Tynan's Anger

From the start of Princes of Waco, it's pretty clear that Robert Askins is writing about what he knows. The 29-year old Houston native has a smoothness in his Texas dialogue that comes from a native speaker, and the play streams so comfortably through the ins and out of the mythology of Texas and the Wild West that you almost forget that it's actively present. Only a handful of major American playwrights could match this kind of all-American darkness, and that list would include names like Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, and Tracy Letts.

What makes Askins a remarkably precocious playwright, and what makes Princes of Waco such an enthralling theatergoing experience is the fact that in addition writing about what he knows, Askins already knows his audience. Despite the overwhelming Texan themes, Princes of Waco is a serious drama that deals with the ethical, emotional, and social issues it introduces with the same kind of nuance and perspective that most New York audiences demand. He's writing in a New York that is more open to darker straight plays than it has been in quite some time. He's also writing for the Youngbloods, arguably the most prestigious assembly of young playwrights, in the Ensemble Studio Theatre, which is increasingly becoming the all-around best place for new drama in New York City.

Princes of Waco starts off with a Jim confused preacher's son waiting for a bus on the day of his father's funeral, ignoring a beer he ordered at 8 in the morning while trying to start a future as a teen runaway. He meets a man in a bar named Fritz, a man who's been down that road and seen it all before, and can see right through Jim a mile away. In one of those seemingly innocuous first lines that sets the tone for everything else later on, Fritz tells Jim "you gotta drink it fur it to work."

Fritz's not trustworthy, but he's a natural mentor to Jim, who can see right through the lies of a repressed rural town, but not the lies of a man sitting right next to him. Fritz's "mentoring" results in Jim losing his stolen watch, turning into a felon almost instantly, and spending jail time after Fritz rats on him, and losing his underage girlfriend to his supposed father figure.

What makes the play isn't this story; which as far as general plots go, is one of the oldest in the book. What makes Princes of Waco so great is the kind of emotional weight, intellectual maturity, and complex social portrait that Askins weave. In Princes of Waco, no joke is made without a hidden motive, no one is innocent even if their motivations are understandable, no one changes all that much and even the biggest badass in the room is really quite puny and needy. In this mindset, you're either Jesus or you're damned, an impossible situation with no wiggle room, but one that it's characters still try (and fail) to wiggle out of all the same.

Of course, this kind of attitude would be nothing without the words to back it up. Askins finds humor everywhere it's to be found in Princes of Waco, and no one could accuse the play of being anything less than entertaining. The humor of the play is not as black as the play itself, and it creates a world out of its characters that's easy to enjoy on a basic level. Like the play's characters, Princes of Waco will draw you in with its charms, and leave you with a gut resonance that exists long after you leave the theater (without all the devastation the play runs through).

There's not much original about Princes of Waco, and that's okay; just because the play's tragedy is typical doesn't make it any less tragic. The magic comes, as Fritz points out, "ain’t…in the outcome just in the telling." Askins is able to tell a drama at 29 better than some playwrights can in their entire lives—as good as Princes of Waco is, the best is yet to come.

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Princes of Waco by Robert Askins. Directed by Dylan McCullough; set by Maiko Chii; costumes by Danielle Schembre; lighting by Ji-youn Chang; sound by Hillary Charnas; props by Renee Williams.

Starring Evan Enderle (Jim), Scott Sowers (Fritz), Megan Tusing (Esme), and Christine Farrell (Toasty).

Performances run through January 30, Thursday through Saturday at 7:00pm. Tickets are $18 and may be ordered at www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org or 866-811-4111. Running time: 2 HOURS.

Photo courtesy of Bruce Cohen.

Labels: 2009-2010, ensemble studio theatre, new york, off-off-Broadway, princes of waco, robert askins, theater review

There's little doubt in my mind that 2009 was the best year in recent memory for the revival of straight plays in New York City, and the year was bookended by two of the very best. In January, vaunted Chicago import Our Town turned what had always been a more intelligent play than its reputation preceded and turned it into an essential meditation on mortality in a jaded recession-era New York. The year ended with a revival of an even more unlikely source of contemporary weight: Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play Emperor Jones, a relic of pre-Golden Age American drama that, despite its importance, has been ignored due to its mostly outdated racial overtones. The Irish Repertory's production, now off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse, is even more daring, just as entertaining, and features some of the most brilliant acting, stage design, and theatrical vision you're likely to find in New York at this time.

It's easy to see why Emperor Jones has gone so ignored. Emperor Jones helped make stars out of both O'Neill and Paul Robeson upon its premiere, and the play was already an American standard by the time Moss Hart was just beginning his career. Nonetheless, in an era when even Huck Finn can be too controversial for a high school English curriculum, the fact that the thoroughly WASPy O'Neill could take such a frank view of an egomaniacal escaped African-American dictator in the Caribbean, with such frequent, unblinking use of the world "nigger," has caused it to be mostly ignored in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. (It should be noted, however, that Emperor Jones was not traditionally performed in blackface; the most prominent blackface performance of the play was actually a postmodern, cross-gender casted revival by the Wooster Group in 2007).

It's also easy to see imagine why a play of an egotistical black leader cursed by classic Greek hubris would resonate with New York theater audiences in 2009, however foolhardy the Obama comparison may be. Wisely, the Irish Repertory's Ciaran O'Reilly lets the superficial comparison speak for itself in O'Neill's script. Rather than the 4 hour+ blab fests for which O'Neill later became famous to literature scholars, but poison for most directors, Emperor Jones is a compact 74 minutes of raw human emotion, modeled after the Greeks.

At the beginning of the play, Emperor Brutus Jones is a dictator no less cocky, brash, or seemingly fully in command of his role as Oedipus or Lear. By the end, Jones' firm convictions in his manifest powers, both in the physical, metaphorical, and Machiavellian senses, ends up cursing his reign to a surprisingly early demise by a fickle, superstitious citizenry. Sound familiar?

More than any current event, however, what makes this particular production transcendent is three-fold. First and foremost, we have the awe-inspiring performance of John Douglas Thompson as Brutus Jones. After his deservedly award-winning turn as Othello last year, the Irish Rep couldn't have picked a better candidate to play Brutus Jones, a character whose cockiness, cynicism, and ultimate devastation reads on paper like Thompson's particular interpretation of Shakespeare . Here, Thompson ratchets up things to a higher level, switching between power-drunk haughtiness to nuanced vulnerability via the slightest eye-twitch in the play's first half. As Emperor Jones takes a more avant-garde turn in Jones' rush through the jungle in the play's second half, Thompson turns into a mad fool, but one completely congruous with the cocksure leader we saw just 30 minutes ago. It's a rather awe-inspiring transformation that defies easy description, and it more than makes up for the rest of the cast's lackluster performances. Either way, I have a hard time seeing Thompson not piling up even more awards that an off-Broadway show will allow.

Aiding to the smoothness of Jones' second-half shift is the remarkable design and choreography by the play's technical team. The creative team takes remarkable risks with its use of puppetry, masks, costumes doubling as sets, and background music that would be seen as stereotypical if it wasn't so perfect, the tech team, with a combination of theatrical and film and TV experience, mixes the use of indigenous stereotypes with that of the Jim Crow-era south to see Jones wrestle with his demons. If Willy Loman's daydreams seem at all dated in Death of a Salesman, Emperor Jones provides a crucial link between classic American drama and the Banquos, Ghosts, and Greek Choruses of theater's past.

Perhaps even more restrictive to staging Emperor Jones than the script is the stagecraft, which requires a kind of wizardry that for the last half-century years has mostly been dominated by erstwhile Artaud disciples. There's nothing absurdist about Jones' mad rush through the jungle to freedom, but with nothing else but Jones' internal monologue to keep the play running for the last 40 minutes, it's difficult to revive the play for audiences who go to legitimate theater expecting good dialogue more than good craft. The tech team hear wins by taking risks that almost always work.

All of this is remarkably audacious territory for director Ciaran O'Reilly, who took risks that far exceeded his critically praised work in 2006's The Hairy Ape, the more audience friendly of O'Neill's early classics. This play tackles some serious issues head on, in a context and style that makes most people uncomfortable. O'Neill could get away with this kind of frankness in 1920, when American drama was still raw and American pop culture was dominated by D.W. Griffith, but few Americans today could focus on the poetry and not the details of Emperor Jones.

Though O'Reilly's been in the States for several decades, he's a native of Ireland and a product of the generation of Irish drama that produced Brian Friel and Frank McGuiness (a generation marked by the wake of the rise to power of historically second-class citizens). Suffice to say, O'Reilly has the clout, both in terms of his resume, his biography, and his long-term vision, to bring Emperor Jones back to the American consciousness, in the right way, and at the right time. He knows where the historical parallels end and where the play becomes the thing, and has overseen a remarkable, seemingly impossible accomplishment in New York in 2009: he's taken an 80 year old play with archaic American values towards politics and theater, and turned it into the most visceral theatrical experience of this winter. The Irish Rep's Emperor Jones reanimates the heart of a theatrical legacy that had seemingly run dry eons ago.

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The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill
Directed by Ciaran O'Reilly

Cast: John Douglas Thompson (Brutus Jones, Emperor); Dick Foucheux (Henry Smithers) Michael Akil Davis (Ensemble, Crocodile God), Jon Deliz (Ensemble, Dandy), Sameerah Lugmaan-Harris (Old Native Woman, Ensemble), David Heron (Lem, Native Chief/ Ensemble), Sinclair Mitchel (Ensemble, Witch Doctor)
Set design: Charlies Corcoran
Costume design: Antonia Ford-Roberts
Lighting design: Brian Nason
Original music and sound design: Ryan Rumery and Christian Fredrickson
Puppet design: Bob Flanagan
Choreography: Barry McNabb
Properties: Deidre Brennan
Stage Manager: Pamela Brusoski
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Performances of THE EMPEROR JONES are set to run December 15, 2009 through January 31, 2010 at Soho Playhouse (15 Vandam Street): Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8pm; plus 3pm matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays (with Christmas and New Year's schedules to be announced). Tickets are $65 and are available by calling 212-691-1555 or online at www.sohoplayhouse.com.

Labels: 2009-2010, ciaran o'reilly, Emperor Jones, eugene o'neill, irish rep, John Douglas Thompson, new york, off-off-Broadway, theater review

13P Started as a collective of mid-level playwrights (e.g. regional and off-Broadway level) who were unsatisfied with the workshop process. It's interesting to watch that mission apply to American Treasure, which feels like a good play that would have been great with more workshopping. American Treasure is one of the few plays I've seen that manages to recover from an exceeding weak opening, which plays up the noir speak to a preposterously high level. This kind of over-stylized dialogue dies down as the plot takes over, but the dialogue does set you off from the plot from the start.

The play also suffers from a weak pair of actors who look lost and poorly disciplined. Playwright Julia Jarcho also directed the show, and the play could certainly have benefitted from an outside source to tighten up the play's pacing and loose ends.

Nonetheless, there's a lot of intelligence abound in American Treasure. The play takes traditional liberal tropes of overwhelming power structures and applies them at a local historical level. In American Treasure's vision, the power that controls your town is no different from the one that controls the national myth, which, as Jarcho astutely notes, was based on genocide. For a genre so dominated by Indiana Jones in American pop culture, Jarcho doesn't gloss over anything.

What could change about the play is a more refined sense of humor, as most of the plays comedy produces nothing more than mild chuckles. The atmospheric effects are great, and most playwrights would dream for this kind of technical design for a small scale show. A few of the playwrights in the 13P collective have already had greater successes since it was formed; Sarah Ruhl already has a Pulitzer nomination and a Broadway show under her belt. Jarcho, featured in the New York Times as a teenager, still has a lot of room to grow as a playwright, but she certainly has a precocious thematic flair. Modifying her knack for dialogue, and letting some of the collaborative processes into her work will only make her work better with maturity. 13P has allowed Jarcho to dictate her vision more than most playwrights, ignoring the fact that playwrights are dictators of their work like few other genres of writers.

Photo by Rob Strong.

Presented by 13P at the Paradise Factory, 64 E. Fourth St., NYC. Nov. 29–Dec. 12. Wed., Thu., Sat., and Sun., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 7:30 and 10 p.m. Tickets:(212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, or www.americantreasuretheplay.com.

Labels: 2009-2010, american treasure, julia jarcho, new york, off-off-Broadway, Playwright, theater review

It's not surprising that, when The 39 Steps premiered on Broadway, some critics were outraged that a play lacking any focus on plot would be any sort of success. The outrage was less palpable when the play made it to Broadway, where it has become a smash success, outlasting every play from its season, including the more beloved farce of Boeing Boeing and the endless (and deservedly) awarded play August: Osage County. Two years later; it is easy to see why; what The 39 Steps lacked in drama or plot, it made up for in a remarkable display of stagecraft that is rarely seen today. It's perhaps the only non-musical that fully provides a bang for its buck to Broadway visitors more interested in spectacle and escapism, and in a unique twist of contemporary culture, it provides such entertainment in a way movies cannot.

Up until the last 10 years or so, there was simply nothing the theater could do to compete with movies for spectacle. No matter how much explosions, gunfire, loose women, or blood you had on stage, it was nothing compared to the Schwarzenegger movie playing a few blocks down from Broadway, let alone any town in America. Despite all the advances in special effects however, there is still a sizable portion of America that prefers organic effects to digital; no matter what CGI can accomplish in Avatar or Lord of the Rings, it will never replace the more natural sets of Star Wars or 2001. That portion of American audiences has been abandoned by Hollywood, and they're the types who have bankrolled The 39 Steps, guffaw by guffaw.

Between the endless supply of visual, verbal, and auditory gags, the occasional breaks for puppetry, the intentionally horrible use of accents, and references to just about every Hitchcock movie you can thing of, criticizing the script of The 39 Steps would be like criticizing the virtuosity of Bob Dylan's singing voice. The poetry is not in the words of this plays, but in the effects, the actors, the mannerisms, and the jokes (in other words all the things that made farce the go-to form of entertainment before pictures could move.)

