1.
HOW 2
B A NEW YORKER
HOW 2 B A NEW
YORKER, in the nightclub-like environment at Sofia’s Downstairs on W. 46th
Street, is a revue-like series of rapid-fire comic sketches revolving around NY
history and character types. It’s clearly intended for the tourist trade, yet
only a handful of audience members tonight identified themselves as
out-of-towners. Everybody wants to be a NU YAWKA! It’s written and performed by
two amiable young actors, Margaret Copeland, a Manhattan native, and Kevin
James Doyle, a Woody Harrelson type from Ohio. She’s a really good looking
blonde, something like Kyra Sedgewick but prettier, he’s an average-looking
bald guy; they work well together, but she’s got the edge in comic talent,
especially when it comes to varying her characters and accents.
The material is so-so funny, but
there are a few good laughs, as they perform on a tiny stage, using multiple
hats and jackets, supported by still and video projections behind them. There’s
a buffet dinner of salad and pasta (quite good) and a cash bar, and you sit at
long tables with other theatergoers facing you (we met a nice couple), but have
to shift your chair to see the stage. Sightlines are bad, so sit up front if
you go.
Nathan Englander’s
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN, at the Public, deals with a frightening episode in
postwar Soviet-Jewish relations, when Stalin, paranoid about the loyalty of
Soviet Jews, rounded up the major writers of Yiddish literature and had them
executed. This very powerful material is dramatized by having four such writers
thrown into a dreary jail cell, where they argue about their relative standing
in the literary community, and their feelings about the Stalinist regime. One,
played by Chip Zien, believes he has saved himself by toadying to Stalinism;
even he, though, when confronted by a government agent (Byron Jennings), is
unable to betray his colleagues in order to save his own neck. Unfortunately,
the play bogs down in excessive talk and weakens its potential impact. The good
performances include one by Ron Rifkin, but none can save the play from losing
steam even before its hour and 40 minutes have expired.
Plays about Jews and Judaism are
everywhere this season, just as are plays with “golden” in their titles: GOLDEN
AGE, GOLDEN BOY, THE GOLDEN LAND, and GOLDEN CHILD, all of which are now
running. It’s so confusing I even got a press rep’s announcement for GOLDEN AGE
that invited me to GOLDEN CHILD.
P. H. Lin’s ZELDA
AT THE OASIS is a very weak two-character play, although Gardner Reed as Zelda
is very good to look at, especially in the clinging, gold satin gown she wears
throughout. Her acting is only adequate in a tough role requiring that she go
from one hallucination to another, as the other actor, Edwin Cahill, plays a
wide assortment of men and women in her life, F. Scott being the most
prominent. Cahill is totally out of his depth, although he plays a hot piano,
and the script and staging are disposable. Cusi Cram’s RADIANCE, produced by
the Labyrinth Theater Company, is a little better, and has strong possibilities
in its dramatization of how the copilot of the Enola Gay apparently behaved
when he had second thoughts about agreeing to go on THIS IS YOUR LIFE and shake
hands with the Japanese minister who had come to America to raise money for the
Hiroshima Maidens. But it is defeated by awkward writing, clumsy staging, and
mediocre acting. The enterprise seemed ersatz from beginning to end. ZELDA was
a bore; RADIANCE was at least watchable.
4.
GIANT
The show covers too much material
in its three hours duration, and is dramaturgically inert, yet it somehow keeps
you involved in the 27 years during which we watch cattle baron Bick Benedict
(Brian D’Arcy James) and his beautiful Virginia wife, Leslie (Kate Baldwin),
deal with their downtrodden Mexican ranch hands; the rise to wealth of Bick’s
rival, Jett Rink, who strikes it rich from oil on his land and becomes a symbol
of Texas’s boorish, nouveau riche aristocracy; the coming of war; the marriage
of Bick and Leslie’s bookish son, Jordy, to a Mexican girl who is the victim of
racial prejudice; marital disillusion, and many other things before it draws to
a close. Some of it makes for very satisfying theatre; some of it never comes
to life. Despite a lovely production, this show is not for everyone. And, if
you know the movie, it will never succeed in replacing those indelible images
of Rock, Liz, and Jimmy set against the wide expanses of the Lone Star State.
5.
A
SUMMER DAY
A SUMMER DAY, at
the Cherry Lane, is a Norwegian play translated and directed by Sarah Cameron
Sunde. Its main attraction is Karen Allen of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame; she
plays the Older Woman, a middle-aged woman who lives in a house near the sea
and continues to stare blankly out the window, as if waiting for her husband to
come home from a fishing excursion on his small boat. The husband drowned
during such trip many years ago as she and a friend awaited his return. As the
Older Woman, visited by the older version of that friend, remembers the night
he died, she narrates the events as they are reenacted by her younger self and
her husband; she shadows the action and even embraces the Younger Woman at one
point, although, of course, this is not meant literally. Except for brief
scenes at the beginning and end, she serves mainly as a “poetic” narrative
voice, and has no interaction with the others.
The words are banal, there is an
inordinate amount of repetition, the mood is bleak, and the overall effect is
one of undercooked Bergman. There is some nice lighting, dependent--as is
becoming increasingly common on the New York stage--on projections (the stark
walls of the set become inundated with churning sea effects) and the acting is
competent, but the production is essentially a dramaturgic form of Ambien.
In THE GOOD WIFE,
Gretchen Mol is just as stunningly beautiful in person as you’d imagine afterseeing her on the large and small screen, but she is in a decidedly
unbeautiful, clumsy, and artificial contrivance of a play that her acting chops
are simply not good enough to overcome. I can’t say much for her costars,
although Alfredo Narcisco as Mol’s onetime boyfriend, now a happily married
cop, is probably the standout. Even the reliable Mark Blum struggles to no
avail with a terribly written role.
Mol plays a psychologically
troubled woman with a penchant for making major life mistakes and blaming
others for them. The plot is instigated by her accusing a gay, teenage boy, the
son of her alcoholic, onetime counselor (Blum), against whom she bears a
grudge, of molesting her four-year-old autistic daughter; the child (unseen)
does not speak but somehow convinces her mother that something bad happened
when the boy--a Goth, of course--babysat for her. This implausible event
cascades downward to wash over the mother’s closest friends and soil their
relationships, until the mother, depressed by what she hath wrought, seems
poised to make one final decision. A smart decision would be to avoid this
mistake.
7.
THE
LAST SEDER
THE LAST SEDER,
which is playing in the Mint Theatre’s venue on W. 43rd, is about a
dysfunctional Jewish family that comes together for the family’s last seder at
their home before it’s sold, since the patriarch, played by Gregg Mullavey (of
“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”) fame, is fading away from Alzheimer’s.
The extremely episodic plot, with
its four feuding sisters, its emotionally burdened matriarch, and the various
love complications of everyone involved, is sluggishly directed and performed,
although it does have some touching moments, especially during the seder
itself; the script simply has too many problems bogging it down. Nor is the
production helped by a poorly conceived setting.
8.
NAKED
HOLIDAYS
But even worse is
NAKED HOLIDAYS, right across the street, which is about the most amateurishly
written and performed show I’ve seen in months. It’s a comic and musical revue
of holiday-themed sketches with sexual undertones (OVERtones might be a better
word), but it has lots of nudity for those who like that sort of thing. I
wonder who that might be. If it’s you, I advise getting there early. Seats are
general admission and sightlines are bad. My view was blocked by the guy in
front of me, and I had to twist myself into a pretzel to get a good look at the
proceedings.
9. INNER VOICES
INNER VOICES is
three one-act, one-performer musicals. The first two are forgettable, the last
one—about an Afghan girl raised as a boy but now forced to come out as a
woman—more impressive but still nothing to write home to mother about, so I won’t
write anything else about it here.
10. MIES JULIE
MIES JULIE, Yael
Farber’s adaptation of Strindberg’s classic MISS JULIE, is another thing
altogether, an impressive reimagining of the play as set on a farm in the
desolate Eastern Cape Caroo, South Africa, and performed with a mixture of
stark realism and choreographic theatricality, including a torrid sex scene. It
explores the underbelly of South African racial politics in a potent way, but
does lose a bit of steam as it lurches toward its shocking climax. The leads,
Hilda Cronje and Bongile Mantsai, are both splendid actors and dancers, and
their sensual physicality is exciting to witness.
11. THE PIANO LESSON
THE PIANO LESSON,
at the Signature, is a rousing revival of a rousing play--a true achievement. I
wish I had more time to describe its myriad excellences, but you can rest
assured this one is worth your while.
12. THE WHALE, 13. IVANOV, 14. VANYA AND SONIA
AND MASHA AND SPIKE, 15. MURDER BALLAD
No time to
comment at length on the four shows I saw this weekend, so here’s a few words
about each of them: THE WHALE is, by far, one of the most powerful pieces of
theatre I’ve seen this season; Shuler Hensley gives a fantastic performance as
a 600-pound man. IVANOV is a snore, with talented but overactive actors trying
to animate one of Chekhov’s lesser plays. Ethan Hawke, Austin Pendleton, and Joely
Richardson lead a talented cast in a play whose leading character never stops
talking about how depressed he is. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE is an
often hilarious comedy about a modern family enmeshed in world of Chekhovian
references. Great performances by each of the characters in the title, and by
others as well. The funniest of the 130 plays or so I’ve seen since late June.
MURDER BALLAD is a high-quality, sung-through, intimate rock opera about a New
York murder stemming from a love quadrangle; brilliantly staged in an environmental
setting suggesting a night club, it has four memorable singer-actors, but I
would have liked more variety in the consistently aggressive music and lyrics.
16. THE GOLDEN CHILD
The revival of
David Henry Hwang’s THE GOLDEN CHILD, at the Signature Theatre, tells the
fascinating story of a Chinese family in Fujian, China, between 1918-1919. The
wealthy landowner, Eng Tieng-Bin (Greg Watanbe), returns to his three wives—the
domineering, opium-smoking First Wife (Julyana Soelistyo), the manipulative Second
Wife (Jennifer Lim), and the beautiful Third Wife (Lesley Hu)—after three years
of doing business in Manilla. He brings back with him his newfound Western ways
and tries to introduce them to his tradition-bound family. The changes this
requires, such as the abandonment of women’s bound feet, the adoption of
Christianity in place of ancestor worship, and the replacement of polygamy by
monogamy, create strong dramatic possibilities.
The play, however, has difficulty
in finding the right tone in its struggle to make the supposedly
Chinese-speaking characters sound both colloquial and formal, and to convey the
conventions of their daily life in a way that suggests rigid formality (Chinese
theatre elements play a small role in this) and more ordinary behavior. Some
dramatic scenes veer dangerously toward overacting, but, on the whole, the play’s
picture of China in transition is quite fascinating and worthy of a visit. The
idea of a society in transition is also at the core of GIANT, which I also
discussed on FB, so seeing these two shows on the same day was rather
instructive.
17. BAD JEWS
BAD JEWS by
Joshua Harmon, at the Roundabout’s tiny Black Box Theatre in the basement of
the Laura Pels Theatre on W. 46th St., is not the broad yiddishkeit comedy its
name suggests, but is a rather compelling, if imperfect, dramedy about a young
woman, her two male cousins, and the blonde shiksa one of the cousins brings
home to attend the shiva for the family’s deceased grandfather.
The central action is sparked by
the young woman, Daphna’s, desire to inherit the grandfather’s gold chai
symbol, which her cousin Liam also desperately wants. This conflict incites
some remarkably bitter arguing between the cousins, mostly about their relative
attitudes toward Judaism. Traceee Chimo as Daphna gives a remarkable
performance as the neurotically pushy advocate for her Jewish roots, while
Michael Hagen fights back with stinging intelligence in defense of his own
assimilationist beliefs and against what he perceives as Daphna’s inauthentic
Jewishness.
The performances of Philip
Ettinger as Liam’s seemingly feckless brother, Jonah, who tries not to get
involved in the fray, and Molly Ranson as Melody, the friendly outsider to whom
Liam wants to give the chai as an engagement gift, are also outstanding. This
is a fine discussion drama, somewhat similar in its preoccupation with the
authenticity of one’s religious beliefs to DISGRACED, now at the Claire Tow
Theatre, in which Islam is the subject of concern. BAD JEWS has some dramaturgic
problems, like how do you get people off stage so others can talk about them,
and also an implausible ending, but during its 90 minutes of intermissionless
action it remains deeply engrossing. You will see much in it to reflect on if
you’re Jewish, but even if you’re not you should find it worth your attention.
And it’s only $20 bucks, I think, for a ticket.
18. WE ARE PROUD TO
PRESENT A PRESENTATION . . .
Jackie Sibblies
Drury’s WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT A PRESENTATION . . . , at the SoHo Rep, is
about a group of young actors, three black and three white, trying to put
together a play about the genocide of the Herero tribe of Namibia in Southwest
Africa early in the 20th century. The ambience is that of a rehearsal, with the
audience seated on folding chairs right on the edge of the acting area, but the
piece veers from improvisational-sounding but actually scripted dialogue to
highly theatricalized sequences as the "actors" struggle to tell the
largely undocumented story before shifting gears to introduce internal racial
politics in the company and, by extension, modern America. It combines realism
and stylization in equal measure, and, while you will not learn anything new
about racism during its 90 minutes, you will be thoroughly engaged by the
intensity and talent of the memorable ensemble giving the performance.
19. A TWIST OF WATER
A TWIST OF WATER,
by Caitlin Parrish, is a Chicago play, where it was nominated for a Jefferson
Award. It is about the troubled relationship between a black teenager and her
gay white father in the aftermath of the father’s husband’s death in an
accident when his car crashed into a lake. The girl, feeling alone after the
loss of her beloved dad, wants to reunite with her birth mother, which she
does, but not with the happiest results. Throughout, the living father, Noah,
weaves a poetic narrative of Chicago, as projections of the city’s history
flash on the background. This seems to be an attempt to make the city’s
evolution as a home, its catastrophes, and its rebuilding a metaphor for the
play’s central conflict and resolution, but the connection is too tenuous to
strike sparks and its existence is more baffling than enlightening.
The play is filled with
questionable directorial choices (for example, people standing around in 8
degree weather in spring jackets without scarves or gloves, or with no jackets
at all, and complaining about the cold but doing little about it). There’s a
natural emotion generator when the daughter first meets her mother, but that
would happen in any play and can’t be credited to the writing, acting, or
direction. The actor playing Noah’s schoolteacher colleague and gay lover,
Liam, is supposed to be 26, but looks 16. And so on. To take a cue from the
high school scenes, I’d give this play a C.
20. THE PERFORMERS
THE PERFORMERS
closed tonight after a few weeks of previews and a handful of performances.
Just as I had been told, the audience seemed to love it. The friend who
accompanied me laughed loudly through much of it, and, while aware of its weaknesses,
he enjoyed much of it nonetheless. I wasn’t able to stir up much enthusiasm,
however, and despite laughing at a few of its jokes I felt very uncomfortable
listening to its nonstop profanity and determinedly dirty humor. I love the
smutty routines of the great comics, like George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and all
the rest, but this show actually made me feel uncomfortable, since the level of
its wit was so consistently low. I’m afraid my ultimate feeling is that it
deserved an early burial. Gone and soon forgotten.
21. THE GOLDEN LAND
Let me make this
simple. THE GOLDEN LAND, a Yiddish-English musical produced by the Jewish
National Theatre--Folksbiene, is wonderful. That’s W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L. To
paraphrase one of its songs, "Oy, oy, I liked it." My time is limited
at the moment so here’s a blogger’s review with which I wholly agree. (I didn’t
paste it in here.) I hope you shlep your tuchus down to Baruch and kvell at
this delightful assortment of songs that capture the Jewish immigrant
experience from the late 19th century to the founding of Israel. You don’t have
to be Jewish to like THE GOLDEN LAND.
22. CONEY
David Johnston’s
CONEY at the New Ohio Theatre at 154 Christopher Street is set on a recent
August day at Coney Island. It attempts to weave around half a dozen disaparate
stories into a cohesive whole, something like films such as BABEL and CRASH,
perhaps, but to very little effect. Despite some scattered acting highlights,
especially Andrea Gallo as a blowsy alcoholic with a carny past, CONEY,
overlong at two hours plus, is no Cyclone of a play.
23. SCANDALOUS
SCANDALOUS is a
heavy-handed biomusical that makes the same egregious error in dramatizing its
subject’s life as CHAPLIN. It tells practically her entire life story, with
huge amounts of narrative exposition spoken either by Aimee Semple McPherson or
members of the ensemble to fill in the gaps and goes on and on for over 2 and a
half hours. It isn’t as bad as I expected, I must admit, but it is riddled with
serious problems, including a ho-hum score, stereotypical characters, and a
book that gets duller as the evening proceeds, even as its drama intensifies. A
fascinating life has been reduced to a monotonous musical. Carolee Carmello in
the lead is on stage almost throughout and expends enough energy to light up
the Rockaways, but despite her powerhouse vocal chops she tends to overact and
is ultimately unconvincing as someone who reportedly had extraordinary
charismatic gifts.
24. THE OUTGOING
TIDE
THE OUTGOING
TIDE, by Bruce Graham, at 59e59, is a domestic drama about a man (Peter
Strauss) with Alzheimer’s who chooses to end his life before he has to endure
the indignity of life as a vegetable in a facility. This news must be digested
and responded to by his long-suffering, but loving, wife, Peg (Michael
Learned), and his somewhat diffident son, Jack (Ian Lithgow, John’s son). The
situation is simple but fraught with dramatic tension, especially since the man
still is lucid and physically competent most of the time; it’s those increasingly
common moments when he loses that lucidity and physicality that are eating at
him. It’s a touching dilemma and, depending on your own experiences and
sensibilities, you will either weep (as many in the audience did) at
recognition of the story’s familiarity, or question whether a man who still
retains a modest degree of the prowess in which he’s always taken pride should
be allowed to end his life (which action, by the way, will also provide a
useful financial bonus to his family if staged so it seems accidental).
The dominant performance is that
of Strauss, playing Gunner, a working-class character with strong Philly roots;
since the play, like so many others recently, uses flashbacks, it’s interesting
to see him play both the increasingly forgetful, shambling character he’s
become and his younger, physically impressive self. But Strauss isn’t quite the actor to pull off
this kind of transformative acting, and he isn’t thoroughly convincing as the
struggling Alzheimer’s victim, tending to overdo the accent and the movements.
The other performances are rather quiet, but there is not much given them to do
other than to react to Gunner’s predicament. Ms. Learned does rise to the
occasion toward the end as Gunner’s choice becomes more settled, and she offers
a picture of quiet nobility in the face of imminent loss that many will find
moving, even if they disagree with where she stands on Gunner’s plan.
The set is a simplified version
of a lakeside house, inside and out, with a too obvious scrim upstage made even
more obvious by being inadequately lighted. This is the second Alzheimer’s-themed
play I’ve seen in a week (the other was THE LAST SEDER); neither of them
impressed me deeply, although THE OUTGOING TIDE is better crafted and more
worthy of a visit.
26. RESTORATION
COMEDY
RESTORATION
COMEDY, at the Flea, is Amy Freed’s high-camp reimagining of what an audience
might have experienced during the Restoration period (roughly, 1660-1700),
famed for the occasional bawdiness of its comic plays and the reportedly
intimate relationships between certain actors and upper-class audience members.
Unfortunately, although there was undoubtedly some raunchy interplay between
spectators and performers, it was never the in-the-face kind reflected in the
Flea’s hyper-energetic production. Still, younger audiences will have a lot of
fun interacting with the attractive young cast (members of the Flea’s Bat
theatre company), who wear an assortment of colorful costumes and wigs, some of
them suggestive of the Restoration period, and others a mélange of contemporary
and indeterminate periods.
The setting, with the audience
seated on three banks of seats surrounding an open space where the “pit” would
have been located, gets to intermingle with and talk to the actors during the
preshow period, the intermission, and post-show dance party to upbeat modern
music. Free drinks are served (two were enough to make me a little woozy).
The play that all this supports
is a conflation of a couple of actual Restoration comedies, excised of most of
the highfalutin language of the originals and of their deeper social meanings
so that what remains are the sexual situations, with the cast, if not the more
discerning spectators, constantly reveling in their discovery of the double
entendres they find in every line. Ultimately, this grows tiresome, but for
those into high-camp sexual high jinks, lots of it homoerotic (male tushies are
often exposed and squeezed), this show may be your cup of English tea.
27. CIRCUS OZ: FROM
THE GROUND UP
CIRCUS OZ: FROM
THE GROUND UP, at the New Victory Theatre in Times Square, is a children’s show
touring here from Melbourne, where the company began in 1978. Although it seeks
to push the idea of diversity, including a speech by an indigenous Australian
praising mankind as a fruit salad, it is essentially a variety show of
acrobatics, tinged with broad (if not especially funny for adults) comedy, some
of it campy, thematically tied together by that famous photo of steelworkers
sitting on a beam overlooking 1930s Manhattan while casually eating their
lunch. Within this framework you see a pole climber doing marvelous physical
stunts while inching up and down a vertical pole, lots of flying bits, trapeze
acts, balancing acts (including one where a woman juggles a table and a bunch
of balls with her feet as she lies on her back), tightrope walking, multiple
people riding on a single bike (but not as many as you’ll see in many Chinese
acrobatic shows), some remarkable twirling, balletic movement while hanging
from ropes (like those hotel commercials where a woman dangles from draperies),
juggling, and so on. It’s performed to continuous music (mostly rock) played by
an onstage band, so there are few longeurs.
You’ve probably seen these kinds
of acts before, and none of them were truly eye-popping, like what you
sometimes see at Cirque du Soleil, but, given the good spirits of the
Australian company, it’s hard to deny that the intended audience was in seventh
heaven.
28. FOREVER DUSTY
FOREVER DUSTY,
written by Kirsten Holly Smith and Jonathan Vankin, and starring Ms. Smith as
Dusty Springfield (1939-1999), is a paint-by-numbers juke box musical, with
banal paint-by-numbers dialogue, about the late British pop singer of 1960s and
1970s fame (“Son of a Preacher Man,” “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,”
etc.). Presented at New World Stages on W. 50th Street, it surrounds
the star with a small company of supporting players to enact multiple people in
her life, all of it an excuse for Ms. Smith to sing Dusty’s most famous songs,
linking them together either as numbers she performs while recording or before
an audience or as storytelling devices in which they figure as an expression of
her personal problems. The show tells us about her career issues, her lesbian
love affair with a black woman, the trouble she ran into when she deliberately
played before a racially mixed audience in South Africa, her drug and alcohol
addictions, and her death at fifty from breast cancer. The set is essentially a
bare wall against which we see a slide show of projections showing places,
headlines, videos, and other images reflective of Dusty’s life.
Smith gives a tour de force
performance as Dusty Springfield, and resembles her more closely than Rob
McClure resembles Chaplin, although the wig she wears for much of the first
half doesn’t have a high enough beehive, and she could use a few more wigs to
capture the changing times. Her voice is strong, but throatier than the
original’s, and lacks its musicality, but she should be commended for her
valiant effort to remind of us of Springfield’s talent. While she includes many
of Springfield’s hits, some of the most famous, like “The Look of Love” and “If
You Go Away,” are omitted. A better singer, but a weaker actress, is Christina
Sajous, who plays Claire, Dusty’s lesbian lover. For the real Dusty, check her
out on YouTube. For a moderately reasonable facsimile, check out this
artistically weak but still mildly enjoyable show. Despite its weaknesses, I
have to admit that I found it more enjoyable than many more highly touted shows
I’ve seen this month.
29. INGENIOUS NATURE
INGENIOUS NATURE,
at the SoHo Playhouse on Vandam Street, is an odd bird of a show, being a two-man
production. One is the writer, Baba Brinkman, a 34-year-old, white Canadian, who
does 99 percent of the talking; the other, a Brit named Jamie Simmonds, is a DJ
cutting and scratching his own musical and sound score to Brinkman’s nonstop
rapping. The evening’s subject is sexual evolution, boiled down to the rap
artist’s personal quest for a compatible sexual partner. Creationists are
summarily mocked off the face of the earth and made the butt of some funny
lines.
The set is nothing but
projections of a dating site and similar images, and Brinkman ultimately asks
the audience to use their cell phones to text responses to questions whose
sexually oriented answers—including whether you are currently ovulating—are
instantly calibrated as onscreen statistics. Brinkman essentially raps the
entire 80-minute show, and gives a tour-de-force performance that requires
close listening to follow his complex analysis, but he is always accessible and
often witty, so you may find this unusual show more enjoyable than it otherwise
might sound.
30. LET’S KILL
GRANDMA THIS CHRISTMAS
LET’S KILL GRANDMA
THIS CHRISTMAS, at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, is about as stupid a comedy as
I’ve seen this year. It’s set in a very realistically depicted, large,
Victorian home whose occupant, Grandma Cathy (Roxie Lucas), has let it go
seriously to seed. Just short of her 80th birthday, Granny is about as
foul-mouthed and mean-tempered a creature as you’re likely to encounter, at
least at first sight. But she gradually begins to seem more human as the truly
inhuman natures of her family members, who arrive at her home to celebrate
Christmas, come gradually into focus. The action revolves around a plot to kill
her in order to get her money. Enough said. I appreciated the loud voices of
the actors, which meant I didn’t have to use an assistive listening device, but
otherwise the acting was as unsubtle as this jackhammer of a play, which was
about as unfunny as the unemployment rate.
31. DEAD ACCOUNTS
DEAD ACCOUNTS,
Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy at the Music Box, is a moderately entertaining if
dramaturgically uneven work about a Cincinnati family whose prodigal son,
played by Norbert Leo Butz, returns from New York to his parents’ modest home.
His manic behavior, apparently not much different than his ordinary behavior,
reflects his current problems with a snobbish, Mayflower-descended wife (Judy
Greer), who wants a divorce, and his having embezzled $27 million from the
“dead accounts” at the bank for which he works. He seeks refuge in the embrace
of his zealously Catholic mother (Jane Houdyshell) and his spinsterish sister
(Katie Holmes). Along the way, satirical barbs are constructed around the
themes of the Midwest vs. New York environment (trees, the air, etc.),
predatory banking, religion, and sex, among other things. Meanwhile, the sister’s
romantic life gets a boost from her encounters with her brother’s old school
buddy (Josh Hamilton).
The play’s principal energy
derives from Butz’s hyper-caffeinated performance, far too over the top for my
tastes and too close for comfort to this actor’s work in previous shows.
Everyone else does quality Broadway-level work, including Katie Holmes (albeit
in a not especially demanding role), and the play simply peters out once its
points have been made and its energy expended. There are no artistic,
intellectual, or thematic breakthroughs here, the comedy is only sporadically
laugh-inducing, and the net result is yet another mediocrity in a progressively
depressing Broadway season.
32. A CHRISTMAS
STORY
Folks, this
depressing Broadway season is now a little less depressing thanks to the recent
arrival of A CHRISTMAS STORY, THE MUSICAL, the delightful family show based on
the classic Jean Shepherd tale (and film) about a 1940s Indiana boy named
Ralphie (an adorable Johnny Rabe) who craves a Red Ryder BB rifle for Christmas.
This is an indisputably entertaining, lively, and highly polished,
nostalgia-driven show (book by Joseph Robinette), with a glowing cast of
grownups and kids that sparkles like the lights on a lit-up Christmas tree. Dan
Lauria, playing Shepherd, narrates the story, set largely in a cozy home
surrounded by huge panels magically suggesting giant swirls of snow; we follow
Ralphie’s attempt to convince his parents (played by the excellent John Bolton
and Erin Dilly) to get him the rifle, only to be told continually, “You’ll
shoot your eye out,” an admonition echoed by his schoolteacher, Miss Shields (a
terrific Caroline O’Connor). Along the way we are treated to many bubbly and
amusing songs (music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) and inventive
dances (choreography by Warren Carlyle).
This is another show with
extraordinarily talented young kids (playing multiple roles) capturing much of
the limelight, none more so than a tiny (3 foot 11 inch) 9-year-old named Luke
Spring who, in a number where he impersonates an old-time gangster in black
suit and white fedora, literally stops the show with an incredible display of
Lilliputian tap-dancing. The show’s story is, perhaps, a bit too thin for the
two hours and ten minutes (which includes one intermission) it takes to tell it,
but otherwise, this visually sumptuous, melodically tuneful, unabashedly
sentimental yet also hilarious greeting card of a show will catch you by the
heartstrings and never let them go. If you’re still thinking of what to give
someone you love for Christmas, especially if that person is a child, think no
further. Then again, even if that person is as old as I am (see Methuselah) you
won’t go wrong. The show closes on December 30, so hitch up your reindeer and
get a move on!
33. THE ANARCHIST
David Mamet’s
crown has gotten rather tarnished lately, and THE ANARCHIST, at the John
Golden, does little to restore its former sheen. Two major actresses, Debra
Winger (in her Broadway debut) and Patti LuPone (Broadway diva of divas), play,
respectively, Ann, a sort of parole officer, and Cathy, a onetime anarchist who
has been in jail for decades because of her involvement in a terrorist-related
crime in which two cops were killed. Cathy pleads (or, one might say, bloviates)
for her release, claiming to have found Christ and promising to enter a convent
to do good, and to donate her substantial inheritance to the families of those
whose deaths she caused. Ann, who has overseen Cathy’s case for years but is
now retiring, engages in a final interrogation to determine if Cathy’s claims
of redemption are trustworthy enough so that she may recommend release. She is
the state, using its great power to control the life of this inmate, and
distrusting everything Cathy says, although toying with her in hopes that Cathy
will betray her accomplice, Althea, still at large.
This two-character confrontation
has the possibility of strong drama, but Mamet so overloads it with pompous
philosophical arguments and artificially inflated dialogue—especially by Cathy,
who speaks professorially as if she were determined never to end a sentence
with a preposition—that the totally humorless argument grows ever more unreal
and the characters increasingly like stick figures put on stage to illustrate
Mamet’s points. Cathy appears to be a target for Mamet’s conservative ire
against liberalism, but it’s hard not to sympathize with her in the face of Ann’s
icy demeanor. I read a critique that suggested Mamet had offered a sucker punch
to liberal sympathies for Cathy toward the end, making Ann the heroine, but I
must have been sleeping because I never heard it land. Why anyone would ever
have thought this a play for today’s Broadway stage is another conundrum I am
also unable to answer. It is closing much earlier than expected.
34. WORKING
WORKING, Off
Broadway at 59e59, is a revival of the Studs Terkel-inspired 1978 Broadway
musical based on
interviews with a wide assortment of working people. It is a production by the
Prospect Theatre Company, whose redoubtable artistic director is Brooklyn
College MFA alumnus Cara Reichel. The much larger original company has been
pared down to six, three men and three women, all of them highly proficient
actor-singers, performing 26 roles. The original songs, by Stephen Schwartz
(who created the original adaptation), James Taylor, Mary Rodgers, Susan
Birkenhead, Craig Carnelia, and Micki Grant, has been supplemented by two new
numbers by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Each character gets to express his or her
feelings about their jobs, and there is also considerable input about
joblessness, which I found particularly poignant because of someone very close
in precisely that position despite being talented, likable, responsible,
attractive and so on.
The show is very well staged by
director Gordon Greenberg and choreographer Josh Rhodes on Beowulf Borrit’s
simple set consisting of a black mesh background that allows for some action to
be staged behind it (although not especially well lit there), and for the
musicians to be mostly screened from view on an upper level. Occasionally,
projections, now de rigueur in so much New York set design, are flashed across
this background. A row of reel-to-reel tape recorders run along the upper
level, much like the TV sets one often sees in Wooster Group productions, and
we occasionally hear segments of the original tape recordings used by Terkel in
the book of worker interviews he compiled in 1974.
Despite the generally tuneful
quality of the songs, the effective production values, and the chameleon
abilities of the versatile cast, the show ignited for me only in a few select
numbers. This is to be expected when there is no real interchange among
characters and you have instead a series of 14 numbers linked only by the
tenuous theme of what people do for a living and how they feel about it. The
show stopper, for me, at any rate, is “It’s an Art,” a high-energy, funny, and
perfectly sketched expression of a charismatic waitress’s energetic affection
for a job others might have thought sheer drudgery. Donna Lynne Champlin sings
and dances the hell out of it. Still, kudos also go to the show’s other fine performers—Kenita
R. Miller, Joe Cassidy, Nehal Jōshi, Jay Armstrong Johnson, and Marie-France
Arcilla—who demonstrate that what they themselves do is, of course, “an art.”
35. ANNIE, THE
MUSICAL
The current
revival of ANNIE, THE MUSICAL makes you feel good the minute you enter Broadway’s
Palace Theatre, with its huge proscenium arch filled with dozens of white
sheets and garments hanging from clothes lines going every which way to form a
magnificent curtain that captures the exuberant feeling the ensuing show
provides. The night I went, Lilla Crawford, who plays Little Orphan Annie, was
out, having experienced an onstage mishap the day before, so I’ll be going back
to view her performance in January, but her understudy, Taylor Richardson, was
every bit the Broadway professional, gave an amazingly polished performance
regardless of her having had few opportunities to practice it before a live
audience. The talent on view among Broadway’s kids never fails to astonish me,
and ANNIE delivers, not only with kids like Taylor Richardson, but a supporting
cast of children and adults (and a remarkably well-trained dog playing Sandy)
that helps her carry this visually spectacular, thematically heart-tugging, and
melodically absorbing show. Taylor not only looks just right, especially when
she dons Annie’s red dress with white borders, but dances with grace, acts with
charm, and sings with power, albeit in a tone somewhat deficient in vibrato.
Outstanding adult performer in
the mostly sterling company is Australian actor-singer Anthony Warlow as Daddy
Warbucks, who sings beautifully and adds considerable depth to his cartoon-like
billionaire character. Brynne O’Malley is exquisite as Grace, Warbuck’s
assistant, but the usually wonderful Katie Finneran, in the great comic role of
Miss Hannigan, works too hard at making this blowsy harridan of an orphanage
operator funny, and is the only minor drawback to an otherwise splendid
revival. Although one could call this a schmaltzy piece of comic-strip
nostalgia, ANNIE’s Depression-era background is strikingly relevant to today’s
America, which could use as much of its redheaded heroine’s optimism (and a
billionaire Republican’s willingness to work with Democrats) as it can muster.
36. BARE
BARE, a rock
musical (by Jon Hartmire and Damen Intrabartolo) that evolved from a
sung-through rock musical of some years earlier (which I didn’t see), is at New
World Stages, where the most memorable element is the projections flashed upon
a wall divided into cubicle-like spaces, with a section that can open and close
like a huge door. Most of the projections are of the faces of the boys and
girls at a Catholic high school, put together montage style and lit to suggest
stained glass windows; the kids are putting on a production of Romeo and Julie under the direction of a
Sister Joan (Missi Pyle), a pretty young nun whose liberal ideas (she allows
the subject of contraception to be raised in class) put her in jeopardy with
the headmaster, the seemingly open but actually uptight Father Mike (Jerold E.
Solomon). The core action concerns a budding love affair between two boys, one
who is not ashamed of his gayness (Taylor Trench); the other (Jason Hite)—cast
as Romeo in the school play—is confused by his sexuality and so unwilling to
admit his true feelings that he impregnates the pretty girl (Ivy Judd) who
loves him. Ultimately, his fate is not dissimilar to that of Shakespeare’s
fated lovers, and we all learn a lesson of tolerance before the lights go out.
My tolerance level, however, was
breached by BARE’s insistently brash, tuneless music, commonplace lyrics, and
hardworking but generally uninspired performances. Apart from one fantasy
number, where Sister Joan dolls up as a pop star Virgin Mary supported by a
trio of girls in glittering, silver costumes (think Supremes), everyone in the
cast fades as quickly as the markings on a Buddha Board.
37. THE VELVETEEN
RABBIT
THE VELVETEEN
RABBIT is a kiddy show based on the classic children’s book about a boy’s
stuffed rabbit that wants to become “real,” and manages, briefly, to do so. It’s
being done at the DR2 Kids Theatre near Union Square. Lots of kids were using
booster seats; I could have used one, too, since the dad in front of me had a
head as big as “Harvey” The show was sweet and cleverly done, but it began at
1:00 p.m. (actually, it began late, at 1:20, to accommodate the latecomers),
which is my nappy time, so I dozed and dreamed of bunnies for a few minutes
when I should have been watching one on stage. That’s okay, though, since it’s
only 40 minutes long. This was another show I’d love to have been able to see
with a five-year-old. But I’m plum out of them at the moment.
38. A CIVIL WAR
CHRISTMAS
Paula Vogel’s A
CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS, at the New York Theatre Ensemble, makes worthwhile viewing
for this holiday season, not only because it offers a bunch of intertwining
stories, mainly uplifting, revolving around the last Christmas of the Civil War
(in 1864), but because it coincides with Spielberg’s epochal film about
Lincoln, who is also a major figure in this play. So you get to learn your
history and enjoy it, too. The work falls on the borderline between play and
musical, as it includes numerous traditional songs, in snippets and complete
renderings; technically, it could be called a play with music. The very
talented actors in the racially mixed cast play multiple roles, including Bob
Stillman, the lanky actor who capably plays the sixteenth president. There are
fine performances by Karen Kandel, K. Todd Freeman, Sean Allen Krill, and many
others in what is actually a superb ensemble piece that doesn’t focus on any
particular character.
Vogel weaves her stories together
to show people on both sides of the conflict, including John Wilkes Booth and
his co-conspirators, who muff their attempt to kidnap (not assassinate) the
president; a black child who gets lost in Washington when separated from her
mother during their flight north from slavery; Mrs. Lincoln’s attempt to find
and purchase a Christmas tree (still a novelty at the time) as a present for
her husband; Lincoln’s foolhardy adventure retrieving a gift for his wife he’d
left behind, and so on. We see the coming and going of heroic black soldiers fighting
on the Union side; the black bourgeoisie of Washington in the persons of the
Wormley family; the Confederate and Union military leaders, Lee and Grant, and
so on; they appear in a Brechtian panorama created on designer James Schuette’s
large, bare stage consisting mostly of planking on walls and floors, with
minimalist set pieces representing both what they are in reality and what they
can be used for theatrically. A horse is played with wonderful mimicry by an
actor (Jonathan David) who also performs several human roles. Under Tina Landau’s
imaginative direction, all movement is perfectly coordinated, and scenes are
distinguished by the brilliant area and mood lighting of Scott Zielinski. All
that prevents this slightly overambitious piece of theatre from being fully
effective is its unnecessary two and a half hour running time; at least a half
an hour could have been cut.
39. WHAT RHYMES WITH
AMERICA?
WHAT RHYMES WITH
AMERICA?, by Melissa James Gibson, is being given a fine production at the Atlantic
on W. 20th Street, but is not likely to brand its image on your
brain as an example of outstanding new American playwriting. Once again we have
a sullen, alienated teenage girl, Marlene (Aimee Carrero), unable to connect
with a troubled adult, a father named Hank (Chris Bauer), who is undergoing a bitter
divorce from his wife after losing his job as an economist. He picks up some
income as a spear carrier at the opera, where he is criticized for his lack of
onstage involvement by a colleague, a sassy black woman (Da’Vine Joy Randolph);
she’s a would-be actress who gets to do an extended bit from Macbeth when she shows him how she
auditioned for the play. Marlene works at a hospital where, thinking she’s
simply a volunteer, Hank goes to visit her and ends up befriending Lydia (Seana
Kofoed), a 40ish woman whose father just died there. She’s never had sex, but,
for whatever reason, is ready to begin with Hank; as this is getting underway
at his apartment he allows himself to be distracted by a phone call from his
wife, with whom he argues and shouts his love while ignoring the woman whose
bra he removed only seconds earlier. She soon drops him, telling him to picture
her breasts; when he says he does she insists he now forget them completely as
he’ll never see them again. Reconciliation with his daughter is suggested
before the play concludes.
None of this adds up to a play,
unfortunately, although the scenes are all well written, if sometimes
implausible (like the one with the phone argument). But scene writing, even
with juicy dialogue, is not playwriting, and this play doesn’t add much to the
season’s gallery of unhappy marital, parental, and sexual relationships. Nor is
it helped much by a cavernous white set resembling an MRI machine; its sterile
ambience may be suitable for the hospital scene but makes no sense for
backstage scenes at the Met, or the intimacy of a bedroom sex scene (no bed,
just a mattress). Two scenes have father and daughter converse on opposite
sides of an apartment door that isn’t there, obviously suggesting the emotional
distance between them but also being out of sync with the staging of the other
scenes.
One final note: it seems that
many stage actors are very health conscious and do not actually smoke. In play
after play, however, they are called upon to do just that and it’s instantly
apparent to anyone who does or has smoked that they’re faking it. They don’t
inhale and they are clearly uncomfortable holding their cigarettes or flicking
the ashes. They take singing lessons, dancing lessons, acting lessons, and
voice lessons; there’s clearly a need for some enterprising person to open a
studio to give actors lessons in how to smoke.
40. P.S. JONES AND
THE FROZEN CITY
P.S. JONES AND
THE FROZEN CITY, at the New Ohio Theatre, parodies the comic book superhero
genre with a story about a youth named Pig Shit Jones (Joe Paulik), who is
quite happy working on his family farm shoveling pig droppings, with which he
is liberally splattered, while his dandified, epicene brother, Benjamin
(Preston Martin), departs for an important position in the Frozen City. Soon
after, P.S. discovers a huge green hand (manipulated, like all the puppets in
this show, by a very visible puppeteer), amid his manure mountains, and
simultaneously is recruited by the ghost of a Gunslinger (Steven Rishard),
straight out of a spaghetti Western, to help him take vengeance on the Great
Glass Spider in the Frozen City. With the help of the giant hand’s superpowers,
the dimwitted P.S. becomes a superhero, soiled cloak, goggles, and all, and
encounters various kooky characters and adventures until he fulfills his quest.
Not only the hand, but a number
of major oddball characters are played by highly imaginative puppets; most
clever is the spider-woman villainess (Sofia Jean Gomez), who rolls about on a
converted office chair accompanied by a pair of supposedly invisible, black
garbed actors operating her multiple mechanical legs in perfectly coordinated
movements. All of this silliness is accompanied by comic strip-style video
images and projections (including the “Wham,” “Bam,” etc. effects familiar from
the old Batman TV series).
José Zayas’s lively production
puts us in the land of blatant campiness again (as per RESTORATION COMEDY and
THE BUTT-CRACKER SUITE, to name recent examples), and whether you laugh at it
or squirm (I did a little of both, but definitely more of the latter) depends
on your tolerance for over-the-top acting, overdone hillbilly accents, goofy
sound effects, nut cake dialogue, outrageous costumes, and nuance-free
zaniness. Good golly, Miss Molly, this must be the season to be jolly.
41. CHRIS MARCH’S
THE BUTT-CRACKER SUITE: A TRAILER PARK BALLET
If P.S. JONES AND
THE FROZEN CITY isn’t campy enough, there is always CHRIS MARCH’S THE BUTT-CRACKER
SUITE: A TRAILER PARK BALLET waiting at another downtown venue, the HERE Arts
Center. And that’s where I ventured to view this inoffensive, deliberately
cheesy, and sometimes quite diverting take on THE NUTCRACKER SUITE, which
envisions it as the daydream of a young girl named Clara who wants a pair of
ballet shoes for Christmas. Her redneck dad punishes her by making her sit on a
toilet seat while he and his wife, who wears beer cans for curlers, make love
in their trailer (a real one—topped by a Jesus, Mary, and Joseph crèche—that
forms the main part of the set). The little girl is not so little, since she’s
played by Chris March, the obese creative force behind the show: producer,
costume designer, director, etc. His huge, gelatinous belly on full display in
a tight, white t-shirt, his face dressed with cutie-pie makeup, his hair
adorned by a Shirley Temple wig, and his waist by a large, pink tutu, he dreams
the Christmas dreams of all trailer trash kids, which is to say a succession of
dance numbers reflecting the most immediate concerns of anyone who lives amid
the cultural icons of the trashocracy in the Deep South.
As a wide-ranging assortment of familiar
and not-so familiar pop-rock and Christmas tunes (“Here Comes Suzy Snowflake,”
“Tequila,” “All I Got for Christmas Was this Ugly Sweater,” etc.) mingled with
conventional and upbeat versions of the NUTCRACKER score blasts over the loud
speakers in this intimate theatre, a succession of well-choreographed numbers
dominated by a corps de ballet of half a dozen pretty and furiously smiling
girls passes before our eyes, some of them involving a male dancer dressed as
the Nutcracker character replete with giant full head mask. Throughout, video
projections of scenes from famous TV Christmas shows (including “Charlie
Brown”), commercials, and movies play upon the trailer façade.
With little rhyme or reason (who
needs rhyme or reason?), other than to get us laughing, the dances show us a
bevy of dancing beer cans (Old Milwaukee Beer, if you want to know), emerging
from a refrigerator; a bunch of Spam canisters doing a Spam ballet; a trio of
very well crafted, balletic flamingoes, the effect created by black light
technology; a flamenco-inspired ballet backed by a large, foam-rubber tequila
bottle spinning on a turntable; a tap dancing line of bowling pins; an ugly
sweater ballet in which all the sweaters get to light up like Christmas trees;
a crazy ballet in which Joseph and Mary toss baby Jesus around like a Frisbee;
a Hanukkah routine in which the girls dress up in black robes and curling side
locks as Hassids, with menorahs hanging from their necks while dancing to “Hava
Nagila” and the “Draydel Song” (makes perfect sense in a redneck trailer park,
right?); a leg lamp ballet inspired by the movie, A Christmas Story, that comes close to replicating the more
elaborate leg lamp number in Broadway’s current A Christmas Story musical; a Miracle Whip dance performed to Barry
Manilow’s “It’s a Miracle” (groan!); a Wonder Bread (spelled Wunda Bred, of
course) ballet; a laundry line ballet, and so on. If you think this might
eventually grow tiresome, you’re absolutely right, but, since this low-rent but
high energy extravaganza lasts only 80 minutes, it ends before you barf up all
that beer, cheese, spam, tequila, Miracle Whip, “Wunda Bred,” and dirty
laundry.
Is it funny? Sometimes (the hyena
behind me seems to have thought “all the time”). Is it entertaining? Mostly.
Will you like it? Who the hell knows?
42. THE SONGS I LOVE
SO WELL
Phil Coulter, who
stars in SONGS I LOVE SO WELL at the Irish Rep, is an Irish songwriter, record
producer, musician, and singer, although his fame appears to reside largely on
the Emerald Isle and among those on this side of the pond who are fond of
contemporary Irish music. He’s a well-preserved 70-year-old who offers a
cabaret-like show in which he accompanies himself on the grand piano as he
sings a slew of his own songs, many of which seem to be familiar to the people
visiting his show; when invited to sing along, many in the house seem quite
familiar with the words. Some of his material is purely instrumental, designed
to show off his piano playing, including a nonverbal rendition of the classic “Danny
Boy,” with which he opens the show. The songs are tied together by his low-key
chatter, delivered in a mild Irish brogue, much of it in the vein of “and then
I wrote.” He also effectively recites a couple of Irish-tinted poems, although
I didn’t catch every word.
Almost as if to vouch for his
reputation, a video of famous Irish talking heads, including Van Morrison and
Liam Neeson, speak on his behalf, and other videos accompany much of the
performance, including a few numbers in which an overhead camera allows us to
watch his piano playing projected on the screen.
Onstage with him and his piano is
a lighted Christmas tree and a wreath, as well as the stained glass window
effect from the Dublin Guildhall set used in the Irish Rep’s revival of Brian
Friel’s THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY; the holiday effect is appealing, made more so
when Coulter tells us he actually performed once in the actual Guildhall. He
himself hails from Derry, which he salutes in “The Town I Loved So Well,” a
moving song to that city’s idyllic and, later, battle-torn, past.
Dressed in a dark, three-piece
suit in the first act, and a white dinner jacket and black bow tie in the
second, Coulter is a genial host, and his music is melodic and easy to listen
to (and sing) in a Muzak sort of way (which was its destiny, he informs us); in
fact, it’s perfect accompaniment to an afternoon theatre snooze. Coulter is not
an Irish tenor, by the way, but sings in a slightly gravelly key that is
pleasantly average. On the other hand, he comes to life late in the show—which
should have been in one act, not two—when he does a Jimmy Durante tribute (of
all people), capturing “The Schnoz” in spot-on style. Joining him for several
numbers, also late in the proceedings, is his wife, Geraldine Branagan, a once popular
singer who left the business to raise the couple’s six kids but is now performing
again. A striking woman, slightly oversized, with big blonde hair and dressed
in glamorous black, she sings with excellent phrasing and feeling but, like her
husband, doesn’t have the strongest or most musical of voices.
All in all, this is a harmless,
old-fashioned endeavor I’d expect to see in a cabaret, and not on a legitimate
theatre stage.
43. IT’S A WONDERFUL
LIFE
If you think you’ve
had your fill of annual holiday season screenings of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE in
theatres and on TV, you might find it amusing to see the story told in the form
of an old-time radio play, which is exactly how it’s being presented at the
Irish Rep in a production flawlessly directed by Charlotte Moore that falters
only in the casting of one role, albeit a crucial one. The Irish Rep’s tiny
basement stage, where Julian Sands recently gave his solo Pinter performance,
is no longer the bare space it was for Sands, but has been converted into a
replica of a 1946 radio station, replete with “on the air” and “applause” signs
that light up, and with a sound effect area for the many background sounds
famously used in radio scripts.
A cast of four men and two women
play all the characters in this family classic, which adaptor Anthony E.
Palermo has stripped down to an intermissionless 70 minutes. (No credit is
provided for the writer of the original story or the screenplay adaptation.) Everyone
is dressed effectively in the styles of 1946, and the actors behave as “actors”
when they’re not “on,” coming to life as “characters” when they read their
hand-held scripts. When cued to do so at the ends of scenes, the audience
applauds loudly, and mock commercials for products to reduce various gastric
ailments are given in the play’s interstices.
