64. Review of SMOKE (September 11, 2014)

64. SMOKE

 

Earlier this week I reviewed a show called BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG, a program of four one-acts commissioned by the Scandinavian American Theatre Company (SATC) to find new ways of thinking about August Strindberg’s groundbreaking 1888 play, MISS JULIE. Most of these efforts were disappointing, and I wrote that being commissioned to write a play as a contemporary response to a classic was extremely difficult because the best new plays usually are born out of the artist’s need to express him or herself exclusive of restrictions. Ironically, when watching a new play last night in the tiny basement at the Flea, I was delighted to discover that the playwright, Kim Davies (who has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College), had written just the kind of play the SATC had been seeking; at 90 minutes, it would have been too long for their program, but it’s far and away superior to anything they’re providing. I was further surprised to find that, while some critics mentioned VENUS IN FUR as an analogue, none of the several reviews I looked at afterward (including the one in the New York Times) mentioned any connection between SMOKE and MISS JULIE; I’d be amazed, though, if someone else hasn’t pointed it out somewhere. To top it off, my theatre companion, a retired theatre professor, director, and playwright, argued that I was wrong, suggesting that even if SMOKE was indeed based on MISS JULIE, it was probably unconscious on Ms. Davies’s part.



Stephen Stoute, Madeleine Bundy. Photo: Hunter Canning

There are, of course, major differences between MISS JULIE and SMOKE, which is why this new play, despite its possible source, is a sizzlingly original creation, like Tom Stoppard’s HAMLET spinoff, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN, or any other famous stage work taking its cue from a classic predecessor (Anouilh’s ANTIGONE, or the musical WEST SIDE STORY, for example). Still, there’s no avoiding the parallels: here are a few of the more obvious examples. Both plays take place in a kitchen during an offstage party (Midsummer Night’s Eve in MISS JULIE, a Harlem BDSM party in SMOKE). There are only two characters in SMOKE, a young woman named Julie, and a slightly older man named John, while in MISS JULIE there are three, Julie, Jean, and Kristin.  However, a third character, John’s girlfriend, is present via her cellphone texts and calls. Her name: Kristen. Jean has a menial position working for Julie’s father, a famous artist, just as Jean is a valet in the household of Julie’s powerful father, the Count. Like MISS JULIE, SMOKE explores the sexual power struggle between the upper-class Julie and the lower-class John, and includes moments of sadomasochistic wordplay and byplay (although taken to sharply different degrees in each). In MISS JULIE, Jean suggests that he and Julie run off to start an enterprise in Switzerland; in SMOKE, the proposed destination is Detroit. In both MISS JULIE and SMOKE, the characters have sex, offstage in the former, on in the latter. Still, as per various modern stagings of MISS JULIE (including two plays in BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG as well as last year’s South African version, MIES JULIE), the sex in SMOKE is on a kitchen table. MISS JULIE makes much of Jean’s razor, which in SMOKE becomes a pair of knives, one big, one small. Miss Julie exits with the razor in an ambiguous conclusion that many believe will lead to her suicide; the script of SMOKE ends without mentioning a knife, but in the production Julie takes up the folding knife, which earlier has been used in a dangerous sexual act, holding it in a way designed to make us contemplate her next step.

Madeleine Bundy, Stephen Stout. Photo: Hunter Canning

In SMOKE John (Stephen Stout), 31, is hanging out in the kitchen to smoke, which isn’t allowed at the otherwise freewheeling party. Julie (Madeleine Bundy), a 20-year-old college student, enters, asking for a cigarette. She’s spotted John at the party, recognizing him as her father’s assistant, and knows he’ll be in this room. He’s a downtown type, a would-be artist (who’s worked mainly as a barista) with a five-o’clock shadow, side hair trimmed close with a shock that falls over his forehead, black jacket, black shirt, black boots, and black droopy-assed jeans with skinny legs; a long chain dangles in a loop at his side. Julie’s wearing a flared, black schoolgirl-like miniskirt, thick-soled boot-shoes, and black knee-high socks. (The spot-on costumes are by Beth Goldenberg.) 

Madeleine Bundy. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Soon enough, as the exposition unrolls, we begin to see Jean’s initially dominant position as the older hipster begin to blur as Julie’s at first seemingly submissive girlishness peels away to reveal a craftily manipulative creature seeking to use her position as the daughter of John’s employer—to whom John professes loyalty while also putting him down—to her advantage. There’s lots of talk about this or that being “gross” or “creepy,” and it’s not always easy to tell when the characters’ occasionally extreme behavior is real and when it’s “playing,” as they put it, since the premise of the party is people choosing partners to make “scenes.” Mirroring such offstage scenes are those of John and Julie engaging in acts of dominance, submission, and sadomasochism. There’s also talk of the need for permission in these activities, as people won't always be as nice in such situations as those at this party. Julie, whom John thinks is a “sub” (submissive), says she’s interested in being treated roughly, while John, who claims he’s a “het dom,” likes to dish it out, although he knows just how far he can go. For him, with his cache of knives large and small, his ability to inflict pain in sensual encounters is a skill he enjoys practicing with willing victims; she, for her part, needs to prod and poke at his defenses so she can eventually put him down as the “lapdog” to her father she accuses him of being. 

The authentic-sounding, often profane, dialogue sounds perfectly real in the mouths of these gifted young actors, who invest their roles with the kind of naturalistic believability of which Strindberg could only have dreamed. The tiny venue has been arranged by set designer Andrew Diaz so that the kitchen is placed at what is usually the stage right end of the elongated space, with the audience seated around it on two sides. The actors are so close that any false notes would be immediately apparent, yet you rarely feel they’re acting or aware of your presence, so intent are they on carrying out their actions, which include moments of violence and intimacy; female flesh is shown, but there’s no actual nudity. Of course, certain restrictions apply; in real life the characters would have gone further in their physical behavior than director Tom Costello, who has done a masterful job in helping hone these performances, allows. This is a play, after all.

