Orville McCarter,  Justin Patrick Meyer, James Walter,
Bill McVey, Matt Hyland, John Scamardella Jr, Kevin Gutches





Justin Patrick Meyer, Kevin Gutches





Orville McCarter, Matt Hyland, John Scamardella Jr.


Photos by Jan Somma-Hammell

MY MARINERS:
Theatre review – Staten Island Advance
September 30, 2004
Sundog sniffs out murder at ‘Mariners’ Snug Harbor
Michael J. Fressola

Retirement quarters full of cranky old sea-swabs may not boil with dramatic possibilities, but playwrights Damon DiMarco and Jeffery Harper found one there.
“My Mariners,” the company’s Snug Harbor whodunit, had its world premiere last weekend in a bare-bones but deftly atmospheric Sundog Theatre production in Veterans Memorial Hall.
It’s good, grim fun and there’s still time to catch it tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday.
The story, a tweaked composite of 19th Century historical fact, turns on a murder. An inmate of the Harbor has turned up dead – “gutted like a fish” – in an orchard on the grounds (probably Livingston). The facility’s trustees have dispatched a representative, who has a mystery of this own, to investigate the slaying.
The plot co-opts details from the regimes of two notorious bosses (called governors at the time) of Sailors’ Snug Harbor” --Thomas Melville, brother of author Herman, and William Trask. Both were tyrannical and arguably dishonest. And they are actually on record at the Harbor during its nearly 150-year history.
Weirdly enough, “My Mariners” is the second Harbor script to surface in the past year. The first, John Thorpe’s “Snugs,” debuted last season as a staged reading. It was historically driven and murder-free.
In “My Mariners,” which Sundog commissioned, the two governors are combined in the pompous person of the fictional Gov. Thomas Brack, played with unctuous malevolence by Matt Hyland. Among Brack’s crimes: Selling provisions that should have nourished Harbor inmates, and forcing them into harsh labor regimens. Brack’s enforcer/stooge, Amos Parker, is done with lumbering panache by Orville McCarter. He’s the one they find eviscerated.
Will you figure out who did it? It won’t be easy. Hint” Think about “Oz,” the HBO series, and Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Except for some detailed costumes, the production is stark and straightforward, a matter of necessity, not choice. Director Christopher Catt’s customary workplace, Wagner College, has a reasonably well-equipped theater. The Harbor has no such facility as yet. Veteran’s Memorial Hall has been used as a theater venue for 20 years now, but it’s never worked well. It has no rake (the seating is level), no wings, and no stage depth. Lighting and sound systems are minimal and the seats, which are pews, are punishing. Catt has added atmosphere wherever possible.
Two gifted singers (Justin Patrick Meyer and Kevin Gutches) send sea-songs pulsing through the space and the action is played in stark pools of illumination which resembles lamplight.
The acting is uniformly good. Bob Elia’s William Garland, an old Snug, is so salty, you don’t always know what he’s saying. Sundog regular John Scamardella, a natural clown, is defeated as a weak-willed lackey who gains strength as the plot thickens. The hardest role, naturally, is that of the tortured investigator Charles Reinbeck. It’s underwritten, but James Walter works it intensely.
A better venue and a bigger budget might have allowed for more texture. Flashback projections and/or video wouldn’t have hurt this production. 
 Even as it is, it’s creepy and effective.
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