Quality work is done by all, but
most especially by veteran Peter Maloney, who wears many hats to play the angel
Clarence, the villainous banker Mr. Potter, the pharmacist Gower, and the
Italian immigrant Martini. As Clarence, he puts on a white top hat whose peak
is rimmed with white feathers, a charming touch. He moves seamlessly from
character to character, perfectly embodying the essence of the roles made
famous by Henry Travers and Lionel Barrymore. At the other end of the acting
spectrum, in the role of George Bailey, so unforgettably associated with Jimmy
Stewart, is the relentlessly uncharismatic Max Gordon Moore, whom I thought
memorably miscast as Jack Tanner in the Irish Rep’s MAN AND SUPERMAN, earlier
this season, and who has somehow landed yet another plum role here for which he
is in way over his head. Jim Parsons was a disaster when playing a Stewart role
in HARVEY this summer, and Mr. Moore is no Jim Parsons. Nevertheless, the
production is smooth enough to cover even for his lack of charm and will appeal
to everyone who still has a tiny bit of room left in their hearts for this
still throbbing bit of Christmas nostalgia.
44. VOLPONE OR THE
FOX
Red Bull Theater
artistic director Jesse Berger, who staged that company’s current revival of
Ben Jonson’s Elizabethan comedy, VOLPONE OR THE FOX, at the Lucille Lortel
Theatre, writes in his program notes: “Jonson himself said that the aim of
comedy should not be to provoke easy laughter by slapstick farce and bawdry,”
yet his own production, colorfully set and costumed in the 1607 Venice called
for by the script, is precisely guilty of doing just that. It’s as broad a
staging of the play as you could imagine, even to the point of having the three
foolish men—each named for a particular bird—gulled by Volpone make bird-like
cawing sounds when they exit after receiving their comeuppance. The only actor
who is able to seem both comically idiotic and real is octogenarian Alvin
Epstein, as Corbaccio (“The Raven”), but Rocco Sisto as the lawyer Voltore
(“The Vulture”) and Michael Mastro as the merchant Corvino (“The Crow”), while
physically impressive, struggle to be both believable and funny. Tovah Feldshuh
as Fine Madame Would Be, who looks wonderful, gives a technically fine comic
performance, but is too outrageously cartoonish to be honestly amusing.
Even bigger problems loom in the
hollowly zany performance of Stephen Spinella as the lecher/con man Volpone
(“The Fox”), who fools the three birdmen into giving him their riches (and Corvino
his wife) in the hope that Volpone will name one of them his heir. Perhaps
Spinella might work as a con man, but as a dirty old man lusting for a victim’s
wife, he’s as convincing as someone like Chris Christie shilling for Weight
Watchers. Even more disappointing is the play’s real comic fulcrum, Volpone’s
sidekick, Mosca, given a thoroughly unconvincing performance by a drearily
costumed Cameron Folmar; he works so hard at being the clever, Arlecchino-like
trickster, that I feared someone might slip in the trail of sweat he left
behind him.
I’ve seen several revivals of
this famous play, and, for all its historical and literary values, only one has
convinced me that it’s still stage worthy. That one was Larry Gelbart’s updated
1974 version, Sly Fox, set in 19th
century San Francisco, which starred the great George C. Scott. It was
essentially a new play, with modernized jokes and language; Jonson’s Renaissance
original is too long and bloated with outdated shtick to survive if given
anything like a faithful revival. And, for all its excesses, the Red Bull
rendition is just that.
45. GOLDEN BOY
Clifford Odets’s
classic Depression-era boxing drama, GOLDEN BOY, about the struggle of Joe
Bonaparte, a poor, second-generation Italian-American who is equally adept at
playing the violin and knocking people out, to decide between his artistic and
materialistic aspirations (a struggle reputedly faced by Odets himself), is
being given a rousing, if not fully satisfying, revival by Lincoln Center
Theater. The production is at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, where the play had
its premier in 1937, with Luther Adler as Joe. The 21-year-old William Holden
played Joe (who is also 21) in the 1939 movie version (check it out on YouTube),
and while he had neither Joe’s ethnic nor New York qualities (although he did
sport a mop of curly black hair), he had a charismatic presence and physical
beauty sadly missing from Seth Numrich’s vigorous but, ultimately, merely
ordinary interpretation in this often spirited revival. Numrich also looks too
slight to be a powerful boxer, especially when we see the arms and chest of
Michael Aronov, who plays Joe’s brother-in-law Siggie.
Like too many of the male leads,
Numrich never quite gets inside his character, despite his efforts to look and sound
like a cocky fighter from a tenement in one of the outer boroughs. There’s a
great deal of shouting in the production by him and others (such as Danny
Mastrogiorgio as Tom Moody, Joe’s manager, and Anthony Crivello as the
dandified gangster, Eddie Fuseli, actually referred to as “queer”). Much of the
play is performed pedal to the metal, with the cast often directed to aim more
for speed and theatrical effect than subtlety and nuance. This makes an already
melodramatic play even more so, yet director Bartlett Sher has nevertheless
found a way to convert Odets’s theatrical contrivances into riveting, even
emotionally moving, theatre. Despite an intensity that often seems forced, the
play’s core dramatic conflicts spring to life and hold your interest for nearly
three hours; the story and the characters are as vividly painted as in a
graphic novel, which comes across even more effectively in Michael Yeargan’s
striking sets of a tenement apartment, boxing manager’s office, park bench, and
boxer’s gym and locker room. Assisting enormously are Donald Holder’s bold, chiaroscuro
lighting and Catherine Zuber’s spot-on period costumes, all of which capture a
feeling not unlike that of a George Bellows painting.
Not all the performances are
overblown, of course, and those that most affected me belonged to Tony Shalhoub
as Joe’s immigrant father, Mr. Bonaparte (Lee J. Cobb in the movie), and
Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski (who starred in this season’s Dexter on TV) as Lorna Moon (Barbara
Stanwyck in the film), the Newark dame Joe falls for. Each brings a restrained
believability to their roles, allowing for the fireworks they light to stand
out in stark contrast when circumstances demand them. Each also has mastered
their respective dialects more convincingly than many of their colleagues.
All that glitters may not be
gold, but the precious ore in GOLDEN BOY can still shine, even if sometimes
mixed with dross.
46. GLENGARRY GLENN
ROSS
The scenery for
GOLDEN BOY and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS must be very tasty indeed because the actors
in both shows are feasting on it, chewing it up as if it were fresh from the
Cooking Channel. The cast in GLENGARRY contains some outstanding scenery
chewers, and sold-out houses are paying premium prices to watch them dig their
fangs into David Mamet’s exposé of ruthless business practices exemplified by
the scurrilous real estate salesman that populate this play. With two
exceptions, a detective (Murphy Guyer) and a suckered customer (Jeremy Shamos),
every character gets at least one aria where he goes profanely ballistic, shouting
excoriating expletives that typify the Mamet method we missed so dearly in the
just closed THE ANARCHIST.
Scenery chewer in chief, of
course, is the great Al Pacino, playing Shelly Levine as a once successful but
now shaggy, dog eared loser, pleading, threatening, cajoling, haranguing, and
even bribing the office manager, John (David Harbour), for the leads that will
bring him viable real estate clients. Looking perhaps a bit too seedy to be a
convincing salesman, Pacino practically sings the part, finding musical
variations, replete with stammering exclamations and pregnant pauses, on the
themes of obnoxiousness and desperation. Similar themes also rush through the
dialogue and actions of his costars, Richard Schiff, John C. McGinley, and
Bobby Cannavale, all of whom do nastily energetic work in their relentlessly
ruthless drive to close a sale and score highly in an office sales competition.
Pacino seems intent on earning
every penny of his $120,000 weekly salary (plus a hefty piece of the profits),
and his costars, earning considerably less, do their best to match him.
Cannavale, in particular, is as convincingly slimy a huckster as you can
imagine, and his slippery attempts to befuddle a customer who wants to get his
money back are among the production’s highlights.
The play’s first act is three set
pieces acted by three different pairs of characters, all of it intended to set
up the situation worked out in act two. Pretty soon, though, it becomes clear
that what we’re seeing is more a high-powered acting exercise than a serious
X-ray of pitiless capitalism, but if you’re in the market for a theatrical
demonstration of testosterone-fueled male dynamics as performed by masters of
the craft, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is your ticket.
47. THIRTEEN THINGS
ABOUT ED CARPOLATTI
Penny Fuller’s
theatrical career includes her being one of the actresses who took over the
lead in the original Broadway production of Barefoot
in the Park, which I saw in 1964. She’s had a solid, if not spectacular,
career since then, and I was delighted to see her in the (mostly) one-woman
show 13 Things about Ed Carpolotti,
in the tiny Theatre C at 59e59. I’m happy to report she’s just as pretty at 72
as she was at 24, with her high cheekbones, deep-set blue eyes, and carefully
frizzed blonde bangs and pony tail. Her still slender figure looks quite fine
in a straight, brown skirt, a beige, silk blouse, open at the neck, and
matching heels.
Fuller’s role is Virginia
Carpolotti, widow of the eponymous Ed, who tells the story of her relationship
with her late husband and of the enormous debts he left her after he died. Her
narrative takes us back at one point to 1955 when, to cover up for having been
necking with Ed in a car, when she was supposedly at the movies, she makes up
the story for her parents of a Marie Wilson film, My Friend Irma Goes West, during which she imitates the comic
costars, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The show also lets her assume the voices
of others in her narrative, notably an Italian hoodlum who is after her for the
money he loaned Ed. One wonders whether Virginia, who seems quite capable of
handling her mixed up affairs, despite a suggestion of helplessness, would be
quite as naïve as she claims; several times she declares she doesn’t understand
her daughter’s jokey comments, such as one about Ed’s hospital being
Dickensian, or her question, now that Virginia is president of her husband’s
company, as to whether she would recognize Cuba.
The one-hour piece, originally a
straight play (by Jeffrey Hatcher) in which Fuller starred, has been turned
into a musical with book, lyrics, and music by Barry Kleinbort, who also
directed. It’s performed on a postage stamp-sized stage, where Fuller is joined
by musical director Paul Greenwood, at a grand piano; he joins her for a
two-part harmony in one song and engages in some brief chatter as well, but, in
the main, if not technically, this is a solo show. Apart from the piano, there’s
nothing on stage but an easy chair and small side table. The audience sits
jammed in at little cabaret tables. Fuller’s sweetness, intelligent readings,
and heartfelt (if somewhat vocally diminished) singing are all one needs to
enjoy this melodious, lighthearted, but disposable, work, which the star’s
polished expertise prevents from becoming too precious or sentimental. 13 Things makes up for at least 13
recent shows about which the less said the better.
48. MY NAME IS ASHER
LEV
MY NAME IS ASHER
LEV, at the Westside Theatre, is the kind of play that will interest many
serious New York theatergoers. Like so many other shows this season, it is
about a Jewish family, although not the kind one is likely to see at the
theatre, even if the play is about them. As you may know if you’ve read the
Chaim Potok novel from which Aaron Posner has adapted this work set in the
1950s, the Levs are a family of Brooklyn Hassids. Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev are so
religious that they cannot accept the idea that their son, Asher (Ari Brand),
could possibly want to be an artist, something they consider sinful as per the
Torah’s teachings. But Asher happens to be a prodigy, and even at the age of
six is in conflict with his parents, particularly his devout but loving father,
over his preoccupation with drawing. Once the conflict is set up, it continues
through the years. We see Asher at age ten, thirteen, and eighteen, when he has
a major exhibition in New York. At each step the conflict deepens, but it is
always the same conflict.
Asher’s warmhearted mother is
sympathetic, and even Aryeh begins to slowly come around when he realizes how
famous and financially successful his boy is becoming. But Asher, believing he
must be true to his vision of artistic truth and not become a “whore” by
denying it, portrays his mother in a crucifixion image, with himself and his
father to either side, thereby expressing his view of her as an anguished soul
torn between her love for her son and her husband. The parents see the picture
at Asher’s big gallery opening and we watch as their pride in his
accomplishment turns to ashes as they view his obviously shocking portrait of
them.
Posner, in his 90-minute,
intermissionless, adaptation, is unable to cover all the years in Asher’s
journey easily, so he resorts to having Asher narrate the story, using
flashbacks. A considerable amount of stage time is thereby consumed by this
earnest narrative. While only one actor plays Asher, Mark Nelson plays the
father, a wise family rebbe, and Jacob Kahn, a famous Jewish artist, once
religious but now secular, who becomes Asher’s mentor and entrée into a world
of liberal thought no ordinary Hassid would ever join. Jenny Bacon makes a
striking transformation from the wig-wearing Rivkeh to the roles of a
fashionable gentile gallery owner and a nude model (whose posing is seen only
from the back). There is a lot of talk about why it’s necessary for Asher to
paint pictures of Jesus and nude females, what being an artist means, how one
can be a pious Jew and also an artist, and so on. Much of the play has a
didactic tone as we hear Asher debate these issues with both his father and Kahn;
it is often interesting but not always very dramatic, allowing the play to become
unduly talkative. At the end, Asher, even in the face of a biting diatribe
against him in the New York Times,
has somehow come to terms with his unique situation, even if at the cost of
having seriously hurt his parents.
Ari Brand is intense and urgent
as the conflicted artist, but he doesn’t have many colors on his palette and
conveys the same troubled earnestness as a six-year-old as he does as a teenager.
The other actors have a chance to show more variety, but only Jenny Bacon
succeeds in offering something of the chameleon quality required. The
rich-voiced Mark Nelson is always satisfactory, but does not really make his
Jacob Kahn that much different than his Aryeh Lev, unless the intention is to
underline both the similarities and differences between the two father figures
in Asher’s life.
The entire play is set in a space
designed by Eugene Lee that serves equally well as a Brooklyn apartment and an
artist’s studio, among other locales; its garret-like windows allow for James
F. Ingalls’s subtle lighting to underline the play’s dramatic undercurrents.
49. THE GREAT GOD
PAN
The hottest new
playwright in town is Amy Herzog, who has received many glowing notices for her
recent 4,000 MILES at Lincoln Center,
her current THE GREAT GOD PAN at Playwrights Horizons, and the out-of-town
production of BELLEVILLE, soon to arrive in New York. Charles Isherwood wrote
in his New York Times review that THE
GREAT GOD PAN was “haunting,” but that it “may not satisfy theatergoers looking
for highly charged drama with tidy resolutions. Its assemblage of scenes . . .
can seem arbitrary, its dramatic pulse distinctly soft.” When I emerged from
the theatre, I admit to having felt satisfied with the results, but on the
subway ride home, after talking it over with my wife, I began to doubt my
original feelings and to suspect I had been more impressed by the strong
performances than by the play itself. Ultimately, I realized I was one of those
whose responses Isherwood was so casually dismissing.
This slight, conventional,
90-minute, intermissionless play begins with a meeting between Frank (Keith
Nobbs), a heavily tattooed, gay massage therapist, and up and coming journalist Jamie (Jeremy Strong,
believable), a childhood friend Frank last saw 25 years ago when each of them
was 7. Frank declares that he is filing charges against his own father for
having abused him during his childhood. The father’s own admission of guilt indicates
that he may have abused Jamie and others as well, and Frank wants to know what
Jamie remembers. Jamie, who remembers nothing, is flustered by the news and,
aware of his own relationship problems, begins to wonder if he has been
suppressing his memory of whatever may have happened. Encounters with his
mother (Becky Ann Baker), father (Peter Friedman), former babysitter (Joyce Van
Patten), now suffering from dementia, offer nothing concrete but do manage to
increase Jamie’s fear that he may actually have been abused. The situation also
leads to serious conflict with his pregnant girlfriend, Paige (Sarah Goldberg,
very good), a nutrition therapist, whom he informs of what Frank told him,
while leaving out the part about his own possible involvement. When she finds
out that he held this information back from her, she is furious and mentions
things about his recent sexual behavior that she thinks may have been influenced
by such experiences, if, indeed, they really happened. Meanwhile, we see Paige
conducting therapeutic sessions with an anorexic girl, Joelle (Erin Wilhelmi),
during which she struggles with her own emotional problems, although the play
does not explain what relationship these have to Jamie’s difficulties. Finally,
when Jamie is unwilling to hear Frank describe what Frank’s father allegedly
did to the children he molested, Frank writes it on a piece of paper and hands
it to Jamie to read when he is ready. The play ends right there, and Jamie’s
memories of what may have happened remain clouded and unresolved.
Throughout we listen to the
characters struggle to recall minor and major things from the past; some things
have stuck, some have vanished. This is true for everyone, of course, and
whether deeper therapy can help Jamie recover his submerged memories is
undisclosed. So, essentially, the play is about Frank coming from nowhere into Jamie’s
life, suggesting that Jamie may or may not have had a horrendous experience as
a child, which causes Jamie’s psyche to begin crumbling, merely because of the
possibility of what may have happened: curtain. Yes, Mr. Isherwood, I agree
that many theatergoers will be disturbed by the lack of a “tidy resolution,” or
at least by the lack of something more dramatically compelling.
Fortunately, Herzog has a good ear
for dialogue and is able to create people who are recognizable and offer actors
something to bite into. But, in this play at any rate, she seems to want to
handle big ideas while not having found a suitable context for doing so. The
characters and their aspirations and fears remain unfulfilled, merely figures
on a dramatist’s writing desk waiting for a play in which to breathe more fully.
50. GOLDEN
AGE
Before writing GOLDEN
AGE, now at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage 1 at City Center, Terrence McNally
expressed his passion for opera in two other plays, MASTER CLASS and THE LISBON
TRAVIATA. For me, the only one of this trio that works is MASTER CLASS. The
opera background is the only true link among this trio, as each has its own
themes, characters, and even time periods. GOLDEN AGE, as the program tells us,
takes place “Backstage at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris on the evening of
January 24, 1835, the first performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s last opera, I Puritani.” The central character is
Bellini (Lee Pace) himself, so where do we find him during most of the opera’s
premier performance, which is going on in the theatre proper, offstage?
Backstage, of course, where not only he, but all the principal singers—the
rotund soprano Giulia Grisi (Dierdre Friel); the bald, stubby bass, Lablache
(Ethan Phillips); the conceited lady’s man of a baritone, Tamburini (Lorenzo
Pisoni); and Rubini (Eddie Kaye Thomas), the bearded tenor, proud of his
ability to hit the note of “F.” Their efforts in the opera are incidental while
their backstage relationships are central, even during the course of the opera
itself. And, of course, others deeply interested in the opera ignore it as well
(apart from what little they can hear from backstage); these include the
presumably bisexual Bellini’s lover and patron, Florimo (Will Rogers), and a
rival soprano diva, La Malibran (Bebe Neuwirth), who has come to Paris
explicitly to view the production, in which she herself might have starred.
Toward the end of the play, the aged composer Rossini (George Morfogen,
replacing F. Murray Abraham) ventures backstage, more concerned, it would seem,
to express his heartfelt compliments to Bellini than to sit through the grand
finale of the grand opera he so warmly appreciates.
Yes, you have to accept McNally’s
conceit that even Bellini himself would prefer to rant and rave and engage in a
panoply of emotional theatrics (partly owing to his suffering from TB, bloody
hankie and all) in his backstage world—equipped with a piano on which he
occasionally plays, regardless of any consideration that perhaps the audience
might hear him—rather than to actually witness the performance; what need, when
others, especially Florimo, can so easily check out the proceedings and report
back regularly? Now and then, we are allowed to hear snatches of the opera
being performed out of our view.
There are plenty of doings in
this backstage world, but very little real plot, which makes the two and a half
hours of Bellini and company’s innocuous personal issues ever harder to take,
especially since the play’s tiresome attempts at humor can be summed up by the
running joke of the baritone Lothario’s constantly stuffing his pants with
fruits and vegetables to make his cocksure behavior present in the flesh as
well as in his attitude. The cast is uniformly spirited but there are too many
stylistic differences among them, ranging from the overtly melodramatic
flailing of Bellini to the farcical carryings on of Grisi and Tamburini to the
restrained cynicism of La Malibran to the simple realism of Rossini. I was
particularly disappointed in Neuwirth, a longtime favorite; although she looks
lovely, her diminutive size (underlined when she stands next to the very tall
Lee Pace) makes her unconvincing as a 19th-century diva.
Fortunately, Santo Loquasto’s imaginative
creation of a backstage environment, Jane Greenwood’s excellent period
costumes, and Peter Kaczorowski’s nuanced lighting give the proceedings a
visual appeal that helps soften the play’s dramaturgic and performative weaknesses.
51. WATER BY THE
SPOONFUL
The 2012 Pulitzer
Prize-winning drama, WATER BY THE SPOONFUL, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, opens soon
at the Second Stage Theatre, where it is being given a respectable production
under the direction of Davis McCallum. The play is the second in a trilogy
Hudes is writing, the first, ELLIOT, A SOLDIER’S FUGUE, having been a Pulitzer
finalist, but the plays are meant to stand alone, making knowledge of the
others unnecessary. Despite its having received the Pulitzer, or perhaps
because of it, I was disappointed because the play was so distinctly lacking in
the ability to make me willingly suspend my disbelief. The fact that a
theatrical character is, by its very nature, an artificial construct doesn’t mean
you can’t believe in it if it is true to itself and to the world in which its
author places it. Thus I give myself totally to the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and
Cowardly Lion in THE WIZARD OF OZ because they satisfy this requirement.
WATER BY THE SPOONFUL, however,
is not a fantasy; despite certain theatrically stylized liberties, it is mostly
realistic. The principle nonrealistic artistic conceit is the presentation of an
Internet chat room during which the participants speak the words they’d
normally be writing; instead of communicating with keyboards and monitors they simply
direct their words toward the audience, even if the person they’re addressing
is right next to them. This is acceptable as far as it goes; once we catch on
to the idea that the handful of correspondents, scattered about on disparate
pieces of home and office furniture, are sharing a virtual, not an actual
space, and that the names and photos projected on the wall behind them are
their screen identities (Haikumom, Chutes and Ladders, Orangutan, and
Fountainhead), we can appreciate their interplay as we come to realize that
they are all struggling with crack cocaine addiction and that this is a
Narcotics Anonymous site. But once their relationships go deeper than mutual
support and criticism (with the site administrator, Haikumom [Liza
Colón-Zayas], censoring any vulgarity), and move from the virtual into the real
world, I had really serious problems in believing that any of this was really
happening.
For example, Orangutan (Jean Sue
Kim), a young woman of Japanese ancestry who was abandoned and raised by a
white couple in Maine goes to Japan to teach English and decides to search for
her birth mother. Meanwhile, she has become thoroughly infatuated with the
uptight middle-aged black man she knows only as Chutes and Ladders (Frankie
Faison). She becomes so desperate for his affection he decides to sell his car,
leave his job, and fly to Japan to join her. Instead of traveling to where she’s
living, in Sapporo, he flies instead to Tokyo, which is like going to Chicago
instead of New York, so, despite her frustration, she has to take a leave from
her job to meet him. When he arrives, he leaves her waiting outside customs for
hours because he is so sick to his stomach he must spend the time barfing in
the bathroom. Finally, he emerges into the waiting area and not only meets the
girl for the first time, but also only then exchanges real names with her. I’ll
take the Cowardly Lion any day.
The play has too much of this
kind of thing, including an assortment of crack addicts all of whom are
middle-class, highly articulate professionals. There are, undoubtedly, educated
crack heads, but to have all of them on
this level rings as false as the way the actual chat room conversation is
conducted. And, as my son, who accompanied me, asked, since when is crack a
major drug among such people in this day and age?
Meanwhile, the chat room stories
are only half of the dramaturgical equation. There’s also a major plotline
about Elliot (Armando Riesco), an Iraq war veteran and would-be actor who makes
a living as a sandwich guy at Subway; he speaks with an authentic Spanglish
street accent, and is haunted by a war experience (rather vaguely expressed) with
an Arab. He has been raised by his beloved Puerto Rican aunt Ginny, who has just
died and whose funeral he’s busy arranging with his slightly older cousin, Yaz
(Zabryna Guevara), an adjunct professor of music who has a big scene in which
she gives a lecture about how John Coltrane revolutionized jazz by introducing
dissonance, clearly a subtextual reference to the beautiful dissonance in
people’s relationships. This plotline blends with the chat room stories when we
learn that Haikumom (real name: Odessa) is Elliot’s birth mother, whom he
strongly resents for having been so incapable of caring for him he had to be raised
by her sister (maybe he also resents that fact that the actress playing Odessa doesn’t
look a day older than he). And it is only through a really implausible plot
device that Elliot—himself a pill popper because of his Iraq experiences—goes
on line and learns about Odessa’s work with crack addicts, so each step the
playwright makes to blend the two plotlines only serves to emphasize the
essential problem she set up for herself and the difficulty she faced in
resolving it. Her theme of people needing people, and of the human need to
communicate, is deeply felt but, in this context, artificially presented, and
thus rings false. Also running through the play like a leitmotif are references
to water, in both its destructive and creative aspects, but these provide
literary, not dramatic vitality.
Even the set design is unable to
reconcile the play’s dramatic threads. Neil Patel’s set of sliding panels with
cube-like segments (used for a generous amount of projections by Aaron Rhyne) is
generally abstract so that it can encompass multiple locales; for the most part
it works efficiently, but when the action moves at the end to Puerto Rico, to
which Elliot and Yaz have traveled, we are suddenly faced by a realistic
background painting of a waterfall, completely out of sync with the approach
followed in the rest of the play.
52. PICNIC
If, like me, your
teenage years were spent in the 1950s, you’ll clearly recall the impact of the
1955 film version of William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, PICNIC,
about how people in a small Kansas town react to the arrival of a sexy young
drifter named Hal Carter. Seeing the current Roundabout revival at the American
Airlines Theatre brought memories of the movie flooding back.
The original stage version
starred Ralph Meeker as Hal, with Janice Rule in the role of Madge, the town
beauty, and Paul Newman making his Broadway debut in the secondary role of Hal’s
local friend, Alan Seymour. Newman understudied Meeker (and ultimately replaced
him), while Joanne Woodward did so for Rule. As every theatre and film buff
knows, Woodward and Newman fell in love, married, and remained so until Newman
died in 2008.
The movie starred the 37-year-old
William Holden as Hal, who should be around 22, and the up-and-coming sex bomb
Kim Novak, then 22, as the 18-year-old Madge. Despite the disparity in their
ages, there was real chemistry in this pairing, as you can see for yourself
(http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwq44_picnic-1955-w-holden-k-novak_music)
after Holden stops dancing with Millie (Susan Strasberg). To one 15-year-old
boy, Novak’s sex appeal was never as alive as in her dance scene with Holden.
In the picture, it’s set during the picnic noted in the title, but in the play
it takes place on the lawn of Madge’s house, where the middle-aged lovers,
Rosemary and Howard, join in. The movie scene is enormously enhanced by the
song being played in the background, “Moonglow,” which became a huge hit
because of the film. In the current revival, several nondescript but upbeat pop
tunes are used.
So PICNIC has very personal
vibrations for many people of a certain age. Seeing anyone other than the now
iconic images of Holden and Novak as Hal and Madge would have to be
disappointing, unless some casting genius were able to find their equivalents
among today’s young actors. Sadly, with Sebastian Stan as Hal and Maggie Grace
as Madge, that isn’t the case. Stan, who goes through large chunks of the play
with his muscular upper body, oiled to look like sweat, on display, is
physically attractive, but his acting tries too hard to capture the loutish,
uneducated Hal’s crudity and overt sexuality, and often seems more forced than
natural. (Hal seems very much a reflection of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, down to his
ripped shirt. Happily, he never screams out “Ma-a-a-dge!”)
Maggie Grace’s Madge is
unconvincing as a proper young woman who suddenly finds herself driven by a
powerful attraction she is unable to suppress; in addition, she’s awkward and
occasionally struggles not to step over her own feet. Novak was not a great
actress, but she had the sensual thing down right, and when she rhythmically
walked her way into the dance with Holden, you could practically hear the male
hearts beating in the theatre.
Despite lacking such powerful
magnetism in its central characters, this production, directed by the red-hot
Sam Gold, nevertheless makes seeing PICNIC worthwhile. The play has a number of
colorful characters, several of whom reveal the amusingly dizzying effects of
sexual forces bubbling beneath the surface of repressed, small-town Kansans,
and most of the secondary characters are well drawn. The play clearly
underlines various gender issues with its depiction of conventional and
nonconventional male and female behavior, and how people struggle to deal with
the roles they’ve been assigned or have assumed for themselves; on the other
hand, it asks that you accept certain dramatic possibilities, such as that
Madge will actually leave home to follow Hal (who has run off to Tulsa by
hopping a freight train), someone she’s met only the day before. When I
expressed my doubts about whether this would happen in reality to my
21-year-old granddaughter, who accompanied me, she disagreed, saying such a
thing was not at all unusual, and even cited someone she knows who did
something similar (although not after only a day’s acquaintance).
Particularly
successful among the actors is Elizabeth Marvel as the spinsterish Rosemary
(the great Rosalind Russell in the movie), who is reduced to begging her
middle-aged beau, Howard (the dependable Reed Birney) to marry her, as he has often promised.
Birney is excellent, as are the redoubtable Ellen Burstyn as Mrs. Potts and the
always reliable Mare Winningham as Mrs. Owens, Madge’s mother. The rest of the
cast acquits itself well.
The two houses
that form Andrew Lieberman’s set are here placed next to each other in a
strange arrangement, with the Owens house dominating the upstage area and Mrs.
Potts’s house jutting on from stage left. This leaves a triangle of grassy
space at stage right, backed by an enormous wooden fence that reaches to the
rafters. There is absolutely no hint of the sky, much less of the moon, despite
textual references to these things. Most shots of other productions on the
Internet show a house at either side, with an expanse of sky up center,
sometimes with a full moon suspended there. Perhaps the intent is to suggest
how fenced in the small lives of these characters are, or perhaps the director
wanted to be able to locate the main house upstage center so he could stage a
few scenes inside it, as in a doll house, with the action just visible through
the windows. Whatever the reason, the set looked off kilter and realistically
unconvincing, and was not conducive to the romantic feeling a vision of the sky
overhead might have created.
PICNIC remains
a viable theatre piece. It moves swiftly, has a full complement of laughs, and
contains pathos, romance, and sex. This production is respectable and sometimes
highly effective. But it lacks the throbbing sexual tension that would have
made it memorable.:
53.
MULAN, THE MUSICAL
Maybe it’s because
I’m already starting to lose my hearing, but, despite being warned, I didn’t
need to protect myself with earplugs during the almost continual assortment of percussive
displays that constitute the principal reason for seeing MULAN, THE MUSICAL at
the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre. This Chinese import, presented by the Red Poppy
Ladies’ Percussion, Ltd., features a dozen young women from Beijing, and tells
the ancient story of Mulan, the girl who allows herself to be conscripted into
the army as a boy in order to prevent her aged father from having to go instead.
At the end, of course, when her true gender is revealed, she is celebrated for
her bravery and filial piety. Western familiarity with the story is based on
the Disney animated feature film about Mulan, but there is no other connection
between Disney and this show.
In essence, the story is acted
out in a sequence of thirteen episodes, with titles like “A Stormy Night,”
“Gongfu,” “At School,” “Working and Playing,” and so on. There are a few
passages where dialogue or snatches of song are heard, all in Mandarin, but,
for the most part, everything is in pantomimed movement or precision
drill-style choreography. The movements, poses, and occasional vocalization are
strongly influenced by traditional Chinese opera (jingju), and there is even a sequence where the performers engage
in mock battle using the flexible, red and white striped “spears” seen on the jingju stage, although without the incredible
acrobatics associated with that form.
Since the movements and lack of
dialogue only now and then have an apparent narrative meaning, the story is
conveyed mainly through projections on an upstage screen. The images combine
supertitles explaining some new development in the story with video and stills
meant to enhance the onstage action, such as flying arrows during a battle
scene. But many images are abstract and seem chosen mainly for aesthetic effect
rather than narrative meaning. Ultimately, the mélange of projections comes off
like theatrical chop suey. Some of the supertitles, which were occasionally out
of order when I saw the show, are, sorry to say, written in Chinglish, and the
bottom half of one lengthy supertitle was hidden by an onstage scenic element.
The main course here is the company’s
extraordinary drumming talents. Each scene is merely an excuse to set up a new
drumming sequence, with most ot the percussion being produced on a variety of
traditional instruments, small and large, although there are also routines
where the drummers pound on desks and other objects. The drumming, of course,
is accompanied by dynamic poses. Seeing a dozen lithe young women performing
unbelievably complex rhythmic patterns in perfectly synchronized precision is
an experience not soon forgotten, although I was glad that the show lasted only
70 intermissionless minutes. I’m unable to say, however, that an hour later I
was hungry for more.
54. THE OTHER PLACE
When the doors to
the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre’s auditorium open prior to the start of Sharr
White’s THE OTHER PLACE, the entering audience sees not only the curtain-less
stage with its spare set and preshow lighting, but the solitary figure of an
actress sitting nearly statue-still in an armchair at center, her shapely legs
crossed, isolated in a softly focused spotlight. Her face is hard to make out
but she is dressed in a tailored suit and heels. If you watch her closely you’ll
see she’s concentrating on writing notes on a pad in her lap, but her movements
are nearly indiscernible. As the moment for the show to begin arrives, she
moves more noticeably and when the lights come up she rises and begins to speak
in a strong, determined voice, delivering a lecture on a new medication to an
audience of doctors. The actress is Laurie Metcalf, and she’s about to offer a
tour de force revelation of what first-class acting is all about.
Happily, she’s involved in a
vehicle perfectly designed for her dramatic talents. The theatre season is past
its midway mark, but the real rush of shows, both on and off Broadway, has yet
to begin; that will come in March and April, when productions vie to get on the
boards in time for the seasonal awards. So there may be more affecting and
effective plays and performances yet to arrive, but they will have to contend
with the high water mark set by Metcalf and THE OTHER PLACE.
Actually, the play is not really
new to New York. It was given a highly praised premier in March 2011 in a
production also starring Metcalf (nominated for a 2011 Drama Desk Award), so
this is simply its Broadway premier. As might be expected, Metcalf’s
competition for the DD’s Best Actress Award—which covers both Broadway and Off
Broadway—was tough: Nina Arianda in Born
Yesterday, Stockard Channing in Other
Desert Cities, Frances McDormand
in Good People, Michele Pawk in A Small Fire, and Lily Rabe in The
Merchant of Venice. McDormand was the winner, and, since she was already
nominated for her role in The Other Place,
Metcalf isn’t eligible again for that award. But I’d be extremely surprised if
she’s not a nominee for this year’s Tony (which covers only Broadway), so
compelling and authoritative is her artistry.
She plays Juliana, a brain
specialist who has patented a pill for dementia that will probably make
billions. However, as we see her undergo various episodes in which she confuses
illusion and reality, the play gradually reveals that she is herself suffering,
not from the brain cancer she suspects, but from dementia, a diagnosis she defiantly
refuses to accept. Her personal life has engraved deep chasms in her psyche as
she copes with the memory of a daughter who ran off one day and whose fate has
never been determined, and with her fraying marriage to an oncologist, Ian (the
very good Daniel Stern, in a role unlike any I’ve ever seen him in on screen).
A scene toward the end, where Juliana barges in to the family’s Cap Cod home
(“the other place”), and confronts a young woman she believes is her daughter,
opened the spigots in my tear ducts. Metcalf brings anger, insecurity,
jealousy, cruelty, love, cynicism, and distrust to Juliana’s crumbling stability,
and to watch her go from the self-assured woman we see at the beginning to a
rumpled creature finally able to confront the demon she is facing, is both
emotionally devastating and theatrically fulfilling.
Zoe Perry, Metcalf’s actual
daughter, plays the several other women in the play, and shows that the acorn
did not fall far from the tree, while John Schiappa (from the original
production) effectively plays the other men.
Joe Mantello’s direction is
perfectly calibrated to elicit all the play’s affecting (and humorous) facets,
and the set by Eugene Lee and Edward Pierce is thoroughly conducive to
expressing the play’s thematic and dramatic substance. It consists of a
surrounding, semicircular, wall of open, interlocking frame-like squares and
rectangles, suggesting, perhaps, the problematic gray matter that lies at the
heart of the play, while Justin Townsend’s lighting, the video and projection
designs by Will Cusick, and the sound design by Fitz Patton are among the most
creatively potent of any available this season. If there’s a place on Broadway
you’re sure to find good drama acted to within an inch of its life, that place
is THE OTHER PLACE.
55. CAT ON A HOT TIN
ROOF
There are a lot
of cats screeching in this revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 play at the
Richard Rodgers Theatre, but none needs a shoe thrown at her as much as Scarlett
Johansson. From the moment the curtain rises and Johansson’s Maggie “the Cat”
begins speaking to her alcoholic husband, the ex-football hero Brick Pollitt
(Benjamin Walker), in a monotonous stream of anger and sarcasm, she seems more
a candidate for the ASPCA than a seductive vamp trying to lure her sexually
ambivalent spouse into bed with her. Costume
designer Julie Weiss hasn’t helped matters much in giving this Maggie a rather
dumpy-looking slip that doesn’t come close to doing for Johansson’s figure what
the one worn in the 1958 movie version did for Elizabeth Taylor 55 years ago. Here
she is, if you need proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OchpaSIYrDY.
Taylor’s Maggie would be hard for any man to resist. She also makes you
empathize with Maggie’s dilemma; Johansson elicits not a whit of compassion for
her plight.
Benjamin Walker’s Brick, like
Sebastian Stan’s Hal in the current revival of PICNIC, spends much of Act I
shirtless. But, good-looking as he is, he fails to suggest the inner ravages of
a man whose self-doubts and sense of alienation have eroded his soul to where
he’s never without a glass of whiskey, waiting for that “click” that will signal
his having totally separated himself from his problems, the way a room goes dark
when you click off a switch. The late Paul Newman, who played Brick opposite
Taylor, remains the consummate actor in this role.
On a side note, this season appears,
thus far, to be an homage to Taylor and Newman. There was the Public Theatre’s
musical version of GIANT, of course, which brought back memories of Taylor’s
performance in the 1956 film version, while Taylor’s Martha in the 1966 movie
of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? was
compared positively by many to Amy Morton’s portrayal in the current Broadway
revival. And, as I reported recently, Newman did not play Hal in the movie of Picnic, but he played Alan Seymour while
understudying Ralph Meeker’s Hal, and eventually took over that role
himself. (Ben Brantley in his New York Times review mistakenly claimed that Newman
originated the role of Hal.)
The production’s Big Daddy and
Big Mama aren’t strong enough to overcome the deficiencies of Maggie and Brick.
Ciarán Hinds’s fully bearded Big Daddy comes closest to the mark with a
reasonably colorful performance as the wealthy plantation owner who insists on
getting to the truth of matters only to learn that the positive news about his
illness is a lie and that he is dying of cancer. Debra Monk’s Big Mama, dressed
in hunter green, too often borders on hysteria in her concern for Big Daddy’s
welfare, making it clear why Big Daddy is so willing to admit how much he
despises her. But should the audience feel the same way about her?
This production
has been over-directed by Rob Ashford, who allows each character one or more
chances to vent his or her spleen at operatic levels; he also uses a variety of
poorly motivated staging tricks to keep the actors moving around the bedroom
set in which all the action takes place. Brick, despite a painful ankle injury
that has placed his foot in a cast and forced him to use a crutch (in addition
to the one symbolized by his whiskey), walks about continuously, every now and
then falling down and struggling to get up. And the bed gets a workout, of
course, although not for its usual purposes. In the long scene between Brick
and his father, each has to mount the bed at one time or another, at one time
both together, merely to have somewhere other than one of the multiple chairs
available to flop on during their conversation. Michael Park as Brick’s greedily
ambitious brother, Gooper, and Emily Bergl as his equally avaricious wife, Mae
aka Sister Woman, generally acquit themselves well, although they both get
their arias, Park in particular.
The expansive bedroom in Big
Daddy’s Mississippi plantation home consists of a wall-less semicircle of four
huge sets of French doors, with billowing curtains, and a high, hexagon-shaped ceiling
of exposed rafters from which hang a pair of old electric fans and a huge
chandelier. The chairs are rattan, with cushioned seats, making nonsense of a
line about how expensive it would be to upholster one of them. As befits an
expensive Broadway production, the lighting and offstage sounds (especially a
raging storm) and music do what they can to create a hothouse atmosphere. But,
as this staging of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
demonstrates, you can’t have a hothouse without heat.
56. MIDSUMMER (A
PLAY WITH SONGS)
Scotland’s
Traverse Theatre won the 2012 Best of Edinburgh Award (shared with MIES JULIE)
with this play by David Greig, with songs by Gordon McIntyre. It was a big hit
when it first opened in 2008, and has since toured the United States, Ireland,
the U.K., Canada, and Australia. Its current incarnation is at the Clurman
Theatre on Theatre Row. This intimate venue was half empty at the midweek
performance I saw, and I’m afraid my own response will not help round up
additional theatergoers.
This is a two-actor play with
songs, not a musical; the poetically folksy, guitar-accompanied songs scattered
through the show are mainly to provide emotional vibrations, and do nothing to
tell the story or illuminate the characters. These are Bob (Matthew Pidgeon)
and Helena (Cora Bissett), the latter obviously a reference to the similarly
named figure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Shakespeare’s romantic comedy seems to have inspired playwright Greig to write
a play about two contemporary, Scottish, would-be lovers on Midsummer night in
Edinburgh. Midsummer’s plot is concerned
with how two unlikely lovers fall for one another on a Midsummer weekend filled
with eventful happenings. That’s about the extent of the Shakespeare influence.
Bob and Helena, both 35, are
loveless, single losers. Desperate, Helena goes to a pub and picks up Bob, a
petty criminal, for a one-night stand. Bob has to turn over a stolen car to a
buyer for 15,000 pounds and then deposit the money in the bank for the gangster
who hired him. Bob and Helena unintentionally develop a relationship beyond
having sex, although they’re not willing to admit it. Bob, unable to deposit
the money before the bank closes, decides to splurge it with Helena on a night
of drugs, booze, and Japanese bondage. When the overweight, older gangster
finds out, he chases Bob but drops dead before his fist hits Bob’s face. The
lovers set off for Europe to fulfill their dreams.
This simple story seems a lot
more complex when you watch the play because all of it is enacted by two actors
playing not only Bob and Helena, but the other mildly colorful characters—an
autistic-seeming child, a Goth teenager, a bank guard, Helena’s angry sister,
Bob’s teenage son, etc.—who figure in the action. The play is structured in
story theatre style, with Bob and Helena narrating, sometimes speaking in the
author’s voice, sometimes in their character’s voices, while rapidly shifting
course from direct address to the audience to actual dialogue in the play
proper. This can get confusing, so it’s wise to listen closely. The very
colloquial, profanity-laced dialogue is spoken with Scottish accents.
There is a small number of juicy
scenes, such as one in which Bob is having difficulty peeing because he has an
erection, so he engages in an extended conversation with his penis. No nudity
is involved, however, as the stand-in for Bob’s member is a red Elmo doll that
figured in a previous scene. Nor is there nudity in the scene in which Bob and
Helena have sex in a variety of positions, during which Bob’s lines, not heard
by Helena, reveal his inner thoughts as he struggles to complete the act
successfully.
For all the play’s potential on
paper, it comes to life only sporadically on stage. Clocking in at an hour and
45 minutes, without an intermission, it flags far too early, and the two
actors, who also sing and play the guitar, while talented, simply didn’t have
the charisma to keep me interested for very long. The play requires actors
capable of giving a tour-de-force performance; Matthew Pidgeon and Cora Bissett
play people facing a life-changing moment—a principal theme is the need to have
the courage to change and not stay in a rut—but they are too sweet and lacking
the edge these characters require if we want to see how love alters them. In a
play like this, the lovers must not only fall in love with each other, but the
audience must fall in love with them. This didn’t happen for me, even though I
wish I could have warmed to Midsummer on this midwinter night.
57. THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF
SONG: THE MUSIC OF HAROLD ARLEN
Much as those of us of a
certain age could probably sing the lyrics to many of the songs in this juke
box revue of Harold Arlen’s music, it’s a sad reality that many younger people
would look glassy-eyed if you asked them even to hum such tunes as “Get Happy,”
“World on a String,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Down with Love,” “Blues in the
Night,” “Paper Moon,” or “Anyplace I Hang My Hat is Home.” Try asking the
average college student if they’ve ever heard of “Come Rain or Come Shine,”
“Stormy Weather,” “That Old Black Magic,” “I’ve Got the Right to Sing the
Blues,” or“The Gal That Got Away.” Most of Arlen’s songs, like so many in the
great American songbook, are now largely the domain of old-time show biz
aficionados or seniors passing their days in nursing homes. About the only
numbers that young and old alike will easily recognize are the evergreens from The Wizard of Oz, half a dozen of which
close out this show. The final number is “Somewhere over the Rainbow,”
reportedly voted the greatest song of the twentieth century.
If you brought an Arlen-deprived youngster with you to St.
Luke’s Theatre to see THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF SONG, the odds are you’d lose all
credibility in their eyes when the show was over. Sad to say, the Arlen songs I’ve
mentioned, so deeply embedded in the bloodstream of people raised in the U.S.A.
during the thirties, forties, and fifties, are given only so-so performances by
the four modestly talented singers in this low-rent presentation. A mediocre
trio of male singers, calling themselves The Three Crooners (George Bugatti,
Marcus Goldhaber, and Joe Shepherd) and a young African-American woman
(Antoinette Henry), of Rubenesque proportions, offer conventional renderings of
Arlen’s music, none of them coming close to the level of the Sinatras,
Bennetts, Garlands, Fitzgeralds, Hornes, and so on who made these tunes
immortal (or so we once thought). The standout is Ms. Henry, dressed for most
of the show like a 1940s-style night club chanteuse, a la Billie Holiday (but
without the gardenia), in a full-length, blue evening dress and long white
gloves. Her powerful voice often borders on shrillness, though, and her
interpretations lack depth or originality.
The singers are not helped by a piano accompanist (Andrew
Simpson) whose aggressive key pounding sometimes threatens to swallow them, by
Gene Castle’s cheesy choreography and direction, or by the commonplace dialogue
George Bugatti has written to link the songs and give the audience some sense
of who Harold Arlen was. The simple set shows several panels at either side plastered
with movie posters and pictures of Arlen, while an upstage screen provides a
background for still and video projections, the most interesting of which are
home movie clips Arlen took during the filming of The Wizard of Oz.
Harold Arlen was indeed a
wonderful wizard of song; The Wonderful Wizard of Song lacks such a
wizard and is not nearly as wonderful.
58. AIRSWIMMING
There is a tiny
theatre in the basement of the Irish Repertory Theatre that you reach by going
down a flight of stairs and walking along a series of narrow corridors. It is
an overheated, claustrophobic space, which is just the right setting for
Charlotte Jones’s 80-minute two-hander, AIRSWIMMING, set in a nondescript room—part
bathroom, part inmates’ cell—at England’s St. Dymphna’s Institution for the
Criminally Insane. A small picture of Dymphna, the patron saint of the
criminally insane, as she is called in the play, is the only decoration. There
is a single, small window, high on a wall. In this extremely cramped
environment, where the low ceiling over the stage and audience is composed of
beams and steam pipes you can practically reach up and touch, are Dora (Aedín
Moloney) and Persephone (Rachel Pickup), who have little to do except mop,
scrub, and scour. Dora, soon called Dorph, is short, homely, and direct; she
speaks in a lower-class accent, and displays a somewhat masculine demeanor.
Persephone, who will assume the name of Porph, is tall, slim, and beautiful;
her speech and movements betray her upper-class background. Both are dressed in
drab maid-like uniforms. The year is 1924.
Dorph has been incarcerated here
since 1922; Porph is the bewildered newcomer who has no idea of why she’s here,
declaring there’s been some mistake and that her family will soon come and take
her away. But she is deluded. In fact, Dorph and Porph are the fictionalized
versions of two women, Miss Kitson and Miss Baker, actually committed to an institution
(real name, St. Catherine’s) by their families for having had babies out of
wedlock. Left there to rot, no one ever claimed them and they remained
forgotten by the outside world as well, it would seem, as by the institution
itself, until released in 1972, half a century later, creating a national
scandal. No information is provided in the program about the real-life
situation that inspired the play, originally produced in England in 1997, but
this article from a contemporary newspaper will help those who might be
interested: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19720525&id=yoIuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=O6EFAAAAIBAJ&pg=7264,1765389
We see only these two women in a
series of scenes set over the fifty years of their residence in the institution,
where they have been declared “moral imbeciles,” and watch as they develop an
inseparable bond of friendship. For much of the play, the seemingly
stronger-willed Dorph acts as the protector and nursemaid over the delicate and
high-strung Porph, but later in the play it is Dorph who begins to break down
and needs the affection and care of Porph to survive. At one point, she tries
to drown herself in a bathtub (the third onstage bathtub scene I’ve witnessed
this season). The characters, who lose all sense of time and eventually have no
idea of what year, or even what decade, they’re living in, create a fantasy
life to help them pass the days. Porph believes she is channeling Doris Day
and, wearing a ratty blonde wig, sings Day’s most popular songs and references
things from her life, such as her support for animal rights. Dorph imagines
herself a male military officer; she is also prone to cite arcane references to
heroic women—the best known being Joan of Arc—of the past who overcame dire
circumstances. One way Dorph and Porph enjoy themselves is to imagine they are
doing synchronized swimming, and there are moments, especially in the poignant
closing moments, when they move their arms and bodies in swimming movements,
giving the play its unusual title.
There is very little reference to
any other inmates or to persons working in the institution. We don’t know
anything about who the women are in contact or what news they have of the
outside world, although the fact that Porph knows so much about Doris Day
suggests they have access to movies, records, and other forms of information.
Dorph is seen reading at several times.
