156 (2017-2018): Review: IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD (seen February 9, 2017)

“Yes, Vagina. There is an Eve Ensler”

Eve Ensler, the actress-playwright-activist, whose extraordinarily popular solo piece, 1996’s The Vagina Monologues, may have done as much for female genitalia (and opposition to violence against women) as Martin Luther King, Jr., did for civil rights, has created another one-woman starrer with In the Body of the World. It’s not likely, though, that this new work—produced by the MTC in the City Center’s Stage 1—will enjoy the worldwide audience of her most famous play, which has been published in 48 languages and performed in close to 150 countries.

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Not that Ensler’s left the vagina behind. It’s just that In the Body of the World—adapted from Ensler’s 2013 memoir of the same name and originally staged at Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre—is decidedly autobiographical and that particular body part is only one of the too many other things the play wants to discuss.

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

In the Body also requires the presence of this daring artist’s own body—from her shaved head (don’t let that silken Louise Brooks helmet fool you) to both her surgical and psychological scars—to make its searingly poignant and satirically comic points.

The pixyish, youthful-looking, 64-year-old Ensler has had quite a life, and you’ll find out a lot about it in her rambling, scary, funny, informative, moving, occasionally grisly, but scattershot docudrama—three parts divided into 27 scenes—whose centerpiece is her battle with uterine cancer.

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Ensler, disarmingly forthright on several levels—she doesn’t hesitate to expose her breasts when changing into a hospital gown—uses powerfully descriptive words to make us privy to her symptoms and procedures, from chemo to surgery (the Mayo Clinic and Sloan Kettering figure heavily); the difference between caring and careless doctors; the loving support she received from her sister; her experience with her once eye-catching, later cancer-ridden, dementia-plagued mom, and so on. Much is made of the mind-body connection in disease, including a brief lecture on “somatizing”, i.e., “To manifest psychological stress as physical symptoms.”

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

We also hear about many private parts (not just biological ones) of Eve’s life, like her hippie days (she dons a bandanna for a lengthy period), her freewheeling life style of sex and drugs, her therapist’s advice on dealing with her father’s sexual abuse, her ecological concerns (the Gulf Oil spill becomes metaphorically connected to her illness), her feminist activism, particularly her work in fighting violence against women (some gut-wrenching/retching stuff here), and her commendable contributions toward helping Congolese women build the City of Joy.

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The considerable grimness she describes is lessened somewhat by her aggressively spirited tone and the lighter, if you could call them that, elements in her story. There is, for example, her description of the uncompensated, totally dedicated woman whose specialty in treating patients is helping them to fart.

Cancer survivor stories, of course, have become increasingly common, both on the page and stage; there will be few spectators at Ensler’s performance who, if not victims themselves, don’t know someone whose experiences echo much of what they’ll hear. Initiated or not, many will find the cancer-related descriptions painful; things only get harder when hearing about Congolese soldiers’ behavior toward their victims. 

It’s understandable that Ensler would want to introduce some welcome wisecracks into the horrors—like those ripping Kellyanne Conway or our Pussy Grabber-in-Chief—but is it really necessary for us to be asked to rise so we can dance during a hospital room party?

Eve Ensler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

A lot of effort has been put into making In the Body of the World more than just a frequently compelling, intermissionless, 90-minute narrative. While it could conceivably be done on a bare stage, considerable attention has been given to its physical representation, with Broadway superstar director Diane Paulus not only helping to elicit a wide range of emotional and humorous qualities from Ensler but also assembling a first-rate team to create a beautiful visual and auditory environment.

Myung Hee Cho—who designed Ensler’s attractive black ensemble of sleeveless top and tight slacks—has created a deceptively simple set showing only a chaise longue, an elegant Chinese chair, and an oriental chest of drawers topped by a cabinet whose lack of a back panel is revealed when its doors are opened.

