252.
HAND TO GOD
Robert
Askins’s intriguingly subversive, boundary-crossing play, HAND TO GOD, at the
Lucille Lortel Theatre, features the second breakout performance I saw on the same
day. The first was James Monroe Iglehart’s as the Genie in ALADDIN, which I’ll
report on after the show officially opens. The one in HAND TO GOD, as duly
reported by most other reviewers, belongs to Steven Boyer, although it already
has been seen and lauded locally; Mr. Boyer starred in the play’s 2011 premiere
at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, for which he won an Obie.
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| Steven Boyer, Geneva Carr. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The
Lortel production, under the aegis of the MCC Theater, features a new set
designer (Beowulf Boritt), lighting designer (Jason Lyons), and sound designer
(Jill BC Du Boff), and three new actors. Michael Oberholtzer is the upstart
teenager Timothy, Sarah Stiles is his classmate Jessica, and Marc Kudisch is
Pastor Greg, who runs a church in Cypress, Texas, where the recently widowed Margery
(Geneva Carr, who created the role), the mother of another student, 15-year-old
Jason (Mr. Boyer), is in charge of a Sunday School class learning how to tell
Bible stories through the use of hand puppets.
The inventive Mr. Boritt has created various spaces via a combination of revolving panels and walls that turn like book pages. The principal room, a cinderblock-walled church basement, has a desk, several plastic chairs, church posters, and a puppet booth with a red cross on its front.
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| Steven Boyer. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
It’s
in this room that Margery, asked by Pastor Greg to prepare a puppet
presentation to the church for the coming Sunday, is running her class. Each
student has a sock puppet that also comes with small metal rods for
manipulating the puppet’s arms. Jason’s puppet is called Tyrone; a sort of
prologue shows him in the puppet booth, deploying his sardonic sense of humor
to offer his own strange take on Genesis. A lot is going on beneath the surface
for each of the characters, with the uptight Margery doing her best to suppress
her sexual longings; Timothy finding it hard not to come on strong to her; the
pastor stealthily trying to seduce her under the guise of offering support;
Jessica feeling urges toward Jason; and Jason trying so hard to repress his own
demons that they possess him in the form of Tyrone.
Tyrone, who speaks the ugly truth (like declaring that Jason’s father ate himself to death) in guttural tones totally drenched in nastiness, engages in a struggle for control of Jason’s psyche, a struggle that leads to Jason trying to destroy the puppet by tearing it apart. However, he wakes up in bed one night and Tyrone is back on his hand, his features now wildly rearranged with scary, protruding teeth lining his big red mouth. He’s a foulmouthed monster, fully capable of biting off someone’s ear lobe and attacking Jason by the throat. (Pastor Greg calls for an exorcism at one point.) Mr. Boyer goes back and forth between being the retiring Jason and the frighteningly aggressive Tyrone with astonishing facility, changing his voice instantaneously to suggest Tyrone’s growly anger and sarcasm, and manipulating Tyrone’s tiny, but stretchable arms with such ease that it’s hard not to believe the gray sock puppet with the red and white button eyes is not a living being. If you remember the 1945 portmanteau movie DEAD OF NIGHT, starring Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist whose dummy seems to take control of him, you’ll have an idea of how nerve-wracking this can be. (MAGIC is another movie example.)
The play is often hysterically funny, and it also is extremely profane (part of why it’s so hilarious); one of the highlights is a remarkably literal sex scene between Tyrone and a female puppet worn by Jessica, as Jason and Jessica stand idly by chatting about how they feel about one another. Performing with such a split focus is a tour de force of acting concentration; the contrast between their ordinary conversation and the puppets’ pornographic actions is remarkably well done.
Under Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s clever direction, all the actors deliver the goods; the company makes up one of the season’s finest ensembles. Ms. Carr, a trim, attractive woman, is especially excellent at playing a prim woman whose frustrations so overcome her that she throws all caution to the wind and engages in ferociously aggressive sex with one of her teenage students. Marc Kudisch’s Pastor Greg is completely believable as an earnest man who fights his urges to express his inner feelings; when he starts to curse he forces himself to twist his words into something non-blasphemous. “God . . . damn it,” for example, is converted quickly to “God . . . bless America.” Both Mr. Oberholtzer and Ms. Stiles are fully up to the considerable demands of their roles.
Although we never learn the answer, we’re asked to consider if Tyrone is the devil incarnate (there’s a scene of him in the puppet booth surrounded by flames) or some psychological cancer eating away at Jason. But since everybody in the play has an inner demon of some sort, his seems only the most extreme manifestation of the problem. Whatever HAND TO GOD’s moral is, it definitely isn’t a puppet play for kids, and even some adults may find its occasional crassness hard to take. Nevertheless, it definitely makes a stinging impression and Jason’s dilemma is one hand job you won’t easily forget.
