ALT's 'Aspen Ideas' comically scrutinizes the dangerous mystery around aspiring elitism

Unlikely new friends Chris and Rob think they're connecting. 

It only takes flying into Aspen, Colorado, once to embed the town's image as Shangri-La in your brain. No doubt it's a kind of cliche that many have applied to the experience before me.

With mountains all around, Aspen seems the sort of place for which the word "nestled" was invented. It's nestled in its wild and cultivated setting and immediately conveys the sense of a special place worthy of hosting the well-to-do for either summer or winter visits; the people who work there and cater to them can barely afford to live there.

Many years ago, I sampled the town in the summer, mainly for the music. In retrospect, the Aspen Ideas Festival seems custom-made for its location, an obvious partnership between high-flown talk and elevated environment. My stroll around its scarcely imaginable neighborhoods had the lilting accompaniment of fresh-water streams sculpted into front-lawn trenches. The wonders of nature can be contemplated under such minute control or viewed on the large scale of the intimidating Rocky Mountains and the diadem of night-time sky.

Full extroversion: Anne demonstrates openness.

In "Aspen Ideas," Abe Koogler has focused on the sort of aspiring East Coast urbanites whose pretensions are well-served by regular returns to this intellectually and sensuously attractive resort and its ballyhooed festival. The satirical thrust of the play, seen at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre in American Lives Theatre's production opening night, lays open to scrutiny the hermetic self-involvement of such a couple: Anne is a fragile, willful ex-dancer, with firm ideas about clocks and darkness at night and neurotic about party food. Her older husband, Rob, is a Type A social and professional climber who creates wealth for others and himself and wants more as he escapes nagging memories of homelessness and failure as a junk artist.

At the loftiest levels of discernment, there may be a fine line between the connoisseur and the  dyspeptic crank (Anne) or the superficial arbiter of exquisite taste (Rob). Their personalities'  twin houses of cards encounter a strange couple at a New York party in the first scene: Jay and Chris, stingy with self-revealing and, in the man's case, almost inarticulate. Jay is more open to social engagement, but she's equally distant from the monologues Anne and Rob launch into with overlapping fervor. After an invitation to Rob and Anne's is secured, without progress in mutual rapport, Jay bonds with the host couple's fractious daughter, Sophie.

Daughter Sophie gives vent to her unmet needs.

Director Zack Neiditch has his five actors well-honed to portrayals that verge on caricature while centering on believable quirks that have been set in stone, especially with Rob (Clay Mabbitt) and Anne (Donna O'Halloran). This is a couple that interrupts each other and edits the other's speech: Anne insists that what Rob calls Aspen's "core" should be designated its "center." The niggling never ends. They trumpet their areas of agreement to their new friends while skirting difficult matters with difficulty. Their failure as parents is brilliantly elaborated in Megan Janning's performance as the permanently disgruntled Sophie. 

Signs that Chris (Zach Tabor) and Jay (Alaine Sims) want to push back against the other pair's ossified thinking emerge as the play's dark side comes into focus. C'hris and Jay have an agenda, of which we get hints in Sims'  mastery of a Medusa stare and Tabor's of an ingrained laconic norm. Why Rob and Anne repeatedly declare they really like their new friends, persuading the couple to join the near-dysfunctional family in a trip to Aspen Ideas, remained a mystery to me. But eventually I trusted the playwright's grasp of Rob and Anne's sincerity and how well it is represented by Mabbitt and O'Halloran. If egocentric people are given plenty of room to function, they will eagerly fill the space. And they will love anyone who allows them to.

Speaking of spaces, the four milieus of this show are represented well by Laura Glover's lighting and Matt Mott's set. Sound and projection designer Ben Dobler fills out the settings imaginatively, especially the festival spectacle. I would only fault the background party noise of the first scene as too remote to convey that the two couples have accidentally found each other in a room away from the hubbub.

Classical music has nothing to do with this play, but two of my experiences there touch base with the world of "Aspen Ideas." I got my first hearing in concert of Paul Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphosis" there under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, ending the program. The last movement, a rowdy march, the most unbuttoned orchestral display the strict German modernist ever wrote, proved a perfect fit for the sensory overload of Aspen. Amusing and disturbing alike, this play addresses that feeling, and this production taps it into place.

The celebrity overlay of the Aspen experience, touted effusively by name-dropping Rob at one point in the play, surfaced for me recalling when  Jack Nicholson was spotted in the audience at a performance I also attended of "Madama Butterfly." To think about an actor so expert at playing cads on screen taking in one of opera's most egregious cads, Lieutenant Pinkerton, makes for a happy blend of imagination and memory. "Aspen Ideas" evoked both qualities in me. 

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]