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

A century later, a still-shocking trial provides criminally uninteresting theater


Those who purely value the socially conscious in theater will no doubt be thrilled by Terranova, a new drama by Pamela Monk and Dennis J. Loiacono. The play certainly explores an interesting premise, but Terranova struggles from a script that lacks any flow in dialogue and dramatic pacing. The script is so awkward that it ends upper boring than moving, resulting in a wasted opportunity.


Terranova takes an unconventional approach to the old world/new word dilemma of the American immigrant experience, and Terranova's premise and characters creates an interesting set of dramatic opportunities. On the one hand, the old world ethics of Josephina (Laura Lamberti) prevents her from fully acknowledging the ramifications of the horrific sexual abuse she grows up with. On the other hand, Josephina is in the Bronx, not Sicily, and the luxury provided by a fairer justice system produces a nearly irreconcilable differences in expectations. The ensemble of characters provide an interesting mix, from the establishment America of William Randolph Hearst (John Gazzle, who lacks anything resembling the gravitas you'd expect from Hearst), the compassionate but materialistic reporter Dorothy Dix (Raissa Dorff), and Josefina's counsel John Palmieri (Steve DiNardo), stuck in between the Italian ethical code and the opportunities provided by America.

All this would make a fascinating drama with a less painfully turgid and shallow script. Monk and Loiacono sacrifice anything resembling nuance in order to advance its larger conceptual themes. The cast constantly struggles to find the right tone, and almost no actor really succeeds, as much a fault of the script as the actors' lack of chops. The one standout is Lamberti as Josephina, the only actor able to provide raw emotion to seep through the scripta wordy script (her perpetual rants in Italian, Lamberti's native tongue, certainly help.)

Terranova is based on a real-life trial that was brought back to attention in an article by playwright and bioethicist Jacon M. Appel in 2004. Appel's article focused on just how unnerving the case was to most who had heard it previously. Public acknowledgment of sexual abuse was practically unheard of before then, and almost every facet of the trial, from its use of psychological profiling and the temporary madness argument, the application of yellow journalism to an individual's life, and Terranova's controversial acquittal, mostly a result of jury nullification.

All of this is dramatic enough on its own, and leaves open plenty of room for theatrical innovation. The play however, takes no risks whatsoever, and falls back on blunt describing the implications rather than showing them. Monk and Loiacono didn't necessarily need to resort to shock tactics to get the point across; then again, I've never seen a play that glossed over sexual abuse so carelessly. Terranova's failures end up making a better case for going into riskier territory. Because the script is so insufferable, and because the only thing remotely risqué about the play is its occasional racial epithet (epitheths that were thrown around much more carelessly in 1906) Terranova only weakens any sympathy an audience can feel for characters who were much more interesting in real life. Granted, Terranova suffers from a weak production, but there's so little to be enthusiastic about with this script that I doubt anyone could redeem it.

Terranova by Pamela Monk and Dennis J. Loiacono. Directed by Theresa Gambacorta; costume design by Natasha Daniels; lighting design by Adam H. Greene; music by Michela Musolino and David Pinkard.

Starring Steve DiNardo (John Palmieri), Raissa Dorff (Dorothy Dix), Lucia Grillo (Concetta Reggio), John Gazzale (William Randolph Hearst), Laura Lamberti (Josefina Terranova), Joseph LaRocca (Gaetano Reggio), Joseph Mancuso (The Alienist), Margo Singaliese (Maria D'Angelo), Emilio Tirri (Giuseppe Terranova).

Terranova's last fringeNYC Encore performance runs tonight, September 22, a 7 p.m. in the Actor's Playhouse (100 Seventh Ave. South). Ticket Information: 866-468-7619; http://www.fringenyc-encoreseries.com

Labels: 2009-2010, Dennis J. Loiacono, Laura Lamberti, nyc fringe festival, Pamela Monk, terranova, 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

"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

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

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics.)

I've seen a lot of off-off-Broadway and workshop productions in the past year that have played with meta-theatricality, political symbolism and reworking classics. Some have utterly failed, some have been more successful, and some I've positively reviewed. After seeing Rising Phoenix Company's Too Much Memory at the New York Theatre Workshop, however, I've found exactly what I've been looking for but have failed to find all this time: a truly honest, tough but fair, and remarkably intelligent play that didn't implicitly apologize for its very existence.

Perhaps the smartest thing Too Much Memory does is start the play by setting humorous but very important ground rules. With no attempt to create a fourth wall (actors even greet their friends in the audience while waiting for the play to start), the "Chorus" (Martin Moran) describes the play as "an adaptation of an adaption of a retranslation" of Antigone, while wisecracking with his fellow actors. But within this explanation of the theatrical ground rules is one of the best explanations of the nature of adaptation I've ever heard:

A director can take a Greek play and have people come on riding motorcycles, come in on motorized scenery. We don't have that kind of room. There's a hundred ways in which you can bring something into the present. We have that freedom, but like I said, in today's world, things being what they are, I think we also have an obligation. To speak up.

How I wish every other company in New York City believed this! Incidentally, that statement works equally well for coping with tragedy. Tragedy, Moran points out later, never ends well—one of things that makes tragedy so upsetting is how inevitable and arbitrary the process is in creating a tragedy. That lack of justice applies equally well for politics, which is what ties this adaptation of an adaptation of a retranslation of Antigone together.

In previous generations, it was the responsibility of the young to speak up, and responsibility of the old to react when the young had a point. Now, with a generation taught that the system of justice is hopelessly arbitrary, that instinct to speak up has been silenced by the same people who initially were doing just that. Playwrights Keith Redden and Meg Gibson have recognized that while justice and laws may not follow any logical standards, the instinct to speak up, to fight against injustice no matter how pointless, can never fully be overcome. They're lucky to have a 2000-year old play that almost too perfectly fits those beliefs.

Unlike almost any other tragic hero or heroine, Antigone recognizes the fate that will follow her actions from start to finish. By pursuing what she believes is right, she has no doubts about the repercussions of her actions, unlike Hamlet, Willy Loman, or even her father Oedipus. Antigone knew that she was to die by sticking to her principles. In Sophocles, she died without almost ever flinching.

Sticking with your beliefs until death is an infatuating concept, but it's more martyrdom than tragedy. In most other versions of Antigone, it's Creon who takes the brunt of the tragedy when his son Haemon and wife Eurydice commit suicide. In this version, Antigone is the most affected by the tragedy, but with a path to tragedy in reverse. At first resigned to death, she ultimately breaks down in remorse as she realizes the full implications of giving up her life for an idea. Ideas can go on without her. It's Antigone's real emotions—her love for Haemon, her hopes for the future—that can never be reclaimed with her death. Conversely, instead of feeling any remorse, Creon ends up resigned to the fate of his principles, even after his own tragedies befall him.

This confounding vision of tragedy and political philosophy could be too much to take at once if it wasn't handled as deftly by Reddin and Gibson, who resist all instincts to turn the play into a lecture. That's why the introduction was so useful—it allowed for the audience to look pastthe ideas of the show by laying out those ideas out immediately. As a result of the honesty of this adaptation, none of the show's political imagery to the present seems forced, nor do its occasional fits of fancy seemed misplaced (though in one misstep in Gibson's direction, she makes a superfluous allusions to waterboarding). The device recalls Our Town, but rather than be a detached omniscient Stage Manager, Moran claims no responsibility or predetermined knowledge for what comes from the rest of the play. Instead, he tries to make sense of what's happening on stage as it happens. For this production, as in life, that's the best anyone can do.

