102. Review: THE ETERNAL SPACE (seen November 18, 2015)

“The Tragic Fate of the Most Majestic Train Station the World Had Ever Known”

Stars range from 5-1.

If you’re a New Yorker, imagine how you’d feel if you were to learn that Grand Central Station was going to be demolished so an office tower and sports arena could be erected overhead. Most likely, you’d feel as if a vital part of New York were being torn away, if not by the terrorism of a 9/11 attack then by the terrorism of capitalist expansion and architectural vandalism. You might also feel that a vital part of your own existence was being destroyed. Such a scenario is unlikely, of course, now that such edifices are protected by the Landmarks Preservation Act, but that act didn’t exist in 1963 when the soaring arches, gigantic windows, and steel, marble, and concrete structure of the monumental Pennsylvania Station—designed by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910—began tumbling down, aged only 53. In fact, it was Penn Station’s tragic demolition that prompted the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and catalyzed a national preservation movement.

Clyde Baldo, Matthew Pilieci. Photo: Mike Scully.

THE ETERNAL SPACE, a two-hander by Justin Rivers at the Lion Theatre, takes us back to 1963 when the three-year demolition of what the playwright calls “the most majestic train station the world had ever known” began. The play, which has been seen in several staged readings dating to 2012, imagines a series of confrontations between a rough-edged, young construction worker, Paul Abbot (Matthew Pilieci), and a cultured older man, Joseph Lanzarone (Clyde Baldo), who teaches English at Xavier High School in Brooklyn.

Clyde Baldo, Matthew Pilieci. Photo: Mike Scully.

Joey, as Paul calls him, represents one of the many who decried the Cathedral-like station’s loss, and whose practice of sticking up protest posters interferes with Paul’s work, thereby setting up their initial confrontation. Paul, for his part, is a budding photographer who occupies himself when he’s not doing demolition work by taking photos of the cavernous place’s every nook and cranny, which he says he’s doing as a favor for his wife. Despite his obsessive picture taking, he seems unable to acknowledge that he’s performing a major act of historical documentation. Otherwise, Paul says he couldn’t care less about taking down the sooty old pile. Joey, however, like a stalker, continues showing up at Paul’s photo sessions, even as early as 6:00 a.m., annoying the hell out of him, but obsessively trying to convince him of the significance of the station’s obliteration.

Clyde Baldo, Matthew Pilieci. Photo: Mike Scully.

The men’s conflicting goals and temperaments, their personal connections to the space, and their respective attitudes toward the past and present, the traditional and the modern, create a series of talky, artificial clashes, some interesting, others bordering on the didactic. At one point their conflict is expressed in an act of physical violence (contrived, I thought), but they ultimately reach a rapprochement and Paul’s photos are preserved as a book for which Joey writes the eloquent preface. The play gives the impression that these men existed, but they’re actually fictional, even though other photographers did document the demolition; in fact, a book of photos by Peter Moore, The Destruction of Penn Station (2001), served Mr. Rivers as his initial source of inspiration.

Matthew Pilieci. Photo: Mike Scully.

Under Mindy Cooper’s direction, Mr. Baldo, as the prim, articulate, and somewhat pedantic English teacher, whose fading sight adds a melodramatic touch to the developments, overplays the character’s prissiness a bit, while Mr. Pilieci’s laborer with the soul of an artist goes in the opposite direction to emphasize his salt-of-the-earthiness. Interestingly, a video clip of the two giving a reading from the play reveals more grounded and less stagey performances from both.

Matthew Pilieci, Clyde Baldo. Photo: Mike Scully.

What makes THE ETERNAL SPACE most worth visiting is its striking visual conception. Set designer Jason Sherwood has made highly creative use of the Lion’s tiny stage by creating a forced perspective row of white, arched columns along each side with a central arch upstage, allowing the projection of 1,000 stills—combined with video photography—picturing the gradual dismantling of the massive institution. The all-encompassing images show the work of Norman McGrath, Aaron Rose, Ron Ziel, Alexander Hatos, and, of course, Mr.Moore. Brad Peterson is responsible for the exceptional projections, and Zach Blane assists with his varied lighting scheme. This is the kind of show that might have benefitted from the technical resources at 3-Legged Dog on Greenwich Street in the Financial District.