The choice of The 39 Steps, a great Hitchcock movie (both in its U.K. and U.S. versions), but by no means among his best work, is rather appropriate. The 39 Steps was one of the earliest displays of the MacGuffin method of cinematic narrative Hitchcock pioneered: it doesn’t matter what the 39 Steps are, so long as it allows Hitchcock to advance his cinematic vision (The Maltese Falcon featured the most famous use of the MacGuffin). The same holds for Maria Aitken's staging, which features a constant barrage of theatrical devices old and new, including a brilliant display of stage tech that deservedly won Tonys for lighting and sound. At no point does The 39 Steps feel dated or self-righteous; it would seemed more like that had the play been a straight adaptation. The winks to the audience are occasional and only when necessary—most hilariously at the play's climax.

The 39 Steps is the only play I've seen, Broadway or not, where the director has gotten billing over the writer/adapter/conceiver. That's pretty much at the heart of the play's appeal. Its genius cannot be displayed in a script, but in a theater, using devices that have mostly been abandoned by non-musical theater. But The 39 Steps didn't just outlast August; it outlasted Grease and Xanadu. There's a fine line between old-school theatrical escapism and new wave, self-satisfied theatrical spectacle. The 39 Steps toes that line better than most anything that's been on Broadway in recent memory.

Labels: 39 Steps, adaptation, Broadway theatre, new york, Theatre

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

Preserving the American Family, with More Compassion than Conservatism

When I saw Stain last year, Tony Glazer struck me as a playwright with a remarkable voice in terms of dialogue and scope, but one who took a particularly repulsive view of his characters and social dynamics. A year later, desperate for drama that invoked the same reaction, I found myself watching his follow-up, In the Daylight. Not only did In The Daylight confirmed my suspicions that Glazer was a playwright of remarkable skill, but also let me see what has to be the best new play of the year, one that's as invigorating to the American stage as August: Osage County, but perhaps even more vital.

Quite simply, In the Daylight exposes a timely strain of white suburban angst as it tries to find a place in an America that's turning away from that direction. It's easy to see a more misguided neighbor of the Feingold household taking the streets in a teabag riot. Martin Feingold (Joseph Urla, from Seinfeld and The Wire), a writer straight from Oprah's book club with a cryptically semi-autobiographical novel, has taken his much feared homecoming trip to deal with his father's ashes, 6 years after his father's death. Something is clearly amiss, and it's more than his mother's health.

What follows is an unremitting family drama full of suspense, terror and remarkable vision. While Glazer pulls no punches in In the Daylight, what makes the play truly extraordinary is the compassion that Glazer finds constantly throughout the play's two hours. On the one hand, the terrors of a dominant white patriarchal household are fully acknowledged, as the terrifying flashback with Martin's father (Jay Patterson) demonstrates. At least on a personal level, Marty, the play's primary masculine voice is no misogynist, despite his passing jokes to the contrary.

The Feingold father spends the rest of the play haunting the family, as the full details of his death are reckoned with despite Martin's desperate attempt to disown his past life. Martin's sister Jessica (Sharon Maguire) and mother Elizabeth (Concetta Thomei), are ruthless in behavior and motivation, but their ruthlessness is more out of a devotion to persevere than out of a desire to torment. Family loyalties are the consistent thread which unites the Feingold's despite the intrusion of a potentially dangerous outsider (Ashley Austin Morris's "Charlotte"). The Feingold family is as volatile and emblematic of its times as any in classic American drama, but Glazer's knack for dialogue and contained scope means he never has to resort to excessive melodrama.

All the elements that drew me to Stain present, but Glazer's, writing has tightened and improved on just about every level. In the Daylight's premise and execution are carefully and cleverly carried out, and the plays;s consistently entertaining streak makes it no less exciting to those who would rather go to the theater for pure escapism. Glazer's script is also aided by a uniformly excellent production,  including the direction of John Gould Rubin, a fantastic abstract technical design, and a cast of disciplined New York veterans fully committed to the project. Glazer takes some considerable risks with the plot twists of the play's second act, but he backs them up with both discipline as a playwright and proper respect for his characters and the audience. The plays closing image, recalling "American Gothic," is among the most affecting I've ever witnessed.
Ever since Obama was elected President, I have been looking for an explanation for the backlash he has received, something "reasonable" conservatives like David Brooks or Ross Douthat have not been able to provide. By reducing larger cultural themes to an individual family, Glazer has provided an empathetic meditation on what was lost when America devalued the role of the nuclear family and community, one that does not need to rely on intellect to justify its underlying beliefs. Glazer is something of a traditionalist, but he's neither anti-intellectual nor a zealot, which will no doubt confuse those Americans who don't know of any other kind of traditionalist. Nonetheless, the uproarious ovation the play received on opening night in the Upper West Side is indicative of just how transcendent this play could be.

In The Daylight uses the theater's unique ability to combine remarkable intellect with genuine emotion, without the pressures of a more commercial medium. In The Daylight invokes a chilling view of American life in the tradition of Shephard, Mamet, and LaBute, but with the distinctly contemporary perspective of a younger playwright entering his prime. I can't recommend it highly enough.

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In the Daylight, by Tony Glazer. Directed by John Gould Rubin; scenic design by Christopher Barreca; costume design by Andreea Mincic; lighting design by Thom Weaver; sound design by Elizabeth Rhodes. Photo by Gili Getz.

Starring Sharon Maguire (Jessica Feingold), Ashley Austin Morris (Charlotte Fontaine), Jay Patterson (Dr. William Feingold), Concetta Thomei (Elizabeth Feingold), and Joseph Urla (Martin Feingold).

Performances will run through October 11th, 2009 at the McGinn Cazale Theatre (2162 Broadway, 4th floor at 76th Street). Tickets are $35 ($30 during previews) for tickets visit www.vitaltheatre.org or call 212.579.0528.

Labels: 2009-2010, in the daylight, new york, stain, theater review, tony glazer

Whatever the flaws of Complete, a new play by Andrea Kuchlewska now playing as part of the FringeNYC Encore series, its intelligence cannot be questioned. Complete has a unique conceptual framework that displays the delicate balance between intellect, emotion, genuine religious experience and our inherent suspicion of those who claim to have all the answers. The religious implications of the American self-help guru, a trend which started in the '70s and has only become more widespread, have not to my knowledge been given this kind of treatment in a play. Certainly, none have applied the self-help guru to the graduate student experience while not directly invoking the names Osho or Timothy Leary.

Wrapping its framework around 4 players, Complete features two linguistics graduate students Eve and Micah (Lucy Owen and Zac Jaffe) who bond over their closeted affinity for prescriptive grammar. Also featured are Jack (Dylan Price), flexing through the roles of two competing, self-help groups as well the professors who mock Eve and Micah's meandering, and Evie (Sophia Nicole Rodyakin), and Abigail Breslin-like combination of the play's inner child and Greek chorus. Evie. Complete's stylistic touches, including non-linear scenes, audience engagement, and an eerie prologue, are not particularly new, and in some cases take away from the play's overall strength. Certainly the lackadaisical direction by Birgitta Victorson didn't help. Nonetheless, it's very difficult to think of the play working any other way. The confusion of emotional and intellectual intelligence is central play's ability to remain entertaining and interesting. The occasional confusions were a smart price to pay for the right general tone.

At the center of the play are Eve and Micah, the two characters that really drive this play to another level. A not-necessarily romantic relationship is sparked by a discovered their mutual disgust for "bad grammar," despite linguistics' devotion to being purely descriptive in regards to language usage. How Eve and Micah view their roles in graduate school, however, couldn't be more different. While Eve's passion for language is inalienably tied to her thirst for knowledge and emotional health, Micah is much more concerned with his status in the field and not embarrassing himself. What's particularly striking about Complete is its complicated and unconventional take on the effect these two motivations have. Eve is more willing to put herself out there in her devotion to the subject matter, and her obsession with details ultimately sours her relationship with Micah. Micah, on the other hand, feels a compulsion to hide his intelligence out of fear of public speaking and scorn. His insecurity becomes so paralyzing that he needs to turn to a guru to fill an emotional void, much to the disgust of Eve, who has a bad history with gurus.

The differences between the "The Training" and "The Program," the two competing, generic self-help groups are never fully explored. Instead, Kuchlewska focuses on the indistinguishable emotional tactics used by each group, involving repeated catchphrases, deceptive jokes and colloquialisms, and the occasional screaming and strong-arming. Kuchlewska doesn't focus on the behaviors of the converted; There's no Heaven's Gate or Jonestown parallels here. Instead, she focuses on the margins of the conversion process, making it more understandable, if not relatable.

Complete contains a full gamut of attitudes towards cult-like behavior and academic pursuit, without applying any particular value set to them. No doubt audiences will be willing to add their own beliefs to Complete. Yet, Kuchlewska has audience biases fully covered with her smorgasbord approach. All this could have easily resulted in a very messy, unwieldy production. In fact, Kuchlewska errs on the side of intelligence at the expense of natural dialogue, and there are at least two scenes that would be best cut out. But by providing pockets of pathos and humor in the script, aided by the veiled intensity of Owen and Jaffe, Kuchlewska turns Complete into a smart play that intimately grasps theater's ability to become an intellectual platform, without becoming a soapbox.

Labels: 2009-2010, Andrea Kuchlewska, complete (play), Lucy Owen, new york, nyc fringe festival, theater review, Zac Jaffe

Barely a block away from the stop light with the New York salute, we get this sign on an abandoned warehouse:


It's almost like that "suspiciously fantastic apartment" listing in Futurama (hah! they still have newspapers in the 30th century!). Anyone who puts up a sign like this has to be cool, unless they're preying on hipster irony. Regardless, I'd much rather live there than in Williamsburg.

Labels: crazy landlord, lower east side, new york, raised middle finger, signs, simpsons in real life, wtf

"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

If you’re looking for the most savage depiction of the plight of the college-educated young woman struggling to manage work/life balance, don’t look to Sex and the City, Real Housewives of New York, or even the Fight Club spoof on last week’s 30 Rock. Instead, you’ll find it at UNDER St. Marks in Caitlin and the Swan, yet another fine production by The Management. In an adult working girls' night out, everything is going relatively normally until you hear a beast bellowing from behind the stage so loudly that it seems more fitting for a Martin McDonagh play. Yet it turns out that the bellow is from Peter the Pig, the new physical relationship (or as the kids call it these days, fuck buddy) of married, bored, and still virile Rachel (Teresa Stephenson). Peter, in the world of this play, isn’t just a metaphorical pig. 

That her friends don’t walk out in disgust is a sign that playwright Dorothy Fortenberry did not have realism in mind when writing Caitlin and the Swan, but the emotional plight of the women who make up the play is as real as anything. All three of the central female characters have a different species that brings out their animal instincts: Rachel her pig, Indian lesbian gynecologist Priya (Shetal Shah) a cat, and Caitlin (the exceptionally versatile Marguerite French), whose indecision becomes the central focus of the play, the Swan that haunts the lawn of the too-smart-for-his-own-good Bastian (Jake Aron) whom Caitlin is SAT tutoring.

As the choreography, costumes, and names indicate, Caitlin and the Swan is something of a revisionist feminist adaptation of Swan Lake: in addition to the gender reversal of who woos the swan, while Tchaikovsky’s ballet focused on marriage and commitment, Caitlin and the Swan focuses on pure sexual desire. The endings are reversed as well; the ballet ends with a sad but beautiful romantic image of forlorn lovers falling into the sea, while Fortenberry’s play ends happily with Caitlin satisfied with her life but having had to perform a senseless act of violation and destruction to trigger that ending.

The impossibility of total happiness is a common enough theme, but it applies especially to the female graduate of an elite undergraduate education. In today's world, the Working Girl romantic vision of the dual life of a professional woman has been shattered, but the Stepford Wives vision hasn't come back either. Instead, we now have a real world where 60% of female graduates of Yale plan to sacrifice parts of their careers when they have children, where the ever-increasing dominance of the online word is plagued with rampant anonymous misogyny — yet the Sex and the City myth of being able to live single life to the fullest still pervades our culture.

Fortenberry, a Yale School of Drama alumna who may very well have conceived parts of Caitlin and the Swan while that debate raged at Yale, has a keen eye for reducing larger social mores to the world of individual characters — however twisted that world may be — without reducing the characters themselves. Occasionally, she can let these larger themes override naturalistic dialogue or total consistency, but her occasional lapses in Caitlin and the Swan are more than made up for by the originality in her expression.

Along with director Joshua Conkel, who showed his willingness to depict the role of rural deviancy in a larger American framework in September’s The Chalk Boy, Caitlin and the Swan marks The Management’s rapid ascent towards becoming one of the leading voices of downtown Manhattan theater; The Management's audience has grown with each production I’ve seen, and if the economy forces theater dilettantes to go further off-Broadway to avoid high ticket prices, all the better, as half the shows currently on Broadway don’t have the keen vision of what American theater needs that The Management has constantly displayed through black box productions.

Finally, there's another cultural factor in play here that may make Caitlin and the Swan an even more significant work in future generations. With themes of bestiality expressed so frankly and without a consideration for realism, Caitlin and the Swan may be the first major play to address a subculture that most online media users caustically acknowledge, but few outside that world dare consider. Rick Santorum supporters, hide your eyes: we now have a play that addresses furry fandom in full force.

For those without exposure to the full underbelly of the Internet, furry fandom is the online subculture of anthropomorphized animal enthusiasts, often with a sexual fetish involved. If you’ve interacted with college or high school students recently, read enough Inside Baseball Internet nerd blogs, or researched the history of Second Life, you’re probably aware of this culture. If not, be prepared for the next alternate lifestyle battle our culture will be facing, shortly after American society has addressed the homosexuality and transgendered debate.

This fetish freaks me out, but I've learned not to question cultural trends once they become established on the Internet. Once that issue becomes a mainstream topic, however, expect future generations to look at Caitlin and the Swan as a launching point in the theatrical debate. Whether or not she has intended this to be the case, Fortenberry has taken the furry fetish and both made it real in her theatrical world, and expressed how real-world members of the subculture can address the issue. For the moment, however, it's just as easy to treat Caitlin and the Swan as a fun, smart, and raucous experience that addresses current American issues in The Management's trademark slanted style, in addition to pointing to where things are going in the future.

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Caitlin and the Swan by Dorothy Fortenberry; directed by Joshua Conkel; choreography by Croft Vaughn; original music by Colin Wambsgans; sound design by Adam Swiderski; costume design by Caite Hevner; set design by Timothy McCown Reynolds; lighting design by Kelsi Welter and Conkel; photos by Moira Stone.

