Wishing Makes It So

Coffee, Hershey’s Kisses, cookies and silky bites of chocolate cake cover tables for four at Old Town Hall — the perfect setup for the Goshen Players’ treacly “Enchanted April.�

   It’s sweet.

   It’s comforting.

   And it fuels a sticky glycemic high, climaxing with a shower of white blossoms at play’s end. The message, as many in the audience knew already from a 1992 film and a Broadway run in 2003, is that sun, wisteria and a Mediterranean castle, albeit a small one, can right the world.

   It’s 1922. England is still mourning the million men — husbands, children, brothers — lost in World War I, or The Great War, as it was known then. And change is in the air. Victorian propriety is toppling, to the confusion of some and the amusement of many.

   And it’s raining.

   And thundering.

   Which is why notice of a Tuscan castle for rent in the month of April looks so appealing to Lotty (Beth Steinberg), a duty-bound British housewife who tends to the shining of her husband’s shoes and the brushing of his lawyer’s coat with mounting dismay. “It’s not important that you enjoy yourself,â€� Mellersh, Lotty’s mate tells her when she complains about dreary social calls, “but that you are simply there.â€�

    Desperate to escape, she rounds up her savings and three strangers — the restless and Cognac-lapping Lady Caroline (Andrus Graves), Rose (Janice Connor), another dutiful wife in middle age; and the marvelously imperious Mrs. Graves, a woman of regular habits and vivid memories of the Victorian poets she met in her father’s house (Lea Dmytryck). And off they go for a spell away from gloomy chores, and a changing culture.

   The second act, in which the quartet is more or less happily settled in a dream, is sunny and romantic. Men start appearing: first the charming landlord Antony Wilding (Michael Bolinski), then Mellersh (John Fabbri), and finally Rose’s spouse, Frederick (David Robinson). And we are off to a jolly finish. It’s odd, though, that a play with no suspense, only one mild and well-warned surprise and a burlesque prank or two works so well. But this production moves along at a nice pace;  all the actors know what they are about. And really, who would be so curmudgeonly as to fault a world so suddenly righted?

   “Enchanted April,â€�including coffee and sweets, plays at Goshen’s Old Town Hall through Oct. 6. For reservations, call 860-491-9988.

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