Matthew Pilieci, Clyde Baldo. Photo: Mike Scully.

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THE ETERNAL SPACE

Lion Theatre

410 West Forty-Second Street, NYC

Through December 6

101. Review: ABYSS (seen November 16, 2015)

"Gone Girl"

Stars range from 5-1.

It’s become increasingly rare for translations of recent plays from non-English-speaking countries to appear on New York stages. Despite the plethora of local companies, many with their own niche, none specialize in producing foreign plays. So the Play Company must be applauded for producing ABYSS, a minor but promising play by the German-born playwright-director Maria Milisavljevic, in her own translation, at Theaterlab. ABYSS won the 2013 Kleist Promotional Award for Young Dramatists when it premiered as BRANDUNG in Berlin. ABYSS subsequently was seen in Vienna, Toronto (the Tarragon Theatre commissioned its English version), and London, each production being revised by the playwright to adapt it to the expectations of local audiences.

Carter Hudson, Flora Diaz. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

In adapting ABYSS, Ms. Milisavljevic says she sought to make what German audiences found stimulatingly ambiguous more immediately comprehensible by clarifying the storyline and character intentions. She noted that, if English-speaking audiences “hadn’t gotten ‘what it all meant’ by the end of the night, I had failed to do my job as a storyteller.” Ambiguities do remain, especially at the end, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect the playwright to entirely abandon what gives her writing its distinct tone.

Flora Diaz, Nicole Balsam, Carter Hudson. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

ABYSS is written as a slightly elliptical narrative told by I (Flora Diaz), a Serb who shifts from storytelling to dialogue when she participates in the action. I tells the tale of Karla Richter, a 24-year-old German woman in an unnamed German city that includes a Russian quarter. One recent night, Karla went out to buy cheese for making pizza and never returned to the ménage à trois arrangement in which she’d been living with I and Vlado (Carter Hudson), a man whose father was Serbian and mother Croatian. Living with them is I’s younger sister, Sophia (Nicole Balsam). The script calls the actor playing Vlado “He” and the actress playing Sophia “She.” “He” also portrays Jan, a German computer expert with whom I falls in love. “She” performs as several characters, male and female. The character transformations are presented mainly through vocal and physical changes.

Carter Hudson, Nicole Balsam. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The action concerns the distress caused by Karla’s mysterious disappearance; the dismissive attitude displayed by the German police, who take their sweet time before seriously investigating; the lack of media attention toward Karla, whom they insultingly label “a party girl” when they do cover the story; and the efforts of Vlado, I, and Sophia to sleuth the situation themselves, including the use of social media and a website set up by Jan. Their efforts lead to a vodka-swilling Russian immigrant (Ms. Balsam) Vlado knows from his youth who directs them to a couple of Russian women living in a construction trailer; this brings about their confrontation with an elderly German homeless man (Ms. Balsam) who possesses Karla’s yellow bag, and who may or may not have something to do with her disappearance,

Nicole Balsam, Flora Diaz. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Secrets and lies are exposed, loyalties and priorities questioned, and lovers’ jealousies provoked. The poetic prose is filled with images of water, ice, fire, boots, and diving into the abyss (of despair?). Obscure but suggestive elements keep intruding, such as Vlado’s constantly polishing his knife to help him focus, or Sophia’s frequent interjections of “Do It Yourself” instructions on how to slaughter, skin, prepare, and cook a large rabbit.  Then there’s Vlado’s tendency to scream (on the page, at any rate) and recite lines from a once-popular German ballad about Nis Randers, whose frightened mother tried to prevent him saving a man from a shipwreck during a violent storm; this tic may be the result of his childhood trauma of seeing his mother die when her house was burned down during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In fact, he seems to see in the eyes of the aged German man the embers of a similar experience. Elements like these tend to give the piece an artsy tone that draws attention from the central narrative. Hints of the difficulties faced by Balkan and Russian refugees living in Germany emerge, but they remain hints, valuable mainly as background color.

