145 (2017-2018): Review: UNTIL THE FLOOD (seen January 20, 2016)

“Black Life/White Cop”

Award-winning actress/playwright Dael Orlandersmith (Forever) owes a debt of gratitude to Anna Deavere Smith’s playbook in creating her one-woman play, Until the Flood, soon to be joined in repertory at the Rattlestick with another solo show, Draw the Circle. The work was originally commissioned and produced by the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in 2016.

Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Robert Altman.

Smith, of course, is the remarkable actress/writer/activist/social scientist/journalist, who has given us such remarkable solo performances as Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities. In such works, Smith interrogates major, racially motivated conflicts by recording interviews with people representing all sides of the issue and then speaking their words in uncanny replications of their tone and manner.

In Until the Flood, Orlandersmith, a robust African-American woman with a high forehead and her hair in red-tinted dreadlocks, represents a small number of people she interviewed in St. Louis in 2015. Her subject is the widely reported killing a year earlier of black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO.

Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Robert Altman.

Opening the piece is a prologue sequence playing, as we see the words projected, the actual radio transmission between the Ferguson police dispatcher and Officer Wilson regarding a theft of cigars from a convenience store. Wilson’s search for the suspect, of course, ended tragically with Michael Brown’s death. Like similar cases in the not that distant past, the event inspired local and national protests, gave life to the Black Lives Matter movement, and put the spotlight on many similar cases in which black citizens were harassed, beaten, or shot by policemen, usually white.

Following this setup, Orlandersmith, using only a chair and an occasional prop, and backed by Nicholas Hussong’s projections, portrays a sequence of seven black and white individuals (Fires in the Mirror had 26!) offering, in their own words, their thoughts and feelings about the Brown shooting as well as their own race-related experiences. Regardless of whether her characters stand or sit, Orlandersmith alters her accent and body language accordingly.

Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Robert Altman.

Each person—none of them celebrities—offers a thorough, sometimes eloquent explanation and defense of his or her perspective, their opinions ranging from outraged liberalism to narrow-minded white supremacism. As in Smith’s work, the artist takes no side; no single point of view predominates, not even among the black persons. 

The goal is to demonstrate the multiplicity of positions on the spectrum of racial attitudes and opinions regarding police actions when it comes to dealing with black people. There may be no major surprises but it’s definitely healthy to hear the diversity of views so humanly represented. And Orlandersmith even manages to inject a note of love and hope into the generally angry maelstrom of responses.

Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Robert Altman.

Straightforwardly directed by Neel Keller, Until the Flood is performed in a neutral setting--dressed with a typical street shrine to the victim--designed by Takeshi Kata, lit by Mary Louise Geiger, augmented by Justin Ellington's effective music and sound, and costumed by Kaye Voyce, who provides simple items of clothing to differentiate one person from the other. 

Orlandersmith’s characterizations are all apt, both vocally and physically; she’s as able to replicate the mannerisms of a black kid with hip-hop moves, speech, and attitude as, for example, a retired black school teacher, a barber with a professorial vocabulary, or a hulking white guy who thinks little of telling his little boy to fight back against a “nigger” child.

Distinct as these people and Orlandersmith’s characterizations are, they rarely have the emotional power that Smith achieved. Smith was extraordinary at capturing not only vocal tones and gestures, but at duplicating stutters, stammers, and other verbal lapses. She also capitalized on reproducing telling minor tics that might otherwise go unnoticed.

After all these years, minor moments in Fires in the Mirror still rush back, like the way Nation of Islam representative Minister Conrad Mohammed, sitting over a cup of coffee, rhythmically flicked his packets of sweetener to settle their contents. Until the Flood never creates the kind of theatrical presence such minute touches brought to Smith’s performances.

Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Robert Altman.

Also, none of Orlandersmith’s interviewees, while all expressive and interesting, are especially memorable, nor are their stories as indelible as those in Smith’s work. The lack of celebrity personages, like Al Sharpton in Fires in the Mirror, is another drawback, since having recognizable speakers would help lighten the overall tone and prevent it from a general sense of anonymity.

Whether or not Dael Orlandersmith continues to develop the piece, audiences will receive a first-rate performance addressing a compelling problem in American society. It doesn’t attempt to offer solutions but if it can keep the conversation going it will have done its job.