Upstage is a neutral rear wall that makes abundant use of Finn Ross’s exquisite video projections of emotional signifiers, from trees, forests, and oceans whose water seems to lap at the stage floor, to images of the Gulf Coast disaster and Ali knocking out Foreman. Jen Schriever's sensitive lighting pulls it all together, while M.L. Dogg and Sam Lerner’s sound design supplies mood-enhancing music in many modes.

The kicker, though, is the coup de théâtre that comes near the end, when—for reasons you’ll have to learn yourself—the stage transforms, as the curtains open wider and wider, into a luscious Asian garden, backed by a large golden idol, which the audience is invited to examine up close and personal. Gorgeous as it is, its decided positivity tends to overwhelm and distract from what’s come before.

  

“Did the Folks Next to Me Like It?”

Often, I’m very aware of how the strangers sitting next to me at a show are reacting. I may hear the audience laughing across the way or behind me, while the man or woman beside me is sitting stone-faced. Or I may notice sniffling while I myself am falling asleep. Since I often wonder how they feel about what we’ve both just experienced I’ve decided to simply ask them and record their reactions by giving the show an on-the-spot grade on the scale of 1-100. I begin this feature, “Did the Folks Next to Me Like It?,” with the reactions of two women, one who looked to be in her 20s, the other in her late 40s, both of them very active theatregoers, to In the Body of the World.

Their mutually agreed-upon grade: “around 70.”

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In the Body of the World

New York City Center Stage 1

131 W. 55^th St., NYC

Through March 25

155 (2017-2018) Review: FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL (seen February 8, 2018)

“Holes Holes Holes . . . ” 

Steph Del Rosso’s Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill—a title guilty of overkill if there ever was one—is an enthusiastically theatrical, downtown counterpart to Kate Benson’s uptown [Porto] at the WP Theater.

Both deal with single women, lonely, adrift, and trying to find not only love but who they are as human beings independent of their relationship with a man. But in order to do so they must first overcome their conditions as victims of the male hegemony. Appropriately, Fill, as we’ll call it, kicks off the Flea’s “Season of Womyn.” 

Sarah Chalfie, Roland Lane. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Presented by the Flea’s resident group of talented young actors, the Bats, in the recently relocated theatre’s intimate downstairs space, the Siggy (named for Sigourney Weaver), Fill follows the journey of self-discovery by 29-year-old, Joni (Sarah Chalfie), a promising photographer whose day job is writing textbooks. 

Joni begins her identity quest following a raucous opening scene in which her rock star boyfriend of five years, Noah (Roland Lane, charismatic), interrupts his concert to call her onstage, not (as she might expect) to propose but so he can break up with her before his adoring fans. Ouch.

Pierced by rejection, Joni goes to a doctor (Joseph Huffman), complaining of the holes she feels in her brain and all over her body. Seeking not only to determine who she is by filling the holes but also hoping to forget Noah and find a “replacement,” she swirls and subways through the urban romantic and sexual landscape, deluged with advice from friends and professionals. What she hears about improving her personal appearance echoes the advice given the heroine in [Porto].

Her adventures are depicted in a series of comically exaggerated scenes, some kaleidoscopically brief, others a little more extended, and all more or less surrealistically heightened and overlaid with Ben Vigus’s insistently rhythmic sound design. The pacing races, the movement is choreographically crisp, and the charmingly executed mugging and double-takes are nonstop.

Director Marina McClure makes clever use of a relatively bare setting by You-Shin Chen, dazzlingly lit by Reza Behjat, with a few movable units, a large, empty frame for one of Joni’s photos, and highly selective hand props. The ensemble moves confidently around the space, showing off their overacting chops, and squeezing Del Rosso’s script for whatever satirical fun it possesses. As my plus-one suggested, the energetic approach is like a throwback to PBS’s 1970’s kids’ show, “The Electric Company.”