Starring Jake Aron (Bastian), Brian Robert Burns (Doug), Elliott Reiland (Pig/Swan), Marguerite French (Caitlin), Shetal Shah (Priya), and Teresa Stephenson (Rachel).

Labels: 2009-2010, caitlin and the swan, dorothy fortenberry, Horse Trade Theater Group, joshua conkel, new york, off-off-Broadway, the management company, theater review, under st. marks

Doing the unprecedented is not necessarily a good thing; in fact, there are an infinite number of bad things you can do that are certainly unprecedented. If I were to walk around Manhattan stabbing people while dressed as a rhinoceros and singing “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa, it would be unprecedented. We all understand that’s not good behavior. Yet, if I were to say that Dinner and Delusion was unlike anything I’ve ever seen on stage before, you’d probably think that was a good thing. (Never mind, for a moment, that doing something unprecedented is the whole point of live theater.)

But what if I were then to tell you that Dinner and Delusion was based on a weaker version of the same basic premise of Portnoy’s Complaint, with Freudianism so obvious that its creators seem to have forgotten Freud thought you repressed things, and that it featured cameos by the Good Doctor along with Timothy Leary, Osho, and the Prophet Elijah? And that it all centers around the Seder? Some people, those who confuse the unprecedented with the good, would assume that’s awesome, simply because they would have never thought of it. The others, those who can distinguish good and bad for themselves, might very well think that it’s the worst idea they’ve ever heard.

There’s a long, glowing, reverent tradition of the B-movie, or the “bad movie”; J Hoberman of the Village Voice popularized the idea in his 1980 Film Comment essay “Bad Movies.” In theater, however, where the medium's existence is much more fleeting and price more expensive, success in putting across camp, schlock, and so-bad-it's-good motifs has been much harder to achieve. The occasions where B-movie aesthetics did work were usually flash-in-the-pan successes, like The Producers, Xanadu, or Jerry Springer: The Opera. But those were all mainstream successes, and one of the key elements to a bad movie is its intentionally low production values.

With the cell theatre providing a cramped, horizontal space for Dinner and Delusion, the new opera has joined the ranks of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage and Toxic Avenger: The Musical as part of a new generation of B-theater, a result I’m sure the predominantly jacket-and-tie, Upper West Side Jewish audience didn’t anticipate.

As it stands, Dinner and Delusion was the closest theatrical experience I’ve had to a Paul Verhoeven movie. Paul Verhoeven, who made B-movie schlock mainstream without sacrificing its aesthetic in glorious travesties like Starship Troopers, Showgirls, and Black Book, is famous for taking the most preposterous premises with the worst scripts imaginable and somehow making them work, his utter conviction making everyone involved with the production, from designers to actors on down, commit to a project like it’s the greatest art work ever.

In Dinner and Delusion, we follow the travails of Sheldon (a decidedly creepy Demetrios Bonaros), a thirteen-year-old boy ignoring his family’s discussion of the role of Israel during a 1949 Passover while fantasizing about his Aunt Rosie. As soon as that fantasy becomes a reality, by my count roughly 20 minutes into the show, the Dinner portion of the evening ends and the Delusion sets in. For the rest of the opera experience we are left wondering: is what we are seeing a fantasy, or real? Is Sheldon really a drugged-out hippie who eventually settles down and becomes a shrink, without losing his lecherous side even in old age? Are we going to have one of those it-was-all-a-dream moments at the end?

I’m not 100% sure that composer Michael Sahl or lyricist Nancy Manocherian were aware of what kind of monster they were creating, but their resumes certainly imply that they are the perfect types to bring this kind of theater to New York. Sahl was a composer for '70s exploitation picks with names like Hot Circuit, Blood Bath, and The Incredible Torture Show as well as fancy-pants movies like the German film Waiting for the Moon about Gertrude Stein and an Oscar-nominated documentary on Adam Clayton Powell. Manocherian, meanwhile, has spent her entire career poking vortex-sized holes in the upper crust of New York City, and I find it remarkable that rich New Yorkers have grown up enough to be mocked so savagely, but fairly, on stage.

Either way, Sahl and Manocherian have provided a vehicle for Kira Simling to show off her Verhoeven-like approach to theater in full force. No matter what you say about Dinner and Delusion, its production values cannot be questioned, as every actor knows exactly where to be and what to emote, and can pipe out a hell of a song, no matter how preposterous the actual content may be. You couldn't ask for more from the technical design; they even make the impossible space of the cell theatre seem like the only possible way to express the play. During intermission, I went to the bathroom, which was at the end of the horizontal living room space, and a sexually graphic sketch was framed on the wall. There was no way to tell whether the sketch was part of the set, nor did it seem to matter. If Simling did mean to add that level of detail to the show, however, she deserves some kind of award, though I don’t know if it should be a Drama Desk or a theatrical equivalent of a Razzie.

While Dinner and Delusion is heavily based on B-movie aesthetics, its presentation is inherently theatrical. Perhaps the greatest joke of all about the play is that it is an opera, which, by taking the highest form of elegance in culture and bringing it to the lowest, adds the same kind of touch as casting James Bond schlockmeister Timothy Dalton in the action movie spoof Hot Fuzz.

Yet, with B-movies, which are projected on a screen, the badness is easy to hide from. I’ve never been a fan of the beautiful train wreck theory of aesthetics—to me, the number of people killed by a horrific tragedy overwhelms the (normally false) sense of beauty the onlooker feels. Yet, I found myself rubbernecking constantly throughout Dinner and Delusion, mainly because I had never seen this kind of mindset applied to theater in such a manner. Maybe that’s why the Bad Movie aesthetic was once so appealing, before Showtime started to use Razzie award victories in ads promoting I Know Who Killed Me. Maybe it was the fact that I was in an altered state from two Seders I had attended in the nights before I saw Dinner and Delusion. But either way, through the power of theater, confusing the dream and reality in Dinner and Delusion clicked. I left the theater wondering which was the right choice: the dinner or the delusion? An awesome work of art, or the worst work of art I’ve ever seen? Or perhaps, Sheldon’s choice at the end of Act I: your mother’s kosher chicken, or massive quantities of LSD?

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Dinner and Delusion - Music by Michael Sahl; Libretto by Nancy Manocherian; directed by Kira Simring; musical direction by Djordje Stevan Nesic; costume, prop design by Hilary Krishnan; lighting/scenic design by John Hurley. Photo by the cell theatre.

Starring Demetrios Bonaros (Sheldon), Blythe Gaissert (Auntie Rose/Eden West/Rose), Philip Callen (Bernie/Baruch/Timothy Leary), Peter Clark (Morris/Mike/Freud), Jessica Medoff Bunchman (Millie/Mindy/Disciple), Vivian Krich-Brinton (Sarah/Sara/Disciple), and Christopher Herbert Director (Elijah/Osho).

Dinner and Delusion played at the cell theatre (338 W. 23rd Street) from Thursday, April 9-Saturday, April 11.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, bad movies, camp, cell theatre, dinner and delusion, kira simring, michael sahl, nancy manocherian, new york, off-off-Broadway, opera, paul verhoeven

(Taken from the corner of 2nd Avenue and 1st Street last night)

Labels: attitude, new york, new york city, raised middle finger, signs

p>Am I a bad student of Western culture if I have never read Beowulf? In high school, Beowulf had the reputation of being the book assigned by a vindictive teacher who only assigned it to prove a point, either about the merits of high school or his own worthiness. In college, Beowulf became the book that was not assigned even in the core classes but was beloved by the Old English enthusiasts, and for most other males, an impressive book to show off to girls on your bookcase.

In a recent interview with the New York Times’s Jason Zinoman, Jason Craig, the playwright/star of Banana & Bodice’s madcap production of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, expressed a similar sentiment.

“I just saw it on my bookshelf,” he said. “But I had never read it and wasn’t particularly interested in warriors or that kind of thing. Not my bag.”

I’d say that the second part of that statement separates Craig from most of the rest of his generation. With the rise of vampires (Twilight, Buffy), Zombies (Shaun of the Dead, World War Z), Ogres (Lord of the Rings, Shrek) and comic book heroes and mutants of various shapes and sizes, warriors and monsters are about as cool for the young of this era as they have been since the time of Beowulf.

Despite the return of monster popularity, theater, though it has a long tradition of bringing the world the coolest expression of monsters, has fallen behind its film and graphic novel competitors. Craig’s Beowulf, a go-for-broke experiment in zaniness that hits as often as it misses, nonetheless marks the beginning of a return to monster love in theater; I hope to see more of it in theater to come.

Lest you think monster love in theater is a lark, what if I were to tell you it could end up saving theater as we know it for future generations? While Beowulf was by no means the best show I’ve seen in New York in the past year, its audience ranked among the most enthusiastic, with perhaps more tattoos, raucous laughter, and intoxication-on-arrival than any non-improv show I have ever attended. The only grey manes in the audience were either those of critics or parents, and yet the rather large Henry Street Settlement theater was packed to the brim. Unlike most recent shows in New York that have had youth appeal, this show did not trade in idealism, hope, or rage at elders. Rather, it traded in a kind of sarcasm, debauchery, and raucous laughter that only those under 30 are crazy enough to still engage in regularly.

Banana & Bodice, along with their co-sponsors the Bay Area's Shotgun Players, have a reputation for creating the biggest spectacles you’ll ever see in a garage theater setting. Beowulf, which is one of the biggest budgeted and name-making shows for either company, constantly dazzles with its tech design, making your jaw drop in ways productions with ten times (or even movies with a thousand times) the budget cannot.

The tech overwhelms so much about this show that every other aspect of Beowulf has to catch up with director Rod Hipskind’s manic staging. The actors have been deftly prepped with a sense of comic timing, even when something goes wrong. The most difficult problem with this cast of no-names is the inconsistent singing talent, which ends up making the most personal musical instrument the weakest and most distracting. However, when the occasional actor belts out something fantastic, or when Craig belts out something preposterous as Beowulf, the play is at its best.

Where the show runs into real problems is its script, which, despite my expectations, did not meet the Urinetown-level sophistication of mixing high-intellect concepts with a low-brow pop culture knowledge and sense of humor. The scenes where farcical professors try in vain to analyze Beowulf are completely vapid, and some better writing in these scenes could have lifted the play to another level. As it stands, this Beowulf is more about taking large concepts and turning them into vehicles for theatrical trickery and ridiculous stage antics.

That’s by no means the worst thing that could have come out of this show—Rocky Horror had a script that was no less idiotic. The cult appeal of fighting monsters, filling tanks with blood, reenacting epic fights with action figures, and loud rock music trumps all else. As it stands, Beowulf won’t win any awards like Urinetown did, but it could be hell of a lot more popular among audiences that theater desperately needs. Broadway has already started to break through to the young with its plays of hope; now it’s time for the fringe to appeal to the young’s more diabolical side. Beowulf may be one of the first plays to capture this audience, but hopefully it’s not the last, nor the best.

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Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage by Jason Craig; directed by Rod Hipskind; composer/musical direction by Dave Malloy; artistic direction by Craig and Jessica Jelliffe; dramaturgy by Mallory Catlett; set design and technical management by Banana Bag & Bodice; choreography by Anna Ishida & Shaye Troha; light design by Miranda K. Hardy; sound design by Brendan West; additional costumes by SF Buffoons (Eric & Riddle); props design by Sig Hafstrom; illustration by R Black.

Starring Jen Baker (Trombone, Chrous), Dan Bruno (Percussions, Chorus), Jason Craig (Beowulf), Ezra Gale (Bass, Chorus), Benjamin Geller (Viola, Chorus), Ishida (Warrior), Jeliffe (Academic), Christopher Kuckenbacker (Academic), Mario Maggio (Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Harmonicas, Chrous), Dave Malloy (Hrothgar, Piano, Accordion, Programming), Andre Nigoghossian (Guitar, Saw, Chorus), Andy Strain (Trombone, Chorus), Troha (Warrior), Beth Wilmurt (Academic).

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage is a Banana & Bodice production in collaboration with the San Francisco Shotgun Players. It runs through April 18 at The Abrons Arts Center’s Harry de Jur Playhouse (466 Grand Street @ Pitt). Photos by Jessica Palopoli. For tickets or to check out clips from Beowulf visit www.beowulfnyc.com.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, Beowulf, Henry Street Settlement, Jason Craig, new york, off-off-Broadway, theater review

There are many literary reference points in Leslie Lee’s The Book of Lambert: Shakespeare, Byron, Chaucer, O’Neill, and Lanford and August Wilson. All of those authors, however, are filtered in Lee’s conception back to one source: The Bible. Lee, Like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison before him, has created an extremely Biblically-styled work about the crushing realities of racial politics.

Lee’s particular conception has some bold innovations, and the personal bond that he developed with the work, which he reworked for decades before its world premiere at La MaMa Playhouse, is readily apparent. Unfortunately, Lee lacks the power and grace in writing that his predecessors, at their best, were able to achieve.

The Book of Lambert takes an unprecedented approach in the history of African American dramatic literature. Informed by recent history—and with the advantage of his play being the first new drama by a major black playwright following President Barack Obama’s inauguration—Lee acknowledges that no matter how legitimate and overpowering racial strife may be, the experience of pain can only be felt on a personal level. Most of the play’s central characters are black, but while they are all squatting in an abandoned building outside the A train, each of their struggles comes from a particular set of grievances, a variety of circumstances in their separate histories.

This is in stark contrast to works like Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain or Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, in which each black character’s separate personal history is shaped by the same cultural narrative. In Lee’s world, there is an abundance of factors relatively independent of race, such as health, family, and sexuality, that are all variables in sorting out one’s lot in life. 

In a particular act of bravery, Lee depicts the clearly autobiographical Lambert as struggling to maintain his own sense of blackness while dating a Caucasian woman, who haunts him long after the relationship deteriorates. Virginia is attracted to Lambert precisely because of his blackness, and Lambert’s attempts to keep up while embracing the world of Western—and mostly white—literature is a virtually impossible task; he can’t praise Defoe without Virginia wanting to talk about Langston Hughes. Virginia’s constant baiting of Lambert to “talk black” is met with painful awkwardness, as expressed by standout cast member Clinton Faulkner.