All that would make Too Much Memory a clever, exciting play on an intellectual level. The play's moving, visceral edge comes almost entirely from Laura Heisler's absolutely life-affirming performance as Antigone. I first saw Heisler steal the show in an otherwise unimaginative Williamstown production of Top Girls in 2005. After making a career out of playing mentally unstable and vulnerable young girls, Heisler is stunning and tear-jerking throughout Too Much Memory, flawlessly managing an Antigone whose emotional range varies between adolescent incorrigibility, young love, and tragic devastation at almost a moment's notice. In the Village Voice back in May, Heisler seemed surprised at how often she gets cast as a teenager. In a performance like Antigone, in which she singe-handedly ratchets up the play to a level of transcendence, there should be no doubt that Heisler has the ability to capture the indignant, righteous, and confused nature of youth to a level that, other than perhaps Zoe Kazan, is simply unrivaled among today's American stage actresses.

The play makes uses of texts from Richard Nixon, Pablo Neruda, Peter Brook, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt, but those quotes are so seamlessly integrated into the text that only the most obsessed individuals will recognize where they pop up. Again, there are infinite ways to adapt of Sophocles, just like there are infinite ways Nixon (and the range of Nixon adaptations is already staggering). But this is an adaptation that has something important to say, which is rarer than you think it is.

In this case, the political symbolism takes a back seat to what this play says about the nature adaptation. It's true that ideas last longer than individual life or adaptation. But to the play's creators, the fleetingness of an individual life or adaptation may actually make it more valuable. That ideas persist doesn't mean they ever get settled, but the human need to resolve them is an essential part of our existence. That Reddin and Gibson see this view in all its complexity makes Too Much Memory one the most vital theatrical adaptations of the present day, and one of the most intelligent adaptations I've ever seen. No matter whether you're resigned or perpetually frustrated by politics, philosophy, or any other aspect of human life, there's a side to Too Much Memory that will make you think differently. And that's the best thing any adaptation can ever do.

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Too Much Memory by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson, adapted from an adaptation of a retranslation of Antigone by Sophocles; directed by Gibson; set design by Ola Maslik; costume design by Clint Ramos; lighting design by Joel Moritz; sound design by Brandon Epperson; video design by Joseph Tekkipe. Photos by Paula Court.

Starring Martin Moran (Chorus), Laura Heisler (Antigone), Aria Alpert (Ismene), Seth Numrich (Haemon), Peter Jay Fernandez (Creon), Ray Anthony Thomas (Jones), Jamel Rodriguez (Barnes/Messenger), MacLeod Andrews (Stuart), and Wendy vanden Heuvel (Eurydice).

Too Much Memory runs through December 22 at New York Theatre Workshop's Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East 4th Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.smarttix.com.

Labels: 2008-2009, Antigone, blogcritics, keith redden, laura heisler, me gibson, new york theatre workshop, play adaptations, rising phoenix repertory, Sophocles, theater review, too much memory

(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

(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

At first, the jump between Mike Daisey’s last two projects seems ungainly and almost impossible. Barely four months after shaking the foundation of contemporary American theater with his incendiary How Theater Failed America, Daisey is now tackling homeland security, a much larger, more complex, and more important issue. Yet, there is a link between Daisey’s previous screed and the more meditative, politically-charged If You See Something Say Something.

That link is economics. In Mike Daisey’s world, every pursuit one can take in life, be it artistic expression or thermonuclear war, breaks down very simply into humanity’s weakness for money. It’s that streak of cynicism that ties Daisey’s critiques of contemporary life to the last 200-odd years of Western theater. Some would say Daisey’s fury towards capitalism and flirtation with Marxism are irrational and dated. But as current events should make all too apparent, every human desire reduces to the stability of his economic situation. That’s something both radical Marxists and staunch capitalists can agree upon.

Lest you think by the title that Daisey is at Joe’s Pub just to carelessly rant about having to take his shoes off at the airport, If You See Something Say Something spans the Cold War, World War II, the founding fathers, and present-day Los Alamos. Modern homeland security concerns make up a relatively small fraction of the play. Daisey’s main target is the military-industrial complex; his thesis states that “if you keep a standing army, and it doesn’t do anything, it will find something to do,” a statement he repeats twice, first in reference to Eisenhower, then to Washington, DC. When the military, government, and corporate sectors converge, Daisey doesn’t just see a rise in paranoia: he sees a systematic manipulation of human weakness to get everyone to conform to a system that ultimately benefits no one.

Daisey is smart enough not to detach himself from the situation. He spends much time talking about his childhood fascination with Los Alamos, the Bomb, and the cleansing power of Total Destruction. Always willing to refer to his painful, traumatic childhood as a loser in the bowels of Maine, Daisey depicts himself as a comic-book-loving outcast (he compares Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to Skeletor), harboring pre-Columbine fantasies of annihilating all the sources of his misery.

He finds a kindred spirit in Sam Cohen, the deeply troubled, morally tormented father of the neutron bomb, who invented that ultra-efficient weapon partly to appease a similar fantasy. Rage at the political economy of the military-industrial complex was the bait for Daisey to create If You See Something Say Something. It was that deeply ingrained sense of longing that forced Daisey to fall into the monologue hook, line, and sinker.

Ultimately, If You See Something Say Something will probably not have the same impact on the theatrical community that How Theater Failed America did, but it does cement Daisey’s status as the finest, most unique monologist of his generation. Daisey’s often been compared to Spalding Gray, but he’s got an an attitude straight out of the the Angry Young Man movement, comic books, and punk rock. As today’s foremost self-described fat, angry asshole, Daisey has a perpetual itch to provoke that he will probably never be able to escape (he probably doesn’t want to, either).

Yet he’s accomplished that rarest of feats: mixing rage and a revolutionary spirit with a well-grounded intelligence and an ability to promote discussion, maybe even solid changes. If You See Something Say Something may not be as fresh as Daisey’s 21 Dog Years or as directly vital as How Theater Failed America, but as long as there’s a place for a voice to point out the injustice and political outrage that so many feel but few articulate, there will be a place for Mike Daisey. With the economy what it is, that place may only get bigger.

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If You See Something Say Something, written and performed by Mike Daisey; directed by Jean-Michele Gregory; lighting design by K.J. Hardy. Photos by Kenneth Aaron.

If You See Something Say Something is performed at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater (425 Lafayette Street). The show runs through November 30. For performance times and ticket information, visit www.publictheater.org. This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, how theater failed america, if you see something say something, mike daisey, military industrial complex, public theater, theater review

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

Hell hath no fury like hipsters on Halloween. The East Village, long a domain for crazed Halloween festivities, is not letting a mere few weeks of waiting get in the way of its chance to drink and be weird. The Red Room at the K.G.B. Bar, a New York hipster institution ever since it opened in 1993, is the perfect place for a bunch of irony-worshippers to drink a few beers, watch a couple of bizarre plays, and chat with artist types. Something Weird…In the Red Room, a Rachel Klein joint, is a pretty emblematic example of how this generation’s artsy-fartsy youth executes theater: a few good ideas, some indie rock background music, sporadic funny moments, and lots of intentional clichés. In Something Weird’s case, an otherwise enjoyable night of eccentric theater is marred by a lack of artistic and creative discipline.

Rachel Klein, who is quickly becoming a key player in all things weird off-off-Broadway, has found two plays that play to her strengths as a director: circus arts, ghouls, and twisted dramatic logic. Sir Sheever and Aenigma are two imperfect plays that should have made up in spirit what they lacked in meaty production values or narrative fulfillment. Benjamin Spiro’s Sir Sheever, a play where mannequins come alive to good manners in a freaky would-be tea party, is smarter and more complete than its counterpart. It’s also the more conventional of the two. A deceptively traditional play that still features some funny moments, Sir Sheever overcomes its rather lazy fairy-tale elements and dramatic inconsistencies with attitude and some sparkling performances, spearheaded by the Abbott and Costello meets Edward Gorey pair of leads in Bret Haines’ Ralph and Kari Warchock’s Miss Elise.