Sitting in a restaurant, Joni meets a waiter named Todd (Ben Schrager); following cute chatter about her spicy order, he asks—in one of the play’s best bits—if he can buy her a drink. They then rush through a possible relationship in a series of brief, rapid-fire sentences that end with their inevitable breakup when she discovers he’s not ready to “take care of” her as he’d promised; he'd merely been quoting a line from “the employee’s handbook.”

Joseph Huffman, Sarah Chalfie, Valeria A. Avina. Photo: Hunter Canning.

A far more expansive scene follows when Joni meets a couple, Ray (Joseph Huffman, lots of promise) and Lisa (Valerie A. Avina, totally committed), at another table. Soon, she finds herself on the verge of a threesome with them at her apartment, where things get raunchy, with both Ray and Lisa changing into the kind of erotically charged undies you get at adult boutiques. Kate Fry deserves kudos for these and other terrific costumes.

Ben Schrager, Sarah Chalfie, Monique St. Cyr, Jonathon Ryan, Valeria A. Avina, Joseph Huffman. Photo: Hunter Canning.

When swinging doesn’t prove to be Joni’s thing, she winds up as a contestant on a TV game show, “The Perfect Woman,” produced and hosted by her girlfriend Kate’s (Monique St. Cyr, the whole package) sequin-jacketed fiancé, Doug (Jonathon Ryan, as blonde as they come and funny, too), who claims the show is “feminist” although it’s just the opposite. Standing on a pedestal, lined up with two stereotypical man-pleasers who represent her opponents, Joni struggles to be true to herself in the face of misogynistic questions from the male participants.

Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir, who appear in [Porto], could as easily show up here to insist to the heroine that a woman’s fulfillment should not depend on making a man happy, that every woman should exist on the same terms as every man. In Fill, Joni finds herself when she reconnects with her younger, innocent, and, it would seem, wiser self (Maggie McCaffery), at the time she acted one of the orphans in Annie. Suddenly she’s lonely no more, an ending that offers closure but leans toward the sentimental and simplistic.

The Bats perform Del Rosso’s hour and 15-minute play as if to the manner born, with Chalfie’s bold, animated, and sharply honed performance, ranging from bewilderment to self-assertion, leading the way. She also displays abilities in the dance and singing departments.

While the hilarity potential in Fill is palpable, the play, despite Del Rosso’s obvious sense of humor, is too self-consciously clever to reach the big-laugh, comic level it requires. And clichés like the game show take-off are too familiar to make an impression, no matter how well performed. Fifty-one years ago, I played a character very much like the game-show host in a play called The Contestants at La Mama; even then this kind of parody was dated.

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Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill

The Flea Theater

20 Thomas St., NYC

Through March 4

154 (2017-2018): Review [PORTO] (seen February 7, 2018)

“Boushy from Bushwick”

Plays set in barrooms go back at least as far as those featuring Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Pt. 1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Soon, one of the classics of the genre, The Iceman Cometh will stumble back to Broadway. 

For now, we can imbibe at one of the genre’s lesser gin joints in [Porto], by Kate Benson, whose A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes was one of the cleverest offerings of Off-Broadway’s 2014-2015 season. Unfortunately, Benson’s new play, a quirkily comic cocktail with a bitter twist of feminism, has a kick more closely resembling a Shirley Temple than a Long Island Iced Tea.

    

Julia Sirna-Frest, Jorge Cordova. Photo: Maria Baranova.

Benson’s play, which originated last year at Brooklyn’s Bushwick Starr (also responsible for the headier Miles for Mary, at Playwrights Horizons until February 18), has moved to the Upper West Side’s McGinn/Cazale Theatre, where it’s being produced by the WP Theater in association with the Bushwick and New Georges. Both New Georges and WP (Women’s Project) are devoted to women (or, in the latter case, female-identified) artists.

Julia Sirna-Frest, Jorge Cordova. Photo: Maria Baranova.