Director Maria Mileaf, working in a simple, white-walled room more suitable for play readings and rehearsals than full productions, does a good job of creating an engrossing and suspenseful mood. Set designer Neil Patel provides a spare, minimally furnished environment for the several locales, and the tension generated is helped considerably by Matthew Richards’s imaginative use of limited lighting equipment (much of it in the form of fluorescent lights), and Bart Fasbender’s effective sound design and original music. Two TVs inform us of how much time is passing during the search: “Three days”; “It’s been seven days. A whole week”; “Two days later. Ten days,” etc.

Ms. Balsam, with her multiple roles and accents, makes the most of her opportunities, and Ms. Diaz is reasonably effective in a part that requires her to keep shifting from direct address to character portrayal. Weakest is Mr. Hudson, who brings a modicum of charm to Jan, but makes the suffering Vlado little more than an uninteresting cipher with a tendency to mutter into the abyss of his beard.

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ABYSS

Theaterlab

357 West Thirty-Sixth Street, NYC

Through December 6

100. Review: INCIDENT AT VICHY (seen November 13, 2015)

"The Curious Incident at Vichy in the Nazi-Time"

Stars range from 5-1.

For my review of INCIDENT AT VICHY, please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

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INCIDENT AT VICHY

Pershing Square Signature Center/Signature Theatre

480 West Forty-Second Street, NYC

Through December 20

99. Review: SHEAR MADNESS (seen November 10, 2015)

“Shave and a Haircut, She's Dead”

Stars range from 5-1.

Talk about out-of-town tryouts! SHEAR MADNESS, the endearingly (and enduringly) silly audience participation murder-mystery farce that just opened at New World Stages, clocks in (according to the Guinness Book of Records) as America’s longest-running comedy, even though that record has been compiled elsewhere than in New York. (A few plays have had even longer runs in Europe.) Created by Bruce Jordan and Marilyn Abrams for a Lake George, NY, dinner theatre in 1978, it proved so successful that it was soon being shown in Boston (where it’s been running for 36 years), with companies springing up around the country in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere, and as far away as Buenos Aires, Athens, Istanbul, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, and God knows where else, grossing a reported $232 million. Mr. Jordan and Ms. Abrams have been involved with what has evolved into a cottage industry ever since; Mr. Jordan, who staged the original, is still its director.

Jordan Ahnquist (standing), Adam Gerber. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

This low-brow, highly funny novelty may have delayed its appearance on a local stage because it feared the snooty disdain it would receive from Manhattan audiences and critics. However, judging from the way the crowd I watched it with warmed up when invited to figure out whodunit, they could as easily have been from Podunk as from Park Avenue. I even spotted the New York Daily News critic raising his hand to pitch in with a comment. (He was ignored.)

Jordan Ahnquist, Patrick Noonan. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Resembling a fast-paced, high-energy mashup of Agatha Christie murder mysteries (like The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in history), the board game “Clue,” The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the louder door-slamming TV sitcoms (you can practically hear a laugh track in your head), SHEAR MADNESS is actually a translation of a 1963 German play called Scherenschnitt by Paul Pörtner, who died in 1984.

Kate Middleton, Jeremy Kushinier. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

It’s set in the brightly lit baby blue, pink, and brick unisex hair salon of the title (lighting and set by Will Cotton), where the flamboyant Tony Whitcomb (Jordan Ahnquist, replacing Jonathan Spivey) cuts men’s hair (and flirts with everything in pants) and gum-chewing, bleached blonde, sexpot ditz Barbara DeMarco (Kate Middleton—no, not that one) handles the ladies. Customers include Mike Thomas (Adam Gerber) and Nick O’Brien (Patrick Noonan), who turn out to be detectives staking out the clip joint; a fashionable Park Avenue socialite, Mrs. Shubert (Lynne Wintersteller); and Eddie Lawrence (Jeremy Kushnier), a shady “used antique dealer.” In one way or the other, everyone’s a stereotype, which is part of the fun; then again, amusing as Mr. Ahnquist is when he’s not overdoing it, the gay hairdresser shtick tends to date the piece.

Jordan Ahnquist, Lynne Wintersteller, Jeremy Kushiner, Kate Middleton, Adam Gerber, Patrick Noonan. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

As per the show’s practice elsewhere, local references are to the city where the show is being performed. Thus Shear Madness’s address is at Ninth Avenue and 50th Street, down the street from the theatre. In D.C., however, it’s in Georgetown. Only time will tell whether jokes referencing things like Hell’s Kitchen will go over in touristy New York. If anything, the show could use more and better Big Apple yocks.