Two major things hold back Sir Sheever. First, and perhaps most surprisingly, is Klein’s loosey-goosey choreography. With most of the actors playing mannequins for the majority of the show, Sir Sheever would seem like perfect vehicle for some of the staged movement exercises you learn in elementary acting classes. Yet, while the core of the motions are correct, the mannequins are not stiff enough for anyone to take the shock value of their eventual movement seriously. Whether it be a product of the relative inexperience of the cast or a lack of discipline in Klein’s direction, the looseness of the mannequins results in a play that seems more fun for the company than the audience.

The second major flaw is a completely traditional ending that can be predicted within the first fifteen minutes of the show. The moral of the story in an adult fairy tale play - as opposed to in children's theater - has to have a punchline that still shocks a mature audience. In the case of Sir Sheever, the ending simply seems like a cop-out.

Aenigma, though the weaker of the two plays, at least wins style points for being a little more daring. Playwright Sean Gill injects some theory into the weirdness, and Klein’s direction is a little sharper. The play can’t maintain a sense of flow, and occasionally borders on incoherence, but the premise of incestuous sisters being woven into and out of reality by a master manipulator is certainly deeper into left field. Aenigma could use a few rewrites and maybe an extra scene or two to reach its optimal level. Sir Sheever, conversely, has probably peaked.

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Something Weird...in the Red Room. Featuring Sir Sheever by Benjamin Spiro and Aenigma by Sean Gill. Directed and choreographed by Rachel Klein.

Sir Sheever stars Candy Bloise (Euripides), Ted Caine (Fredrick), Bret Haines (Ralph), Abigail Hawk (Eunice), Megan O'Connor (Miss Prissypants), Michael Porsche (Robert), and Kari Warchock (Miss Elise).

Aenigma stars Jillaine Gill (Diana), Bret Jaspers (Tad), Dasha Kittredge (Body Rock Crew), Christopher Loar (Body Rock Crew), Rob Richardson (Mr. Green), Claire A. Sansaricq (Body Rock Crew), and Elizabeth Stewart (Charlotte).

Something Weird...in the Red Room runs through October 31st, Tuesdays at 8 PM and Fridays at 10:30 PM at 85 E. 4th St. Tickets can be purchased online at SmartTix.

Labels: 2008-2009, benjamin spiro, east village, halloween, rachel klein, sean gill, something weird...in the red room, theater review

Don't have time to post them all but the links and excerpts can be found here:

Theater Review (NYC): Villa Diodati at the New York Musical Festival
With youthful energy suddenly emerging in musical theater, Villa Diodati seems at least 50 years out of date.

Theater Review (NYC): Taboos by Carl Djerassi
Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the Pill, sees his scientific perspective conflict with his dramatic one in Taboo.

Theater Review (NYC): A Great Place to Be From by Norman Lasca
The heat gets to the characters, but's that's as far as this ambitious play goes.

Labels: 2008-2009, a great place to be from, carl djerassi, norman lasca, taboos, theater review, villa diodati

Normally, flights of fancy in legitimate theater are a dangerous prospect. They can get too confusing or absurd for an audience to follow, and unless you tread carefully, your writing can end up seeming lazy. When you set the ground rules that Terrence McNally sets in A Perfect Ganesh, however, your opportunities for being fanciful are virtually limitless.

The overwhelming theme of A Perfect Ganesh is pantheism; the play emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans to each other and to the rest of the world, and how blind Westerners can often be to the lives and environments of even those closest to them. When, in the opening monologue, we meet Ganesha (Gary Mahmoud), the Hindu god who is “in your kiss” as well as “in your cancer,” we allow ourselves to see a whole, free-flowing unity in everything that happens in the next two hours. To criticize inconsistency in A Perfect Ganesh would just be bad karma.

To contrast Ganesha’s world to our own, McNally gives us perhaps the pinnacle (some would say lowpoint) of the Western sensibility—two wealthy ladies from Greenwich, Connecticut. Kitty and Margaret think India offers a respite from a lifetime of trips to the Caribbean. Soon, however, we learn of larger spiritual longings that plague these two. They have come to India to heal, both for emotional and physical purposes. Both have suffered tragedies that have caused irrevocable damage to their souls, and both get lost in their attempts to recover the good spirits that the women are too damaged to find again.

A Perfect Ganesh, which deals with homophobia quite prominently, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1994. It lost to Albee’s Three Tall Women, perhaps a safe pick after another gay-themed play, Angels in America, had won the Pulitzer the previous year. McNally would go on to win back-to-back Tonys for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class. As a result, A Perfect Ganesh has slipped through the cracks.

As the WorkShop Theater Company’s revival proves, however, not only is Ganesh one of McNally’s best plays (it may even be his best), but it’s one whose relevance has only grown stronger. In an era where America has become increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, where sections of America have grown hostile to other sections, and where spirituality has been squeezed out by technical and socioeconomic demands, A Perfect Ganesh is a crucial reminder of just how close to each other we really are, yet how distant we can often seem.

Unfortunately, the WorkShop’s revival leaves something to be desired. In a play where ethnicity, dialects, and characters change constantly, it’s crucial that actors are able to handle all the shifts, and communicate them to the audience clearly. In Peter Sylvester’s production however, it’s unclear whether slips of the tongue are due to intentional language divides or actors simply missing their lines. A play with such majestic themes could also use a more expansive production, and while the problem can’t be blamed on WorkShop’s modest space, the production still feels too cramped and neurotic for the play to feel completely natural.

The production values mar what are otherwise some excellent performances. In particular, Mahmoud, who maintains his Ganesha mentality through multiple characters, commands the stage with his voice, his pinpoint-precise facial expressions, and a confidence that never drops despite all obstacles. As Katharine, Ellen Barry truly stands out as a Connecticut housewife with white-trash roots who, unlike her cold, bitchy fellow traveler Margaret, is unafraid to let herself get lost in emotion and wonder at the new world she’s seeing.

As Margaret, Charlotte Hampden does very well playing up the Connecticut stereotypes, but has a harder time expressing her character’s more human side. Margaret is always shut off, and her unflinching inability to open up is a necessary element of the play. But when she recalls some legitimately tragic experiences, it would be nice if we could see some trace of human emotion.

Nonetheless, it is a credit to the WorkShop Theater Company that it reminds us of a forgotten McNally classic, and that it reintroduces a play dating from deeper into the Culture Wars, one that showed us that even when hostilities at all levels of humanity are at a high point, we’re more connected than we initially appear. McNally used the power of live theater to harness that closeness; it’s up to us to take it with us after we leave the theater.

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A Perfect Ganesh by Terrence McNally. Directed by Peter Sylvester; set design by Aaron P. Mastin; costume design by Cynthia D. Johnson; light design by Duane Pagano; sound design by Peter Carpenter. Photos by Sylvester.

Labels: 2008-2009, a perfect ganesh, blogcritics, terrence mcnally, theater review, workshop theater company

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

Weird always has a place in theater, and the Fringe is one of the only opportunities in New York for strangeness to truly run wild. Creena DeFoouie, a show that claims to be “Ab Fab meets Addams Family by way of Rocky Horror,” is both stranger than the Broadway conversion of the last and as surreally funny as Ab Fab.

As the titular character, revenging her sister Mary Annabel’s murder by killing mental patients (basically, a less morose Sweeney Todd), Charlotte Barton-Hoare is the weirdest female British performer we've seen this side of Helena Bonham-Carter. In terms of her performance as Creena, Barton-Hoare has as much skill as she lacks shame. That only means good things for the production.