Kirsten Robinson’s set, nicely lit by Amith Chandrashaker, places us, unusually, on the bartender’s side of a counter that runs parallel to the front of the stage. The denizens of this “boushy” (Benson’s neologism created from douche and bourgeois) Brooklyn saloon, serving artisanal food (bring on the hasenpfeffer), sit under Edison lights in an unnamed, gentrifying neighborhood. They face the audience from the upstage side, forcing the bartender to find creative ways to keep as open as possible.

Noel Joseph Allain, Julia Sirna-Frest, Jorge Cordova. Photo: Maria Baranova.

That dude is Doug the Bartender (Noel Joseph Allain, artistic director of the Bushwick Starr, believable down to his cool, wine-pouring wrist twist), which is how the others address him. Similarly, they call the joint’s other employee, who dreams of owning a bar that sells books, Raphael the Waiter (Ugo Chukwu, always a pleasure).

Noel Joseph Allain, Julia Sirna-Frest, Leah Karpel. Photo: Maria Baranova.

The names of the regulars are even more precious, their names all suggesting a type of alcoholic beverage: the principal one is the Malbec-drinking Porto (Julia Sirna-Frest, first-rate), a lonely, anxious, well-read woman in her late 30s, tending to chunkiness. Her very act of going to a bar unaccompanied is seen is an act of feminine defiance.

Julia Sirna-Frest, Leah Karpel, Noel Joseph Allain, Jorge Cordova. Photo: Maria Baranova.

Then there’s her overly buzzed, not too bright, garrulous friend, Dry Sac (Leah Karpel, perfectly cast), a beauty who prefers to say “vo-ka” for her preferred drink of vodka and soda. The sole male customer is the Hennepin-guzzling Hennepin (Jorge Cordova, convincing), nice-enough looking, but generally reticent, inoffensive, and otherwise ordinary. Hennepin and Porto’s shared love for particular books (he’s reading David Foster Wallace’s “doorstop” Infinite Jest, which she’s read several times), however, is enough to fuel their motors.

Ugo Chukwu, Julia Sirna-Frest. Photo: Maria Baranova.

And there also are those brackets—[ ]—which not only embrace the title character’s name but denote, in the cast of characters, the amplified "voice of God" narrator (Benson, the playwright), who offers constant commentary, expresses the thoughts of certain characters, and even tells them, with different levels of insistence, how to act. (She also orders Porto to “exeunt,” which means the exit of multiple characters, not one. Quirk or mistake?)

Brackets, as I'm constrained to call her, also seems consumed by the need to explain in the grittiest detail how sausages are created, how goose are force-fed to fatten their livers for foie gras, and how pigs are raised for slaughter. In its indirect way, the play is as critical of our overindulgent eating and other habits as it is about anything else. Good thoughts, of course, but so much time is consumed by Bracket’s verbiage, much of it with the stage’s dark curtain closed and the lights off, you begin to look forward to such moments to catch some z’s.

Julia Sirna-Frest, Leah Karpel. Photo: Maria Baranova. 

Later in the play, a scene shift is created by the interesting device of opening an ovoid hole in the rear wall to take us into Porto’s apartment. Here, thanks to the miracle of magical realism, we observe two more characters, feminist icons Gloria Steinem (Allain) and Simone De Beauvoir (Chukwu), behaving and dressed like feminine gay men as they advise Porto on how to assert her independence as a woman by abandoning any desire to serve a man’s needs. It’s momentarily amusing, but begins to look like padding in this 85-minute play.

I must dutifully report that the play elicited a fair share of laughs—some explicable, some not—the night I went; my own humor meter barely moved. The loudest yucks were heard when, in one of Benson’s surrealistic intrusions, a pair of uncredited characters (presumably played by Allain and Chukwu), the Chorus of Dumb Bunnies, entered, wearing huge, fuzzy rabbit heads (the work of costumer Àsta Bennie Hostetter). Their job is to chant to the lovelorn Porto that she doesn’t need to eat or drink so much since all she really needs is to spruce up her looks, get some moves, and find a man who not only has a penis but knows how to use it. Or, as Benson seems to ask, is that too heteronormative?