Kate Middleton, Lynne Wintersteller. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The inciting incident is the murder by barber shears of Isabel Czerny, the famed pianist who lives upstairs and whose incessant playing drives Tony nuts. Her killing precipitates an investigation, with Tony, Barbara, Eddie, and Mrs. Shubert all being potential suspects. The fun comes from the way the show breaks the fourth wall to allow the audience to participate. The characters are asked to quickly repeat everything that’s happened since the play began, and the audience responds—often raucously—whenever something doesn’t jibe with what they’ve seen. So make sure you watch closely if you want to join in.

Jordan Ahnquist, Patrick Noonan, Kate Middleton. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

After the intermission (the play runs two hours), the audience asks questions of the participants, until, finally, a vote is taken as to whom everyone thinks is the guilty party. As in Edwin Drood (and Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16, which had a different onstage jury at each performance), someone else could be singled out nightly, with the actors prepared to respond with a separate scenario. The actors, especially Mr. Noonan, who handles the investigation, must know their material intimately in order to answer the very specific questions and comments made by observant theatregoers. (It helps that Mr. Noonan has been with the show, off and on, since 1998.)

Patrick Noonan, Jordan Ahnquist. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Many of the laughs are of the wink-wink, self-consciously groan-worthy type, with characters who should know better nuking the language and setting off radioactive puns, double entendres, and malapropisms, which seem to explode in every speech. What do I mean by groan-worthy? How about the close friendship between two women being called a Lebanese relationship? I think I heard a groan. Or someone claiming she knows her constipational rights? Was that another one? Or correcting someone who calls a Steinway a Steinberg by saying they mean Steinbeck? Groan away, but there are so many you’ll eventually have to crack a smile.

There are no cellphones (the play maintains a 1980s ambience), but the wisecracks include a steady stream of up-to-the-minute jibes at pop culture (the Kardashians and Bill Cosby, natch) and presidential candidates such as Clinton, Carson, Trump, and Bush. As in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, the company has to keep the jokes as fresh as the 6:00 news. The entire cast rises to the challenge of combining improvisation with set-in-stone dialogue and over-the-top characterizations.

Mr. Noonan told a New York Times reporter covering the show that “People aren’t going to walk out of the theater a better person . . . but they will walk out in a better mood.” True. Judging by the response when I attended, SHEAR MADNESS may have found yet another home for its worldwide franchise.

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SHEAR MADNESS

New World Stages

340 West Fiftieth Street, NYC

Open run

98. Review: LOST GIRLS (seen November 8, 2015)

"All Is Not Lost"

The daughter apples haven’t fallen far from the mother trees in LOST GIRLS, John Pollono’s (Small Engine Repair) engrossing blue-collar family dramedy at the Lucille Lortel, in an MCC Theater production. (It originally was produced at Los Angeles’s Rogue Machine Theatre.) There’s a lot to appreciate here, both in the writing and performances, but there’s also a humongous plot contrivance that requires tiptoeing through the plot to avoid giving away the spoiler.

We’re in the living room-kitchen of a plain little house in Manchester, New Hampshire, as a dangerous snowstorm rages outside and Maggie Lefebvre (Piper Perabo), a harried woman in her mid-30s, is rushing to get to work at her Bloomingdale’s outlet store sales job. Out the door she goes only to come back in a moment later, raging: “Goddamn motherfucking sonofagoddamn cunt!” This is close to the perpetually angry Maggie’s standard level of discourse, raised here to a slightly more profane level because her old Honda Accord (her “caarh” as they say in New England) is gone, apparently stolen. Soon enough, her live-in mom, Linda (Tasha Lawrence), a blowzy, bleached blonde still given to wearing thongs, enters; once she begins cursing—I mean talking—we see where the seed that became Maggie comes from.