What hurts it is the lack of a coherent story. True, Rocky Horror didn't have much of a plot either. But although Creena at least tries to build a somewhat coherent narrative, the result feels rushed and tangential when it should just feel fun. Empathy is clearly not the emphasis in such a bizarre play, but if you’re going to introduce a lost-love subplot and actually solve the murder you introduce, common courtesy is to make the events clearer. As it stands, the show wavers between a weird variety show and a classic revenge plot.

That doesn’t mean the action is all that hard to follow, and at moments the play can take hilarious, manic turns. With a dildo fight between Creena and clueless copper Superintendent Hardon (James Hoare), a creatively choreographed murder of a patient (also played by Hoare), and a pitch-perfect closing image, there’s more than enough creativity throughout Creena DeFoouie to keep the show thoroughly entertaining.

The show took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm last summer, and now with a successful run in New York, it should be seeing a larger production in England sometime soon. Maybe around Halloween.

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The final Fringe show I saw took me through the largest range of emotions and opinions of any show I saw at this year's Festival. At first I was somewhat angered by The Redheaded Man’s unassertively staged hallucinations, by mentally unstable architect Brian (David Jenkins), of the title character (Bruce Bluett). I am generally offended by caricature portrayals of mental illness in any medium, and in addition to playwright Halley Bondy frequently playing Brian’s borderline schizophrenia for laughs, we also get a Cheri Oteri-like pill-pushing quack shrink (Dr. Jones, played by Michelle Sims). In sum, after the first half hour, I was more disgusted than moved.

Against my expectations, the play sneaked up on me. I had figured The Redheaded Man to be a Harvey-like play where a mentally unstable man hallucinates a friend (in this case a visible imaginary friend). What followed, however, was more the unraveling of a psychological history, in the vein of Equus. The result was a somewhat more nuanced, if rather preposterous, depiction of mental illness. Ultimately, The Redheaded Man looks at how people - both the sane and the far from sane - deal with the traumatic but crucial moments in their lives, and how those moments can even make us better people.

Brian and Dr. Jones are not the only people who need to spend some significant time on a couch (though they’re the only two who would be better off in a straitjacket). Brian’s best friend, roommate, and adopted brother Jonathan (James Edward Shippy) constantly wavers between the two poles of romance and familial ties. The lack of a normal young adult life - Brian has taken it from him - has clearly taken its toll. Jonathan is the most well-adjusted individual in the play, which for someone in his situation constitutes nothing short of a miraculous feat of strength of character. Not surprisingly, every time we see Jonathan, we want to see more of him.

Less can be said for Lydia (Bondy), however, a seemingly innocent girl smitten with Brian who frequently borders the line of stalking. While we ultimately realize that Lydia’s attraction to Brian is rooted in guilt about their linked childhoods, her plan to meet Brian is too carefully crafted to be considered anything other than pathological. There is a lot of discussion about how Lydia might be as deranged as Brian. Less talked about is whether Lydia’s presence is legitimate even though it could emotionally crush an already vulnerable individual.

Still, the play’s conclusion about what not to tell Brian, and why, is the emotional crux. It's what ultimately redeems an otherwise inconsistent play, one backed by a rather smart and solid production. Yet, if the play is really going to go places, that ending sentiment needs a stronger, more fleshed-out emphasis. The Fringe is exactly the place to realize this.

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Creena DeFoouie by Charlotte Barton-Hoare. Directed by James Hoare; choreography by Haruka Kuroda. Starring Barton-Hoare and Hoare.

The Redheaded Man by Halley Bondy. Directed by Jessica Fisch; set design by Lara Fabian; costume design by Nicole V. Moody; lighting design by Paul Toben; sound design by Mira Stroika; video design by Jesse Garrison. Photo by Garrison. Starring David Jenkins (Brian), Bruce Bluett (The Redheaded Man), James Edward Shippy (Jonathan), Michelle Sims (Dr. Jones), and Bondy (Lydia).

Both shows were performed at the New York International Fringe Festival. More information about the shows can be found at http://www.creena-defoouie.co.uk/ and http://theredheadedman.com/.Creena DeFoouie photo by Reg Beaudry.

Labels: 2008-2009, charlotte barton-hoare, creena defoouie, halley bondy, nyc fringe festival, the redheaded man, theater review

For one reason or another, third-wave feminist sexuality has had an awkward transition to the stage. Perhaps that lack of relevant material is what makes The Boy in The Basement by Katherine Heller, a hilarious, smart play about liberal arts college nymphomania, seem so fresh and welcome. With the more traditional Feminazi being performed not too far away at the Players Theater, The Boy In The Basement addresses feminine sexuality in a manner that is always tasteful and often poignantly real. Anyone who’s shared a complicated living arrangement with oversexed early-twentysomethings knows the drill, and this is a play that can bring in young people and repulse the Greatest Generation types. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of theater we should be seeing more of.

The Boy in the Basement purports to be a live action romance novel, the format in which it was originally written. Indeed, the story conforms to all the conventions of the genre, including flowery sexual narration and an intentionally formulaic plot. While the trappings of such a structure may limit the play to Fringe-like venues, there’s a reason Boy was converted into a play. Enacting a story that would otherwise merely be described allows the play to constantly poke fun at romance novel conventions, ultimately giving it more authenticity. The format also lets the audience meet some particularly inspired and perfectly complementary characters that make up this Macalester College student house.

We have the dominant, aggressive Venezuelan Xandra (played by Heller), who uses her foreignness—complete with brilliant broken English dialogue—to her sexual advantage. We also have Aurora (Anna Stumpf), raised as a hippie, with more Eastern sexual leanings (at least in theory). And we have the tough and practical if still lascivious Clarissa (a standout Lynne Rosenberg), who defines her sexuality as “some old fashioned who’s -ya-momma.” All three vie to seduce Lance Speedworth, an extremely attractive and large-packaged intruder into their home (he was stealing to support his dying sister) whom they punish by making him their slave—and not the kind of slave who performs traditional labor, if you get my drift. Contrasting with all the other three is Anna (Meghan Powe), a virgin farm girl from northern Minnesota who, while staying completely oblivious to the intentions of her housemates, falls in mutual love with Lance.

Anna’s sexual awakening is the only part of the script where I feel the writing could have been better, but Heller’s done more than enough to prove herself with The Boy in the Basement. The play is at least partly autobiographical—in the playwright’s note, Heller contends that “her housemates wanted [her] to tell you that none of the stuff in this play actually happened even though it did." It is unclear whether Heller can go beyond an homage to the romance novel, and this may end up being the lone or rare play in a young romance novelist’s career. But with her sharp eye for social and sexual dynamics, there’s a lot of room for growth.

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Kansas City Or Along The Way has one quality that almost no other Fringe Festival shows has: it’s a revival, or at least a pseudo-revival. Rising playwright Robert Attenweiler’s Depression-era tale centering around a chance meeting on a southern Ohio train car was first produced as a workshop two years ago, before Attenweiler had much else on his résumé. Structurally, the play recalls Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul in its use of combining multiple characters' monologues to form an unreliable narration and mask the true plot details until the play’s end.

But what Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul’s structure had that Kansas City does not are distinct starting and ending points between each monologue. In those plays, as in most great monologue plays, we could spend enough time with a character to fully build relationships with all the characters in the picture. While the constant rotation between the monologues of Joseph (Adam Groves) and Louise (Rebecca Benhayon) certainly makes the situation more confusing, it also prevents the play from building any sort of momentum or sense of attachment. The narrative and chronological relationship between the two monologues is unclear until the climactic meeting scene at the end, which serves as the play’s only moment of dialogue. It’s not surprising that this is the most compelling portion of Kansas City Or Along The Way, as we can finally see Joseph and Louise as human beings, as opposed to intermittent performers.

