"Is This A Room"
Monday, October 21, 2019
GUEST REVIEW 16 (2019-2020): GAMES
"En Garde, Foil, Retreat" **
I am sitting down at my computer. I am typing. Thrust, kerplunk,
tap tap tap go the keys!
I pause for a moment to take a sip of my coffee. It is hot, and it
penetrates my throat like fire flying through a narrow tunnel. It makes me
sweat, but I don’t let it bother me. I am a writer.
 |
| Renita Lewis, Lindsay Ryan. All photos: Hayley Procacci. |
Portraying the athletes are two actors, Renita Lewis and Lindsay
Ryan, who narrate events as they occur, with some dialogue interspersed. It
reminds me of the type of project I might have done for extra credit in school
when challenged to dramatize the subject we were studying. In fact, I did one,
not for the Holocaust but for Hiroshima.
Director Darren Lee Cole’s minimalist approach lays the writing and performances bare. The set consists of only a few screens
that the actors stand behind when they characterize anyone but their respective
athletes, creating cool silhouettes (design by Carter Ford).
The one-note performances are dramatic to the point of dullness.
There is barely a shift from the intense stares you see in the promotional
photos. In their defense, the actresses are given the difficult task of
bringing life to tedious dialogue. They’re more successful in finding the
physicality of their characters, doing a nice job embodying their respective
sports. Be prepared, though, for a giant chunk of lines, delivered from a
fighter’s stance, repeating “Riposte! Parry!” and other fencing jargon, ad
nauseum.
 |
| Lindsay Ryan. |
Since the story is the play’s saving grace, let’s get into it.
Helene Mayer (Ryan) is a fencing prodigy who wins an Olympic gold medal at 17
in 1928. Crushed by her loss in the 1932 Games, she is desperate to regain her
title in the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics. When the Nazis take power, Jews
are banned from participating.
Meanwhile, Gretel Bergmann (Lewis) follows a similar trajectory.
As a world-class track-and-field athlete, she is crushing high-jump records in
Europe, left and right. She is a favorite to snag the gold medal in the
1936 games until the opportunity to compete is ripped from the Jews.
 |
| Renita Lewis. |
Thanks to political upheaval, Mayer does get her shot at the gold
after all. When the U.S. threatens to boycott the Games because of the
treatment of the Jews, Hitler invites Mayer to play for the German team. She is
a token Jew, meant to prove that Jews are doing just fine under this
regime.
Through it all, Mayer refuses public commentary. “I am a fencer,”
she states stoically, claiming repeatedly that politics have no place in
sports. In one harrowing scene, we get a rare glimpse into her head. She comes
into the aisle where she must shake Hitler’s hand. In her fantasy, she is
crushing his fingers and bringing the dictator to his knees, challenging him to
remember her name.
Unable to overcome the pressure of being the only Jew representing
the German team, Mayer is devastated on taking the silver medal (if it were a
real sword fight, she says, the person in second place would be dead). She is
unable to celebrate that, in the end, it is three Jewish women (the others
represent Hungary and Austria) standing on the podium. Instead, as she is
awarded her medal, she (infamously, as I later read) gives an enigmatic “Heil,
Hitler” salute.
At least Mayer got to compete, says Bergmann, whom Mayer
encounters several times over the years. Unlike Mayer, who insists on working and competing alone, Bergmann is outspoken over the disgraceful treatment
of non-Aryan races. Ultimately, she flees to New York to clean houses for the
wealthy.
While Lindsay Ryan is the spitting image of photos of Helene
Mayer, Renita Lewis is an African-American actress portraying Gretel Bergmann,
who was white—a choice perhaps meant, in part, to remind us of Jesse
Owens, a famous American high-jumper of
color in the 1936 Olympics. Even a black man in America held more status than a
Jewish woman in Germany.
As Bergmann was also portrayed by an African-American
actress in the U.K. production of Games, this is not simply a case
of colorblind casting, which is made all the more apparent by some hard-to-watch scenes.
When we witness a white child on the street call Bergmann a “shitty Jew,” or
see Bergmann as a black woman on her knees scrubbing the floors when she should
be competing for championships, the discomfort and horror in our gut serves as a caution that history is repeating itself.
