How does it feel to feel?

Look Back in Anger begins before the audience has had time to seat itself. Alison Porter (Ginny Smith, TC'02), barefoot and—as it later turns out—pregnant, irons a shirt blandly and mechanically. Her husband Jimmy (Jeremy Strong, TC '01) and their live-in friend and the self-declared "no man's land" between the couple, Cliff Lewis (Adam O'Byrne, TC '01), sit reading their halves of the paper. Jimmy is smoking a pipe. Light jazz plays in the background. The set is simple; a clothesline takes center stage in the Porters' one-room flat, and almost everything seems typical of the abode of less-than-well-off Brits in the mid-'50s. Next to the radio, however, a stuffed squirrel regards a large teddy bear, a set decision that initially seems terribly random.

Look Back In Anger: By John Osborne, Directed by G. J. Cederquist REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH

Then the play begins. Jimmy can't stop talking about the news. He wants tea. He has an insatiable appetite. It is Sunday night. There is never anything to do Sunday night. The weather is lousy; thunder rumbles outside; where is his tea? Time is passing, all his wife can do is iron expressionlessly as his Cliff mindlessly thumbs through the paper, and Jimmy isn't satisfied being angry alone. Strong shines in the role from the very beginning; he is brilliant and lovable as Jimmy, who wins us over with his cracks and criticisms, sometimes sarcastic and cruel, sometimes just plain fun. Jimmy is, it turns out, the bear. He is big and brutal but no more threatening, after all, than the stuffed squirrel sitting beside him.

Nor can any of the other characters be judged on appearance alone. Alison is silent, unresponsive, dedicated to the sole task of ironing the men's clothes while, it seems, playing the martyr. She is, in reality, an uptown girl who made the mistake of marrying a man with a dream deferred. He is miserable, and she rarely opens her mouth save to tease and flirt with the caring Cliff or, later, to complain to her high-class friend Helena Charles (Vanessa Wolf, BR '01). Only a few times does the humanity of Jimmy's wife emerge, and these are the moments when she is swept up in her love for her husband, becoming the playful squirrel to his bear.

Wolf is wonderfully despicable in the role of Helena, and Smith's Alison is focused on creating peace—or rather avoiding discussion and the possibly ensuing conflict—regardless of its consequences. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that no change will occur until each character can escape monotony by allowing himself to actually feel, whether the emotion be anger, bitterness, sadness, or love.

Anger is a consistently excellent production. The actors' accents are as convincing as their personalities, and while Strong's Jimmy doesn't quite steal the show, the others are willing to allow us to love him best. After all, each of them ultimately finds this angry prophet in an emotionally frigid age irresistable.

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