Whatever debt it may owe to MISS JULIE, SMOKE is a fresh and novel look at sexual power politics in its most elemental form. Made even more vital by its intensely convincing performances, it’s one of the best things currently available on the Off Broadway scene. If the SATC wants to see how MISS JULIE can speak to today’s audiences with a contemporary point of view, they need only take a trip downtown to White Street. This show is s-m-m-mokin!

 

63. Review of THE WAYSIDE INN (September 10, 2014)

64. THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN
 

A.R. Gurney readily admits that this 1977 play, now being revived at the Signature Theatre at Pershing Square, was written under the influence of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, as in his play HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES, which uses the same set to show two stories at the same time. Writing on his website, at argurney.com, he says: “The assumption I make in THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN is that since all the rooms in a medium-priced American motel are virtually the same, why not have several different plots work themselves out simultaneously within one single motel room standing for many others. If this sounds needlessly complicated, I tried to make the evening comprehensible by making the different stories occurring in this room fairly simple and straightforward.”

From left: Will Pullen, Jon DeVries, Quincy Dunn-Baker. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Mr. Gurney hoped to offer an incisive examination of America, with the motel representing “a generalizing image of transitory American life.” As the play was rehearsed, however, he realized how difficult the task he’d set for himself was, since having so many actors inhabiting the same space made it difficult for them to find the logic in the pauses required as one scene’s dialogue and action collided with another’s. He observed that the audience was being asked to watch as he, a juggler with five plots flying about, kept them all in the air, which ran the risk of losing their interest. In his eyes, the play had failed because it had been “drowned” in its conceptual framework.

From left: Rebecca Henderson, Will Pullen, Quincy Dunn-Baker. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Much of what he says is true, and it’s difficult while watching the play not to be conscious of the trickery involved as characters avoid sitting or standing in the same place or in the way of others, or to be speaking when others are doing so. You wonder if the pauses in one conversation, created to allow another to proceed, are justified, or if you’re being asked to fight a losing battle with suspending your disbelief as the play proceeds. Thus the juggling act does sometimes intrude on the believability of the characters and situations; they are, after all, basically created to satisfy a dramaturgical concept rather than the organic working out of their own needs.

Still, the play, especially in this finely calibrated production directed by Lila Neugeberger, does hold your interest, and you’re able to appreciate Mr. Gurney’s cleverness while also being invested in the play’s inner life (or lives). As far as those lives are concerned, the playwright has kept things simple, making each plot line essentially familiar and unprovocative; this detracts from the power of any one set of characters’ individual drama while contributing to the overall effect of five separate stories intersecting within the same locale, with only the slightest overlap on several occasions.

Within the room at the Wayside Inn (a name taken from a famous poem, we’re told), somewhere near Boston, we meet Frank (Jon DeVries) and Jessie (Lizbeth Mackay), a couple in their 60s, who’ve come to visit their nearby daughter and see her new baby; Ray (Quincy Dunn-Baker), a slick sales rep in a three-piece suit, who’s there on business; the pot smoking Phil (David McElwee) and Sally (Ismenia Mendes), college students who’ve come for their first night of sex together; Vince (Mark Kudisch), a middle-aged businessman, and his teenage son, Mark (Will Pullen), present because Mark is scheduled for an interview for Harvard; Andy (Kelly AuCoin), a young doctor, and Ruth (Rebecca Henderson), who are going through a painful divorce after he chose to move elsewhere for career purposes; and Sharon (Jenn Lyon), a pretty chambermaid and onetime hippie on whom Ray quickly puts the moves. 

Jenn Lyon, Quincy Dunn-Baker. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The stories of this motley, yet familiar, crew (all of whom are white and without any ethnic markers) are rife with anxiety, loneliness, alienation, and problems of communication. There are incidental comic moments, but, in essence, these are five slices of life, mildly poignant and instantly identifiable, carefully edited to keep out excessive dramatic encumbrances that might complicate Mr. Gurney’s structural layout. The acting is generally low-key and naturalistic, with just as much dramatic tension as needed to sustain interest.

For example, Frank worries about his heart, which distracts him from the reason for his visit, and creates subdued friction with his wife, who can’t wait to hold her grandchild; Frank, who has to reassure his wife on the phone about his fidelity, immediately begins using his wiles to find a local bed partner, and then to seduce the interested but also somewhat reluctant Sharon; Vince, a nightmare of paternal smothering, conflicts with Mark’s wish to avoid Harvard in favor of a year off to work on cars; Ruth and Andy clash when he tries to gain possession of their family albums; and Sally, uncomfortable with Phil’s interest in a one-nighter he intends as an experiment to test their compatibility, isn’t quite as ready to jump into the sack as he might wish.

The two-act play enjoys a uniformly capable ensemble in a work that doesn’t make any specific character more important than any other. The acting is nicely modulated, emotionally powerful when needed, but always essentially subdued as part of the overall scheme of things. Andrew Lieberman’s large motel room set (at least the fourth motel setting in the past two years), with its two double beds ($32 a night!), sliding door to a balcony, glen plaid wallpaper, and pushbutton TV, resembles what anyone who’s ever been in a motel has seen, and the late 1970s costumes of Kaye Voyce, the lighting of Tyler Micoleau, and the sound design of Stowe Nelson all contribute to the period ambience.

It’s fun to see a play set in the not-too-distant past without a cellphone or computer in sight, and to try to pin the approximate year by what the designers and director provide. It’s also nice to see a play even the playwright was ready to dismiss prove itself stageworthy; its problems may remain but, given the dearth of outstanding playwriting these days, even lesser Gurney is definitely worth a visit.