Aedín Moloney and Rachel Pickup
both deserve applause for performances that manage to be both touching and
funny. Under John Keating’s sensitive direction, they never wallow in self-pity
but, except at the rare moments when life overwhelms them, they maintain a
lively and loving interest in each other and the fanciful things they imagine
in order to help survive their Kafkaesque ordeal. The fact that this story is
based, even if very loosely, on something that really happened in the civilized
country of England in the mid-twentieth century is astonishing, which only
deepens the echoes of this surprisingly affecting little play that continue to
haunt me.
59. BETHANY
To what lengths
would a woman desperate to regain custody of her five-year-old girl go to in
order to achieve that goal? What would be her moral boundaries if faced by this
dilemma, especially if the clock was ticking in her quest? Assume it’s 2009 and
she’s an attractive, capable saleswoman of Saturn cars who earns a nice
commission on every car she sells. Since she has to impress the social worker
who is looking into her suitability as a mother, would she take occupancy of an
empty, foreclosed house in an exurban neighborhood, in order to suggest a
respectable lifestyle? If she encountered there a disheveled, young, homeless
man already squatting there—one ready to assault any intruder with a two-by-four
and so given to conspiracy theories about the “military industrial complex” that
he refuses even to step outside—would she befriend him and convince him to
pretend to be the plumber when the social worker comes to inspect the premises?
When, after she learns she has only a few days left before she loses her job
because of Saturn’s imminent folding, would her need for money so blind her
that she would go to any lengths to sell a car to a middle-aged man whose
interest in sex rather than buying a car from her is obvious within five
minutes? What about after he takes her out to dinner, wangles his way into her
home, and refuses to leave, promising to buy the car if she goes with him
someplace else, away from that menacing housemate? When she returns to her home
and finds that her housemate has gone on a rampage, destroying the kitchen and writing
“WHORE” on the fridge in excrement, would she not merely fight back in self
defense when he threatens her with that handy two-by-four but, when she has him
at her mercy, cold-bloodedly smash in his skull? Would she then, with
tremendous effort, slowly, oh, so slowly, drag the corpse out through the
sliding glass doors, to dispose of later in some undisclosed way? Would she then
come back in and, almost as if she did it every day, methodically clean up the
blood and feces and broken furniture? And when, at the salesroom the next
morning, would she, when confronted by the wife and told that the man was both
jobless and penniless (unlike the wife, who admits to having money), and had no
intention of buying the car, lie that she and the man were in love and were
going to run away together as a way of extorting $10,000 from the wife in
return for giving him up? Would the wife actually give it to her? And, finally,
would she, using a fake lease, successfully convince the otherwise sharp-eyed social
worker that she was fit to have her child returned to her?
These are some of the questions
audiences will have to ask themselves if they are going to accept as plausible
the action in BETHANY, a play by Laura Marks, having its world premiere at City
Center under the auspices of the Women’s Project. This is one of those plays
that makes you want to shout at the characters, the playwright, the director
(Gayle Taylor Upchurch)—someone, anyone—for thinking they can fool an audience
so easily. (Perhaps they can, since the applause was far from cool.) BETHANY is
clearly intended to make the audience ponder the immoral lengths to which
someone might go to achieve some worthy goal, but, if the options are so
contrived and the choices so implausible, the play becomes little more than an
abstract exercise in relative morality with little basis in reality.
One reason many might visit this
production is the presence of America Ferrera (TV’s Ugly Betty) as Crystal, the central character. Ferrera gives a
perfectly professional performance but there’s little she can do to make her
character or the circumstances convincing. None of the other capable performances
is able to rise above the material, nor is the set—a simplified one that serves
as both a kitchen and a Saturn showroom, with a backdrop showing a
Levittown-like exurb as seen from the air—especially noteworthy. The most
memorable moments, theatrically, are the fight between Crystal and her
housemate, intended to be viciously brutal but actually rather clumsy, and the
lengthy sequence during which, using spray cleaner and paper towels, she cleans
up the bloody mess. If only the play itself could have been given the same
treatment.
60. IN ACTING SHAKESPEARE
In 1983, a rather naive,
young actor named James DeVita saw British star Ian McKellen do his one-man,
autobiographical play, ACTING SHAKESPEARE, in New York and had an epiphany.
Never having had a clue as to what made Shakespeare special, he suddenly
realized how great acting could make the Bard’s words exciting and accessible.
He then determined to overcome his personal limitations and become a classical
actor. Three decades later, having built a career in classical theatre, mainly
in the Midwest, he got permission from McKellen to adapt ACTING SHAKESPEARE for
his own performance. At first, he used McKellen’s own autobiographical words
for the non-Shakespearean parts of the narrative, but eventually realized the
show needed to be about him, James DeVita, not Ian McKellen; he then thoroughly
rewrote the narrative around his own life. The result is IN ACTING SHAKESPEARE,
now at the Pearl Theatre.
IN ACTING SHAKESPEARE is a two-act solo performance, running
two hours-plus, in which Mr. DeVita recounts his stumbling journey toward
classical actorhood, including his growing up on Long Island as the less than
well-educated son of a fisherman; his three years as a first mate on a fishing
boat; his unsuccessful attempts at college before being accepted at the
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; his struggle to overcome his acting
problems, including his New York-area accent (there’s an extended bit in which
a Kristin Linklater-type teacher tries to get him to say the “o” in “monarch”
correctly); his first professional job in Shakespeare, when he was cast as a
spear-carrier in a Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of OTHELLO,
starring Jimmy Smits, whose performance he watched in awe; his work in a
touring production of KING LEAR, staged by a Japanese director (obviously Suzuki
Tadashi, who goes unnamed); his listening to recordings of great English actors
doing Shakespeare; his successful, long-term engagement with the American
Players Theatre in Wisconsin; and various aspects of his private life.
Interwoven in the narrative is the story of Shakespeare’s
own journey, from an apparently education-deprived background in Stratford to a
magnificent career in London; the implication is that there are definitely
correspondences between DeVita’s life experiences and Shakespeare’s. Through it
all, DeVita speaks directly to the audience in both his own voice and those of
his teachers and others in his life, including women, while changing to a
variety of English accents to express, often in humorous ways, Shakespeare’s
own experiences. One nicely done bit, for example, shows Richard Burbage as a
somewhat dimwitted actor being directed by Shakespeare the first time he had to
read “To be or not to be” at rehearsal, and questioning the playwright about
the meaning and necessity of words like “contumely,” “fardels,” and “bodkin.”
At several junctions, Sir Ian himself materializes to
deliver some lines in his own voice, with DeVita doing what he can to imitate
the inimitable actor.
However, if you’re mainly interested in the acting of Shakespeare’s
plays, not DeVita the actor or Shakespeare the person, you’ll be seriously
disappointed. Judging by the script, only about one sixth of the performance is
of Shakespeare’s words; everything else is about the actor or the playwright.
When Shakespeare’s speeches do appear, they usually emerge from the narrative
itself, so that they assume a natural, honest connection to DeVita’s life.
Among the handful of plays quoted from are RICHARD III, HENRY IV, PART I,
HAMLET, and OTHELLO.
DeVita is a good-looking, well-built, average-sized man in
his early fifties, who wears just cowboy boots (which he admits are meant to
give him additional height), jeans, a white dress shirt, open at the collar,
and a black suit jacket that he uses in a variety of ways, such as an apron,
when needed. The stage is bare except for scenic flats stacked at the rear, and
the only props are a leather shoulder bag, a cane, a crate-like box, and a
chair, all of which serve multiple functions. Although the lighting is
generally unassuming, there are several moments when sound and lights combine
to create surprisingly effective moments.
DeVita has a distinct charm and a facility with Shakespeare’s
words that allow him to invest them with insightful readings that make them
immediate and comprehensible, but he is not without his own actorish tics and
mannerisms. You see how hard he’s working to create his effects, and this robs
him of the ease and complete naturalness that might otherwise invest him with
star quality. James DeVita had a life-changing experience when he saw Ian
McKellen in ACTING SHAKESPEARE. I’d be surprised if some young, aspiring actor
were to have a similar experience when seeing James DeVita in IN ACTING
SHAKESPEARE.
61. THE SUIT
Eighty-seven-year-old British
director Peter Brook is still at it. I’ve been following Brook’s remarkable
career ever since I saw his epochal MARAT/SADE and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
back when my hair not only was black but when I actually had the hair to make
that claim. In 1991 I even published an award-winning book, From Belasco to
Brook: Representative Directors of the English-Speaking Stage, in which I
included a lengthy discussion of Brook’s career until that time. His latest
piece, co-directed, designed, and composed with Marie Hélène Estienne and
Franck Krawczyk, is THE SUIT, now playing at the BAM Harvey Theatre.
The production has been performed at various international
venues, including Paris, where it was first done in French, and will continue
to tour, with trips scheduled to as far away as China. It has received
predominantly positive reviews, including one from Ben Brantley of the New
York Times who said it wrought “devastation by enchantment.” When the
performance ended tonight, the audience continued clapping far longer than I’ve
witnessed any audience doing so all season, although only a few people actually
stood (a custom that has become commonplace on Broadway, even for mediocrity).
I clapped dutifully, but with far less enthusiasm, I’m afraid. Not because the
show was bad, but because it simply wasn’t THAT good! The applause for the far
worthier THE OTHER PLACE was considerably briefer.
If you’ve seen Brook’s productions over the past three
decades, you’re sure to recognize his signature artistry; this aesthetic
evolved during the latter part of his career, after he’d spent months traveling
in Africa with a troupe of actors, performing for villagers under the most
restrictive conditions. The components include a nearly bare space, a rug, and
a minimum number of scenic props with multiple creative possibilities; onstage
musicians who may also participate in the action; the use of mime to suggest
minor props; a small cast, etc. In THE SUIT we have a rectangular coral-colored
rug to denote the main acting area; a dozen or so wooden chairs, painted in
bold primary colors—red, green, orange, blue; half a dozen metal clothing racks
on wheels, in different sizes; a table. Not much more is visible, apart from a
musician’s keyboard, but the Harvey’s famed architectural look of pitted and peeling
walls (first seen when Brook’s MAHABHARATA
played there in 1985), was fully exposed on the open stage.
The fable-like story is set during the apartheid era in a
South African suburb, Sophiatown, known for its rich cultural life, but
scheduled during the action for demolition so its inhabitants can be forced to
move elsewhere at the government’s request. Philemon (William Nadylam), a
middle-class law clerk, comes home one day to find his beautiful wife, Matilda
(Nonhlanhla Kheswa), in bed with another man, who flees, leaving his suit
behind. To punish her, Philemon requires that the suit, on its hanger, become
part of their daily lives, dining with and even sleeping with them, as a
constant reminder of Matilda’s transgression. She sadly submits to this
humiliation and, later, when she has joined and become active in a women’s
club, she, Philemon, and others attend a party at which she sings joyfully,
only for Philemon to bring forth the suit to publicly shame her. Soon after,
she dies, presumably of a broken heart, and it belatedly dawns on the
heartbroken Philemon how cruel he has been.
To tell the story, the actors engage in various theatrical
exercises using the minimal props with which they’re provided, their body
movements making it clear that they’re riding a bus, for example, or engaged in
other behaviors. A memorable scene occurs when Matilda slips an arm through one
of the suit jacket’s sleeves to create the impression of her lover caressing
her. We’ve seen this convention before, but the actress does an exceptional job
of evoking the sensuality of the experience. Two additional actors (Jared
McNeill and Rikki Henry) play several others in the story, and, like the leads,
give excellent performances. Most affecting for me was the absolutely stunning
Ms. Kheswa, who, while not gifted with an especially outstanding voice, is
quite touching and magnetic during her several singing opportunities.
A lot has been written about the relationship of this tragic
love story to the dire circumstances in which, as black South Africans, the
characters are enmeshed. Brook told The Wall Street Journal, for
instance, “This most extraordinary human situation between a man and a woman
could not have taken this strange and frightening form except when minds are so
warped. Something becomes a pressure cooker in the mind.” Despite the several
references to local socio-political issues, these all seemed extraneous to what
is surely a universal example of the extremes to which jealousy can drive an
otherwise rational person. I found nothing particularly South African in the
story; what I saw could have happened anywhere.
The music, which combines familiar tunes with original
material, is quietly effective in supporting the action, and there’s even a
deeply moving rendition of the classic song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.”
The three musicians, while not given any lines, move in and out of the action
as additional characters when needed. Philippe Vialette’s exquisite lighting
and Oria Puppa’s costumes (she also did the scenic pieces), especially the
lovely outfits worn by Matilda, do much to make this slight piece of theatre
physically appealing; Matilda’s garments include a close-fitting slip that she
fills in a way that would have done wonders for Scarlett Johansson in CAT ON A
HOT TIN ROOF.
During the party scene, three members of the audience are
brought onstage to take part in the festivities. I’d read that Ben Brantley had
been pulled onstage, to his dismay, but that he’d actually found the experience
rewarding. I was seated on the aisle in row G so I felt totally secure from
this invasion of my privacy. Sure enough, however, when the time came, an actor
came rushing up the stairs and asked if I wouldn’t join him onstage; “Not
really,” I nervously responded, and he took instead a young woman who was right
behind me. I watched as she and the other two victims, another young woman and
a man about my age (think Methuselah), improvised the roles of party guests, to
the great delight of the BAM audience. During the curtain calls, after they’d
already returned to their seats, they were once again shanghaied so they could
take a bow. My relief at not being there to share the moment with them was
perhaps the greatest pleasure I derived from THE SUIT.
62. COLLISION
There’s a theatre
critic/journalist I know who, when asked in person his opinion about something
he didn’t like, rolls his eyes and says, mournfully, “Oy vey.” I expect he’ll
groan “Oy vey” when questioned about his response to COLLISION, Lyle Kessler’s
new play (which clocks in at an hour and 40 intermissionless minutes) being
given a reasonably well-acted but quickly forgotten—except for one
thing—performance at Off Broadway’s Rattlestick Theatre by the Amoralist
Company.
Kessler, best known for his 1983 ORPHANS, soon to be revived
on Broadway with Alec Baldwin and Shia LaBeouf, sets the action in the dorm
room of an unnamed college where a weak-willed student named Bromley (Nick
Lawson), already ensconced there at the start of the semester, comes under the
influence of his newly arrived roommate, Grange (James Kautz), a smooth-talking
manipulator and possible psychopath, who immediately decorates the space with
supposedly cool posters of iconic rebels like Janis Joplin, Ché, Bob Marley,
and Kurt Cobain (are these folks still on college students’ radar?). Grange’s
proclivity for playing mind games with those insecure people he feels he can
control soon brings within his web a pretty blonde coed, Do (Anna Stromberg),
and the campus’s allegedly most popular teacher, the aging Prof. Denton
(Michael Cullen), a professor of philosophy. Grange says he wants to strip them
of their “veneer,” to expose their true, authentic selves, absent of hypocrisy.
In one scene Grange has sex with Do while Bromley hides under the covers in the
neighboring bed. Although shocked to discover that Bromley was there all along,
Do (short for Do Re Mi, not doe a deer, she declares), who otherwise seems
intelligent enough, allows Grange to convince her, against her better
instincts, that she should now have sex with Bromley. In another scene, Grange,
having invited the professor to the dorm room, persuades Bromley to strike the
professor until he falls down, merely as a way of exercising his power.
Grange is obsessed with making video recordings of his
conversations with his friends. In the second half of the play, he talks Renel
(Craig muMs Grant), a black gun dealer, to sell him his entire stock of
standard and automatic pistols. (All of this transpires in the dorm room.) Do,
Bromley, and the professor think that Grange is going to make an
action-oriented video with them, and needs the guns for that purpose. The
dealer, who speaks in an exaggerated black street dialect, is clearly dangerous
and street smart but allows himself to be duped into accepting a check, rather
than cash, for the weapons. When he angrily returns to insist on his money, he
is quickly disarmed and killed by the professor, who bashes his head in with a
statuette. The body is simply stashed under a bed, its legs sticking out, and when
Bromley and Do return, there is very little sense of shock at what’s just
happened. The quartet of weirdoes, who now believe they’ve evolved into a
family (each has a depressing family history), turn toward the audience and,
with the suggestion that mass violence is in store for this college campus,
point their weapons at it as the lights go down.
Originally intended as a black comedy, the play was
reportedly revised in the wake of the Newtown shootings to take on a more
somber hue as a straight drama, but the effect is still unsettling,
suggesting—albeit unconvincingly—the potential for violence in the most
innocuous of people. Kessler’s clunky dialogue is filled with pretentiously
intellectual dialogue touching on the existence of God and various pseudo-philosophical
issues, and names like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are casually tossed about.
The characters are paper thin (how anybody in their right mind could find the
charisma-challenged Grange and his ideas attractive is harder to figure out
than E=MC2), the action is implausible (see above), there is an
uncomfortable racist tinge to the depiction of the drug dealer (given the
evening’s best performance by Mr. Grant), and the production values are
unmemorable, especially the palpably phony scenes of violence. There is one
redeeming factor, however, inappropriate as it may be; in a brief nude scene,
Miss Stromberg displays a strikingly robust and well-shaped body. Still,
shouldn’t the audience be expected to view her disrobing in terms of its
dramatic meaning rather than as a stimulus of prurient thoughts? COLLISION is
one theatrical accident for which you’ll wish they had sold insurance at the
box office. Oy vey!
63. WORKING ON A
SPECIAL DAY
Because of my
misgivings about this production, the minute I got home after seeing WORKING ON
A SPECIAL DAY at 59e59 I was pulled to the computer like a fly on a frog’s
tongue. I was simply unable to overcome my desire to see if there were any
clips on YouTubefrom the Italian movie, A SPECIAL DAY (Una Giornata Particolare),
from which the play was adapted. A SPECIAL DAY starred the extraordinarily
beautiful and talented Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, two of the
greatest screen actors of the late twentieth century, Italian or otherwise. I
found a couple of extended scenes from the unsubtitled, undubbed version, and
my misgivings were confirmed. YouTube can be wonderful, but it can also poop on
your party when you use it to compare performances of the same material when
performed by ordinary actors who are competing against icons.
This 75-minute production,
cosponsored by New York’s The Play Company and Mexico City’s Por Piedad Teatro,
was adapted for the stage from Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari’s screenplay by
Gigliola Fantoni, and directed and performed by Ana Graham and Antonio Vega,
two Mexican actors who also translated it into English with Danya Taymor. The
film, while mainly about two characters, Gabriel and Antonietta, who dominate
most of the action, also has a number of minor characters, such as Antonietta’s
six kids, her husband, and a porter, observed in exquisite detail as they start
the day in the first scene.
The conceit of
this stage production is to have its two actors play not only Gabriel and
Antonietta, but everyone else as well. They perform on a stage consisting of
nothing but the space’s own plain black-painted walls, with two door-less
openings at stage left. A few props lie here and there (a table, a piece of
luggage, books, etc.), but the play relies equally on props and scenic elements
drawn on the walls with chalk by the actors as they perform. We see a birdcage,
with a bird in it; a large, open window upstage; another, smaller window at
stage right, and other things, such as a shelf with salt and pepper, a clock,
and a hanging lamp, drawn when needed. When something needs alteration, like
the closing of a window, the actor erases what must be changed and draws a new
picture over the now smudgy space. The action takes place mostly in the
apartments of the two protagonists, as well as on their apartment building
rooftop; it moves from place to place fluidly. Like an Alan Ayckbourn play, the
two characters sometimes share the same space, although he’s in his apartment
and she’s in hers. For the most part this works, and when one character goes to
another’s apartment, we hear the offstage sound of feet running up or down the
many steps from one apartment to another several floors away.
The other characters are mostly
heard from offstage, either by the actor going offstage and changing his or her
voice from there, or while saying the lines deadpan from an onstage position
but in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Sound effects of alarm bells, phones,
and doorbells are made by the actors themselves, but there are recorded effects
as well, including a plane, and, most importantly, a loudspeaker announcer
outside narrating the events of May 8, 1938, when a parade was held in honor of
Mussolini and the visiting Hitler, whose speeches are also heard.
During this special day, frumpy
housewife Antionetta is home doing the wash; preoccupied with housework, she’s
too busy to attend the parade and ceremonies, even though they’re nearby;
meanwhile, several floors away, Gabriel, is about to blow his brains out with a
pistol. When her bird flies out the window and lands at Gabriel’s, the pair are
brought together. They become immediate friends, she the unappreciated drudge
whose life is completely lacking in romance, he an educated, appealing, and
presumably attractive radio announcer who has lost his job. As they warm up to
one another, each desperately seeking some release from their private torments
in a shared moment of intimacy with another human being, she kisses him
passionately, only for him to violently reject her because he is gay and angry
that she expects him as a man to respond only one way, which he demonstrates by
forcibly clutching her crotch. We have thought, perhaps, that he lost his job
because of something subversive he said to which the fascist state took
umbrage, so his homosexuality is intended to come as a surprise; being gay, of
course, was in its own way a subversive act at the time. Still, Antonietta’s
chemistry gets to him and they ultimately do have good sex, which seems
completely out of character for Gabriel. Could the film have thrown it in to
satisfy Marcello’s millions of female admirers, even though Gabriel insists,
after the sex, that “it doesn’t change things”? The special day ends as
Antonietta’s family comes home and Gabriel is taken off to prison.
If you’re going to adapt a film,
even one as unfamiliar today as A SPECIAL DAY (which the YouTube clips show to
be very good, indeed), and boil it down to a two-hander based on characters
played by still-remembered, world-class stars, then you’d better do something
really special with it production-wise or in the casting of the actors. The
directorial notion of drawing the props on the walls, and having the characters
do other voices and sound effects, has a certain ingenuity, but it has to be
executed with unique ability and technical precision. Here, it remains merely a
clever idea performed with no special visual or physical artistry. When things
are erased, the result simply looks sloppy. The film’s highlight scene, where
Gabriel and Antonietta have a riveting confrontation on a rooftop amid white
linen being hung up to dry, is replicated more or less on stage, but compared
to its filmic realization, which I’d rate at a 10, it comes off as a 1. Here’s
the film scene; it’s in Italian but it doesn’t matter with these actors. Be patient
and watch it build. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gq2wf2LN4Y
The actors in WORKING ON A
SPECIAL DAY are competent professionals, who adapt their native Mexican accents
so they sound Italian; they are not, however, attractive, charming, or gifted
enough to even approach the levels of loneliness, sensuality, and desperation
so powerfully conveyed by Sophia and Marcello. Then again, who is?
64. THE VANDAL
Hamish Hamilton’s THE VANDAL, at the Flea Theatre,
runs only an hour and 15 minutes, so I’ll try to focus much of my response on
what happens in it. This is a three-character play set in Kingston, New York,
with three contiguous locales: a bus stop (with a bench) outside a hospital; a
liquor store; and a graveyard. (Yes: there are lines about how ironic this is.
For example: “That’s like the one thing the city planner got right, like if you
have to go to one or other of the other two places, and you’re able to stumble
out alive, at least there’s the liquor store waiting for you. We’re at the
center of the triangle, (points at hospital) Dying, (points at
cemetery) Dead, (points at liquor store) Drunk.”)
One cold winter night, a Woman (Deirdre O’Connell), as the
script calls her, whose husband died of cancer at the hospital after three
years of suffering, is waiting on the bench for a bus that’s late when a garrulous,
skinny, 17-year-old Boy (Noah Robbins) in a hoody, who says he’s been visiting
a recently deceased friend’s grave, begins talking to her; he insists on asking
her questions despite her obvious desire to ignore him. He tells her that his
mom died when he was delivered via a C-section, and that she reminds him of his
French teacher. He claims in a long story (sort of like the one about the dog
in Zoo Story), that the teacher had
an affair with a student who then killed himself by burying himself alive, a
gruesome death whose method he carefully describes. He shares other horrific
stories about people he knows who died. She soon opens up a bit, and grudgingly
goes to buy him a six-pack and Ranch Doritos. The liquor store’s proprietor,
the Man (Zach Grenier), is suspicious of her because other people, usually
homeless men, have come on similar errands on the first Friday of every month;
he reveals that he knows she’s doing it for his son, Robert, although he doesn’t
say much more than that; however, he declares his wife isn’t dead, that they’re
just divorced. He also drills her on why she’s using someone else’s credit
card, forcing her to come up with an explanation since the name on the card is
that of her late husband’s nurse. (The Woman stole it for revenge because her
husband was in love with the nurse.)The Woman brings the Boy the beer and
chips, and begins to drink with him, starting with a small bottle of Jim Beam. As
she begins to get drunk, she berates the Boy for lying about his mother being
dead, but he clings to his version of reality. He leaves her and, soon after, she
stumbles through the cemetery, looking for him, only to be found there by the Man.
He drinks the remaining beers and reveals more about himself. The Woman says
she came there to vandalize the cemetery with Robert, which she proceeds to do by
tagging “TITS” on the tombstones in lipstick. One of them, he says to her dismay,
is his wife’s, which exposes his lie about her being dead. Then he tells her something
else about the Boy that takes the play to another level beyond its deceptively naturalistic
tone, but I’ve already provided too many spoilers, so I’ll leave it at that.
The stories the characters share
veer from truth to fiction, and the play’s essence lies in the willful lies
they tell, which stem from various motives. The lies seem necessary both as
ways to face life’s anguish oneself and to help others do so as well. The Boy,
for example, desperately wants the Woman to be his mother, so she makes up an
elaborate story about how she died but came back to life. There is a black
humor scattered throughout the stories, and the audience often laughs, although
not much of it struck me as very funny. If you peruse the plot summary I
provided, the degree of plausibility in the sequence of events can easily be
questioned (as can having so much of the play take place in the freezing cold),
but the often imaginative dialogue keeps you interested in what happens next.
Under Jim Simpson’s capable
direction, Deirdre O’Connell, who took the role of the Woman when Holly Hunter
had to bow out because of a scheduling conflict, gives a strong and
multicolored performance, and both Zach Grenier and Noah Robbins are effectively
believable as well. But nothing in the play or in their characters made me care
much about them, and, when the play ended not that long after it had begun, I
was happy it was over and I could get home early enough to watch something
better on TV.
65. LE CID
If you were a
student in my theatre history class back in the day, you would have been
required to read Pierre Corneille’s LE CID, the 1637 neoclassical tragicomedy
that rocked the French Academy because of its too free application of the
unities of time, place, and action. The play remains an important masterpiece
in the canon of French theatre, where it demands actors who command the
technique of speaking alexandrine verse, such as those in the Comédie Française.
It is rarely produced in America, whose familiarity with French theatre of its
period is strictly limited to the comedies of Molière. For the Storm Theatre, a
small Off-Broadway company, to even dream of attempting an English translation
of LE CID (not to be confused with the Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic movie
about the same title character, EL CID) should be seen as an act of sheer
hubris unless it is able, through sheer force of will, brilliant staging, and
inspired acting, to overcome the huge obstacles it presents.
These are not physical obstacles,
by the way, as the play requires only a single set; if the locale changes, it
remains within the same general space (i.e., the palace), and there’s no need
for any scenic alterations. Here, the set is a simple archway on a platform
several steps up from the main acting area at one side of an arena stage
arrangement. The look is vaguely classical and the cyclorama behind the arch
can take on different colors according to the lighting designer’s choices. The
space is a tiny theatre (I counted 64 seats) located in the basement of the
Church of Notre Dame, situated at the corner of 114th Street and
Morningside Drive, near Columbia University. If you’re venturing there from
distant reaches of the city, you’ll be hoping the effort is well worth the
trip.
I’m afraid that, unless you’re an
educator or theatre buff with an overwhelming desire to see a rare American
staging of this play, you may find you’ve come on something of a fool’s errand.
This is not to say that the production is horrible; it does have redeeming
features, but these are simply not strong enough to provide the desired payoff.
In fact, my companion for the evening wanted to leave after the first act, but
I made him stay the course; he ultimately whispered to me during act two that
it actually was a pretty good play. What seems to have compelled him was the
intriguing development of the action, in which Don Rodrigue (Jeff Kline), the
handsome beloved of the beautiful Chimène (Meaghan Bloom Fluitt), must maintain
his honor by killing her father, the Count (Brian J. Coffey), after he insults
Rodrigue’s own father, Don Diègue (George Taylor). This places Chimène in the
difficult position of either marrying the man who killed her father, or taking
revenge on him instead. Since the concept of honor is an obsession with
everyone in this hermetic world, its permutations become the subject of lengthy
speeches that twist this way and that as the characters rationalize their
responses. To some degree, we are aided in following the arguments by Richard
Wilbur’s rhymed-couplet translation, but most of the actors are hampered by
this material, struggling to project not only the heightened reasoning required
but the powerful emotional undercurrents so necessary to their relationships.
Peter Dobbins’s pedestrian
direction does little to illuminate the characters, and the performances range
from amateurish to acceptably professional. Best are the three older men,
George Taylor, Brian J. Coffey, and, as the King of Castile, Spencer Aste, but
the leads, while physically attractive, are dully wooden, incapable of handling
either the intricate intellectual demands of the verse or its passionate
underpinnings. What a great role Don Rodrigue would have been for a young Jimmy
Smits! No comment is necessary for the remaining cast members.
Courtney Irizarry’s period
costumes work nicely to suggest the world of the Spanish aristocracy, but more
than costumes are needed to overcome the dramatic tedium. However, despite a
generally low-key approach to sound and lighting throughout, for some reason
the curtain call is staged as a sound and light show, with rock music
accompanied by alternating bursts of colored lighting. Perhaps more along these
lines might have helped juice up what came before.
66.
ALL THE RAGE
ALL THE RAGE,
Martin Moran’s entry into this year’s solo performance sweepstakes, is
performed on the spacious stage of Theatre Row’s Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, where
the set evokes a loft-like locale, with a large wooden table standing at center
on a Persian rug. At stage left is another table, with an overhead projector,
and up left is a rolling cork board with a large map of the New York subway
system. Later, another rolling demo board is pulled down right on to display a
large map of Africa. On the large table is a globe and an attached desk lamp
whose conical shade is directed at it like a spotlight. Overhead are various
functional lights, that Moran can turn off and on at will. The upstage wall is
painted to look like brick, and a projection screen overhead can be pulled down
to use as needed. The screen, globe, rolling boards, and lights all come into
play in Moran’s deft hands as he uses them to illustrate his rambling, often
funny (if not overwhelmingly so), and sometimes sad, narrative memoir.
Moran, a slim man in his early
fifties, dressed in jeans and a buttoned shirt, is a friendly, fairly
unassuming presence. He has had a decent career in as an actor (including
SPAMALOT on Broadway, which he references), and in 2004 received a Drama Desk
nomination for his one-man play THE TRICKY PART; based on his own book about
his having been sexually abused from the ages of 12-15 by a camp counselor. In
ALL THE RAGE, this admittedly gay actor talks briefly about that experience
because it relates to his bigger theme, which covers a number of other personal
stories in which he tries to explore his longstanding incapacity for giving
full vent to his anger; the chief examples are when he had a hostile
confrontation with his father’s mean-spirited second wife, and when he
re-encountered his childhood abuser, years later, when the man was dying in a
veterans’ hospital. In these situations, despite the pain these people had
brought to him, he found a way to fight through his anger to find forgiveness.
When he did finally explode at something in rage, it was at a careless New York
driver who might have killed him, a moment that provides one of the biggest
laughs in the show.
Much of the narrative concerns
his efforts to discover a way to help suffering humanity. Hoping to do this in
Africa, he is turned down by Doctors without Borders because his background
makes him unprepared for the rigors of the job, but his fluency in French
(which he uses to a considerable degree in the play) allows him to find
part-time work as an interpreter for African immigrants seeking political
asylum. This experience, which makes up a good chunk of the narrative, leads to
his developing a close friendship with a Muslim man from Chad, who suffered
torture and was forced to leave his family behind; it also provides him the
opportunity to make excellent use of his globe and maps. Other images related
to his stories are projected from a laptop or from the overhead projector. When
he talks of various locations in New York, he places a marker on the subway map
to denote each place.
The evening moves swiftly under
Seth Barrish’s skillful direction. Moran manipulates the lights, rolling
boards, projections, and so on, smoothly and without a hitch, as he paces
around the large space, varying his delivery from gentleness to fury as the
moment requires. His scattershot material, ranging as widely as it does, is
neither consistently nor overwhelmingly interesting, but Moran’s engaging
likability, and his frequently surprising insights, compel attention; the hour
and 20 minutes that pass prove just long enough. ALL THE RAGE may not be all
the rage with many theatergoers, but, compared with what else is out there this
dreary season, you could do worse.
67. WOMEN OF WILL
WOMEN OF WILL is
a two hour and 50 minute investigation of the way Shakespeare’s treatment of
women evolved. It uses two actors, Tina Packer and Nigel Gore, to both talk
about and perform a healthy number of scenes involving female characters; while
some may quarrel with the level of Ms. Packer’s artistry, there’s no denying
that this woman not only knows her Shakespeare but that when it comes to
performing him she means business. The work has been in development over a
period of fifteen years during which Packer acted in and directed numerous
Shakespeare plays with Shakespeare and Company, the group she headed for many
years in Lennox, Massachusetts (it is now run by Tony Simotes). It was first
produced in 2010 with the subtitle THE OVERVIEW, and then, presumably in a
sequel, as THE COMPLETE JOURNEY in 2011, with the entire piece then given at
the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.
The British-born, trained, and
accented Packer’s extensive investment in Shakespeare’s works led her to
discover a pattern in his handling of female roles. She writes in a program
note, “I was not particularly looking for a pattern; it came of its own accord.
But once I had seen it, I couldn’t let it go.” The production is dedicated to
explicating this pattern, both in lecture-like terms and in acted scenes.
Packer discovered that there are five major cycles in the way Shakespeare wrote
about women, wherein his “consciousness of what life was really about . . . appeared in his exploration of feminine ways of
power in both women and men, and the effect the women could have on the way we
run our lives.” She gives each cycle a name and, aided by Mr. Gore, performs
substantial scenes from representative plays in each cycle. Those she is now
presenting differ somewhat from those she offered in earlier versions, and it’s
not unlikely that she is still tinkering with the selections.
The production begins with a
scene from THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, which Packer soon dismisses as too
uncomfortably anti-female to continue doing, although she and Gore offer
several different ways in which the scene could be interpreted. She then moves
along to the first cycle, which she terms “The Warrior Plays,” the characters
she chooses to portray being Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou in \HENRY VI, followed by Elizabeth
Woodville in RICHARD III. The second cycle, “The Sexual Merges with the
Spiritual,” is represented by Juliet in ROMEO AND JULIET. Cycle three is
“Living Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth,” represented by Rosalind in AS
YOU LIKE IT and Desdemona in OTHELLO,
which she presents in rapid alternation, switching from one to the other and
back again, before beginning cycle four, called “Chaos is Come Again,” about
ambitious women, the single character chosen being Lady Macbeth in what amounts
to a tab version of the Scottish play. Finally, cycle five, “The Maiden
Phoenix,” features Marina in PERICLES. Gore plays all the chief male roles
opposite her in this eclectic group of plays. The play ends after Packer and
Gore speak Shakespeare’s words about the baby Elizabeth in HENRY VIII. No
scenes involving Gertrude, Cleopatra, Ophelia, or many other major female roles
are included, and most are not even mentioned. If they had been, we would have
been there for another several hours.
This problem of length, in fact,
is the production’s ultimate Achilles heel. At nearly three hours, WOMEN OF
WILL is longer than practically any show I’ve seen all season, including WHO’S
AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? I would probably have gotten restless even if the performers
were Dame Judy Dench and Sir Derek Jacoby, but since they weren’t, you can
imagine the task Packer and Gore have in keeping their audience engaged. Those
familiar with Shakespeare’s plays will fare best at this event; others, despite
the noble attempt to clearly articulate the dramatic, historical, and character
issues required to appreciate the scenes, will drift off as if Bottom in A
MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM had sprinkled sleepy dust on their eyelids. I noticed
an avid theatergoer friend of mine, seated a few seats away, catching up on his
z’s quite unconcerned that he was sitting in the front row where the actors
could surely see him.
Tina Packer is, unbelievably,
74-years-old. I say unbelievably because I’m sure there are few women who have
the stamina to do a nearly three-hour show in which they not only are on stage
continuously, except for a 10-minute intermission, but play so many demanding
roles and also keep turning off the thespian spout so they can engage in
lengthy and detailed explanations of Shakespeare’s intentions. These academic
segments are often quite illuminating, especially when Packer goes into the
monarchical successions of the Wars of the Roses plays, but there is so much to
digest and experience in this Bardic pantheon that interest eventually wanes. Packer
is a full-throated actress, built like a small tank, and dressed for much of
the time in tights, high boots, and a tunic; for some scenes she dons a green
velvet gown, for the role of Marina a pink silk one. With her boyish,
short-cropped red hair atop a still pixie-like face, she resembles an aging
Peter Pan. Watching her maintain her
energy level and vocal power throughout will make you want to say, like the lady
in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, “I’ll have what she’s having.” She brings a lifetime
of Shakespearean experience to the production, and even though she only
occasionally rises to true excellence in her interpretations, she must be
respected for her intelligence and presence. I didn’t care much for her Juliet,
among others, but seeing this septuagenarian as that teenage girl nevertheless
make you forget her age and concentrate on her readings. In the final actual
scene, her very youthful Marina was truly touching. I wouldn’t pay to see an
actress of her age play such roles (although I did once see Dame Judith
Anderson play Hamlet when she was in her dotage), but in the context of this
production, there were lessons to be learned from the professionalism of Tina
Packer’s work.
Nigel Gore, who appears to be in
his fifties, wears jeans and a polo shirt throughout, except for when he plays
Pericles, when he dons an odd jacket made of shredded cloth strips. He is a
good actor, and plays his many parts quite capably, while also offering helpful
commentary during the academic sections (which are often presented as a kind of
friendly repartee between the stars). He is solid and serviceable, but he lacks
star quality.
The visual components are suitably
spare, just a large Persian rug, a few small pieces of furniture when needed,
and a minimum of props. A half-dozen metal scaffolds lined up against the
upstage wall and covered in black mesh form the scenic background. The space is
three-quarters round, with the area closest to the actors lined with cushions. The
lights are also minimalist, sometimes being manipulated by the actors
themselves, but they are often used strikingly, as are the subtle but still
powerful sound effects that underscore much of the action.
At the end of the show, audience
members are invited to write something on the wooden railings separating
sections of the seating. When I looked, others already had written lines from
Shakespeare. My comment was: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” But I might equally
well have written, “If it were done when tis done ‘twer best it were done
quickly.”
68. THE JAMMER
On Sunday, I saw THE JAMMER,
a play at the Atlantic Theatre Company, about roller derbies in 1950s Brooklyn,
but was not feeling well (probably a stomach virus), so I won’t be writing
anything about it. I actually ran out shortly before the end and wound up
barfing my brains out in the street outside the theatre. “Hey, daddy! Look at
the drunk tossing chunks!” I returned to the theatre a night later to see the
following.
69.
MAN UNDER
I learned something new from
this innocuous new play by Paul Bomba at 59e59: when someone falls on the
subway track in front of an oncoming car, the conductor yells “Man under!”
Other than that, the play offers very little enlightenment about the human
relationships it attempts to explore in its depiction of two young men and two
young women searching for love in all the wrong places.
Jeff (Paul Bomba, the playwright) shares a New York
apartment with Martin (Curran O’Connor). We don’t know what Jeff does for a
living, but Martin seems to have some sort of office job that requires a coat
and tie. Down the hall lives Jennifer (Veronique Ory), an ordinary girl living,
unhappily, with her boyfriend. She and Martin, who share a love for the
Yankees, seem to have promise as a couple but he is crippled by his inability
to express his feelings, despite the signals she emits. He is a giver, someone
able to help others with their problems, but is unable to take care of his own.
Jeff, for his part, is suffering from the death two years before of his fiancée,
whose wedding dress he practically worships. One evening, while waiting at the
edge of the subway platform, he has an impulse to toss himself in front of the
oncoming train. He doesn’t, of course, but he returns home to declare that he
shared a look with an attractive girl who seemed to have the same impulse. This
leads him and Martin on a quest to find the girl, which Jeff finally manages to
do. But she, Lisa (Briana Pozner), has been aware of this search and, after she
makes herself available to him, turns out to be something of a sexy nutcase who
enjoys nothing more than lying in the well between the tracks and allowing a
train to run over her, a “thrill” to which she introduces Jeff. Her favorite
hangout is a graffiti-scrawled subway tunnel hideaway, a sort of subterranean
temple, where she and Jeff hook up. The hour and fifteen-minute,
intermissionless, play follows the romantic developments of this foursome, with
few surprises, little humor, some pseudo-tragic hokum, and a dearth of
memorable characterization.
The tiny Theatre C at 59e59, a black box whose configuration
changes for every show, is set up for a proscenium-type (actually, end stage)
presentation, with the downstage edge of the living room floor, about 10 inches
off the theatre’s floor, bearing a painted yellow line to suggest a subway
platform. The space in front of the stage becomes the subway tracks, and the
living room becomes the subway hideaway through projections of graffiti on its
walls, as well as on those surrounding the audience. Set designer Julia
Noulin-Mérat is unable to provide more than low-budget chintziness to the
overall effect.
The acting is standard issue, with only the prematurely gray
Curran Connor, who brings a certain charm to Martin’s romantic clumsiness and diffidence,
able to provide anything truly interesting. The direction does little to
enhance the proceedings, and the sight of the actors dashing off to change for
their next scene, before the stage is fully dark, is disconcerting. I had a
better time reading the press rep’s colorful description of the play than
seeing the work itself. My admonition to potential visitors is, “Play under!”
70. THE MAN WHO
LAUGHS
One of the more
intriguing pieces of pure theatre I’ve seen this season is THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, being
given by the Stolen Chair troupe at Urban Stages on W. 30th Street.
It’s based on a little-known novel by Victor Hugo that has received other
dramatizations as well as being made into a silent film in 1927. It also has
had many cultural reverberations, not least of which is the Joker in the Batman story. The Stolen Chair company
first staged it in 2005, and it is now being produced with a different cast.
What makes it memorable is that it is done entirely as if it were a silent
movie, with the actors on a stage fitted with a false proscenium with painted
tab curtains. A scrim serves as a background for the projected title cards, and
also to enhance the filmic effect.
The six-member company, under Jon
Stancato’s very imaginative direction, collaborated in the staging of this
90-minute, intermissionless theatre piece, which employs an adaptation by Kiran
Rikhye that effectively evokes the melodramatic style of the old silents.
Pianist Eugene Ma sits at a piano on auditorium level, just beneath the stage,
and accompanies the action with his original score, which perfectly captures
the music one would hear at an old-time movie performance. All the handsome and
clever visuals (sets and lighting by David Bengali; costumes by Julie Schworm)
are hued in tones of black, white, and sepia, to suggest a cinematic look, and
the actors’ movements are an excellent recreation of the more flamboyantly
stylized attitudes we associate with those movies. Something similar was tried
in the now vanished CHAPLIN earlier in the season, but this show’s artistry
comes off even more successfully because it is a low-budget labor of love. This
is not a campy exercise, mind you; it takes very seriously the task of
recreating the true ambience of movie from the days before The Jazz Singer revolutionized movies.
The freely adapted story,
borrowing from Hugo and the 1927 movie, is a piece of Gothic horror and
sentimentality, set around the beginning of the 18th century, about
an abandoned boy, Young Gwynplaine (Noah Schultz), who is set upon in a
snowstorm by a band of comprachicos,
a strange gang who kidnap and disfigure people so they can put them to work in
side shows. They carve a permanent smile upon his face before they have to make
their escape. The boy rescues a baby from its dying mother and brings it to the
cabin of Ursus (John Froehlich), a “misanthropic violinist” whose initial
reservations are overthrown as he decides to shelter the boy and infant. The
baby, he soon discovers, is blind. She and the boy grow up in the care of the
violinist and, nineteen years later, they have formed a traveling side show
act, with the girl, Dea (Molly O’Neill), billed as “The Beautiful Blind Girl”
and Gwynplaine (Dave Droxler), now a clown, as “The Man Who Laughs.” Although
he succeeds in garnering audience laughter, Gwynplaine is depressed because he
wants to be recognized as a serious actor. He is also in love with the Mary
Pickford-like, blonde-tressed Dea, and she with him, but he is seduced by
Josiana (Rebecca Whitehurst), a sexy duchess in a Louise Brooks hairdo and a
sleek black dress that practically shouts “vamp!” She and her companion, an
effete lord (Raife Baker), are merely toying with Gwynplaine out of boredom.
The action and music grow increasingly melodramatic, as the drama works itself
out to a tragic conclusion.
Everyone in the cast does a
wonderful job, but my favorite is Dave Droxler in the title role. His face,
made up in silent movie fashion but with a device that attaches a never-ceasing
grin to his features, combines the handsome and grotesque in a haunting manner.
Seeing his plaintively expressive eyes floating above the distortion of his
huge lips is a pitiful sight that brings to mind one of Marcel Marceau’s
classic routines in which he plays a man who also has a smile permanently
implanted on his face and does everything in his power to alter his expression.
In Gwynplaine’s highlight scene, Droxler does a routine during a side show in
which he displays a masterful ability at Marceau-like mime movement, including
skillful walking and running movements.
The principal drawback to this otherwise
intriguing work is that, for all the plot development it provides, it contains
several scenes that drag on way past their dramatic interest has passed. Either
these scenes need cutting or additional scenes need to be cut into the action
for more variety. With so much of the action dependent on pantomimic acting,
the conceit can wear thin without additional novelty in the plotting.
Nevertheless, although this review, like the play it’s based on, ends on a less
than happy note, you’ll be very glad you caught THE MAN WHO LAUGHS.
71. BODEGA BAY
Tonight, when I returned home
after seeing BODEGA BAY, a new play by Elisabeth Karlin at the tiny Dorothy
Streisin Theatre on W. 36th Street, my wife asked me what I thought
of it; my response was one of my more expressive grunts. I added, however, that
no matter how bad I thought it was, I was sure some critic would find all the
good things in it to which I was blind. Sure enough, when I checked this out I
found that, although the show has received only a few online notices thus far,
all of them were positive: the reviewer for BACKSTAGE said “Elisabeth Karlin
has fashioned a smart play on the theme of seeing and being seen. She’s also
written a fairly effective and involving detective story. . . .” A blog called
EDGE added, “Every part of this production works. From great writing and
tremendous acting, to creative set design, this play is surprisingly good.” And
TIMES SQUARE CHRONICLES weighed in with an equally upbeat response.
So why did I grunt? Because the play seemed to me—despite a
mild chuckle here and an effective performance there—amateurishly written,
acted, directed, and designed, and overlong at a little more than two and a
half hours.
Karlin’s episodic dramedy follows the peregrinations of
37-year-old Louise Finch (Sarah Louise O’Connor), as meek and mousy a Staten
Island woman as you’re likely to meet, as she makes a cross country trip trying
to track down the apparently sex-crazed and otherwise unbalanced mother who
abandoned her and her brother, Scottie (Brian McManamon), when they were
children. Her goal is to ask her mother for the money to pay for the expensive
rehab program the meth-addicted Scottie needs in order to get his life back on
track. Her quest takes her to a variety of locations and into the company of
various eccentrics until, at the end, when she arrives in Bodega Bay,
California, she seems to finally have discovered the elusive Mrs. Finch,
although the playwright tries to leave this ambiguous when the lights finally
go down. She also, in the process, has found not only herself, but love.
Bodega Bay, as some may remember, is the site of Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds, to which
reference is made in the script, but—according to a promotional comment I came
across afterward—the play also is said to contain a couple of hundred
references to Hitchcock trivia; I didn’t know this when I entered the theatre,
and, apart from the specific references to The
Birds, I still have no idea of what the other references are, nor do I
care. And even if I did, watching a play in order to check my knowledge of
something that speaks to a trivia-obsessed subset of movie fans does not have a
high priority on my list of theatergoing goals.
Aside from Sarah Louise O’Connor as Louise, all the other
actors play multiple roles, with the lanky actress Rae C Wright, covering five
of them, none convincingly, despite her attempt at different accents (her
Hispanic accent sounds Russian). The best overall performance belongs to
Gerardo Rodriguez as Juan Garza (could this be a hidden reference to Jimmy
Smits and "Outlaw"?), who, thankfully, uses an
authentic Hispanic accent to play the private eye who helps Louise track down
her mother and also falls in love with her. Nancy Rodriguez portrays four
characters, but stands out only as a coworker of Louise’s; she nails the woman’s
Staten Island speech patterns with laser accuracy in a telephone monologue. Ms.
O’Connor, who is on stage almost throughout, has an affect something like that
of Dianne Wiest, with her low-keyed, crinkle-eyed, smiling through-her-tears
delivery, but she does this from beginning to end, showing barely any change,
and her shy neediness grows increasingly annoying as the play wears on.
The numerous scenes require numerous rearrangements of the
few basic pieces of furniture that serve for all the different locales; this
means frequent pauses as stagehands come out to move the pieces around. The
actual set remains fixed—two walls with venetian blind-covered windows—no
matter where the action takes place; at least the windows allow for variations
in color according to how they are lighted. The positive side of these scene
changes is that they are all covered by songs sung by Nat King Cole, which, in
the end, is what I most enjoyed about this otherwise undistinguished
production. I hate to say it, but, for me at any rate, BODEGA BAY is one for
the birds.
72. BLOOD PRIVILEGE
Here’s what an online publicity release has to say
about BLOOD PRIVILEGE, playing at the tiny Richmond Shepard Theatre on E. 26th
Street near Second Avenue:
Orphaned and vulnerable early in life, Elizabeth Bathory
rose to become one of the most powerful women in Europe. However, she was not
left untouched by her struggle and, possibly insane, she is reputed to have
tortured and murdered over 600 women.
Bathory’s life was one of the inspirations behind the
vampire myths, including Sheridan Le Fanu’s CARMILLA and Bram Stoker‘s DRACULA.
In BLOOD PRIVILEGE, playwright Don Fried looks behind
the legend to where truth, myth and horror collide. The play explores the
corruption that comes with absolute power and the doom that pursues those who
seek it.