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Until the Flood 

Rattlestick Theater

224 Waverly Place, NYC

Through February 18

144 (2017-2018): Review: BALLYTURK (seen January 19, 2018)

“What’s It All About, Enda?”

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Like Disco Pigs, his linguistically impenetrable two-hander now being revived at the Irish Rep, Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, currently at St. Ann’s Warehouse, challenges audiences to break through its surrealistic shield to pick up whatever crumbs of meaning it may now and then deign to share.

Mikel Murti. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

Walsh’s dreamlike combination of slapstick farce, ritual, violence, dance, music, mime, intellectual abstraction, colloquially accessible and lyrically poetic dialogue, Beckettian overtones (Endgame and Waiting for Godot come to mind), and narrative confusion is performed, under Walsh’s own direction, with such exceptional conviction that the play’s meaning becomes secondary to its physical and vocal expression. 

Walsh is reportedly concerned with creating atmosphere more than meaning in Ballyturk, which he certainly achieves with his three actors, only one of them—Mikel Murfi—from the original production in 2014 at the Galway International Arts Festival. Murfi plays 2, the older of the two main characters, while the role of 1, first played by Cillian Murphy, and that of 3, created by Stephen Rea, were afterward taken by, respectively, Tadgh Murphy and Olwen Fouéré; all do brilliantly.

The men occupy a massive, doorless room designed by Jamie Vartan, who also did the costumes, and memorably lit by Adam Silverman. It looks like the interior of a gray, concrete warehouse, with furniture piled up at the sides, including wardrobes packed with shoes, clothing, and a Murphy bed.

Tadhg Murphy, Mikel Murfi. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

There’s an exposed shower and toilet, a fridge, a microwave, a 45 rpm record player, piles of 45s, red balloons, and a wall filled with childish drawings. All sorts of detritus come into play, including a cuckoo clock and an alarm clock, both of which actively insist on the crushing imminence of time and thus, the brevity of life.

A curtain hides the lower part of the upstage wall behind which is an electric light spelling the name of the fictional town of “Ballyturk.” Also visible are numerous drawings of the town’s residents, many of whose names are mentioned, and several of whom are targeted with darts.

A remarkable cacophony of sound (thanks to Helen Atkinson)—including original music by Teho Teardo, and heavily rhythmic musical selections (like ABC’s “The Look of Love” and Blancmange’s “Living on the Ceiling”)—are heard as 1 and 2 eat crisps and cereal while plowing through a script marked by multiple blackouts and sharp tonal shifts.

Mikel Murfi, Tadgh Murphy. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

Both 1 and 2 wear ordinary grunge when they’re not stripped down to their jockey shorts, the latter inspiring considerable use of talcum powder. References to hair are frequent, 1’s being worn in a ponytail while 2’s is bright red and swept up in matching waves. 1, it should be noted, has a propensity for epileptic fits and bashing his head bloody against the wall.

Their precisely timed, thickly Irish-accented banter, much of it shouted, is often delivered in bursts of rapid-fire verbiage as they talk of and portray the various townspeople, reviling them and their town.  Birds, flies, and cats people the images, and 1’s frequent handling of a kitchen knife suggests that someone has been murdered. Sometimes, amplified voices from the other side of the walls are heard as 1 and 2 listen closely to these persons in an outside world they can only imagine.

Mikel Murfi, Tadgh Murphy. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

Who 1 and 2 are, where they are, what their relationship is, or why they behave as they do aren’t explained. For all the physical realism of their environment, none of what’s happening is intended to be real in a conventional sense. This becomes especially clear when, in a remarkable visual effect I’ll refrain from describing, 3 appears, cigarette in hand. Her appearance is unforgettable, Olwen Fouéré being a striking-looking, deep-voiced woman of a certain age in a pale peach-colored trench coat, her gorgeously resplendent white hair spilling onto her shoulders.

 Olwen Fouéré. Photo: Teddy Wolff.

The manic pace, which makes much of what the actors say indecipherable, now slows as 3 takes control over the men’s lives, interrogating them, singing the old Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne standard, “Time after Time” into a mic that descends from above, and bringing refreshing clarity to Walsh’s image-laden prose, if not necessarily to its purpose. The impression is that she is Death, come to take one of them back with her. That accomplished, the continuation of life’s cycle is touchingly embodied in a surprise ending.