Ultimately, however, what degrades Lambert from the highs of academia to the slums of New York are his own personal failings, not the failing of an entire culture. I don’t know if Lee could have gotten away with such a play a few years ago, but that premise marks a bold new direction for African American literature as a whole, not just theater.

What plagues The Book of Lambert is how often Lee’s execution doesn't match the high level of his conceit. For a Biblical narrative to work, every word has to drip with a sense of deep, epic emotion without seeming self-important. This is a virtually impossible task, and even the best writers have only partially succeeded in maintaining such a high level (even the Bible). Over the course of the play's 150 minutes, Lee does occasionally reach poetic heights, but more often that elevated dialogue is cheapened with the kind of jive talk Lambert would naturally feel uncomfortable around. There are also times when the dialogue feels extremely childish, almost patronizing the audience.

It’s unclear whether the inconsistent maturity of Lee’s dialogue is a product of his struggle to achieve truly great literature, or of the same kind of insecurities Lambert feels in leaving his cultural roots. August Wilson, Baldwin, and others were often able to mix banter with heady philosophical speech effectively, yet Lee seems genuinely perplexed by how to achieve the correct balance. It’s no wonder The Book of Lambert proved a perpetual frustration to Lee over his career; he had a radical new conception of black literature, but lacked a practical way of expressing it.

On balance, however, at the end of the play, it feels like the successes of the content win out over the failures of style.

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The Book of Lambert by Leslie Lee; directed by Cyndy A. Marion; set design by Andis Gjoni; lighting design by Russel Phillip Drapkin; costume design by David B. Thompson; music by Joe Gianono Fight; dramaturgy by Maxine Kern; choreography by Michael G. Chin. 

Starring Clinton Faulkner (Lambert), Heather Massie (Virginia), Joresa Blount (Bonnie), Sadrina Johnson (Priscilla), Gloria Sauvé (Zinth), Arthur French (Otto), Howard L. Wieder (Clancy), and Omrae Smith (Miss Wambaugh).

The Book of Lambert runs through March 1 at La MaMa (74 A. East Fourth Street). Tickets can be purchased at LaMama.org.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: black playwrights, book of lambert, clinton faulkner, first breeze of summer, james baldwin, la mama playhouse, leslie lee, new york, theater review, toni morrison

While the epidemic of straightforward revivals off-off-Broadway is potentially a much bigger threat to the vibrancy of New York theater than any closing on Broadway, it’s hard to think of a more perfect, timely play to revive than Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy, now playing in the Red Room in a superb production by the Black Door Theatre Company. In 1979, while the kids were spiking their hair and listening to the Clash, the 30-somethings were just doing their best not to get caught up in the chaos bearing down on Thatcher’s England. The real victims of the era were the working classes, a group that includes every character in Ecstasy, who spend the entire play trying not to think about the doom that’s about to hit them.

The sociopolitical significance of these characters' lives is undeniable, but save for one painful-to-hear discussion of immigration, the vulnerability is kept on a personal level. Whether it's the unhealthy relationship of naked lovers Jean and Roy in the opening scene (a relationship which, at its boiling point, nearly results in a rape), the obvious but repressed unhappiness in the marriage of Jean’s only real friends Mick and Dawn, or the impossibility of a rekindled relationship between Jean and old friend Len, no one is getting out of this play happy. But almost none of the dialog directly refers to this desperation. Because of the characters' deep but glaring repression, Ecstasy requires an excellent cast — and an even better director — to nail the social dynamics and mannerisms of characters who are very rarely sober, and though almost always forlorn can still force out a laugh whenever they can get it.

Despite inconsistent accents and a limited set, director Sara Laudonia works miracles from her cast; there are more than a few moments when the audience is just as ready to weep as the characters. The two female leads are the cast's two standouts, and provide the most distinct contrast in ways of dealing with emotional pain.

Gina LeMoine’s Dawn, married to brutish Irishman Mick (Brandon McCluskey), tries in vain to pretend she’s still 20, remaining the boisterous life of the party against all sense of reason. LeMoine lets brief moments of pain sear across all her dignified perkiness, and it’s those sparse moments that brand the memory harder than over 90 minutes' worth of Dawn supposedly enjoying herself.

Unlike Dawn with her insufficient perkiness, Jean is a character whose utter despair is behind every emotion, just waiting to break out. Mary Monahan never once lets the sorrowful look in her eyes dissipate. This makes her ultimate confession of unhappiness to Len the inevitable result of everything we’ve seen on stage.

In terms of direction, Laudonia does a fantastic job navigating the play's emotional waves. There is rarely an off-moment. The inconsistency in the accents never detracts from the emotion of what is being said. Given a mostly American cast in a Cockney-sounding play, Laudonia was smart to put the emphasis on emotional substance over style, and only dialect nitpickers will object. The small space of the Red Room is also used to its fullest capacity by set designer Damon Pelletier; anyone who's ever lived in a crappy studio apartment knows just what they’re seeing.

The studio apartment set and the emotional turmoil of a politically unstable time are just some of the more obvious indicators of the play's current significance. That these characters seem so alive to us is more to the point of how every young person must eventually realize that they’re not so young anymore. Youth has a peak, and when the point of passing that peak comes at a turbulent time, it’s virtually impossible to recover. Whether it’s 1979 London, 1917 St. Petersburg, or 2009 Brooklyn, the anger and hopelessness remain essentially the same. Leigh has explored sociopolitics through personal interactions throughout his career, and Ecstasy, one of his few plays, may have nailed this particular dynamic better than anyone. This a truly ingenious choice for a revival, and one of the few that could cover contemporary circumstances better even than any new play.

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Ecstasy by Mike Leigh; directed by Sara Laudonia; set design by Damon Pelletier; sound design by Christopher Rummel; lighting design by Paul Howle. Photos by Cedar.

Starring Mary Monahan (Jean), Gine LeMoine (Dawn), Stephen Heskett (Len), Brandon McCluskey (Mick), Josh Marcantel (Roy), and Lore Davis (Val).

Ecstasy runs through January 25 at the Red Room, 85 East 4th St. Tickets can be purchased at www.horseTRADE.info.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: 2008-2009, ecstasy, england, happy-go-lucky, margaret thatcher, Mike Leigh, new york, recession, sara laudonia, theater review, working class

Watch this episode of Theater Talk very carefully. Michael Riedel, the instigator of most of the conversation, is not treating the death of theater criticism as a "what if" question. He's treating it as a given. If the aforementioned death hasn't happened already, it will, in Riedel's viewpoint. Very subtly, he manipulates the conversation to talk about the death of intelligent theater criticism and suggests that the rise of celebrity gossip, outrageous blogging (never mind the outrageousness of his column), and an A.D.D. culture will make the likes of Kenneth Tynan and Clive Barnes obsolete. There's a reason he's doing this: nothing would benefit Riedel personally more than exactly that kind of death.

The panel he assembled includes two critics who are in his pocket; Mike Kuchwara of the Associated Press, the only theater critic who benefits from critics losing their jobs, and Jacques le Sourd, who even Riedel himself has admitted is a close confidant and potential leaker. John Heilpern, for one, is not having any of it, and saves this panel from turning into an outright eulogy for a medium that isn't quite in the coffin. But Riedel wants you to believe it is. Because that would benefit Riedel.

Let's make one thing clear on Riedel: he is not a theater critic. Riedel is a gossip columnist for a trashy tabloid. He will trash shows in his columns, but those are reviews in the same way New York Post covers are editorials. He mainly succeeds by being the only voice for the inner workings of Broadway—for theater geeks, that is exceedingly rare, interesting information. But that he writes about a more obscure field doesn't reduce the fact that he embraces the worst traits of tabloid journalism. He will be nasty instead of being insightful, trade on rumor and shallow personal aspects of the theater scene rather than critical judgment, and he's probably more corrupt in doing so than we like to think. Riedel writes for the New York Post, a publication most good New York theater liberals don't trust with anything else; in fact, they usually despise the paper like nothing else in the New York media. So why should they make an exception for Riedel?

When you think carefully about the source of the eulogies, most of the immediate talk of the death of theater criticism that has gotten the theater press and blogosphere in a tizzy stems from Riedel himself. Figuring himself as a theater critic, Riedel wrote a column in October that bemoaned the dimished role of the theater critic in the internet age. He said nothing new, and I took pains to point out that theater criticism is far from dead. The reason the idea took off, however, was because the theater press figured that if even Riedel is worried, we're in trouble.

Listen, here's what everyone's already known about Riedel even before the death of print began. He's an egotist, unafraid of controversy and utterly devoid of empathy; a careerist, and a manipulator. He is not only willing to trample over anything and anyone to get on top—he takes active glee in the process. These are all the classic traits of a tabloid journalist, and they're the traits that make the rest of the the traditonal journalistic world avoid tabloid journalism like the plague. Riedel just happens to have an Ivy League education and concern himself with a "high art" rarely privy to tabloid journalism anymore in the U.S.. All the conniving parts of his trade and personality are still there.

So I would venture to say that Michael Riedel is actively, intentionally manipulating the talk of theater press to bemoan the death of theater criticism more than actually cover theater. Why would he do this? So he can turn the overall discussion to the TMZ side of theater, maybe even integrate a bit of Hollywood scandal into the stictchings of Broadway "coverage." This would give him the authority in the theater world Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood currently have.

Watch that video, and you see that Riedel is doing exactly what I have just described in this discussion. Take this panel discussion as a microcosm of the theater discussion at large, and it's scary to think of how powerful Riedel would become if no one had the guts like Heilpern to stand up to him. Normally I don't call on spurned theater artists to fight back against their detractors in the press. But no journalist should instill a culture of fear over a community like Riedel has. It's time the theater community, of New York and the nation, learned to grow a spine and fight him. He's not the sharpest mind we have. He can easily be outwitted.

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Labels: Broadway theatre, celebrity gossip, john heilpern, michael riedel, new york, new york post, tabloid journalism, theater criticism

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics)

"Postmodernism is a theory that eats itself" is a line repeated twice in Kristen Kosmas' challenging, confounding play The Scandal! It seems that Kosmas, is determined to see just how far she can go in testing that assertion. Pink, The Scandal!'s protagonist (played here for the first time not by Kosmas herself but by another actress, Amy Patrice Golden), lives without any advanced awareness of reality, yet shows flashes of understanding that keep her from living in a completely dreamlike state.

Pink is what we would define as an emotionally unstable woman, with an emotionally removed mother and a small but twisted social circle in an isolated desert town. Pink's own isolation, however, is more personal than social or geographical. Perhaps The Scandal!'s greatest accomplishment is its ability to reduce the contradictions and instability of postmodernism into the existence of a singe individual.

The Management Company, one of the rising companies of the Horse Trade Theater Group, is establishing a distinct reputation for producing magical realist perspectives on broken pieces of Americana. More than any other company, The Management presents New York with theatrical visions of bleak American rural life. The cognitive dissonance of the two settings provided a minor controversy when The Management's last show, Joshua Conkel's The Chalk Boy, received universally positive reviews except for one particularly jaded review: the New York Times's. While The Management's reach is still small, the Times affair may have done more than anything else to catapult the Management to the status of one of New York's hottest hole-in-the-wall theater companies.

The Scandal! is much less accessible than The Chalk Boy, and probably not as good an overall production, but it's a show of almost unfathomable depth, deeply personal soul-searching, and a surprising level of danger. The Scandal! challenges the audience to form a bond with a woman of deeply tangential thinking, whom we know from the start will either kill herself, burn her house down, or both. Until the last possible moment, the audience is even more baffled about what's really going on than Pink is herself.

Part of the problem with The Management's production is that Kosmas's deeply personal play translates somewhat awkwardly to another actor's hands. Golden looks and feels the role of Pink, with a face older and more vulnerable-looking than her still-in-her-prime body. While Golden is a little inconsistent with her physical expression of Pink, the moments when she hits the right notes are absolutely devastating. More problematic is Golden's delivery of Kosmas's unique dialogue. Golden's pacing is disappointingly monotonous, with the breaks occurring at more or less the same time in every sentence. Her vocal inflections also lack the right level of variety.

I did not see Kosmas perform her own lines, and I cannot judge how much of the production's inconsistency is the product of Kosmas herself, Golden, or Courtney Sale's direction. But strangely, that ambiguity seems right for a play that focuses so intently on personalizing and outwardly expressing a world of ideas. Despite the production's flaws, it's better for the play's sake that The Management makes the personal and the intellectual so inseparable in The Scandal!

The deeper you get into The Scandal!, the more it seems like the play's parable of postmodernism will never eat itself. Eventually, and unexpectedly, however, Pink suddenly finds herself in the realm of reality. Her life becomes more normal, her social sphere more stable, and her mind fully intact and aware, contrary to both Pink and everybody else's expectations (audience included). Some may find this conciliatory final note maddening, but it's a twist that proves strangely uplifting. In the end, it's not that postmodernism eats itself, but that reality finds a way to purge postmodernism from your system.

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The Scandal!, by Kristen Kosmas; directed by Courtney Sale; set design by James Carney; costume design by Peggy Vivino; technical design by Kelsi Welter; sound design by Josh Conkel; original music by Kosmas. Photos by John Alexander.

Starring Amy Patrice Golden (Pink).

The Scandal! runs through December 20 at the Red Room, 85 East 4th Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.horseTRADE.info.

Labels: 2008-2009, amy patrice golden, Horse Trade Theater Group, kristen kosmas, new york, off-off-Broadway, the management company, the scandal, theater review

(This review was originally published in Blogcritics).

Greg Kotis' The Truth About Santa was a good test of my critical sanctity. Growing up an intellectual theater geek in New York, I basically discovered I was bound for the University of Chicago by seeing Proof and Urinetown (twice each) while in high school. I would draw the somewhat arbitrary line at reviewing Proof scribe David Auburn, whom I studied playwriting with in high school and whose work I directed in college. While I had never met Kotis before seeing The Truth About Santa, the play not only reminded me of what drew me to Urinetown and Chicago in high school, but what the intellectual monstrosity of the school has wrought on me since.