Part of the blame for the choppy feeling has to go to director Joe Stipek, who fails to provide the show with the precise timing of cues that the script requires. Additionally, while Groves and Benhayon do a respectable job in their performances, they don’t project well, which really kills the show in an acoustically challenged space like the CSV Cultural Center’s Milagro Theater. Groves also plays some Woody Guthrie-inspired songs he co-wrote with Attenweiler, one of which opens the play. The awkwardness of this opening sets the tone for the rest of the awkward timing that follows. The plot itself is pretty interesting, but its redeeming qualities are mostly betrayed by Kansas City’s structure and execution.

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The Boy In The Basement by Katherine Heller. Directed by Neil Balaban; set design by Sean Tribble; lighting design by Grant Yeager; original music by Jon Quinn. Starring Hller (Xandra); Nick Fondulis (Catherine DuCheval); Tom Macy (Lance Speedworth); Meghan Powe (Anna); Lynne Rosenberg (Clarissa); Michael Solis (Randy, Felipe); and Anna Stumpf (Aurora) Photo by Luke Ratray. The remaining performances are 8/21 at 11:45 p.m. and 8/23 at 10 p.m. at the Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam St.

Kansas City Or Along The Way by Robert Attenweiler. Directed by Joe Stipek; set design by Bret Haines; lighting design by Justin Sturges. Starring Rebecca Benhayon (Louise) and Adam Groves (Joseph). The remaining performances are 8/17 at 12:30 p.m., 8/18 at 7:45 p.m., 8/21 at 3:15 p.m. and 8/23 at 9:45 p.m at the Milagro Theater at the CSV Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street. Photo by Robert Attenweiler.

Tickets to both shows can be purchased at www.fringenyc.org

This review was originally published on blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, kansas city or along the way, katherine heller, monologues, nyc fringe festival, robert attenweiler, romance novels, the boy in the basement, theater review

I did not expect much from Cake and Plays…But Without the Cake. There were multiple technical mishaps throughout the first of the three cake-less plays by Jono Hustis. But more importantly, that first play, Cow and Shakespeare, had very few redeeming qualities. Featuring Michael Hartney as a Shakespeare in half-modern, half-Elizabethan dress stealing all of his plays from a mostly human, inconsistently depicted cow (Michael Micalizzi), Cow and Shakespeare is a cross between a half-assed spoof of the Shakespeare authorship debate and a marginal account of writer’s block. The play would have better served as merely an exercise for Hustis to break out of a creative slump than as something worth a full production.

In the final two plays, however, Hustis began to show his genuine talent and promise as a playwright. The first, Monsoons, is a stark, blackly comedic vignette about a failed first date that, despite being frequently hilarious, never lets its audience laugh too long. Monsoons succeeds exactly where Cow and Shakespeare fails. It takes a solitary theme—what should and should not be said when making a first impression—and distorts it in a manner wholly digestible for the playwright, cast, and audience alike. Monsoons is the kind of play you could teach classes with, and any teacher who uses this play would be a damn good one in my book.

The final and longest play, In the Name of Bob, is a finely executed one-act about a beleaguered woman who meets her guardian angel. The only play of the three to offer fully fleshed-out characters, it has two excellent ones in Alicia and Marvin, played with remarkable realism by Darcy Fowler and Andy Gershenzon even as their performances frequently touch the absurd. Gershenzon in particular stands out as the oddball, nearly spastic guardian angel Marvin. Marvin’s unpredictability is a constant toy for Gershenzon and director Daniel Horrigan to play with, until Hustis uses the characterization for a brilliant punch line ending. Fowler also shines as a woman disinclined to talk to any stranger, let alone one claiming to be her guardian angel, and who sinks into an aloof-but-needy persona rather gracefully.

In the Name of Bob doesn’t stray too far out of the ordinary for a fallen guardian angel story (the kind we see on film much more frequently than on the stage). It also has an extremely unfortunate title. But what In the Name of Bob lacks in ingenuity, it makes up in charm and execution.

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The Grecian Formula, by Carter Anne McGowan, is much more likely than most Fringe Festival shows to come out of the Fringe with a larger production waiting. It’s got theatrical in-jokes seeping out of its pores at every moment. It had the audience roaring, and played with theatrical themes quite poignantly. Just about every stage convention was lambasted, from the 11 o’clock number to the play-within-the-play (or even play-within-the-play-within-the-play). McGowan clearly has a deep knowledge of theatrical conventions and the absurdity of the producer’s side of the process, and knows which buttons to push to get the most laughs.

As the play progresses, however, the theatrical in-jokes become less and less novel and increasingly tiresome. McGowan tries to work in a plot through the jokes, a poorly fleshed-out story of a slave, Alidocious (Todd Lawson), seeking freedom for his daughter Iphigenia (Elena Dones) from the rhapsode Thespiotis (Kevin Carolan). In a lull in his career, and bemoaning how writing and papyrus has destroyed the young’s attention span (nice touch), Thespiotis is commissioned by the tyrant Peisistratus (Anthony Cochrane, frequently called “Pissistratus”). With no writing skill himself, Thespiotis assigns the task to his slave, who alternately writes too happy or too depressed, depending on Peisistratus’ mood.

What’s more upsetting than the uninspiring plot is the inconsistency and shallowness of McGowan’s use of satire. She obvious grasps the nuances of classical theater, modern dramatic theory, and theater’s contemporary realities. But rather than turning her knowledge into a whole work that really gets contemporary theater’s goat, she comes up with something more closely resembling Forbidden Broadway or, worse, a Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer-level shallow spoof. The Grecian Formula uses lazy, name-dropping references instead of going deeper for satire, and the result is something less fun, meaner, and more stupid and tasteless. It's what Epic Movie would be like as a play. McGowan clearly knows the theater like the back of her hand, but without a more disciplined satire, the play simply feels redundant rather than loving. Her frequent interjection of self-mockery is not an acceptable substitute.

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Cake and Plays...But Without the Cake by Jono Hustis. Directed by Daniel Horrigan. Starring Darcy Fowler (Alicia), Andy Gershenzon (Marvin), Michael Hartney (William), Michael Micalizzi (Cow/Doug), Craig Mungavin (Jack), and Morgan Lindsey Tachco (Theresa). Through August 24 at the Gene Frankel Theater (24 Bond Street). Tickets can be purchased at www.smarttix.com.

The Grecian Formula by Carter Anne McGowan. Directed by Mary Jo Lodge. Starring Jason Rosoff (The Narrator), Anthony Cochrane (Peisistratus), Brian Marino (Sock), Jason Pintar (Bushkin), Ramona Floyd (Phye), Nick Sullivan (Ikon), Kevin Caroan (Thespiotis), Rich Affannato (Tragelistis), Todd Lawson (Alidocious), Jolly Abraham (Caligone), Julie Tokarcik (Clytemnestra), Elena Dones (Iphigenia), Robert Hooghkirk (Oeddy), and Holly Sansom (Laura). Remaining performances occur on August 16 at 7:30 p.m. and August 17 at noon at 45 Bleecker Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.fringenyc.org

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, cake and plays...but withut the cake, carter anne mcgowan, greek drama, jono hustis, nyc fringe festival, one-acts, the grecian formula, theater review

What’s the purpose of farce? Anyone with half a right mind will tell you it’s not just to be silly and entertaining. The best farces obliterate social conventions and make a mockery of squares, producing a new baseline for reality that is miles away from our own standard. Not surprisingly, some of the best post-Brecht farce has had more than a little political and intellectual motivation, be it Joe Orton or the Marx Brothers.