The production makes no secret that it wants us to pay attention
to the parallels between Hitler’s regime and Trump’s administration. Thankfully,
it doesn’t hit us over the head with the comparison. The question of how a
leader in power defines the master race, and the influence this holds over the
nation’s actions and discourse, remains at the forefront.
I’m not sure if it’s to the play’s credit or detriment that I
eagerly hit Google after I left to read as much as I could about the
extraordinary athletes represented on stage. I learned that Bergmann
eventually received an official apology from Germany, as well as a stadium named after her in Berlin. She broke her vow to never return, in 1999, with a visit
to her hometown, but died in Queens at 103, just two years ago. Mayer returned
to Germany after the war and continued to compete. She died young of breast
cancer, and was inducted into the U.S. Fencing Hall of Fame.
In my reading, the more I learned more about these women’s lives,
the more robbed I felt of the opportunity to experience their complexity on
stage. For example, the criticism Helene Mayer received regarding her loyalties
might have been explored. While the play is limited by its narrative structure,
there is plenty of time within the hour-long monologues to layer nuance and
light into these grim stories.
Games won critical acclaim
overseas largely because of its relevance to the issues we are battling now of
gender, identity, and race. Still, I like to get my doses of political
finger-wagging through more human storytelling.
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St, NYC
Through November 24
Through November 24
Elyse Orecchio studied musical theatre at Emerson College, acting at CUNY Brooklyn
College, and English Linguistics & Rhetoric at CUNY Hunter College. She has
worked in nonprofit communications for more than a decade. She lives in
Sunnyside, Queens, with her husband Joe, kids Theo and Melody, and three cats.
eorecchio@gmail.com @elyseorecchio
Thursday, October 17, 2019
93 (2019-2020): Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (seen October 12, 2019)
"That Is One Strange and Interesting Plant"
For my review of Little Shop of Horrors please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.
92 (2019-2020): Review: DUBLIN CAROL (seen October 17, 2019)
"Binge Watching"
Dublin Carol, Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s (Girl from the
North Country, The Night Alive) chamber play from 2000, seen
at the Atlantic in 2003 starring Jim Norton, is now getting a quality revival
at the Irish Rep. The play reminds me of how going to the theatre almost daily can
expose similar subjects or images in several works within a very short space of
time. |
| Cillian Hegerty, Jeffrey Bean. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
The substance abused in Dublin Carol, like The
White Chip, is alcohol, and the abuser is John Plunkett (Jeffrey Bean), a painfully
lonely, middle-aged, Dublin undertaker. Set entirely on Christmas Eve, 1999, it’s
located in a funeral home’s office, designed by Charlie Corcoran, its drearily paneled
walls decorated with casual, seasonal reminders: a string of colored lights, an
Advent calendar, a tiny, artificial tree.
 |
| Jeffrey Bean, Cillian Hegerty. |
Slowly, as John, surely desperate for a friendly ear, chats
up a new employee, Mark (Cillian Hegerty), suggesting the Ghost of Christmas Future,
we learn what they do for a living. We discover as well how indebted John is for his job to Mark’s uncle, Noel,
their kind, hospitalized boss. Also gradually
exposed is John’s bibulousness, which comes fully into focus in the second of
the intermissionless, 90-minute play’s three parts. In that part, taking place
later in the day, John, is visited by Mary (Sarah Street), his downbeat
daughter, like a Ghost of Christmas Past, whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years.
 |
| Sarah Street, Jeffrey Bean. |
John, learning from Mary that her mother—his wife, Helen, from
whom he’s been separated for many years—is dying of cancer, reluctantly agrees
to pay her a final visit at the hospital, although he’s hesitant about handling
her funeral. Father and daughter recall the past, mentioning John’s alienated son,
Paul, a motorbike repairman living in England. The emphasis is on John’s failure
as a dad and husband because of his incessant pub crawling and fall-down drunkenness.
