of loosing temporarily contact with one another. One could go on and on.

Borden, whose plays have widely been seen nationally and internationally, demonstrates his innovative spirit as a writer by having Butch and Ardis take an imaginary trip through a second marriage (which pretty much takes up the entire second act). The journey is replete with the ups and downs that customarily attend marriage. There is diminishing love, sex that slowly vanishes, ample self-interest, rankle, combativeness, flirtation with divorce, and professional ambition that can rattle the foundation of the union. It could well be a paradigm of the 21st-century marriage.

Borden has the imaginary trip, and the play, conclude with Butch and Ardis trying to decipher the mystery of reality and love while dancing to a Frank Sinatra tune. The answer remains suspended in the dark after the lights have faded.

Borden provides a delightful evening. His dialogue travels with the precision and bounce of a first-rate ping-pong match. Single words, short phrases, and incomplete sentences fire the imagination and often turn the proceedings into an elegant game of chess.

In the highly skilled hands of director Peter Moore and such seasoned actors as Julian Bailey (Butch) and Phyllis Wright (Ardis), the material takes on a life of memorable vibrancy. Moore moves the play along with fluidity and imagination. He cleverly turns the change of scenery (from medium to high-class hotel room) into a nifty intermezzo.

Bailey gives a finely layered and flavorful performance as Butch, and Wright, exploiting her expert timing acquired as a stand-up comedian, delivers a delicious portrayal of Ardis. Their interactions are exemplary of superior ensemble work.

Congratulations are in order for Producing Artistic Director Robert Ruffin and Producing Director Mary Watkins. Their remarkable efforts of bringing new and professionally-executed plays to local audiences under frequently difficult circumstances deserve our notice and admiration. May sold-out houses be their reward.

The play runs through October 30 at the Kimball Theatre, Williamsburg.
For reservations call 1-800-HISTORY, or 804-725-3645.