A Flea In Her Ear seemed primed for such transcendence. Having a play by definitive Belle Époche farce writer Georges Feydeau updated by David Ives, the definitive contemporary farce writer, seems like a can’t miss proposition, even (or perhaps especially) with a three act, nearly three hour adaptation. Yet, Ives’ Flea In Her Ear never goes beyond surface-level silliness, and John Rando’s production lacks the precise timing required for the format. The messy, unfulfilling affair is an unexpected disappointment that proves a significant blunder for Nicholas Martin’s first year helming Williamstown.chrome://foxytunes-public/content/signatures/signature-button.png

A Flea In Her Ear touches on themes that are all too common in modern farces: womanizing men, wives with waning fidelity, middle class malaise and a cynicism to all notions of propriety. There’s certainly enough implicit and explicit sexuality, be it a no-tell motel known as the “Frisky Puss” or an ostensibly pure nephew who can’t keep his hands off the maid’s bottom. But the deviousness is completely obvious in the first and third acts, and there’s no real deeper send-up of cultural values. What are we suppose to get out of these double entendres other than a few cheap laughs and some naughty giggles? In the second act, which takes place at “the Puss,” Ives and Rando let the slapstick take over to the point where it becomes impossible to pinpoint fully which farcical plot point is happening where. If The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners, Ives’ A Flea In Her Ear is a carnival of manners, down to John Gromada’s music and Alexander Dodge’s frequently brilliant set design.

But if you’re looking for deeper meaning, the best you’re going to get is Ives’ equally shallow program note, which embraces a lazy pop Freudianism and refers to Feydeau’s play as a “reverse Ionesco.” Reading the note reveals that the writer of All in the Timing and Polish Joke may not be as effervescently brilliant as he once seemed to be. If the justification of A Flea In Her Ear doesn’t go beyond an “it’s the Id!” level in even the writer’s mind, you’re going to have a hard time finding anything much deeper than the roaring laughter of nursing home matinee attendees.

Perhaps a worse indication for the future of Williamstown than a messy adaptation is a messy direction with disproportionately low production values. With a Tony for Urinetown on his resume, John Rando has as much clout as anyone to touch Williamstown this summer. But despite a nearly flawless technical design, Rando’s cast seems one beat off more often than not, either rushing a cue or falling behind. There’s also an inconsistent level of verisimilitude, with a poorly timed sound cue for a repeat act of abuse and a misplaced introduction of a character’s double (both played Mark Harelik). There’s no explanation why the two characters are identical looking, and if the point was to throw off the audience’s expectations for such an explanation, it certainly wasn’t apparent from the direction. It may be worth pointing out that Rando’s recent revival of Damn Yankees in New York was also criticized for substandard production values. Rando may be beginning to exhaust the respect earned by Urinetown, which itself was an unexpected hit.

Perhaps there is a value to this empty-calories kind of humor in theater; after all, it certainly draws crowds. But Williamstown is not the place to offer this kind of appeal, and David Ives is not a playwright you produce to serve it. Nicholas Martin has certainly taken a more eclectic, ambitious approach to his first season at Williamstown than Roger Rees was known to take. But until he can avoid flat productions and near-misses like he has produced this season, he’ll have a long way to go before truly making his mark.

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Through August 10. A Flea In Her Ear by Georges Feydeau in a new version by David Ives; Directed by John Rando;Starring Brooks Ashmanskas (Dr. Finache), Deborah Jo Rupp (Olympia), Mia Barron (Lucienne), Jeremy Beck (Ettienne), MacIntyre Dixon (Baptiste), Carson Elrod (Camille), Mark Harelik (Victor Chandebise / Poche), Tom Hewitt (Roman Tournel), Tom McGowan (Ferraillon), Kathryn Meisele (Raymonde Chandebise), Geoffrey Murphy (Rugby), Heidi Niedermeyer (Antoinette), David Pittu (Don Carlos Homendes de Histangua), and Sarah Turner (Eugenie);Lighting design by Rui Rita; Sound design by John Gromada; Set design by Alexander Dodge; Costume design by Gregory Gale, Original Music by John Gromada. Photo by Andy Tew

Labels: a flea in her ear, david ives, georges feydeau, john rando, theater review, williamstown theatre festival

If you want a little more meta in your theater, how’s this: an 18th century play about Australian prisoners putting on an unlikely production of a play is performed by an unlikely group of inner city high school students in turn of the 21st century Bronx. That’s a play in and of itself, and the play, No Child won just about every off-Broadway award imaginable last year. And that play is being produced in the unlikely setting of southern Vermont a year later, to an audience tas far removed from the South Bronx as it is to 18th century Australian prisons.

That’s a confusing number of levels to unravel, and I apologize, but if No Child is all about defying the odds to somehow produce an inspiring work of theater, the Weston Playhouse’ production may have even more resonance than its premiere in Manhattan last year. The production is a testament to the power of live theater; how could a tiny town in rural Vermont, who holds its ”OtherStages” plays in the Weston Rod & Gun Club, produce such fantastic theater? All this despite an audience that, as the plays’ janitor narrator says, couldn’t possibly understand the experience of a Bronx public school unless it’s been there.

It helps that the Weston Playhouse’s production of No Child is helmed by a adept director in Johanna Gruenhart, who was mentored by No Child’s original director Hal Brooks. The production also stars an equally fantastic actor in Elizabeth Wilson. In New York, the one-woman show was performed by the playwright, Nilaja Sun. So Wilson faced even more challenges trying to embody the play’s seventeen characters, who range across all ethnicities, ages, and social statuses.

The depiction of the horrors of inner city schools had the unwitting effect of drawing roaring laughter from the Vermont crowd. It’s certainly a relatively lighthearted portrayal of the situation, but I found myself cringing at the realities of a school at the lower end of the educational spectrum. The crowd probably thought it was a comical exaggeration. If they didn’t realize how realistic the depiction was, the joke’s on them.

No Child is not an overtly political play, as I had somewhat expected it to be. Certainly the play explicitly addresses themes of how some smart children fall through the cracks and how some simply have no hope. Rather than get caught up in whining, however, Sun was smart enough to focus on the tribulations on trying to give kids hope in spite it all. The most chilling character we meet is a security guard that at best resembles an asshole drill sergeant and at worse—pardon my reductio ad Hitlerum—a Gestapo agent. If no one expects these kids to be anything other than in jail or dead, how do you get the kids to believe otherwise? Sun doesn’t try to take on inner city poverty single-handedly, but she does attempt to give them a moment where they don’t feel worthless. The play within a play, which the class somehow manages to pull off, doesn’t save the kids. But it gives them something to actually look forward to in their as opposed to poverty, metal detectors, and being belittled.

Sun has a few indulgent tendencies, mostly towards the play’s end, but with the shit she had to go through, she has a right, I suppose. The one major flaw in Wilson’s performance is her tendency to play those indulgences as smug rather than with a wink to the audience. But if that’s the worst offense in a translation of a Bronx schoolroom to Vermont, so be it.

As for the play overall, its impact on the Vermont crowd were more complex. No Child Left Behind is certainly a national issue, and Vermont education is just as dominated by the same high-stakes troubles. The Weston Playhouse’ excellent production of No Child is at the very least a success for American regional theater. For Vermont, it can also be a reflection of an education policy that rarely gets seen in artistic settings. As a Bronx public school product, however, to me No Child reflected a much deeper problem in our society, one that exists well below the margin of potential success. It’s an issue we’ll need more than good regional theater to address.

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Photo by Ryan Harlow

Labels: 2008-2009, Elizabeth Wilson, hal brooks, Johanna Gruenhart, nilaja sun, no child, theater review, weston playhouse

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics).