Much of John’s pathology, his deceptions and rationales, resemble those of Steven
in The White Chip.
 |
| Sarah Street. |
In the third part, John, waiting for Mary’s return, and dreading
his marital reunion, is already in his cups when Mark arrives. Mark recounts the
reaction of his girlfriend to his having just ended their relationship, which
he’s starting to regret. As the men toss a few back, John advises Mark that he’s
better off without her, for some reason guiltily recounting an adulterous love
affair he had with Carol, a widow he bedded more because she paid for his booze
than because he loved her. Mark, angry at this bit of “wisdom,” is stopped from
leaving when John discloses his wife’s condition.
 |
| Jeffrey Bean. |
As the pair gather up the ornaments, John offers a
clinically horrific description of an alcoholic’s hangover. It helps make Dublin
Carol what would be a perfect match for The White Chip in an AA
repertory of contemporary temperance dramas. At the end, of course, this being
a Christmas drama with people named Noel, John, Mary, Paul, and Mark, a hint of
redemption hangs in the air.
 |
| Jeffrey Bean. |
Essentially plotless, Dublin Carol is a garrulous character
study about the ravages of spirits (alcoholic, psychological, and Dickensian), redeemed
by McPherson’s Irish-colored prose and the realistically nuanced performances
of its actors, smoothly directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. Bean is a convincingly
self-flagellating souse, but, without much of a dramatic goal to fight for, there’s
little about the man to make him notably different from countless other woozy,
puking, remorseful stage drunks.
I can almost imagine Dublin Carol being relocated to a
pub where you must fight the urge to flee while listening to the outpourings of
a barely sympathetic barfly going on about what brought him to this pass. And
isn’t that what AA is for?
Irish Repertory Theatre
132 W. 22nd St., NYC
Through November 10
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Guest Review 15 (2019-2020): PAINTED ALICE: THE MUSICAL
“Sunday in LIC With
Alice” ***
By Elyse Orecchio (guest
reviewer)
 |
| Tana Sirois, Meghan Ginley. |
To get to the performance space for Painted Alice involves
winding through multiple exhibits at the Plaxell Art
Gallery in Long Island City; pretty cool
to get a free art show along with your theatre tickets. The show is performed
in an enormous room in the back of the 12,000 square-foot gallery (eat your
heart out, Manhattan) where there’s ample stage space and the audience watches
from chairs set up on bleachers.
Presented by Long Island City Artists, Inc. by special arrangement
with Greg Schaffert, Painted Alice is a love letter to LIC, where
warehouses converted into art galleries neighbor waterfront high-rises with
skyline views and the beautiful Gantry
Plaza State Park, and where struggling artists walk their dogs
alongside the wealthy. The titular character Alice (Tana Sirois) paints with
the Citi building as a
backdrop, as seen through her window (original art created for the show by
Eileen Coyne).
The concept is nifty: a modern-day Alice In Wonderland where
Alice is an uninspired artist who falls through her canvas and enters an
alternate universe in which she encounters odd characters who must teach her
life lessons before she can return home. A zany show about art in an eclectic
art gallery: great start.
Painted Alice features some fun ideas:
Alice’s childhood drawings come to life and lecture her, she dances a duet with
an Italian painter in which they both wear one roller skate, the audience gets
to munch on brownies, there’s exercise-ball choreography, and the front row
acts as a jury by holding up paddles of famous paintings (I had Girl With a Pearl Earring).
William Donnelly’s (book and lyrics) and Michael Mahler’s (music
and lyrics) songs are upbeat and entertaining, led by music director Jonathan
Bauerfeld at the piano and enhanced by Conor Keelan’s orchestrations. Guillermo
Laporta’s lighting and projections bring gusto to Alice’s wonderland. Director
Edjo Wheeler’s staging makes creative use of the space, though the show’s
pacing needs more snap.
The many characters in Alice’s orbit are played by Jack Bowman,
Molly Kelleher, Adam B. McDonald, and Jamie Shapiro, who all have a lot of work
to do and do it very well. Kelleher is given the bulk of the larger-than-life
roles, including the flamboyant art agent who channels Frasier
Crane’s agent Bebe, and an insult-hurling
incarnation of a mermaid Alice drew as a kid, costumed by Olivia Vaughn
Hern.
The piece refreshingly focuses on a female artist, and I don’t
even want to make it a thing that the primary romantic relationship is between
two women, because the show doesn’t. Unfortunately, what begins as the
progressive story of a young woman’s career as a painter surprisingly
devolves into typical romcom trappings. Alice’s girlfriend Dinah (Meghan
Ginley) is strangely unsupportive of the time Alice puts into her work and
wishes she’d be more of a priority for her partner. It was hard to appreciate
the pretty song imploring Alice to “make room in your life for love” when I was
distracted wondering what the heck she did wrong other than try to meet a
deadline.