Julia Sirna-Frest. Photo: Maria Baranova.

None of this prevents me from commending Evans (who did such fine work with Benson’s A Beautiful Day in November . . . , among others, including the Public’s recent The Winter’s Tale) for her fine-toothed direction, or the uniformly talented ensemble. Benson, a graduate of Brooklyn College’s graduate program in playwriting, didn’t reach me with [Porto] but it’s certain to open the portals to other opportunities in the future.

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[Porto]

McGinn/Cazale Theatre

2162 Broadway, NYC

Through February 25

152 (2017-2018): Review: IMPERFECT LOVE (seen January 31, 2018)

“Imperfect Play”

If you remember the 1998 movie Illuminata, coauthored by John Turturro—who also starred—and Brandon Cole, you’ll have an inkling of what to expect in Cole’s Imperfect Love, the play that actually inspired the film. I say an inkling because there are major differences in the movie and the play, in terms of plot, characters, locale, and even style.

Rodrigo Lopresti, Cristina Spina. Photo: Richard Termine.

Turturro, who earlier directed and starred in Cole’s film script for Mac (1992), which transforms Macbeth into a Sopranos-like tale of Mafia ambition, has maintained his interest in Imperfect Love over the years, as noted in the producers’ billing of “The Left Wing Ltd. in association with John Turturro.”

David O'Hare, Aidan Redmond, Cristina Spina, Ed Malone. Photo: Richard Termine.

Illuminata (38% on Rotten Tomatoes) sets the action in turn-of-the-20th-century New York, and indulges in comedic overkill; it also includes one of Christopher Walken’s trademark bizarro performances in the role of a critic. Imperfect Love, however, which calls itself “A Serious Romantic Comedy,” takes place in Rome in 1899, on the stage of the Teatro Argentina, a still-standing opera house.

Rodrigo Lespriti, Cristina Spina, Ed Malone, David O'Hare. Photo: Richard Termine.

Unlike the movie’s extensive cast list, it includes only five characters, the playwright Gabriele Torrisi (Rodrigo Lopresti), the star actress/manager Eleanora Della Rosa, the leading man Domenica (Aidan Redmond), and two Irish clowns, Marco (Ed Malone) and Beppo (David O’Hara). Two others, Pallone and his wife, Asters, the theatre’s owners, are often referred to but never appear.

Rodrigo Lespriti, Cristina Spini. Photo: Richard Termine.

Much has been made (including in the program) of Imperfect Love’s being inspired by the controversial romantic/artistic relationship of Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of the best-known Italian writers and public/political figures of his times, and the acting genius Eleanora Duse, whose revolutionary style bridged the florid, romantic dramas represented by D’Annunzio and the modern age. In the play, the latter is represented by what were then considered the radical plays of Henrik Ibsen (anachronistically referred to as “the great new writer”), who was writing for the “thinking class.”

Cristina Spina, Rodrigo Lespriti. Photo: Richard Termine.

Cole claims to have done extensive research on these persons; however, perhaps to have more artistic freedom in depicting them and their circumstances, he changes their last names, making the play a drame à clef.

David O'Hare, Aidan Redmond, Cristina Spina, Ed Malone, Rodrigo Lopresti. Photo: Richard Termine.

Even had Cole called them D’Annunzio and Duse, though, the play reflects their real identities in only the broadest fashion, offering just a few historical crumbs that those familiar with one or the other person might appreciate. For the most part, they’re rather generic—the sensitive, tormented writer and the temperamental, jealousy-wracked actress—who could as easily be called Gino and Maria.

Rodrigo Lopresti, Cristina Spina. Photo: Richard Termine.

