Theater Review (NYC): The Chalk Boy by Joshua Conkel

The Chalk Boy, perhaps more than any other play in recent memory, treats teenage girls as more than caricatures. Its characters are all human beings with human problems, whose flaws are just as tragic as those of characters from Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, or Ibsen. Their identity crises and their views on religion, destiny, and hope touch the same themes that have been touched by thinkers far removed from small town America. Two of the girls resort to witchcraft for the same reason people have been resorting to religion, drugs, art, or any other form of escape for as long as there’s been civilization: being alive is too painful without some sort of outlet.

Of course, all that’s in the undercurrent of what is in actuality a very funny play. The darker implications of the story are hidden in a black box of teen girl slang, with “kisses, bitches” and enough “bitches” “sluts” and “ho-bags” to convince you that you’re in high school all over again. Linguists argue that the popular bitchy middle- and high-school girls are the origins of new developments in American English, and while I’m too far removed from this period to say if playwright/director Joshua Conkel’s catalog of slang is completely accurate, he’s certainly developed a deftly-tuned ear for the meter and intensity of teen girl speak.

Marguerite French and Mary Catherine Donnelly narrate the play (they’re, what do you call it…omniscient!) as Trisha Sorensen and Lauren Radley, leaders of the Christian Varsity Youth, giving a presentation and hoping you’ll drink the orangeade they made. Both actors provide the comical framework and help establish a brilliant use of the limited Under St. Marks venue. They also take on any other role that is needed in a pinch, and while the fourth-wall breaking is somewhat too lackadaisical for my liking, it does provide Conkel with a number of tools for his storytelling. The play is somber, but almost always funny; its presentation is adolescent, but still intellectually challenging.

Another of The Chalk Boy’s greatest strengths is the unflinching honesty and bleakness it ascribes to small town America. Clear Creek, Washington is “one of those towns,” Conkel puts it - and as a native of one of those towns himself, his insights into the utter despair that grips these small towns is spot on. The play also highlights how blind most theater audiences—and New York audiences in particular—can often be to how the other half of America lives.

The play centers around the presumed abduction of a relatively popular boy named Jeffrey Chalk, who has gone missing and is presumed dead. This has been a problem with Clear Creek in the past and will continue to be. A curfew is instated, mothers and teachers become paranoid, and girls who are in love with Jeffrey start behaving even more nastily than they did before.

Chalk’s disappearance is the main motivation allowing the girls to feel comfortable asserting their own feelings about life, love, spirituality, and all that blah blah blah. Penny Lauder (Jennifer Harder) is perhaps the most complete character in the play; she experiences a false pregnancy from Jeff but refuses to believe it's false, with the same intensity and obvious futility with which she refuses to believe that Jeff is dead (futility is a recurring theme here). She sees herself as either unlucky, unredeemable, or just plain unlovable, destined to follow in the footsteps of her trailer-trash mother who also had a teen pregnancy. Her vaguely creepy, obviously confused friend Breanna (Kate Huisentruit), future Smith College material, tries to express love and affection for Penny that she knows can never truly be reciprocated until she gets out of this shit town.

The actors often struggle with the wide-ranging, constantly shifting emotional baggage of the play, both explicit and implicit. Conkel makes jokes about his characters’ limited vocabulary, yet they sometimes take on large themes in language too astute for a fifteen-year-old. But perfect consistency was a goal that Conkel was rightly willing to overlook with The Chalk Boy for the larger pursuit of taking the small-town American teen girl into existential territory, and his results are almost always grippingly poignant. You’ll more readily drink the comedic orangeade during the play, but you’ll leave it with a much deeper affliction.

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The Chalk Boy, written and directed by Joshua Conkel. Starring Jennifer Harder (Penny Lauder), Marguerite French (Trisha Sorensen and others), Kate Huisentruit (Breanna Stark), and Mary Catherine Donnelly (Lauren Radley and others). Photo by John Alexander.

The Chalk Boy runs through September 20 at the Under St. Marks theater. Tickets can be purchased here.

This review was initially published on Blogcritics.

Theater Review (NYC): The Pleasures of Peace by the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble

(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.