62. Review of BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG (September 9, 2014)

62. BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG

 

 

 

It’s hard to repress the urge to use the word “pretentious” when describing BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG, an evening of four one-acts inspired by Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s 1888 naturalistic masterpiece, MISS JULIE. On taking your seat at the Lion Theatre, the first thing you see on the black stage, bare except for a black dinner table and chairs, is Anette Norgaard, an attractive woman sitting motionless in semi-profile, spotlighted in an elevated corner of the back wall. No matter how early you arrive she’s there, waiting for the play to begin. Even when the house lights dim she waits there endlessly, until you begin to wonder if this is meant intentionally as a way of creating an air of mystery, or if, perhaps, something has gone wrong technically and she’s unable to escape her lofty perch. Then, breaking the puzzlingly somnambulant mood is a woman’s amplified voice on the PA system, welcoming the audience and giving it the usual preshow instructions. Well, there goes the mystery. Finally, as Ms. Norgaard begins singing atmospheric, lyric-less music of her own composition (abetted by Amy Altadonna’s sound design and Elyssa Samsel’s violin accompaniment) in what sounds like a faux CIRQUE DU SOLEIL mode, the cast of seven enters down the theatre’s single aisle and takes the stage, rearranging the stage furniture and dancing as if they were the servants in Strindberg’s play at their Midsummer Night’s Eve revels.

These actors, some of whom will appear in more than one play on the program, soon take up places on the walls bordering the stage, a tired theatrical conceit perhaps designed in this case to remind us of Strindberg’s comments about spectators at naturalistic presentations being like flies on the wall.  During the interludes separating one play from the other, as Ms. Norgaard sings, all the actors will dance, some of them rather awkwardly, in oddly choreographed (by Lauren Camp) sequences, only to take up new positions on the perimeter as the next piece commences. In one scene they stand rigidly side by side in profile along the stage left wall, like Roman statues in a museum. Despite all this unnecessarily pretentious (sorry, I couldn’t help it) theatrical folderol, however, all great Neptune’s ocean will not wash clean the general inadequacy of the acting, direction, and writing in this unfortunate misfire.  

BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG company. Photo: Kait Ebinger.

BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG is the ambitious brainchild of the Scandinavian American Theatre Company, which, in 2012, commissioned four playwrights, two Americans and two Swedish, to write short plays responding to the ideas and emotions generated by MISS JULIE as a way of memorializing the centenary of Strindberg’s death, and introducing “emerging” Swedish playwrights to the American stage. As ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN, Tom Stoppard’s HAMLET spinoff, so brilliantly demonstrates, the notion of creating a new play out of a famous one and thus examining the original’s relevance in the contemporary world is certainly a viable one; however, when it’s done as part of a commissioned project it can easily create work that seems forced rather than inspired by burning need. Commissioning a playwright to write whatever he or she wishes is one thing; doing so based on a specific theme or subject is something different. (A recent exception might be BAUER, at 59E59, commissioned to dramatize an inherently powerful true-life story.)

Revivals of MISS JULIE are staples of the modern repertory; only last season St. Ann’s Warehouse presented MIES JULIE, a well-received adaptation set within a South African environment. A movie of Strindberg’s play, starring Jessica Chastain, is also forthcoming. Strindberg’s “naturalistic tragedy,” set in a basement kitchen on Midsummer’s Eve, a night potent with life-changing possibilities, is famous for its groundbreaking treatment of sexual, class, psychological, and gender themes. Miss Julie, the spoiled, 25-year-old daughter of a Swedish count, flirts with and has sex with Jean, her father’s valet, and thus of much lower social class. Shamed by her transgressive behavior, and believing she loves him, she’s prepared to flee with him to open a hotel in Switzerland. Jean is engaged to the servant Kristin (who nods off during crucial scenes), however, and backs out of the plan. Faced with the count’s return, Julie has nowhere to turn; Jean hands her his razor and she goes off to commit suicide.

While the one-acts in BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG vary in the degree to which they reflect the plot and circumstances of MISS JULIE, it would be hard to imagine anyone appreciating them without at least a cursory knowledge of the original. Some of these plays’ allusions are immediately recognizable, such as the sexual byplay and the business with the razor, some are narrower, such as references to Switzerland, animals, flowers, and excrement. In tune with today’s feminist sensibilities, Julie now usually takes the upper hand in her power struggle with Jean. Despite its respected position as a pillar of the early modern theatre, MISS JULIE is not as widely familiar as HAMLET, which may partly account for only a dozen people being present when I attended on Tuesday evening, a number diminished by two midway through.

The four plays, in order, are David Bar Katz’s “Chanting Hymns to Fruitless Moons,” Linda Ekdahl’s “Midsummer at ‘Tyrolen,’” Dominique Morisseau’s “High Powered,” and Andreas Boonstra’s “The Truth about Fröken Julie.” Ms. Ekdahl and Mr. Boonstra are the Swedish contributors. Alicia Dhyana House directed the first and last play, and Henning Hegland the second and third. Apart from “High Powered,” the plays all toy with surrealistic or absurdist effects. The set, credited to Starlet Jacobs, is little more than a group of chairs and tables, rearranged for each playlet on the black stage. Yuki Nakase’s lighting does what it can under limited circumstances. Throughout, the actors wear simple black and white ensembles, designed by Nicole Wee.

From left: Ingrid Kullberg-Benz, Vanessa Johansson, Devin B. Tillman. Photo: Kait Ebinger.

In the first play, “Chanting Hymns to Fruitless Moons” (a title with unfortunate echoes of an underwear brand) Young Julie (Vanessa Johansson), barefoot and dressed in a short, white shift, is mirrored by her older self (Ingrid Kullberg-Benz), wearing a formal black dress with a sequined shoulder jacket. Young Julie can commune with the older Julie (it’s Midsummer’s Eve, after all) and, following her advice, subverts Strindberg’s game plan of having Julie die by turning Jean (Devin B. Tillman) into the suicide victim at the end. Insecure actors, plodding tempo, and clumsy staging provide little support for this dull trifle.