Ballyturk, which runs an hour and a half, is a decidedly well-done work of absurdist theatre. What’s it all about? Damned if I know (and damned if I care).

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Ballyturk

St. Ann’s Warehouse

45 Water St., Brooklyn, NY

Through January 28

143 (2017-2018): Review: THE UNDERTAKING (seen January 18, 2018)

“Psychopomp and Circumstance”

The Civilians, founded in 2001, calls itself an “investigative theater company” whose productions grow out of field research, the work seeking “to dynamically engage vital social, cultural, and political questions.” In their newest work, The Undertaking, written and directed by Steve Cosson, they turn their attention to the ever-popular subject of death; the result, though, too often borders on the deadly. The work reportedly sold out at the 2016 BAM New Wave Festival but less than one half of Theater B at 59E59 was filled the night I went.

Aysan Celi, Dan Domingues. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Taking a cue from artists like Anna Deavere Smith—who turns tape-recorded interviews into hot-button, topical performances, portraying all the people she’s spoken to—Cosson (in collaboration with Jessica Mitrani) has created a collage of multiple interview-based episodes, with all the characters played by two versatile actors.

Dan Domingues. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

His metatheatrical premise is that writer-director Steve (Dan Domingues) is recording a session with a Brazilian media artist named Lydia (Aysan Celik)—apparently based on Cosson’s collaborator, Mitrani—at her sparsely furnished, sleekly modern studio (smartly designed by Marsha Ginsberg and lit by Thomas Dunn). Its walls are created out of slender strips of white fabric; its look is enhanced by potted plants and animal skin rugs.

Dan Domingues, Aysan Celik. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

As Steve fumbles with his recording device, the Latin-accented Lydia chats about her thoughts on death, the dialogue having the kind of rambling, disconnected, “real-life” quality familiar from taped conversations. Lydia, talking about her anxieties, refers to the “vine of death,” ayahausaca, and its use in shamanistic rites that make a subject feel the imminence of death.

A pattern of self-referential conversations between Steve and Lydia, interwoven with taped bits from Steve’s interviewees, constitutes the 80-minute play’s basic structure. The lights pop off and on for each new scene, with Steve and Lydia always being revealed in some new space, as Steve strives to come to terms with his fears about mortality. His obsession is closely connected to his mother’s suffering in a nursing home from MS, whose symptoms he may himself be subconsciously experiencing.

Dan Domingues, Aysan Celik. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The first new episode begins as Steve, accompanied by weird sound effects (good work by Mikhail Fiksel), assumes the persona of someone named Bryn, who describes his near-death experience following a horrific skiing accident.

Dan Domingues. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

As time passes, someone talks about how bodies are embalmed; a hospice nurse discusses the process of dying; British philosopher Simon Critchley talks about actors doing our dying for us and about immortality as discussed in Plato’s dialogues; Dinah, a cancer victim, discusses what she went through, along with a psychologist, Tony, who oversaw a drug-induced treatment seemingly designed to replicate what dying feels like; and Everett Quinton, longtime collaborator of famed Ridiculous Theatrical Company actor-writer-director Charles Ludlam, considers his reactions to the deaths from HIV of Ludlam and others close to him.

Dan Domingues, Aysan Celik. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

This being a multimedia production, much of it involves all three walls of the set being splashed with Tal Yarden’s still and video projections. Most memorably, footage from French writer-director Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, starring Jean Marais as a man who descends into the afterworld, are projected as the action downstage proceeds. Lydia, inspired by Orphée and Aristophanes’ The Frogs, improvises Steve/Orpheus’ own transition to the other side, with Lydia, like Heurtebise, the chauffeur in Orphée, being his psychopomp, or escort to the afterlife, as a means to overcoming his terrors.

Aysan Celik, Dan Domingues. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Grim as its subject is, some room is found for laughter in this earnest but soporific work. Domingues and Celik, fine actors both, do their best to keep Cosson’s morbidities alive, but nothing expressed is at all original or provocative. Nor are the random bits and pieces well enough integrated to provide a cohesive response to Steve’s problems.