The most significant historical facts, loosely employed, concern the playwright’s plans to provide his new play—unnamed but presumably La Città Morta—to French star Sarah Bernhardt. She, of course, was the period’s other most famous European actress. Cole’s Della Rosa is deeply resentful of Bernhardt, calling her “that French slut”; it's hard to reconcile such sniping, though, with descriptions of the lofty, ethereal Duse.

Ed Malone, David O'Hare, Cristina Spina. Photo: Richard Termine.

Act One of this two-act drama, which runs an overlong (for its contents) two hours or so, is set upstage of the set for a historical melodrama by Torrisi; we’re in the position of the upstage wall, looking at the empty auditorium of the multi-tiered opera house (painted on the backdrop), with only the backside of a downstage scenic piece between us and the artificial auditorium.

Ed Malone, David O'Hare. Photo: Richard Termine.

In Act Two, the arrangement has been reversed, and we’re now in the Argentina’s auditorium, in front of the scenic piece, which represents an old-fashioned but impressive set showing a large, Hellmouth-like stone sculpture, with downstage steps and platforming. The designer responsible for this rather elaborate scenic investiture—and the period-appropriate costumes—is Academy Award-winner Gianni Quaranta (A Room with a View), who also designed Illuminata.  

Imperfect Love’s principal action concerns the failure of Torrisi’s latest play, which opened to critical blasts the night before, and the insistence of Pallone and Asters that it be closed. The writer and his actors feel they can salvage the play if Della Rosa’s big monologue can be revised enough by that afternoon to get Pallone and Aster’s approval.

To show theatre’s collaborative nature, much of the time is taken up with either Della Rosa and Domenica, Beppo and Marcos, or Della Rosa and Torrisi engaged in spontaneously combusted scenarios that both express immediate circumstances but also have the potential to create dialogue that can be incorporated into Torrisi’s script. In other words, a few scenes can be seen as either natural outgrowths of the play's relationships or improvisational outbursts designed to lead to theatrical discoveries. Thus the play occasionally toys with the relationship between reality and theatre. This is likely a nod to the memories of Pirandello and Beckett, to whom Cole dedicates the play, saying that without their works “this play could not have been written.”

The action rambles along with very few of its attempts at humor hitting their mark. A lugubrious air hovers over the frequent, repetitive squabbling as each character comes to feel somehow betrayed. The actors worry about their futures if Torrisi leaves them to go to Paris; Della Rosa threatens Torrisi’s outmoded style by deciding to do Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Della Rosa is enraged by Torrisi’s rumored abandoning her for Bernhardt, and so forth.

Too often the play seems to be spinning its wheels, with frequently plodding dialogue unrelieved by wit. Director Michael Di Jiacomo’s sluggish, unimaginative staging does little to illuminate the characters or themes, whatever those might be.

Ed Malone, Cristina Spina, David O'Hare. Photo: Richard Termine.

Spina, an Italian actress whose natural accent adds welcome color to her portrayal, isn’t especially convincing as a world-class theatrical star but she brings fine emotional intelligence and some needed fire to her role. Redmond is thoroughly acceptable as the dashing but vulnerable leading man, while the tall, skinny Malone and the shorter, stockier O’Hara as the Irish-accented clowns are good actors stymied by leaden material. As Torrisi, the whiny Lopresti lacks the charisma even a faux D’Annunzio should project.

Ed Malone, Aidan Redmond, Dave O'Hare. Photo: Richard Termine.

For a play that seeks to reflect the paradigm shift from extravagant 19th-century dramaturgy to the realistic, intellectually oriented methods of Ibsen and his ilk, Imperfect Love is too closely aligned with the former and insufficiently so with the latter. What results is, obviously, imperfect.