For instance, there's simply no way I can review The Truth About Santa without mentionin Emile Durkheim, whose Elementary Forms of Religious Life hangs over The Truth About Santa as strongly as it hangs over Chicago's core curriculum (and hence all of Chicago's academic experience). References to collective effervescence aside, the best summary of the religious sociology of Durkheim in The Truth About Santa comes from a song lyric by Kotis himself, where his Santa declares, "What strength that some people have come to perceive in me/ Comes from the fact that you people believe in me." In Kotis' play, the worship of Santa—and your fooling itself if you think it's anything but worship—fuels his existence (that and the Joy Weed that is the glue that binds his form). Kotis turns Santa into a universal sacred symbol of winter solstice who literally morphs into a new form everytime a new myth comes to dominate a society. In this play, Kotis essentially brings the same intellectually-grounded absurdity to to religion that he brought to revolutionary politics with Urinetown.

Of course, this off-off-Broadway production of The Truth About Santa is not as universally accessible (i.e. Broadway-ready) as Urinetown. While its roughness around the edges adds something of an indie charm, it also means the play will have to be tidied up if it wants more life. The play's opening is a little too jarring, it's performances a little too over the top, and it's pacing a little to inconsistent to fully maximize on Kotis' intelligent writing and exceedingly sharp sense of humor. John Clancy's production stays true to the Showcase roots of the Kraine Theater, and with Kotis' entire family in the cast it is clear that the ambitious are somewhat lower than the Great White Way (despite his family's qualifications).

Still, there's too much great stuff in The Truth About Santa to be kept off-off-Broadway. While the play's theoretical origins may go over the heads of a larger audience, the play's zany humor and bitingly cynical view of religion would not. It was that humor and social sensibility that made Urinetown a surprise audience success after its intellectual astuteness made it an even bigger critical success. Likewise, you don't have to know Durkheim to find The Truth About Santa hilarious, or to get it's larger message (though it certainly adds another level).

The humor comes from lines like a sibling lamenting that "Luke can smash the laws of physics, confound our sense of reality, and all I can do is make people slightly more pleasant for about a minute or two" (it's kinda boring) and involving Santa in a paternity battle. It comes from design touches like elves in Crocs and on-again, off-again intentionally 99-cent store angel halos (part of a generally ingenious costume design by Kotis' wife/fellow cast member Ayun Halliday). It comes from characters and performances as brilliantly rendered as Elves Jo-Jo (Clay Adams) and Jim-Jim (Jeff Gurner) and the pseudo-prophet George, who Kotis himself plays in Ralph Kramden-like fashion.

It's easy to forget that, despite his modest profile, Kotis is probably the most famous alum of the Neo-Futurists, a radical experimental theater group founded in Chicago that focused on breaking down the divide between "performer" and audience (that doesn't include Stephen Colbert, who was a member for one rehearsal in the early '90s before being pulled back to Second City). After The Truth About Santa, Kotis' next project is Yeast Nation (the triumph of life), his second project with Urinetown collaborater Mark Hollman, which premieres in Chicago this spring. It may be that, not wanting to tempt the theater gods (and other gods) too much, Kotis has hedged his bets on that project returning him to the Promised Land.

But it would be a shame to overlook The Truth About Santa, a play that has every right to become the Christmas Carol (or Mahabharata) for weird theater geeks across the world. Personally, I hope to see The Truth About Santa every winter solstice for years to come, preferably with a more polished script and production. If Seinfeld a similarly quirky, culturally-specific enterprise, can find a place for Festivus for a universal audience, The Truth About Santa can find a place for classic religious sociology in the mainstream world. You just have to believe.

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The Truth About Santa by Greg Kotis; directed by John Clancy; set design by Heather Wolensky; lighting design by A.J. Epstein; costume design by Ayun Halliday. Photos by Colin D. Young

Starring Kotis (George), Halliday (Mary), India Kotis (Freya), Milo Kotis (Luke), Clay Adams (Jo-Jo), Jeff Gurner (Jim-Jim), Bill Coelius (Santa), Lusia Strus (Mrs. Claus).

The Truth About Santa runs throuh December 20 at the Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street). Tickets can be purchased at www.horseTRADE.info.

Labels: 2008-2009, emile durkheim, Greg Kotis, new york, off-off-Broadway, religion, the truth about santa, theater review, university of chicago, Urinetown

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Say what you will about the depressing state of Off-Off-Broadway theater (and it certainly is depressing), one thing you can’t complain about is the unprecedented quantity of theater that currently exists in New York City. Quality theater, and quality coverage, is what’s missing, and venturing Off-Off-Broadway has increasingly turned into a crapshoot for entertainment. But here’s a good rule of thumb for your future New York theater ventures: if the show is a product of No Tea Productions, you’ll almost certainly be entertained, and maybe even moved.

I may have gone a tad overboard when I claimed that the success of The Artistical Process of Mark and Andy was “a reason for hope for American theater,” a statement that has followed the publicity of No Tea wherever they have gone, but with the company's top-notch reworkings of one-act love story vignettes in Plucking Failure Like Ripe Fruit, I was glad to see my enthusiasm for my first experience of the company was no fluke. Ripe Fruit is not as wholly entertaining as Mark and Andy—a natural product of the format—but the quality of the cast, execution and spirit are just as strong.

The selection of plays is short and sweet, with a mix of established playwrights like Harold Pinter, David Ives, and David Auburn with some, younger, more ragged, indie-mined playwrights. Though the show claims to be “A Night of One-Act Romantic Tragedies,” Ripe Fruit offers as many glimpses of hope as it does of unrequited love. Its spirit is perfectly in tune with one of the most dismal holiday seasons in recent memory. In a time when all seems hopeless, just making a human connection—any connection—can be enough to get you through. Even recognizing the possibility of such a connection can be enough. This spirit makes Ripe Fruit strangely uplifting, and one of the better shows you can see while alone in New York around Christmas time.

No Tea has wisely kept an element of spontaneity by performing a different selection of shows in a different order each night. While this leaves me unable to comment on the entirety of the experience, I will say I was not disappointed by any of the shows I saw. All of the actors have incredible chemistry, in particularly Sabrina Farhi and Jeff Sproul in David Ives’ Sure Thing, Sproul and Brooke Eddey in Garth Wingfield's Please Have a Seat and Someone Will Be with You Shortly (which was the most satisfying one-act I saw all night), and Farhi and Richard Lovejoy in the honeymoon-gone-awry saga of Dorothy Parker’s Here We Are. All in all, this is a company that’s on a roll right now, and has nowhere to go but up if the economy allows it.

My one complaint was that Lindsey Moore’s direction often let the occasional beat linger too long, which threw off some scenes’ timing. But that’s no reason to miss one of the best displays of romantic malaise you’re likely to see on the New York stage this season. Plucking Failures Like Ripe Fruit is an absolute joy, and it’s almost enough to make you overlook whatever problems plague you in what is supposedly the most wonderful time of the year.

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Plucking Failures Like Ripe Fruit: A NIght of One-Act Romantic Tragedies. Directed by Lindsey Moore; lighting design by Timothy Mather; sound design by Lisa Nussbaum; production photos by by D. Robert Wolcheck.

Starring Alicia Barnatchez, Brooke Eddey, Sabrina Farhi, Richard Lovejoy, Jeremy Mather, and Jeff Sproul, with D. Robert Wolcheck.

Plucking Failures Like Ripe Fruit is produced by No Tea Productions and Horse Trade Theater Group. The show will run at UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place) until December 6. Tickets can be purchased at www.horseTRADE.info

Labels: 2008-2009, Horse Trade Theater Group, new york, no tea productions, off-off-Broadway, plucking failures like ripe fruit, theater review

This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Vice Girl Confidential is one of those plays where if you drink the Kool-Aid of its premise, you’re in for a raucous, thoroughly entertaining, maniacally smart show. What you have to accept is that you’re witnessing pure, unadulterated spoof and nothing more.

If you want depth to your satire, look somewhere else. This film noir take on a prostitution ring is pure farce and over-the-top emotions, making absolutely no apologies for its exorbitantly high rate of clichés per second. Playwright Todd Michael, who also plays the drag role as the pseuo-classy Madame Stella Fontaine, has more fun with the play than anyone else could possibly have. How much of that fun trickles down to the audience depends purely on how jaded an audience member is.

If the best farces feature a Simpsons-like range of humor styles and approaches to storytelling, Vice Girl Confidential is a bit more like Family Guy—a one-trick pony in terms of comedy, but one that be uproariously funny for the occasional short burst. Like Family Guy, Vice Girl makes a reference and makes it for an exceedingly long period of time, daring the audience to turn away. But at the same time, even Family Guy is able to poke fun at the cultural reference points it worships. Here, Michael is too in love with the world of loose dames, hard-nosed detectives, and vicious crime lords to take a step back and give even the slightest wink to the audience.

Michael is smart enough to keep the play to an hour’s length, as there would be no way to maintain this kind of comedy for any longer. But as with Family Guy, you leave the play feeling like you’ve seen nothing really substantial and long-lasting, even if you've laughed your lungs out.

This kind of knuckles-dragging spoof, where clichés are milked for laughs until the comedic cow runs dry, feels dated. Ten to fifteen years ago, it was an approach to satire that still seemed fresh, as no one had previously had the idea of embracing the clichés that all their formal training had told them to despise. Yet it has become increasingly dominant in comedy, both on an amateur level and, increasingly, on a professional level as well. It’s more disappointing when, in the case of Vice Girl Confidential, the play’s creator seems so willfully oblivious to how unoriginal the approach actually is.

The play was a hit at the 2006 Fringe Festival, largely because of the boisterous cast. The cast remains as enthused and committed as ever, and everyone, including Michael, plays their roles with the utmost conviction. That enthusiasm is what keeps Vice Girl from disaster, and makes the play very enjoyable on a shallow level. Beyond that, however, maybe it should have stayed in Fringe’s vaults.

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Vice Girl Confidential by Todd Michael. Directed by Walter J. Hoffman. Photos by Louis Lopardi.

Starring Jeff Auer (Duke Cragie), Emily King Brown (Florence Kelton), Thom Brown (Walter Slade), Courtney Cook (Mamie Winters), Matthew F. Garner (Muggsy Regan, Edgar Baldwin), Lawrence Lesher (Lou Braddock), Zach Lombardo (Narrator, Trigger Nelson, Frazier), Jessica Luck (June Winters, Police Woman), Todd Michael (Stella Fontaine).

Vice Girl Confidential completed its run at UNDER St. Marks on November 16. It was produced by Graycie Productions.

Labels: 2008-2009, blogcritics, Family Guy, new york, simpsons, theater review, Todd Michael, under st. marks, Vice Girl Confidential

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.
American Buffalo, David Mamet's breakthrough play currently in an excellent revival at the Belasco Theater, may be a better source of explanation for the current economic crisis than you can get from any economist. Every exchange in the play has business on the mind; in the world of Donny, Teach, and Bobby, even friendship breaks down into business. The overwhelming sense of mistrust among these closest buds ultimately results in disaster on both the business and personal level.
American Buffalo is a tragicomedy, but all the play's comedy comes from the humanizing effect of the word "fuck." All the play's tragedy results from the perils of the phrase “I don't know.” On the television show You Can't Do That On Television, uttering the phrase "I don't know" got you slimed. In the world of the petty Chicago crooks of American Buffalo, which could also be called You Can't Do That in Business, uttering the phrase will get a gun pulled on you, or worse. Forget your economics textbook; try messing with Teach with a porous economy of information.
I'll admit that when the cast of American Buffalo was announced, I was a bit frustrated. Not so much about the stunt casting of Hollywood stars who fit the roles but had no theatrical experience. I was more upset by the missed opportunity to see the poetic beauty of grizzly old white men on Broadway, a thrill that few but Mamet can provide anymore (where have you gone, Lawrence Tierney?).
But was the highly anticipated Broadway revival of arguably Mamet's greatest play ill equipped for the task? Fuck you, this is David Fucking Mamet we're talking about. Everyone involved in this production knows that this is too good of an opportunity to mess up, and though things are played relatively safe, everyone holds his own. Things are kept tight thanks to the direction of Robert Falls, a sensible director who, as the current Artistic Director of Mamet's own Goodman Theatre in Chicago, was the only sensible pick for the job.
Keeping things in line is no small task with any Mamet play, but especially with American Buffalo, which may be the tightest, most definitive Mamet play, even now, over 30 years and 20 plays later. Every beat is concentrated into three actors, any of whom can throw the play off the rails at any time with a single stumble. The demand for that kind of precision is why, despite the star power of John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer, and Haley Joel Osment, the real star of this production of American Buffalo is Mamet himself. That emphasis is portended by a pre-show reminder on behalf of Mamet to "turn off your fucking cell phones," the most effective strategy I've seen yet. In terms of the star power, I predict that even those complete theater novices who come merely for the celebrity factor of the actors will leave the theater thinking “this Mamet guy is pretty good.”
Leguizamo, the biggest stage star of the production, is given the most free reign by Falls, in a role that Leguizamo not surprisingly nails. Teach's mix of cockiness, explosiveness, and thinly-veiled vulnerability are all motifs that Leguizamo has explored extensively on stage in the past. The dialogue in his one-man shows may as well have been Mamet's. My only complaint was the drug-dealer costume Leguizamo was given. Cedric the Entertainer, whose best roles have been as paternalistic, straight-talking sidekicks, translates his onscreen persona naturally to the stage. Save for a couple of hammy moments, Cedric makes for a nearly flawless Donny.
The real X-factor is Haley Joel Osment as the hard-edged but incompetent Bobby. Osment, whose starry-eyed image and acting chops staked his name in films like The Sixth Sense and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, had become tainted in recent years with tales of teenage drunken escapades. Here, Osment reinvents himself from the preppy, puppy-eyed kid to the slummy, hard-talking young ingrate, and the transition is surprisingly successful. Some of Bobby's naïvete mirrors past Osment roles, which helps ease the actor into the role. While it's not a perfect transition, Osment does more good work here than most would have expected (including wisely deciding to keep facial hair for the role).
Any discussion of Mamet's legacy can no longer avoid the laissez-faire conservatism and resentment of the left that Mamet recently espoused in his controversial Village Voice piece "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" back in March. At that time, especially following the lack of sophistication in his latest Broadway smash November, it was becoming popular to dismiss Mamet's importance. Sure enough, Mamet followed that piece with Redbelt, arguably his best movie of the last fifteen years, and he is now seeing two of his classic plays get Broadway revivals.
After seeing American Buffalo for the first time after the “brain-dead liberal" piece, I've found it's simply impossible to dismiss Mamet's vitality. It's also hard to see how anyone could have assumed Mamet to be a true-blue liberal in the first place. What liberals saw as a reflection of the breakdown of American idealism in American Buffalo, Mamet saw as “just business.” Business can be awful, cold, and frequently destructive, but it's the core of all human interactions. The story of the breakdown in American Buffalo mirrors the breakdown of the American economy: when crooked businessmen lack the information they need to do business properly, the lack of trust can only lead to disaster. Rather than see this as a product of a broken system, Mamet sees the outcome of American Buffalo as an inevitable consequence of the economic system America is based on: in Teach's words, "The freedom…of the individual…to embark on any fucking course that he sees fit."