Dan Domingues, Aysan Celik. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

There’s little about Steve and Lydia to make us care about them, the people whose words they speak are abstractions. The Undertaking comes off as a string of random thoughts on something most of us already think about regularly, if not as intensely, all of it stuffed into a half-baked, if well-done, experimental theatre exercise. For enlightenment, more might be gained from a conversation about the grim reaper while passing around a bong.

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The Undertaking

59E59 Theaters/Theater B

59 E. 59 St., NYC

Through February 4

142 (2017-2018): Review: HINDLE WAKES (seen January 17, 2018)

"There's No Fathoming a Woman"

For my review of Hindle Wakes please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

141 (2017-2018): Review: JOHN LITHGOW: STORIES BY HEART (seen January 16, 2017)

“Teller of Tales”

Designer John Lee Beatty has enclosed John Lithgow: Stories by Heart, a tour de force one-man show for the Roundabout Theatre Company, within an expansive, unadorned, even slightly sterile wood-paneled room with coffered ceiling, artfully lit by Kenneth Posner. Suggesting anywhere from a private men’s club to a university conference room, it would have been better to scale it down to more intimate proportions, or even to present the show in a smaller venue, like the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.

John Lithgow. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Nonetheless, it’s a tribute to his talent and charm that the tall, graceful Lithgow, still lithe and impishly boyish at 72 despite his receded, towering, silver hairline, is able to entertain his audience for two hours (with one intermission) on such a stage with little more than a rug, an upholstered chair, and a stool.

Tieless, in a gray suit and white shirt (credited to Jess Goldstein), Lithgow performs his own script, which he’s been developing for a decade. In it, he “reads” two stories to us while also discussing the art and power of storytelling via an autobiographical account centering on his late father, Arthur Lithgow, whose memory the show enshrines. The most poignant part of his personal narrative concerns the healing effect the star’s reading had on the spirits of his father (and mother) during Arthur’s last days.

John Lithgow. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The elder Lithgow, a distinguished college professor, actor, producer, and director (who staged all of Shakespeare’s plays), loved reading stories to his children, especially those in a 1939 collection called Tellers of Tales, edited by W. Somerset Maugham. The actual book (apart from a glass of water), proudly displayed on several occasions, is the only hand prop he employs.

John Lithgow. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Act One is devoted to a 1925 story by Ring Lardner called “Haircut,” for which Lithgow removes his jacket and pulls out his shirttails to represent a tonsorial tunic. Using nothing but a stool, he portrays a Michigan small-town barber called Whitey giving a “newcomer” to town a shave and a haircut as he gossips about some local characters, particularly a man named Jim Kendall. Whitey, oblivious to the cruelty of Jim’s behavior, makes chattily amusing anecdotes of Jim’s hurtful pranks, behavior that eventually led to Jim’s violent demise.

John Lithgow. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Lithgow describes the story as “a light comedy of small-town American life that slowly turns into a gruesome tale of adultery, misogyny and murder.” It’s as much a character study of the garrulous barber’s obtuseness as it is a reflection of small-town life. In Lithgow’s remarkably deft performance (excellently directed Daniel Sullivan), as Whitey laughs and giggles at Jim’s exploits, it also perfectly captures the way barbers went about their business in the old days.

We watch Lithgow’s marvelously precise mime of jacking the customer’s seat up or down by stepping on a lever, searching his shelves, deploying hot towels, applying powder, skin bracer, and cologne, stropping a straight razor, applying lather, pinching the man’s nose as he shaves him, and using only scissors to trim his hair.

John Lithgow. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Remarkably, you could close your eyes and think a Foley sound artist was creating all the effects of stropping, clipping, snipping, and the like, each one perfectly accurate, the timing precisely integrated into the dialogue, yet produced entirely within the narrow compass of Lithgow’s mouth. Whatever you think of the story he tells, Lithgow has found a terrific medium for displaying his acting finesse.

In Act Two, Lithgow again brings personal experiences to bear in introducing his second short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” a high British farce from 1935 by P.G. Wodehouse, in which he limns half-a-dozen British characters, including not only a couple of upper-class women but a parrot. Before performing it, the star wisely warns us that, while he’s always thought it “flat-out hilarious,” “when it comes to humor, one man’s rose is another man’s garlic.”