Rikke Lylloff, Albert Bendix. Photo: Kait Ebinger.

The thinly drawn “Midsummer at ‘Tyrolen’” sees Julie (Rikke Lylloff), Kristin (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz), and Jean (Albert Bendix) as modern day characters hanging out at a rundown restaurant, the Tyrolen, a replacement for MISS JULIE’s kitchen, with Jean hoping to use Julie’s capital to go into business for himself with a trucking company. Each actor also doubles as their own internal commentator, making statements about their character’s motivations. STRANGE INTERLUDE it’s not. Once again, flabby performances and direction only make things murkier.

The only play on the program with recognizable characters, a reasonably compelling narrative, dialogue worth listening to, and consistently strong performances is Ms. Morisseau’s “High Powered,” which deviates most sharply from Strindberg’s play by focusing on Kristin and Jean. In this telling, Kristin is a contemporary black woman named Mya (Zenzele Cooper), who works for Julie as a dog walker. She and her black boyfriend, the Jean character, named Darrin (Devin B. Tillman, understudying for Kwasi Osei), are preparing to move from their Bronx hole-in-the-wall to a Manhattan studio being paid for by Julie, whose father has given Jean, Julie’s chauffeur, a well-paying sales job in his business firm. Jean, who claims to have mathematical prowess, claims this is the reason for his imminent success, but Mya suspects there’s something more involved with regard to Darrin’s relationship with Julie. Mya speaks in ungrammatical black vernacular, which the implausibly articulate Darrin (who nonetheless thinks “be” is a preposition) is constantly correcting. The play explores issues such as race envy (Darrin seeks to become “like them”) and the disparity between the 99 and the 1. Perhaps because the characters, dialogue, and situations are more immediate than in the other plays, the acting (especially that of Ms. Cooper, who gives the best performance of the evening) and direction are more convincing. The play may stand out because of its relative credibility rather than because it offers anything particularly outstanding; it still takes a stretch of the imagination to accept the dialogue as reflective of these particular characters, rather than as words put in their mouths to fulfill the dramatist’s agenda. And it's hard to ignore a scene where Darrin gets so angry he practically strangles Mya; a few moments later, after she gets her breath back, she’s reconciled to remaining with him. Shades of Janny Palmer Rice!!!   

Last, and not quite least, is the one play with some comedic content, “The Truth about Fröken Julie” (“fröken” means “Miss). Also set in today’s world, it includes music by Bob Dylan sung by Jean (Drew O’Kane), and the Dead Boys, sung by Kristin (Rikke Lylloff), and contains an extended sequence using drawings on a whiteboard to deconstruct Jean’s tall tale, told to Julie (Vanessa Johansson); it concerns a time in his childhood when he escaped from her father’s exotic outhouse by diving into the excrement and exiting through a rear door. Whatever. The last third of the piece shifts into metatheatrical territory as the characters, obviously stimulated by their chatter about lies, begin to confront their own existence as characters in a play, directly addressing the audience about it. Julie’s polemic informs us of how she has a big problem with theatre “when we try to make this unreal fantasy-thing as close to real as possible. It becomes so unreal.” I hope she doesn’t think the play she’s in offers a meaningful alternative.

The final line of “The Truth about Fröken Julie,” spoken by Julie, says it all: “Just tell me stories, give me relationships, feelings, messages, politics, music. Something I can believe in.” To which I counter, please do.

61. Review of JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY (September 8, 2014)

JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY

 

 

Docudramas come in various styles and shapes, and some subject matter is better suited for one than another. Take, for example, JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY, now playing at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. This is a devised theatre piece dealing with the story of the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, TX, its sister city. While Juárez became known over the past three decades as “the murder capital of the world,” El Paso was touting itself as the safest city in America, which claim can actually be documented. The socially conscious experimental theatre company Theater Mitu, which developed the piece at various institutions in Lebanon, Abu Dhabi, Mexico, Texas, and elsewhere, performs it in a markedly stylized way under the vision of director Rubén Polendo, who says in the program note: “I made this work with the company members . . . as a way to rediscover my hometown—Ciudad Mexico—and El Paso, TX. . . . For years I had been overwhelmed by news about the violence, cartels, kidnappings, murders, drug smuggling and other woes that plagued this border community.” 

The company approach immediately reminded me of my advice to a friend who just the other day asked for my feedback on the outline of a five-hour docudrama he’s writing about an important Holocaust-related historical event. I wrote to him, in part:  

I am very doubtful that it should be dramatized as a straightforward docudrama recreating in verbatim detail what happened. . . . It needs an imaginative theatricalist approach that condenses the material into no more than 2 hours, with characters and scenes that are overtly theatrical and nonrealistic; with a cinematically episodic, swift-moving style (Living Newspaper comes to mind) using the whole arsenal of projections and lighting; with actors playing multiple roles with minor physical changes, music, and so on. There also needs to be ironic humor. . . .We go to the theatre for dramatized history, not recreated history.



JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY. Photo: Theater Mutu.

Apart from there being barely any humor, ironic or otherwise, JUÁREZ essentially follows this template, even though its subject matter covers several decades while my friend’s play focuses on only six days. Given Theater Mitu’s ambitious project to document the local people’s responses to Juárez’s decline into crime and a level of violence whose cruelty often exceeds that of ISIS, the approach fits the subject matter, but also reveals some of the pitfalls such stylization can create. A more successful recent blending of theatricalization and realism to tell an historical story would be Robert Schenkkan’s ALL THE WAY, which doesn’t allow conceptual creativity to get in the way of the narrative material.

JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY. Photo: Theater Mutu.