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American Buffalo by David Mamet. Directed by Robert Falls; Set and Costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Photos by Carol Rosegg.
Starring John Leguizamo (Teach), Cedric The Entertainer (Donny), and Haley Joel Osment (Bobby).
American Buffalo is being performed at the Belasco Theater, 111 W. 44th Street. Tickets can be purchased at telecharge.com.

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Labels: 2008-2009, american buffalo, Broadway theatre, Cedric The Entertainer, david mamet, haley joel osment, John Leguizamo, new york, theater review

Image via WikipediaTalking points from tonight’s Artist Talk with Tom Stoppard and David Remnick at BAM (not quoted verbatim):

The great innovation of Chekhov was his fundamental neutrality towards his characters. It seems jarring to consider The Cherry Orchard or Ivanov as comedies, but they are comedies in the same way that life is a comedy.

As he wrote in Ivanov, Chekhov recognized that in every human interaction the following conditions exist: I don’t know what you’re thinking, you don’t know what I’m thinking, and neither of us knows what ourselves are thinking.

In translation, it is not good to be a linguist. It is good to have an exactly literal translation as a reference point, but in translating it is more important to have to understand meaning and tone more than to strictly what is actually said (Stoppard doesn’t read Russian).

There is no such thing as a finished translation. When you write your own work, you’re done with it at the end of the day and you’re happy with it. But when you’re working on someone else’s work, there’s no way to compress and finish the creative process of translation.

In a free democracy, where there are no restraints on the media, the culture becomes saturated, and opinions lose their importance matter. But in a world where thought is restricted, media becomes a prime focus. Behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia and Russia, students would frequently go to the cafés asking for when the next article by a popular radical thinker came out.

It is hard to adjust from that mindset to one if a free-, media saturated society.
At the same time, it is not in human nature to see the positives of the good of a media saturated world. We want every opinion to matter, and can’t focus on the fact that thought is free.

In the New York theater world, there’s more of a focus on “how we’re doing “ than in London. The Broadway producer plays a larger role than the West End producer. It’s partly based on capitalism, but it’s more of a cultural focus on success and fear of failure.

There are more small theaters in New York than there ever were before. Despite the disparity between musicals and straight plays in New York, and increasingly in London, the next new play is still the great animal everyone in theater is trying to catch.

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Labels: broadway, brooklyn academy of music, chekhov, David Remnick, london, new york, tom stoppard

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics).

If there’s any reason to see As We Speak, an otherwise unbearable new play by John Patrick Bray, it’s to see how theater is slowly beginning to adapt to the Web 2.0 era. It seems virtually impossible to dramatize a generation who grasps their laptops like respirators, but as liberal grad student Noreen, Alyson Brock assumes a pose in the first act that people of my generation are all familiar with: hunched over a tiny screen, unable to turn away, willingly ignoring one’s surroundings, and unable to function in the world off the web. Minor technical difficulties aside, director Tom Berger and projection designer David Bengali succeed in maintaining an effective staging of this otherwise dull act, and sound designer Henry Akona keeps attention constantly tuned in.

There’s little else to redeem As We Speak, a play with a script, performances, and ambition that all reek of amateurism. The script itself has very little if anything to bring to the table. Though the director’s note speaks of multiple edits, somehow lines like “Go to Hawaii, wherever you can drive to” evaded the red pen. Attempts at humor unfailingly miss their target, and the balance between realism and fantasy, both in actions and realistic human emotions, never comes close to harmony.

The basic weaknesses of the script speak to nothing of the problems of the play’s premise. As We Speak is a present-day adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, which imagined a dystopian fascist America. The novel was written in 1935, a time when major world democracies were falling into totalitarianism with terrifying frequency. It seemed that the fundamental viability of democracy was breaking down, a concept that was also addressed by Brave New World, 1984, and even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Yet, after fascism was defeated in World War II, all future attempts to revive Lewis’ novel seemed spurious. The idea of a totalitarian America was intellectually alluring, but subsequent adaptations usually had to resort to science fiction or alternate histories to make the scenario remotely plausible. Most successful attempts, such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, attained believability by reversing the results of World War II.

Bray, however, tries to update the premise to Dick Cheney’s America, post-9/11 and post-Katrina. Bray could be forgiven for the bad timing of the play, coming after an election that trounced fear-based conservative politics, had he dealt with those fears in any sort of interesting way. But Bray treats a fascist American uprising as a narrative inevitability that ultimately make the play simply boring. At the production I saw, not a single audience member clapped at intermission. I can assure you that was not due to awe.

Given little to work with, the cast can be forgiven for its uninspired performances. As Noreen’s Minutemen ex-husband Chad, Michael Littner doesn’t convince at all in portraying his conflicted loyalties. This results from his absurd characterization by Bray as well as the actor’s own lack of effort. The Greek Chorus of journalists is farcical, but not in a funny way, and tough guy Case Aiken isn’t all that tough. What none of the actors can be forgiven for is their lack of ability to project. It’s a small theater, but even so I could barely hear them half the time.

How much you’re willing to tolerate As We Speak depends on how willing you are to believe the title of the Sinclair Lewis book the play is based on. There are certainly some who believe America can devolve into fascism, and some may even believe it already has with the Bush presidency. For sure, there are also fascist parallels to be found in the Minutemen and Patriot Act. But the play’s 2005 perspective clearly reduces its impact. De Toqueville’s notion of a self-correcting democracy has proven to be stronger than even most liberals thought possible. Whether or not you believe America could ever fall into full-fledged totalitarianism and martial law—despite what some may think, the Bush presidency ain’t Nazi Germany—it’s hard to deny that there are institutions in place and core ideals preventing that from occurring. If there weren’t, we’d currently be talking about a Brownback presidency.

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As We Speak by John Patrick Bray. Directed by Tom Berger; Costume Design by Erin Smiley; Projections Design by David Bengali; Set Design by Jack Blacketer; Lighting Design by Tim Kaufman; Sound Design by Henry Akona; Fight Choreography by Kathryn Lawson. Photos by Leigh Celentano.

Starring Alisyn Brock (Noreen), Anthony Rand (Travis), Michael Littner (Chad), Michelle Rabbani (Jennifer), Michael Bertolini (Harrison), Rajesh Bose (Stanz), Cary Hite (Man 1, Nov. 8-9), Kyle-Steven Porter (Man 1, Nov. 7, 10-23), Case Aiken (Man 2), Kathryn Lawson (Woman 1), and Sarah Engelke (Woman 2).

As We Speak runs through November 23 at the 14th Street Y Theatre (344 E. 14th St.). Tickets are available at www.smarttix.com or by calling 212-868-4444.

Labels: 2008-2009, as we speak, fascism, it can't happen hear, john patrick bray, new york, Plot Against America, presidential election, sinclair lewis, theater review

It’s impossible to discuss Missa Solemnis or the Play About Henry without mentioning that I happened to see it the same day California's Proposition 8 was passed into law. The politics of Proposition 8 are virtually identical to those of 2000’s Proposition 22, the law that prompted the suicide of gay Mormon Henry Stuart Mathis (the one difference being that this time, voters were taking away rights that homosexuals had previously been awarded). In both cases, the Mormon church played a heavy role in bankrolling the anti-gay marriage efforts.

Playwright Roman Fesser had to contend with current events while creating a work of drama that could stand firm in its own right. He may not have completely succeeded, but the results are stunning. Through a deceptively cunning narrative structure, Fesser has forced audiences to internalize Henry Mathis's struggle, and Missa Solemnis succeeds as a play both timely and convincing in its portrayal of a tortured soul who, as in all good tragedies, is a noble human being trapped by circumstance.

It's important to remember that Mormon hatred of gays is not just homophobia: it’s an increasingly crucial part of an all-encompassing theology, a theology that is, to its adherents, perfect and infallible. Yet that theology stands in direct conflict with human biology, an all-encompassing system of beliefs in its own right. In New York, of course, the latter point of view dominates.

In a good Mormon household, conversely, the dividing line is much blurrier. Mormons accept modern medicine and general science, except when its ambiguities clash with a question that is inflexible in terms of Mormon thought. Above, I called Mathis a gay Mormon. Let me correct myself: there is no such thing as a gay Mormon. Central to Mathis’ struggle is the fundamental incompatibility of the Mormon belief, via Christianity, that attraction to the same gender is a wicked behavior, with the belief that homosexuality is innate in a percentage of individuals. An individual can combine the two as he pleases, but if he does so, he has stepped outside the bounds of Mormonism.

To a liberal New York audience, explaining rigid religious faith, especially a faith as peculiar as Mormonism, may as well be like talking to a Martian. I also expect that Missa Solemnis will consistently draw a majority gay audience. But in order for the play to work, Fesser has to put his audience deep into the Mormon mindset of Henry Mathis (played with unflinching earnestness by Matt Huffman). The results are jarring, and at times painfully awkward. Henry delivers lines like “My devotion to Heavenly Father is palpable,” and “I have felt the Holy Ghost before and I know with dedication and prayer he will guide me.” Contractions are eschewed, and the mannerisms, speech patterns, and meter seem like they are from another century. Fesser, a Long Islander turned undercover Mormonologist, struggles to reach a balance in these early scenes, not helped at all by his cold passion play-like opener.

But while these initial scenes may kill the play’s early momentum by telling rather than showing, they do succeed in getting you into Henry Mathis’ mindset. In the middle and later sections, when Henry actively confronts his demons, the nuances of his struggle become immediately clear. The yeoman work of the early scenes pays dividends when Henry meets with Bishop Robert Rhodes (Warren Katz), whose own sexuality is made somewhat ambiguous.

The story comes to full fruition with Henry’s love affair with Manhattan socialite Todd (Jai Catalano, who provides the character with the necessary effortless simpatico). Todd is baffled but intrigued by Henry's devout religious faith, and he remains open to Henry’s spirituality mainly because of the irascible charm of Henry himself. Todd’s view is most similar to that of a New York audience, but because the scene comes much later in the play, the focus stays entirely on Henry’s struggle. You can see in Huffman’s face just how drawn he is to Todd, but also how much his faith violently tugs at that attraction every time he lets it show.

In the play’s final scenes, we again see Henry trade teary conversations with his parents. This time, Fesser achieves much more urgent and well-written dialogue, as Henry announces to his parents that he has bought a gun. In the play’s devastating final scene at Henry's funeral, Todd solemnly introduces himself to Henry’s mother Marilyn (Gail Winar). The last line: “My name is Todd, Todd Elliot. I‘m from New York. I was a friend of your son’s.” There are larger themes at play in this final scene, where we see the humble introduction of Todd's world to Marilyn's under the circumstances of a faith-based tragedy. That kind of humble introduction is perhaps the only way these two worlds can ever come close to existing in harmony. If only it didn’t take tragedy to make sure that any future Proposition 8 will never succeed again.

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Missa Solemnis or the Play About Henry by Roman Fesser. Directed by Linda S. Nelson; scenic design by Marisa Merrigan; costume design by David B. Thompson; lighting design by Graham T. Posner; sound design by Justin Utley. Photos by Posner.

Starring Jai Catalano (Todd Elliot), Bill Fairbairn (Fred Matis), Matt Huffman (Henry Matis), Warren Katz (Bishop Bob Rhodes), and Gail Winar (Marilyn Matis).

Missa Solemnis or the Play About Henry runs through November 22nd at the TBG Arts Complex, 312 W. 36th St (3rd Floor). For tickets, call 212-868-4444 or order tickets online.

Labels: 2008-2009, henry stuart mathis, miss solemnis or the play about henry, Mormons, new york, proposition 8, roman fesser, theater review

Harm’s Way is one of those plays that may get knocked as an excessively political play (or not political enough, by some standards). It may get knocked for the occasional clichéd line by playwright Shem Bitterman, or for being too long, or for being too unbelievable. I may have a hard time defending against any of those arguments, but I will refuse to budge in calling Harm’s Way a play of absolute vitality with a quick-witted intelligence, as close to Greek or Shakespearean tragedy as it is to current events.

Yes, some of the characters have archetypal qualities. But every one has a vitality and humanity that overcomes a lot of shortcomings. Deeply disturbed and sexually abused Bianca (Sarah Foret) may have simplistic dialogue, but it belies her inability to communicate on a human level. Stupid, ox-like private Nick (Ben Bowen), a confused, disturbed and frequently violent individual, is something of an existential hero.

And emasculated military prosecutor Major Jonathan Fredericks (Jack Stehlin), utterly defenseless against the circumstances of his life, is one of the most pathetic military officers you’ll ever see in a play. Fredericks’ values and commitment to the greater good—whatever that may be—are as strong as any good soldier's. By taking the muscle away from military might, Bitterman has shown military bravado for what is it: a thinly veiled farce which sounds stupid and absurd when uttered by a man without a gun in his hand.

The problem that keeps Harm’s Way from reaching the heights I fully believe it capable of achieving is a lackluster production from Circus Theatricals. I was surprised by just how uninspired the cast seemed to be, especially since their credentials far exceeded the average for off-off-Broadway. Also, Harm’s Way has multiple lines that border on cheesiness and cliché. With the right actors and direction, the power of the play’s deeper implications could overcome these problems. But the cast, helmed by director Steve Zuckerman, seems utterly lost about how to convey any of the play’s nuance, and looks like it is going through the motions. That’s bad in any play; in a play like Harm’s Way, which needs an enthusiastic cast to succeed, it’s a tragedy in its own right.

The major exception in terms of the cast was relative novice Sarah Foret (Bianca) who came up with a fantastic portrayal as the damaged, not-right-in-the-head army base brat. Foret is the only actor in the New York production with a consistent view of her character’s mindset. It would be easy to play a simple character simply, but Foret adds a level of maturity to Bianca’s damaged soul that gives the play a significant bump. The twist at the end of the first act, for instance, would seem contrived in a less capable actor’s hands. Foret shows just how much a strong actor can contribute to this play, and embarrasses the rest of the cast with her commitment.

