The Good Hours

By John Farrell
Special to the Press-Telegram

"The Good Hours," the new autobiographical play by Todd Cunningham that opened over the weekend at the Found Theatre in Long Beach, is as much about bad hours as good.

Cunningham tells the story of his romantic relationship with Patty, a consummately damaged and deeply loving young woman whom he met, befriended, fell in love with and came within a few day of marrying.

Patty, a victim of violent and alcoholic parents, violent boyfriends, alcoholism and early onset diabetes, died a few days before she and Cunningham were to wed. Cunningham, who was once an editor and writer at the Press-Telegram, tells his story himself, in the person of Todd, played with affecting honesty by John Sturgeon.

Kay Richey is Patty, the woman whom fate and circumstance have betrayed. She is still in an unsuccessful marriage, with her only child a victim of cerebral palsy from an ineptly handled birth, when Todd and she meet working at a baseball game concession stand.

She is a diabetic who takes insulin every day, a convicted felon (she fought back when her police officer boyfriend attacked her) and a serious alcoholic. She is also a sweet person who gives candy to children, loves her daughter desperately and tries, however unsuccessfully, to make her life work.

Richey makes this conflicted woman, filled with violence and anger and sweetness, a figure of depth, a person you care about from her first appearance, just as Todd cared when he first met her.

The story is an affecting one. Cunningham has created believable characters, pleasant and attractive people whose lives have been damaged and even destroyed by drinking and uncontrollable rage. Those include Todd's mother, Catherine (Barbara Duncan Brown), and Patty's father, Sam (Michael Dale Brown), and mother, Estella (Joyce Hackett). These three appear throughout the one-act, two-hour play as ghosts, commenting on the action while drinking their fill from whiskey flasks and cocktail shakers.

The problem with "The Good Hours," if it is a problem, is that everyone is just too nice. Todd is almost saintly, but a playwright is allowed a little leeway. Patty is occasionally violent, often very drunk, but she struggles to improve.

The three parents, though, are comic turns, friendly drunks making comic asides.

Consider that Todd's mother was an angry alcoholic and you'll wonder why she is portrayed so fondly. Patty's parents were dangerously violent people, drunk and engaging in continual fistfights, apparently. Her father, whom she loves so much she named her only child after him, we learn sexually molested her when she was a teenager.

As her father, Michael Dale Brown is a warm, fuzzy teddy bear: a drunk, yes, but a funny and charming one, the kind you might hope to meet in a local tavern. As Estella, Patty's mother, Hackett seems to have a better idea of the difficult life the two of them have bequeathed to their daughter. Barbara Duncan Brown's performance is tinged with a bit of shame at how things have turned out, but all three repeat the mantra, "We did the best we could" as a way of dealing with the feelings that even liquor, lots of liquor, can't hide.

An example of the problem: When Patty dies and passes over to wherever her parents have been partying, she is almost immediately fondled by her father. This should be shocking but is par for the play's course.

What kind of heaven is it where everyone drinks like fish and parents can still abuse their children?

Virginia DeMoss directs this play (and appears in a small part as a bartender), and has done a wonderful job of using the Found's very intimate space effectively. The sets are simply pieces of furniture moved and turned around by the cast as the play progresses.

Scott Burchard has created a complicated and intricate lighting scheme that follows the cast as they move about, fading and brightening, creating new spaces in the dark. It is a brilliant design.

Kerry Getz and Drayfus Grayson have written original songs for the play, and Getz performs one of the songs in a recording. The cast members sing two of the pieces during the show - pleasant evocations of the characters' emotional states.

This is a first-rate production, using all the theatrical skills the Found has acquired, and the story is moving and controversial enough that you'll discuss it long afterward, even if you can't agree with its too-gentle point of view.

From "The District"

Playwright Todd Cunningham’s first effort, The Good Hours, about his relationship with a former fiancée who died tragically, bears an apt tagline: “Just when you think you’ve got love right, everything goes wrong.” It’s a metaphor for this production, which has good bones and is entertaining, but could use a rewrite and the skill of a more experienced cast.