Theater Mitu has done an admirable job of research and documentation, including having its company members visit Juárez and interview “anyone who would sit down and talk to us, to create a piece with and about its citizens.” Its six actors, Kayla Asbell, Denis Butkus, Inés Garcia, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, and Alejandro Rodriguez perform a text developed by Messrs. Butkus, Littig, and Nestor, along with Aysan Celik, Adam Cochran, and Ryan Conarro. They each play multiple anonymous roles, identified on a flat screen hanging over the stage by their ages and professions (journalist, activist, writer, librarian, teacher, graffiti artist, political scientist, etc.) or some other marker, such as father, great grandmother, and so on. Mr. Polendo narrates large sections on what I assume is a recording.

There’s a note in the script explaining that “The text is never performed. It is transmitted, conveyed, offered, but never emoted or inhabited. They speak as witnesses.” This seems a bit disingenuous because, whatever the intentions, the actors do indeed perform, if only unconventionally. They alter their voices to play the different roles, for example, not realistically but in a variety of offbeat ways, using microphones that sometimes greatly alter how they sound (including making an actress sound male). And there are choreographed sequences that, regardless of their alienated manner, are indeed “performed.” The problem is that, interesting as these choices seem at first, they become, like so much of the production, mannerisms that point to the ingenuity of the staging and acting rather than as a means for furthering the emotional impact of the material.   

The stage (described in the script as looking “more like a rock concert than a theater piece”) is essentially undecorated, but filled with music stands, amplifiers, microphones, portable light stands, and folding chairs. A silver tarp-like screen covers the rear wall for the rather extensive and sophisticated projections (designed by Adam Cochran and Justin Nestor), and a number of smaller screens are brought on and held up for other projections or different purposes. Alex Hawthorn is listed as the lead designer of the sound, which plays a major role in the show. The show’s aesthetic is more “found” than “designed,” with a large number of company members credited for “Stage Installations, Text Architecture, Additional Video and Sound.”

Much of what we see and hear concerns the nostalgic memories of Mr. Polendo for Juárez when he grew up there before the era of the drug cartels. These memories (and those of other locals) are contrasted with information, fed to us in numerous ways, from videos, projections, maps, and shadow puppetry, to songs and straight narration. We’re introduced to a wide assortment of perceptions and particulars about the causes behind the city’s decline, with most of the blame going to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the development of manufacturing plants (maquiladoras) to which American companies outsourced thousands of jobs at ridiculously low wages ($5 a day) to needy Mexicans, who rushed north to take employment in a city whose infrastructure was completely unequipped for such a mass migration of workers. We’re told that the employment of women, traditionally stay-at-home mothers and housekeepers, led to feelings of emasculation by the male population, and a consequent rise in incidences of “femicide,” i.e., the killing of women merely because of their gender.

JUÁREZ: A DOCUMENTARY MYTHOLOGY. Photo: Theater Mutu.

In a program note, much of it reading like grantspeak, Mr. Polendo says the production’s goal is to theatricalize “what we witnessed; to convey in a theatrical grammar what this place feels like; how the offices, streets, cafes, homes entered our bodies—what we as corporeal creatures witnessed—the artist as archive.” While I learned a lot about Juárez, I didn’t share the company’s experience of what the city feels like to them. Instead, that feeling got lost somewhere in the distanced and self-conscious acting style and the tangle of technical and aesthetic decisions that often took precedence over what the witnesses were saying. The most affecting elements were not so much about the accumulation of corpses, the bloody rivalry between cartels, and the conflict between the citizens’ needs and the government’s inability to satisfy them, but those in what is essentially the play’s frame, the story of Mr. Polendo’s charismatic father (seen in multiple videos), whose wisdom acts as a kind of through line in helping his son make sense of Juárez’s story.

Toward the end of this intermissionless, 90-minute docudrama, we hear some encouraging news regarding Juárez’s future; we can only hope that the situation continues to improve.

60. Review of BAUER (September 4, 2014)

60. BAUER

 

 

Imagine you’re an internationally famous German abstract artist imprisoned by Hitler because your art is considered “degenerate.” Through the intercession of an artist-curator friend named Hilla Rebay, the American copper magnate and art collector, Solomon Guggenheim, pays enough money in 1938 to secure your release, enabling you to emigrate to the United States in 1939, where Guggenheim ensconces you in a gorgeous seashore mansion in the exclusive New Jersey town of Deal, buys you a spectacular Duesenberg to tool around in, and sets up a fund that will take care, via monthly stipends, of all your financial needs for life. All you have to do is sign a contract stating that all your work henceforth belongs to Guggenheim, who will open his new Museum of Non-Objective Art with your paintings, of which he has a large collection, displayed prominently along with the top avant-gardists of the day, such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Klee, and Picasso. However, not long after signing your name you come to believe that you’ve misunderstood the contractual stipulations and bound yourself to a Faustian bargain in which you see yourself as little more than an indentured servant. You thereupon rebel by choosing never to paint again. You die in 1953, and when Frank Lloyd Wright’s new version of the museum, now called the Guggenheim Museum, opens six years later, your work is relegated to a basement storeroom and your name gradually forgotten except by art historians.

This, in brief, is what happened to Rudolf Bauer, about whom an excellent recent documentary called “Betrayal: The Life and Art of Rudolf Bauer” was produced in 2005 (and recently re-aired on PBS); it was the inspiration for playwright Lauren Gunderson to be commissioned by the San Francisco Playhouse (in association with the Weinstein Gallery) to dramatize the story. BAUER, now showing in Theater A at 59E59 Theaters, under the direction of Bill English, who staged the San Francisco production and also designed its set, is an often tense—even melodramatic—
exploration of the ethical and personal issues involved in Bauer’s behavior. It presents most of the known biographical facts within an imagined confrontation among Bauer (Sherman Howard), his wife, Louise (Susi Damilano), and the artist-curator, Hilla Rebay (Stacy Ross), Bauer’s former lover, whose enthusiastic support of Bauer was largely responsible for Guggenheim’s extensive patronage. There never was a meeting of these three people, but, the possibilities of what might have happened had there been one, are rather well realized by Ms. Gunderson. Schiller did the same thing with Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth in MARY STUART.