Okay. I’m willing to admit that sounds interesting
enough. Too bad that this promising material has been made the basis for what
is without a doubt the worst excuse for a professional theatre production I’ve
seen all season. Compared to it, BODEGA BAY is HAMLET. Play, direction, set
(excuse me: I mean 3 pieces of wooden furniture and a mirror), lighting,
costumes, and acting were beneath comment (including a former Brooklyn College
MFA student). This underprivileged play needs a transfusion.
73.
THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN
For only the second time this
season, a person who was supposed to join me at a play failed to show up last
night at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre because of a scheduling oversight. The
play was a universally lauded, Off Broadway revival of THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN
(aka THE GOOD WOMAN OF SETZUAN), Brecht’s modern classic about the difficulty
of being good in a world dominated by greed and selfishness. Normally, my being
stood up like this wouldn’t be a big deal, since so many shows I’ve been
visiting haven’t been worth the time spent watching them, but THE GOOD PERSON
came with higher than usual expectations. Thus I was disappointed that my
friend, who sometimes accompanies me to half a dozen or more plays in a month,
would be missing out on something really worthwhile; also, that a perfectly
good ticket had to sit in my pocket since it was too late to turn it in for
someone else’s use. It turns out that I was right to feel this way, since the
production, apart from a few drawbacks, was memorable. So rather than bitching with
my friend about what we’d just seen as we rushed to the subway afterward, I
lost a chance to share some of those rare good vibes while I was still embraced
by them.
THE GOOD PERSON,
of course, is a parable in which three ancient gods (Vinie Burrows, Annie
Golden, and Mia Katigbak, all in white costumes and white wigs) come to
Szechwan in a wearisome search for a single good person, only to find that the
only such individual is a poverty-stricken hooker named Shen Tei (Taylor Mac).
They reward her with a gift of money and she buys a tobacco shop, but almost
immediately is set upon by those seeking to take advantage of her newfound good
fortune. In a flash, her livelihood is threatened; only by assuming the alter
ego of a fictional male cousin, the ruthless Shui Ta, is she able to stop being
a fount of generosity and do what is necessary for her own and the shop’s
survival. Eventually, Shui Ta’s appearances go from brief visits to lengthy
ones as it is impossible to stem the greedy demands on Shen Tei’s goodness.
Meanwhile, she falls for an unemployed flyer, Yang Sun (the very good Clifton
Duncan), who is mainly interested in her money and who gets her pregnant. Afterward,
Shui Ta is suspected of doing away with Shen Tei, and he is put on trial before
the three gods, who serve as judges. Left alone with them, Shen/Shui expresses
the impossible moral dilemma s/he has been placed in by the gods’ seemingly
willful demands on people’s goodness. The play ends with a narrator (Lisa Kron)
asking the audience to make up its own mind about how a good person can exist
in a world where everything but goodness thrives.
Like Brecht’s
other “parable play,” THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, this material demands highly
theatricalized staging, and a company of versatile actors who can carry off the
required stylization. Another famous American production of the play, which I
saw, was done in this same venue in 1987, directed by Andre Serban, with young
Diane Lane in the cast. Serban was a master of theatricalism, and his production
took advantage of the space’s ample dimensions, with the audience seated around
the perimeter of an arena-like environment. Director Lear DeBessonet is also up
to the task of creating the appropriate theatrical world for Brecht’s
nonrealistic action and characters, and most of her actors fulfill their roles
with skill and panache. The set is placed at one end of the large, rectangular
room with the audience stretching away from it on bleachers. What they see is a
stage around four feet high, with half a dozen steps leading to the auditorium
floor. Actors sometimes enter and exit via a trap (thus the high stage) and via
the auditorium (thus the steps). The set itself a series of risers, with small,
crudely constructed, cardboard box-like houses placed on each level; the
effect, with each “house” lit from within, is of a town set upon a hillside.
Way up at the very top of the risers is a small band, the Lisps, which
accompanies the action, provides musical sound effects, and sings the
occasional songs sprinkled through the text. César Alvarez wrote the excellent
music set to Brecht’s lyrics (in John Willett’s translation).
Some actors play
multiple roles, the most effective being Lisa Kron as both Mrs. Mi Tzu, the
nasally annoying landlady (in black horn-rimmed glasses and black wig), and
Mrs. Yang, the handsome flyer’s Streisand-like mother, with long, enameled
fingernails.
The standout
performance, and one of the season’s most striking, belongs to drag queen
Taylor Mac as Shen Tei/Shui Ta. With his slender physique, high cheek bones,
and shaved head, he need only change from a red, form-fitting dress to a
pinstriped suit with shirt and tie to go from role to role, adding a mustache
to disguise his clown white face with its hyped-up eye makeup to establish Shui
Ta’s masculinity. He never indulges in campy excess when playing Shen Tei, but
manages to suggest her femininity with expert control of movement and gestures,
while he is convincingly masculine when he has to assert Shui Ta’s authority. He
sings well, moves like a dancer, and acts with both feeling and wit, even
adlibbing when something goes wrong.
Nearly all
movement and behavior is choreographed, and there are several full dance
numbers (staged by Danny Mefford) that interrupt the action. Movements are
frequently heightened by a sound effect provided by the band. Costumes, props,
and scenic pieces have the feel of found objects, even the footlights being
converted coffee cans.
There are, of
course, several drawbacks to this otherwise effective production. For one
thing, at least fifteen minutes can be lopped off its 2 hours and 45 minutes by
eliminating the bluegrass music overtures to each act. This music was
delightful, especially the unusual percussion provided by a drumset in an
attaché case, but it really had nothing to do with the show per se. The play
runs out of dramatic steam midway and definitely needs all the theatrical
juicing up a clever director can give it, so adding all this concert music
isn’t of much help in preventing later restlessness. Also, despite the often
comic nature of the business, the show comes off as mildly amusing, not funny,
and the humor can seem a bit strained, especially as everyone plays their roles
with abandon, often with excessive mugging, in order to sustain its manic
energy. And finally, the language, for all its colloquial qualities,
nevertheless has that stilted “translated” quality that sounds unlike the
English we speak in everyday life; this is made more noticeable by the action
being set in a fictional China, where the foreignness of the world we are
watching is made even more palpable.
THE GOOD PERSON OF
SZECHWAN, despite these cavils, remains one of the Off Broadway season’s
highlights, and I only wish I could have shared my response with the good person
of Brooklyn who stood me up.
74.
DONNYBROOK!
The Irish Repertory Theatre has
done a commendable job in breathing new life into the musical DONNYBROOK!, a
1961 Broadway flop with music and lyrics by Johnny Burke and a book by Robert
C. McEnroe. Its source is the popular 1952 movie, THE QUIET MAN, directed by
John Ford, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, set in the colorful, quaint
Irish village of Innisfree. The show stars Broadway baritone James Barbour in
Wayne’s role of Sean Enright (Sean Thornton in the film) and Jenny Powers in
O’Hara’s character of Mary Kate Danaher (Danagher in the movie; Ellen Roe
Danaher on Broadway). The Broadway production starred Art Lund and Joan Fagan,
names now known only to theatre trivialists. For some reason, the female lead’s
name has been changed from Ellen Roe Danaher for the Irish Rep revival.
DONNYBROOK’s book
hews closely to the film’s basic plotline, in which the brawny hero is an
American (from “Pittsburgh, America,” as the local priest keeps saying), who
returns to Innisfree, where he was born, to settle down after retiring from a
successful boxing career that ended when he killed a man in the ring. He is
determined never again to lift his fists in anger. He falls in love at first
sight with the tempestuous, flame-tressed Mary Kate, and we have a bit of a
TAMING OF THE SHREW romance between the two strong-willed leads. But Mary
Kate’s brother, the fiery Will Danaher (Ted Koch; Victor McGlaglen in the
movie; Philip Bosco on Broadway), angry because Sean has outbid him in the
purchase of a piece of property, refuses to let his sister wed the American,
even starting a fight with him and calling him a coward when Sean refuses to
fight back. Only when he’s convinced by Mikeen Flynn (Samuel Cohen), the local matchmaker,
that wealthy widow Kathy Carey (Mildred Dunnock in the movie, where she’s
called the Widow Tillane),would like to marry him, does Will give in to his
sister’s marriage; he knows he could never live with two women in the same
house . But when he finds out that he’s been duped (the widow prefers the
matchmaker), he refuses to give his sister her promised dowry. This means
nothing to Sean, but Mary Kate is enraged by Will’s stamping on tradition, and
Sean’s refusal to confront Will cools her ardor for him. Ultimately, she
decides to leave him, but Sean forcibly prevents her from boarding the train,
and he demands the dowry back from Will, only for the couple to take the
currency and tear it up. This leads to the donnybrook that gives the show its
title, with Sean and Will mixing it up in a slugfest only partly shown on
stage, with most of it taking place offstage and watched by the onstage
townspeople whose reactions tell us how it’s going. This fight was the movie’s
highlight, with the burly McLaglen and the powerful Wayne giving it their all
across the Irish landscape, but the somewhat less imposing presences of Koch
and Barbour don’t do the scene justice, nor does the fact that so much of it is
offstage help much. Sean bests Will, and they become buddies, and the other
relationships are nicely resolved as the show comes to its foregone conclusion.
Before the show,
an elderly Irish lady I’d never met addressed me in the lobby and said she
didn’t care much for the movie. When I asked why, she said, in a lovely brogue,
“It’s not oos [us].” I suppose she meant that all those charming villagers,
with their accents, taste for spirits, and readiness to brawl at the slightest
provocation, were simply too stereotypical and shallow to represent her image
of the Irish. Her reaction reminded me of the uproar that surrounded one of
Ireland’s most famous plays, THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, when it debuted
at the Abbey Theatre in 1907 and many Irish found its depiction of Irish
villagers offensive. It’s hard to deny that the men and women of DONNYBROOK!
match the familiar stereotypes of so many
plays and movies set in rural Ireland, but this is a small objection to
the appeal such characters always have had when well performed.
The performances
are here are somewhat uneven, but most are quite engaging, particularly the
Mary Kate of Jenny Powers, who captures the temperament and sexual appeal of
this straightforward Irish lass, and whose radiant smile when singing makes a
spotlight superfluous. James Barbour, however, despite his booming baritone and
evident musical talent, seems out of place as Sean. My impression is that he appears
comfortable only in costume dramas, like JANE EYRE, where his Shakespearean
bearing and orotund tones are less stagey and more appropriate. In a show about
everyday modern characters, he struggles to seem real and sincere. The
impression he gives when singing is of someone demonstrating his vocal powers,
not of a truly engaged character from whom song issues naturally. In a role so
closely associated with an iconic star, Barbour’s lack of comparable charisma
is a serious drawback. Kathy Fitzgerald as the widow, Samuel Cohen as Mikeen
Flynn, Ted Koch as Will Danaher, and David Sitler as Father Finucane are all
solid, as are those in the lesser roles of the townsfolk.
Charlotte Moore’s
direction keeps everything moving at a suitable clip, with high energy
operative throughout, but there are some clumsy moments as well, not helped
much by the difficulties imposed by the Irish Rep’s odd physical space. There
is a chase scene, for example, that is staged so that Sean runs after Mary Kate
around the house standing upstage with only a narrow passageway at one side for
them to squeeze through as they go round and round. Barry McNabb’s choreography
is limited, but it fits the abilities of the company and does a serviceable
job. On the other hand, the set is by far the most successful I’ve seen this
season at the Irish Rep, with that upstage house set on a turntable and built
so that its walls can open in different configurations to reveal a number of
contrasting interiors.
Johnnie Burke’s
score is pleasantly listenable and more enjoyable than I expected of a show that
ran for only 68 performances. However, the two standout numbers in this revival
are not from the original score but are interpolations of songs with Burke’s
lyrics and music by Jimmie Van Heusen: “It Could Happen to You” and “But
Beautiful” are both exceptional numbers that are part of the American songbook
but predate DONNYBROOK!’s creation.
Despite its
weaknesses, DONNYBROOK! has been given a respectable revival that is fairly
painless to sit through. In a season that has given New York a revival of one
of Broadway’s most famous bombs, MOOSE MURDERS, a show that proved once again
why it’s such a stinker, DONNYBROOK! comes off smelling like shamrocks.
75.
REALLY REALLY
During the intermission at
yesterday’s matinee of Paul Downs Colaizzo’s REALLY REALLY at the Lucile Lortel
Theatre, two gentlemen in their sixties sitting next me were trying to figure
out which character was which. “Cooper, he’s the one who raped the girl,
right?” “No, that was, wait, what’s his name?” “Was it Davis?” “Which one is
Davis?,” and so on. There are only seven characters in REALLY REALLY, and,
while their names are all generic American, after an hour-long first act in
which their names are repeated continually, it’s pretty amazing that two
theatergoers would still not know who was who. Their conversation continued:
“So the one who gets raped, that’s who?” “The blonde girl?” “Isn’t that
somebody’s daughter?” “Yeah, a playwright or something.” At this point, I
jumped in to be helpful. “She’s Zosia Mamet and her father is David Mamet.”
“David Mamet?” “Yes, he’s a famous playwright.” “Right. I know David Mamet. Did
he write this play?” And so on, including their belief that Zosia Mamet’s
character, Leigh, actually had been raped, which, I pointed out, was still very
much in question.
Now I’m the first
person to be confused by who’s who in plays with lots of characters (not the
case here), and also by plays where important plot details are drawn very
sketchily or left hanging for purposes of deliberate ambiguity (this does
apply). In REALLY REALLY, the detail about whether Leigh was raped is actually
the central dramatic question in the play. The action is set in the off-campus
houses of two female college students, Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh, and
four male students, Johnson (Kobe Libii), the sole nonwhite; David Hull
(Cooper); Matt Lauria (Davis), and Evan Jonigkeit (Jimmy). Most of them are the
children of very well-to-do parents, and the school is clearly for the
privileged. The language, especially of the men, is frat-brother filthy,
especially during the incessantly raucous discussions of sex. In fact, based on
the profanity, one can understand thinking that David Mamet might have written
the play (although I suspect the guys sitting next to me might not have made
that connection). On the other hand, the way women are crudely objectified
suggests the influence of Neil LaBute.
Early on we learn
that Leigh, who is in a relationship with Jimmy, had sex with Davis at a
boisterous party thrown by Cooper while Jimmy was out of town. When Jimmy finds
out, he becomes jealously enraged at Leigh, who counters his aggressive
accusations by declaring that the sex was nonconsensual. This sets off alarms
that soon have all the characters enmeshed in a quest to either find out if
that’s what really happened, or if Leigh (quite capable, it turns out, of
concocting major lies to get her way) is fibbing as some sort of power play.
Davis, who at first seems one of the most serious and least shallow of this
gaggle of totally self-involved students, insists he can’t remember what
happened that night because he was blind drunk. The story has been reported to
the college officials and his entire future seems threatened. But one of the
other students did overhear something revelatory when Davis and Leigh were
alone together at the party, and Jimmy ultimately squeezes it out of him. Not long
after, playwright Colaizzo offers a graphic scene that removes any lingering
shred of ambiguity about what actually transpired. The play concludes with a
speech by Grace, representing a student group called Future Leaders of America:
“And so, future leaders, what we have learned is with persistence, grace, a
plan of attack, and that secret weapon of ours—healthy selfishness—we can
accomplish any feat. We can acquire any goods. And we can get exactly what we
want.”
With its echoes of
both Mamet’s potty mouthed dialogue and LaBute’s misogyny, the play fires on
all cylinders to reveal the shallow, corrupt, and selfish substrata of
America’s privileged youth, and much of it definitely holds your attention as
the characters bicker among themselves, everybody more concerned with serving
their own needs than with any higher moral ground. But, while David Cromer
keeps the action moving at a rapid pitch, with the two principal locales being
depicted by frequent rearrangements of the same furniture and scenic elements,
the acting too often is overwrought and the characters essentially force their
obnoxiousness on you rather than letting it emerge more subtly. Much of the
dialogue is intended to be funny but the audience at the performance I saw
laughed only fitfully, apart from some young women sitting near me whose
screechy giggles seemed to come on every line.
Zosia Mamet, now
in the zone because of her precisely limned characterization of Shoshanna, Lena
Dunham’s friend with the rapid-fire, monotone delivery on HBO’S GIRLS, is
mostly successful in avoiding Shoshanna’s most obvious mannerisms, although it
isn’t always easy to divorce her from the distinctive comic image she’s created
on TV. She is surrounded by a talented, if over-directed, cast, including Aleque
Reid as Leigh’s snarky sister, who appears in Act Two determined at all costs
to punish the alleged rapist. She is involved in one of the play’s less
plausible moments when, after lying to Cooper that she had been at the party
when the rape occurred, says that she lost a pendant that night and threatens
to tell the police it was stolen if she doesn’t get it back. What happens when
Cooper anxiously searches for the missing jewelry seemed so contrived my wife
jumped all over it when we talked about the play.
Paul Downs
Colaizzo is a talented young dramatist who makes a strong impression with this
play, and will surely be heard from again. REALLY REALLY is among the best new
plays of the season, but that may, of course, be saying more about the season
than about the play itself.
76. JESUS IN INDIA
Did you know that there was a
lacuna in Jesus’ life that scholars have been trying for many years to fill in?
Did you also know that many believe that Jesus spent those “lost” or “missing”
years in India? And to go one step further, did you know that he spent those
years in India as a hippie-like, foul-mouthed wanderer who joined a punk rock
band featuring two Indian guitarists; abandoned Abigail, his equally profane
girlfriend from Galilee; gave up his music to settle down as a carpenter with
his Indian bride, a servant girl named Mahari; had a son with her; and then,
when he learned that Jerusalem was in chaos caused by the warring Romans,
abandoned Mahari and his son so he could return to help his people? Well, while
the first and second questions are based on actuality (there is such a gap and
there are people who believe in the doubtful India notion), the third is the
conceit of playwright Lloyd Suh, who dramatizes it in his comedy JESUS IN
INDIA, directed by Daniella Topol. The play, produced by the Ma-Yi Theatre
Company, comes to New York after premiering at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre a
year ago.
The relatively
empty stage at St. Clement's Theatre evokes a desert by the draping of a lumpy
beige cloth across the floor, with a dromedary suggested by a two-seater
structure built of wooden boards, a large camel head, and a set of rollers. An
interior is merely a few Persian rugs, and a house built by the carpenter hero
is constructed of several thick pieces of unpainted lumber assembled as we
watch. The costumes are all modern day grunge, with some touches of local color
for the Indians. Everyone speaks colloquial English in the kind of dude-like
locutions heard in movies like BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENTADVENTURE. There’s also a
stereotypical scene of two guys getting stoned and having the usual doper
dialogue, part of it involving a philosophical Indian guy explaining to Jesus
his bloated religious perceptions about giving up Hinduism in favor of
Buddhism.
At first the
cheeky premise seems mildly amusing, even provocative, and there is some
risibly vulgar dialogue (because half of it is spoken by Son of God) between
the 18-year-old Jesus (Justin Blanchard) and Abigail (Molly Ward), the girl who
loves him, as they cross the desert into India. Jesus has come here because
he’s “lost” and searching for his destiny, like so many other rootless
teenagers. When he goes off on his own and meets up with the caricature-like
Gopal (Vedant Gokhale), a mung bean farmer turned punk rocker (who shares a
joint with him), he’s invited to join the punk rock band fronted (until Jesus
arrives) by another caricature, the spoiled maharaja Sushil (Neimah
Djourabchi), whose horrible riffs include his favorite number, “Aaaargh,” which
is nothing but a loud scream to the unmusical shrieking of an electric guitar.
Jesus, who says he doesn’t play an instrument, and would be happy to simply
stand at the rear and keep time, picks up a hint or two about playing the bass,
and instantly becomes a terrific singer and musician (Blanchard's musical
talents are well displayed), but the experience leads to his realization that
what he really wants is to be a carpenter and to marry the adolescent servant
girl, Mahari (Meera Rohi Kumbhani, who, in a weirdo oedipal twist, also plays
Jesus’ mother, Mary), whom he has impregnated. When Abigail, whom he carelessly
abandoned in the desert years before, and whose long absence from the play does
it little good, returns to tell him that his father, Joseph, is dead and he’s
needed back in Jerusalem, he quickly decides to go home and fulfill his earthly
mission, even if means leaving his new family behind. By this time the humorous
tone of the early scenes has evolved into something more spiritual, and the
play has taken on a split personality.
The acting is
uniformly good, and Molly Ward is especially strong when playing Abigail’s
hippie persona; at the end, her character has become uninterestingly serious.
This is true of the play as well; its central conceit grows wearisome and the
laughs grow sparse, although Suh must be commended for his command of
dude-speak. Still, it’s never totally clear what drove Jesus to take his
journey, nor is the nature of what he’s discovered about his destiny made fully
manifest. I’d suggest that what the play needs at this point is a visit from
JESUS CHRIST SUPERDUDE.
77. FROM WHITE
PLAINS
FROM WHITE PLAINS
is a four-character play at the Signature, written and directed by Michael
Perlman. He and his four actors are all graduates of Brown University. The
premise is straightforward: a 30-year-old gay filmmaker, Dennis (Karl Gregory),
wins the Academy Award for his movie, WHITE PLAINS, which dramatizes his
traumatic high school experience when a gay friend of his was so overwhelmed by
the gay-bashing treatment he received from a bullying schoolmate that he killed
himself. His acceptance speech mentions the bully’s name, Ethan (Aaron
Rossini), which immediately leads to Ethan’s being shunned by friends and
losing his job, even though he shows remorse for what happened 15 years earlier.
An online dialogue between Ethan and Dennis continues as Ethan tries to
apologize and Dennis refuses to relent in his public revenge for his friend’s
death. A reluctant resolution of their relationship concludes the play, but by
this time Ethan’s life needs serious rebuilding.
Dennis’s unrelenting sense of
victimization, during which he grows more rather than less hostile as his more
emotionally balanced lover, Gregory (Jimmy King), tries to ameliorate his
attacks, grows wearisome. Despite its promisingly dramatic situation and the
possibility of strong ethical discussions, the playwright goes for melodrama
and his choices aren’t always believable. For instance, Dennis stumbles through
his Academy Award acceptance speech because he failed to prepare one in
advance, but he is totally fluid when he creates his online diatribes. There’s
also a totally implausible encounter on the subway between Gregory and Ethan’s
best friend in which, without knowing who the other is, they discuss the
situation in which their friends are involved. And all the actors are more or
less androgynous, so there’s little distinction between the straight and gay
characters.
Tristan Jeffers’s set, by the
way, is yet another in which a single living room interior serves as more than
one residence; there are even scenes where two sets of characters inhabit the
space at the same time without actually being in the same room. This latter
device was also used in GRACE, earlier this season, and the use of the same
furniture (although moved around in different arrangements) for two locales is
seen in REALLY REALLY.
78. THE MNEMONIST OF
DUTCHESS COUNTY
The driving idea
behind Josh Koenigsberg’s THE MNEMONIST OF DUTCHESS COUNTY at the Beckett
Theatre, directed by Laura Savia, is fascinating, but the execution is not all
that could be desired. It’s inspired by an actual case study published in 1968
by a Russian psychologist about a man of the 1920s who “was a fivefold
synthesthete with an astonishing memory” BUT who went undiagnosed until he was
an adult. This man then made a career with a professional memory act. Such
people are called mnemonists (with a long e, as in “knee”), and thus the play’s
title. It’s not a word I knew before; ditto synthesthete, which is someone
whose five senses all respond to the same external stimuli, i.e., you smell,
taste, hear, and feel everything you experience.
Milo (Henry Vick) is a doofus of
a security guard who happens to have an astonishing memory. His best friend, a
fellow security guard named Joey (Malcolm Madera), brings him to a research
psychologist, Dr. Hulie (Brit Whittle), and the professor becomes so fascinated
by his abilities he gets him to participate in a study for a book he wants to write.
Although a bit clumsily written, this part of the plot is plausible, although
one wonders why no one ever thought to investigate Milo’s condition before.
Unfortunately, the play settles for depicting Milo’s private life in an overly
conventional way by making him the kind of sad sack who spends his time in a
local bar where he’s in love with the pretty bar owner, Gina (Ava Eisenson). I
won’t spend time on the ups and downs of their relationship, or of what happens
to the other characters, but will note only that the bar’s drug-dealing,
hip-hop spouting, wheeler-dealer bouncer, Tito (Aaron Costa Ganis), realizes
that Milo could be a money-making machine if he appears at local colleges (in
Dutchess County) doing a memory act. We get to see Milo doing this, and he performs
a couple of routines with an audience member apparently picked at random; the
results are mind bending enough to make you wonder how the actor carries it off
without the seemingly guileless and embarrassed spectator being a plant. If you
watch closely, you may be able to figure out the tricks.
Milo is a sort of idiot savant,
with poor social skills, and an inability to understand much of what he
remembers so astonishingly. But Koenigsberg seems unsure of just how dumb-smart
the character is, and, especially toward the end, Milo—after experiencing a
number of emotional crises—seems much more intelligent than earlier in the
play. Still, Vick’s performance is something of a technical, if not artistic, tour
de force, and, despite the artificiality of the plot and its many inconsistencies
the play holds your interest, For a play about memory, THE MNEMONIST OF
DUTCHESS COUNTY is not so easy to forget.
79. HAMLET
The Access
Theatre is located in an old building at 380 Broadway near White Street in
Tribeca. To gain access to it you press a button outside and wait for the
buzzer, then (if you don’t want to wait for the elevator) climb four long
flights to a nondescript door that lets you in to a small lobby, from which you
enter a rather tatty looking performance space that has several rows of
cushioned theatre seats on risers. For HAMLET, presented by a company called
Bedlam, the stage floor facing the seats has been set with 20 or so folding
chairs and you sit on them facing the actual theatre seats, which is where the action
of the first act (there are three) is performed. You are asked to take your
belongings with you into the lobby during the two intermissions and when your
return you find a different seat each time facing the area you sat in for act
one or sitting along its walls. The walls around the permanent seats are
painted black and when the lights go out for the scenes on the battlement the
huge word “Elsinore” glows phosphorescently on the back wall. For acts two and
three there are nothing but a few chairs and the dingy white walls of the stage
space. Barely any scenic elements get between you and the play, although there
is an empty hanging picture frame, and a wire with colored lights hung in front
of a cheap white curtain unfurled from the ceiling for the play within a play.
The actors wear everyday modern clothing, the men in commonplace grunge-wear,
the one woman (Andrus Nichols) in a sleeveless, close-fitting tunic dress with
a thick cinch belt, tights, and low boots.
I say one woman because that’s
all there is, folks, to play not only Gertrude and Ophelia, but Marcellus, the
Ghost (shared with another actor), Guildenstern, Voltemand, the First Player,
the Sailor, and the Second Clown (gravedigger). All the other roles are played
by three men, with the actor of Hamlet (Eric Tucker) restricted to that role
and the small one of Francisco. He also directed this challenging exercise in
doing a barely cut HAMLET (it clocked in at around 3 hours 15 minutes) with
four actors (actually, there’s a fifth, uncredited and usually masked somehow,
who plays a couple of minor roles, including Fortinbras).
The actors make maximum use of
minimal props and lighting (the flashlights in the darkened space when the ghost
walks on the battlements are very well deployed), and they change from role to
role with only the slightest alteration of clothes or personal props: the actor
of Horatio/Polonius/Laertes/the Ghost/etc., need only to put on his glasses or
a hat for us to know who he is. All this theatrical tomfoolery would be irrelevant
if the actors were out of their depth playing Shakespeare, so it’s a pleasure
to report that these guys are not bad; not great, but not bad. None of them are
physically ideal for any of the principal roles they play, and it’s unlikely
they’d be cast in these characters in a conventional production, but they
somehow manage to overcome their personal limitations to create an intimate
engagement with Shakespeare’s greatest play, speaking the lines as if they
really mean something personal, yet switching effortlessly from role to role
without skipping a beat.
There is considerable movement
and action, all perfectly timed, and the scenes in which the actors, using only
four chairs, conjure a multiplicity of plot developments, or those played on a
patch of fine brown dirt strewn on the floor for the graveyard scene, are
expertly managed. The carefully choreographed duel scene uses metal swords
within the close confines of the stage space, with weapons violently swinging
not far from spectators’ heads.
The concept does grow thin after a while, for after all one of the delights of seeing a good, modern Shakespeare production is to experience beautiful costumes and lovely sets and lighting, as well as a variety of faces, voices, and bodies, yet for those who believe all that is nothing compared to the brilliance of Shakespeare’s language, this staging will serve their needs well. Those who don’t know the play well may struggle to differentiate one character from another, but for Hamlet lovers the problems will be minimal. Eric Tucker’s Hamlet is fiery and passionate, and he brings great clarity and terrific energy to his Dane, although he has a tendency to mug a bit too much. The other actors do decently in discharging their exhausting responsibilities, but they go on at such a rapid pace that their diction is sometimes not sharp enough to make what they’re saying instantly comprehensible. Tom O’Keefe as Claudius, the gravedigger, and others, delivers too many lines in borderline mushy-mouth, but the clarity of the overall interpretation helps him from losing our attention.
The concept does grow thin after a while, for after all one of the delights of seeing a good, modern Shakespeare production is to experience beautiful costumes and lovely sets and lighting, as well as a variety of faces, voices, and bodies, yet for those who believe all that is nothing compared to the brilliance of Shakespeare’s language, this staging will serve their needs well. Those who don’t know the play well may struggle to differentiate one character from another, but for Hamlet lovers the problems will be minimal. Eric Tucker’s Hamlet is fiery and passionate, and he brings great clarity and terrific energy to his Dane, although he has a tendency to mug a bit too much. The other actors do decently in discharging their exhausting responsibilities, but they go on at such a rapid pace that their diction is sometimes not sharp enough to make what they’re saying instantly comprehensible. Tom O’Keefe as Claudius, the gravedigger, and others, delivers too many lines in borderline mushy-mouth, but the clarity of the overall interpretation helps him from losing our attention.
I once saw a 12-actor Hamlet,
directed by William Ball and starring Dame Judith Anderson (she was in her 70s); it was awful on a number of
fronts, one of them being its inability to surmount the limitations in its cast
size. This production, on the other hand, shows that what was really missing
was the directorial imagination and performative ambition displayed by this
quartet/quintet of ambitious thespians.
80. KATIE ROCHE
The Mint Theatre
on W. 43rd Street is devoted to reviving forgotten and overlooked
plays, and their earlier ventures this season have been effective, in the main.
KATIE ROCHE, an Irish play by Teresa Deevy, one in a series by this playwright
the Mint has been devoting itself to for a few years, was given only one
previous New York staging, when it came here in 1937 as part of the visiting
Abbey Theatre Irish Players’ repertory and had five performances at the
Ambassador Theatre.
Years ago, I wrote a brief essay on
it in my Encyclopedia of the New York
Stage, 1930-1940: it begins, “The Abbey Theatre made a poor choice by
opening its 1937 engagement with this ‘half-hearted comedy’ (Brooks Atkinson—NYT), given a mediocre performance. Its
author was a mute from birth who had won a Dublin play contest with it.”
Atkinson might just as well have been writing about this lethargic and, for the
most part, insipid 2013 staging, one that might have benefitted if director
Jonathan Bank 1) had found a way to light a fire under his somnambulistic,
testosterone-challenged leading man, Patrick Fitzgerald, and 2) had cast
someone in the title role whose squeaky, high-pitched voice didn’t make her
sound like she was a mouse caught in a trap.
This revival of
David Ives’s evening of six hilarious sketches is one of the best things
available Off Broadway. Performed at 59e59 in honor of the play’s 20th
anniversary, it is given a splendidly directed (by John Rando) production with
a terrific team of actors who play a variety of roles with comic élan. If
anyone has to be singled out, it’s clearly Carson Elrod, who moves seamlessly,
and sometimes unrecognizably, from role to role. And the guy is seriously
funny.
The set (Beowulf Boritt),
lighting (Jason Lyons), sound and music (Ryan Rumery), and costumes (Anita
Yavich) all work perfectly to present these six linguistically brilliant
pieces, beginning with “Sure Thing,” in which a guy (Elrod) tries to pick up a
girl (Liv Rooth) in a restaurant, but keeps altering his words as a “ping” goes
off in response to her reaction and he (and then she) is allowed to revise
accordingly as time momentarily stands still. There’s a marvelous piece about
three chimps (Elrod, Rooth, and Matthew Saldivar) who are part of an experiment
in which they’ve been placed before typewriters on the premise that if left
alone to peck away the day will come when one of them would write Hamlet. The
actors’ monkeylike shenanigans as they discuss their dilemma had the audience
in stitches. Another bit has to do with a teacher (Elrod) instructing a woman (Jenn
Harris) in a universal language, while “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread” is a
spoof of how the famous avant-garde composer’s (Elrod) simple act of buying a
loaf of bread might look and sound, with all its repetitious phrasing, if carried
out in the style of a Robert Wilson-like production (Glass composed music for
various Wilson works). “The Philadelphia” finds a way to express how people’s
feelings can be represented by likening them to the states of mind suggested by
particular cities, like Philadelphia, where you never get what you want, or Los
Angeles, where everything is always sunny. “Variations on fhe Death of
Trotsky,” despite some memorable moments, ends the evening on something of a
downer, though, as its concluding tone is much darker than what has come
before. Still, this is an evening to savor, but, as the title reminds you, make
sure you catch it before it closes.
82. GRUG, 83. CLIVE,
and 84. THE PILO FAMILY CIRCUS
On Saturday, I
saw three shows. At 12:30 it was a show for 4-6 year olds called GRUG,
performed at the New Victory Theatre by three actors from Australia’s Windmill
Theatre. It took a half hour and was perfectly charming, but, being the only
adult in the house without a kid accompanying me, I was on my best “I’m not a
perve” behavior. The play is based on a popular children’s book about the top
of a weird Australian tree that falls off and becomes a creature living
underground who receives a number of intriguing parcels in the mail. It’s
actually a puppet show in which the performers both speak the words and
manipulate the doll-like puppets in full view of the audience. The kids loved
the worm character, manipulated by two sticks attached to its either end.
That half hour was the day’s
highlight. It was followed by CLIVE, Jonathan Mark Sherman’s egregiously
tedious adaptation of Brecht’s BAAL, a play I’ve always detested, and that
CLIVE made me hate even more. The star power of Ethan Hawke as the dyed blonde,
nihilistic rock star into which the leading role has been converted, is totally
wasted, as are the presences of Vincent Donofrio and Zoe Kazan in supporting
roles. Hawke also directed this solipsistic drek.
More effective was THE PILO
FAMILY CIRCUS, a bizarre, nightmarish drama about how an innocent young man,
after nearly running over a clown, is forced to become a clown himself in a company
of vicious, evil circus performers who are responsible for many of the world’s
catastrophes. The piece, presented by the Godlight Company at the New Ohio
Theatre on Christopher Street, has a hallucinogenic, dreamlike quality, but is
so depressingly downbeat as you watch the central character, Jamie/JJ the Clown
(Nick Paglino), struggle to break free of the clown personality that has been
magically forced upon him (think Jekyll and Hyde), that it leaves a sour taste
in your mouth. Still, it is given an outstanding low-budget production that
makes it necessary to give the director (Joe Tantalo) and his creative team
props for their imaginative efforts on the technical front. All the creepy
characters, including acrobats, a man with a fish’s head, and a fortune teller,
are acted at full blast; Nick Paglino (with one half of his face in clown
makeup, the other left untouched) goes beyond the call of duty in capturing the
tortured dilemma of his bipolar role, although you sometimes want to tell him
he doesn’t need to let every single stop out all the time. The clowns in this
weird play look like most others you’ve seen but they are truly bizarre and
deliberately unfunny. I’ll never look at clowns the same way again.
85. BUNNICULA and 86. PASSION
Drag queen and
playwright Charles Busch adapted the children’s book BUNNICULA for a kid’s
musical being given a lively production at the DR2 Kids Theatre on E. 15th
Street. This 65-minute piece engages its young audience of kids from around 4
to 10 with its tale of a suburban family that brings home a bunny from a movie
theatre that was struck by lightning during a showing of DRACULA. When the
fruits and vegetables in the fridge go completely albino, suspicion falls on
the bunny, which has been named Bunnicula and seems to have Transylvanian
vampire attributes. There is a college professor dad (Abe Goldfarb), his lawyer
wife (Erin Maguire), their two teenagers (Ashley Campana and John Garry), and
their dog Harold (Robert Anthony Jones) and cat Chester (Prescott Seymour). The
bunny is a hand puppet whose eyes blaze red when his bloodthirsty cravings are
stimulated. Chester’s efforts to get rid of the rabbit end up with the latter
in an animal hospital that’s more like a loony bin with a crazy head doctor
(Abe Goldfarb), but ultimately Bunnicula’s vampire personality becomes
secondary to the cat and dog learning to live and love with it, since we should
do our best to accept everyone else’s differences.
Or something like that.
The show has some spooky moments
but it’s mostly right up the alley of most kids (only a few of whom had to
leave to take care of their own bodily urges). The music (by Sam Davis) and
lyrics (by Mark Waldrop) are cute and bouncy, and there’s some campy humor when
Harold the dog disguises himself in an outfit made of fruits and veggies taken
from a garbage can with the help of a couple of cats he befriends in the city.
With a fart reference here, and a pee reference there, your kids will feel
right at home.
PASSION, a revival at the CSC on
E. 13th Street of the Sondheim musical that starred Donna Murphy on
Broadway some years back, is very much worth seeing, but by adults, not
children. Its story is of Giorgio (Ryan Silverman), a handsome, mid-19th
century Italian military officer in love with a beautiful, but married, woman,
Clara (Melissa Errico). He is sent to a military post where he meets a
plain-looking and very ill woman, Fosca (Judy Kuhn), cousin of the post’s
commander, Colonel Ricci (Stephen Bogardus). To Giorgio’s dismay, Fosca falls
in love with him; nevertheless, her passion eventually overcomes his great distaste
for her, especially when Clara is unable to leave her husband and child to run
away with him. This very dramatically romantic story, told with nary a touch of
humor, is minor Sondheim and has few songs that non-Sondheim fans will know,
but it is consistent both musically and theatrically and, in this elegant
production, grips you for the entirety of its hour and 45 minutes of
uninterrupted performance.
John Doyle, who directed and
designed the set, must get credit for staging this work with supreme taste and
sophistication. The set is merely a slightly raised platform of shiny, marble
tiles, with distressed edges; the rear walls and pillars are painted black,
there are a few simple curtains that the actors pull open or closed at the
rear, and two ornate mirrors hang on the rear wall upstage of the pillars. The
only furniture consists of a few black chairs, used in different
configurations, and a small writing box placed on the floor rather than on a
desk. Jane Cox’s exquisite lighting, Ann Hould-Ward’s excellent costumes
(especially the gorgeous dress worn by Clara), Jonathan Tunick’s
orchestrations, and a beautifully staged company of actor-singers make this an
exceptionally tasteful revival. Errico, Silverman, and Kuhn are marvelous, and
the performances of Bogardus and Tom Nelis (as the post’s physician) provide
superlative support. This is a PASSION you can get passionate about.
86. THE REVISIONIST
One of the things
contributing to this year’s dreary New York theatre season is how few shows are
being headlined by someone of superstar or, at least, household-name,
familiarity. All we’ve had has been Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain, Scarlett
Johansson, and, just recently, Edie Falco. Each has taken their lumps, for
their own performance flaws, for those of the shows they’re in, or even for
both. Al, Jessica, and Scarlett have been plying their wares on the Great White
Way, but Edie has chosen to perform Off Broadway (in the THE MADRID). Joining here
there is the 76-year-old Vanessa Redgrave, in THE REVISIONIST, at the tiny
Cherry Lane Theatre. This is, of course, a credit to her integrity as an
artist. (As you may know, she’s also famous for her controversial leftwing
politics, including her support of the Palestinian cause, and for rejecting an
offer to be made a Dame of the British empire.) Not so creditable, however, is
the vehicle she’s chosen for this visit. The play is by her co-star, Jesse Eisenberg,
the scrawny film actor and occasional writer, whose performance as Mark
Zuckerberg in THE SOCIAL NETWORK was nominated for an Academy Award. I have not
listed him among the headliners mentioned above because, while many know who he
is, my gorge rises at dubbing him a big star.
THE REVISIONIST is about David
(Eisenberg), a young American writer of Jewish heritage who visits a distant
Polish relative in the grimy port city of Szczecin on the Baltic. She is his
grandfather’s cousin, Maria (Redgrave), a Holocaust survivor whose family was
killed by the Nazis, and who only met David once before, when she visited
America back in the 90s (the play is set sometime during the George W. Bush
presidency). David, 29, is an obnoxious, self-centered pothead, who has come to
Maria’s tatty apartment to revise the book he’s writing before it goes to
press. For some odd reason, he thinks that coming to this dreary apartment (he
has no plans to sightsee) will overcome his writer’s block so he can finish the
job, He behaves with irritating selfishness toward the plainspoken, kind, and
sometimes funny Maria, who does all she can to accommodate his unpleasant ways
(including his turning facedown the family pictures she so proudly displays in
a bedroom); gradually, as his needs become more desperate, he—whose family
relationships are practically nonexistent—finds in Maria someone who becomes a
powerful maternal presence, a family member to whom he can reach out. In the
midst of all this we meet Maria’s friend, Zenon (Daniel Oreskes), a crude
cabdriver who speaks no English, giving Maria and David a chance for some
linguistic pranks at his expense when they teach him the wrong English words
(like “shit” and “asshole”) so they can hear him use them inappropriately in
what are supposed to be hilarious malapropisms. The fact that they are attached
to Polish sentences and have to be translated by Maria back into English for
the joke to register is not an especially risible device. As usual in plays
like this (RED DOG HOWLS, earlier in the season, comes to mind), the
relationship between David and Maria comes to a head when she willingly offers
to tell him her deepest secret, something related to a choice she made about
her family relationships after the war. However, no sooner does David find in
Maria the comfort he requires than she turns on him and forces him to return to
America.
Without Vanessa Redgrave to
anchor this clumsy, hole-ridden dramedy, the audience would surely have been
streaming for the doors before its intermissionless 100 minutes were concluded.
The tall, white-haired (worn here in bangs), and usually majestic Ms. Redgrave,
now slightly stooped, plays Maria with a heavy Polish accent and, indeed,
engages in a considerable amount of Polish dialogue with Zenon. The accent, and
her low-key approach to the role, make her sometimes hard to understand, but
she gradually draws you in and makes you care about Maria, despite how many
inconsistencies there are in how she’s written. For one thing, she has no
trouble understanding the rapid-fire gabbling of her co-star, with all his
pompous locutions, yet she has difficulty following the simplest
colloquialisms. In one instance, when told to keep things light she thinks it
refers to turning on the lights. And the sudden shift in her treatment of David
comes out of nowhere, despite the rationales she attempts to offer. This
denouement comes off seeming like a desperate ploy to arrive at a dramatic
conclusion. Perhaps it’s meant as retribution to suggest how Maria felt when
David turned her family photos down, although there’s been nothing in the play
until then to hint at her retributive nature.
Eisenberg must be the most
ungainly presence on a New York stage. He is as skeleton-like
skinny as a Tim Burton character; he plays David as such a grungy, gawky, neurotic,
pot-smoking, febrile bundle of nerves, that his jerky, uncoordinated movements,
with his soles rarely planted on the floor, suggest a jumpy puppet on a string.
Most of his lines are projected in an underplayed, rapid fire delivery, even
thrown away under his breath; given how innocuous many of them are, this may
not be a bad thing. (By the way, how on earth did David smuggle a lid of grass
into Poland by hiding it in a sock in his carryon? And why would he have taken
the risk if he was planning on staying only a week?)
You may not get another chance to
be in such close proximity to a great actress like Vanessa Redgrave, so for
that alone you might wish to see this play. But the experience might have been
so much more if only THE REVISIONIST had a revisionist of its own.
87. THE DANCE AND THE RAILROAD
Perhaps you
remember the handsome Chinese actor John Lone, who made something of a splash
on stage and in films during the 1980s and 1990s. Lone’s films included ICEMAN,
in which he played a caveman, and M. BUTTERFLY, in which he was the Beijing
Opera female impersonator with whom Jeremy Irons falls in love. Lone, born in
Hong Kong (his real name was Nk Kwok-leung), was actually a well-trained
Beijing Opera (jingju) performer who
made his first big impression in America when he starred in David Henry Hwang’s
first two plays, F.O.B. and THE DANCE AND THE RAILROAD, the latter produced in
1981. In it, he had the opportunity to display his Chinese opera skills within
the context of a play about two Chinese laborers working on the
transcontinental railroad in 1867. Lone now works mainly in films and TV for
Asian audiences, so their gain is our loss, but if you want to see the play that
brought him his first shot of fame, it’s in revival now as part of the
Signature’s season honoring playwright Hwang.
The play itself is a rather thin,
70-minute exercise that seems to have been conjured up as an excuse for
introducing Chinese theatre techniques into a drama about Chinese characters in
an American context. The concept is laudable, but, apart from the considerable
number of sequences using Chinese theatre movement, there is not much else of
interest on display. Chinese traditional theatre makes great use of song, but
very little is in evidence, probably because the traditional singing style makes
great demands on its performers’ vocal ability. I saw the current production
with my friend, Dr. Mo Li, who was raised in Beijing and is a scholar of
Chinese and Japanese theatre; his father is a major Beijing Opera set designer.
According to Dr. Li, the Chinese men who slaved away on the American railroads
in the 19th century were mostly from southern China, especially the
provinces of Fukien and Canton. The theatre performed there is largely singing
oriented, while the movements displayed in the production are more likely to be
encountered in Beijing Opera, not Cantonese opera. Moreover, he said, the
show’s movements are primarily martial, such as one sees when generals march
into battle, and, for all their flashiness, have very little to do with the
dramatic activities presented in the play.
Of course, theatre artists have
the right to take liberties with such things, especially when their audiences
are likely to have little knowledge of the technical details behind what
they’re seeing. I, for one, appreciate the idea of using Asian performing
techniques in a modern play written by an American; the Asian context of two
Chinese railroad workers is sufficient excuse for choosing this way of telling
their story.
The two characters are named
after their original interpreters (Lone’s co-star was Tzi Ma). Lone (Yuekun Wu)
finds that the only way to escape the drudgery of his labors on the Central
Pacific Railroad, on which he’s been working for three years, is to climb nearby
“Gold Mountain,” as the workers have dubbed it, and practice his theatrical
skills. He carries himself with grace and nobility, and has a certain
philosophical attitude toward life. To him, the other workers, who send their
earnings home to China, are “dead men.” The recently arrived, 18-year-old Ma
(Ruy Iskandar) is a less-educated, but innocently ambitious young man who admires
Lone and wants to be trained by him so he can return to China and become a
wealthy actor, ignoring the fact that Lone, for all his abilities, is himself
nothing more than a lowly laborer. Apart from Ma’s efforts to convince the
reluctant Lone to teach him, and some time spent as we watch the difficult
exercises Lone puts him through, the only dramatic conflict concerns a strike
against “the white devils” by the workers for higher wages and fewer hours. The
strike seems little more than a device to give Ma time to study under Lone’s
tutelage. Toward the end, Lone enact the story of their journey to America in traditional
Chinese style, accompanied by offstage Chinese music. This play within a play
is the evening’s highlight.
The play, well directed by May
Adrales (Lone directed the 1981 original), is performed on Mimi Lien’s attractively
abstract set, which, aided by the evocative lighting of Jiyoun Chang, creates
the craggy silhouette of the mountainside and the vast sky beyond. Jennifer
Moeller’s costumes resemble those of nineteenth-century coolies, and the
actors wear wigs with long queues attached (Lone’s is useful for a sequence in
which he rotates his head to spin it around and around).
Although Yuekun Wu shows evidence
of having studied Chinese theatre techniques, which affects his bearing even
when in normal conversation with his fellow actor, neither performer is
sufficiently interesting to sustain interest in this emotionally skimpy play. Even
before their dance was over I was thinking of my trip home on the trans-borough
subway.
88. LUCY LOVES ME
“There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” said Hamlet
to me as we exited last night from LUCY LOVES ME at the Intar Theatre way over
on the West Side at 10th Avenue and W. 50thStreet. This
was in response to my question as to why this play by prolific playwright
Migdalia Cruz, which has received two previous productions outside New York, so
excited Intar that they decided to offer it in New York. Perhaps it was because
the play was developed as part of Intar’s Maria Irene Fornés Hispanic
Playwright-in-Residence Laboratory, but if so, the laboratory produced a rather
odd concoction calling itself a play. According to the promo on it, “Lucy
dreams of not having to deliver pizza, Cookie dreams of a cabaret career, and
Milton dreams of bleeding. Lucy delivers a pizza to Milton. Milton randomly
calls Cookie. And when Cookie invites him over, Lucy answers the door. Is this
a recipe for love?"
I have too many things on my plate today to spend my time
chomping away at this lugubriously cooked recipe for disaster, so I’ll just add
that the director, pardon the expression, is Lou Moreno, and the actors are
Gerardo Rodriguez (the standout in the otherwise tasteless BODEGA BAY of recent
memory), as Milton, who enjoys bathing in chicken blood; Bertha Leal as Lucy,
the pizza girl; and Annie Henk as her bizarre mother, Cookie. All are decent
ingredients needing a better recipe to bring out their flavors.
89. THE WILD BRIDE
If you’re looking
for a wild ride on the wings of theatrical imagination, you won’t do any better
than taking the F train to the York Street Station in DUMBO and walking four
short blocks to St. Ann’s Warehouse, where the Kneehigh Theatre Company’s THE
WILD BRIDE is presently packing them in. The Kneehigh, of Cornwall, England,
is, of course, the brilliant group that brought their magical theatricalization
of the classic romantic movie, BRIEF ENCOUNTER, to Broadway a few seasons back,
and they are up to their usual way more than kneehigh standards in THE WILD
BRIDE, a remarkably effective, musical retelling of the protofeminist folk
story, THE HANDLESS MAIDEN.