Anton Ego, the food critic from the movie Ratatouille, rightly pointed out that not everyone can be a great artist. If every potential artist who dreamed the dream could be a success, art itself would cease to be interesting. But where does that leave the lower tier of artists, those who dream the dream but simply aren’t capable of achieving it?

It’s no small act of bravery that playwright Jeff Sproul and No Tea Productions, a company barely a year and a half old, should address the issue. For a company that is more than two degrees off-Broadway, the subject could be too painful. How lucky they are, then, to have produced The Artistical Process of Mark and Andy, a play that is wickedly smart, skillfully executed, and unflinchingly honest. Mark and Andy is certainly conscious of its modest situation, but has turned that very situation into a production that shows the company has all the tools to lift it out of a basement on St. Marks.

The Artistical Process of Mark and Andy is centered around two losers who have the conviction to make great art, but are utterly clueless about how to do it. This is not an unusual problem, but what plagues Mark and Andy, and their even less creative friends, is their lack of awareness of how clueless they truly are. Mark and Andy are not writing their paranormal cop show for fun—they’re legitimately trying to break into an artistic world that may as well be located on Mars.

As amateurish as their talents are, their self-righteousness and sense of paranoia and jealousy are of the kind usually seen in much greater men. Mark in particular shows an ego, volatility, and temper that we usually think of when we think of Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino. But Mark is certainly no Tarantino, and that only amplifies his pettiness.

The play would be a much lesser accomplishment if it focused simply on the absurdity of Mark and Andy’s dreams. Andy’s girlfriend Janine is the most consistent spokesperson for reality in the play, more so even than her filmmaker friend Rachel (Dana Rossi), who is too defensive of her professionalism to gain a proper perspective. Every real human emotion in Mark and Andy, and all its desired sympathies, are funneled through Janine, and Sabrina Farhi does an admirable job handling the most challenging role of the play.

Janine, however, is not the most sympathetic character, nor is Rossi’s performance the true standout. That distinction goes to Matt Sears’ Andy, who, despite his slacker tendencies and laid-back demeanor, is the closest thing to a hero in this play. He still humors the hopeless dream, but not to the point where he loses his sense of right and wrong. Andy wants to pursue his goals while remaining inclusive and making everyone happy; stepping over someone for success is the last thing on his mind.

From before the lights even go up, Sears naturally sinks into the role, moving and acting like a loser, but one who is nonetheless exceedingly likable. Yet Andy, who is incapable of taking leadership of any project, is not perfect himself, in the same way that Mark, acted by the playwright Sproul, is still a redeemable character despite his general dickishness.

If Mark and Andy are unaware of their surroundings, the play’s creators, including director Lindsey Moore, are finely in tune with their own. Towards the end of the play, Mark and Andy rent out a tiny theatrical space—a space not unlike the diminutive UNDER St. Marks Theater. We are treated to a play within a play that is painfully bad but hilariously appropriate, even if the stupidity is overplayed a little bit. Moore and Sproul have deftly used the minute scale of the production to suit their purposes. This kind of theatrical thrift puts to shame the ineffective extravagances of most higher budget shows.

The Artistical Process of Mark and Andy is by no means a perfect play: the tone of the dialogue struggles with consistency, and the low-budget production often commits the kind of gaffes that the play itself seeks to mock. But the real success lies precisely in Mark and Andy's modesty. That a play this minor could succeed so greatly even in New York is a reason for hope for American theater.

Mark and Andy comes at the same time as [title of show], a play that has self-consciously made it to Broadway through sheer willpower. That play, however, has used the same motivation to simply make it at all. No Tea Productions has taken what’s been given to them and, through seemingly nothing but sheer ingenuity and enthusiasm, created a work of theater that surpasses its space and all that could be expected from it. Anton Ego was right that not everyone can be a great artist. He was also right that a great artist could come from anywhere.

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Through August 9 at the UNDER St. Marks Theater. The Aristical Process of Mark and Andy was written by Jeff Sproul and directed by Lindsey Moore. It stars Sproul (Mark), Matt Sears (Andy), Sabrina Farhi (Janine), Jeremy Mather (Collin), Timothy Maher (Brett), Dana Rossi (Rachel), Alicia Barnatchez (Amber), and D. Robert Wolcheck (Jay). Tickets can be purchased online at SmartTix. Photos by Wolcheck

Labels: 2008-2009, anton ego, jeff sproul, no tea productions, the artistical process of mark and andy, theater review, under st. marks

(This review was originally featured on Blogcritics).

Having graduated college less than two months ago, right now I’m at one of those points in everyone’s life when the real friends start to distinguish themselves from the people I will never speak to again. We’ve all had the experience of being a friend (with a lowercase “f”) as opposed to being a Friend (with the cultish connotations of the capital “F”), and we all know there are certain types of personalities that have different kinds of dynamics with their friend situation.

What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends is a hilariously stark exploration of that distinctly contemporary phenomenon, a play that breaks down how we view our friends into its more preposterous basic form. Larry Kunofsky’s remarkable play is as funny and absurd as it is poignant to modern adult life, one that sees through all the bullshit and gets down to the nitty-gritty.

Kunofsky is not one to treat the subject with a situation that bears any semblance to reality. In addition to breaking down the fourth wall in a manner closer to Brighton Beach Memoirs’ Eugene Jerome than to Our Town’s Stage Manager, Kunofsky has developed a social hierarchy for the friends situation that is obviously satirical, but comes to dominate every moment in the play. The upper-case Friends have a personal ranking system that updates on a month-by-month basis. The Friends can mark demotions in those rankings by clearing their throats, and, if necessary, can occasionally demand that a fellow Friend “be honest” when an isolated problem slips through the cracks. There’s also the prole-like “friends,” those who are sometimes invited to parties but not allowed to obtain any of the perks of being a Friend.

What this thoroughly developed system leaves out is any trace of individuality, and the ultimate inability of a network of friends to cope with reality with their own absurd mechanisms leads the Friends absolutely haywire. If the structure of the Friends is meant to stand in for a more realistic structure of friends, it is here where the play transcends its own machinations. Has today’s bourgeois society become so isolated, even among those closest to us, that we have set up a social system that robs us of our true character?

Of course, the play also works on its own internal terms. The breakdown of the Friends is in part orchestrated by Matt (Todd D’Amour) the character referred to in the play’s title. Matt is a violent, gruff individual who’s grainy voice rivals that of Christian Bale’s Batman. Despite his general misanthropy, Matt still has human needs, which lead him to at least try to build a relationship with Celia (the hilarious Carrie Keranen).

Celia is Matt’s polar opposite, someone who is everyone’s #1 Friend. Yet, she shares Matt’s inability to relate to other people on a much deeper level. The fact that Matt and Celia’s perspectives meet at opposite ends of the spectrum is probably what draws them together, even though their relationship is turbulent from the start.

Susan Louise O’Conner and Josh Lefkowitz serve as an effective greek chorus of friends and Friends, each cast in several roles ranging from the alcoholic Friend with a plummeting ranking, the lawyer who keeps his Friends from his cynical wife, and the hopelessly cheesy losers doomed to eternal friend status. O’Conner and Lefkowitz display remarkable range in their eclectic roles, even if some of their performances succumb to the play’s more cartoonish tendencies.

The highlight of the cast is without a doubt Amy Staats’ Enid, a mentally unstable but consistently lovely woman who is fully aware of her “friend” status, and uses narrating as therapy. Though Staats looks like Ana Gasteyer, her performance more closely resembles Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher in her overwhelming eagerness to impress and the embarrassment that ensues. She’s as funny and sympathetic as any quirky female character you’ll see on the stage.