Sherman Howard. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

All of the action, which takes place on an afternoon in 1953, some months before the 62-year-old Bauer’s death of lung cancer, is set in the Deal mansion’s disused, dusty, white-walled, coffered-ceilinged, tall-windowed studio, beautifully lit by Mary Louise Geiger. Louise, an Austrian who had been hired by Rebay to serve as Bauer’s housekeeper, and who eventually married him, has deviously, but with good intentions, arranged to have Hilla, from whom Bauer has been estranged for a decade, come to the mansion; she hopes they can be reconciled. Bauer, intensely angry at Hilla for what he believes to have been her machinations in getting him to sign the contract, refuses to meet Hilla in the home’s gracious drawing room, insisting they do so in this nearly empty space, redolent of his abandoned career; the seating here is confined to a shabby armchair, a board set on boxes, and the like. Louise, an attractive 50-year-old woman in a pale violet dress, sincerely wishes to make the meeting a success, even though she knows Hilla was once her husband’s lover. Hilla arrives wearing a chic red dress with a wide-brimmed black hat; her hats were a personal trademark, although this one looks nothing like the rather odd ones worn by her in vintage photos and film clips. (The nicely balanced period costumes are designed by Abra Berman.) Hilla wears her aristocratic background almost like another part of her ensemble, treating the eternally patient Louise with crushing contempt, as if she were still Bauer’s maid. (Hilla had written an essay in which she called Louise a prostitute, resulting in a libel suit brought by the Bauers.) Hilla, not realizing at first why she is there, has come with the mission of convincing Bauer to paint again, and goes after him with relentless determination, but Bauer resists with all his power, believing that to do so would mean abandoning his integrity.

Sherman Howard, Stacy Ross, Susi Damilano Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The ethical dimensions of the dilemma are turned this way and that, as Bauer and Hilla engage in a furious blame-game fight, replete with sniping banter, that introduces enough expository background to let us know how things have come to such a pass. Forgiveness becomes a major theme, but who is to be forgiven, and for what? Ms. Gunderson can be excused, in the interests of dramatic necessity, for some of the liberties she’s forced to introduce. It’s unlikely, for example, that it was directly from Hilla that Bauer learned that, after his patron’s death in 1949, Guggenheim’s nephew and successor decreed that the artist's work would be kept in storage and that Hilla had been fired as curator of the Guggenheim collection, thereby losing her ability to fight for him. Still, having her bring all of this information into their meeting definitely deepens the drama and makes Bauer’s desperation more devastating. Also, Hilla’s plan to have Bauer paint again never really clarifies how his doing so publicly could overcome his contractual restrictions; on the other hand, the play’s fantastical conclusion (about which, more below) offers at least a satisfactory imaginary resolution.

Each character is sharply drawn and expertly performed, including the use of German accents (with choice German phrases thrown in). Mr. Howard’s Bauer, a dapper, silver haired and mustached picture of elegance, in blue blazer and ascot, has a proud, imperious presence. He’s clearly benefitted from his financial comforts, despite his complaints that he hasn’t enough money for all his needs. Bauer comes across as impetuous, petulant, and angry, but always with the dignity and stature befitting his position. Mr. Howard is new to the production, but both Ms. Damilano and Ross appeared in the San Francisco staging. Ms. Damilano’s Louise is helpful, self-deprecating, and likeable, while Ms. Ross’s Hilla is convincingly direct and urgent, although the actress has a distracting tendency to charge forward and retreat. She’s also far slimmer than the physically imposing person she plays, who appears quite frequently in the Bauer documentary.

A smattering of Rudolf Bauer’s work is cleverly introduced during the course of the action via several striking projections (created by Micah Stiegletz) that spread across the stage, and, as alluded to earlier, the play concludes with a remarkable display of his artistry in a surprisingly phantasmagoric scene that abandons the play’s hitherto realistic style and boldly pictures the newly liberated artist slashing the air like an orchestra conductor as powerful brush strokes of color and form splash across the studio walls.

Apart from the premise of a meeting that never happened, and some artsy talk that borders on pretentiousness, Ms. Gunderson’s 90-minute intermissionless drama, which is not without some welcome caustic humor, makes effective use of a true story dramatic enough to sustain interest on its own. Still, the play does occasionally seem to wear out the thrust of its central conflict as Hilla and Bauer battle it out, calm down, and take up weapons again in an on-again, off-again tempest that gradually begins to seem stretched. Nevertheless, BAUER is a welcome arrival for those seeking an effective dramatization of a compelling tale with powerful moral implications, and for anyone interested in an introduction to the power of great abstract painting. Bauer’s work has slowly come back into favor since a 1967 exhibition at, ironically, the Guggenheim, which gave it an even more impressive showing in 2005. This play about his life will surely inspire many theatergoers to seek it out. 

Stacy Ross, Sherman Howard, Susi Damilano. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

59. Review of BOYS AND GIRLS (September 3, 2014)

59. BOYS AND GIRLS

 

Here’s the recipe for the not too stiff Irish theatrical whiskey called BOYS AND GIRLS now running at 59E59 Theaters as part of the First Irish 2014 festival: take four young Dubliners, two men and two women, seat them on a bare stage decorated with nothing but two dozen hanging light bulbs, and have each in turn rise, face the audience, deliver a monologue about their sexual and romantic feelings—with a growing focus on a single partner on a particular night. Then, break the monologues up by intercutting them with one another, season the brew with a barrage of colloquially poetic prose, garnished with deep blue slang, and bring the quartet to what is for three of them both an erotic and dramatic climax, and for the other merely an anticlimax.