The expansive St. Ann’s stage is
set up center with a strange, leafless tree, part branches and part ladders, a
few circular platforms to the left and right, including one for the small
orchestra, and a floor strewn with leaves. Heard almost continuously throughout
the action is a cornucopeaia of musical selections, mostly new but also filled
out with wonderful jazz, folk, bluegrass, and other tunes. Each of the five actors
is multitalented; all are skilled dancers, several are excellent singers, and
one is a virtuoso violinist. Even when not dancing in the charmingly
choreographed (by Etta Murfitt) set numbers, the actors move in rhythmic,
graceful ways in time to the ever present musical background. The rhyming
dialogue, much of it delivered as narration directly to the audience, also adds
to the theatrical storybook atmosphere. Humor and sexual byplay are other
featured elements that enrich this creatively inspired construction.
As in similar “devised”theatre
pieces, like Peter Brook’s recent THE SUIT, the performance is filled with
inventive theatrical touches, some of them unforgettable. When the central
character, struggling to survive without hands in a hostile world, needs food,
a shower of dimly lit bulbs overhead is imagined as a pear orchard, each pear
numbered. As she looks up at them a bulb, manipulated by an actor holding a
rope at the side, descends and she stretches forth her head so she can take the
bulb in her mouth; miraculously, the bulb, still lit, comes out of its socket,
so she can then play with it before making it her meal.
The story, whittled down to its
essentials, tells of how the Devil (Andrew Durand)—a pleasant young man in a
fedora and a brown, three-piece, Depression-era suit, who says he likes to
“upset the apple cart”—tricks the poverty-stricken Father (Stuart Goodwin,
using what sounded like an Irish accent) into giving him whatever is in his
backyard in return for gifts of clothing and jewelry. All the Father thinks
he’s giving up is his barren old apple tree, but he overlooks the presence of
his daughter. From this point on, the Devil seeks possession of her, but her
purity repels him and he decides to wait until that purity is soiled so he can
“put his hot fingers all over her.” This incites him to make the Father chop
off her hands (otherwise she’ll burn in hell, says the Devil), after which she
goes off into the forest and becomes a feral creature in a crown of twigs.
Despite her filthiness and handicap (first indicated by hands dipped in red
paint, then by bloody bandages), a kilt-wearing Scottish Prince (Stuart
Goodwin, again) falls in love with and marries her. But war breaks out and the
Prince (by now the King) departs, leaving his wild bride behind. When he
returns, after seven years of struggling to survive in the forest, he learns
that her eyes have been gouged out and her tongue cut off as the result of
letters he sent his mother (depicted as a large painting, with an actress’s hands
protruding from it), but the letters were a deception of the Devil’s.
Ultimately, of course, all turns out well, the Devil admits his failure, and
the bride’s hands, which the King had replaced with a blade for one and a
pitchfork-like device for the other, grow back, and all—including their little
boy, played by a puppet—live happily ever after.
The expressive genius behind the
telling of this simple story belongs to Emma Rice, the director and adapter,
who has come up with one thrilling effect after the other, always within the
limits of what can be created with a limited budget and boundless imagination.
The talented ensemble, in which three actresses play the daughter at different
stages—the Girl (Audrey Brisson), the Wild (Patrycja Kujawska), and the Woman
(Etta Murfitt)—is consistently superlative, the choreography by Edda Murfitt is
perfectly in touch with the material's folk quality, Martin Rippeth's lighting
is exceptional in its ability to create a variety of fantastical effects, Simon
Baker's sound design takes you to another dimension, and Sarah Wright's puppets
(a deer, a bird, a child) are dexterously built and handled.
My wife thought the major
drawback was that the show’s two-hour length was more than the material could
bear. I can understand how someone might feel that way, since this is, after
all, a fairytale about characters that are more images or outlines than
fully-developed people, but, for me, the experience was thoroughly enthralling
from beginning to end. I strongly recommend an engagement with THE WILD BRIDE.
90. SET IN THE LIVING ROOM OFA SMALL TOWN
AMERICAN PLAY
Down in the
depths of New York, at 46 Walker Street in Tribeca (the space normally used by
the SoHo Rep), a downtown troupe called A Theater Reconstruction Ensemble is performing
a play wieth the hard to remember title, SET IN THE LIVING ROOM OF A SMALL TOWN
AMERICAN PLAY, by resident playwright Jaclyn Backhaus, who also appears in it.
This group’s project is to investigate realistic acting as represented by the
plays of American dramatists of the ‘30s and 40s. According to the program,
when they tried to get the rights to plays of that period, even less well-known
ones, they were consistently turned down by agents and literary estates for no
stated reason, although the company suspected it was because of fears they’d do
something distressingly “experimental” with the material. Those who recall what
the Wooster Group did with THE CRUCIBLE might know what they were afraid of. So
director Johnb Kurzynowski says he “sat down together with . . . Jacklyn
Backhaus and together we began the process of identifying and extracting
various elements from the plays we had work shopped—recurring themes, iconic
characters, the building blocks of dramas of that era.” Presumably, these were works
like Odets’s AWAKE AND SING!, Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN and ALL MY SONS,
Williams’s THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and others in which family issues within the
matrix of American social and political values are crucial.
The result of the company’s
attempt to examine American realism is SET IN THE LIVING ROOM . . . , which
depicts the stressful familial and romantic conflicts that surround a son who
returns home after his stellar college football career ended when he crashed a
car that not only injured him but killed his girlfriend. The
“experimental”aspect of the work is that it is presented as a rehearsal,
beginning with the actors sitting around a table reading the lines, with the
stage manager (Nick Smerkanich) speaking the stage directions. Now and then the
reading stops as the actors ask questions or make corrections. At this point,
we see something interesting happening as the naturalism of their personal
comments contrasts with the acted realism of their characters, but this conceit
is soon abandoned and the rehearsal morphs into a blocked out one, although a
few characters tend to stand outside the action while the others relate to them
as though they were in their assigned stage places. I have no idea of why such
choices were made, and the entire point of interrogating realistic acting
methods seems to fade in favor of what is essentially a typical performance of
a play, albeit in rehearsal clothes in a bare space, and with a few directorial
gimmicks added in for creative seasoning.
The play itself comes off as a
surprisingly respectable pastiche of what it is attempting to replicate, but
without the artistic imagination of Miller, Odets, Williams, or the slightly
later Inge (who seems to be referenced with all the staircase activity). The
young company, supplemented by Off Broadway veteran Tina Shepard, is competent
enough (many are graduates of NYU’s theatre program), but once act one is
ended, and the intermission arrives, the idea of what they’re doing has been
conveyed and there doesn’t seem a compelling need to return for act two
(although I did, of course).
There was no talkback after the
show, but I, for one, would like to have asked what the company thinks it has
discovered that somehow enlightened them about the subject they were exploring.
Did they believe they made any breakthroughs? Was there something they did that
brought realism to a new level? Did they have some revelation about training
for this “style.” For me, they were on the brink of doing something interesting
during the first 20 minutes or so when they contrasted their seemingly
off-the-cuff remarks with those of the play they were rehearsing. Did they
believe they’d somehow embodied that kind of “in the moment” honesty when the
play moved from the table (which, of course, remained present throughout) to
their feet? Perhaps if they had, I might not have felt that the exercise had
lost its impetus by the end of act one. On the other hand, their decision to
play the final scene in a near whisper, as if that’s how people talk in real life
when there’s no paying audience listening, as period music played behind them
on a continuing soundtrack (another “theatrical” device used throughout),
demonstrated the ultimate dilemma of the most realistic acting: how do you
speak in a truthful, sincere, totally believable way so that not only your
fellow actors but an audience (especially one in a larger space than this) can
hear you? That is, if an actor speaks in a full theatre and no one hears him,
did he make a sound?
91. THE OLD BOY
A.R. Gurney’s 1991
play, THE OLD BOY—set in an expensive New England boarding school catering
mainly to a clientele of old money WASPS, and proudly declaring that not only
has it gone coed but that it is now open to Jews (who “raise the level of
discourse”) and blacks—has been revived by the Keen Theatre Company at the
Clurman Theatre. Though the promos say it’s been revised, director Jonathan
Silverman told me afterward that the only significant revision is some cutting
done to a brief commencement speech given at the end by the leading character.
Too bad, because the play is definitely in need of revision to make it more
effective today, when its treatment of homosexuality seems rather dated.
Not that gay people in 2013 have
shed all the heavy burdens they bear in this increasingly liberal world; it’s
just that, however brave the play’s handling of these issues may have seemed in
the early 1990s, Gurney’s approach now seems dated and unconvincing. Topicality
is a dangerous dramaturgic concept; the fact that certain subjects are even
being expressed can sometimes overshadow the integrity of their expression.
Sam (Peter Rini), a charismatic
politician who works for State Department and who is being groomed for his
state’s governorship, has returned to the boarding school to give its
commencement address. Also present is Harriet (Laura Esterman), the wealthy
mother of Perry (Chris Dwan), there to make a gift to the school of an indoor
tennis complex in honor of her late son, who was a fine tennis player and who,
although his mother says he died of an accidental drug overdose, actually died
of AIDS. Accompanying her is the attractive Alison (Marsha Dietlien Bennett),
Perry’s widow and Sam’s former lover. We soon see that sexual tension between
Sam and Alison remains alive, although she reminds him that it was his
influence that led to Perry marrying her. Sam was the designated “old boy,” a
senior student mentor to the incoming Perry when the younger boy entered the
school. We see their relationship in flashbacks set in the late 1960s, where we
watch Sam advise Perry that his love of opera and his agreement to play Viola
in a school production of TWELFTH NIGHT are, among other things, bound to have
people label him as “a fag.” Perry denies being gay, especially in a scene
while the boys are out driving, and Sam keeps using the term “faggot.” But a
few moments later, Perry admits to having had a sexual encounter with a man,
confirming the rumors about him. Sam then set about straightening Perry out by
setting him up with Alison in what, of course, was doomed to be an unhappy
marriage. Sam, warned by Bud (Cary Donaldson), his aide, to beware of saying
anything controversial in his speech, nevertheless delivers comments that
express sympathy for the plight of people like Perry, leading to Bud’s angry
departure and the possible end of Sam’s political ambitions, something of which
the guilt-ridden Sam was fully aware when he began to speak.
Although given an attractive
presentation in a set backed by a heavily paneled wall adorned with portraits
of past schoolmasters, Jonathan Silverman’s production is mostly low-keyed and
lethargic; there are too many times you want to poke the actors with a pin and
get them to pick up the pace and raise their energy levels. Peter Rini as Sam
looked the part of an attractive young politician, but lacked the necessary
charisma. The casting of Chris Dwan as Perry is a major miscalculation; if a
major element in the play is whether the character is gay or not (at least for
the characters), why cast someone whose presence screams out the minute you see
him that he’s a refugee from THE BOYS IN THE BAND? Three people I discussed the
production with agreed with me that the only believable portrayal was Laura
Esterman’s as Perry’s upper-class mother, although another friend thought the
actress was merely repeating the same performance she’s given in many other
plays. Marsha Dietlein Bennett’s Alison is attractive but dull; and why is she
wearing a white dress whose sides are so open they reveal large portions of her
back and waist? Is that what one would have worn to a commencement at a fancy
boarding school?
Fortunately, THE OLD BOY clocks
in at around 75 minutes, sans intermission; unfortunately, THE OLD BOY is old
hat.
92. ISAAC’S EYE
"It is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to
enter into the kingdom of God." The only thing this Biblical quote has in
common with Lucas Hnath’s new play, ISAAC’S EYE, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre
on W. 52nd Street near 11th Avenue is the phrase “eye of
a needle,” but the eye in question here is a human eye, not the little hole in
the needle through which you draw thread. Nothing actually is threaded through
a needle’s eye in the play, but the needle and the human eye do meet when the
ambitious young scientist Isaac Newton (Haskell King) convinces his rival
scientist, the older Robert Hooke (Michael Louis Serafin-Wells), to carry out
an experiment concerning the nature of light by inserting a needle into Isaac’s
tear duct. And there’s even an extended scene played with Newton sitting in a
chair with the needle appearing to be sticking out of his eye. Not only that,
but someone is actually credited in the program as “Needle Consultant,” which I
don’t expect to be a contested category in this year’s awards season.
The theatre is one flight up in a
grungy old factory-like building with a tiny lobby into which the audience
squeezes before being allowed into the small, uncomfortable performance space,
where two banks of seats forming a V face a dingy gray concrete wall punctuated
by tall, dirty, industrial-size windows. The set is nothing more than a large
blackboard, several smaller ones, and a small table and a couple of chairs.
Cardboard placards with writing on them are also present. Much of the action
consists of writing with chalk on the blackboards or on walls and windows, as
when Hooke lists all of his breakthrough accomplishments in an attempt to
belittle the unknown Newton.
Despite being set in the
seventeenth century, ISAAC’S EYE is not written, costumed, or performed as
period drama. Even though the play tells us that Newton had white hair when he
was very young, no attempt is made to suggest this in Haskell King’s
appearance. The characters speak and behave very much as everyday people might
in 2013, including the frequent use of profanity, which makes its themes of
professional rivalry and the lengths that people will go to in the interests of
scientific research seem immediately familiar and accessible. The 25-year-old Newton
has a kind of brazenly insinuating college-boy snarkiness, while Hooke is like
any arrogant and self-involved professor you’ve ever encountered. While the
themes and relationships are serious, there’s also a tongue-in-cheek,
anachronistic, self-referential quality to the writing, resulting in a
comfortable blend of serious debate and humorous one-liners. A narrator
character (Jeff Biehl) even informs the audience (by writing on the blackboard)
of what in the play is true and what is not (a lot). So there’s an “as if” quality
to the proceedings that allows you to believe just as much as you want to about
how closely the play hews to reality; we know, for instance, that Newton did
stick a needle in his eye, but we don’t really know the reason, regardless of
the rationale given for it in the play.
The central conflict between the
scientists, which provokes the needle in the eye experiment, is a disagreement
over whether light consists of particles (Newton) or waves (Hooke). The
conflict is exacerbated by Newton’s ambition to become a member of the Royal
Society, of which Hooke is an influential officer. There is also a conflict
between the life of the farmer (Newton) and that of the city dweller (Hooke),
with Hooke casting envious eyes on the life Newton so eagerly seeks to leave. Another
part of the tapestry is a concocted love rivalry built around Catherine
(Kristen Bush), an apothecary and Newton’s beloved.
Once the play’s premise and funky
style are established in act one, there isn’t much more to look forward to in
act two. For all the consistently clever dialogue, and the finely tuned
characterizations, the play’s dramatic pulse gradually weakens; the characters
are too obviously artificial constructs and sustaining interest in them, while
sitting on an uncomfortable chair for over two hours, is a test of one’s
endurance, if not near the level of putting a needle in one’s eye. But Lucas
Hnath definitely has a unique voice worth listening to and I’ll look forward to
seeing his next effort.
93. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA
Okay, boys and
girls. Let’s see a Broadway musical! What, you’re only 8-years-old and don’t
think you’ll have a good time? Why, what did you think Broadway musicals were
for? Grownups? How about ANNIE? Or what about MATILDA, coming very soon? And
then there’s MARY POPPINS, although that’s closing now. But you can certainly
enjoy Disney’s NEWSIES and get your comic book thrills at SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF
THE DARK. Of course, THE LION KING is still roaring, and there’s still WICKED
for all you tots who want to see what’s on the other side of the rainbow. Oh,
wait a second, I forgot to mention the newest kid on the block, RODGERS AND
HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA, which just opened at the Broadway Theatre. Hey, kids!
Isn’t Broadway just the child-friendliest place on earth?
In point of fact, a hell of a lot
of adults were having a grand old time at CINDERELLA the other night, and, like
many of the little girls in the house, many a woman of a certain age could be
seen capering in the aisles in a sparkling tiara. This spectacularly produced
show, which had three earlier incarnations on television over half a century
ago, is now receiving its Broadway premier, and all the stops have been pulled
out to make it an engaging, fun, tuneful, and eye-popping experience. The costumes
are lavish, the sets are stunning, the cast is talented, and the music is . . .
well, okay! The names of the late Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II may
be attached to the show, but none of the songs compares with the classics
associated with OKLAHOMA!, CAROUSEL, THE KING AND I, SOUTH PACIFIC, and others
in the Rodgers and Hammerstein album. The closest, I’d say, would be “It’s
Possible” and “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful.”
The classic fairytale of
Cinderella has been given a humorous revision by Douglas Carter Beane, who has
injected some of his trademark quirky humor into the familiar story.
Cinderella, called Ella (Laura Osnes), is mistreated by her stepmother, Madame
(Harriet Harris), and her two (only two) stepsisters, Charlotte (Ann Harada)
and Gabrielle (Marla Mindell). But the mistreatment in this retelling is
relatively benign, the stepmother is more goofy than evil, one of the sisters
is comically short and chubby, and the other—who becomes Ella’s ally—tall and
angular and in love with a political firebrand, Jean-Michel (Greg Hildredth),
who slightly resembles Nathan Lane. The handsome prince (Santino Fontana) is
humorously proud of his martial abilities but otherwise naïve and silly until
he learns to take command from his scheming regent, the effete Sebastian (Peter
Bartlett). Cinderella’s fairy godmother first appears as the crazy old hag,
Marie (Victoria Clark), but at the proper moment transforms magically into her
dazzling real self, even to the extent of flying over the stage to spread her
fairy dust. (Clark’s singing, by the way, is especially memorable.) Aside from
the political angle in which the prince, influenced by his love for Ella,
willingly agrees to alleviate the economic problems of his downtrodden people,
all the conventional pieces are in place, including the pumpkin that magically
becomes a gorgeous coach drawn by a team of sparkling horses, the ball (with
the hands of a giant clock upstage getting ever closer to midnight), and the
business of the glass slipper, although with another twist in the way it fits
into the dramatic puzzle and onto Ella’s foot.
The tongue-in-cheek humor works
most of the time, often with knowing nods to the audience’s familiarity with
what comes next, and the general tone is lighthearted, spirited, upbeat, and
sweet. No real threat to the spunky Ella—a protofeminist, of course—is ever present
in this mostly benevolent world, and we never doubt for a minute that everyone
will live happily ever after. Kids will love it for its visual and auditory
delights, its appealing lovers, its comedic highlights, its raccoon and fox
puppets who morph into human coachmen and then back to their natural selves,
its flying godmother, and its sometimes gymnastic choreography, but some adults
may wish they were watching something with more bite and depth than just
another retelling of a children’s story they grew up with. Then again, RODGERS
AND HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA is really a multimillion dollar children’s show,
so it’s kids who will get most from it. Unless you’re bringing your young ones
with you, you’ll have to make sure you don’t forget your inner child.
94. ANN
Holland Taylor,
who has made a fine career out of playing elegant older women, has written a
one-woman show she also stars in about Ann Richards, the feisty ex-governor of
Texas who died in 2006. Actually, ANN (at the Vivian Beaumont) is not quite a
one-woman show, as a long scene has Gov. Richards talking on an intercom to her
offstage secretary (Julie White). Richards, who, after she lost her bid for a
second term in office, gained a wide following among liberals by her frequent
appearances on TV shows, like Larry King’s, is perfect material for a show not
only because she was so colorful and spontaneous, but also because she
projected a basic honesty and concern for people. Her well-groomed good looks,
accompanied by beautifully coiffed white hair and tasteful attire, made her
very telegenic, and her earthy sense of humor always made listening to her
entertaining and informative.
Ms. Taylor has done an
astonishing job in recreating Ann Richards’s persona. With a marvelous white
wig and exquisite white business suit she looks as much like the original as
one could wish, and she carries herself and speaks with all the vigor and
spunkiness we associate with the late governor. Ms. Taylor is 70-years-old, but
she has great reserves of energy; except for an intermission, she is onstage
talking constantly for two hours, a feat she must do twice two days a week. Not
once did I see signs of flagging physically or vocally, and her final moments
showed a surprising surge of electricity.
Taylor begins and ends the play
with a commencement address that allows us to learn some facts about her
biography (including her marriage, divorce, alcoholism, and rehab) as we see
photos of her rural Texas background projected on an upstage screen. The
setting, designed to look like a formal platform at some unnamed Texas
university, smoothly transforms to her governor’s office, where she engages in
numerous one-sided phone conversations, then shows us a New York office she
moved into following her gubernatorial defeat, and finally returns to the
university platform, where her closing comments manage to include a description
of the funeral she received after she died of cancer.
Richards’s liberal policies are
mentioned scattershot throughout the play, but the one that got the Lincoln
Center audience excited to where there was an eruption of applause was her
position on the need for gun control. Hearing a major Texas politician come out
strongly against concealed weapons was a terrific moment in the current climate,
especially when she suggested that people who carried guns should be required
to wear them hanging from their necks so you’d know immediately who it was that
could shoot you. She also wisecracked that allowing Texas women to carry
concealed weapons was absolutely foolish as they’d never be able to find them in
their handbags when needed.
However enjoyable it is to listen
to and watch Ms. Taylor’s embodiment of Ann Richards, a two-act, two-hour
performance is more than the subject can bear. The compilation of random
political and personal phone calls that make up much of the dialogue has no
driving dramatic point, so the effect is rambling rather than propulsive, and
there’s no conflict or suspense to keep us involved. All we can do is wonder at
how remarkable Ms. Taylor’s performance is, and wait for her next vivid
theatrical moment, not Ann Richard’s next vivid political or personal action.
Still, seeing Ann come back to life in this stage play only makes me wish she could
do so in real life. She added something to the discourse that no one has ever
replaced.
95.
JACKIE
Not many plays by
living Nobel Prize winners come to New York, so JACKIE, by the reclusive
Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, produced in Gita Honegger’s translation by
the Women’s Project at the City Center II Theatre, is a rare opportunity to see
one. The play is tough, being a rather abstract, literary,
stream-of-consciousness monologue by Jackie Kennedy (Tina Benko). The
production is set in Marsha Ginsberg’s flawlessly replicated vision of a
dilapidated swimming pool, showing both the inside of the rusty, leaf-strewn
pool and the floor from which the pool is entered and exited via a steel pool
ladder. But even to enter and leave that pool floor requires Jackie to do so
through a trap door. (No pool is mentioned in the script, so the choice of an
abandoned pool will suggest various hell or limbo-like meanings to each
viewer.) And Jackie's not quite alone, as she shares the space with three
man-sized dummies wrapped in duct tape, with their names—Jack, Ari, and
Bobby—written on their torsos, and two tiny dummies, possibly representing
babies lost to miscarriage (chlamydia is referenced in the play).
Much of the play concerns John
(Jack) Kennedy’s affairs, and sarcastic references to Marilyn Monroe abound
(including a bunch of Marilyn-like Barbie dolls, one of which is mutilated to
comical effect); there also are some disturbing lines describing the gore
associated with Kennedy’s assassination. Another thematic line is fashion. In
this regard, Ms. Benko first appears in trench coat, headscarf, and large
sunglasses, which she removes to reveal a lovely, peach-colored chiffon dress
designed by Susan Hilferty. Nevertheless, this Jackie is not the coolly genteel
and sophisticated person so familiar from public images of her; she is far more
bitter, ironic, and witty than the one we were allowed to view. The overall
impression is of an iconic person deconstructing her own public image as an
American icon of femininity, and perhaps, as someone has written, sharing
responsibility for the shallow image she’s allowed the patriarchal society to
build around her.
This might have been a colossal
bore were it not for Ms. Benko’s extraordinary tour de force performance
reciting the dense, nonlinear speeches in which she and her imaginative
director, Tea Alagik, have found dozens of fascinating transitions and
opportunities for strikingly theatrical physical movement. Aiding immensely are
the potently surprising lighting of Brian H Scott and the intense sound effects
created by Jane Shaw. Among the combined lighting and sound effects are the
numerous occasions when it seems Jackie is being photographed in a burst of a
camera’s flash accompanied by the shutter snapping like a bullet shot.
As it was, I’m not sure I
understood all of what I was hearing, but I was generally intrigued enough to
keep me interested and even chuckling at some of the amusing, pun-filled lines
sprinkled throughout the script. For example, “I cast myself as a cast—plaster,
but not plastered, and not my waist. My waist isn’t cast in plaster, and my
hair isn’t plastered, it’s lacquered.” And even these lines work, when they do,
because of Ms. Benko’s very smart delivery.
JACKIE will have limited appeal.
For all its positives as a performance piece, it remains a challenging and
cerebral work that will puzzle and annoy some theatergoers. The more I think of
it the more I believe I appreciated what was done with it more than I enjoyed
the play itself.
96. NEVA
Neva refers to
the river of that name in St. Petersburg, where the action of this drama is set
in January 1905. Three people occupy a tiny circular stage in the Anspacher
Theatre at the Public Theatre complex; there is one prop, a chair, and the only
light comes from an electrical device downstage that the actors manipulate as
needed to illuminate the space. When the play ends, it is turned toward the
audience and we see that it’s an electric heater, which accounts for the stark,
reddish color cast on the actors, who are otherwise in shadow. This design
choice may be intended to suggest how artists are often in the dark when it
comes to their awareness of the world outside the theatre, but it grows
tiresome and dull well before the play’s 80 minutes are up.
NEVA is by Guillermo Calderón, a
Chilean playwright (who also directed) being given his first English-language
American production with NEVA, which has been smoothly translated by Andrea
Thome. It has received critically praised productions in Spanish in several
international contexts, including Moscow. Calderón (a CUNY graduate student in
film a decade ago) has imagined a time, not long after the death from TB of the
great playwright, Anton Chekhov, when his widow, the famous Moscow Art Theatre
actress Olga Knipper (Bianca Amato), shown as something of a diva, is in a St.
Petersburg theatre with two local actors, Aleko (Luke Robertson), from a
wealthy family, and Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), an incipient revolutionary;
they are waiting for the rest of the cast to show up so they can begin
rehearsals of THE CHERRY ORCHARD. As they wait, they engage in talk about
Chekhov, even re-enacting his death; the art of acting; sex; and politics; some
of this is amusing, but most of it is charmless. Much of the language is
anachronistically modern. The play gradually shifts to talk of the political
revolution going on just outside, for this is the time of Bloody Sunday, the
1905 uprising in which the czar’s militia turned its guns on striking workers,
slaughtering many of them. (It was the prelude, of course, to the Russian
Revolution of twelve years later.) Possibly, the actors who haven’t yet arrived
at the rehearsal have been caught up in the violence. The dramatist, having
grown up during the years of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship, has a strong
sympathy for the people who suffer under oppressive regimes, which his other
plays reportedly express as well.
Calderón has said, “What’s the
point of seeing a theatrical work when, because of politics, people are dying
every day?” Well, there are plenty of points, as artists living under
oppressive regimes have always demonstrated. Despite Calderón’s wish to make
some connection between what he apparently sees as the mundane concerns of the
three actors huddled in the theatre and the greater issues reverberating in the
streets outside, his points are vaguely articulated, being further muzzled by
the stylistic choices in the writing and production. Too much of the play comes
off like acting exercises designed to show the actors’ expressive range (and
they happen to be quite expressive); the very long political speech at the end,
spoken at machine-gun speed by the suddenly angrily politicized Masha, may be
technically impressive but its ideas go by so fast that they barely register;
instead the listener focuses on the elocutionary skill of the actress in being
able to say so much at such a pace without stumbling.
It’s good that the Public is
seeking new voices from the international theatre world, thereby addressing a
serious lack in New York’s theatre scene, but I’m not convinced that NEVA does
much to fill the gap. Hopefully, the Public will do better next time. My
suggestion, though, would be to never say NEVA but I suspect others commenting
on this play will make similar cracks. For a much stronger play that ties
political events transpiring in the streets to a group of characters whose
lives are powerfully influenced by them, fast forward 62 years to DETROIT '67,
which I'll report on soon.
97. THE MADRID
I’m a big Edie
Falco fan and, until now, would have thought nothing she did could be wrong,
which only goes to show you how wrong I was. Liz Flahive’s new play, THE
MADRID, stars Ms. Falco as Martha, a woman with a comfortable family life,
including her aged mother, Rose (Frances Sternhagen), her 21-year-old college
student daughter, Sarah (Phoebe Strole), and a husband who cares for her, John
(John Ellison Conlee). She also has a couple of caring neighbors, Danny (Darren
Goldstein) and Becca (Heidi Schreck), who have a tall 16-year-old, Dylan (Seth
Clayton), who suffers from a condition that creates actual growing pains. (He
speaks in the sing-song intonations of Shoshana on GIRLS, only slower.) Martha
also has a job teaching kindergarten; the one child we see in the play’s
opening classroom scene is a very well-groomed little blonde girl (Brooke
Ashley Laine), who is slightly aggressive in the questions she asks Martha.
During this scene, Martha suddenly rises, tells the child she’s now the
teacher, and walks out, leaving her job and her family, and not telling anyone
where she is. When her daughter tracks her down, we learn she’s living in a
shabby room in a rundown apartment house, the Madrid, with no phone. She’s
saved her money by working in a bar for several years (a fact not known to her
family), and gives Sarah $10,000 not to reveal her whereabouts. She never says
why she left or why she’s so happy living like this, nor does she say—and the
play doesn’t ask—why, if she was so obviously disgusted with her marriage, she
didn’t simply ask for a divorce.
Regardless of whatever else
happens in this dull and plodding play, this question lingers throughout, and
is never answered. At the talkback following the play, at which the dramaturg
and two actors (Frances Sternhagen and Seth Clayton) were present, this was the
preeminent question on the audience’s mind, and the three representatives of
the play could do little but speculate on what causes Martha to leave. From
what they said, the director, Leigh Silverman, also had little to offer in this
regard.
So we have a presumably realistic play with the motivation
behind the chief character’s major life choice unexplored, compounded by
various other illogicalities, such as having her college student daughter
replace her in her teaching job (tell me where this would happen); thinking
nothing of giving her daughter $10 K to keep her ratty apartment’s location
secret, even though it’s bound to be found out; refusing to see her mother in
the hospital after she has a car accident, and so on. Yet, at the very end,
when the family home furnishings are being sold she shows up at the tag sale
and, as her daughter lies sleeping on Martha and John’s bed, snuggles up to lie
alongside her, although with no apparent intention of remaining. WTF?
So, okay, it’s a lousy play, but
at least it gives Edie Falco a chance to perform live in a role that surely
must allow her opportunities to show why she’s been so successful on TV in
shows like THE SOPRANOS and NURSE JACKIE. Not! For one thing, she’s on stage
only around 50% of the time, not even as much as the actress playing her
daughter. For another, her performance, as Dorothy Parker famously said of
Katharine Hepburn, runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B. There isn’t a
single big scene that lets her strut her stuff.
Playwright Flahive is a producer
of NURSE JACKIE. Might this have had something to do with Ms. Falco’s decision
to do this clunker?
98. DETROIT ‘67
In 1967 the music
of Motown, inspired by Detroit’s black population, was thriving and many in that
community saw in it the seeds of Detroit’s revival as a major city. But
seething beneath the surface were serious problems of social inequality and
police brutality toward blacks, problems that erupted on July 23 into one of
the worst riots in American history, with 43 people killed and Gov. George
Romney bringing in the military to supplement the city’s inadequate police
force. Detroit would never recover from the horrors of this outbreak of burning,
looting, and shooting.
In DETROIT ’67, her
new play set against this backdrop, and playing at the Public’s Shiva Theatre,
fledgling playwright Dominique Morisseau, plunks us down in the
cinderblock-walled basement of Chelle (Michelle Wilson) and her brother Lank
(Francoise Battiste) as they and their close friends, the smooth-talking Sly
(Brandon J. Dirden) and the foxy lady Bunny (De’Adre Aziza), prepare the place
for a party intended to earn some money. Lank and Sly hope to make things
exciting with the new 8-track tape player they’ve acquired, although the very
conservative Chelle, who lives her life within the confines of tried and true
rules, objects, preferring to listen to her Motown music on 45s. Before the
party begins, however, Sly and Lank bring home a white girl they rescued when
they found her beaten up in the street. The cautious Chelle is outraged by the
presence of the attractive girl, Caroline (Samantha Soule), because she fears
the reaction when news leaks of this white girl’s presence in the home of black
folks. Caroline, who has been robbed of her purse, is a bar employee; we
eventually learn what her problem is, but it turns out to be minor in the
play’s scheme of things. Still, she’s a cool customer and is perfectly at home
among blacks; to Lank’s surprise, she even loves Motown music, but this only
shows how limited his perception of the white world is. (One of the biggest
laughs comes when Bunny, realizing how comfortable Caroline is in this world,
shouts out with joy, “She’s a nigger lover!”) Despite Caroline’s well-meaning
demeanor, Chelle is enraged to detect a growing affection between her and Lank.
She is even more upset about Lank’s decision to use the money their father left
them to go into business with Sly in a liquor store; some may be reminded of
Walter Younger’s unfulfilled dream of using his father’s insurance money to
open a liquor store in A Raisin in the
Sun. Then the riots break out nearby, with the flashing lights of police
cars visible through the basement windows, and the frightening sound of tanks
heard rumbling through the streets. Chelle and Sly are at the liquor store
they’re planning to open when they find themselves in a tragic confrontation
with the cops; in this case, however, the dream will not be deferred.
Unlike NEVA, where the connection
between revolutionary action in the streets outside and the lives of the actors
in the theatre is never effectively dramatized, DETROIT ’67 makes moderately
good use of the outside socio-political environment to bring dramatic life to
the people it portrays inside these basement walls. Despite the militant black
power fist painted on the rear wall, and the preoccupation of the characters
with black cultural signifiers (and language, including the constant reference
to other blacks as “nigger”), no one is shown as anti-white. They are disgusted
with and frightened by the racist actions of the white police, who
systematically oppress the black community, but they don’t spout racially
loaded comments, and simply want to be let alone to fulfill their destinies as
decent people. Thus Chelle’s dismay at Caroline’s presence is not because of
prejudice against her skin color, but simply because she knows the presence of
a white girl in this household is bound to bring trouble in its wake.
Director Kwame Kwei-Arman has
infused this promising, if imperfect, play with energy and passion. The cast is
uniformly solid, forming an artistically integrated ensemble. The occasional
playing of Motown highlights creates the right feeling, and the actors’
occasional transitions into dance movements adds visual interest. Dominique
Morisseau is a playwright worth watching and DETROIT ’67 is a play worth
visiting.
99. OLD HATS
Bill Irwin and
David Shiner are once more the princes of New York clownery with their new
show, OLD HATS, at the Signature Theatre. This has to be one of the most
delightful theatre events of the season, as these two veteran funnymen seem
ageless in their physical dexterity and comedic spirit. OLD HATS is given in
the format of an old-time vaudeville show within a gorgeously red false
proscenium with a placard stand at stage left announcing each act’s title in an
attractive digital style, showing that while the show may be old hat in format
it’s new hat in technology. Mr. Irwin even has a memorable scene in which he
creates some awesome effects interacting with an Ipad. To further this tech-oriented
theme, the acts are often backed by marvelous video projections, including one
that shows Mr. Irwin’s face blown up to giant size so that when he opens his
mouth wide the flesh and blood Mr. Irwin can step into it through a slit in the
screen and out of it in another image on the other side.
The show is composed of a
sequence of comic and musical acts whose quality barely dips, and that show the
full range of these artists’ mimic and comedic skills. They wear costumes that
are surrealistically clown-like exaggerations of everyday clothing and that
allow their limbs the room to create all sorts of limber movements. Except for
one classically pathos-ridden hobo scene by Mr. Shiner, they don’t wear clown
makeup. They do sometimes put on funny faces, though, like the glasses and
large nose worn by Mr. Irwin in a scene that does wonders with the contents of
a large pot full of stringy spaghetti. In another bit, they wear bright false
teeth smiles and slicked down wigs to play rival politicians in a broadly
slapstick political debate. A number of bits revolving around the juggling of
their oversized top hats reveal the technical perfection of their art. The
humor is mostly in good taste, only occasionally skirting the edges, as when Mr.
Shiner and Mr. Irwin play baggy pants commuters on a train platform sharing
each other’s pills and reacting accordingly. When Mr. Irwin takes a certain
pill from Mr. Shiner, the sudden rise in his pants tells us instantly what it
was; Mr. Irwin has the hardest time trying to beat the thing down. In another
scene, Mr. Shiner is a pony-tailed, lounge lizard-type magician and Mr. Irwin
is his broadly smiling, buxom, blonde female assistant; their slick, dance-like
moves are worked out precisely to a Latin rhythm.
This magician routine requires an
audience volunteer, and a young woman is brought on stage to be sliced in two.
Real as she seemed at the performance I attended, she was so accommodating it
made me wonder if she was a plant. Specific audience members are frequently
addressed, especially those in the front row. Mr. Shiner often looks at some
old lady and, doing a quick phone gesture, mouths the words “call me.” Four
audience members come on stage to participate in a brilliantly comic routine
about the making of a silent cowboy movie, with Mr. Shiner as director and
cameraman. Without the audience members seeming totally authentic and eager to
be there this number can easily flop, but the shanghaied performers when I went
carried out their duties to awkward perfection, putting the audience in
stitches.
To top it all off, the show is
accompanied by a terrific orchestra placed outside the proscenium at stage
right, and led by a pianist (and ukulele player) and singer named Nellie McKay.
This petite blonde artist, wearing a bow in her hair, wrote the wonderful
jazz-pop songs she sings, always with some sharp social commentary to catch
your ear. She ties the whole show together and, near the end, joins her male
costars for a bit of tap dancing on stage.
OLD HATS is the kind of top hat entertainment
that makes all the theatrical tedium I sit through worth it.
100. HONKY
Urban Stages is
the venue for Greg Kalleres’s HONKY, an often sharply stinging satire on
American racism, well directed by Luke Harlan. The venue’s name is appropriate
for a play in which we learn that, allegedly, in the modern world of
advertising, “urban” is a euphemism for black people. In fact, the play has a
field day with the way people use words to express, disguise, or hide racist
attitudes. It touches on nearly every imaginable stereotype of race-related
thinking, often very amusingly; eventually, despite some cuttingly funny
revelations of how many of us think about people who belong to races other than
our own, the play’s singular theme plays itself out. This is a work whose theme
dominates its situations and characters, all of which are straw men set up to
provide targets for a machine-gun barrage of racially motivated lines and
actions.
The title, says the playwright in
a New York Times Artsbeat column, was
chosen because there really is no word equivalent the N-word in impact when
referring pejoratively to white people. “To find something even close to the
power of the N-word you have to use well-known slurs that refer specifically to
heritage or race,” since “‘white’ refers to so many different types of people
that a reference to it as a skin color has no negative historical relevance in
this country.”
The principal races in HONKY are black and white; its premise is that Thomas (Anthony Gaskins), a black designer working for Sky Shoes, a white-owned sneaker company, has come up with a wildly colorful sneaker for the youth market. At the play’s start, we see a live enactment of a TV commercial created by white ad man Peter (Dave Droxler). It shows two silhouetted black boys doing some slickly choreographed basketball moves that culminate in one boy holding up a sneaker like a pistol and shooting the other boy dead. A slogan pops up on the rear wall, “Sup now.” We learn that the commercial has inspired a real shooting, and the company head and his designer—whose upbringing in a wealthy white neighborhood led to his black friends calling him “honky”—debate the validity of using violence to sell sneakers. The boss insists that the sneakers need to have ghetto cred before the white teen market will consider them cool enough to buy. The designer is furious, and wants vengeance. The ad man who created the commercial visits a shrink, Emilia (Arie Bianca Thompson), when he begins to feel guilty about the shooting (white guilt is a continuing motif); the shrink is an attractive black woman, allowing for further twists of the racial knife. She also is Thomas’s sister, throwing more salt on the racial wounds, as she denies having racist feelings, insisting she sees only people, not their color, while the skeptical Thomas becomes increasingly preoccupied with his blackness. The plot takes a number of turns, including having Thomas become the lover of Peter’s blonde girlfriend, whose attitudes toward race at first seem obtuse but grow more complex as the play proceeds. There is also a subplot about a pharmaceutical company that sells Driscotol, a pill intended to suppress racist thoughts; at the end, the company president, the ad man, and the shrink do a TV commercial shilling its benefits. Consumerism, the advertising industry, and drug companies all receive sharp bites on the butt.
The principal races in HONKY are black and white; its premise is that Thomas (Anthony Gaskins), a black designer working for Sky Shoes, a white-owned sneaker company, has come up with a wildly colorful sneaker for the youth market. At the play’s start, we see a live enactment of a TV commercial created by white ad man Peter (Dave Droxler). It shows two silhouetted black boys doing some slickly choreographed basketball moves that culminate in one boy holding up a sneaker like a pistol and shooting the other boy dead. A slogan pops up on the rear wall, “Sup now.” We learn that the commercial has inspired a real shooting, and the company head and his designer—whose upbringing in a wealthy white neighborhood led to his black friends calling him “honky”—debate the validity of using violence to sell sneakers. The boss insists that the sneakers need to have ghetto cred before the white teen market will consider them cool enough to buy. The designer is furious, and wants vengeance. The ad man who created the commercial visits a shrink, Emilia (Arie Bianca Thompson), when he begins to feel guilty about the shooting (white guilt is a continuing motif); the shrink is an attractive black woman, allowing for further twists of the racial knife. She also is Thomas’s sister, throwing more salt on the racial wounds, as she denies having racist feelings, insisting she sees only people, not their color, while the skeptical Thomas becomes increasingly preoccupied with his blackness. The plot takes a number of turns, including having Thomas become the lover of Peter’s blonde girlfriend, whose attitudes toward race at first seem obtuse but grow more complex as the play proceeds. There is also a subplot about a pharmaceutical company that sells Driscotol, a pill intended to suppress racist thoughts; at the end, the company president, the ad man, and the shrink do a TV commercial shilling its benefits. Consumerism, the advertising industry, and drug companies all receive sharp bites on the butt.
Structurally, the play is very
episodic, with one sketch-like scene rapidly following the other, but
everything moves swiftly and with high energy. Some of the discussions are
surprisingly cogent, and the playwright is not afraid to confront commonly
discussed subjects, such as who has the right to say the N-word, usually in a
fresh and spirited way that offers both humor and food for thought. The walking
on eggshells problem of how to speak about race without being offensive—or how
people of one race should speak to or refer to another—sets up multiple
opportunities for ironic thrusts. Just today, there was a news item about Gov.
Christ Christie having referred to the first black female leader of the New
Jersey state assembly by her race and gender rather than by her name, thereby
stirring up a hornet’s nest because of his “racist” statement. Playwright
Kalleres says, in fact, that just hearing the R-word, “even implied, will make
a white person lose sleep.” Whether the rhino-skinned Christie is such a white
person is another matter.
To allow for the multiple scenes to speed along smoothly, Roman Tatarowicz has designed a simple, modernistic, boxlike structure with sliding panels upstage for exits and entrances. The walls make excellent screens for Caite Hevner’s imaginative projections of stills and videos, which are flashed upon them during the scene shifts as thumping rock music of one sort or another keeps the play’s energy flowing.
To allow for the multiple scenes to speed along smoothly, Roman Tatarowicz has designed a simple, modernistic, boxlike structure with sliding panels upstage for exits and entrances. The walls make excellent screens for Caite Hevner’s imaginative projections of stills and videos, which are flashed upon them during the scene shifts as thumping rock music of one sort or another keeps the play’s energy flowing.
The ensemble plays this sometimes
heavy-handed material with gusto, and, despite the overall effect being akin to
a comic fever dream this honky left the theatre thinking about just how deeply
racism affects us, no matter how much we deny it. And it will take more than a
pill to make it go away.
101. TALLEY’S FOLLY
It was a pleasure
to return to TALLEY’S FOLLY, Lanford Wilson’s 1979 two-hander, which I first
saw at Off Broadway’s now defunct Circle Repertory Theatre, starring Judd
Hirsch and Trish Hawkins (it later moved to Broadway). That production was
memorable, and so is the current one, with rising comet Danny Burstein as Matt
Friedman, the balding, 42-year-old, Jewish accountant from St. Louis, wooing
the blonde, gentile, 31-year-old spinster from Lebanon, Missouri, Sally Talley,
played here by the luminous Sarah Paulson. Set on the fourth of July, 1944, it
takes place on the platform of the ruined, gazebo-like boat house built in the
Victorian era by Sally’s grandfather, as Matt, having driven all the way to the
Talley family's rural estate, pulls out all the stops to win her hand.
A love story with two apparently
mismatched lovers is a marvelous challenge for a playwright, and Wilson was
totally on his mark in capturing the problems such a relationship might stir
up. The pairing, especially as captured by the luminescent lighting of Rui Ruta
on Jeff Cowie’s perfectly romantic ruin of a lake boathouse, is magically
compelling, and Michael Wilson’s sensitive direction has drawn as much humor,
political wit, and affectionate byplay from his actors as possible. Schmaltz,
of course, is unavoidable in such a situation, but it’s leavened here with
enough intelligence and humanity to make it palatable; besides, there’s still
nothing quite like the feeling in the theatre of that little tear trickling its
way down your cheek despite every effort you make to contain it.
Burstein is as wonderful in the role
of the acerbically charming, gruff, fast-speaking, volatile, and nevertheless
secretive Matt as was the role’s originator, and the exquisitely delicate Paulson
is every inch his equal as the reluctant lover, Sally, equally secretive, whose
big reveal makes her coupling with Matt the ideal solution to their troubled
relationship. If I had to nitpick, I’d have to say that Burstein tends to go
just a tad too far in his Jewish inflections and hand-waving gesticulations,
but I doubt that most people will find this problematic.
The play is not perfect, of
course, and its dramatic momentum requires sharp transitions from
lightheartedness to darkly serious, from pleasantries to passionate outbursts,
that sometimes seem contrived. Nevertheless, watching these two master actors take
these moments and steer them through the Scylla and Charybdis of plausibility
and melodrama is worth a dozen acting classes. I’ve seen at least three
previous productions of TALLEY’S FOLLY, and wasn’t looking forward to seeing
yet another one. Now that I have, I wouldn’t mind seeing this one again.
102. HENRY IV, PART I
Davis McCallum’s
production of Shakespeare’s HENRY IV, PART I, at the Pearl Theatre is an
unimpressive journeyman version (or as my theatre companion said,
“workmanlike”) of this history play about the rebellion of Harry Percy (a.k.a.
Hotspur: Shawn Fagan), son of the Earl of Northumberland, and his supporters
against the monarchy of King Henry IV (Bradford Cover) in the early 15th
century. It is also the play in which Henry’s son, Prince Hal (John Brummer),
cavorts with the fat, bragging knight, Falstaff (Dan Daily), whose earthy humor
and cowardly behavior make him one of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters.
The Pearl stage has been deprived
of its proscenium in order to create as broad a playing space as possible for
the multiple-scened action, set in a more or less timeless era notable only for
the large kegs of sack set up at the rear as a permanent backdrop but intended
specifically to represent the Boar’s Head Tavern, where some of the action
transpires. The costumes are a blend of modern and traditional, and the casting
is both colorblind and gender-blind. Most of us have become used to colorblind
casting, especially in Shakespeare, where the performance matters more than the
actor’s skin color (although it can, in certain cases, be distracting).
Gender-blind casting, where men play women and women men can still be a
stumbling block, unless carried off with great skill. It sometimes seems, as
here, to be done as a way of cutting down on the number of actors a production
has to cast. Thus, to take one example, the sturdily built Chris Mixon, who
plays Thomas Percy, Hotspur’s brother, also portrays Mistress Quickly, the
tavern hostess, which he acts with suitably feminine mannerisms and only a few
costume elements to suggest her being a woman. What happens, for me at any
rate, is that I become so aware of the acting exercise I become diverted from
the play. Not a good thing, I would say.
None of the performances rises
above the B- level, although Dan Daily’s Falstaff might arguably deserve a B.
Wearing a fat suit, the already large actor (I saw him last night at the
Theatre Row Diner) looks the part, but he simply doesn’t have the vocal power
and interpretive nuance to give more than a competent performance. John
Brummer’s Prince Hal and Shawn Fagan’s Hotspur are unmemorable, although it
must be said that, because of the lighting, their performances—and others—were
virtual spit-fests of saliva spewing. If what was being sprayed about on the
Pearl stage whenever an actor opened his mouth to speak in profile is any
indication of what comes out of the mouths of people in ordinary life, then
maybe we should all be walking around with surgical masks over our faces.
The production runs three hours
long, and the slog seems longer (unlike another three-hour play seen this
weekend, THE FLICK, reviewed later). When the curtain calls concluded I was
ready to bolt so I could rush from 11th Avenue to 8th to
catch the A-train for the journey home. Unfortunately, Mr. Daily stepped forth
from the company lineup to make a pitch for donations to the theatre, and put
the already sleepy audience on hold. I didn’t get home until past midnight, and
then had to rise early to go into Manhattan to catch a children’s show at 11:00
a.m. My report follows.
103.PIGGY NATION
My kids are grown
so I regret having no little ones of appropriate age to accompany me to all the
professional children’s shows I get to see. On the other hand, I wouldn’t make
a priority of taking a little one to PIGGY NATION. Like so many others in the
genre, it’s a musical (book/lyrics: Richard Rosser; book: Alec Wells) based on
a reputedly popular series of children’s books. The venue is the third floor
theatre at the Snapple Theatre Center on W. 50th Street, a building
that also houses the current revival of THE FANTASTICKS.
This is a low-rent production,
performed with a single piano, a painted cloth backdrop, and a non-Equity cast.
Normally, the latter wouldn’t be an issue, but in this case the general lack of
professional polish demonstrated by the cast was heightened by their lack of
union accreditation.
In PIGGY NATION, Sammy Hamhock
(David Rosenberg) is the piglet son of Hank Hamhock (Anthony Police), a sort of
cop whose job is give tickets to people who display “piggy behavior.” Thus the
story illustrates all the little things that people do that are “piggy”; you
don’t “pick your snout,” leave dirty diapers on park benches, allow your
porcupine to poop in people’s gardens, etc. But Officer Hank himself soon
learns that he too can be guilty of piggy behavior, and both he and all the
other animal characters learn as well that you must be able to apologize when
you misbehave.