Hours, at the Found Theatre, is the semi-autobiographical story of Cunningham—former entertainment editor of the Press-Telegram and current national editor of The Hollywood Reporter. He meets Patty Bonura (her last name, we’re told, means “the good hours” in Italian) when they’re working the concession stands at Long Beach’s Blair Field. Sadly, any good hours they experience are few and far between.

Bookended by expository monologues from Todd, the play opens with him speaking to Patty while working beside her at the stands. He is touched by her manner with young customers and makes his move despite her disinterest. In his opening speech we learn of Bonura’s “profoundly damaged soul” and, as the play unfolds, Cunningham’s attempts to rescue her. In his quest to fix her he falls in love.

But Patty is deeply self-loathing, and as the child of alcoholics who were “always fighting and yelling,” she remains in a violent relationship she has no plans to leave—despite Todd’s objections. Abused and abusive, she constantly pulls Todd close, only to immediately push him away. She is prone to asking such questions as “why do you love me?” and running through a litany of reasons as to why one wouldn’t want to be with her.

Meanwhile, Todd has abandonment issues of his own. Never getting to know his father and witnessing his mother’s own love affair with the bottle, he confesses to Patty that maybe he was drawn to her because of “the pain in your eyes.” He establishes himself as the knight in shining armor to her damsel in distress.

There’s an important third party in their relationship—and it’s booze. Patty and Todd are only seen without an open bottle when they’re working, in that first scene. They trade lines like, “Money doesn’t always make you feel better” straight-faced while passing the bottle between them.

The couple’s deceased parents act as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the action from the proverbial heaven. They may serve as the comic relief—but the obvious damage they did to their children undercuts the humor. They even offer their kids drinks from the great beyond to ease the effects of what drinking has done.

In an interview with the P-T, Cunningham said one of the themes he wanted to explore was “how your idea or ideal of a loving relationship is established by your family, for better or worse.” But his Hours comes off as more of a cautionary tale of the dangers of alcoholism.

This production has an experimental feel to it—like a gangly toddler trying to find his walking rhythm. Performances by Found regulars are serviceable, with Kay Richey as Patty being a bright exception. Richey acts with her whole body and gives us a weary woman uncomfortable with herself, and who flinches at the slightest display of kindness. I’m unsure whose idea it was to include singing in this non-musical, but the characters break into song no less than three times. It’s a distracting stunt, adding an unneeded artsy element to the proceedings.

The Good Hours has an emotional accuracy that really resonates, but as staged by director Virginia DeMoss, much of it is overshadowed by a sense of clumsiness. It feels like a rough draft in need of a revision. As a first-time playwright Cunningham shows potential, but I believe this piece serves as more of an exorcism for him than a satisfying night of theater.

The Good Hours

By James Scarborough

Wow!

That’s my first impression of the world premiere of Todd Cunningham’s drama The Good Hours: A Play About Life, Love, and Spirits, directed by Virginia DeMoss for The Found Theatre.

It’s the story of Todd (John Sturgeon) and Patty (Kay Richey). You think, how cute, how innocent, a couple meet as they work at a concession stand at a baseball game, He’s smitten with her, woos (poetry, flattery, attention) and wins her. He develops a relationship of mutual trust with her daughter from a prior relationship, and they live happy ever after.

Well, except for the happy ever after part.

Cunningham slams home an explosive, wrenching story of how the perpetuation of family dysfunctionality must be encoded in certain DNAs.

Todd’s not really the Woody Allen-debonair guy we think he is at first. His mother Catherine (Barbara Duncan Brown) is an addled alcoholic, very funny but not very nurturing. Patty’s not about to ride off Brett Butler-like into the sunset with her white knight because of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse her father Sam (Michael Dale Brown) and mother Estella (Joyce Hackett) heaped upon her.

Though Todd drinks a biblical deluge of apricot brandy he’s a good guy. He cares for Patty and Samantha and wants to establish a stable family. When he moves to Santa Barbara to take a job, he gives Patty his apartment so she can escape the second of two abusive relationships that plague her.

Normalcy descends on the scene...for about five minutes.

