Tynan's Anger

An adjustment of America's attitudes toward the sixties has been long overdue, and while Mad Men may be reminding people of how the adult world worked in the face of turbulence, August Schulenberg's The Lesser Seductions of History gets with the fresh faced college grads, caught in between the choices of the larger world and their personal demons. A crucial theme in Schulenberg's play is that the divide between personal and political, even in times of rapid change, isn't a black and white distinction.

The Lesser Seductions of History is a fantastic buffet of the sociology of a trying time, when everyone wanted to have a revolution, but not every revolution was on the same page. The sheer number of characters and story lines (10 characters and even more locations) in Lesser Seductions doesn't overwhelm the audience; Schulenberg was wise to trust the empathy inherent on theater to avoid getting lost in exposition or context. He's also taken the American narrative of any elementary school understanding of the '60s, (Beatlemania, MLK, Kennedy, Vietnam), and used is more as a backdrop to his characters, all of whom stay interesting even as they range from saintly, idiotic, and occasionally evil.

The characters you meet in Lesser Seductions aren’t all that different than the characters you see in modern young adult life: the hipster leader who brings people together as he manipulates, the mentally damaged woman trying to avoid the demons, the earnest minority member who becomes radicalized with the education he fought hard to achieve; the no-frills political advocate who can barely watch a politicIan on TV without screaming.

What Schulenberg has tapped into was that the '60s was the first time these groups, all of which had previously existed in private, saw an opening to get their cause heard. The faces of all actors start to turn wide-eyed and smiling around 1963, and, as we all know, by 1968 they are worn, burned out, and attempting to recover the shreds of happiness or normalcy.

Perhaps because of the disparity in all these causes, Schulenberg has chosen to embody the spirit of all causes in one character, aptly named "One" (Candice Holdorf). One serves as something of a cross between a Greek chorus, the Stage Manager in Our Town, and the narrator of a campfire story, much like the one recently scene in Universal Robots off-Broadway (a play Schulenberg has lauded in interviews and on his blog). While I would have much preferred Holdorf to be less fey and cheeky to the audience, Lesser Seductions of history demands a character like One, who draws the audience in to the characters lives. This is a play that would never work in a proscenium setting, and while it may never be performed in a commercial setting, the play works with a minimum of a disciplined and unified cast and crew (likethe Flux Ensemble that produced) with almost no limits at the maximum.

In fact, the major flaw of Lesser Seductions  is not anything to do with the cast or crew, but the space. The Cherry Pit theater is way too claustrophobic to fully express a play like Lesser Seductions, and director Heather Cohn has done a fantastic job simply to avoid having actors bump into anyone or anything in rapid transitions. In reality, however, the play would be ideally suited for a park, field, or open space. If Lesser Seductions had been produced in 1969; it would have been better than Woodstock; the play provides a clearer perspective of young American life than any acid trip ever could.

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The Lesser Seductions of History by August Schulenberg. Directed by Heather Cohn; Costume Design by Becky Kelly; Sound Design by Asa Wember; Lighting Design by Lauren Parrish; Set Design by Will Lowry.Photo by Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright

Starring Jake Alexander, Matthew Archambault, Tiffany Clementi, Michael Davis, Candice Holdorf, Ingrid Nordstrom, Kelly O'Donnell, Jason Paradine, Christina Shipp, Raushanah Simmons, and Isaiah Tanenbaum

The production, presented by Flux Theatre Ensemble will play at The Cherry Pit (155 Bank Street) November 6-22, Wednesdays-Sundays at 7:30pm with Sunday matinees at 2pm. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.fluxtheatre.org or by calling TheaterMania at 212-352-3101.

Labels: 2009-2010, august schulenberg, flux theater ensemble, new york, off-off-Broadway, the lesser seductions of history, theater review

"You are sitting in an empty bar (in a town you’ve never before visited), drinking Bacardi with a soft-spoken acquaintance you barely know. After an hour, a third individual walks into the tavern and sits by himself, and you ask your acquaintance who the new man is. 'Be careful of that guy,' you are told. 'He is a man with a past.' A few minutes later, a fourth person enters the bar; he also sits alone. You ask your acquaintance who this new individual is. 'Be careful of that guy, too,' he says. 'He is a man with no past.'

"Which of these two people do you trust less?"