I wouldn’t say the company should
apologize for foisting this show on the public, since, despite the lack of any
noteworthy singing talent (and the presence of a few real clunkers), the actors
all are fully invested in their cartoonish antics, and their spirited
performances keep the audience of tots and their anxious parents engaged for
the hour-long performance.
104.THE FLICK
Two and a half
hours after seeing PIGGY NATION I was seated at Playwrights Horizons, watching a
suitably adult presentation, THE FLICK, by red-hot dramatist Annie Baker,
directed by her usual collaborator, the similarly in-demand Sam Gold. Having
been spoiled by a season in which 80 per cent of the shows seem to run 80-90
intermissionless minutes, having endured a three-hour trudge through HENRY IV
the night before, and having only just left a second-rate children’s show, I
was prepared to hunker down for yet another snooze-fest at what I knew was
going to be a three-hour, slowly paced production. SURPRISE! THE FLICK turned
out to be the promised three-hour, slowly paced production I was expecting, but
it also turned out to be mesmerizingly interesting. This is not to deny that in
one scene, played in the dark, I did allow myself to close my eyes and slip
into a semi-doze, but what I lost in that brief interval was insignificant
compared to what I gained from the work as a whole.
When the curtain rises (remember
the curtain?), the blinding light of a movie projector high at the rear of the
stage is all we can see. Triumphant movie music signals that the film being
shown, presumably behind us, is nearing its end. Then the flickering light goes
out and we gasp at seeing the interior of a small, single-screen, suburban
movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts, with the seats facing us, and
the fluorescent lights as bright as we’d expect after the movie audience has
filed out and the cleaners have entered to sweep the aisles.
The perfection with which this familiar environment has been realized becomes even more believable as the action begins, with the theatre’s workers, the bald, 35-year-old Sam (Matthew Maher) and the Urkle-like, spectacle-wearing, college-age black man, Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), doing their clean-up job. Avery is a new hire and Sam is teaching him the ropes. Sam is a lonely guy in love with the green-haired projectionist, Rose (Louisa Krause), whom he believes is a lesbian, and from whom he would like to learn how to run the theatre’s 35-mm projector, which would mean a sort of promotion for him. Rose and Sam convince the very reluctant, squeaky clean Avery to participate in a scam they operate that allows them to resell a small number of tickets and earn around $10 or $11 dollars of “dinner money” every night. Avery, who speaks with relatively emotionless, almost robot-like inflections, is a nerdy film savant who, despite its low pay, wants this job so he can watch films for free. He believes no great American film has been produced in the past ten years, and that the last such movie was Tarantino’s PULP FICTION. As he and Sam get to know each other and become friends, he reveals his remarkable film knowledge by answering Sam’s questions in which two seemingly unrelated film actors are mentioned, with Avery connecting them through a series of films as per the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. One day, when Sam is away attending the wedding of his “retarded” brother, Rose, who always dresses in the same shapeless black blouse and slacks, finds herself sexually drawn to Avery, whose response is not what she expected. When Sam returns, he sees that the dynamic has changed among the three employees, and his jealous resentment becomes palpable. Avery is also preoccupied with convincing the man who is planning to buy the theatre to retain the 35-mm projector and not use digital projection, which he believes will be the death of cinematic artistry.
The perfection with which this familiar environment has been realized becomes even more believable as the action begins, with the theatre’s workers, the bald, 35-year-old Sam (Matthew Maher) and the Urkle-like, spectacle-wearing, college-age black man, Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), doing their clean-up job. Avery is a new hire and Sam is teaching him the ropes. Sam is a lonely guy in love with the green-haired projectionist, Rose (Louisa Krause), whom he believes is a lesbian, and from whom he would like to learn how to run the theatre’s 35-mm projector, which would mean a sort of promotion for him. Rose and Sam convince the very reluctant, squeaky clean Avery to participate in a scam they operate that allows them to resell a small number of tickets and earn around $10 or $11 dollars of “dinner money” every night. Avery, who speaks with relatively emotionless, almost robot-like inflections, is a nerdy film savant who, despite its low pay, wants this job so he can watch films for free. He believes no great American film has been produced in the past ten years, and that the last such movie was Tarantino’s PULP FICTION. As he and Sam get to know each other and become friends, he reveals his remarkable film knowledge by answering Sam’s questions in which two seemingly unrelated film actors are mentioned, with Avery connecting them through a series of films as per the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. One day, when Sam is away attending the wedding of his “retarded” brother, Rose, who always dresses in the same shapeless black blouse and slacks, finds herself sexually drawn to Avery, whose response is not what she expected. When Sam returns, he sees that the dynamic has changed among the three employees, and his jealous resentment becomes palpable. Avery is also preoccupied with convincing the man who is planning to buy the theatre to retain the 35-mm projector and not use digital projection, which he believes will be the death of cinematic artistry.
What suspense the play generates
revolves around the “dinner money” scam, the romantic interests of Rose, Sam,
and Avery, and the future of the theatre. Near the end, the characters are
faced with a serious ethical problem, and we wait anxiously to see how they
will resolve it. With these essential ingredients playwright Baker capably
brings her play to its ultimately satisfying closure.
We watch these lonely, striving
characters in their hermetically sealed world of reality and illusion,
struggling to articulate their feelings, growing increasingly familiar only to
discover how little they actually know about each other. The trick that makes
all this so original is that each scene in the episodic structure seems to be
taking place in real time. It’s almost as if you’re involved in a photo-realist
dramatic presentation. There are long, sometimes very long, pauses in the
conversations (40 minutes go by at one point with only a couple of pages of
dialogue spoken); characters often stumble in trying to express their thoughts;
nothing dramatic seems to be happening as the aisles are swept or a piece of
gum is scraped from a chair. But something is always happening, and every
moment is actually fraught with feeling and concentration, even if it seems to
be taking forever to go from point A to point B. Many of the things the
characters say are hilarious, brightening the potentially cloudy atmosphere
with unexpected levity. By the end of the performance you feel that while you
may not really know these characters, you have come to know and care about them
on a far deeper level than you do about the people in many more conventional dramas.
Under
Sam Gold’s precisely timed staging, Motet, Maher, and Krause create a perfectly
blended ensemble that leads to complete involvement in their lives and
aspirations. Motet, in particular, deserves special praise for his low-key,
subtly suppressed performance; toward the end of the play, he has a moment that
I will not spoil but that shows us a side of him that will blow you away. Aided
by David Zinn’s startlingly believable set and Jane Cox’s effectively lifelike
lighting, THE FLICK is very different from most other plays you will have seen.
It’s not for everyone, but, if you’re patient, the payoff will be rewarding.
Just make sure you’re well rested before you see it; otherwise, the temptation
to take a nap may be too strong to resist.
105.FOR LOVE
Not long after
leaving THE FLICK, I was in the tiny basement theatre at the Irish Repertory
Theatre, watching FOR LOVE, a “dark blue romantic comedy” by the talented Laoisa Sexton,
who also plays one of its three women starved for love and sex during the
economic downturn in Dublin. Like the current revival of PASSION at the CSC,
this play begins with a woman, Val (Jo Kinsella), having sex by sitting on top
of a man (the handsome John Duddy, who plays all the men in the play). Unlike
in PASSION, this engagement turns out to be a misfire, probably to be blamed on
the characters’ excessive drinking before they stumbled into Val’s flat. The
man rises and takes a pee in the woman’s fridge before departing, which becomes
a reference point for later in the play.
Then we meet Tina (Georgina McKevitt), an
attractive shopaholic married to a sweaty man who physically repulses her, and
Bee (Laoisa Sexton, the dramatist), a pretty bank teller, seated in the BMW of
a married man (his baby carrier is in the back seat) whom she allows to diddle
her with his hand, but—for the moment—no further. Before long we’re introduced
to the three women in more detail, much of their history and feelings revealed
in direct address monologues. Bee and Val are co-workers, and they have several
heart to hearts across the stage on their cell phones. Bee, despite her youth,
is on the verge of becoming a grandma (she had her son when she 14), and has
difficulty facing this development. Val is a bosomy, plus-sized woman whose
potty mouth ejects one vulgarity after another (the play contains a bucketful
of profanity, some of it very funny). Much of the charm of all this comes from
the authentic accents of the actors, all of them from the old sod. There are so
many Irishisms in the dialogue, the program even contains a glossary: did you
know that “poncey” describes “a place or person who is posh,” that “bulling”
means “furious,” that a “slapper” is a prostitute, that a “mickey” is “a man’s
genitalia,” and that a “minger” is someone “who is sexually unattractive”? I’ll
leave out the phrase given for female genitalia, if you don’t mind.
FOR LOVE is given on a practically bare stage (no
set designer is credited) and, since it’s very close to the spectators, the shouting
sometimes gets a bit too loud for comfort, especially since there’s so much of
it. This isn’t to deny that the acting is actually quite vivid and smart; it’s
just that some of it, especially that of Jo Kinsella, might have been toned
down for so intimate a space. The audience seemed to find most of the play
witty enough to laugh at, and there were indeed a few good zingers, but the
characters and their behavior never earned my full belief and I was unable to
become earnestly involved in their issues. Maybe, with all the people dressed
in bright green shirts, hats, and sunglasses parading the streets of midtown
Manhattan on Saturday, many of them loutish and drunk, I’d simply had a bit too
much of the St. Paddy’s ambience to appreciate more of it in such close
proximity.
106.THE LYING LESSON
The honest truth about THE LYING LESSON, the new Craig
Lucas dramedy at the Atlantic Theatre Company, is that it is stale, flat, and
unprofitable, despite the presence of the usually delightful Carol Kane and the
promising newcomer Mickey Sumner (Sting’s daughter) in its only two roles.
It is
summer 1981 at a large home in a small town in Maine; outside, a violent
thunderstorm is raging. Movie star Bette Davis (Kane), who has come here to buy
the property, suddenly finds herself in the dark when the lights blow after a
terrific crash of thunder and lighting. She lights a couple of candles that
just happen to be waiting for her, but takes refuge when she hears someone
trying to get in. After a few moments, a lanky young woman named Minnie Bodine
(Sumner) crawls in through the window over the sink, but Bette holds her off
with the large kitchen knife she’s grabbed for protection. It looks like we’re
in for a conventional thriller as Bette and Minnie spar over what each is doing
there. Pretty soon the play settles down into a suspense-less tale about the
73-year-old Bette’s having come here to live during the declining years of her
career, and her interest in meeting again a man she recalls romantically having
known when she visited this town on a family vacation 60 years ago. Minnie, an
eccentric local yokel, begins their relationship by declaring she has no idea
of who Bette is; she only seems to recognize the distinguished actress when the
song “Bette Davis Eyes” is mentioned. As the plot progresses, we see that
neither the movie star nor the local is telling the truth, and the play plods
along until we learn what is true and what is lies.
A good
deal of time is occupied with Davis reciting Hollywood anecdotes, especially
when she can push verbal pins into Joan Crawford, her filmic rival in WHATEVER
HAPPENED TO BABY JANE. Cinema buffs with a taste for the campier efforts of
Davis and Crawford’s twilight years might enjoy these reminiscences, but the
chances are they’d find them passé. Perhaps if Carol Kane’s portrayal of Davis
the diva was more authentic, the piece might at least have had performative—if
not dramaturgical—excitement, but, alas, all that Ms. Kane shares with the
flamboyantly dramatic movie star are large eyes and short stature. Her voice,
diction, gestures, and general behavior are all wrong, and if you’re at all
familiar with the original, you’ll be unable throughout the otherwise
monotonous proceedings to accept the performance on its own terms, since
without at least a believable replica of the original, there’s nothing else to
grab on to here.
Ms.
Sumner, who is making her Off Broadway debut, shows promise, but tends to
overdo Minnie’s quirkiness, with a broad Maine accent that my theatre companion
found phony, and a host of mannerisms designed to show Minnie’s physical
awkwardness.
Pam
McKinnon’s lackluster direction (nowhere near the quality of her work on VIRGINIA WOOLF) did little to enliven the production, and the
set and lighting were unexceptionable. And that’s the God’s honest truth.
This is not to deny the effective work of Mr. Turner and Mr. Tafti. The former is convincing as a supercilious, officious, gregarious, and artificially friendly high school administrator. Mr. Tafti, although clearly older than 18, carries himself with the awkward shuffle of an insecure teenager, shy and self-effacing until pushed to where his inner self rises to cross words with a nasty authority figure.
If I were searching for a good theatrical swim, I’d search elsewhere than THE NORTH POOL.
When I first learned the show’s core subject, an endurance contest to award whoever could stand longest next to a pickup truck with at least one hand on it, I wondered how something so narrow in scope could be turned into a Broadway musical, even if the characters are allowed brief breaks at set intervals to take care of physical needs. My fears were somewhat justified, since, despite an excellent, well-rounded company and some strong musical numbers, the show doesn’t totally succeed in overcoming the stasis of its basic premise.
An effort has been made to infuse the action with physical activity, but since the major choreographic routine—clever and well executed as it is—forces the actors to move around while keeping a hand on the truck, the dancers are unable to break free for more expressive dancing. The movements of the truck itself are very significant, but no truck can compete with the rhythmic flexibility of the human body, and the conceit of a “dancing” hardbody eventually grows thin.
Somewhat in the vein of shows like A Chorus Line or Working, each cast member has a distinctive story to tell and sing. There are ten contestants, each desperate to win the $22,000 truck (its mid-90s price), and each given plenty of opportunity to sing about what he or she will do with it should they win. Carradine plays JD Drew, an oil rig worker who was injured some months back and lost his job; despite the pain in his legs, he perseveres with the help of his devoted, if overly solicitous wife, Virginia (an excellent Mary Gordon Murray). Foster is the arrogant, rough-edged, red neck Benny Perkins, who won a previous contest, but who seeks to win as a way of filling in the gaps in his empty life following his wife’s leaving him and his son’s deployment to Iraq. There’s a stolid Marine, Chris Alvaro (David Larsen), suffering the effects of his own recent deployment; a deeply pious fat woman, Norma Valverde (Keala Settle), believing God is on her side; a sexy Texas blonde, Heather Stovall (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone), desperate to get off her bicycle and into the truck; an overweight black man, Ronald McCowan (Jacob Ming-Trent); a pair of youngsters who fall in love, Kelli (Allison Case) and Greg (Jay Armstrong Johnson); a Tex-Mex fellow, Jesus Peña (Jon Rua), who needs money for veterinary school and who considers himself a victim of racism; and, finally, there’s Janis Curtis (Dale Soules), an older, whiskey and cigarette-voiced, trailer-trash type, supported by her rail-thin husband, Don (William Youmans). There are also the dealership’s managers, the slightly sleazy Mike Ferris (Jim Newman) who tries to help the blonde in order to get sexual favors in return, and his assistant, the perky Cindy Barnes (Connie Ray), hoping that she and Jim won’t lose their jobs if the business goes under. Finally, Frank Nugent (Scott Wakefield) is the local radio celebrity who keeps his audiences up to date with the contest’s developments.
Visually, HANDS ON A HARDBODY is not competing with your usual Broadway production. The costumes capture the Walmart chic that characters like these would wear, and the set is little more than the truck itself, backed by a washed-out billboard that depends on expressive lighting to keep it from being simply boring. But it’s determined plainness gives the show a simplicity that makes it stand out from all the spectacle in the standard Great White Way products surrounding it. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the nearly blank billboard dominating the stage might have been used for interesting projections to give the recital of each character’s troubles some more visual excitement.
After 91 hands-on hours, the contest has a winner, of course, and the show’s interest lies largely in the way each loser drops out—one from sheer exhaustion, another from eating too many Snickers, another from sleepwalking, another from hallucinating, and so on. There are also the personal sufferings of these forgotten, working-class folk to keep us well-fed theatergoers interested, the problems of family and poverty that drive them to stand in the broiling sun without sleep for days until their limbs go numb for the chance of winning a shiny red pickup.
Like all of the contestants, the show is worthy of respect for its depiction of working class America, but it falls away before its own struggle for survival ends. You won’t have trouble keeping your hands on this hardbody of a musical, but when it’s over you may not be certain as to just how big a winner HANDS ON A HARDBODY really is.
Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller) have moved to Paris so that he can take a job there doing AIDS research for Doctors without Borders; we’re led to believe he graduated from medical school. They seem an attractive couple, apparently in love, but also with cracks beginning to show in their relationship. Before long, the cracks widen into fissures, and the play shows just how wide those grow before the marriage crumbles. Each has psychological issues to contend with, and we eventually begin to wonder at just how little they each know of each other. To help create dramatic complications, Herzog introduces Abby and Zack’s landlord, an amiable Senegalese named Alioune (Phillip James Brannon) whom Zack believes he has befriended but who now demands the four months back rent Zack owes him (a matter of which Abby is ignorant). Later, we meet Zack’s less amiable wife, Amina (Pascale Armand), whose preoccupation is her infant child.
All the action transpires in Zack and Abby’s oddly angled, top-floor apartment in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, known for its racial diversity. Abby has been on antidepressants ever since her mom died a few years back; Zack’s dependency is on pot, which he now smokes at every opportunity. Abby is somewhat culturally obtuse; she offers Alioune a Christmas cookie only for him to have to remind her that he’s Muslim. Her off-kilter personality is also responsible for cutting remarks she sometimes makes to Zack, who, at first, seems a soothing, solicitous spouse, worried for his troubled wife. An unexplained visa problem for which Zack is somehow responsible means that if they leave for the USA, they won’t be able to return. Abby, unable to find anything to keep her rooted here, longs for home, where her sister is expecting a baby. Trouble begins to brew when Abby comes home to find Zack, who says he stayed home from work, masturbating to Internet porn. When he continues to stay home and Abby questions him about it, he tries to blow her off. She seems tied to the daily phone calls from her dad, but Zack takes her phone and won’t let her receive the calls, possibly out of jealousy. Meanwhile, another character of sorts begins to appear now and then—a large kitchen carving knife. The knife may be the reason some think the play a thriller, but it proves to be nothing more than a shiny red herring, and the only bleeding it causes comes from Abby’s misuse of it to deal with an injury to her toenail.
Anne Kauffman’s direction tries to build up suspense with its languorous pace, long silences, and moody lighting (even with all the lights turned on the apartment remains gloomy in the nighttime scenes). Finally, as we learn more about Zack’s mendacity, the tension does increase until he makes a final, fateful decision and brings the drama to an unsettling conclusion, albeit an ambiguous one. The last scene is performed in simple French by Alioune and Amina as they clean up the apartment, throwing all of Zack and Abby’s possessions into garbage bags, but precisely what happened before then is left to the audience to decide. Key lines they speak are, “It’s not a catastrophe,” and “Let’s go. We’ve got lots to do,” indeterminate comments that leave a cloud of vagueness hanging over what has just transpired.
Herzog leaves many questions unanswered in this wishfully atmospheric drama, such as how Abby could have been so ignorant of Zack’s behavior and the nature of his position in Paris. Even Alioune seems to know more about Zack’s character than she does.
Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller give strong performances as fragile, emotionally unstable people, and Pascale Armand and Phillip James Brannon offer solid support but all their efforts do not add up to anything significant, and the play comes off as neither original, believable, nor compelling, just another drama about how little we know each other because of all the lies we use to define ourselves. If you want to see something really memorable set in this Paris neighborhood, I’d skip BELLEVILLE and see THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (on DVD) instead.
This historical event is the core of the drama, but it’s not a documentary depiction and, if you wandered in to the play without knowing anything of the historical context you’d be completely lost, other than to see that something bad happened between the police and gay folks back in the late 1960s. This lack of context is, for me, one of the show’s most glaring problems, and its condensation of the events of several nights, with the cops represented by a single, monstrous example, oversimplifies history in the interests of polemics and melodrama. Similarly, there is no coda informing the audience of the aftermath of the rioting, which seems all compressed into the events of a single evening.
The homosexual characters are all extreme stereotypes, such as a black transvestite (Nathan Lee Graham), a cross-dressing lesbian (Rania Salem Manganaro) who gets manhandled by a cop, a black lesbian who prefers being called a dike (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a fast-talking pair of very swish young men, one black (Gregory Haney) and the other Puerto Rican (Arturo Soria), a handsome guy in a suit straight out of MAD MEN (Sean Allan Krill), and so on. Everyone is either flamboyant, promiscuous, horny, or smartass sassy with rapid-fire putdowns. Romantic relationships happen instantaneously. Dramatically, there is a series of brief scenes focused on different characters, all of them leading up to the raid, which is a theatrical highlight staged in slow mo (by ubiquitous fight director J. David Brimmer) with excellent lighting (designed by Lauren Helpern) and strobe effects accompanied by pulsating music (sound design by Daniel Kluger and Brandon Wolcott).
Apart from its several effective performances and some well-staged moments by director Eric Hoff, HIT THE WALL is not high on my list of this year’s hits.
The title refers to an ancient tribe of Native Americans whose past is being unearthed from beneath huge mounds by a team of archaeologists led by Prof. August Howe (David Conrad) and his assistant Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth). The dig was begun in the summer of 1974 in the town of Blue Shoals, Illinois, and the results of that summer are narrated into a tape recorder, with accompanying slides, in 1975. The narration offers material about the nature of the ancient civilization that reflects ironically on the characters in the play; August's his narration is a frame for extended flashbacks in which we see August and Dan, with their wives, staying at a lakeside summer home in Blue Shoals. It is owned by the father of Chad Jasker (Will Rogers), a local who hopes his father’s real estate investments on the lakefront will become vastly profitable when an Interstate highway comes through, eliminating the mounds and the lake as well. Chad is also staying at the house, where his attraction to the women there creates a destructive atmosphere, shattering August’s marriage among other things; a scene with a shirtless Dan suggests his interest in men as well. His financial goals lead to a confrontation with the archaeologists, whose aim is to maintain as a tourist attraction the important site on which they’ve expended blood, sweat, and tears. This brief précis gives only the barest outlines of the play, of course, and there are all sorts of interpersonal issues that arise, not only with Chad but among everyone dwelling in the house. These include August’s attractive wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), a photographer; their adolescent daughter (Rachel Resheff); Dan’s pregnant wife Jean (Lisa Joyce), a gynecologist; and August’s ailing sister, Delia a.k.a. D.K. (Danielle Skraastad), a novelist and recovering drug addict, estranged from her brother; seated throughout on a couch at center stage, she offers dryly negative comments on everything around her.
None of the actors is able to truly inhabit their roles, making it impossible to create a believable ensemble. Several are simply guilty of overacting (too much shouting), while others seem out of touch with their characters’ inner lives; nuance is sorely missing. If one of the things the play is intended to reveal is how the absorption of the archaeologists in the ruins of the past is so total that they allow their own lives and relationships to fall into ruins, we need more than just the sense of that absorption. We must also believe in what’s happening to them in the here and now.
The house they’re staying in is designed (by Neil Patel) to look almost deconstructed and distressed, to the point that you can look through the narrow slats that compose the walls and floor, but the effect is bland and forgettable.
For it to work, THE MOUND BUILDERS needs a company and director with the archaeological tools to excavate its themes and relationships and bring them back to life. In this production, the play remains buried within its own artistic mound.
Simply stated, there’s nothing much about which to be ado in this production.
We start with BELLO MANIA, a circus show for kids at the New Victory Theatre, starring the remarkable clown Bello Nock. If you look him up online you’ll see a youngish man who wears his hair (I call it blonde, others say it’s red) straight up like a crown; he’s not too young because he has an 18-year-old daughter Annaliese, who is one of the supporting performers in his show. She’s a gymnast with a perfectly shaped Junoesque physique that is the equivalent of two normal gymnasts in size, which makes her graceful routine on a hanging ring something rather out of the ordinary to watch. If she were slim and lithe it would be just another act, but her plus-sized anatomy makes what she does even more remarkable.
Still, we watch BELLO MANIA for the Chaplinesque pantomimic skills of her dad, an unusually gifted acrobat who does his thrilling yet hilarious routines on a high wire, a trampoline, a bicycle that keeps falling apart, a tiny bicycle even a child can’t ride, and so on. There was considerable interaction with kids both on stage and in the audience, and one memorable number included Bello’s bringing a woman on stage (not a plant; I checked with others who saw the show) and involving her in doing a William Tell skit with him. He fashioned a bow out of a balloon and then proceeded to have her “shoot” invisible arrows at a series of large red balloons he held as if they were apples, while the William Tell Overture played in the background. The results were hysterically funny. At the show’s close he climbed a pole set in the front of the auditorium and did a series of comical acrobatic bits at its top as the pole swayed to and fro near the theatre’s ceiling and he reached for a balloon that had gone astray there. Awesome!
After BELLO MANIA, I saw MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which I covered in my last report, and after that ended I popped into my third show of the day, LAST MAN CLUB, downtown (and downstairs) at 1 Sheridan Square, where Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre used to hold court in campy days of yore.
This unassuming little play written and directed for the Axis Theatre by Randy Sharp is something of an eye-opener (although you may need protective goggles). It’s set in Oklahoma in the 1930s during the horrendous drought of the Dust Bowl years; unlike the Joads, who, in Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH, represented the Okies who left their farms and fled to migrant work in California to escape the ravages of the Dust Bowl’s arid lands, the family in LAST MAN CLUB has stayed behind, waiting for the endless drought to end. They and others like them belong to Last Man Clubs, standing for their concerted effort to outlast nature’s curse. We see only a table and some bare furnishings in the family’s house; no walls are shown, and the entire scenic space is wrapped in creased and soiled gray curtains. Dust and sand seem to be everywhere, and when two outsiders enter, it cascades from their heads when they take off their hats. Meanwhile, there is the constant soundscape of wind and dust that never lets us forget the bleak and parched conditions in the world outside.
The grizzled, dirt-covered outsiders turn out to be feckless con men, hoping they can talk the house’s oddball inhabitants into giving up their savings as an investment in a rainmaking invention. The interaction between these outsiders and the family makes up the heart of this simply structured play, but it is surprisingly well acted, especially by the two con men, Middle Pints (George Demas) and Henry Taper (Brian Barnhart), the latter claiming to be a scientist and clearly uncomfortable in the role of swindler. If you’re seeking a piece of strikingly atmospheric theatre, done on a dime budget, LAST MAN CLUB won’t blow dust in your eyes but you’ll certainly think it did. The production reminded me of Spencer Tracy’s Brooklyn-accented comment about Katharine Hepburn in PAT AND MIKE: “Not much meat on her but what there is is ‘cherce.’”
There’s no rest for the weary on this job, so the next day saw me visiting New York in the 1940s and 1950s for BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S at the Cort Theatre; lunch from the hotdog vendor on the corner would have been more fulfilling. This adaptation of Truman Capote’s beloved novella by Richard Greenberg reportedly stays truer to its source than the even more famous movie version starring the inimitable Audrey Hepburn. The film toned down the sexual adventures of the story’s iconic heroine, Holly Golightly, eternal representative of the poor girl from nowhere who comes to the Big Apple with dreams of conquest on her mind. Unfortunately, Greenberg is unable to find a suitable approach to transfer the episodic story to the stage. What he provides is a succession of clunky scenes, tied together by the narrative speeches of Fred (Cory Michael Smith), the attractive, sexually ambivalent young writer Holly befriends at their mutual boarding house, who tells the story years later, when he has become successful.
Even with this second-rate script the play might have worked if its self-dramatizing, ambitious, neurotic, and yet lovable heroine had been played by anyone who could somehow capture the charming appeal that Hepburn brought to the role, miscast as she may have been (Capote thought so, at any rate, and would have preferred Marilyn Monroe). Emilia Clarke, of TV’s GAME OF THRONES, is truly miscast. Like Hepburn, she speaks with a British accent (which Holly, who hails from the rural South puts on as an affectation, but which is natural to the UK born and bred Clarke), but her voice is shrill and monotonous, and her attempts at charisma mostly grating. To be fair, she is battling an image that few actresses would be able to stand up to, and the play she’s in does little to help. Still, without a Holly Golightly you can love and weep for, how can you love BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S?
F#%KING UP EVERYTHING, like COCK earlier in the season and THE MOTHERFUCKER IN THE HAT before it, uses the top row of keyboard keys to fill in the letters of a word that some media outlets refuse to print. Whatever else this accomplishes, it does help to draw attention to this rock musical, which it will need desperately once the reviews appear, I’m afraid.
FUCKING UP EVERYTHING, to spell out the word that must be spoken in the play in one variation of another at least a trillion times, is about two friends, a sexy rocker named Jake (Jason Gotay), who vaguely resembles Adam Lambert but without the flash, and Christian (Max Crumm), played by the actor who won that TV show a few years back about the search for a Danny to star in a Broadway revival of GREASE. Whereas Danny might be seen as a 1960s version of Jake, Christian is a nerdy guy who makes his living as a puppeteer (hand puppets that resemble those on Sesame Street or AVENUE Q). Jake is a lady’s man; Christian, who has a supposedly comical Eastern European last name and is Jewish, has a hard time connecting with girls. Cute, bespectacled Ivy (Dawn Cantwell) loves Jake, but doesn’t let him know; instead she has a relationship with stoner musician Tony (Douglas Widick). Christian falls in love with Juliana (Katherine Cozumel), a pretty, would-be singer and ukulele player. Jakes moves in for the kill and Christian walks in on the big kiss. Christian and Jake quarrel but make up. They then participate in an attempted ménage a trios with sexpot rocker Arielle (Lisa Birnbaum). The guys even sing about Arielle’s areolas. (You needed to know that, right?) Jake doesn’t do as well as one might have thought in this adventure. Christian and Juliana reunite, Ivy and Jake find they’re a natural fit, and stoner Tony comes out of the closet to mate with his monosyllabic drummer (George Salazer).
A familiar plot, no? Yes. Not that familiarity always breeds contempt. It does here, however, because, apart from a few cute performers, there’s nothing else going on in this low-budget enterprise being given at the Electra Theatre on 8th Avenue near 42ndStreet. The music is only occasionally listenable; much of it sounds remarkably tuneless and off key. Despite many desperate attempts, humor is in amazingly short supply, as witness the witless name of Jake’s band, Ironic Maiden. Enough with this show already. It’s too fucked up.
THREE TREES by Alvin Eng is the season’s first from the Pan-Asian Repertory Theatre, where I have a personal connection. All I’ll say is that it’s about the relationship between famed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and the existentialist Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara; Yanaihara posed for Giacometti in Paris in the 1960s, but the artist had enormous difficulty in capturing the philosopher’s essential being. The play suggests that Yanaihara was not only Alberto’s muse, but, as an outgrowth of the tribulations of his artistic involvement with Giacometti, had an affair with his wife, Annette (Leah Cogan). Giacometti’s less well-known artist brother, Diego (Scott Klavan), who bears what seems a jealous grudge against Alberto, also is involved in the action.
The dialogue examines various viewpoints regarding the artistic process. In his program notes, Eng writes: “When we become enraptured by a portrait, are we under the spell of the artist or model? Can spiritual ownership of a portrait ever be assessed?” If you are inclined to ponder such questions, as was my guest, an art specialist, you may wish to pay THREE TREES a visit. But be prepared for languorous pacing, persistent seriousness, and performances that don’t rise above adequacy.
The remarkable thing about watching this taut little drama, which lasts only an hour, is how believable the puppet characters become. Voiced by their manipulators, using Icelandic accents (which have that familiar Scandinavian lilt), they sound remarkably natural in a dry and offhand but theatrically authentic way, which creates a wonderful blend of the real and the unreal as we see and hear their overtly puppet-like personae behaving and talking like recognizable human beings. There are strikingly memorable special effects, such as a house on fire and a car crashing into a Jacuzzi. A flashback to when Gunnar met Helga allows for a hilariously believable sex scene as the couple go at it with the vivid use of a friendly finger, a munching mouth, and a perky penis. Having puppets perform the sex, as well as the horrifically brutal scenes at the end, allows for just the right separation between illusion and reality that audiences would never accept if live actors were involved. Seeing a body part chopped off, no matter how gorily presented, is far more watchable when it’s a puppet hand than a presumably real one, and I’m sure there isn’t a porn star who could get his member to stand to attention with military precision on cue the way that Gunnar the puppet does.
Unfortunately, this special little production is not attracting crowds. Only around half the house was filled on Friday, when I saw it, despite its low price of $35 a ticket. On the other hand, the mediocre LUCKY GUY, soon to open on Broadway, is selling premium seats for $350 on weekends, and there aren’t enough to go around.
Playing Addie is Mary Bacon, an otherwise respectable actress, who is totally unable to make Addie convincing, and whose performance is often embarrassingly strained. Her best moment comes when she displays a pleasant singing voice to render Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “I Haven’t Got a Worry in the World,” written for the original show. But it would be impossible to say of her, as Brooks Atkinson said of Hayes, that she acted “with the sincerity and magic of an honest actress who enjoys the sentiment, warmth and showmanship of popular comedy.” Perhaps the talented Karen Ziemba might have succeeded in the role; she’s certainly wasted in the thankless role of Grace, the bar owner. HAPPY BIRTHDAY is not very happy, after all.
Nearly everyone, including McAlary, comes off as one-dimensional, and if you asked me to differentiate one reporter from another, I’d have a hard time doing so. To a degree, this is because George C. Wolfe’s direction, in an effort to hype up the action and keep things moving with energy and speed, has all the actors speaking rapidly at full volume nearly all the time, so one narrative speech ends up sounding like another, the only difference being that this actor is tall, that one is short, this one is bald, that one has hair, this one is fat, and that one is thin. All are stereotypes of the hard-driving, profanity-spewing, whiskey-chugging, fast-talking, chain-smoking reporters we’ve seen in dozens of plays and films dating back to THE FRONT PAGE and others.
Hanks resembles McAlary facially, but is 15 years older than the journalist was when he died, and he’s considerably wider at the waist. Much of the play deals with an even younger McAlary, making the age disparity seem even greater. This robs the play of some of the pathos it might have evoked if a younger actor played the role. There’s no question that Hanks brings to the stage much of the nice guy charisma, sensitivity, and intelligence he projects on screen, but the role as written gives him too few notes to play, and he only begins to deepen his dimensionality in the second act, when we see him suffering the effects of a car crash and, later, cancer,or when he speaks about his feelings after winning the Pulitzer Prize. But these moments are digressions from a character of boundless ambition and drive whose activities give him little opportunity to do other than bluster, brag, or make demands.
LUCKY GUY is scheduled to close on June 16. You may consider me a lucky guy to have been able to see it. I am. But don’t consider yourself unlucky if you miss it.
This commercial aspect aside, the show itself is the usual spectacular assortment of acrobats and clown acts, with weirdly beautiful music and remarkable costumes, lighting, sound, and visual effects; I was especially awestruck by the projections on a raised oval platform of images that were startlingly real, such as water washing up on a beach. The integration of live action and projections was unbelievable. In fact, I can’t recall how many times I kept saying “unbelievable!,” or “Oh, my God!” when I saw the different artists defy gravity, perform impossible balancing or juggling feats, or fly through the air in complex patterns only to land with eye-popping accuracy on predetermined spots.
Like all previous CIRQUE shows, this one will amaze you not only at the physical things human beings are capable of doing, but at the exquisite beauty, strength, coordination, focus, and physical perfection of many in the company. What can I say? There are many wonders here to behold, and you won’t be bored for a second.
Running around an hour and a half, with no intermission, it’s an efficient, briskly paced, tuneful, very well performed, largely sung-through show, to which the audience, including the friend who attended with me, responded enthusiastically; it appears to have a cult following and is even now in production as a film. My friend pointed out that a couple of its songs have become relatively mainstream because of the airtime they’ve gotten from Jonathan Schwartz’s radio show. Still, it’s a musical that’s never been on my radar, so it was entirely new to me.
Derek McLane’s set presents an open stage with a deep blue, brick-like rear wall against which scaffolding on several different levels allows a visually attractive arrangement of the musical ensemble of piano, violin, two cellos, bass, and guitar. Simple set pieces, like a door, rowboat, or car seat, slide on or off, and a pretty assortment of windows flies in now and then to suggest a landscape of apartment house windows. Excellent use is made of Jeff Suggs’s still and video projections on varying sized picture frames that also fly in as needed. Evocative lighting by Jeff Croiter brings the simple scenic plan to life.
The show begins with Cathy’s singing sadly about the end of her marriage, followed by Adam’s paean to the “Shiksa Goddess” with whom he’s just fallen in love. Each scene that follows allows the characters to sing something that takes the relationship backward or forward, since the play’s structure tells Cathy’s story from the time she and Adam split up after a five-year relationship, and Adam’s story from the time he fell for Cathy. Although they appear together occasionally, they sing every number but one as a solo, joining only in the middle when he proposes in a Central Park rowboat. Early on, we see his career taking off, while hers is going nowhere. We then see her resenting his paying more attention to his writing than to her. Success leads him to eye all the women now paying attention to him. She finds the struggle to get acting work depressing, and is unable to share the pride he takes in his achievements. He has an affair. Toward the end, we see how happy Cathy is after her first date with Jamie, only for it to be followed by his lamenting the crumbling of their marriage.
The reverse chronology part, of course, is reminiscent of Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, based on Kaufman and Hart’s 1930s play of the same name, and Pinter’s BETRAYAL. But here, because each number is sung solo without the interplay of another character, if you’re not listening very closely and don’t know the structural premise going in you may be confused by the chronological mishmash until you figure out what’s been happening. This, at least, is what happened to me, which is why I look forward to listening to a CD of the show to get a better idea of its dramatic development.
While telling the story on two separate time tracks may be inventive and, for those familiar with the material, attractive, my response was to feel alienated from the characters; the premise also seemed to make Adam and Cathy alienated from each other. It’s hard to feel compassion for people who you see acting out their love lives in artistic vacuums. And with two beautiful, talented young people who seem to have everything going for them (even with the sensational-looking Cathy’s disappointing career arc), but whose breakup is indicated only in solo songs and not in personal interaction, you have to wonder what the hell they had to complain about, other than her being less successful than he. It reminds me of Herman Mankiewicz’s reaction to the Kaufman and Hart MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG: “Here’s this playwright who writes a play and it’s a big success. Then he writes another play and it’s a big hit, too. All his plays are big successes. All the actresses in them are in love with him, and he has a yacht and beautiful home in the country. He has a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, and he makes a million dollars. Now the problem the play propounds is this: How did the poor son of a bitch ever get in this jam?”
The set is intended to suggest a hotel in Helensburgh, Scotland, and consists of nothing but a heavily patterned rug and a chair surrounded by the small theatre’s black walls. A simple lighting plot making use of a small number of instruments allows for the action to shift from the lobby to a hotel room to its bar without straining the audience’s imagination.
The slight dramatic action involves the return to his home town of Helensburgh of Evan (Scott-Ramsey), back from serving as a nurse in Pakistan, where his duties involved aiding the Taliban as part of a deal to tamp down their aggression. Helensburgh, once a thriving port town, has gone downhill since the introduction there of a British naval base harboring nuclear subs, and there has long been animosity between those the naval base brought in and the local population. Evan, now in his mid-20s, grew up in Helensburgh after his dad got a job there. The sole remaining hotel, where Helen (Duff), in her mid-40s, is a manager, has barely any customers, but she nonetheless acts icily officious when Evan checks in. He’s returned after many years because his parents are remarrying after a period during which they were divorced. Her behavior is, to a great extent, fueled by her remembrance of him having bullied her son, Jack, at least a dozen years earlier. The bullying incident, once over, had little effect on the son but it fed Helen’s resentment. Tension between Evan, who carries a chip on his shoulder (he actually complains of shoulder pain), and Helen, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage, develops incrementally and subtly and evolves into a combination of animosity and sexual attraction. After his overnight stay, he departs; Helen and he have, during their brief encounter, resolved their differences.
The dialogue is composed of brief, sometimes elliptical sentences, delivered naturalistically. Because there’s no furniture, the floor becomes an important acting area, with lighting suggesting different locales. Theatrically, this is a mood piece, where nothing much happens on the surface, and everything important goes on beneath the skin. Occasional laugh lines lighten the mood, but very little of the play reached me deeply.
The book, which hews closely to the screenplay, is about a shoe factory in the provincial town of Northampton, England, that is on the verge of closing after its beloved owner, Mr. Price (Stephen Berger), dies. His son, Charlie Price (Stark Sands), is not interested in taking over the business, and has moved to London with his fiancée, Nicola (Celina Carvajal), to go into real estate marketing. When he meets and befriends the drag queen Lola (Billy Porter), whose real name is Simon, he gets the idea of altering the factory’s product by filling a niche market for the kinds of glitzy boots favored by persons of Lola’s persuasion, and hires Lola as his designer. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nicola tanks when she shows no sympathy for his business plans, while, as per hundreds of similar plots, the pretty and loyal factory worker Lauren (the very fine Annaleigh Ashford), who has been panting for Charlie all along, steps in as a replacement. A conflict between Don (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a burly, homophobic worker and Lola is resolved after a boxing match between them—Lola, a trained boxer, allows Don to beat him—and homophobia is defeated once and for all (what if Lola actually was a wimp?). Both Charlie and Lola seek to gain their father’s approval, Charlie via his resuscitation of his late dad’s business, Lola through his performance at his dad’s nursing home. The new business model succeeds in a splashy closing number at an international fashion show in Milan when Lola’s “Angels,” a chorus line of drag queens, show up to model the new line of kinky boots, and the theatre rocks to a number that sounds uncomfortably close to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.”
The attractive set consists mainly of a large brick wall with windows and a sign indicating the outside of the factory, and, when the panels of which it composed slide away, the interior of the factory, with its 19th-century ironwork. The scene occasionally shifts elsewhere with slide on units, but for most of the show we’re inside the colorfully gritty shoe factory. The principal relief from the factory clothes worn by the workers is the flashy garments worn in the several drag queen numbers; some of the men in the Angels chorus have strikingly feminine, long-legged appearances, even in their sequined bikinis. If you’ve ever seen a good drag show (or even LA CAGE AUX FOLLES), you’ll know what I mean. When Lola has her big solo toward the end, “Hold Me in Your Heart,” an anthem that comes off like a DREAMGIRLS “I’m Telling You” wannabe, she wears a stunning gown adorned with a chiffon scarf that flies artfully up in the air when she moves her arm; it’s then revealed that the scene is in a nursing home and that her disabled father is watching in his wheelchair. The incongruity of her attire in such a place struck me as typical of the kind of overkill of which the show sometimes is guilty.
The breakout performance would appear to be that of Billy Porter, and perhaps he will gain the accolades that playing a role like Lola is designed to inspire. He certainly has the looks, the moves, and the voice to carry it off, but I never felt that his acting went beyond the surface to make this drag queen truly distinct from the stereotype that such characters usually reflect. When he needs to get a laugh, he sometimes does so with an overstated growl or grimace; subtlety is sorely missing. Everyone else on stage is highly polished and professional, but the bar doesn’t rise high enough to make anyone truly memorable. Jerry Mitchell’s direction and choreography doesn’t break any new ground, and the show too often seems forced and manipulative; even the audience’s laughter at various bits of staging or acting seem like knee-jerk reactions to conventional shtick.
Given the dearth of major musicals and musical performances thus far this season, I will not be at all surprised if KINKY BOOTS rakes in a substantial number of award nominations. But, as is so often the case, that will be a reflection of the state of Broadway musicals, not of the real quality of the show.
Anyone tarred with the suspicion of having been even slightly associated with communism was in danger of being blacklisted, meaning his or her employment could be terminated by a major film or television producer (the theatre was more lenient) unless the person involved not only recanted but provided Congress with the names of others that person knew to have been similarly involved. Writers went to jail, actors committed suicide or collapsed from the pressure, and many simply went into other fields when no one would employ them in their chosen profession. Major films and plays that have treated this period, directly or indirectly, include THE CRUCIBLE, AFTER THE FALL, THE WAY WE WERE, THE FRONT, ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, and so on.
Among the popular performers whose careers were seriously damaged were Jack Gilford and his wife, Madeleine Gilford, both now deceased. In FINKS, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, their playwright son, Joe Gilford, has written a very smart and valuable play about the blacklist (whose existence was denied by those who used it), changing the names of his parents to Mickey (Aaron Seretsky) and Natalie (Miriam Silverman), and conflating their experiences with those of others who were summoned as witnesses before HUAC. Some witnesses appear in the play under their real names, such as actor Lee J. Cobb (Thomas Lyons) and director Elia Kazan (Jason Liebman), both of whom named names (gaining them the appellation, “fink”), while others do so under fictional names. This makes the play something of a drame à clef, wherein those in the know will recognize the choreographer Bobby (Leo Ash Evens) as a stand-in for Jerome Robbins (who named Madeleine Gilford), and actor Fred Lang (Ned Eisenberg) as a substitute for actor Philip J. Loeb. By the way, some theatergoers may think that the lead investigator for HUAC was Sen. Joe McCarthy, but that blot on American history was already gone by 1954, and he was succeeded by Rep. Francis Walter (Michael Cullen), a Democrat but similarly driven by a reactionary attitude toward potential commies in show biz.
Gilford has told the complex, multilayered tale, in which themes of courage and cowardice, integrity and betrayal, democracy and oppression, jostle one another in every scene of the episodic but cleverly staged, thoroughly engaging production. Jason Simm’s set consists of a few pieces of living room furniture and a large desk, with freestanding interior wall and door units that can revolve easily to show exterior walls when needed. A piano at one side allows for scenes in the period’s integrated night club, Café Society, to play its part. The action moves quickly from locale to locale, often with the dialogue from one scene overlapping with that of the one that follows it. All the performances are strong (I especially liked Miriam Silverman’s multidimensional work as Natalie), and several actors play more than one role.
Gilford’s ability to compress so much history into a compact play of around two hours 15 minutes is impressive. By focusing on Mickey and Natalie’s lives he makes the play more immediately human than would a docudrama, but there is sufficient material based on actual (or effectively edited) testimony to make the skin crawl when face to face with how people behaved under the glare of Congress’s power and public scrutiny. When Natalie is on the witness stand, we see how we would like to believe we would have acted under the glare of public scrutiny—she gives the committee tit for tat so powerfully that she is cited for contempt and hauled away. But, the play surely means to ask, how would we have responded, when not to name names or beg for redemption might mean the end of one’s career, and the potential impoverishment of one’s family?
Great credit for making this complicated script work must go to director Giovanna Sardelli, who also staged the recent NORTH POOL at the Vineyard. The director’s hand is visible in the high quality of all the performances, the excellent transitions from scene to scene, the imaginative use of EST’s confined space, and the careful balance between comedy and drama. She is aided by Gina Scherr’s excellent lighting, which, together with Jill BC DuBoff’s sound effects, creates the effect of flashbulbs popping whenever a witness is called to the stand.
EST is out of the way on W. 52nd Street near 11th Avenue, but FINKS makes the effort to get there well worth the trouble. (For those who drive, I noticed that there’s plenty of parking on the street after 6:00 p.m.) It is definitely one of the season’s stronger plays and I feel it is my civic duty to turn fink and rat it out.
107. THE NORTH POOL
The title of THE NORTH POOL, Rajiv Joseph’s new play at
the Vineyard Theatre, refers to a nonexistent swimming pool on the grounds of
Sheffield High School, where the play takes place. Instead of there being a
pool at the site, there is a large concrete bomb shelter built during the Cold
War days of the 1950s and named the North Pool to deflate any fears students
may have had about being taken there during an attack. This deception is one of
many that emerge over the course of this 85-minute, intermissionless drama (performed
in real time), during which a zealous vice-principal, Dr. Danielson (Stephen
Barker Turner), interrogates an 18-year-old Middle Eastern student.
All of the action takes place in
the administrator’s authentically dreary office, scrupulously realized by
Donyale Werle. It is the last day of classes at a large public high school before
spring break, and, while the rest of his classmates have gone home, Khadim
Asmaan (Babak Tafti), a recent transfer student from an elite private school, must
visit the vice-principal’s office, although he says he has no idea why.
Danielson, who, over the course of the next hour and a half, uses
passive-aggressive ploys to play both good cop and bad cop, makes Khadim serve
a period of detention in his office for having skipped a class, and then begins
to question him across a wide spectrum of subjects, including his possibly planning
to bomb the school. His incessant prodding, with questions that are largely red
herrings, at one point leads Khadim to accuse Danielson of racism. Khadhim is
the wealthy son of Syrian immigrants, adept at six languages, and capable when
pushed far enough to turn his own sharp intelligence and smug sense of
superiority on his tormentor. What lies behind Danielson’s obsessive
questioning does not become clear until the end, when we learn that the heart
of his quest concerns the suicide of Lia, a troubled student who made a sex
tape; both were intensely interested in her.
As the interrogation proceeds, the
men continually explain themselves and their behavior with words that turn out
to be untrue; fairly soon, as more honest revelations pour forth, we begin to
suspect everything that they are saying, and the disclosures pile up in an
almost “can you top this” pattern of soul baring. The result is a melodramatic
structure that creates a mounting sense of disbelief in anything they disclose.
At the end, none of it adds up to very much, apart from showing us how far
perception can be from what we take to be the truth. What begins as a promising
cat and mouse drama descends into such excessive implausibility that its latter
half is increasingly difficult to accept.This is not to deny the effective work of Mr. Turner and Mr. Tafti. The former is convincing as a supercilious, officious, gregarious, and artificially friendly high school administrator. Mr. Tafti, although clearly older than 18, carries himself with the awkward shuffle of an insecure teenager, shy and self-effacing until pushed to where his inner self rises to cross words with a nasty authority figure.
If I were searching for a good theatrical swim, I’d search elsewhere than THE NORTH POOL.
108. HANDS ON A
HARDBODY
Another musical
has made it to Broadway, this one being a somewhat trimmed down (by 20 minute)
version of the show that first opened at the La Jolla Playhouse in California
last year. Unusually, the Broadway production of HANDS ON A HARDBODY has the
same cast as the La Jolla staging, including the two best-known members of the
company, Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster, both Broadway vets. Despite their
presence, this is an ensemble, and Carradine, for example, hasn’t a word to say
(although he sings along and moves about with the rest) for at least 20
minutes. The real star is a red Nissan pickup truck that dominates the stage
from first to last and is capable of moving around in different patterns as
pushed by the cast, and even to turn on its lights and honk on cue.