Sometimes bracing, sometimes funny, sometimes insightful, and sometimes sad, this 50-minute exercise, written and directed by Dylan Coburn Gray, is rarely dramatic and can only by the loosest definition be called a play. It holds the attention mainly because of the richness of its occasionally incomprehensible language and its depiction of the inner feelings and varying sexual attitudes of a cross section of Irish youth. Much as the characters are involved in a world of booze, pills, and sexual freedom, their philosophical musings and linguistic expressivity mark them as educated and intellectually perceptive.

The characters are named simply A (Ronan Carey), B (Seán Doyle), C (Maeve O'Mahony), and D (Claire O'Reilly). As the audience enters Theater B all four are seated and engaged in low-key conversation. When the lights change to indicate the show’s beginning, they join in a rather lovely bit of a Capella choral harmony to a piece of wordless music, after which A rises and begins to talk to us directly, taking only the barest notice of the others up there with him. This will be the approach throughout, as one after the other actor steps forward to say what’s on their mind. Mr. Gray has applied a structural strategy to mark steps along each character’s story, when one or the other will introduce a number that is then repeated by the group. These serve as rhythmic breaks and offer a mild visual and auditory diversion from the static nature of the overall piece.



Seán Doyle, Maeve O'Mahony, Claire O'Reilly, Ronan Carey. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

There’s no narrative connection among the characters’ stories, neither in the locales where they’re set nor in the relationships of one person with another. There’s just the four characters, speaking briskly and in essentially ordinary but pleasantly expressive tones, as if addressing a buddy rather than an audience in a theatre.

Mr. Gray’s language has a free-flowing, almost Joycean stream-of-consciousness lyricism, sometimes drifting into vagueness, and so sprinkled with examples of the local vernacular that the press packet contains a glossary. I learned, for example, that "gee" and "fanny" are euphemisms for a woman’s genitalia. Numerous examples could be cited, but, if only to give an idea of what you’ll be listening to from the beginning, here’s something from A’s opening monologue, when he discourses on a particular girl:

Let’s call her Laura, a sight for sore eyes at the worst of times and at her best she’s a burst of pure—yeah. If love is a sure and willful self-abnegation, Laura’s a sexy form of zen meditation; inducing intimations of the transcendent in men when she smiles. Her lines are fine enough for double-takes, often double-taken for a model and who’s to say you’re mistaken? She could would should be. Maybe it’s easy to think she’s beautiful; she’s blonde she’s thin, got the shape of a violin to fucking boot. Blah blah blah, ‘dutifully capitulating to what society deems attractive’, just haters hating, an argument from those lacking the lack that Laura’s rack alone is lacking. Need a minute for that one? I’ll spend it in contemplation, cos that lackless rack is crack-a-lacking.

The script combines this sort of rambling rumination—a highlight is C's lengthy disquisition on how women can deflate the negative impact of the word “cunt” by reveling in it rather than being reviled by it—and direct narrative, the latter taking a bit of time before it comes into focus. Each character expresses his or her thoughts on some sexual issue of personal concern, then talks about a specific person with whom they want to or will be spending the night. There are glancing allusions to homosexuality, but none of these characters is gay. The issues of loneliness and desire, for all the references to Dublin clubs and dating habits, are universal, although given idiosyncratic twists here, with frequent dashes of Irish wit, and the characters could be would-be young revelers anywhere.

It’s too bad that the essentially dispassionate style of performance and the lack of dramatic interchange among the characters keeps one from becoming emotionally absorbed in the events. Even when there’s an orchestration of orgasmic experiences among three of the characters, with one chiming in instead about a distraction from his own desires when a young acquaintance needs his assistance, the effect remains more discursive than dramatic, more cerebral than emotional. The actors are nicely balanced, but, in the end, you leave thankful that Mr. Gray was wise enough to bring it to a close within less than an hour, sending all us boys and girls home while there’s still time to attend to our own physical needs.

58. Review of RED EYE OF LOVE (September 2, 2014)

58. RED EYE OF LOVE  

 

       

  

 

You’ve got to hand it to John Wulp, co-librettist and co-lyricist, with the late Arnold Weinstein, of RED EYE OF LOVE, the new musical produced by the Amas Musical Theatre at the DiCapo Opera Theatre on E. 76th Street. The distinguished 86-year-old theatre artist, whose illustrious credits include staging the Tony-winning 1977 Broadway revival of DRACULA, starring Frank Langella, won an OBIE for his direction of Weinstein’s original version of RED EYE OF LOVE, when it was a nonmusical absurdist play presented by the Living Theatre in 1961. That was in the days shortly before the experimentally adventurous Living Theatre, led by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, became one the world’s most provocative avant-garde theatre troupes of the 1960s. Offbeat as RED EYE OF LOVE may have been in 1961, its essential sweetness and optimism, even in a world of capitalist oppression, seems galaxies away, aesthetically, from such Living Theatre landmarks as PARADISE NOW.

Alli Mauzey, Josh Grisetti. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Following DRACULA’s success Wulp and Weinstein sought for years to convert RED EYE OF LOVE into a musical comedy; after running into various hurdles and being stashed in a drawer, the project was revived in 2007, two years after Weinstein’s death. But no producer was interested until composer Jan Warner’s score was scrapped and a new one by Sam Davis introduced; its mission was to make the show “lighter and funnier than in previous incarnations,” according to an article in the New York Times. “They wanted me to write something more tuneful, more musical comedy,” said Mr. Davis. Then, after a North Haven, Me., staging in the summer of 2013, by Todd Sperling (whose THE OTHER JOSH COHEN was so memorable in 2012), the show was noticed by Donna Trinkoff of Amas, and now has opened Off Broadway, over 30 years since Mr. Wulp and Mr. Weinstein began developing its musical incarnation.