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Imperfect Love

Connelly Theater

220 E. 4^th St., NYC

Through February 18

151 (2017-2018): Review: JIMMY TITANIC (seen February 2, 2017)

“Unsinkable”

The RMS Titanic may have gone down on the morning of April 15, 1912, but, like one of its famous passengers, Margaret “Molly” Brown, stories about its brief existence have proved to be unsinkable.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The latest vessel sailing into the waters of the fabled liner’s lore is Jimmy Titanic, a one-person play by Irish playwright Bernard McMullan, starring Irish actor Colin Hamell, and directed by Carmen O’Reilly. The play, which has toured Ireland and North America, is now being presented, in conjunction with the 10th Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival, in the tiny W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre located deep in the bowels of Off-Broadway’s Irish Repertory Theatre.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Jimmy Titanic is the nickname of our narrator, Dubliner Jimmy Boylan, who had worked as a riveter on the building of the ship; he also became a member, with his friend, Tommy Mackey, from outside Belfast, of the Guarantee Group, men hired by Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff to accompany the ship as troubleshooters on its maiden voyage.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Jimmy’s in heaven, where he’s pals with the archangel Gabriel, who, at the start, is teaching Jimmy how to fly. Gabriel, an overtly fey, practical joker, has the job of welcoming JDs (“just dead”) to heaven. Jimmy soon notes that there really are no wings here.  In fact, things, more or less, are just as they are on earth, “just longer like.”

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Jimmy, who died at 25 and has been here for 100 years (the play is set in 2012) spends the play’s 75 uninterrupted minutes recounting his experiences, often with a comically sardonic edge, on the night the Titanic went down. Time jumps around nonlinearly and sometimes confusingly, with scenes both in heaven and on earth.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Enacting over 20 characters, with multiple accents, mostly Irish, Hamell’s Jimmy eulogizes the men who built and operated the ship, especially those stoking its boilers; tells of his and Tommy’s efforts to save a coal-shoveling fellow worker, whose physical toil is closely described; provides scads of information about the nature, scope, and aftereffects of the disaster; and reconstructs the panic of befuddled passengers, especially when they’re being herded into the too few lifeboats.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

 He also recalls his arrival, with 1,500 other victims, in a decidedly Christian heaven (regardless of non-Christian passengers, like Benjamin Guggenheim), and introduces us to St. Peter, God (a white-bearded, cigarette-smoking Irish gangster), Jesus, and the apostles, which inspires a discussion on God’s allowing such things to happen. A few laughs are earned but quickly forgotten.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

We also meet onboard celebrities, like millionaire John Jacob Astor and writer Jacques Futrelle, who had just parted forever from their wives; learn about the building of the ship; feel Jimmy’s concern over the blow the catastrophe will have on Belfast’s shipbuilding industry; observe the journalistic responses to the sinking, and so on; we even view the eventual U.S. Senate investigation. Some of this is informative, some of it satiric, some of it touching, especially a well-acted scene where a father tries to save his child from the rising waters in his cabin.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

But the specifics of what happened on that night to remember are too often mingled with snarky diversions, especially the extraneously jokey stuff about Jimmy’s fun life after death, when, known as Jimmy Titanic, he revels in the aura of having been a Titanic victim. He even searches for love at discos—cue the dance sequences—among women who died as long ago as 700 years. Mention the name Titanic, he avers, and girls all over heaven swoon. You just don’t want to meet someone who died of the plague.

The small McLucas stage has been dressed by Michael Gottlieb with a notably effective arrangement of walls that look, even from a few feet away, like authentic, ever-so-slightly rusting slabs of rivet-lined steel. 

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Illuminated by Gottlieb’s dynamic lighting, Hamell’s performance is consistently energetic and charismatic. He doesn’t nail all the accents, though, especially the Americans, and it’s occasionally difficult to separate one character from another. That, of course, is the price one pays when portraying so many roles in rapid, back-and-forth discourse with no physical alterations or props.

Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Regardless of the holes in Jimmy Titanic’s script and performance, it’s an unsinkable tale that scratches a few icebergs but still manages to stay afloat. 

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Jimmy Titanic

Irish Repertory Theatre/W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre

132 W. 22^nd St., NYC

Through February 18