- Chuck Klosterman

It doesn’t take much philosophical wisdom to see that a bad boy who doesn’t play by the rules is always more sexy than a neurotic nerd who draws within the lines. Yet the bad boys are not just the types you don’t take home to mother—they’re often the types who will commit the most horrible atrocities, yet will always be popular, or at least fascinating, in the public eye. Ted Bundy’s trial was filled with women giving him love letters and wedding proposals. CNN cuts from serious discussion of the war in Iraq to sensationalist chasing of Paris Hilton. The allure of a pure, romantic view of beauty is so powerful that it taints and corrupts anyone who possesses it. 

Pretty Theft, a new play by prolific playwright Adam Szymkowicz, clearly identifies with this problem, and wrestles with it throughout. At the center of Pretty Theft’s epic struggle is Joe (Brian Pracht), “a man with no past,” who lives a preposterously sheltered life in an assisted living facility, subjected to harsh, traumatic treatment if he so much as kisses the one beautiful person who takes an interest in him. On the other side, we have Marco (Todd d’Amour), the “man with a past” who can steal beautiful things with ease, be it by stealing a painting or raping a teenage girl, and knows with utter conviction he will never be caught.

Szymkowicz loosely based Pretty Theft on Charles Mee’s Hotel Cassiopeia, which examined the glorified life of box artist Joseph Cornell. After seeing Hotel Cassiopeia at the Court Theatre in 2006, I was disgusted by how the precision of the SITI company could be applied to a play that was so aimless in its examination of a celebrated artist’s life. Conversely, Pretty Theft, which only takes from Cassiopeia the character named “Joe” who is fascinated by ballerinas, has a relatively clear and larger thematic aim: the simultaneous allure and danger of beauty. Yet Szymkowicz, who is a more enthusiastic but less precise playwright than Mee, can’t seem to find a way to bring it all together. Pretty Theft is an admirably ambitious play, but one that can’t find a center to bring it all together. Part of the problem is utilizing eight actors and even more characters. By trying to tell each character’s story, he loses us along the way.

In general we are focused on the turbulent, traumatic summer before college of Allegra (Marnie Schulenberg), who despite having nearly everything going for her can’t seem to break herself out of a nearly permanent funk. Everyone around her senses her purity and naïveté, but all react to it differently, be it her wild childhood friend Suzy (Maria Portman Kelly), who admires the kind of lifestyle Allegra is able to maintain (great college, great boyfriend, great resources), or her dimwitted boyfriend Bobby (Zack Robidas), whose resentment of Allegra is backed by the same societal logic that lets Marco know he will get away with his crimes.

While society may simply allow Marco to get away with horrific acts, his own reasoning is more complex. A cross between a poet, philosopher, and sociopath, Marco is the only character who understands the realities of the value of beauty in today’s society, and he is as disgusted by that valuation as he is drawn to it. When we first meet Marco, he claims to be “retired” from his job of stealing beautiful things. By the end, he’s committed the most horrific kind of theft imaginable. Like Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Marco is the only one in the play with the courage and shamelessness to exploit a cultural weakness that is vulnerable to exploitation. The last time I saw d’Amour, he was putting his hyper-gruff voice and attitude into a comedic context in last summer’s exceptional, underrated What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends. Here he’s taken that persona to its natural extreme, and I’ll be damned if d’Amour doesn’t give one of the better performances as a villain I’ve seen all year.

Yet we never really get full resolution of the fates of Marco, Allegra, or Suzy, possibly because Szymkowicz, like most male playwrights, downplays the psychology of rape, even as he explores the execution and societal significance of it in gruesome detail. Allegra and Suzy’s relationship, tone, and attitudes are constantly shifting, more a product of out-of-sync, inconsistent playwriting than a conscious attempt to regularly shift definitions of beauty.

What Szymkowicz does understand, however, is the effect socioeconomic scale has on standards of beauty. While Joe finds anything even remotely associated with ballerinas to be beautiful enough, and Allegra’s status awes Suzy, Allegra can never seem to win her mother’s approval, and Bobby is too jaded even to comprehend how breaking up with Allegra after her father’s death may be in poor taste. Even in his evilness, however, Marco is able to see Allegra’s combination of physical, intellectual, and emotional beauty with a clearer eye than anyone else in the play. Ultimately, the most irredeemable character ends up saving the play by bringing Szymkowicz’s message home. Whatever flaws exist in Pretty Theft, it is certainly fascinating, even when ethically dubious. For a play meant to examine exactly that conundrum, I suppose that is all that matters.

Pretty Theft is presented by the Flux Theatre and runs through May 17 at the Access Theater Gallery, 380 Broadway. Photos by Isaiah Tanenbaum. This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: 2009-2010, adam szymkowicz, chuck klosterman, flux theater ensemble, new york, off-off-Broadway, pretty theft, theater review