Piper Perabo, Tasha Lawrence. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Turns out that Maggie’s high school sweetheart and ex-husband, Lou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a recovering alcoholic with whom she maintains a tense relationship, is the state trooper coming over to make out the report, and that the couple’s teenage daughter—a girl half their own ages—didn’t go to school that day. Two plus two equals the daughter’s having run away and taken the Honda. The chip on chain-smoking Maggie’s shoulder grows exponentially larger over the play’s 90 intermissionless minutes: she’s broke and afraid of losing her job, her daughter and car are gone, she bickers with her mother, and Lou arrives accompanied by Penny (Megghan Fahy), his pretty, young, piously Christian wife (whom the dependably sarcastic Maggie unfairly calls “a boring, fuckin’ retard”). As the evening wears on, the reasons for Maggie and Lou’s breakup and why there’s still glue bonding them together come sharply into focus.

Piper Perabo, Tasha Lawrence, Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The sniping snottiness of Linda and Maggie, the restrained reactions of Lou, who struggles to maintain his demeanor, and the upbeat sweetness of Penny, who takes the insults aimed at her in stride, make for both dramatic and comic fireworks, although there’s a limit to how much one can take of Maggie’s nonstop nastiness. Once the family dynamic is established the stage right side of the living room flips around to turn the space into a Connecticut motel room, where a teenage girl (Lizzy DeClement) and boy (Josh Green), enter, brushing off the snow.

Josh Green, Lizzy DeClemente. Photo: Joan Marcus.

It doesn’t take long before we discover that she’s a 16-year-old running away to meet a much older man in Florida, and he, the same age, is being paid to drive her there, even though he’s a good, clean-cut kid, who’s taking a big chance in doing something so stupid. She has the same potty-mouthed snarkiness as Maggie, but the boy’s crazy for her anyway. Despite the idiocy and danger of their adventure they share a cautiously optimistic view of what the future holds in store. One thing leads to another and, ultimately, they make a blood vow that if, some day . . . no, I’ve got to stop here before the spoiler police get me. Suffice it to say that the play returns to Maggie’s house, there’s a power outage just as Lou gets a frightening report of a car accident, that the conclusion borders on the overly sentimental, and that not all you see is what you may at first think it is.

Tasha Lawrence, Meghann Fahy, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Piper Perabo. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The play gains greatly from Jo Bonney’s incisive direction and its potent performances. Ms. Perabo brings fierce defiance and subtle vulnerability to Maggie; Ms. Lawrence is razor sharp as her slash and burn mother; Mr. Moss-Bachrach proves appealingly sympathetic as Maggie’s former spouse, struggling to remain cool in the face of her antagonism; Ms. Fahy is winningly effective in showing Penny’s struggle to do the right thing; Ms. DeClement brings fearsome rebelliousness to the manipulative runaway; and Mr. Green is convincingly innocent and boyishly compliant as her love-addled accomplice.

Richard Hoover’s blue living room interior and seedy hotel room, Theresa Squire’s authentic costumes, Lap Chi Chu’s versatile lighting, and Daniel Kluger’s mood-setting sound design all make effective contributions. Mr. Pollono’s vulgarity-peppered, New England-accented dialogue crackles with sharp ripostes, and his characters—despite some exaggeration—are sharply enough defined to make them both entertaining and plausible. While the setup leading to the big reveal employs the kind of clever trick that seems increasingly contrived the more you think about it, LOST GIRLS would probably be lost without it.

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LOST GIRLS

Lucille Lortel Theatre

121 Christopher Street, NYC

Through November 29

97. Review: MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS LIVE! (seen November 5, 2015)

"When Worlds Collide"

Stars range from 5-1.

For my review of MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS LIVE! please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

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MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS LIVE!

New World Stages

340 West Fiftieth Street, NYC

Through November 29

Peter Story. 

Peter Story. 

Peter Story. 

96. Review: SHANK'S MARE (seen November 6, 2015)

"Shanks for the Memory"

Stars range from 5-1.

For my review of SHANK'S MARE, please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

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SHANK'S MARE

La Mama Experimental Theatre

66 East Fourth Street, NYC

Through November 15

Please note that there are several differences between the photos below and the production itself.

CB Goodman, Sarah Plotkin, Koryu Nishikawa V. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto.

Koryu Nishikawa V. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto.

Josh Rice, CB Goodman, Sarah Plotkin. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto.

Josh Rice, Sarah Plotkin. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto.

Hye Young Chyun, Josh Rice, Gabrielle Schutz, Niva Alush, CB Goodman. Photo: Ayumi Sakamoto.