Why? Because diabetic, alcoholic Patty weaves in and out of sanity, in and out of being able to function as a girlfriend, mother, employee and, later, a fiancée. The story ends sadly. You can’t really say it ends tragically because it was obvious that the spirits of her past were going to hound her until she succumbed.

It’s a well-conceived, well-enacted story. The stage is minimal, the better to focus on how little the two actors really had, save each other, as well as to focus on the taut drama that unfolded before us. Original barstool music by Kerry Getz and Drayfus Grayson contributed to the whirligig atmosphere, especially “I’ll Drink to That.”

In a particularly nice touch (a nice pun, too), the booze-swigging spirits of their dead parents would be just off to their side, commenting like armchair quarterbacks on the cycle of horror and recrimination that they saw repeating before their soused eyes. It took a while to figure out that was how the play was structured but it lent a powerful touch to an already powerful story.

DeMoss made this a nervy story, which she set up as purposefully bland: two non-descript characters, an innocuous beginning. The two leads were as normal as, well, as you or I. You felt (read hoped) they would get their act together. And then things nosedived.

From the Signal Tribune

Just when you think you’ve got love right, everything goes wrong. The Found Theatre is presenting a brand-new play by Long Beach writer Todd Cunningham about life, love and spirits. Directed by Virginia DeMoss, The Good Hours features a cast of Found regulars: Mike Brown, Barbara Duncan, Joyce Hackett, Kay Richey and John Sturgeon, as well as original songs by pop recording artists Kerry Getz and Drayfus Grayson.
Inspired by the untimely death of the playwright’s fiance a week before their wedding, the play was a way for Cunningham to deal with his grief.
The story takes the audience from the time Todd and Patty meet, through the complications of two adults who were abandoned or betrayed as children, and what those tragedies do to their ability to live and love and, in Patty’s case, to raise her own child. It turns the spotlight on the kind of abusive relationships so many people seem to be trapped in.
DeMoss said Cunningham had approached her and asked if she’d stage it, and she agreed.
“He wrote a draft; I read it and offered advice. He wrote another, and a bunch of the Found regulars met and did a read-through and offered more suggestions for subsequent rewrites,” DeMoss said. “This is a collaboration of many longtime Foundlings.”
DeMoss said the Found Theatre regulars were drawn to the compelling story and the fact that it is a new play that’s never been produced.
“The Found likes to experiment, to gamble, and to produce new work. Most of our material was written by the late Cynthia Galles, the founder of the Found and the person who created magic here for over 30 years,” she said. “She liked relevant, edgy material, and so do I, and we are trying to maintain that legacy.”

May 28, 2008
By Melinda Schupmann, "Backstage"

Encapsulating heartbreak into 90 minutes takes skill and a certain kind of courage, and playwright Todd Cunningham is mostly successful in his cathartic drama about the death of his fiancée, days before their marriage, due to complications from diabetes. In the play, after a life filled with ill health, sexual abuse, and chronic alcoholism, Patty (Kay Richey) makes the effort to rise above her problems, mostly in her struggles to be a good mother to her handicapped daughter.

Her champion is Todd (John Sturgeon), a journalist with problems of his own. He meets Patty at a baseball field where both are selling refreshments. For reasons that defy logic, he pursues her despite the barriers she erects early on. No matter how abusive she is to him over the course of their relationship, he just keeps coming back for more, seemingly bolstered by copious amounts of apricot brandy.

In chillingly realistic portrayals, an unholy trio of Patty's parents (Michael Dale Brown, Joyce Hackett) and Todd's mother (Barbara Duncan Brown) provide a ghostly sideshow, re-creating the violence and neglect that led to Todd and Patty's dysfunctional union. It's clear that director Virginia DeMoss and cast are committed to a sensitive treatment of Cunningham's sorrow and the tragedy of Patty's life.

One of the production's distracting elements is the use of frequent blackouts in which actors rearrange furniture and get set up for the next scene. As adeptly accomplished as the scene changes are, they often break the dramatic tension and make for abrupt emotional swings for the characters. Original music is created for the play by Kerry Getz and Drayfus Grayson, allowing the principals to articulate their inner thoughts. It's not a happy play, but it may give writer Cunningham a bit of closure on this episode in his life.