As the tough war journalist Connie, Wendy Makkena gives perhaps the most human performance, but her role doesn’t gain enough traction for it to make a significant impact on the play overall. That could be a fault of the playwright, but it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Stehlin’s performance wasn’t so maddeningly wooden, or if Josh Allen wasn’t so stupidly over the top as Nick’s war buddy Sammy. As the supervising Colonel, Eric Pierpoint delivers his lines flatly, as if we should already know them. That kind of performance is fine for a minor Shakespeare role, perhaps, but not for a role in a new play that is suppose to command authority.

Ultimately, Harm’s Way will not get the traction it deserves, and that’s largely because of a cast and crew that seems more disappointed in itself than committed to the task at hand. Bitterman will have to find a better group of actors to work with in the future, or else he will go criminally unnoticed.

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Harm's Way by Shem Bitterman; directed by Steve Zuckerman; sets and costumes by Kitty Rose; lighting by Derrick McDaniel; original music by Roger Bellon. Photos by Jeannine Stehlin

Starring Josh Allen (Sammy Havesford), Ben Bowen (Private Nick Granville), Sarah Foret (Bianca Fredericks), Eric Pierpont (Colonel Hank Davis), Wendy Makkena (Connie Durrell), and Jack Stehlin (Major Jonathan Fredericks).

Presented by Circus Theatricals at the 45th Street Theatre, 354 W. 45th St., NYC. Oct. 18-Nov. 8. Playing in repertory with "Man. Gov." Thu. and Sat., 8 p.m. (212) 352-3101 or www.theatermania.com.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, harm's way, Jack Stehlin, new york, shem bitterman, theater review, Theatre, Wendy Makkena

Until I saw The Actors Company Theatre’s production of Bedroom Farce, I had never seen a staging of any play by Alan Ayckbourn. Such a statement is probably the reason why TACT decided to stage one of Ayckbourn’s greatest plays, Bedroom Farce. Despite the fact that he is one of the greatest living British playwrights, Ayckbourn’s work is almost never staged in the U.S. You can probably count the number of people in America deeply familiar with Ayckbourn’s work on a few sets of hands, and most of those fingers would represent British ex-pats. Watching Bedroom Farce, a classic, smart British comedy with an equally smart production, I was thrilled to have the privilege of finally seeing Ayckbourn. I also wondered whether any attempt to make Ayckbourn a bigger name in the States could possibly be successful.

Ayckbourn, still going strong at the age of 69, has often been called the British Neil Simon. A better parallel would be to call him this generation’s Noël Coward. Bedroom Farce is more akin to a postwar Private Lives, a funny, endearing examination of marital struggle that takes a simple structure and injects it with enough wit and genuine human emotion for it to reach a higher level than standard mainstream theater.

Each of the four couples in Bedroom Farce has its own crosses to bear, and each character displays alternating degrees of repression and emotional violence. Exploring the dynamics of repression and unleashed emotion was a Coward staple, but Ayckbourn’s particular innovation was to have the degree of these personality types differ within each character based on each situation. Ayckbourn is one of the best living playwrights exploring the inconsistencies in individual behavior, often mistaken for hypocrisy. The result in the case of Bedroom Farce is the kind of social comedy that, while still lighthearted and rather silly, reaches a higher plane of real human emotions that most so-called farces miss.

It’s understandable how frustrated Ayckbourn fans must be to see his plays staged in the U.S. so rarely. Thankfully, TACT’s production of Bedroom Farce, under the helm of director Jenn Thompson, doesn’t miss a beat. Set designer Robin Vest masters a vintage Ayckbourn dramatic space consisting of three beds for four couples on various planes of the stage. Every cast member seems in tune with his role, and no one in the cast or crew holds the show back in the slightest. If the goal was to give Ayckbourn a staging that fully showed off his talents to an American audience, TACT has succeeded tremendously.

The main problem with the production, which is of no fault of TACT, is that the play simply did not resonate with the audience at Theater Row the same way it must have at its original West End staging in 1977. The sarcasm of Scott Schafer’s hobbled, middle-aged Nick got the most laughs, and coming in close second was the Mark Rylance-like buffoonery of Mark Alhadeff’s Trevor. But the real emotional and comedic centers of the play, Trevor’s mother Delia (Cynthia Harris) and his wife Suzannah (Eve Bianco, who may have given the best performance of all), seemed more like peculiarities to an audience expecting a full-on farce.

While I loved the play tremendously, I could immediately see the reasons why Ayckbourn hasn’t become a larger star in America. All the intelligence, all the emotional tugs, and all the deeper intellectual themes that could stay with an audience beyond the theater are hidden in Ayckbourn’s deeper, subtle wryness. This wryness requires thinking in more general terms, and is a cultural trademark of Britain. Yet it doesn’t resonate at quite the same level with brasher Americans. The result is an audience with a prevalence of smiles, but a lack of laughs at what is supposed to be a very funny play. Perhaps Americans have a much harder time mixing comedy and flat-out farce than the Brits. There’s no need to blame Ayckbourn for the cultural disparity that has held back his American success, but then again, there’s no need to blame Americans for that either.

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Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Jenn Thompson; scenic design by Robin Vest; costume design by Martha Hally; lighting design by Aaron Copp; sound design by Stephen Kunken. Photos by Kunken.

Starring Larry Keith (Ernest), Cynthia Harris (Delia), Scott Schafer (Nick), Margaret Nichols (Jan), Sean Dougherty (Malcolm), Ashley West (Kate), Mark Alhadeff (Trevor), and Eve Bianco (Susannah).

Produced by The Actors Company Theatre at the Beckett @ Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd st. Runs through November 8th. Tickets can be purchased at Ticket Central. This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, alan ayckbourn, american theater, bedroom farce, england, neil simon, new york, the actors company theatre, theater review

(This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.)

Stain feels like what would happen if Vincent Gallo wrote a play and didn’t have a disciplined editor at his disposal. It takes a lot to politically offend me, and Stain is the first play that has done so in quite a long time. The play has not-too-obvious right-wing leanings, a racist dad who would be comical if he weren’t so repulsive, and misogyny that rivals Strindberg's. I’m fine with offensive politics and dialogue if there’s an interesting story, as well as believable, if not sympathetic characters, and true human struggle. But rather than inject some creativity and careful thought into Stain, playwright Tony Glazer has instead given the play a hopeless string of cliché’s and confused character motivations. The result is a play where the harshness cannot be justified.

Allow me to list the number of supposedly controversial themes addressed in Stain: abuse, racism, rape, molestation, teen parenthood and confusion over biological parents, incest, divorce, drugs, unprotected sex, and legal manipulation. Glazer left murder out of an otherwise complete set, but his casual assumption that abortion is murder has it there by proxy.

Playing with a glut of themes along these lines is not necessarily doomed to failure—in fact, this year Pulitzer winner, August: Osage County, also featured a seemingly endless string of similar catastrophes. But where August offered real human struggle, black humor, and broken human lives, Stain instead offers stunning plot twists for the sake of stunning plot twists. Glazer mentioned in a recent interview that he wanted to address the repercussions of not being honest with your family, and that point is certainly jammed down our throats repeatedly. But with such confused character motivations and dubious melodrama, there’s not enough else going for the play to overcome the clichés, other than a handful of witty lines.

The play centers around how a bunch of adults have been wholly unfair to one extremely unlucky fifteen-year-old named Thomas (Tobias Segal). In addition to Arthur, the said racist, borderline-alcoholic dad (Jim O’Connor), Thomas has a repressive, manipulative mother, Julia (Summer Crockett Moore), a botox-using, saintly (if Republican) grandma Theresa (Joanna Bayless), and a pot-smoking, insult-trading buddy George (Peter Brensinger). There’s obviously a secret everyone is keeping from Thomas about his parents’ divorce, and he spends most of the first act asking for it. We also learn that he’s knocked up a 32-year-old Puerto Rican lawyer, Carla (Karina Arroyave), who, rather than facing statutory rape charges, plans to raise the baby on her own and ignore Thomas altogether while still demanding child support once Thomas turns eighteen.

The play struggles with consistency and believability throughout. How can Thomas, so wiry and awkward, have convinced an educated women that he was of the age of consent, much less be smooth enough to convince her to sleep with him? How could Theresa, at once batty and immensely grounded, have been so oblivious to the true history of Thomas’ birth? How could anyone not think of calling the cops on Carla, despite her legalese?

Perhaps most offensive, however, is Glazer’s brazen sweep over the question of abortion. Thomas’s situation seems like the kind of case Roe v. Wade was made for, but rather than at least seriously considering all possibilities, the issue is shot down by both Carla and, less believably, Thomas’ family. When Carla mentions she’s not having an abortion, Theresa casually declares, “We’re Republicans.” When your fifteen-year-old son’s future is on the line, you simply cannot shoot down the possibility so easily because of a political conviction, even by a family that believes “liberal” and “welfare” are appropriate crossword puzzle solutions to the description “destructive.” At the very least, you could consult a lawyer much more quickly.

Segal’s performance as Thomas may be the most redeeming element of Stain. A recent Drama Desk nominee, Segal is ironically the most mature and professional actor in the cast, effortlessly gliding through Thomas’ range of emotions while never dropping his overwhelmingly adolescent glaze. Hopelessly clumsy, he looks to have outgrown his body. Through pure charm, he almost allows you to forgive Glazer’s poorly thought-out decision to make Thomas a drug user and lawyer-seducer. Bayless’ Theresa would have given the other noteworthy performance as the capricious grandmother, who seems to be on more drugs than botox. Unfortunately, Bayless struggles with her lines too often for her performance to really shine.

Stain is a willfully obnoxious play, one that doesn’t try to make its audience happy or play to viewers' political sympathies. In a way, we should be seeing a lot more of this kind of attitude in the New York theater scene. But without a proper play to back up that attitude, the obnoxiousness translates to something more sophomoric than productive.

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Through August 23. Stain, written by Tony Glazer. Directed by Scott D. Embler. Scenic Design by Eddy Trotter. Costume Design by Cully Long. Lighting Design by Nick Kolin. Sound Design/Original Music by Andrew Eisiele. Photos by Orlando Behar.

Starring Tobias Segal (Thomas), Jim O'Conner (Arthur), Peter Brensinger (George), Summer Crockett Moore (Julia), Joanna Bayless (Theresa), and Karina Arroyave (Carla).

Labels: abortion, new york, politics, republicans, stain, theater review, theater row, tobias segal, tony glazer

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics.)

I did not have a chance to write this review of TRACES/fades, the second show of the Ice Factory festival, until a week after its premiere. As I began to try to recall the play for this review, I began to fully appreciate its point about how the loss of memory robs us of our vitality and makes us shed some of our distinctly human qualities. Yet I don’t think it was writer/director Lenora Champagne’s intention to emphasize that point by creating a play that was so forgettable.

TRACES/fades is the kind of show that gives experimental theater a bad name. Certainly, fragmented memory and displaced humanity are material ripe for the avant-garde. But instead of taking a turn towards dada, or even towards the theater of cruelty, this play comes across as a lazy, whiny think piece.TRACES/fades’ manipulations are painfully obvious, and its lack of notable dramatic development is more a drag than a thought-provoking device. However worth exploring the themes of TRACES/fades may be, it will take a much more intelligent, creative treatment than what Champagne has produced to give a complete theatrical expression.

The play centers on three generations of females, Ann (Joanne Jacobson), the grandmother with the fading memory, her daughter Claire (played by the playwright, Lenora Champagne), who is a leftist political operative, and granddaughter Rose (Amelie Champagne Lyons), named after Ethel Rosenberg, and trying to rediscover her grandmother’s past. Champagne clumsily weaves scenes of Rose and Claire’s poorly rendered mother-daughter relations, Rose assisting her grandmother, and Ann at the nursing home where she is carefully assigned. All these scenes feature abstract dialogue that wavers between non-magical realist melodrama and dream play extravagances. These scenes would be much better off if Champagne picked one atmosphere or the other.

There are also moments when the actors speak directly to the audience, usually in speeches about politics, feminism, and global warming. There’s also the occasional singing of an anti-war song. The transitions between the more realistic scenes and the fanciful are poorly executed, a product both of the script and of Champagne and Robert Lyons’ co-direction. The use of a giant, continuously changing video in the background distracts more than it assists the flow of the production, even though its faded images are an obvious stand-in for the loss of memories.

The overwhelming video display suggests that for what Champagne has in mind, TRACES/fades might be better suited for an art gallery than for the theater. The play is stuffed with enough imagery, mixed media, and vague thematic allusions to make a fascinating gallery exhibit. What it lacks is cogent drama, which is a death knell for even an hour-long theatrical work. No matter how crucial the topic matter may be, TRACES/fades is an insufferable work of theater that is more likely to have you block it out of your memory than to make you think about memory itself.

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TRACES/fades ran from 7/16-7/19 as part of the Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory Festival '08, which runs through 8/23. Written and directed by Lenora Champagne. Music by Daniel Levi. Video by Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons. Production design by Liz Prince.

Tickets for remaining Ice Factory Festival shows can be purchased here.

Labels: ice factory festival, Lenora Champagne, new york, soho think tank, theater review, TRACES/fades

As a native of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I see playwright-performer James Braly as a mirror image of the cool dads half my friends had growing up. Those were the dads who disproportionately ended up divorcing the moms, often for a younger woman. But Braly, who gave up his Central Park West apartment to improve his family life, has not divorced his wife Susan, despite having ample reason and opportunities to do so over the past twenty years. Having inherited an unstable family life from his childhood, Braly is a man who can’t thrive unless there’s a minimum baseline of chaos in his life. To use a phrase my mom used for my dad, Braly has two speeds: fast and off.

Braly got his expensive apartment as a speechwriter, and his skills as a writer are apparent throughout Life in A Marital Institution. The script never misses an opportunity for a punch line; one can easily see a politician using Braly's seemingly endless reservoir of verbal jabs. But more important than his natural sense of humor is Braly’s ability to distribute the blows equally among family, friends, and himself. Life in A Marital Institution achieves a balance between Braly’s self-righteousness and self-loathing that is rare in a one-man show. After years of writing speeches where the focus is on artifice, Braley has two decades' worth of truth-telling in store that the monologue format allows him to blurt out for an hour.