What to Do When You Hate All Your Friends lets those damn rankings and rules overtake the play in the second half, to the point where the play’s initial charm begins to sag. But while dramatically the play eventually loses its appeal, the gags and laughs remain throughout the evening. Even in the clunky second act you can get by with its characters having perpetual “Meltdowns,” the coup Matt stages in the Friends system, or Enid’s constant unprovoked interjections.

The play could have been a greater success if it focused more on its armchair sociology than on giving the play-by-play of its own set of rules. Nonetheless, the intelligence of Kunofsky’s breakdown of the plight of 21st century adult friendship remains the theme that sticks with you in the long haul. After seeing What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends, you’ll start applying the show’s rules to your own friend situation soon enough. Don’t be surprised if it fits surprisingly well.

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Through August 23 at the Lion Theatre on Theatre Row. What To Do When Your Hate All Your Friends is written by Larry Kunofsky. Directed by Jacon Krueger. Sound design by Ryan Maeker. Set design by Niluka Hotaling. Lighting Design by Gina Scherr. Costume Design by Melissa Trn. Photos by Martin R. Miller

Starring Todd D'Amour (Matt), Carrie Keranen (Celia), Josh Lefkowitz (Garret, James, Bob, Phil), Susan Louise O'Conner (Holly, Nancy, Amanda, Tiff), and Amy Staats (Enid). Tickets can be purchased online at TicketCentral.

Labels: 2008-2009, larry kunofsky, theater review, theatre row, what to do when you hate all your friends

(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 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

Barely in New York for 24 hours, I see my first New York show while living in New York full time, and already I see the benefits of New York's theater culture. At a semi-obscured theater adjacent to a graffiti-laden car shop and the Police Athletic League, I get a world premiere by Neil LaBute and four other exciting new dramas with premiere actors and directors (and the ~100 seat theater was packed on a Monday night). Anywhere else in the country (even Chicago), this level of talent would have been the talk of the town. Here's it's just another night of theater.

I'll start off with the highlight of the night, which also happened to be the main reason people showed up—Neil LaBute's fantastic, career-reviving one-act The Great War. About a month ago, after having given up on David Mamet after November and his childish screed against "brain-dead liberals" in The Village Voice, I had my faith in Mamet revived by Redbelt, in my mind his best movie of the decade. A month later, the same cycle repeated itself with LaBute. Going from This is How It Goes, Fat Pig, and an equally childish screed against American theater in The Guardian, we get his best play since The Shape of Things. Whereas the former two plays played to LaBute's weaknesses, The Great War plays to his strengths. Yes, the trademark LaBute misogyny is still there, but it's secondary to his keen focus on power dynamics in a failed relationship. The focus is not on the vicious, man-eating woman (though Laila Robins is gleefully malicious as the unnamed woman), but on the impossibility of a relationship between two people who, though inextricably tied, can no longer stand the sight of each other. You'd think such a play would result in nothing but a screaming match, but the key to the success of the play is the strange chemistry between the soon-to-be-divorced couple. Their mutual hatred unites them, makes them see eye-to-eye, and, by some bizarre but consistent logic, forces them to come to the best solution. Robins and the emasculated Grant Shaud put on the best performances of the night.

The Great War ends a first act of some very good, if slightly flawed plays. The first play, Lloyd Suh's Happy Birthday William Abernathy, focuses on a 100 year old man struggling to find his identity and legacy in the face of the ethnic ambiguities of his intermarried offspring and the deep guilt related to events that occurred 70 years ago, maybe (he is 100 after all). William imposes this end-of-life crisis on his somewhat baffled Asian great-grandson. If the play raises some fascinating thematic issues, its execution leaves a little to be desired. The dialog focuses a bit too much on William's racist ramblings, and while Ensemble Theater mainstay Joe Ponazecki aces his role, Peter Kim as great-grandson Albert seems a bit lost. The reverse problem afflicts October/November by Anne Washburn, a play that focuses quite hollowly on the relationship between a 16 year old bad girl Nikkie and the confused, extremely adolescent 13-year-old-David. Yet, while there's not much deeper meaning to the play, the quality of the dialogue, and Gio Perez's irresistibly charming David, carry the play to success.

The Marathon moves to the absurd in the second act, with David Zellnik's Eastern-flavored Ideogram and Taylor Mac's surreal Okay, a kind of Brechtian Dawson's Creek. Ideogram focuses on a man who, when writing fake Chinese, accidentally becomes the greatest Chinese playwright of a generation, and merits the censorship of the Chinese government. The play deals with some intriguing themes, such as the nature of authorship, and how a fable can translate in the modern world, but the satire never moves beyond its initial premise, and only fades as it progresses (though that problem is somewhat relieved by the one-act format). Okay is without a doubt the most polarizing of the plays, as audience members were laughing hysterically in equal force as they wanted to leave early, perhaps why it was saved for last. Set in the girls bathroom of a senior prom circa 2003, there's references to teen pregnancy, body issues, drug use, boy drama, 9/11, homosexuality, all masked by more than a little potty humor (and a prom queen spending the majority of the time giving birth into a toilet, recalling Melissa Drexler). I found myself being personally offended and abhorred at some moments, and deeply moved by others.

Labels: anne washburn, david zellnick, ensemble studio theater, laila robins, lloyd suh, marathon b, neil labute, taylor mac, theater review

Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson have spoiled Broadway theatergoers of late. McDonagh's one creative outburst back in 1993 has fueled four incredible Broadway shows in The Beauty Queen of Lenane, The Lonesome West, The Pillowman, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Along with McPherson's The Weir and Shining City, it would seem the words "Irish" and "Broadway" could do no wrong. The Seafarer, McPherson's latest National Theatre transfer (which he also directed), may be the weakest of all seven, but it still has enough of the black Irish wit that made audiences fall in love with the new Irish playwrights in the first place. As a result, the production I attended tonight got a larger ovation than it probably merited.

The Seafarer centers on a deal with the devil in the form of a stranger named Mr. Lockhart (Ciarán Hinds), and James "Sharky" Harkin (David Morse), a recovering alcoholic with a bad temper and a sour view on life. The concept of selling one's soul to the devil has been played out (ahem) to death, so to make such a matter seem vital calls for extreme creativity and enthusiasm both from the playwright, technical staff, and actors. Mr. McPherson's premise for the transaction, Sharky's soul, a rematch of a game of poker 25 years ago, is somewhat novel. Yet, the initial indication of other-wordliness is a weak flicker of the lights and an even weaker clamping of the chest by Mr. Morse. Morse's performance is otherwise solid, but his lack of enthusiasm in this moment is an unfortunately important lapse.

Another flaw is the amount of time it takes to get to this major premise. We do not meet Mr. Lockhart until near the end of the first act, and most of the first act is filled with the drunken antics of Sharky's brother, the blind and senile Richard (Jim Norton), and friend Ivan (Conleth Hill). While Norton and Hill play decent drunks, The Seafarer proves once again that drunkenness alone cannot carry a play for an extended period of time.

Once we get to the meat of the play, however, the play takes a turn for the better. The humor of Richard and Ivan, which was cheap in the first act, feels more genuine when balanced with the gravity of Sharky and Mr. Lockhart's interaction. Mr. Hinds, too gets to show off his considerable performing chops, none displayed better than his chilling description of hell (which provides the source of the play's title), a monologue that is without a doubt the highlight of the play.

Throughout the play, the Irish meter and humorously bleak view of life that Broadway audiences have grown fond of is on full display. That, along with the fact that the play ends strongly, most likely explains the standing ovation. But there's not much here that McPherson or McDonagh haven't done better before, which may leave the uninitiated to wonder what the fuss was about in the first place.

Labels: conor mcpherson, irish drama, martin mcdonagh, the seaferer, theater review