David Cale ’s “Sandra” is a riveting mystery as well a profound tale of personal growth. It’s intimate and confessional yet thrilling and sensational, and TheaterWorks Hartford is giving it a keenly designed top-to-bottom production that brings out all its varied glories. It’s a remarkable achievement by actor Felicia Curry (known in the New York and Washington D.
C. theater scenes and now making her TheaterWorks debut), director Jared Mezzocchi (who’s been part of numerous TheaterWorks online productions, notably the political satire “Russian Troll Farm” and the spooky “Someone Else’s House”), set designer Marcelo Martínez García (a recent graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale), creative content/video designer Camilla Tassi (who previously did the projections for “Fun Home” at TheaterWorks) and sound designer Evdoxia Ragkou. It seems particularly exceptional because the previous show at TheaterWorks, “Sanctuary City,” used similar tools to tell a small-cast big-theme story with none of the panache or big pay off that “Sandra” delivers.
The show is not subtle, yet it is nuanced. Curry sits on a chair at the front of a small stage. She’s sitting there, in fact, when the audience starts filing in preshow.
When the lights go down, she springs to life but doesn’t leave the chair. As Sandra delivers her long involved story — about her musical friend Ethan who’s gone missing, about her failing marriage, about her career ru.
