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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Chuck Klosterman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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.

Labels: 2008-2009, joshua conkel, off-off-Broadway, the chalk boy, theater review, under st. marks

(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