Although the splendidly acted piece does, in fact, inspire considerable laughter, I didn’t exactly laugh my head off, as Lithgow suggested might be the case for some. Which is not to admit his sprightly recital isn’t consistently amusing.

“Uncle Fred Flits By,” theatrical enough to have been dramatized for two TV shows many years ago, centers on Pongo Twistleton and his crackpot Uncle Fred (a.k.a. Lord Ickenham), both of them characters in a number of Wodehouse stories about the latter’s mischievous troublemaking, sort of a benignly comic version of Jim Kendall in "The Haircut." The situations described in “Uncle Fred Flits By” transpire when Uncle Fred induces his uneasy nephew to visit his old suburban property.

After the pair seeks refuge at the house owned by a Mr. Roddis during a storm, Fred finagles his way in by claiming he’s there to clip the parrot’s claws, after which he tells one fib after the other to whomever he encounters. First, there’s Wilberforce Robinson, a “pink chap” who jellies eels for a living and is in love with Julia, a Roddis relation whose parents object to the match. Fred passes himself off to Robinson as Roddis.

He continues the deception, changing his nonplussed nephew’s identity as suits his purposes, when Julia and her parents, the Parkers, arrive. Things get increasingly complicated by the barefaced fabrications he piles up like Pelion on Ossa as he seeks to resolve the Parkers’ objections to Robinson and Julia’s romance.

Lithgow’s delectable performance deploys simple mannerisms, impeccable British accents and voices, and overt mugging, to instantly differentiate one person from another. This is a character actor at the top of his form, his personal likeableness enhancing the appeal his long career has established for Broadway audiences.

John Lithgow has always been one of our most dependable actors, regardless of his medium, but he doesn’t always get the opportunity to use all the weapons in his arsenal. Even though the stories he tells in John Lithgow: Stories by Heart are not precisely cream of the crop they serve ably to show what he’s been hiding.

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John Lithgow: Stories by Heart

American Airlines Theatre

227 W. 42^nd St., NYC

Through March 4

140 (2017-2018) Review: LaBUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL (seen January 12, 2017)

"Three That Don't Match"

 

Probably no prominent, contemporary, American playwright has been as significantly supportive of the one-act or short play form as Neil LaBute. In recent years, his own contributions have been seen regularly at 59E59 Theaters at the annual Summer Shorts Festival of New American Plays and the LaBute New Theater Festival.

Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The latter, originating at the St. Louis Actors’ Studio, is back with its third program since 2016, when it showcased six one-acts. Last year’s show had four plays, and this year’s has three. The plays, selected from a national competition, are all making their New York premieres. Each is directed by John Pierson, who has staged at least one play in each of the previous LaBute Festival productions. 

The plays occupy 59E59’s tiny Theater C, in which the audience faces designer Patrick Huber’s unnecessarily substantial set (lit by Jonathan Zelezniak) of marbled gray walls; it represents a hotel room in the first play, a teenage girl’s bedroom in the second, and a woman’s living/dining room in the third. I say unnecessarily because the scenic realism in such a confined space is oppressive and tends to accentuate the performers’ actorish behavior. If you feel like you’re actually in someone’s bedroom, it’s a bit uncomfortable when they act like they’re on a stage. 

Chauncy Thomas, Spencer Sickmann. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Also, a simpler, more imaginative set would not require the rushed but extensive scene change this one gets between the first two plays as stagehands shuffle about in the semi-dark, inches away from us. The night I went a bunch of props hastily placed behind the bed came crashing noisily to the ground and had to be reset.

Spencer Sickmann, Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

In past showcases featuring LaBute plays, his have usually been the most sharply honed. Not so in this one, which leads off with his mediocre “Hate Crime,” about two anonymous gay men who are plotting a murder. The dominant, overbearing one is Man 1 (Chauncy Thomas), dressed in a white bathrobe, who plans the crime with the subservient Man 2 (Spencer Sickmann). (The pretentious tic of giving characters nameless names is the bane of anyone having to write about them!) 

Their victim is the guy Man 2 is on the verge of marrying, the aim being for them to cash in on the insurance for which Man 2 will be eligible after his new spouse dies. It’s hard to tell just how seriously LaBute wants us to take his clichéd situation, or how much to notice his tongue pushing at his cheek, but none of it is funny or believable. Man 1 comes off as a violent psychopath and Man 2 a simpering dodo, although Sickmann makes him far more credible than Thomas does Man 1.