The truck is there because it’s
the object of everyone’s attention as the prize in a marathon competition at a
Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas, where the struggling management hopes the
attention it creates will draw customers during a time of economic hardship.
The concept of this contest proved so appealing, in fact, that an Academy
Award-winning documentary was made of it in 1997, and that film became the
show’s immediate inspiration. The book was written by Doug Wright, best known
for I Am My Own Wife, and its music
was composed by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green, the daughter of
Adolph Green and Phyllis Newman (if you don’t know who these theatre greats
are, you can check them out on Wikipedia); Green also wrote the appealing lyrics.
The songs are mainly in the country, honky-tonk, mariachi, and gospel veins,
and include social commentary, emotional problems, and religious aspirations in
their themes. They make good listening, and can go from sentimental ballads to
rafter-raising jubilation, but sometimes tend to sound too similar to other
songs in their genres.When I first learned the show’s core subject, an endurance contest to award whoever could stand longest next to a pickup truck with at least one hand on it, I wondered how something so narrow in scope could be turned into a Broadway musical, even if the characters are allowed brief breaks at set intervals to take care of physical needs. My fears were somewhat justified, since, despite an excellent, well-rounded company and some strong musical numbers, the show doesn’t totally succeed in overcoming the stasis of its basic premise.
An effort has been made to infuse the action with physical activity, but since the major choreographic routine—clever and well executed as it is—forces the actors to move around while keeping a hand on the truck, the dancers are unable to break free for more expressive dancing. The movements of the truck itself are very significant, but no truck can compete with the rhythmic flexibility of the human body, and the conceit of a “dancing” hardbody eventually grows thin.
Somewhat in the vein of shows like A Chorus Line or Working, each cast member has a distinctive story to tell and sing. There are ten contestants, each desperate to win the $22,000 truck (its mid-90s price), and each given plenty of opportunity to sing about what he or she will do with it should they win. Carradine plays JD Drew, an oil rig worker who was injured some months back and lost his job; despite the pain in his legs, he perseveres with the help of his devoted, if overly solicitous wife, Virginia (an excellent Mary Gordon Murray). Foster is the arrogant, rough-edged, red neck Benny Perkins, who won a previous contest, but who seeks to win as a way of filling in the gaps in his empty life following his wife’s leaving him and his son’s deployment to Iraq. There’s a stolid Marine, Chris Alvaro (David Larsen), suffering the effects of his own recent deployment; a deeply pious fat woman, Norma Valverde (Keala Settle), believing God is on her side; a sexy Texas blonde, Heather Stovall (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone), desperate to get off her bicycle and into the truck; an overweight black man, Ronald McCowan (Jacob Ming-Trent); a pair of youngsters who fall in love, Kelli (Allison Case) and Greg (Jay Armstrong Johnson); a Tex-Mex fellow, Jesus Peña (Jon Rua), who needs money for veterinary school and who considers himself a victim of racism; and, finally, there’s Janis Curtis (Dale Soules), an older, whiskey and cigarette-voiced, trailer-trash type, supported by her rail-thin husband, Don (William Youmans). There are also the dealership’s managers, the slightly sleazy Mike Ferris (Jim Newman) who tries to help the blonde in order to get sexual favors in return, and his assistant, the perky Cindy Barnes (Connie Ray), hoping that she and Jim won’t lose their jobs if the business goes under. Finally, Frank Nugent (Scott Wakefield) is the local radio celebrity who keeps his audiences up to date with the contest’s developments.
Visually, HANDS ON A HARDBODY is not competing with your usual Broadway production. The costumes capture the Walmart chic that characters like these would wear, and the set is little more than the truck itself, backed by a washed-out billboard that depends on expressive lighting to keep it from being simply boring. But it’s determined plainness gives the show a simplicity that makes it stand out from all the spectacle in the standard Great White Way products surrounding it. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the nearly blank billboard dominating the stage might have been used for interesting projections to give the recital of each character’s troubles some more visual excitement.
After 91 hands-on hours, the contest has a winner, of course, and the show’s interest lies largely in the way each loser drops out—one from sheer exhaustion, another from eating too many Snickers, another from sleepwalking, another from hallucinating, and so on. There are also the personal sufferings of these forgotten, working-class folk to keep us well-fed theatergoers interested, the problems of family and poverty that drive them to stand in the broiling sun without sleep for days until their limbs go numb for the chance of winning a shiny red pickup.
Like all of the contestants, the show is worthy of respect for its depiction of working class America, but it falls away before its own struggle for survival ends. You won’t have trouble keeping your hands on this hardbody of a musical, but when it’s over you may not be certain as to just how big a winner HANDS ON A HARDBODY really is.
109. BELLEVILLE
New York’s two
hottest playwrights of the moment are both young women, Annie Baker, whose THE
FLICK is dividing audiences on its merits at Playwrights Horizons, and Amy
Herzog, whose BELLEVILLE is doing the same at the New York Theatre Workshop. In
the current run-off, I’d have to give THE FLICK the nod as the more original
and consistently effective of these plays. BELLEVILLE, which has gained some
traction as a psychological thriller, seemed nothing of the kind to me; despite
those who’ve argued against it being, instead, a portrait of a youthful
marriage on the rocks, it’s hard to avoid seeing that as its essential raison
d’être. Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller) have moved to Paris so that he can take a job there doing AIDS research for Doctors without Borders; we’re led to believe he graduated from medical school. They seem an attractive couple, apparently in love, but also with cracks beginning to show in their relationship. Before long, the cracks widen into fissures, and the play shows just how wide those grow before the marriage crumbles. Each has psychological issues to contend with, and we eventually begin to wonder at just how little they each know of each other. To help create dramatic complications, Herzog introduces Abby and Zack’s landlord, an amiable Senegalese named Alioune (Phillip James Brannon) whom Zack believes he has befriended but who now demands the four months back rent Zack owes him (a matter of which Abby is ignorant). Later, we meet Zack’s less amiable wife, Amina (Pascale Armand), whose preoccupation is her infant child.
All the action transpires in Zack and Abby’s oddly angled, top-floor apartment in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, known for its racial diversity. Abby has been on antidepressants ever since her mom died a few years back; Zack’s dependency is on pot, which he now smokes at every opportunity. Abby is somewhat culturally obtuse; she offers Alioune a Christmas cookie only for him to have to remind her that he’s Muslim. Her off-kilter personality is also responsible for cutting remarks she sometimes makes to Zack, who, at first, seems a soothing, solicitous spouse, worried for his troubled wife. An unexplained visa problem for which Zack is somehow responsible means that if they leave for the USA, they won’t be able to return. Abby, unable to find anything to keep her rooted here, longs for home, where her sister is expecting a baby. Trouble begins to brew when Abby comes home to find Zack, who says he stayed home from work, masturbating to Internet porn. When he continues to stay home and Abby questions him about it, he tries to blow her off. She seems tied to the daily phone calls from her dad, but Zack takes her phone and won’t let her receive the calls, possibly out of jealousy. Meanwhile, another character of sorts begins to appear now and then—a large kitchen carving knife. The knife may be the reason some think the play a thriller, but it proves to be nothing more than a shiny red herring, and the only bleeding it causes comes from Abby’s misuse of it to deal with an injury to her toenail.
Anne Kauffman’s direction tries to build up suspense with its languorous pace, long silences, and moody lighting (even with all the lights turned on the apartment remains gloomy in the nighttime scenes). Finally, as we learn more about Zack’s mendacity, the tension does increase until he makes a final, fateful decision and brings the drama to an unsettling conclusion, albeit an ambiguous one. The last scene is performed in simple French by Alioune and Amina as they clean up the apartment, throwing all of Zack and Abby’s possessions into garbage bags, but precisely what happened before then is left to the audience to decide. Key lines they speak are, “It’s not a catastrophe,” and “Let’s go. We’ve got lots to do,” indeterminate comments that leave a cloud of vagueness hanging over what has just transpired.
Herzog leaves many questions unanswered in this wishfully atmospheric drama, such as how Abby could have been so ignorant of Zack’s behavior and the nature of his position in Paris. Even Alioune seems to know more about Zack’s character than she does.
Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller give strong performances as fragile, emotionally unstable people, and Pascale Armand and Phillip James Brannon offer solid support but all their efforts do not add up to anything significant, and the play comes off as neither original, believable, nor compelling, just another drama about how little we know each other because of all the lies we use to define ourselves. If you want to see something really memorable set in this Paris neighborhood, I’d skip BELLEVILLE and see THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (on DVD) instead.
110. HIT THE WALL
Ike Holter’s HIT
THE WALL, at the Barrow Street Theatre, was inspired by the Stonewall riots of
1969, when the police department’s homophobic policies reached a disgusting
pinnacle of violent oppression. As you probably know, on a sweltering June
night that year, the cops conducted a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay
bar (also frequented by straights) on Christopher Street, only a short distance
from the Barrow Street Theatre, resulting in the gay community’s fighting back
in a series of riots and protests that are credited with having given rise to
the “gay pride” movement that is still with us. This historical event is the core of the drama, but it’s not a documentary depiction and, if you wandered in to the play without knowing anything of the historical context you’d be completely lost, other than to see that something bad happened between the police and gay folks back in the late 1960s. This lack of context is, for me, one of the show’s most glaring problems, and its condensation of the events of several nights, with the cops represented by a single, monstrous example, oversimplifies history in the interests of polemics and melodrama. Similarly, there is no coda informing the audience of the aftermath of the rioting, which seems all compressed into the events of a single evening.
The homosexual characters are all extreme stereotypes, such as a black transvestite (Nathan Lee Graham), a cross-dressing lesbian (Rania Salem Manganaro) who gets manhandled by a cop, a black lesbian who prefers being called a dike (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a fast-talking pair of very swish young men, one black (Gregory Haney) and the other Puerto Rican (Arturo Soria), a handsome guy in a suit straight out of MAD MEN (Sean Allan Krill), and so on. Everyone is either flamboyant, promiscuous, horny, or smartass sassy with rapid-fire putdowns. Romantic relationships happen instantaneously. Dramatically, there is a series of brief scenes focused on different characters, all of them leading up to the raid, which is a theatrical highlight staged in slow mo (by ubiquitous fight director J. David Brimmer) with excellent lighting (designed by Lauren Helpern) and strobe effects accompanied by pulsating music (sound design by Daniel Kluger and Brandon Wolcott).
Apart from its several effective performances and some well-staged moments by director Eric Hoff, HIT THE WALL is not high on my list of this year’s hits.
111. THE
MOUND BUILDERS
Lanford Wilson’s 1975 play,
THE MOUND BUILDERS, which he considered his favorite, is in revival at the
Signature Theatre under the direction of Jo Bonney. The play was originally
staged by Wilson’s close collaborator, Marshall Mason, who had a genius for
evoking the lyrical realism of Wilson’s plays through the expert ensemble casts
he directed at the old Circle Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village. Whatever
magic Mason was able to weave is definitely not present in this flatfooted
revival in which a cast that should be an integrated ensemble is somehow out of
sync with both the play and with each other. The title refers to an ancient tribe of Native Americans whose past is being unearthed from beneath huge mounds by a team of archaeologists led by Prof. August Howe (David Conrad) and his assistant Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth). The dig was begun in the summer of 1974 in the town of Blue Shoals, Illinois, and the results of that summer are narrated into a tape recorder, with accompanying slides, in 1975. The narration offers material about the nature of the ancient civilization that reflects ironically on the characters in the play; August's his narration is a frame for extended flashbacks in which we see August and Dan, with their wives, staying at a lakeside summer home in Blue Shoals. It is owned by the father of Chad Jasker (Will Rogers), a local who hopes his father’s real estate investments on the lakefront will become vastly profitable when an Interstate highway comes through, eliminating the mounds and the lake as well. Chad is also staying at the house, where his attraction to the women there creates a destructive atmosphere, shattering August’s marriage among other things; a scene with a shirtless Dan suggests his interest in men as well. His financial goals lead to a confrontation with the archaeologists, whose aim is to maintain as a tourist attraction the important site on which they’ve expended blood, sweat, and tears. This brief précis gives only the barest outlines of the play, of course, and there are all sorts of interpersonal issues that arise, not only with Chad but among everyone dwelling in the house. These include August’s attractive wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), a photographer; their adolescent daughter (Rachel Resheff); Dan’s pregnant wife Jean (Lisa Joyce), a gynecologist; and August’s ailing sister, Delia a.k.a. D.K. (Danielle Skraastad), a novelist and recovering drug addict, estranged from her brother; seated throughout on a couch at center stage, she offers dryly negative comments on everything around her.
None of the actors is able to truly inhabit their roles, making it impossible to create a believable ensemble. Several are simply guilty of overacting (too much shouting), while others seem out of touch with their characters’ inner lives; nuance is sorely missing. If one of the things the play is intended to reveal is how the absorption of the archaeologists in the ruins of the past is so total that they allow their own lives and relationships to fall into ruins, we need more than just the sense of that absorption. We must also believe in what’s happening to them in the here and now.
The house they’re staying in is designed (by Neil Patel) to look almost deconstructed and distressed, to the point that you can look through the narrow slats that compose the walls and floor, but the effect is bland and forgettable.
For it to work, THE MOUND BUILDERS needs a company and director with the archaeological tools to excavate its themes and relationships and bring them back to life. In this production, the play remains buried within its own artistic mound.
112. MUCH ADO ABOUT
NOTHING
A friend pointed out the
coincidence of her having seen the very interesting trailer for a forthcoming
film of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, shortly after
she’d seen the play with me. I checked it out online, and found its strictly
modern-dress approach, in black and white, quite intriguing, and at the
opposite pole from the lush and gorgeous movie of the play made by Kenneth
Branagh in 1993, set in the Renaissance. The staging of MUCH ADO by Arin Arbus,
running at the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street, places the action in the
early 20th century, “prior to World War I,” according to the
program, and uses an essentially bare stage to conjure up Messina, Sicily. The
setting, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is a simple platform covered in shiny,
wood-patterned tiles. There’s a tree up right and a swing that comes down from
the rafters when needed, then ascends when not. Black screens stand at the
rear. And, given the difference between the theatre and film, that’s all that’s
really needed.
Also needed are well-balanced leading actors in the roles of
the leading couple, Benedick and Beatrice, whose constant comic bantering is a
subterfuge for the love they feel but resist admitting. Jonathan Cake makes a
suitably dashing and comically serious/seriously comic hero, often speaking
directly to specific audience members, although his actorish mannerisms sometimes
grow too prominent. His costar, Maggie Siff, however, is unable to compete with
him in their love battles, being vocally uninteresting and emotionally charmless.
She’s also dressed in a bland costume that only serves to further undermine the
vitality of her presence. The result is an artistic imbalance that undermines
the central purpose of the play. The remaining cast members range from good to
competent, but the humor of which the play should be brimming, has been toned
down to offer a somewhat darker palette; John Christopher Jones’s language
mangling Dogberry is responsible for most of the laughs.
This is not to deny the production its general effectiveness
in keeping the action moving, the story clear, the dialogue cogent, and the
atmosphere—sometimes abetted by a wandering accordion player—alive. Simply stated, there’s nothing much about which to be ado in this production.
112. BELLO MANIA; 114. LAST MAN CLUB; 115. BREAKFAST AT
TIFFANY’S; 116. F#%KING UP EVERYTHING; 117. THREE TREES
There
have been too many things to do and shows to see this past week for me to keep
up with writing these comments, so, regretfully (for me, if not for you), I’m
reduced to offering only brief remarks on the last five shows I’ve visited.
Hopefully I can get back on track by next week, although April is going to be
hell month because of all the Broadway shows rushing in to become eligible for
awards consideration before the deadline guillotine falls. Of course, there
will also be an abundance of Off Broadway shows, so every nook and cranny of my
schedule will be filled with theatergoing. I will be eating, drinking,
sleeping, and excreting theatre. (Is that more information than you need?) My
own committee’s deadline is April 21, after which I go into hibernation for a
week as we hunker down day and night to come up with our nominations based on
the 250 or so shows we will have seen. We start with BELLO MANIA, a circus show for kids at the New Victory Theatre, starring the remarkable clown Bello Nock. If you look him up online you’ll see a youngish man who wears his hair (I call it blonde, others say it’s red) straight up like a crown; he’s not too young because he has an 18-year-old daughter Annaliese, who is one of the supporting performers in his show. She’s a gymnast with a perfectly shaped Junoesque physique that is the equivalent of two normal gymnasts in size, which makes her graceful routine on a hanging ring something rather out of the ordinary to watch. If she were slim and lithe it would be just another act, but her plus-sized anatomy makes what she does even more remarkable.
Still, we watch BELLO MANIA for the Chaplinesque pantomimic skills of her dad, an unusually gifted acrobat who does his thrilling yet hilarious routines on a high wire, a trampoline, a bicycle that keeps falling apart, a tiny bicycle even a child can’t ride, and so on. There was considerable interaction with kids both on stage and in the audience, and one memorable number included Bello’s bringing a woman on stage (not a plant; I checked with others who saw the show) and involving her in doing a William Tell skit with him. He fashioned a bow out of a balloon and then proceeded to have her “shoot” invisible arrows at a series of large red balloons he held as if they were apples, while the William Tell Overture played in the background. The results were hysterically funny. At the show’s close he climbed a pole set in the front of the auditorium and did a series of comical acrobatic bits at its top as the pole swayed to and fro near the theatre’s ceiling and he reached for a balloon that had gone astray there. Awesome!
After BELLO MANIA, I saw MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which I covered in my last report, and after that ended I popped into my third show of the day, LAST MAN CLUB, downtown (and downstairs) at 1 Sheridan Square, where Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre used to hold court in campy days of yore.
This unassuming little play written and directed for the Axis Theatre by Randy Sharp is something of an eye-opener (although you may need protective goggles). It’s set in Oklahoma in the 1930s during the horrendous drought of the Dust Bowl years; unlike the Joads, who, in Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH, represented the Okies who left their farms and fled to migrant work in California to escape the ravages of the Dust Bowl’s arid lands, the family in LAST MAN CLUB has stayed behind, waiting for the endless drought to end. They and others like them belong to Last Man Clubs, standing for their concerted effort to outlast nature’s curse. We see only a table and some bare furnishings in the family’s house; no walls are shown, and the entire scenic space is wrapped in creased and soiled gray curtains. Dust and sand seem to be everywhere, and when two outsiders enter, it cascades from their heads when they take off their hats. Meanwhile, there is the constant soundscape of wind and dust that never lets us forget the bleak and parched conditions in the world outside.
The grizzled, dirt-covered outsiders turn out to be feckless con men, hoping they can talk the house’s oddball inhabitants into giving up their savings as an investment in a rainmaking invention. The interaction between these outsiders and the family makes up the heart of this simply structured play, but it is surprisingly well acted, especially by the two con men, Middle Pints (George Demas) and Henry Taper (Brian Barnhart), the latter claiming to be a scientist and clearly uncomfortable in the role of swindler. If you’re seeking a piece of strikingly atmospheric theatre, done on a dime budget, LAST MAN CLUB won’t blow dust in your eyes but you’ll certainly think it did. The production reminded me of Spencer Tracy’s Brooklyn-accented comment about Katharine Hepburn in PAT AND MIKE: “Not much meat on her but what there is is ‘cherce.’”
There’s no rest for the weary on this job, so the next day saw me visiting New York in the 1940s and 1950s for BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S at the Cort Theatre; lunch from the hotdog vendor on the corner would have been more fulfilling. This adaptation of Truman Capote’s beloved novella by Richard Greenberg reportedly stays truer to its source than the even more famous movie version starring the inimitable Audrey Hepburn. The film toned down the sexual adventures of the story’s iconic heroine, Holly Golightly, eternal representative of the poor girl from nowhere who comes to the Big Apple with dreams of conquest on her mind. Unfortunately, Greenberg is unable to find a suitable approach to transfer the episodic story to the stage. What he provides is a succession of clunky scenes, tied together by the narrative speeches of Fred (Cory Michael Smith), the attractive, sexually ambivalent young writer Holly befriends at their mutual boarding house, who tells the story years later, when he has become successful.
Even with this second-rate script the play might have worked if its self-dramatizing, ambitious, neurotic, and yet lovable heroine had been played by anyone who could somehow capture the charming appeal that Hepburn brought to the role, miscast as she may have been (Capote thought so, at any rate, and would have preferred Marilyn Monroe). Emilia Clarke, of TV’s GAME OF THRONES, is truly miscast. Like Hepburn, she speaks with a British accent (which Holly, who hails from the rural South puts on as an affectation, but which is natural to the UK born and bred Clarke), but her voice is shrill and monotonous, and her attempts at charisma mostly grating. To be fair, she is battling an image that few actresses would be able to stand up to, and the play she’s in does little to help. Still, without a Holly Golightly you can love and weep for, how can you love BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S?
F#%KING UP EVERYTHING, like COCK earlier in the season and THE MOTHERFUCKER IN THE HAT before it, uses the top row of keyboard keys to fill in the letters of a word that some media outlets refuse to print. Whatever else this accomplishes, it does help to draw attention to this rock musical, which it will need desperately once the reviews appear, I’m afraid.
FUCKING UP EVERYTHING, to spell out the word that must be spoken in the play in one variation of another at least a trillion times, is about two friends, a sexy rocker named Jake (Jason Gotay), who vaguely resembles Adam Lambert but without the flash, and Christian (Max Crumm), played by the actor who won that TV show a few years back about the search for a Danny to star in a Broadway revival of GREASE. Whereas Danny might be seen as a 1960s version of Jake, Christian is a nerdy guy who makes his living as a puppeteer (hand puppets that resemble those on Sesame Street or AVENUE Q). Jake is a lady’s man; Christian, who has a supposedly comical Eastern European last name and is Jewish, has a hard time connecting with girls. Cute, bespectacled Ivy (Dawn Cantwell) loves Jake, but doesn’t let him know; instead she has a relationship with stoner musician Tony (Douglas Widick). Christian falls in love with Juliana (Katherine Cozumel), a pretty, would-be singer and ukulele player. Jakes moves in for the kill and Christian walks in on the big kiss. Christian and Jake quarrel but make up. They then participate in an attempted ménage a trios with sexpot rocker Arielle (Lisa Birnbaum). The guys even sing about Arielle’s areolas. (You needed to know that, right?) Jake doesn’t do as well as one might have thought in this adventure. Christian and Juliana reunite, Ivy and Jake find they’re a natural fit, and stoner Tony comes out of the closet to mate with his monosyllabic drummer (George Salazer).
A familiar plot, no? Yes. Not that familiarity always breeds contempt. It does here, however, because, apart from a few cute performers, there’s nothing else going on in this low-budget enterprise being given at the Electra Theatre on 8th Avenue near 42ndStreet. The music is only occasionally listenable; much of it sounds remarkably tuneless and off key. Despite many desperate attempts, humor is in amazingly short supply, as witness the witless name of Jake’s band, Ironic Maiden. Enough with this show already. It’s too fucked up.
THREE TREES by Alvin Eng is the season’s first from the Pan-Asian Repertory Theatre, where I have a personal connection. All I’ll say is that it’s about the relationship between famed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and the existentialist Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara; Yanaihara posed for Giacometti in Paris in the 1960s, but the artist had enormous difficulty in capturing the philosopher’s essential being. The play suggests that Yanaihara was not only Alberto’s muse, but, as an outgrowth of the tribulations of his artistic involvement with Giacometti, had an affair with his wife, Annette (Leah Cogan). Giacometti’s less well-known artist brother, Diego (Scott Klavan), who bears what seems a jealous grudge against Alberto, also is involved in the action.
The dialogue examines various viewpoints regarding the artistic process. In his program notes, Eng writes: “When we become enraptured by a portrait, are we under the spell of the artist or model? Can spiritual ownership of a portrait ever be assessed?” If you are inclined to ponder such questions, as was my guest, an art specialist, you may wish to pay THREE TREES a visit. But be prepared for languorous pacing, persistent seriousness, and performances that don’t rise above adequacy.
118. SAGA
SAGA, at the Baruch
Performing Arts Center, is a collaboration between Wakka Wakka Productions and
the Nordland Visual Theatre company. The result is an exceptionally powerful
puppet play, filled with tragedy, comedy, violence, and sex. Under the
direction of Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage, half a dozen puppeteers, all
dressed in black with huge horse’s heads masking their faces, manipulate hand
puppets and bunraku-like puppets that resemble Jim Henson’s creations to tell a
story set in Iceland in 2008, when that nation’s three major commercial banks
collapsed, creating vast economic turmoil. We see the effects of the crash on
one family, the father, Gunnar (Kirjan Waage); the mother, Helga (Andrea Osp
Karlsdóttir; and their boy, Oli (Andrew Manjuck). Led on by the predatory
lending practices of the banks, the family builds a large house, buys an
expensive jeep, and in other ways takes on crushing debt, only to have it all
ripped away in the tidal wave of financial ruin that crashes over them. Helga
and Oli leave for Norway, where she gets work, and the marriage falls apart.
Gunnar, aided by what seems a vengeful spirit of Iceland’s past, goes on a
maniacal rampage against the bankers and anyone else he feels created the
problem, and bloody mayhem ensues; even the spirit goading him on gets his. The
story, although taking place in distant Iceland, could as easily represent our
own nation’s recent plight.The remarkable thing about watching this taut little drama, which lasts only an hour, is how believable the puppet characters become. Voiced by their manipulators, using Icelandic accents (which have that familiar Scandinavian lilt), they sound remarkably natural in a dry and offhand but theatrically authentic way, which creates a wonderful blend of the real and the unreal as we see and hear their overtly puppet-like personae behaving and talking like recognizable human beings. There are strikingly memorable special effects, such as a house on fire and a car crashing into a Jacuzzi. A flashback to when Gunnar met Helga allows for a hilariously believable sex scene as the couple go at it with the vivid use of a friendly finger, a munching mouth, and a perky penis. Having puppets perform the sex, as well as the horrifically brutal scenes at the end, allows for just the right separation between illusion and reality that audiences would never accept if live actors were involved. Seeing a body part chopped off, no matter how gorily presented, is far more watchable when it’s a puppet hand than a presumably real one, and I’m sure there isn’t a porn star who could get his member to stand to attention with military precision on cue the way that Gunnar the puppet does.
Unfortunately, this special little production is not attracting crowds. Only around half the house was filled on Friday, when I saw it, despite its low price of $35 a ticket. On the other hand, the mediocre LUCKY GUY, soon to open on Broadway, is selling premium seats for $350 on weekends, and there aren’t enough to go around.
119. HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Helen Hayes was one of the
greatest Broadway actresses during much of the mid-20th century.
Anita Loos was a highly successful screenwriter and novelist, most famous,
perhaps, for her depiction of the roaring 20s in her classic story, GENTLEMEN
PREFER BLONDES. Hayes and Loos were friends, and Loos wrote HAPPY BIRTHDAY for
her as a way for the actress to move away from the historical characters with
which she’d recently been associated. Its 1946 production was a hit and ran for
564 performances. Seeing it in a rare revival by TACT (The Actors Company
Theatre) at the Beckett on Theatre Row makes one wonder about what could
possibly have been so fascinating about it as to have made it such a success?
Clearly, it must have been the special talents of Ms. Hayes in the central role
of Addie Bemis, a mousy, prudish librarian, living with an abusively drunken
father; under the influence of a few pink ladies and other concoctions served
up at Newark’s Mecca Cocktail Bar, Addie suddenly becomes the life of the party,
finds love, and gets her father off her back. Hayes won the first Tony Award
for her presentation (actually, she shared it with Ingrid Bergman, who won for
JOAN OF LORRAINE).
I wrote, in the 1940-1950 volume of my ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE
NEW YORK STAGE, that in the original production, the more Addie “imbibes, the
more the bar becomes a virtual paradise of color and light where anything can
happen. Bottles are brilliantly illuminated, large dollar bills keep coming
from her purse, her stool rises to twice its height, ordinary clothing becomes
spectacular, and strangers become buddies.” Aside from the last item, very
little of the other effects are created or even sought after in Scott Alan
Evans’s sluggish, uninspired staging, which keeps everything literal, although
there is one fairly interesting touch. When Addie and Paul Bishop (Todd Gearhart),
the bank teller on whom she has a crush, hide from her father under a table, a
huge cloth, representing the tablecloth, rises to the ceiling so we can see the
couple huddling together in their secret place.Playing Addie is Mary Bacon, an otherwise respectable actress, who is totally unable to make Addie convincing, and whose performance is often embarrassingly strained. Her best moment comes when she displays a pleasant singing voice to render Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “I Haven’t Got a Worry in the World,” written for the original show. But it would be impossible to say of her, as Brooks Atkinson said of Hayes, that she acted “with the sincerity and magic of an honest actress who enjoys the sentiment, warmth and showmanship of popular comedy.” Perhaps the talented Karen Ziemba might have succeeded in the role; she’s certainly wasted in the thankless role of Grace, the bar owner. HAPPY BIRTHDAY is not very happy, after all.
120. LUCKY GUY
One of
Hollywood’s most popular actors, Tom Hanks, is making his Broadway debut in
Nora Ephron’s LUCKY GUY, and, despite the tremendous business the show is
doing, what happens on stage is decidedly iffy. The play is a biodrama about
the crime reporter and columnist, Mike McAlary (Hanks), who died of cancer at
age 42; a major question it raises is why Ms. Ephron thought his career worthy
of a play. True, he was a rising comet in tabloid journalism during the 1980s
and 1990s, but I would venture that most Broadway theatergoers rarely read him,
since the Daily News, the New York Post, and Newsday, are not found on as many
theatergoers’doorsteps as the New York Times, where the same stories also were
covered, if not as colorfully. McAlary got the scoop on some major events, of
course, most especially the Abner Louima case about police brutality carried
out on an African immigrant; this incident occupies only one in a succession of
episodic scenes, and a late one at that, and is not the core of the drama.
Is the play seeking to show how competitive and
ruthless the life of a tabloid journalist is (something, but not much, is made
of a rivalry with columnist Jimmy Breslin); is it a tale of courage in the face
of adversity (McAlary went from his chemo treatment directly to Louima’s
bedside for an interview)? It’s probably a little of both, but the career and
life of this particular journalist was too brief to truly qualify as
representative, so the play struggles to find drama in his relationships with
his colleagues and his long-suffering wife, Alice (the talented Maura Tierney,
in a non-demanding role). About two thirds of the biographical material is
delivered in direct address narration by a group of journalists in McAlary’s
circle; the other material is standard issue biodrama of no particular interest
or originality. Projections, many of newspaper headlines, play a major role in
informing us of what the background is to particular scenes.
Since much of the action concerns McAlary’s
constant jumping from paper to paper and then back again as his reputation
grows, the musical chairs-like steps in his career become too confusing to
bother about; I don’t think most of this is of great importance to the average
audience member. There are a few promising touches of humor early in the play,
when we’re getting used to the narrative device. For example, Courtney B.
Vance, as editor Hap Hairston, refers to the city’s rich and poor, pointing for
the former at those in the expensive premium seats, and for the latter at those
seated in the balcony. And when we’re introduced to a smoke-filled newspaper
office, more smoke is called for and a stagehand comes on spraying smoke from a
machine. These kinds of shared jokes with the audience soon vanish, reappearing
far too infrequently.Nearly everyone, including McAlary, comes off as one-dimensional, and if you asked me to differentiate one reporter from another, I’d have a hard time doing so. To a degree, this is because George C. Wolfe’s direction, in an effort to hype up the action and keep things moving with energy and speed, has all the actors speaking rapidly at full volume nearly all the time, so one narrative speech ends up sounding like another, the only difference being that this actor is tall, that one is short, this one is bald, that one has hair, this one is fat, and that one is thin. All are stereotypes of the hard-driving, profanity-spewing, whiskey-chugging, fast-talking, chain-smoking reporters we’ve seen in dozens of plays and films dating back to THE FRONT PAGE and others.
Hanks resembles McAlary facially, but is 15 years older than the journalist was when he died, and he’s considerably wider at the waist. Much of the play deals with an even younger McAlary, making the age disparity seem even greater. This robs the play of some of the pathos it might have evoked if a younger actor played the role. There’s no question that Hanks brings to the stage much of the nice guy charisma, sensitivity, and intelligence he projects on screen, but the role as written gives him too few notes to play, and he only begins to deepen his dimensionality in the second act, when we see him suffering the effects of a car crash and, later, cancer,or when he speaks about his feelings after winning the Pulitzer Prize. But these moments are digressions from a character of boundless ambition and drive whose activities give him little opportunity to do other than bluster, brag, or make demands.
LUCKY GUY is scheduled to close on June 16. You may consider me a lucky guy to have been able to see it. I am. But don’t consider yourself unlucky if you miss it.
121. CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: TOTEM
TOTEM, The most
recent version of CIRQUE DU SOLEIL to visit New York, has set up its tents on
the parking lot at Citi Field, which you can get to cheaply by the 7 train; if,
like me, you don’t have access to that line and have to drive, get ready to
fork over $20 for the privilege of parking there. The show lasts two and a half
hours, the half hour being occupied by an intermission, absolutely necessary so
that the large audience can wander into the concession areas and spend big money
on food and souvenirs. Everything is monetized here, including your photos;
you’re not allowed to take pictures of your friends and family but must wait
for one of the company photographers to do so for you so they can sell the
results to you afterward. I advise you to bring your own snacks; the prices
charged are over the moon.This commercial aspect aside, the show itself is the usual spectacular assortment of acrobats and clown acts, with weirdly beautiful music and remarkable costumes, lighting, sound, and visual effects; I was especially awestruck by the projections on a raised oval platform of images that were startlingly real, such as water washing up on a beach. The integration of live action and projections was unbelievable. In fact, I can’t recall how many times I kept saying “unbelievable!,” or “Oh, my God!” when I saw the different artists defy gravity, perform impossible balancing or juggling feats, or fly through the air in complex patterns only to land with eye-popping accuracy on predetermined spots.
Like all previous CIRQUE shows, this one will amaze you not only at the physical things human beings are capable of doing, but at the exquisite beauty, strength, coordination, focus, and physical perfection of many in the company. What can I say? There are many wonders here to behold, and you won’t be bored for a second.
122. THE LAST FIVE YEARS
Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical, THE LAST FIVE YEARS,
in revival Off Broadway at Second Stage, under the author-composer’s direction,
was originally done Off Broadway in 2002, after debuting in Chicago the
previous year. Starring Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott in that version,
it won a slew of awards for its semiautobiographical account of the
disintegration over five years of a romantic and then marital relationship
between a beautiful, blonde gentile, Cathy Hyatt (Betsy Wolfe), an aspiring
actress from the Midwest, and Jamie Wellerstein (Adam Kantor), a young Jewish writer
from Spring Valley, NY. Running around an hour and a half, with no intermission, it’s an efficient, briskly paced, tuneful, very well performed, largely sung-through show, to which the audience, including the friend who attended with me, responded enthusiastically; it appears to have a cult following and is even now in production as a film. My friend pointed out that a couple of its songs have become relatively mainstream because of the airtime they’ve gotten from Jonathan Schwartz’s radio show. Still, it’s a musical that’s never been on my radar, so it was entirely new to me.
Derek McLane’s set presents an open stage with a deep blue, brick-like rear wall against which scaffolding on several different levels allows a visually attractive arrangement of the musical ensemble of piano, violin, two cellos, bass, and guitar. Simple set pieces, like a door, rowboat, or car seat, slide on or off, and a pretty assortment of windows flies in now and then to suggest a landscape of apartment house windows. Excellent use is made of Jeff Suggs’s still and video projections on varying sized picture frames that also fly in as needed. Evocative lighting by Jeff Croiter brings the simple scenic plan to life.
The show begins with Cathy’s singing sadly about the end of her marriage, followed by Adam’s paean to the “Shiksa Goddess” with whom he’s just fallen in love. Each scene that follows allows the characters to sing something that takes the relationship backward or forward, since the play’s structure tells Cathy’s story from the time she and Adam split up after a five-year relationship, and Adam’s story from the time he fell for Cathy. Although they appear together occasionally, they sing every number but one as a solo, joining only in the middle when he proposes in a Central Park rowboat. Early on, we see his career taking off, while hers is going nowhere. We then see her resenting his paying more attention to his writing than to her. Success leads him to eye all the women now paying attention to him. She finds the struggle to get acting work depressing, and is unable to share the pride he takes in his achievements. He has an affair. Toward the end, we see how happy Cathy is after her first date with Jamie, only for it to be followed by his lamenting the crumbling of their marriage.
The reverse chronology part, of course, is reminiscent of Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, based on Kaufman and Hart’s 1930s play of the same name, and Pinter’s BETRAYAL. But here, because each number is sung solo without the interplay of another character, if you’re not listening very closely and don’t know the structural premise going in you may be confused by the chronological mishmash until you figure out what’s been happening. This, at least, is what happened to me, which is why I look forward to listening to a CD of the show to get a better idea of its dramatic development.
While telling the story on two separate time tracks may be inventive and, for those familiar with the material, attractive, my response was to feel alienated from the characters; the premise also seemed to make Adam and Cathy alienated from each other. It’s hard to feel compassion for people who you see acting out their love lives in artistic vacuums. And with two beautiful, talented young people who seem to have everything going for them (even with the sensational-looking Cathy’s disappointing career arc), but whose breakup is indicated only in solo songs and not in personal interaction, you have to wonder what the hell they had to complain about, other than her being less successful than he. It reminds me of Herman Mankiewicz’s reaction to the Kaufman and Hart MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG: “Here’s this playwright who writes a play and it’s a big success. Then he writes another play and it’s a big hit, too. All his plays are big successes. All the actresses in them are in love with him, and he has a yacht and beautiful home in the country. He has a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, and he makes a million dollars. Now the problem the play propounds is this: How did the poor son of a bitch ever get in this jam?”
123. GOOD WITH PEOPLE
GOOD WITH PEOPLE,
a two-hander by respected Scottish dramatist David Harrower, now having its US
premiere at 59e59 as part of the Scotland Week celebrations, received a rave
today from Ben Brantley in the New York Times, and it was warmly
welcomed by critics on the other side of the pond, but
I found it only fitfully engaging, and even then more because of the staging
and restrained, if sometimes too low-key, performances of Blythe Duff and
Andrew Scott-Ramsey. Much of what is on stage is the product of directorial
imagination; the script has barely any stage directions, and doesn’t mention,
for example, the extended scene where Scott-Ramsey stands facing upstage,
entirely nude, taking a shower by pouring a bottle of water over his head, or
the one where Scott-Ramsey and Duff enthusiastically perform a Scottish dance. The set is intended to suggest a hotel in Helensburgh, Scotland, and consists of nothing but a heavily patterned rug and a chair surrounded by the small theatre’s black walls. A simple lighting plot making use of a small number of instruments allows for the action to shift from the lobby to a hotel room to its bar without straining the audience’s imagination.
The slight dramatic action involves the return to his home town of Helensburgh of Evan (Scott-Ramsey), back from serving as a nurse in Pakistan, where his duties involved aiding the Taliban as part of a deal to tamp down their aggression. Helensburgh, once a thriving port town, has gone downhill since the introduction there of a British naval base harboring nuclear subs, and there has long been animosity between those the naval base brought in and the local population. Evan, now in his mid-20s, grew up in Helensburgh after his dad got a job there. The sole remaining hotel, where Helen (Duff), in her mid-40s, is a manager, has barely any customers, but she nonetheless acts icily officious when Evan checks in. He’s returned after many years because his parents are remarrying after a period during which they were divorced. Her behavior is, to a great extent, fueled by her remembrance of him having bullied her son, Jack, at least a dozen years earlier. The bullying incident, once over, had little effect on the son but it fed Helen’s resentment. Tension between Evan, who carries a chip on his shoulder (he actually complains of shoulder pain), and Helen, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage, develops incrementally and subtly and evolves into a combination of animosity and sexual attraction. After his overnight stay, he departs; Helen and he have, during their brief encounter, resolved their differences.
The dialogue is composed of brief, sometimes elliptical sentences, delivered naturalistically. Because there’s no furniture, the floor becomes an important acting area, with lighting suggesting different locales. Theatrically, this is a mood piece, where nothing much happens on the surface, and everything important goes on beneath the skin. Occasional laugh lines lighten the mood, but very little of the play reached me deeply.
124. KINKY BOOTS
If you haven’t seen the
British film that inspired KINKY BOOTS, the new Broadway musical at the
Hirschfeld Theatre, I suggest you should rent the DVD; you may find it both a
funnier and more sensitive presentation of this story about a black drag queen
and his success as a designer of what the title hints at. Several people I know
who’ve seen the new show loved it, so mine may be (as it often is) a minority
opinion, but I came away feeling that it was simplistic, two-dimensional,
contrived, overly sentimental, insufficiently funny, and equipped with a score
that, by and large, was unexceptional. Perhaps some of these remarks can be
directed at the movie as well, but at least on screen there is a level of
authenticity that makes the material seem real. On Broadway, as musicalized
with a book by Harvey Fierstein (the go-to man when campy gayness is required)
and music and lyrics by Broadway newbie Cyndi Lauper (also no stranger to
camp), everything seems overblown and contrived. Or maybe you’ve never seen a
black drag queen who flaunts his sexuality in outrageously flamboyant ways and
is a master of one-liner wisecracks.The book, which hews closely to the screenplay, is about a shoe factory in the provincial town of Northampton, England, that is on the verge of closing after its beloved owner, Mr. Price (Stephen Berger), dies. His son, Charlie Price (Stark Sands), is not interested in taking over the business, and has moved to London with his fiancée, Nicola (Celina Carvajal), to go into real estate marketing. When he meets and befriends the drag queen Lola (Billy Porter), whose real name is Simon, he gets the idea of altering the factory’s product by filling a niche market for the kinds of glitzy boots favored by persons of Lola’s persuasion, and hires Lola as his designer. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nicola tanks when she shows no sympathy for his business plans, while, as per hundreds of similar plots, the pretty and loyal factory worker Lauren (the very fine Annaleigh Ashford), who has been panting for Charlie all along, steps in as a replacement. A conflict between Don (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a burly, homophobic worker and Lola is resolved after a boxing match between them—Lola, a trained boxer, allows Don to beat him—and homophobia is defeated once and for all (what if Lola actually was a wimp?). Both Charlie and Lola seek to gain their father’s approval, Charlie via his resuscitation of his late dad’s business, Lola through his performance at his dad’s nursing home. The new business model succeeds in a splashy closing number at an international fashion show in Milan when Lola’s “Angels,” a chorus line of drag queens, show up to model the new line of kinky boots, and the theatre rocks to a number that sounds uncomfortably close to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.”
The attractive set consists mainly of a large brick wall with windows and a sign indicating the outside of the factory, and, when the panels of which it composed slide away, the interior of the factory, with its 19th-century ironwork. The scene occasionally shifts elsewhere with slide on units, but for most of the show we’re inside the colorfully gritty shoe factory. The principal relief from the factory clothes worn by the workers is the flashy garments worn in the several drag queen numbers; some of the men in the Angels chorus have strikingly feminine, long-legged appearances, even in their sequined bikinis. If you’ve ever seen a good drag show (or even LA CAGE AUX FOLLES), you’ll know what I mean. When Lola has her big solo toward the end, “Hold Me in Your Heart,” an anthem that comes off like a DREAMGIRLS “I’m Telling You” wannabe, she wears a stunning gown adorned with a chiffon scarf that flies artfully up in the air when she moves her arm; it’s then revealed that the scene is in a nursing home and that her disabled father is watching in his wheelchair. The incongruity of her attire in such a place struck me as typical of the kind of overkill of which the show sometimes is guilty.
The breakout performance would appear to be that of Billy Porter, and perhaps he will gain the accolades that playing a role like Lola is designed to inspire. He certainly has the looks, the moves, and the voice to carry it off, but I never felt that his acting went beyond the surface to make this drag queen truly distinct from the stereotype that such characters usually reflect. When he needs to get a laugh, he sometimes does so with an overstated growl or grimace; subtlety is sorely missing. Everyone else on stage is highly polished and professional, but the bar doesn’t rise high enough to make anyone truly memorable. Jerry Mitchell’s direction and choreography doesn’t break any new ground, and the show too often seems forced and manipulative; even the audience’s laughter at various bits of staging or acting seem like knee-jerk reactions to conventional shtick.
Given the dearth of major musicals and musical performances thus far this season, I will not be at all surprised if KINKY BOOTS rakes in a substantial number of award nominations. But, as is so often the case, that will be a reflection of the state of Broadway musicals, not of the real quality of the show.
125. FINKS
American history is filled
with horrendous events, trends, and practices that have gone against the grain
of the country’s claim to be the world’s exemplar of freedom and equality. One
such moment is the frenzy during the mid-20th century when
reactionary elements in Congress smeared as dangerously subversive any
left-leaning liberal, a mania that grew especially onerous in the late 1940s and1950s
when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) chose to focus on people
in the entertainment industry. Various films and plays have dramatized this
nightmare period when friends ratted on friends, naming names even when those
names belonged to people who had done no more than attend a meeting or sign a
petition favoring some group that would later be considered a communist front;
often, of course, the allegations were totally false. Besides, there was
actually no law forbidding the existence of the Communist Party. Anyone tarred with the suspicion of having been even slightly associated with communism was in danger of being blacklisted, meaning his or her employment could be terminated by a major film or television producer (the theatre was more lenient) unless the person involved not only recanted but provided Congress with the names of others that person knew to have been similarly involved. Writers went to jail, actors committed suicide or collapsed from the pressure, and many simply went into other fields when no one would employ them in their chosen profession. Major films and plays that have treated this period, directly or indirectly, include THE CRUCIBLE, AFTER THE FALL, THE WAY WE WERE, THE FRONT, ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, and so on.
Among the popular performers whose careers were seriously damaged were Jack Gilford and his wife, Madeleine Gilford, both now deceased. In FINKS, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, their playwright son, Joe Gilford, has written a very smart and valuable play about the blacklist (whose existence was denied by those who used it), changing the names of his parents to Mickey (Aaron Seretsky) and Natalie (Miriam Silverman), and conflating their experiences with those of others who were summoned as witnesses before HUAC. Some witnesses appear in the play under their real names, such as actor Lee J. Cobb (Thomas Lyons) and director Elia Kazan (Jason Liebman), both of whom named names (gaining them the appellation, “fink”), while others do so under fictional names. This makes the play something of a drame à clef, wherein those in the know will recognize the choreographer Bobby (Leo Ash Evens) as a stand-in for Jerome Robbins (who named Madeleine Gilford), and actor Fred Lang (Ned Eisenberg) as a substitute for actor Philip J. Loeb. By the way, some theatergoers may think that the lead investigator for HUAC was Sen. Joe McCarthy, but that blot on American history was already gone by 1954, and he was succeeded by Rep. Francis Walter (Michael Cullen), a Democrat but similarly driven by a reactionary attitude toward potential commies in show biz.
Gilford has told the complex, multilayered tale, in which themes of courage and cowardice, integrity and betrayal, democracy and oppression, jostle one another in every scene of the episodic but cleverly staged, thoroughly engaging production. Jason Simm’s set consists of a few pieces of living room furniture and a large desk, with freestanding interior wall and door units that can revolve easily to show exterior walls when needed. A piano at one side allows for scenes in the period’s integrated night club, Café Society, to play its part. The action moves quickly from locale to locale, often with the dialogue from one scene overlapping with that of the one that follows it. All the performances are strong (I especially liked Miriam Silverman’s multidimensional work as Natalie), and several actors play more than one role.
Gilford’s ability to compress so much history into a compact play of around two hours 15 minutes is impressive. By focusing on Mickey and Natalie’s lives he makes the play more immediately human than would a docudrama, but there is sufficient material based on actual (or effectively edited) testimony to make the skin crawl when face to face with how people behaved under the glare of Congress’s power and public scrutiny. When Natalie is on the witness stand, we see how we would like to believe we would have acted under the glare of public scrutiny—she gives the committee tit for tat so powerfully that she is cited for contempt and hauled away. But, the play surely means to ask, how would we have responded, when not to name names or beg for redemption might mean the end of one’s career, and the potential impoverishment of one’s family?
Great credit for making this complicated script work must go to director Giovanna Sardelli, who also staged the recent NORTH POOL at the Vineyard. The director’s hand is visible in the high quality of all the performances, the excellent transitions from scene to scene, the imaginative use of EST’s confined space, and the careful balance between comedy and drama. She is aided by Gina Scherr’s excellent lighting, which, together with Jill BC DuBoff’s sound effects, creates the effect of flashbulbs popping whenever a witness is called to the stand.
EST is out of the way on W. 52nd Street near 11th Avenue, but FINKS makes the effort to get there well worth the trouble. (For those who drive, I noticed that there’s plenty of parking on the street after 6:00 p.m.) It is definitely one of the season’s stronger plays and I feel it is my civic duty to turn fink and rat it out.
126. BUYER AND CELLAR
Michael Urie is a well-known
TV star, mainly from his role on UGLY BETTY, which I’ve never watched. But he’s
also done a lot of theatre work, and his stage skills, on display in Jonathan
Tolins’s one-man play BUYER AND CELLAR at the Rattlestick Theatre on Waverly
Place in Greenwich Village, are quite impressive. This slim, attractive, young
actor plays Alex More, a character seemingly much like his own persona, in a
paper-thin but often very entertaining play inspired by Barbra Streisand’s
vanity book, A PASSION FOR DESIGN, in which Flatbush’s great Jewish diva
luxuriates in describing (and photographing) the extravagantly tasteful décor
of the Malibu home she shares with husband James Brolin. One feature of that
home is a mall-like basement composed of shops (spelled shoppes) in which she
has organized her vast collection of “stuff,” from dolls to clothing.
