‘Velocity of Autumn’ provides a funny, touching look at aging

Look closely on the set of the Forum Theatre Company’s “The Velocity of Autumn” and you’ll see a decades-old picture of both of its cast members together.

“That’s us when he was in high school,” Gina Austin said, displaying the snapshot in a frame.

“Let me see that – I don’t know if I want to see that,” Ray Wills responds.

It’s no Photoshop job. The picture is of Austin and Wills, she the teacher/director and he a student actor at Wichita West High School, following a play in the late 1970s.

“Velocity,” which opens this weekend at the Mary Jane Teall Theatre in Century II, casts Austin as an 80-year-old woman who barricades herself in her house, complete with Molotov cocktails, fighting her children’s plans to put her in a nursing home; and Wills as her estranged son, who climbs in a second-floor window to reason with her.

“It’s funny, it’s really touching,” said director Kathryn Page Hauptman, the Forum founder and artistic director.

Hauptman had kept an eye on “Velocity” since its Broadway debut in 2014, where it starred Estelle Parsons in a Tony Award-nominated role as mother Alexandra and Stephen Spinella as son Chris.

When Forum got the rights to produce it, she called Austin and Wills, who last were on stage together in 2014 at the Forum – as mother and son again – in “Driving Miss Daisy.”

“I selected this show for them,” Hauptman said.

Wills, a Broadway veteran whose credits include as a cast member and Nathan Lane understudy in “The Producers,” says “Autumn” approaches the issues of aging, not only for the mother but the son.

“It’s about getting older and the choices that we make or have made for us,” said Wills, now on the theater faculty at Newman University. “She’s struggling with all of these issues. She’s not in bad shape, but the kids want to tell her what to do because they’re concerned for her.

“It’s about coming to terms with who you are and where you are in your life,” he added.

Although the subject may seem depressing, “there actually is a lot of light and brightness in this relationship,” Hauptman said.

“There’s a lot of humor and gritty, intelligent characters,” she added.

Wills said the subject is relatable to anyone with aging parents.

“The more we know these characters and we know the people we know on stage, the more the audience will experience,” he said.

“The Velocity of Autumn,” which opens the sixth season for Forum Theatre, is the company’s first show in the Mary Jane Teall. All but one of the shows of its season – an original world premiere musical, “Christmas Letters,” Nov. 11 to Dec. 18, at First United Methodist Church in Wichita – will be at Century II.

“It’s one of the best theaters in town. Great space, great support,” Hauptman said. “I think our audience is really going to like it.”

Both the director and the performers said they enjoy the amphitheater-style seating in the Mary Jane Teall where, because of Actor’s Equity union restrictions, only 199 of its 652 seats will be sold.

Wills and Austin said they found a bit of deja vu in playwright Eric Coble’s script, set in Brooklyn. The mother talks about taking the son to the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art – places that Wills was first exposed to thanks to his teacher and friend, Austin, on a West school trip.

“We know exactly the locations and have the memories in our heads, so it’s all the more real,” Wills said. “You don’t get that all the time.”

This story was originally published October 13, 2016 at 2:26 PM with the headline "‘Velocity of Autumn’ provides a funny, touching look at aging."