Tynan's Anger

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

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

Woyzeck, an infinitely malleable, intellectually fascinating play that beat Brecht to the punch of modern theater by a century, is a director’s dream. Left unfinished by Georg Buchner before his death of typhus at the age of 23, Woyzeck has been adapted, blown up, and ripped apart countless times by countless translators, directors (of stage and film), and librettists. Part of the play’s very legacy is its ability to be manipulated.

But calling Woyzeck malleable doesn’t even begin to describe its multiple levels of complexity, addressing, as it does, crises that are as much existential, linguistic, and ethical as they are social, economic, and political. It should come as no surprise that we see two very different stagings of Woyzeck at the same time, one in one of the most notorious off-off-Broadway theaters in the East Village, the other in an opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. What is surprising however, is the dynamic between the two.

Let’s compare the two descriptions of the play:

1. A relatively straightforward, conservative staging, with the main innovation being a group of sirens torturing a conflicted, sympathetic Woyzeck into committing his murderous act. A nymphomaniac Marie who is killed by stabbing. Set against the backdrop of the War in Iraq, with “Amazing Grace” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” featured heavily. Virtually flawless execution.
2. A wild, ravenous production by an Icelandic theater troupe, featuring circus theatricals, an industrial set, a beach ball, and a ridiculous use of a pool. Punk rock enfant terrible Nick Cave wrote the music and lyrics (along with Warren Ellis). Marie is played as a conflicted, sympathetic women in a Snow White dress caught in an impossible situation by a suave Drum Major in a purple suit. A pathetic, monkey-like Woyzeck in his underwear, which looks like a diaper. Multiple problems with the sound and crowd control.

30 years ago, the former would have been in the opera house, and the latter in the experimental East Village theater. But comparing these two productions of Woyzeck showed me just how much the public role of experimental theater has changed. Once a haven for daring, wild, and unbridled theater, the East Village and off-off-Broadway have gotten more predictable, safe, and maybe even stale. Meanwhile, mainstream, upper-middle-class, and older audiences are more willing to pay good money to see wild, over-the-top productions by foreign directors. The question that remains is whether this social arrangement, which may be unprecedented in artistic history, is any better or worse than what we’ve had in the past.

Some would say that having the daring stuff where the money is is a reality that previous theatrical generations could only dream of. It is certainly true that it equates to a minor miracle that more mainstream audiences could even begin to digest the antics of Vesturport Theater's manic production. The problem, however, is that those audiences may not be able to digest the production with the same intellectual clarity as younger, more radical-minded theatergoers.

Under the direction of Gísli Öm Gardarsson, this Woyzeck is as comical, manic, and intentionally reckless as it is intellectually shallow (also perhaps intentionally). Cave and Ellis’s score may be the best thing about the play: a brilliant, intermittently tender and insane score that goes through virtually every stage of Cave’s career arc. In a less mainstream context, this production would inspire similar glorious recklessness (it’s a rock thing). At BAM, however, it has probably just produced indigestion.

The Counting Squares Theatre production of Woyzeck at Under St. Marks is smaller in scope, both technically and intellectually. It features stunning, disciplined choreography by John O’Malley, nearly universally fitting performances, and deft direction by Joshua Chase Gold. It’s focus is not on acrobatics or noise rock, but on something rather old-fashioned: current events and national history, with War in Iraq imagery mixing with an occasional anachronous allusion to World War II. It’s the easier version of the play to appreciate, and not nearly as alienating as the production at BAM.

The question, however, is whether a production in this setting should be so easy. The Under St. Marks Woyzeck seems more like a product of a cast not willing to take as many risks. In the program, the cast and crew talk about how thrilled they are to be performing together in Woyzeck, which is roughly the equivalent of Jews being thrilled to celebrate Yom Kippur. It’s arguable that a staging of a production of Woyzeck that can best be described as “solid” is the worst possible way to stage the play. If you’re not taking significant risks in staging a play like Woyzeck, what’s the point in staging it? That rule should apply to all stagings of Woyzeck; the last place it should be invoked is off-off Broadway with a staff of young theater artists with next to nothing to lose.

Both productions are far from perfect or transcendent, just as both productions have flashes of brilliance and theatrical prowess. If the settings of the productions had been reversed, we’d be raving about how we’re getting an eclectic, diverse mix of productions of one of the most beloved, constantly challenging plays of the last 200 years. Instead, we get two productions that would be better off learning a few things from one another.

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Woyzeck by Georg Buchner.

BAM:

Directed and adapted by Gísli Öm Gardarsson; adapted into English by Ruth Little, Gísli Öm Gardarsson and Jón Atli Jónasson; original music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; lyrics by Nick Cave; stage design by Börkur Jónsson; lighting design by Lárus Björnsson; costume design by Filippiá Elisdóttir. Photo by Richard Termine.

Starring Ingvar E. Sigurdsson (Woyzeck), Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir (Marie), Víkingur Kristjánsson (Captain), Harpa Arnarsdóttir (Doctor), Björn Hlynur Haraldsson (Drum Major); Ólafur Egill Egilsson (Andres), Árni Pétur Gudjónsson (Fiddler), Erlendur Eiríksson (Sergeant), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Entertainer), and Jóhannes Níels Sigurdsson (The Swan/Doctor's Assistant).

The Vestuport Theater's Version of Woyzeck was performed at the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week.

UNDER St. Marks:

Adapted and directed by Joshua Chase Gold; scenic design by Sarah B. Brown; lighting design by Jessica Burgess; costume design by Karen Walcott; musical direction and arrangement by Andrew Sotomayor; choreography by John O'Malley. Photos by Counting Squares Theatre.

Starring Kendra Holton (Girl 1), Deborah Radloff (Girl 2), Kristin Stewart (Girl 3), Ryan Nicholoff (Woyzeck), Jarred Baugh (Andres), Dena Kology (Marie), Madeleine Maby (Margret), Aaron Kirkpatrick (Captain), Dan Kane (Drum Major), Stephen F. Arnoczy (Doctor).

The Counting Squares Theatre Group's production of Woyzeck runs at UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place) until October 29. Performances are Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online at www.horseTRADE.info.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: brooklyn academy of music, counting squares theatre group, georg buchner, under st. marks, vestuport, woyzeck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review was initially published on Blogcritics.

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

(This review was originally published 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