The idea of such conspicuous consumption by a major star
appears to be fodder for a gay man’s imagination (I’m presuming that the
playwright is gay), so Tolins creates in Alex an out-of-work, gay LA actor (he
lost his job as the mayor of Disneyland’s Toontown for telling a rotten kid to
shove something up his ass) who takes a job as the caretaker of Streisand’s
private mall. His VW Jetta is so rundown looking when he arrives that Barbra’s
personal assistant makes him hide it in the bushes. His job involves merely
looking after the precisely arranged goods in the shoppes (which he pronounces
“shop-pees”), but one day the diva herself appears and engages him in a role
playing game where she acts as a customer and he as the shop(pe)keeper. When
she expresses interest in buying a certain doll he responds with such clever
repartee that the pair are soon engaged in a can-you-top-this kind of exchange.
Slowly, a relationship evolves between them, and Alex, thrilled to the gills
about it, reports back to his diva-obsessed boyfriend, who is hungry for
details. Alex even becomes Barbra’s coach in preparing for a film of GYPSY
she’s planning to make. But the boyfriend soon grows jealous of Alex’s
relationship, one that ultimately leads to Barbra’s seemingly putting the moves
on Alex after she invites him into her family room to watch TV. When he
realizes that her real interest is in seeing whether his hair color is the right
one for the pillows she plans to purchase, he explodes angrily, after which he is
fired. His relationship with his lover is patched up, and the story of his job
with Barbra Streisand becomes the fond, if lengthy, anecdote that constitutes
the play we’ve just been watching.
At
the very start of the evening, Urie tells the audience that nothing that
they’re about to watch is true, that it’s all a figment of the writer’s
imagination after he encountered Streisand’s book. By the end of the evening,
even though only one actor has been playing multiple roles, it’s hard to shake
the illusion that it all could have happened, that, in the nutty world we
sometimes believe eccentric celebrities inhabit, anything is possible. Urie is
extremely adept at playing both the charmingly appealing Alex, with his
conventional gay mannerisms, and Streisand, switching from Alex to Streisand
and back again instantaneously. For the singer, he lifts a shoulder, holds his
hand in a femme attitude, squints, and purses his lips, transforming his voice
into a reasonable semblance of hers, not so much in sound but in intonation. He
never overdoes it, though, so that by the end of the performance, we get to see
in Streisand not only the kooky star we’re familiar with, but someone resembling
a real person with her fears and cares. And, of course, Urie also offers us
clear images of Alex’s boyfriend and Streisand’s assistant. There’s also a
wonderful scene in which James Brolin wanders into the mall, giving Urie a
chance to play the manly, deep-voiced star.
This tour de force solo show is performed on Andrew Boyce’s simple,
yet elegant box set provided with only a small white table, a white chair, and
a white piano bench. The rear wall has white wainscoting on the lower half, and
the walls all around are lit by Eric Southern in varying shades of the kind of
muted designer pastels we associate with tasteful home decorating.
Occasionally, the rear wall also accommodates projected images in outline form,
such as assorted doors and windows.
Director Stephen Brackett, playwright Jonathan Tolins, and
actor Michael Urie have collaborated effectively to create a lightweight yet
always stylish piece of theatre. If La Streisand has a sense of humor about
herself, I can even see it being performed for guests amidst the modish
furnishings of her Malibu living room. However, as Urie notes in his opening
remarks, she’s famously “litigious,” so maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea
after all.
127. MATILDA
MATILDA, the multi-award winning
British blockbuster based on Roald Dahl’s popular children’s book about a
preternaturally brilliant little girl, is probably the most anticipated new
musical of the season. Matthew Warchus’s production turns out to be rapidly
paced, visually impressive, and marvelously choreographed (by Peter Darling),
with a couple of noteworthy performances, but marred by Tim Minchin’s
unmemorable score, lyrics (also by Minchin) that get muffled in the several
choral numbers, a somewhat awkwardly structured book (by Dennis Kelly), some
excessively loud and cartoonish acting, content that will sail right over the
heads of many American children who will be a main marketing target, and a dark,
sadistic tone that is likely to scare some youngsters; others may simply be bored
(as seemed to be the case among nearby kids by the second act). A friend
suggested it may simply be too British for American youngsters.
One standout performance is that of Bertie Carvel, who
cross-dresses to play Miss Truncbull, the horrendously mean-spirited, hugely
oversized headmistress—winner of the hammer throw in a past Olympics—of the
school where Matilda is sent by Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood (Gabriel Ebert and Lesli
Margherita), her horrifically stupid and cruel parents (her father insists on
referring to her as a boy). Both parents are played in exaggerated, comic-book
style. Miss Trunchbull is also extremely overstated, but Carvel, a
British actor who originated the role three years ago in London, manages to
offer enough comically nightmarish colors to keep it creatively interesting.
Another standout is the child who played Matilda the night I saw the show;
there are four Matildas playing the role in alternation (the other kids in the
cast also have alternates), so I can only vouch for Milly Shapiro, a big-voiced,
tiny American girl (Matilda is supposed to be 5-years-old) who has mastered her
British dialect, as well as all of the stylized movements, while also managing
to command the stage whenever she’s on it despite (or perhaps partly because
of) her somewhat odd physical appearance.
The only other principal performer
who is a true standout is Lauren Ward, who plays Miss Honey, the sweet young
schoolteacher who recognizes Matilda’s genius and takes her to her heart.
I wish I could have taken MATILDA
the show to my heart, and perhaps many will, but I was unable to do more than
admire its aspirations. There’s a lot more I could write about concerning this
musical, but I’m sure there’ll be a surfeit of professional commentary on it
once it opens officially.
128. THE LAST WILL
Robert Brustein, described by
Wikipedia as a “theatrical producer, critic, playwright, and educator,” has
donned his playwright hat to pen THE LAST WILL, the final part of his trilogy
about Shakespeare’s life, now in the June Havoc Theatre at the Abingdon Theatre
complex. Austin Pendleton both directs and plays the bard, who was considerably
younger (52) in his final year (1616) than Mr. Pendleton (73), who, with his
white hair and baggy-eyed face, seems more convincingly close to the grave than
someone two decades younger.
The play avoids
trying to sound Elizabethan and uses contemporary language to reflect on why
Shakespeare’s will, one of the few personal documents he left behind,
bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway (no, not THAT Anne
Hathaway), played by Stephanie Roth Haberle. It all has to do with his
suspicion that she committed adultery. The others in the play are his lawyer, Francis
Collins (David Wohl), who writes the will, his daughters, Judith (Christianna
Nelson) and Susanna (Merritt Janson), and his leading actor, Richard Burbage
(Jeremiah Kissel). There’s also a lot of to-do about Burbage’s interest in
getting all of Shakespeare’s plays published, and the playwright’s resistance
because of his fears about pirating. Brustein squeezes in many familiar
historical references, but in a manner that makes them seem topics that might
come up in normal conversation, so academics will enjoy (or not) hearing things
they already know and checking Brustein for his accuracy.
In the course of
the drama, during which we see Shakespeare’s gradual decline into dementia,
Brustein weaves bits of Shakespeare’s plays into the dialogue, so that the
situations in his life allow us to reflect on the biographical appropriateness
of the lines. Jealousy over a handkerchief corresponds, for instance, to Othello, while concerns about his
family’s loyalty offers an opportunity for the speaking of King Lear’s “How sharper
than a serpent’s tooth” and other familiar lines.
The action takes place at
Shakespeare’s home in Stratford, with Stephen Dobay’s set consisting of a
beige-colored rear wall made up of horizontal wooden planking; at either side
are large, carefully molded sculptures resembling, I imagine, crunched-up
paper. A bed (presumably that second-best one), a desk, and a couple of chairs
supply the few furnishings. Laura Crow’s costumes vaguely suggest Elizabethan
garments, although why Shakespeare fumbles about in bare feet is not explained.
The performances are polished,
but the one most will pay attention to is that of Pendleton as a decrepit
Shakespeare. I find him mannered and unconvincing in serious roles, where his casually
throwing lines away so that his emotional outbursts can seem impressive by
contrast, and his conveyance of distress by holding the backs of his clenched
fists against his brow come off as artificial. His hangdog, sad-sack demeanor
works better in the quirky comic roles for which he’s probably best known.
The play will likely be of
interest mainly to those fascinated by the life of the English language’s
greatest writer; so little is known of it that Brustein (like many before him)
is free to speculate on what it might have been like. I know a very serious
theatergoing couple who wept openly at the play’s handling of Shakespeare’s
demise. I, on the other hand, longed for the sweet swan of Avon to sing his
last song. That bed—second best or not—just looked too tempting.
129. GOLDOR $ MYTHYKA: A HERO IS BORN
GOLDOR $
MYTHYKA, produced by New Georges at the New Ohio Theatres, is a semi-bizarre
comedy by Lynn Rosen with lots of noise and surrealistic effects designed to
tell the story of a couple of Dungeons and Dragons fanatics who drive armored
trucks loaded with cash. When the economy tanks and their jobs are eliminated,
they drop their ordinary names of Bart (Garrett Neergaard) and Holly (Jenny
Seastone Stern) to assume the pseudonyms of Goldor and Mythyka and carry off a
heist of $7.4 million dollars, subsequently becoming heroes to many of the
unemployed and disenfranchised who think this is the answer to the American
dream. Ultimately, reality catches up to them. In fact, reality preceded the
show because it is based on a true story wherein the crooks came to be known as
the “Goth Bonnie and Clyde.”
The hour and 40 minutes show is narrated by a rapper-style
DJ (Bobby Moreno), who continually comments on the action into his amped up
mic, often while hovering over one or another of the actors. Stylized movement
and raucous rock music are used frequently, and the lighting does what it can
to create the proper phantasmagoric effect. The result is an forgettable
mishmash from which flight becomes a compelling option. The rest is blessed
silence.
130. BULLET CATCH
BULLET
CATCH is a magic show written, directed, performed by Scottish actor Rob
Drummond. The title refers to a famous illusion which has had many versions
(including one by Penn and Teller) and is reputed to have caused several deaths
and injuries when something went wrong. In this one-hour show, in the tiny
Theatre C at 59e59, several other tricks come first, with the bullet catch
coming last.
Drummond, a pleasant young man with thick, occasionally
impenetrable Scottish accent, spends most of his time on stage doing his
patter, talking to the audience and getting them in the mood for his various
feats. These all include audience participation involving a single volunteer.
In the performance I saw, a middle-aged man with a British accent took part.
The illusions were all familiar and, as always, mystifying. For example,
Drummond had the man pick up any book he wanted from a pile on the floor. The
man chose one, was told to open to any page, and to find a word on it. Then he
was asked to write the word on a yellow post-it, which he did, using the book
cover to write on. The paper was passed around through the house, and everyone
saw that the word was “adversaries.” Drummond talked some more and then
“guessed” at the word, which, of course, he got correctly. Another trick involved
him and his volunteer each holding the edge of a small table with a cloth over
its top, which then began to levitate. For this illusion, Drummond explained
how it was done, showing a lever he controlled that was hidden under the cloth
and attached to the table’s bottom. This, of course, was intended to convince
the audience that everything he was doing was a deception, not real magic.
After a few more such tricks, he spent a long time talking
about the historical background of the bullet catch; the purpose, clearly, was
to create fear in the audience because of the potential danger. In fact, before
he actually did the trick, one of the members of my group ran out because she
was unable to watch it. For those interested in this trick’s history and
nature, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_catch.
Drummond, using a gun he said was a Berretta, made a big
thing about loading it before our eyes. One bullet was marked in red so it could
be identified later. However, the gun jammed and a female technician came out
and managed to unjam it. We later learned privately from someone at the theatre
that this wasn’t part of the act, and hadn’t happened before. With the firearm
fixed, Drummond put on protective ear muffs and goggles, and aimed the gun at a
plate mounted on a stand. He pulled the trigger and the plate shattered. Then
he gave the gun to the volunteer, who was instructed to aim it at Drummond’s
mouth. This man had never fired a gun in his life yet he was supposed to not
only do so now but to aim it so perfectly that it would enter Drummond’s mouth,
where he would catch it in his teeth. Drummond gave him a series of signals,
the man fired, Drummond went down, and he died a bloody death, with a bullet
through his mouth. NOT. Drummond did go down but he then lifted his face and
showed a spent bullet in his teeth. Big round of applause. Curtain.
This was a decent presentation, and Drummond’s illusions
were acceptable, but there was too much talk for my taste. Others thought him
terrific; for me, his low profile demeanor and emphasis on the background to
the tricks made the show too much like a lecture, scary as its subject matter
may have been. For low-key magic, I prefer the remarkable work of David Blaine,
whose mind-blowing tricks always seem newly fashioned, even if based on
classics of the trade.
131. THE CALL
Tanya Barfield’s
new play, THE CALL, in the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Playwrights Horizons, is
a conventional well-made play set in an urban apartment and focusing on
two young couples, one white and one black. The couple occupying the apartment
is white—Peter (Kelly AuCoin) and Annie (Kerry Butler); they are
attractive, upwardly mobile, and well educated. The other couple is Peter and
Annie’s close friends, who happen to be both black and lesbian—Rebecca (Eisa
Davis) and Drea (Crystal A. Dickinson); they, too, are attractive, upwardly
mobile, and well educated. The only other character is an African neighbor of
Peter and Annie’s, Alemu (Russell G. Jones). Annie and Peter decide to adopt an
African child, a decision that constitutes the core action of the drama, which
investigates the dilemmas faced by any well-meaning couple attempting to carry
out such a project.
As the difficulties mount (principally, the child turns out
to be considerably older than what they originally had been told) Annie begins
to doubt the wisdom of her decision, leading to her and Peter seeing fissures
opening in their marriage. Rebecca and Drea try to be helpful but only increase
the friction, while the gregarious African man tells a lengthy story from his
own experience designed to serve as a lesson in how they should proceed.
The subject of intercultural adoption is worthy
of dramatization, of course. Playwright Barfield is herself a gay, bi-racial
woman who has two adopted kids, and she has gone on record to declare how
difficult she’s found the experience, despite her undying love for her
children. She has written about this play that it’s not only about adoption:
“It’s about race, midlife, Africa and marriage. It’s also about taking a leap,
as terrifying as it may be. It’s about stepping outside your comfort zone and
committing to something bigger than yourself. It’s about recognizing the power
of change and then actually doing it. About being an active member of
society—the global society—and improving upon it. It’s about hearing the call
to be something more, and then taking that call. As uncomfortable as it may
be.”
Still, her play strikes me as
schematic and didactic; moreover, a subplot about Rebecca’s brother and Peter,
and the brother’s death from a dirty hypodermic needle in Africa, suddenly
balloons into a big reveal toward the end and threatens to overwhelm the play’s
central problem.
Rachel Hauck’s set is the most fully
realized I’ve seen at the Sharp this season; it uses a partial revolve to allow
the action to shift from a realistic living room to the nursery, the latter
first seen with dark red walls and then, after a scene in which Annie does some
cursory painting, in a shade of beige. None of the performances is less than
professional, but none offer anything I wouldn’t have expected to see from any
cast of talented New York actors. Russell G. Jones’s supporting role as the ebullient
and wise Alemu is the most colorful, and he gives it an appealing charm, but,
like the other characters. there is a stereotypical quality to Alemu that
prevents him from being truly unique.
THE CALL is earnest and thoughtful;
it simply didn’t call loudly enough to stir my feelings.
132. SLEEPING
ROUGH
Kara Manning’s
SLEEPING ROUGH, directed by Sam Buntrock at the Wild Project on E. 3rd
Street near Avenue B, is a deftly written, lightly poetic, three-person play
about a family’s inner turmoil in the wake of a young son’s death from an IED
in Iraq.
Joanna (Kellie Overbey) is an attractive New
Jersey artist verging on 50 whose emotional distress at the death of her son in
a war she calls “a lie” incites her to burn a series of American flags, actions
which not only get her in trouble with the law but lead her daughter, Izzy
(Renata Friedman), a beekeeper (a.k.a. apiologist) living in Brooklyn, to worry
for her mom’s sanity. Seeking to escape the USA, Joanna flees to London, where
her handsome ex-husband, Mark (Quentin Maré), a BBC announcer whose career is
beginning to slide, lives not too happily with his second wife, Winifred (who
never appears). Izzy (short for Isabel but appropriate for someone who works
with buzzing insects) leaves her bees in the care of a friend in order to track
down her mother, who is living in a squat in London with artist friends, and
painting stenciled images of her son on city walls. All this leads to
confrontations among Joanna, Izzy, and Mark, during which they work out their
issues; Mark, for example, although fond of his daughter, feels guilty for his
having been a neglectful father while she was growing up. During the action, we
learn various things about bee culture and the role in the hive of the queen
bee; at one point, Izzy gets a phone call from home informing her that her
queen has died. Finally, everything culminates in a reconciliation of sorts, and,
when Joanna appears in a red dress at the end, watching Izzy teach Mark the
rudiments of beekeeping (her queen having been replaced), the link between her
and the bees is evident, although not especially meaningful.
The action is set on a sparely dressed stage
whose cinderblock walls have been painted light gray. Simple benches line the
walls, as well as fluorescent strip lights. At the rear are dozens of identical
cardboard storage boxes, neatly piled on one another, apparently meant to
suggest the inner contents of these people’s lives; in one scene, Joanna rifles
through several boxes containing the detritus left behind by her deceased son.
Suspended overhead is a large, shiny baffle whose translucence allows light to
filter through from the instruments above. The effect is of a rather cool,
neutral, almost sterile, environment that allows the action to be wherever the
dialogue suggests, although the playwright’s stated objective is for the
scenery to somehow evoke the atmosphere of London.
Further contributing to the feeling of sterility
is the dramaturgic technique of having much of the story narrated directly to
the audience by each of the characters. This expository method allows a lot of
the background chinks to be filled in easily, enabling us to learn about the
characters’ pasts and what they are thinking and feeling now, but it often
seems a way to dodge the responsibility of dramatizing these things. The acting
ensemble is tight and polished, and was much appreciated by friends of mine.
For me, though, too much of it—even Joanna’s grief—is on a restrained, low-key,
almost polite level; while admiring the actors’ skills, I never felt deeply
invested in their concerns. In fact, if I hadn’t been in the first row, I might
have found myself doing what the title indicates.
133. FUTUROLOGY, THE MUSICAL
It had to
happen one day in such a theatergoing-intensive season. And it did last night
at this inanely titled and ham-fisted sci-fi musical produced by the Negro
Ensemble Company at St. Clements Theatre. This is a production of such
mind-blowing ineptitude that you have to applaud the game cast members—several
of them rather talented—for not simply stopping the show and grabbing the first
bus, subway, cab, or spaceship for home.
The antiquated sound system, using head mics
that make everyone look as though they have huge face moles, produced wildly
erratic feedback sounds that snapped, crackled, and popped, sometimes with such
earsplitting ferocity that the spectators practically jumped out of their
seats. At one point, an actor ad-libbed a brief apology. Charles Weldon’s
staging looks as though he’d delegated the job to Snow White’s Dopey, although
I'm convinced Dopey would have done better. The actors sometimes find
themselves in the dark when they should be lit, and vice versa. Entrances and
exits come and go with no apparent knowledge of how you get actors on and off.
It may be called a musical, but music is rarely used for transitions. And the
music itself is prerecorded, so actors often have to wait a beat or
two before the stage manager gives the cue.
This is one of those shows where
anything that can go wrong will go wrong. On the night I attended, the coup de
grace arrived when, during an energetic song and dance number, an actress’s
Afro wig flew off and she responded by picking it up and dancing with it as
though it were a cheerleader’s pompom; she kept smiling, though, and the
audience responded by applauding.
The ultimate indignity is the
misleading advertising of Sheryl Lee Ralph, of DREAMGIRLS fame, as being in the
company; in fact, her entire performance consists of perhaps two minutes of
voiceovers as someone speaking from the future. Her program bio comes before
all others and takes up half a page, but she never appears. However, even if
Beyoncé herself were to arrive from outer space, there would be no
future in store for FUTUROLOGY.
134. KAFKA’S MONKEY
One of New York’s
hottest tickets at the moment is a one-woman play all the way over on 37th
Street near 10th Avenue, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Perhaps
“one-woman” is a misnomer, as the actor we see is almost as much a monkey as a
human being. That’s because American-born, British-raised actress Kathryn
Hunter is performing the role of Red Peter, the simian narrator of Franz
Kafka’s “Report to an Academy," in which he tells an assembly of academics
about his experience of responding to being captured in Africa by learning to
speak and in other ways behave like a human being, thereby enabling him to become
a renowned music hall artiste. His academic discourse uses subtle satire to
criticize the state of humanity.
Anyone can easily access Kafka’s tale and read
it for themselves, but what is remarkable about this less-than-a-full-hour
presentation is Ms. Hunter’s performance. It is set on bare stage with a podium
at one side, a small stepstool (with several bananas on it) at the other, and a
large screen upstage onto which is projected, for much of the talk, a photo of
a “Hagenbeck” monkey much like what Red Peter would have looked like.
Ms. Hunter spent a great deal of time
doing research into monkey behavior in preparing to play Red Peter, and the
result is a striking demonstration of her mimic gifts. The actress, who is
perhaps five feet tall, appears in bowler hat, morning suit, white shirt, and
bow tie, her every move reflecting monkey-like behavior. She speaks in a
husky, British-accented voice, perfectly suited to the material. The
55-year-old actress displays a stunningly limber body, perhaps from years of
yoga. A full split, for example, in which position she remains for an extended
sequence, leads to an awesomely pretzel-like manipulation of one leg in the
kind of maneuver one might expect only from a much younger contortionist. Her
loping walk, her arm extensions, her head scratching, her occasional
monkey-sounds, all contribute to the image of a real ape-like presence, making
her disquisition all the more believable.
Kafka’s story is open to a variety of
allegorical interpretations, but there is only one way to interpret Kathryn
Hunter’s performance: brilliant.
135. THE NANCE
Nathan Lane’s
star turn in THE NANCE, which plays like a vehicle written expressly for him,
will not disappoint this great performer’s legions of fans, although some may
feel they’ve seen him do roles like this before, most recently as Pepper, the
flamboyant friend of the gay male couple on TV’s “Modern Family.” Lane plays
the title character, a standard comic role in prewar burlesque, where the
character’s effeminacy was used as the basis for countless jokes based on
homosexual innuendoes.
THE NANCE is an attempt to dramatize the
homophobic atmosphere in which gay men (lesbians are barely referenced) lived
in the prewar years. The specific focus is on the world of burlesque, where the
Nance was a stock character and not necessarily reflective of the actual sexual
orientation of its performer. In 1937, when New York’s Republican mayor,
Fiorello LaGuardia, decided to flaunt his conservative bona fides by cleaning
up or shutting down burlesque, known for its off color humor and striptease
acts, the Nance made an easy target as a sign of burlesque’s degradation.
Lane plays Chauncey Miles, an overtly gay Nance
performer at the Irving Place Theatre (which actually was a burlesque house).
We see his private as well as public life, watching him covertly pick up the
handsome young man, Ned (Jonny Orsini), in a Greenwich Village Automat, for
example, while also seeing a considerable amount of him in performance on the
burlesque stage. The play explores his relationship with Ned, who becomes his
live-in lover (and also gets work in the burlesque theatre), and with his
burlesque friends, the Phil Silvers-like top banana Efram (Lewis J. Stadlen),
and a trio of strippers, Sylvie (Cady Huffman), a leftwing activist; Carmen
(Andréa Burns), a faux Latin bombshell; and Joan (Jenni Barber), a flashy
platinum blonde.
Ann Roth’s period costumes and Japhy Weideman’s
lighting, which have to reflect both off and onstage worlds, do so with
panache. John Lee Beatty’s well-designed revolving set enables the action to
move swiftly from one locale to another--the Automat, backstage at the Irving
Place, onstage for the burlesque skits, a courthouse, and Chauncey’s colorful
basement apartment, where yet another bathtub awaits a naked actor to step out
of it; in this case, it is Mr. Orsini’s anatomy that is on display, both rear
and front. If the 2012-2013 season is to be remembered for anything, it will be
for the proliferation of bathtub scenes, of which there have been well over
half a dozen.
The sad, hidden lives of people like Chauncey
are ripe for dramatic exploration but THE NANCE’s ambitions are never fully realized.
The episodic play comes off more as a dramatized history lesson, made to seem
even more so by its preoccupation with resuscitating lots of old burlesque
bits, much as did SUGAR BABIES, a popular show some years back devoted
specifically to that purpose and without the political baggage. These bits,
with each joke emphasized by a wink and a drum beat, are academically
interesting but not really that funny anymore.
Jack O’Brien’s staging, especially of the
burlesque scenes, capably suggests a sense of the late 1930s; the opening scene
of gays cruising the Automat has a wonderful Hopper-like feeling. Joey Pizzi
has created wonderful bits of burlesque choreography, all of it abetted by a
live band playing an original score composed by Glen Kelly; in fact, THE NANCE
might easily be called “a play with music.”
Least effective of the actors is Mr. Orsini,
whose Ned never convinced me that he was an ignorant young rube who falls for
the much older Chauncey. The strippers are all stereotypes, but it was
interesting to see Cady Huffman’s Brooklyn-accented Sylvie reflect the period’s
socialist opinions. In the role of the Nance’s baggy pants comic partner, Mr.
Stadlen has all the right New York Jewish qualities to capture the style, but
the true genius at making these tired jokes work, when they do, is the
irresistible Mr. Lane. His timing and byplay with the audience are perfect, and
he also has the gift of bringing to the offstage Chauncey the depth required to
convey his tragic dilemma. But the character as written never goes that deep,
and the effect created is of dramatic setups designed to display Mr. Lane’s
comic-tragic sides; the play fails to become an organic picture of a man
trapped in a social dilemma from which he will never be free.
136. MOTOWN
If you grew up
moving to the sounds of Motown music, with tunes like “Ain’t No Mountain High
Enough,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “My Girl,” “My Guy,” “Please, Mr.
Postman,” and on and on, you’re pretty likely to be “Dancing in the Street”
when you leave the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre after seeing the newest jukebox
musical, MOTOWN. You’ll be entirely within your rights to consider the show
clumsy, cluttered, and overly long, and to reject it as an example of a
high-quality Broadway musical. But while you’re watching it you’ll probably
find it hard to resist falling under the spell of the close to 60 songs, most
of them classics but several of them new, that come at you almost nonstop for 2
hours and 45 minutes.
Tying all the songs together, if rather loosely,
is the story of the great record producer Berry Gordy (Brandon Victor Dixon:
good singer, weak actor), who created the Detroit company that brought
African-American pop music into the mainstream with performers like the
Temptations, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mary Wells, Lionel
Ritchie, Smokey Robinson, the Contours, the Commodores, Martha and the
Vandellas, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, Jackie Wilson; and let us not forget
Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, and Diana Ross. Each of these acts
is replicated in the show, with several of them—Smokey Robinson (Charl Brown),
Marvin Gaye (Bryan Terrell Clark), and Diana Ross (Valisia LeKae) playing major
roles in the enactment of Gordy’s life.
The 83-year-old Gordy himself wrote the book,
based on his autobiography, and his lack of skill at writing a Broadway musical
is obvious in the show’s overly episodic structure and awkward dialogue
sequences. The show attempts to present not only the trials and tribulations of
Motown over a quarter of a century (it concludes with a 25-year anniversary
celebration set in 1983), but to demonstrate the course of American black
history from the time of Gordy’s childhood as a fan of boxing champ Joe Louis
through the Civil Rights era, the death of President Kennedy, the Detroit race
riots of 1967, and the Vietnam War. It also, in the second act, changes
direction and becomes the story of the Supremes and of Diana Ross’s separation
from them to become an international superstar (as well as Gordy’s wife).
The numbers follow one another with mind-numbing
speed; countless costumes and wigs do a fabulous job in communicating where and
when each scene occurs, as the cleverly nimble scenery, mostly a flexible
arrangement of vertical and horizontal sliding panels and pillars capable of
assuming multiple arrangements, keeps shifting from scene to scene, often abetted
by still and video projections. The lighting, as might be expected for a show
like this, is very flashy and there are some striking effects, especially a
couple of brilliantly realized silhouettes—one of the Jackson 5 and one of
Diana Ross—against a brightly colored cyclorama. The realistic scenic inserts
that sometimes appear clash with the overall feel of a big, stylized Las Vegas
revue. The choreography is sometimes outstanding, but, after the first act,
there doesn’t seem to be enough of it. Overall it’s hard to deny that the show
would work much better if it had taken a more revue-like approach, omitting the
dramatized biographical scenes and offering the expository material in some
more creative way.
In
order to squeeze in so many songs, some of them had to be abbreviated, which
may disturb purists. Others may be disturbed to see their favorite stars
impersonated by singers who, while talented in their own right, can never fully
capture the vocal and charismatic qualities of the originals. Valisia LeKae
struggles with the early Diana Ross, but, as the character moves from shy
teenager to glamorous diva, she becomes more believable and, when she appears
as the classic Diana in gorgeous gowns and high-styled wigs, she is as
reasonable a facsimile as you might desire. A standout when I saw the show was
Raymond Luke, Jr., a kid who alternates with Jibreel Mawry in the role of
Michael Jackson as a child in his Jackson 5 days. The audience went nuts for
him, partly, of course, because of his singing and dancing abilities, but also
because of the enormous affection most people still have for the late
superstar.
MOTOWN will not garner acclaim as a path
breaking musical; it is rather standard stuff for its genre. But the energetic,
enthusiastic, rhythmically infectious, and emotionally satisfying sounds of
Motown, even if not quite up to the original renditions, will be enough for
most audiences. I won’t be surprised if this show is in for a long life and
that it will soon go platinum.
137.
THE BIG KNIFE
THE BIG KNIFE, Clifford
Odets’s angry 1949 diatribe against Hollywood venality, corruption, and
mendacity, has not been seen on Broadway since its original production, which
starred John Garfield in the leading role of Charlie Castle, filmdom superstar.
In the new Roundabout production, directed by Doug Hughes, the role is played
by current rising star, Bobby Cannavale, but the result is decidedly uneven.
While he has the charisma and intelligence to play Charlie, a movie star who is
torn over whether to sell his artistic soul in exchange for a $3.5 million,
14-year contract (imagine what that money would amount to today), Cannavale is
unable to make the clunky, pretentious Odets dialogue sound believable, and his
characterization comes off as forced and artificial. On the other hand, Richard
Kind, as the powerful, crafty, and nefarious studio boss, Marcus Hoff, gives
what I believe to be one of the season’s finest supporting performances. Best
known for his goofy, comic acting, Kind, whose character must pull out every
trick in the book to overcome Charlie’s insistence that he’d rather quit acting
than sign the contract, displays a range and power that is truly impressive.
John Lee Beatty’s set, showing the spectacular interior
of a movie star’s home, creates a living space most of us would die for, and
all the other technical elements required to make us feel the late 1940s
atmosphere are well realized, but director Doug Hughes—who does his best to
pump up the energy and speed up the action—is generally stumped by the problem
of making the formulaic plot and its implausible premise believable. In a
nutshell, Charlie, an inveterate womanizer, is ready to abandon his career and
a guaranteed fortune because his idealistic wife, Marion (Marin Ireland), from
whom he’s already been separated twice, is against his signing a 14-year
contract. All that stands in the way of Charlie’s quitting his profession is
Marcus’s threat to reveal that Charlie was responsible for a car accident that
killed a child but for which Charlie’s friend was persuaded to take the rap by
spending 10 months in jail. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore, folks.
138.
JULIUS CAESAR
The Royal Shakespeare Company
is visiting New York with this revival of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR,
performed at BAM’s Harvey Theatre by an all-black cast within the context of an
African nation's politics. A program note cites a connection between Nelson
Mandela and Shakespeare from the days when Mandela was imprisoned in South
Africa, but it’s hard to specify that country as the precise locale. The
costumes blend modern dress with elements of Roman garb, such as the togas
(black for some reason) worn by the senators in the scene of Caesar’s
assassination.
The show opens with a large choral group of extras milling
about on the steps and ground level of a crumbling amphitheatre, designed by
Michael Vale, singing, dancing, and carrying around election posters with
Caesar’s image on them. At the top of the steps and facing away toward the rear
of the stage can be seen the head of a huge statue of Caesar; later, when he is
overthrown, the statue is toppled, much like that of Saddam Hussein a decade
ago. The opening revelry provides a rather joyous contrast to the dark drama
that soon follows, as the conspirators begin to plot Caesar’s murder.
Everything is spoken at high decibel level with authentic-sounding African
accents, there is a uniformly effective level of intensity, and the acting is
dynamic and forceful. Director Gregory Doran lets all the stops out too often,
though, and there are few scenes of quiet reflection, but the first act, in
particular, builds effectively toward the killing and the subsequent orations
by Brutus (Paterson Joseph) and Mark Antony (Ray Fearon). Hovering over the
action throughout is the presence of a witch doctor-like Soothsayer (Theo
Ogundipe) whose muscular body is, like his face, covered with white ash.
Act Two, with its persistent emphasis on combat situations
and lots of macho shouting and physical bravado, is a letdown, but this is
partly a problem of the play, whose most interesting action is the rising
tension of Act One as the conspirators plot and then carry out the dictator’s
death. The clever oratory of Brutus defending the action and Anthony more
successfully decrying it is in good hands; both Mr. Joseph and Mr. Fearon
do excellent work, each displaying powerful vocal equipment and a charismatic
personality.
The audience response at the end was extremely
enthusiastic but if I could have left after Act One I would have appreciated
this JULIUS CAESAR much more.
139.
THE DANCE OF DEATH
I went from JULIUS CAESAR to
THE DANCE OF DEATH with low expectations for a good time. One bleak play
followed by another is not really a fun way to spend the day. I’m happy to
report, however, that the Red Bull Theatre company at the Lucille Lortel in
Greenwich Village is offering a worthwhile revival of this Strindberg classic
from 1900, partly because Joseph Hardy’s direction somehow manages to find
comical inflections in the often unappetizing situations; it shows even more
vividly than usual how indebted Albee’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? is to
this razor-sharp dissection of a marriage in which the partners viciously slice
each other up while nevertheless maintaining their love for one another.
Daniel Davis (best known as the butler, Niles, on Fran
Drescher’s “The Nanny”) is Edgar, a frustrated military officer living on a
desolate fortress island with his wife, Alice (Laila Robins); he gives an
extremely magnetic portrayal of a charmingly sadistic husband. The white-haired
Mr. Davis, despite being too old for the role at 67, has all the qualities of
an old-time stage star, with a remarkably resonant voice and commanding
physical presence that make you forget his age. Ms. Robins is equally vibrant
as his wife, whose stage career ended when she married Edgar and moved with him
to this forbidding place. She brings high theatricality to her scenes when
called for, and can, in her way, be as conjugally cruel as her nasty spouse.
Derek Smith as Gustav, Alice’s cousin and potential lover, is the weak link in
the triangle; despite his generally restrained and believable performance, he
lacks the masculine sex appeal the play requires and in other ways seems
miscast.
THE DANCE OF DEATH, then, is not deadly at all, although I’m
certain that if the play were written today it would run for an
intermissionless hour and a half, not two and a half hours with an intermission.
140. THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES
The prolific Richard
Greenberg, whose output has ranged from the excellent to the mediocre, is back
in more or less excellent form, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with this Manhattan
Theatre Club production. THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES, a touching and funny dramedy
about upper-middle class Jews, sensitively directed by Lynne Meadow, stars two
pencil-thin actresses, Jessica Hecht and Judith Light, as matriarchs of related
families, one living in a sprawling, 14-room apartment on Central Park West and
the other in Roslyn, Long Island. Ms. Hecht plays Julie Bascov, who had a brief
career as a film star before marrying Ben (Jonathan Walker), a businessman; when
the play begins, she is the mother of college student Scotty (Jake Silberman)
and 4-year-old Timmy (Alex Dreier). Her sister-in-law, played by Ms. Light, is
Faye, wife of Mort (Mark Blum) and mother of Shelley (Lauren Blumenfeld). Act
one takes place on Christmas Day, 1980, and the occasion is the annual family
dinner. Visiting is an outsider, Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), Scotty’s college friend,
who becomes a family stalwart. Act two takes us to Christmas day, 2000. Death
has claimed several of those seen in act one, and the effects of twenty years
on the lives of the people we’ve come to know are revealed.
It’s hard to write about the play without giving away too
many spoilers; I’ll leave the professional critics to provide additional plot
details, and will confine myself to general comments on the play and
production. Greenberg has fashioned a solid Broadway family play about people
that many of us will be familiar with, especially if we grew up in a
Jewish-flavored New York City or Long Island environment. The references to
local institutions, like the Roosevelt Mall in Garden City, the long gone
Alexander’s Department store, or places like Boca Raton, will strike a warmly
familiar—and sometimes hilarious—note, and relationships like that between Faye
and her idiosyncratic daughter will be appreciated both on a universal level
and on a very private one; I’m convinced you’ll come away thinking you actually
know these people. Also good for laughs, given the liberal biases of the
characters, are the politically pointed barbs slyly referencing Reagan in 1980
and Bush, Sr. and Jr., in 2000.
The structural device of having the same characters visited
after twenty years is not a new one, of course, but, if we’ve become truly
invested in them it can’t help but be fascinating to see how they’ve changed over
the years. Greenberg succeeds superbly in getting us involved in their lives so
that, when we see them again after two decades, we’re in for both shock and
delight as we discover how they’ve aged and coped with both the triumphs and
tragedies with which they’ve had to deal. Think back on your own life twenty
years ago and contemplate how vastly it has changed as loved ones died, often
way before their time; how financial crises have altered your existence, for
better or for worse; how people’s promising trajectories have turned to disappointment;
or how healthy human specimens have encountered unexpected physical
setbacks.
To cover so much ground, Greenberg is forced to rely on
artificial means to guarantee that characters can share their stories in
intimate groups while the others are offstage. To a degree, he is helped by
having the locale be an apartment of such great size that people who’ve been
visiting it annually for years still get lost in it. We sense its spaciousness
by how cleverly Santo Loquasto uses a revolving stage to expose different
rooms. And there are some revelations that come toward the end in classically
melodramatic fashion to help neatly tie up all the loose ends. But none of this
really matters because the characters are so well-etched, speaking richly theatrical
language that combines both literary quality with everyday naturalism.
Everyone is perfectly cast, but Hecht and Light are simply marvelous
in roles that seem fitted to them like a glove. Hecht has a sort of theatrical
lilt to her voice that does not sound like anyone I’ve ever known, and she
sometimes sounds artificial, but as the performance wears on she captures your
heart and makes you forgive what first sounded somewhat mannered. But it is
Judith Light’s Faye that really takes one by force and makes it impossible to
stop the tears from falling. Her New York-Jewish intonations are absolutely
authentic sounding, and her physical transformation from 1980 to 2000 is engraved
beautifully in her walk and gestures. Here, too, she slightly overshadows
Hecht, whose physical transformation is less believable, especially when she
dons her mother’s gorgeous silk dress for the 2000 Christmas gathering. In it,
she seems hardly to have aged at all. Both actresses are given aria-like
speeches toward the end, and both deliver the goods, but it is Light’s
revelatory story that most effectively puts the cap on a charming, rich, and
deeply rewarding two and a half hours in the theatre.
141.
JEKYLL AND HYDE
Beginning in March 1997,
Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn’s JEKYLL AND HYDE ran at the Plymouth
Theatre for 1,543 performances, breaking that theatre’s previous long-run
record despite mixed reviews. It has returned to Broadway, at the Marriott
Marquis Theatre, in what’s described as a “re-vamped” version with a
“contemporary rock score,” and with American Idol runner-up Constantine
Maroulis in the lead, for what is scheduled as a limited run through June 30,
2013. This is only two months away, but I wouldn’t be in a hurry to see it,
unless you’re not worried about having your eardrums ruined, or don’t mind that
song after song seems intended to outshout the one that preceded it in a battle
of the decibels.
Maroulis, with his trademark mane tied in a ponytail for the
scientist Jekyll and loosened in a cascade of wavy locks for the monstrous
Hyde, doesn’t change his makeup for the transformation, as per the practice in
previous versions of the show; he merely removes his spectacles, dons a
cape-like coat, and waves his hirsute head around like Medusa to become the
beastly murderer. As Jekyll, the actor, wearing mutton chops and being much too
thin for a Broadway leading man, looks more like a refugee from a Chekhov play
than a brilliant British scientist cum physically powerful serial killer. Both
his acting and his English accent are unconvincing, but he has the vocal chops to
scream the overly amped, rock-inflected tunes he is required to bellow to where
you think he’ll burst his vocal chords. His chief support is from his talented
and beautiful female costars, Teal Wicks as his fiancée, Emma, and R&B
singer Deborah Cox as his prostitute mistress, Lucy. Both have fine voices but
nothing they do can overcome the mediocre score, boring book, or unimpressive
staging, for all director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun’s attempts to capture the
foggy atmosphere of late 19th-century London. One sign of the show’s
directorial weakness is the decision to have so many numbers delivered straight
to the audience, even when the singers are addressing someone else on stage.
For all its problems, I’d much sooner have been at MOTOWN
again than forced to sit through this uninspired production. There are two
sides to Dr. Jekyll’s personality, the good and the bad. There is only one side
to this revival of JEKYLL AND HYDE.
142. MACBETH
Narcissistic, solipsistic,
self-indulgent, artsy, pretentious, and unnecessary are words that kept racing
through my mind, when I wasn’t fighting the temptation to doze, as I watched
Alan Cumming’s essentially one-man production of MACBETH at the Ethel Barrymore
Theatre. This is the second solo MACBETH I attended this season, the previous
one being the exceedingly low-rent version called THAT PLAY: A SOLO MACBETH,
starring the barely know Tom Gualtieri, at Stage Left Studio on W. 30th
Street. I disliked that one too, for not dissimilar reasons, but it has to be
admitted that, despite Cumming’s international fame as a film, TV, and stage
star, his Scottish-accented performance, well done as it sometimes is, does not
seriously outshine that of the much lesser known Gualtieri.
The Cumming version, a big hit in its brief run last summer
at the Lincoln Center Festival, is a production of the National Theatre of
Scotland. It is staged so that the star is an inmate in an insane asylum,
brought there, it would seem, after attempting to physically harm himself. The antiseptic
set consists of very high walls covered with lime-green tiling; an observation
window is high up in the rear wall, and a steep metal staircase leads to a door
on stage left on the same level as the window. There are several metal,
hospital-type beds, a sink, and a few props that come into use, including an
old-fashioned baby doll. And, of course, there’s a bathtub! If you’ve been
following my reviews, you’ll recall my amazement at how many people are taking
onstage baths this season, offering numerous glimpses of naked butts and, on
occasion, other body parts. Just in the past few weeks Broadway skin gazers
have ogled bathtub ready flesh in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S and THE NANCE. Now we
get to gaze on the anatomical niceties of the carefully preserved Mr. Cumming.
The production’s conceit, then, seems to be that Cumming is
a madman whose obsession is the enactment of the entire play of MACBETH. When
you think of it that IS a rather crazy thing to do! To fulfill this nonsensical
conceit, there are two white-coated attendants, a man and a woman. At first,
they speak to the Cumming character by mouthing inaudible words of comfort as
they introduce him to the looming loony bin, but late in the performance—which
they occasionally watch from the observation window, or during entrances
requiring them to treat the patient (sometimes with a hypodermic needle)—they
speak a few lines each in the roles of specific minor characters. This makes no
sense in the context of the concept, just as there is no logic to their lack of
intervention during the various bloodstained scenes that see Cumming’s body
smeared bright red.
Cumming is a fine actor, of course, but I have no interest
in seeing him or any other actor play one role after the other in a
Shakespearean drama, stepping from side to side, or doing whatever is necessary
to separate one character from another. Anyone not very familiar with MACBETH
will find this exercise a total mystery, and even if you know the play you may
be tempted to tune out. When I go to a production of MACBETH, I want to see all
the characters come to life, with the variety of faces and voices that
requires. I don’t want to see a single actor trying to show how versatile he is
by playing young and old, male and female, in what will ultimately be a stagy
mishmash designed to burnish the actor’s reputation rather than to elucidate
the play. Many in the audience at the Barrymore, I admit, felt otherwise,
rising in a rush at the curtain call as if hailing the arrival in Rome of
Julius Caesar.
For me, these famous lines from MACBETH came to mind:
I, however, would amend a few
words so that it read: “Sleep once more! Macbeth doth nurture sleep.”
143. ORPHANS
If you read the Wikipedia
entry on Lyle Kessler’s 1983 play ORPHANS, which first appeared on Broadway in
1985, you’ll discover how successful it has been over the course of its 30-year
life, both in the USA and abroad (including Japan). Tom Waits was reportedly so
overcome by its Steppenwolf production in Chicago, starring John Mahoney as
Harold, Terry Kinney as Treat, and Kevin Anderson as Philip, that he remained
in his seat after the audience had left, unable to move. Although I didn’t
search every seat, I’m not sure anyone was similarly touched at the end of last
night’s performance of the current Broadway revival, starring Alec Baldwin as
Harold, Tom Sturridge as Philip, and Ben Foster as Treat (replacing Shia
LaBeouf). I briefly chatted with Rex Reed as we walked together down W. 45th
Street afterward, and, as one might expect, he was not shy about his
negative response.
The plot concerns a couple of oddball orphan brothers,
Philip and Treat, living in a rundown house in North Philadelphia (designed
here by John Lee Beatty). Treat is a petty thief and Philip seeming slowwitted
and so protected by his older brother from outside influences, other than the
TV (which has made him a film savant with a passion for Errol Flynn), that he
is essentially feral in his behavior. He is not even permitted to open a window
for fear that he will become sick from the outside air. One night, Treat brings
home a friendly, middle-aged drunk, Harold, who proceeds to pass out on the
floor. Treat and Philip put him in a chair, bound with rope and gagged with
duct tape. When he wakes in the morning, Treat has gone out and Philip is
guarding him. Taking advantage of Philip’s boundless innocence, Harold manages
to unbind himself, and to gradually take control of the situation from the two
brothers. An orphan himself, Harold turns out to be a well-heeled Chicago
gangster of some sort who offers Treat a lot of money to become his bodyguard
from the hoodlums who are after him. Treat, a ticking time bomb of violent
emotions who acts before he thinks, resists, but is eventually more or less
tamed by the aggressively smooth-talking and clever Harold, who likens him to a
Dead End Kid from the 1930s and 1940s movies. Before long, he is taking pride
in his new Armani-garbed image, although never able to suppress his propensity
for explosive violence when he believes he’s been insulted. Philip, portrayed
by Mr. Sturridge as a remarkably athletic feral youth, leaping about like
Spider-Man from floor to table, table to couch, couch to staircase, and so on,
takes advantage of Harold’s teaching (his mantra is “Let me offer you some
encouragement”) to become an avid reader of classics, and to improve his
otherwise negligible social skills. The play explores the power balances
between the brothers, and between them and Harold, until the final scene, intended
to provide a powerful conclusion to the proceedings as the two brothers find
themselves wrestling with each other in a tragically unexpected way.
The production is not without its merits. It moves swiftly
and its characters are all theatrically dynamic and magnetic, and each actor
offers something fascinating to watch. But Daniel Sullivan’s pumped-up direction
abandons nuance and overdoes the physical activity and comic business to the
point that the play’s underlying pathos struggles to emerge, and when the
curtain falls we are more impressed by the showiness of the performances than
by any powerful emotional response we should be feeling.
I would praise Mr. Baldwin to the skies if his role didn’t
seem merely a darker version of his character of Jack Donaghy on “Thirty Rock.”
And he has, of course, played other sardonically humorous yet dangerous men in
his various films. Ben Foster is perfectly acceptable as the volatile Treat,
but Tom Sturridge’s Philip is a head-scratcher, partly because it’s unclear
about what the character’s psychological issues are. The actor is markedly
lithe—even monkey-like—as he leaps about set, but his speech and gestures are
strongly reminiscent of severe autism or some other such condition. He is a
film savant because of all the movies he watches on TV, and has total recall of
a TV announcer’s comments, yet he is astonishingly naïve about the world
outside the house, not even knowing what a map is or what the expression “on
the lam” means. While it is likely that his performance will get a lot of
attention, for me it was an assortment of theatrical tics that didn’t add up to
a consistent characterization.
Despite these objections, ORPHANS is enjoyable to watch and
will keep you entertained. It may also have you wondering what all the fuss
surrounding it has been about.
144. THE TESTAMENT OF MARY;
145. COLLAPSE; 146. LA RUTA; 147. I’LL EAT YOU LAST: A CHAT WITH SUE MENGERS;
148. PIPPIN; 149. THE MEMORY SHOW
The season ended in a blaze
of shows and my obligations elsewhere precluded my finding any time to put down
my reactions until now, when I’ve gone beyond the point of no return. I’ll
close out my comments on the 2012-2013 season by speaking very briefly of these
final shows. THE TESTAMENT OF MARY, which so many people liked, both as a play
and as a performance by Fiona Shaw, was so over-directed for my tastes that I
lost interest both in the material and in Ms. Shaw’s portrayal of Jesus’
mother. I’m not surprised it closed so soon. COLLAPSE itself collapsed from a
comically overwrought script attempting to find humor in one characters’
experiences after having been a victim of the famous Minneapolis bridge
collapse several years ago. LA RUTA was an “immersive” experience where the
audience was jammed into an actual 18-wheeler parked in the lot behind St. John’s
Cathedral in Morningside Heights, the purpose being to make us feel what
Mexican immigrants go through when they’re smuggled across the border. It was
not something I needed to encounter firsthand like this. I’LL EAT YOU LAST had
one big reason to be seen: Bette Midler’s tour de force performance, almost
entirely while seated on a couch, as Hollywood super agent Sue Mengers. PIPPIN
is a big and circus-themed revival of the Stephen Schwartz musical from the
seventies, with Bob Fosse’s original choreography present only in spirit and
precious little of it too. My main enjoyment came from the perfectly preserved,
67-year-old Andrea Martin, who appears only in Act One (including a memorable
number on a trapeze), but who steals the show. And finally, THE MEMORY SHOW, a
potentially touching chamber musical for two actresses playing a mother and
daughter; the title comes from the memory problems being experienced by the
mother, who has Alzheimer’s. The music was a little too artsy for me, and I’m
having trouble remembering it.