“Hate Crime,” which, dramatically speaking, stops almost before it begins, is more of a situation than a play. 

Kelly Schaschl, Autumn Dornfeld, Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

More dramatically satisfying, and socially relevant, is James Haigney’s “Winter Break,” which deals with a situation one can actually imagine taking place in an American household. Joanna (Kelly Schaschl), a pretty, girl-next-door teenager, from an Episcopalian family, has converted to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, calls herself Aisha, and is heading for a few weeks in Turkey. 

Her mom, Kitty (Autumn Dornfeld), is distraught and tries to talk her out of it; even more upset and ready to do whatever he can to stop her is her Islamophobic brother, Bailey (Sickmann). Despite her protestations, he fears she’ll be radicalized and become a jihadist. 

Kelly Schaschl, Autumn Dornfeld. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Although Haigney gets a sprinkling of laughs out of this situation, it’s a serious dilemma that’s concerning enough to be dramatized, even on the level of family melodrama offered here. Haigney’s treatment, which offers no easy answers, manages to convey the main points about which most non-Muslim audiences might be worrying. 

For all the equanimity most of us would like to be able to muster when considering how we might handle a similar situation, it’s hard not to sympathize with the fears a family faces when a non-Muslim child converts, throws on a hajib, calls herself Aisha, and heads for the Middle East.  

Kelly Schaschl, Spencer Sickmann. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Sickmann shows considerable versatility in switching from the doofus of “Hate Crime” to the overwrought sibling of “Winter Break,” and Dornfeld is satisfactory as the nervous mother, but the promising Schaschl (a St. Louis high school senior) could use more bite.

Following a 10-minute intermission, the program concludes with Carter W. Lewis’s satirical farce, “Percentage America.” It begins as a dinner date between Andrew (Thomas) and Arial (Dornfeld) in the latter’s Washington, D.C., home; it's the kind of first date based on a dating service pairing satirized so often in movies, TV, and plays. (Red flag: first date in a participant’s house and not at a neutral space?) Soon, the couple begins to reveal the truth behind the personal fibs created for their social media profiles.

Autumn Dornfeld, Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

These include Andrew’s having said he was working on his doctorate, an untruth he confesses by revealing that there’s no doctorate involved; he’s merely a pharmacist. This blooper gets an undeserved laugh since, as someone should have noticed, you can’t become a pharmacist without a doctorate! Isn’t there some other profession that would have served? 

Autumn Dornfeld, Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Anyway, seeing how the issue of truth arouses their libidos, the pair (both of them liberals) decide to spend the evening deciphering the percentage of truth in television news; their fact-checking odyssey also serves to further warm them up erotically. (“Truth? I am so hard for this now,” says Andrew.)

Autumn Dornfeld, Chauncy Thomas. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The percentage of truth, of course, turns out to be quite small indeed. This emerges when the intrepid Andrew and Arial, from the comfort of her living room, choose to track down what a girl (Schaschl) accused of hurling verbal abuse at President Trump (unnamed) in the White House Rose Garden actually said. 

Their cardinal rule is to rely only on phone calls and avoid using the untrustworthy Internet. Along the way, the distorted accounts of what happened—such as how the girl might be a terrorist—are reported by various anchors (all played by Schaschl) spotlighted at one side of the stage.

The potential for pertinent journalistic satire is strong but the treatment—which manages to get in some tired jabs at Trump—is far too broad, goes on too long, has barely any sting, and isn’t as funny as it seems to think it is. Once Lewis makes his point, he makes it over and over again. The energetically performed “Percentage America” is a 15-minute sketch inflated to a half-hour play.

Given the hundreds of one-acts submitted to festivals like this, I’m always surprised at how infrequently anything truly impressive comes along. The theatre appears to be a harder taskmaster at creating short-form work than TV, for example, where so many quality dramas and comedies are squeezed into a half-hour (or shorter, with commercials) series episode, even those done in a single, conventional, living room setting. Shouldn’t theatre be taking the lead, not lagging behind?

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LaBute New Theater Festival

59E59 Theaters

59 E. 59^th St., NYC

Through February 4