Noah Haidle (above) returns to Costa Mesa for his third production at SCR.

HAIDLE RETURNS

by Kelly L. Miller

William Faulkner once said: “The past is never dead.  It's not even past.” Echoes of the past are ever-present for Gustin Novak, the protagonist of Saturn Returns, Noah Haidle’s newest play. A retired radiologist, Gustin is haunted by memories of his life and the women he loved at 28, 58 and now 88 – ages marked by the return of the planet Saturn, an astrological phenomenon of intense change that occurs every thirty years.

As the play opens, 88-year-old Gustin is so lonely that he has resorted to paying people for companionship. He’s tried everyone: a plumber, a computer technician, an au pair, an escort, and finally Suzanne, an assisted-living professional who looks uncannily like his daughter and who grudgingly agrees to make him breakfast and keep him company.

Noah Haidle’s darkly funny memory play explores the nature of love, loss, and the passing of time, alternating between three pivotal days in Gustin’s life over the course of 60 years. We see his love for his young wife, Loretta, at 28, his relationship with daughter, Zephyr, at 58, and his newly formed friendship with Suzanne at 88.

With Saturn Returns, Haidle has created an elegant casting scheme, in which a single actress plays all three women in Gustin’s life – and three different actors play Gustin at ages 28, 58 and 88. This overlapping dramatic structure not only heightens the play’s poetry and adds to its theatricality, it also reinforces the thematic passage of time and how memories echo and reverberate through Gustin’s life.

When Saturn Returns premiered at Lincoln Center Theater in New York last season, critics lauded it as “an intimate reflection on grief and loneliness.” (Variety). Charles Isherwood of the New York Times called the play “a muted study in the constancy of loneliness and need” with a “time-bending structure [that] is formally elegant.”

With this production, playwright Noah Haidle returns to SCR, where he received his first professional production while studying playwriting at Juilliard. His dark comedy Mr. Marmalade premiered at SCR in 2004, followed by Princess Marjorie in 2005. Mr. Marmalade went on to a production at The Roundabout Theatre in New York. Since then, Noah has written several plays that have been produced at theaters across the country, including Rag and Bone at Long Wharf Theatre, Vigils at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and Persephone at Boston’s Huntington Theatre.

SCR Producing Artistic Director David Emmes directs the West Coast premiere of Saturn Returns on the Segerstrom stage. His stellar cast includes Nick Ullett (Gustin at 88) who delighted SCR audiences in Noises Off last season, Conor O’Farrell (Gustin at 58) who played Leo in the world premiere of John Kolvenbach’s Goldfish, and Graham Michael Hamilton (Gustin at 28) who played Laertes in SCR’s recent production of Hamlet. Actress Kristen Bush (Suzanne/Zephyr/Loretta) recently starred in Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour at The Old Globe.

Emmes relishes the opportunity to share this “theatrically evocative play” with SCR audiences. “Noah’s written this moving, poetic play,” he says, “about the universality of memory and loss that connects us all in a wonderfully theatrical way.”

Conor O'Farrell, Nick Ullett, Kristen Bush and Graham Michael Hamilton in Saturn Returns. Photo by Henry DiRocco.

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