Theater review: TheaterWorks’ ‘Sandra’ is a stunning multi-faceted tale of personal growth

David Cale’s “Sandra” is a riveting mystery as well a profound tale of personal growth. It’s intimate and confessional yet thrilling and sensational, and TheaterWorks Hartford is giving it a keenly designed top-to-bottom production that brings out all its varied glories.It’s a remarkable achievement by actor Felicia Curry (known in the New York and Washington D.C. theater scenes and now making her TheaterWorks debut), director Jared Mezzocchi (who’s been part of numerous TheaterWorks online productions, notably the political satire “Russian Troll Farm” and the spooky “Someone Else’s House”), set designer Marcelo Martínez García (a recent graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale), creative content/video designer Camilla Tassi (who previously did the projections for “Fun Home” at TheaterWorks) and sound designer Evdoxia Ragkou.It seems particularly exceptional because the previous show at TheaterWorks, “Sanctuary City,” used similar tools to tell a small-cast big-theme story with none of the panache or big pay off that “Sandra” delivers.The show is not subtle, yet it is nuanced. Curry sits on a chair at the front of a small stage. She’s sitting there, in fact, when the audience starts filing in preshow. When the lights go down, she springs to life but doesn’t leave the chair.TheaterWorks Hartford ends season with ‘Sandra,’ a multimedia, 29-character one-person showAs Sandra delivers her long involved story — about her musical friend Ethan who’s gone missing, about her failing marriage, about her career running a popular New York coffeeshop and about how her search for Ethan where he was last seen in Mexico leads to romantic encounters with a mysterious Italian man named Luca — she mostly stays put in that chair. In fact, you practically gasp when she first decides to stand up, about half an hour into the 90-minute show because the move seems so jarring. Jarring yet believable.This is a measured, controlled, emotionally rigorous and completely thought-through performance. Sandra tells her story and as it gets more involved, so does she. After an opening spout of first-person monologue, she starts introducing separate voices for some of the main players in her yarn: giddy friends, sozzled barflies, lovers, police officers and many others. Some of the voices (enhanced at times by funny physical gestures) are hilarious, others are menacing. Again, “Sandra” doesn’t lose direction, keeps its balance and remembers that the story is the most important thing.“Sandra” is as technologically intense as any show TheaterWorks Hartford has ever done, even in its current self-proclaimed “immersive” season that has brought us such effects as snow falling in the auditorium (for “The Garbologists”) and blood spattering the rock star country folk in “Lizzie.” Yet while the sound, lights, shadows and especially the projected images can transform Curry’s cube-like playing area into a whole new environment in a split second, the show is so well calibrated that the intense design is not overwhelming or distracting. Instead, it’s engrossing. The fresh new environments set a scene or illustrate a conversation. They don’t get in the way.Felicia Curry carefully delivers the role of Sandra at TheaterWork Hartford. (Mike Marques)It helps that Curry is focused on telling her story, just as Sandra is focused on finding Ethan, and ultimately herself, through her wild journey. The refined production has its own great merits but there’s no end of good things to say about Cale’s scintillating script, or Curry’s careful delivery of it. Cale — who made his name as a solo performer himself, performing in Connecticut numerous times in the 1990s and 2000s while expanding into multi-character plays and musicals — has fashioned this manic yet mannered monologue so that it builds like a mystery thriller at the same time that it’s becoming a meaningful personal tale of self-realization.Everything — all the stories, all the expressions, all the effects — converge brilliantly at the end. Again, it’s not overblown but smooth and subtle. “Sandra” is gently, firmly astounding, demonstrating how much modern theater techniques can add to a grand theatrical storytelling tradition that goes back to Homer’s “The Iliad” without detracting from it.This production’s great accomplishment is that, with all its tech, it doesn’t trip over its own feet and instead adds grace and clarity to its harrowing missing-person adventure. Sandra herself can’t really trip over her own feet because she’s usually sitting in that wonderful comfortable chair. The audience, delightfully, is at the edge of their seats.“Sandra,” by David Cale, directed by Jared Mezzocchi and starring Felicia Curry, runs through June 23 at TheaterWorks Hartford, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. $25-$70. twhartford.org.

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