From left: Daniel May, Daniel Lynn Evans, Tracie Franklin, Sam Tanabe. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

It would be the greatest pleasure to report that, after all the decades, dreams, and determination involved that a hidden treasure has been unearthed and brought back to surprisingly gleaming life. While there are definitely delights to savor in the enterprise, as reflected in the preview audience’s generally warm response, the overall result seems dated, precious, and ponderously whimsical (whimsically ponderous also works).  

Alli Mauzey. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

RED EYE OF LOVE—which Mr. Sperling has staged in the manner of a vaudeville show—bears various superficial signs of Eugene Ionesco’s 1950s theatre of the absurd comedies with few, if any, of the master's compelling insights into the absurdity of the human condition. Its hero, Wilmer Flange (Josh Grisetti), is a Berenger-like everyman who falls in love with the cute, blond sales clerk Selma Chargesse (Alli Mauzey) when he seeks employment at the Martinas Meat Emporium, a meat department store owned by O.O. Martinas (Kevin Pariseau), Selma’s illiterate employer;  Martinas's oft-mentioned inability to read or write, by the way, is neither laugh worthy nor significant, which can also be said of his persistent use of “becount” for “because.”

The show charts the on-off love affair and marriage of Wilmer and Selma, complicated by her marriage to the meat millionaire, whose successful business is represented by a store that evolves over the years from a 13-story building into one 49 stories tall, selling every kind of meat imaginable. Martinas is the kind of capitalist that political protest theatre often lampoons by dressing him in dollar signs; still, the authors also give him what might pass as a likable side. Selma, who says it's her “duty to marry for money,” must choose who to love, the aggressive businessman or the goofily charming idealist seeking the “key” to the universe, which will range from the movies to dolls.

From left: Katie Hagen, Kevin Pariseau, Katie Chung. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Beginning in the New York of the 1920s, the action moves forward through the Depression (when Wilmer’s status as “a bum” becomes comic fodder), and then into World War II, peacetime and a succession of other wars. The songs take flabby swings at a world that can create a Depression and find war a profitable endeavor. An extensive amount of time is taken up with Wilmer unsuccessfully trying to invent a doll that will suffer all the human symptoms of disease and death, a preoccupation that forces his wife and son to leave him, at least temporarily. The ongoing rivalry between O.O. and Wilmer for Selma’s love is resolved in a happy ending that satisfies all concerned. Despite its potentially pertinent subtext, however, RED EYE OF LOVE seems far more interested in providing a quirky entertainment than making any original political statements.

As we follow the lives of the three principals, all sorts of peripheral material is introduced as excuses for tepidly amusing songs and dances. Clichéd as it is, one of the better numbers focuses on our obsession with movies, for example, performed in outrageously melodramatic silent movie terms, down to a mustachioed villain tying a heroine to the railroad tracks from which she’s rescued by the hero in the nick of time. Another extensive sequence offers a Ziegfeld Follies-type review  centered on Martinas’s meat business, with dancing cows and strip-teasing lamb chops, among other meaty images. So much prop meat moves off and on it almost seems that someone got a bargain on all those beef carcasses left over from ROCKY.  I even wondered why the show was called RED EYE OF LOVE (the title of one of the songs) when RIB EYE OF LOVE would have been a bit more to the point.

Fantasy dominates reality in the narrative—like the characters’ idealistic decision near the end to live among the Navajo—and many lines border on being non sequiturs. The characters' motivations are all schematic rather than real, the would-be comical effect of their behavior and dialogue taking precedence over psychological truth. On the other hand, sexual byplay is practically nonexistent, limited to an offhand reference to Martinas’s impotence and a ham-fisted sequence in which Selma declares that she and Martinas don't hit it off “in any manner or form,” a phrase repeated several times to hit the audience over the head with its nuance.

Mr. Davis has supplied the musical comedy score for which he was asked; some of it is forgettable (“Two Fat Cats”), some of it is serviceable (the title song), and some verges on the enjoyable  (“I’m Going to the Movies”), but since there’s no orchestra per se—just a pair of straw hat-wearing musicians (Greg Jarrett and Roberto Sinha) sitting opposite each other at upstage twin grand pianos—the songs don’t get the full treatment a richer orchestration could provide. Aside from the songs that strain to exploit meat metaphors (“Does your heart go bump / at the sight of rump”), most of the lyrics are blandly unimaginative. Lainie Sakakura and Alex Sanchez have provided a substantial amount of choreography, including a well-executed tap dance routine by a trio of dancers in silly Guernsey cow costumes, and a 1940s boogie woogie pastiche; much of it is appealing, but a good deal looks wearily familiar.

Visually, the show benefits from clever and attractive costumes by Martha Bromelmeier, who captures the essence of the changing years without being too pedantic about it (although I wondered why a sequence from World War II has Wilmer in an authentic period GI helmet and his three companions in helmets from World War I). The big design name involved is that of painter Robert Indiana, the 85-year-old op art star (his LOVE emblem with its leaning O forms part of the program cover he also designed). Mr. Indiana, who happens to be a neighbor of Mr. Wulp’s, contributed the upstage panel (originally seen in a 1998 version in Maine), which lists various types of meat in a simple crisscross pattern that serves as a background for the noteworthy (and abundant) projections of David Wilson. Matthew Richards’s lighting does a fine job of sculpturing the essentially bare stage (there are star patterns on the floor), which uses minimalist set pieces to move the episodic proceedings along.

At two hours, with one intermission, RED EYE OF LOVE is under-flavored and overcooked. To paraphrase what Spencer Tracy said of Katharine Hepburn in PAT AND MIKE, “There’s too much meat on her and what there is ain’t ‘cherce.’”