As easily as writing comes to Braly, he is not a natural performer. This is a double-edged sword for the play's overall impact. On the one hand, his plain old regular-guy storytelling performance style is a welcome relief, keeping things fresh throughout the evening. On the other hand, Braly’s performance will often betray his writing, as some lines don’t hit as hard as they should. In part to overcome his lack of an actor’s instincts, Braly has a tendency to mug with an annoying smirk when he delivers a particularly smart line. Once things turn serious, however, that smirk vanishes. As a performer, Braly is at his best when he is most vulnerable.

The tribulations of married life aren't exactly a new concept for drama, but Braly’s marital circumstances are legitimately exceptional. No primetime sitcom would touch James and Susan’s marriage, which includes planning on breastfeeding their two sons until the age of seven, having the entire family sleep in the same bed, and holding dinner parties where parents discuss eating their wives' placentas.

Susan’s Eastern spiritual leanings are a constant source of frustration for James (in what may be the best one-liner you’ll hear in New York this summer, James comments that "[he’s] never put 'exorcism' in the memo box of a check before"). In the play’s most emotionally taxing scene, that frustration becomes a matter of life and death. Yet Susan is as much a source of comfort to James as she is a source of rage. In James' family, a long-lasting marriage is an exception rather than the rule. Consider his dying sister who's marrying a violent Australian, a father who can’t hold down a marriage, or his more clueless sister, who owns a salon un-ironically named “Façade.”

While a one-man show usually makes its director invisible, here Hal Brooks establishes himself as this generation’s premier director of the format. Between Thom Pain, No Child, and now Life in A Marital Institution, he’s built a signature style of quick shifts, segmenting a play by lighting changes, and brief, abrupt audience engagement. The guidance he has provided Braly’s performance has proven to be invaluable.

After a few years of an identity crisis after Spalding Gray’s death, the monologue has made a triumphant return with a bevy of new, creative plays. Life in A Marital Institution opens as Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America, a similarly, frank, honest one-man show, just finished a heralded run a few blocks away. In today’s culture of theatrical excess, there’s a premium on unassuming, direct plays that cost a lot less but resonate a lot more. Life in A Marital Institution succeeds precisely because of its small goals. Who would have thought selling an apartment on Central Park West would be worth it after all?

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Through August 31 at the Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam St. Written and performed By James Braly. Directed by Hal Brooks. Tickets can be purchased here. The show runs 1 hour, 5 minutes. This article was originally posted on blogcritics.com. Photo by Jaisen Crockett.

Labels: hal brooks, james braly, life in a martial institution, mike daisey, new york, theater review

(This article was originally posted on blogcritics.org)

On Monday, below the fold on the front page of the New York Times Arts section was a review of Superior Doughnuts at the Steppenwolf Theatre. It would make sense that the review was featured this prominently; it was Tracy Letts' first play since August: Osage County won just about every theatrical award known to man.

Charles Isherwood's review of the new play was decidedly mixed, cautiously recommending the play despite considering it "insubstantial and sweet, with virtually no nutritional value" (for what it's worth, Isherwood was not a fan of Letts' more risqué pre-August work such as Killer Joe and Bug). But what the review actually said was insubstantial. What was more important was that the New York Times, the paper of record, particularly for the theater press, was strongly emphasizing a play from Chicago in the same position it normally places Broadway or prominent off-Broadway plays. That would have been virtually impossible four years ago.

When I was considering colleges, I knew I needed to have theater in my life. My trust in Chicago theater was built not by front page reviews of individual shows, but by annual features about Chicago's lively theater scene that usually crammed 20 plays into 1000 words. When I got to Chicago, I finally saw some of those plays that had previously been nothing more than paragraphs in my mind. My first plays in Chicago were the Second City revue Red Scare, the Neo-Futurists' legendary Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, a production of Equus by the Hypocrites Theatre Company, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Court Theatre. I would later build connections at all four of those theater companies.

I quickly realized that compared to New York, the production values were laughable, especially in some of the smaller theaters. Yet, I also learned that theater need not follow the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and all-the-rest model. In Chicago, anyone can put on a play at virtually any time, be it in a squatters residence in Pilsen that's lucky to get six people a night, a converted art gallery where opening night is canceled because of paint fumes, or in an early 20th century lakeside parlor with the worst acoustics imaginable.

None of this should sound unfamiliar to anyone conversant with either or both cities' theater cultures. Yet, as those who have followed American theater over the past year or so know, the disparity between the two is shrinking. Chicago paradoxically used to be the most segregated major segment of American theater. While its grassroots model of theater was an inspiration, there was also virtually no interaction between Chicago theater and the rest of America. Today, all you need to do is look at some of the more heralded productions in New York of late (August, Orson's Shadow, The Adding Machine, the plays of Chicago native Sarah Ruhl), to see that Chicago's role in American theater is as prominent as it has been since the late 70s and early 80s, when Goodman Theatre product David Mamet and the Steppenwolf both first emerged.

It's not just a one-way relationship either. Most successful New York productions are now invariably given major treatment in Chicago. True, most transfers have been immense disappointments (the worst possibly being the Steppenwolf's version of The Pillowman, which featured none other than Tracy Letts and Jim True-Frost in its cast). In other cases, however, the Chicago productions did more with less than would ever be possible in New York theater. My frustration at missing the Broadway revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer was alleviated by a superb production of the play by Uma Productions. Not only did that production feature a nearly flawless if less-heralded cast, it also made the experience more real by directing you to the patched-together basement space—like the space where a "real" faith healer would perform.

In some cases, Chicago performed what equates to a miracle in the theatrical world: reviving the fortunes of a play that failed on its first run in New York City. InFusion Theatre Company's production of Kate Robin's Intrigue with Faye featured a sparser set and a markedly less famous cast, but its actors had something that Benjamin Bratt and Julianna Margulies lacked: chemistry.

In the summer of 2006, Wicked's run on Broadway in Chicago had reached what was supposed to be its closing point. Its producers then decided to forgo the bigger media market in Los Angeles and stay in Chicago because of the show's overwhelming popularity. Broadway in Chicago was finally a success. This fact had many Chicago theater enthusiasts, myself included, in a frenzy. The fear was that this would create a top-down theater model like New York and kill the grassroots spirit of Chicago. That fear ignored the fact that when you can rent a theater space for under $1000 a month, anything can happen with the right people. It's that kind of open-mindedness that has blasted Chicago into New York's staler theater scene, and has seen both cities reap the rewards.

There's still no place like New York for American theater. Less than 48 hours after graduating from the University of Chicago, I found myself attending Ensemble Studio Theater's one-act Marathon, with work by playwrights no less prominent than Neil LaBute and actors whose credentials topped those found in most elite Chicago theater companies. And this was in a theater on the second floor across from the Police Athletic League and hidden behind a virtually abandoned car repair shop in Hell's Kitchen.

From whichever perspective you take, however, the creation of even the slightest cultural diffusion between the two scenes has dramatically improved both cities—and American theater in general. Some New York theatergoers seem impressed by how many good plays are coming from Chicago. I'm more impressed by how good American theater has gotten overall, whichever world I was considering at the time.

Labels: american theater, chicago, new york, univeristy of chicago

(This review was originally published at Blogcritics.org)

When I sat down at to watch The Pleasures of Peace at the Medicine Show Theatre, I saw immediately a perfect litmus test for the success of the show. Sitting to my right was a group of classic contemporary NYU hipsters, drinking Heineken and discussing celebrity gossip. The success of the show depended on how well it got under the skin of exactly these kind of people.

A revue like The Pleasures of Peace, which takes its title from a poem by Kenneth Koch, is exactly the type of show we should be seeing more of in the English-speaking world, and especially in the U.S. If I had one major objection, it would be that I wanted the show to be larger, and with a larger audience. The Medicine Show Ensemble has carved a niche for itself with shows like this, and while the current show is slightly too long and somewhat uneven (the plight of any revue, good or bad), it was obvious that this diverse, creative ensemble had the intellect to match their inventiveness.

Some skits focused on the dichotomy of political and banal conversation. One routine featured the best theatrical expression I've ever seen of the conflict between classical sincerity and postmodernist apathy: a humming battle between Beethoven's 9th and a lullaby, with the song meant to put you to sleep eventually winning—and sounding very dangerous.

There's a lot of joke telling, mostly of the type of jokes people have all heard but would never tell in such a public forum. There's an Oscar Wilde scene on the morality of the wealthy, which is promptly destroyed by intentionally shit analysis meant to mock the audience. But throughout the show, there's an overwhelming commitment to creativity and attacking complacency. Like all smart theater, the ensemble puts the art before the politics. There's certainly a fair share of leftist rhetoric, but it's mostly either secondhand or treated with a sense of humor.

Of course, if I was totally happy with a challenging show, that would mean I wasn't really challenged that much after all. The Medicine Show Ensemble had that covered by delving into that most verboten of theatrical practices: boring your audience. Nearly an hour after mentioning how boring opera was, the show launched into a sarcastically boring opera based on a Louisa May Alcott story about a subject that's usually anything but boring to young people: hashish. I don't know if it was worth it to bore an audience to make a point—I'm leaning towards no—but I at least appreciate the ensemble's willingness to try. I just hope that they were aware of the boring factor.

There are inevitable limits to the revue format, especially to a contemporary eye. The biggest misstep, which was more a product of the format than the content, was the inclusion of John Gruen's one-act play Guards in Love. While the play, about a love affair between a British royal guard and a Swiss Vatican guard, was not that bad at all, it probably had more of a place downstairs as part of the Ensemble Studio Theatre's one-act marathon, especially considering it didn't add all that much to the theme of the evening. Still, considering the amount of material packed into the night, keeping it to around two hours was an impressive feat.

Perhaps a show this experimental or eclectic can't be expected to pack houses, even in an Off-Off-Broadway production. I'm sure the ensemble members wouldn't have it any other way (except maybe with a bigger paycheck). Yet theater like this is too smart to be left to the fringes, and I wish it could run longer so that critics and crowds would be more likely to take a gander. As for those NYU kids, despite the show being quite funny, if on its own plane, they almost never laughed, and spent the second half of the night whispering to each other in confusion and looking to the door. Brecht would have been proud.

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Through June 28. Located at the Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble, 249 W. 52nd St (3rd Floor). Tickets can be purchased at the box office or online at Smarttix. Photo credits: John Quilty

Directed by Barbara Vann. Pleasures Of Peace features Molly C. Blau, Paul Cloeter, Mark J. Dempsey, Felix Gardon, Jason Alan Griffin, Beth Griffith, Ashley Anne Harrell, Nina Karacosta, Ward Nixon, Andrei Robakov, Peter Tedeschi, Alex Martinez Wallace and Ann Marie Yoo.

Labels: brecht, medicine show theatre ensemble, new york, off-off-Broadway, the pleasures of peace, theater review

It's by no means a coincidence that my first weekday after finishing classes in the college is my most successful day here at Tynan's Anger. A combination of Gerard Butler fangirls and appealing to Will Leitch's schadenfreude to all things Cubs have created unprecedented traffic to this site. While I imagine the bounce rate will be enormous, hopefully those of you who stick around will find this here blog, the only place to get sports, theater, and everything in between in one blog, to your liking. I'm off to deal with my real life for an evening, but until then, here are some things I didn't get to today.

• MSG is making a push for the NCAA tourney after it renovates in 2012 (note how the MSG renovation lines up so neatly with the Mayan apocalypse). I'm opposed to it, if for no other reason than the Dolans don't need another thing to fuck up.
• With all due respect to Gene Wojciechowski, while Chicago certainly has plenty of interesting sports things going on right now, it's not quite on the level of golden thongs on 38 year old men, popcorn-pushing GM's who declare the rights of black men to call women bitches, a Super Bowl title, an epic September collapse, and a hockey player posing as an ice dancer all occurring within 12 months of each other (with the $27 million man being caught with a prostitute in Toronto narrowly missing the cut). New York even pulled a surprise upset over Illinois in the lets see how fast our governor resigns contest.
  
• Wow Camp Tiger Claw is without a doubt one of Deadspin's greatest commenters, I may never forgive him for this gratuitous Joba nipple ring shot.
• Finally, if you are living in New York right now (which I will be doing once again in 1 week's time) you may in fact have herpes, as may many of your friends. 1 in 4 is a rather high ratio, though the racial and sexual divide is a big part of it. If the rumors are true about Derek Jeter, I bet he uses a significantly less entertaining name than Ron Mexico.
  

Labels: chicago, derek jeter, dolans, herpes, joba chamberlain, msg, ncaa tourney, new york, nipples, progress, ron mexico, tipping point

Tell me if this doesn't sound like an ideal artistic director of a New York theater to you:

Give me an annual budget of $5 million, all my downtown contacts and see if I don’t make a splash. I’d program a season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker and Will Eno. Plus—eventually—younger, unproduced playwrights who landed on my desk. (The more violent and obscene, the better.) Foreign writers, too, in fresh translations. Every first Monday I’d throw a free play reading with an open bar. In the summer, I’d open the doors for a two-month workshop by a favored company—Radiohole, the Debate Society or Nature Theater of Oklahoma—ending in a massive celebration. The advertising would be slick and bold, the tickets cheap, the parties raucous and the shows calculated to enrage, excite and astound. For the first five years, I would not accept any subscriber over the age of 35. I’d have blogs, press conferences, preshow talks and fat souvenir programs. I’d constantly bombard the media with video and op-ed pieces tied to our shows—when I wasn’t hosting a kick-ass party.

Time Out New York editor David Cole, who devised this dream scenario, dismissed it as damn near impossibly in today's theater culture, where companies are strained by subscriber demands, critical scorn, raising ticket and rent prices, and the decline in NEA funding. Cole then turned to asking where the next theatrical impresario in the mold of Joe Papp could be found, and preferably one who was slightly less of a douche. It's worth noting that exciting, dangerous theater is somewhat lacking in the U.S., political or otherwise. What I should note is that Chicago, with its smaller real estate prices and less subscription-based audiences, has the potential to support Cole's dream theater, but so far have yet to push quite hard enough.

Labels: chicago, dream theater, joe papp, new york