Stage Review - Mauritius (Actorcraft p2s)
Stage Review - Mauritius
Presented By: Actorcraft Page, Stage, and Screen - Gig Harbor, WA
Show Run: March 07 - March 08, 2025
Date Reviewed: Saturday, March 08, 2025
Run Time: 1 Hour, 45 Minutes (including a 15 minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman
When we moved to the area some ten (plus) years ago, I was impressed by the amount of theatre in the area, and at that point I was just looking at Kitsap County. From Bainbridge Island, through Port Orchard, there was enough theatre to keep anyone who loves the stage busy for awhile. Then, heading to Pierce County and Tacoma, and around into Seattle, of course the amount increases exponentially. With all of that, there was always a bit of a vacuum around the Gig Harbor area, and with Paradise Theatre going by the way as a result, first of losing their building, and then Covid, and WWCA losing their building here in Port Orchard, there’s currently nothing consistent happening on stage between Tacoma and Bremerton. Enter Jeremy Kent Jackson and Adrianne Alvarez-Jackson and their Actorcraft Page, Stage, and Screen (P2S), studio, described as a “brave space in which to identify, explore, experiment with, and apply the skills necessary for delivering compelling performances on stage and screen.” There are similar themed educational spaces on the Seattle side of the Sound, but nothing like it on the peninsula, and Actorcraft definitely fills a gap in purpose and in geography. We’re currently scheduling an episode of Get to Know a Theatre with Jeremy, Adrianne, and Actorcraft to learn more about their history and mission, but when I was presented with the opportunity this past weekend to attend their first full length on stage production featuring Jeremy and students from their classes, I jumped at it. For this first effort, the group reached high, presenting Mauritius, the story of two sisters who have been left a collection of stamps from their recently deceased mother, a collection that includes two extremely rare pieces worth millions each. The sisters have conflicting agendas for the collection, but they have no idea what they’re getting into when one of the sisters approaches a dealer with the stamps, an action that brings both sisters into a web of mysterious and underworldly events that result in an emotionally charged climax that asks a lot from this cast of actors. There’s a lot of emotion in this story, expressed both vocally and physically, and as I said it asks a lot of this group, and the success of their performance is proof positive of how well they’ve been prepared in their classes and by Adrianne, who is also this show’s director.
The Actorcraft team has put the focus on the acting with this show, they’ve partnered with Peninsula School District for its presentation using their high school theatre stage to put the show up on. They’ve also gone simple in their design, using only the stage, with bleachers on three sides of a square area in which all of the action takes place. It’s a black box philosophy, and the set consists solely of the pieces that are brought on for any particular scene. The carrying on and off of these set pieces during each set change could certainly slow down the pace of the show, but the crew impressively seems to descend on the stage to make the changes quickly and confidently, so that the breaks between scenes are minimized. Kudos to stage manager Maile Olsen along with the stage crew and production assistants Amelia Lindberg, Dakota Jackson, Max Mays, and Leslie Mays. This group, along with deck chief Pluto Mays, light and sound board operator Dante True, and assistant to the director Justine Sorrels have all come together to help produce a show that, while simply designed, is extremely entertaining and well presented.
Mauritius, playwright Theresa Rebeck’s debut play, which had its world premiere in 2006 and Broadway debut a year later, starts out with sister Jackie taking the stamp collection she inherited from her recently deceased mother, a collection owned by her grandfather, to a collector, Philip, to receive a valuation. He, not convinced that there’s any real value in what Jackie is describing, refuses to even look at the stamps, but Dennis, lounging in the shop, volunteers to take a look at them and immediately identifies a stamp of modest value. Philip still doesn’t believe it, and they all go their separate ways. Dennis proceeds to meet with someone else, Sterling, an international art collector who it becomes apparent is quite interested, and even more knowledgeable, about stamps, Sterling who also has a history with Philip. In fact the three of them have all worked together before it seems, and here decide to collaborate on a plan to get the most valuable of the stamps in the collection from Jackie and pay as little for them as possible. That’s all well and good, but there are two things that none of them counted on. The first is that as part of Dennis’ reeling in Jackie and gaining her trust, the two would start to have genuine feelings for each other, and the second is Jackie’s sister, Mary, who feels she has a stronger claim to the stamps than Jackie does and is against the sale of the collection. The play has plenty of conflicts, in fact all of its relationships seem based in conflict more than they do anything else. There’s the obvious one between the sisters, but it seems as though every relationship Sterling has with every other character has some sort of conflict built into them. These conflicts get more intense, moving from the verbal to the physical, leading up the climactic ending when nobody is sure which side is up.
When there is so much conflict, and when the stage is simply designed as it is here, the onus is on the actors to tell the story, and that’s the most impressive part about what I saw on stage this past weekend, the acting. Certainly, the acting from Jeremy is top notch. As a professional actor, he’s the most experienced on the stage, he carries the most stage presence and manages his character just perfectly. In fact, when someone is as good as he is, when they have that nuance in their skillset, it’s something you can just watch for hours and never grow tired of it. Sterling is a gangster-type, foul-mouthed and quick to temper, and Jeremey puts all of himself into it, leaving nothing on the table. While the quality of Jeremy’s performance is a given, though, it’s the rest of the cast that is pleasantly surprising. Out of the four other actors in the cast, we were told before the show that this was the stage debut for two of them, but we weren’t told which ones they were, and frankly I couldn’t tell. Not only that, I was impressed at how well each of them kept up with Jeremy in their performances, he’s not the only one who lays himself bare emotionally. Each actor has the opportunity to show the range of their ability. Tim Sobie plays the dealer/owner of the shop Philip, and does so with a nice edge to him, a bit of arrogance, and a decent amount of schlockiness. He’s pretty confident in his ability and it shows in Tim’s performance. When it comes down to it, Philip is as much of a conman as the rest of them, but in any of these performances it’s never exactly clear who is conning whom. There’s a natural quality to this cast’s interactions as well, if acting is reacting, they’ve each got that part down. Along with Tim’s Philip, Peter Hiebert plays Dennis in a role that has him torn between his pseudo-employment/partnership with Jeremy’s Sterling and his new feelings for Jackie, played by Aubrey Jean MacGregor. Aubrey is steadfast in her determination to sell the stamps to someone, she sees this as her ticket out of financial hardship, but sister Mary, played by Heidi Michelle, feels she has a stronger claim to them and is dead set against their sale. The passionate scenes in which the sisters disagree about their intentions are quite good, and Aubrey is especially sublime in her display of emotion in this play. The entire cast, as an ensemble, is simply wonderful, and they’re what make this show work so well.
If the best advertisement for any acting school is how well their students perform on stage, then Actorcraft P2S can ask for nothing better than what they put up on stage at the Penninsula High School theatre this past weekend. Theresa Rebeck’s debut play Mauritius, the story of two sisters bequeathed a stamp collection from their recently deceased mother and who have different intentions with what to do with said collection, is a play that requires a lot out of its actors from an emotional perspective and the cast that director Adrianne Alvarez-Jackson put up and consisting of Actorcraft founder Jeremy Kent Jackson and four of the studio’s students excelled in delivering this play and proved that there is a viable theatre option in Gig Harbor that deserves our attention.
Mauritius, presented by Actorcraft Page, Stage, and Screen, ran during the weekend of March 7 and 8. Though this show has closed, to learn more about the organization, its classes, and upcoming shows, visit https://actorcraftp2s.com/.
Photo credit: Julieanne Ammann