As plot events get “curiouser and curiouser,” so does clarity on
what the production is aiming to achieve. It seems that Alice goes through a
whole lot of trouble just to learn that love is more important than her work
(huh?), and that it’s no big deal to back out of a job commitment if it means
being true to yourself (huh??).
The prevalent phrase I heard whispered among the crowd on my way
out was “that was fun.” You may not leave the theatre with any more meaningful
revelations than Alice had, but chances are you’ll have had a pretty good time.
The Plaxall Gallery
5-25 46th Ave., Long
Island City, NYC
Through Dec 1
Elyse Orecchio studied musical theatre at Emerson College, acting at CUNY
Brooklyn College, and English Linguistics & Rhetoric at CUNY Hunter
College. She has worked in nonprofit communications for more than a decade. She
lives in Sunnyside, Queens, with her husband Joe, kids Theo and Melody, and
three cats. eorecchio@gmail.com @elyseorecchio
90 (2019-2020): Review: GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD (seen October 14, 2019)
"On the Road Again"
Instead of all those annoying titles that think it clever to
use only lower case letters, most recently runboyrun, Catya
McMullen’s GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD insists on using all caps. The play
itself is sometimes loud—to the point of yelling—but it definitely doesn’t call
for headlines.
The few critics who’ve commented on it thus far have had more or
less positive reactions, but I found myself unmoved, incredulous (to use an au
courant word), bored even, and—apart from a few good zingers—unable to find it
as amusing as did many others in the audience.
 |
| Diana Oh, Layla Khoshnoudi, Claire Siebers. All photos: Jeremy Daniel. |
Their car belongs to Emma (Claire Siebers, intense), an
unmarried, successful, sexually overactive, emotionally insecure writer with
mom issues. She shares the driving with Whitney (Layla Khosnoudi, quirky), a
lesbian, also unsure of herself, who’s just quit her job as a chef, and is
weird enough to have built a urination device for Gretchen. Gretchen (Diana Oh,
expansive), in the back seat, is the married, potty-mouthed mother of a kid
with a butt fixation. She looks like she’s about to pop any minute, her belly
so big she could be the next octomom.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi, Diana Oh, Claire Siebers. |
As the narratively flat drive down South proceeds, the
women share a yada-yada barrage of remembered love affairs, sexual encounters,
and other personal detritus. Much of what humor there is either childishly scatological
or naughtily erotic, like “Who’s the oldest person you’d have sex with?” (Even Gretchen’s
husband’s texts are preoccupied with sex and poop.)
 |
| JD Taylor, Diana Oh. |
Over the course of 90
minutes, there’s also a lot of thematic chatter about friendships versus family
and marriage. Various clichéd experiences bring the friends together, tear them
apart, and bond them together again, more closely than before.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi, Diana Oh, Claire Siebers. |
Gretchen and her husband, Jeremy (JD Taylor), who live in Brooklyn’s
Park Slope, need the time to look at a Connecticut house they may be buying. Jeremy
insists she not go to the funeral in her condition but she defies him, a decision
that may have some momentary dramatic merit but, as anyone with a half a brain
knows, is senseless from a practical perspective. Sure enough, the play
proceeds to demonstrate this, albeit unsatisfactorily.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi. |
Credulity is thus strained along with any sympathy for
Gretchen, whose behavior otherwise doesn’t go a long way to making us admire
her. Given to descriptive dialogue about female parts and hemorrhoids, she unconvincingly
turns eloquently contemplative when delivering Georgia’s eulogy. There are
multiple other such moments, as when Whitney, having stopped off at a trailer
park she once lived in, talks to a tree.
 |
| Diana Oh. |
Mack truck-like contrivances keep coming down the road, like
Emma’s reuniting in North Carolina with a handsome ex, a filmmaker named Harlan
(Quincy Dunn-Baker), the pretentious kind who can’t bear when Emma says “movie”
instead of “film.” When, standing in a graveyard, the couple let old tensions
flame into hormone-stimulating anger, you know exactly where this train is
headed.
 |
| Quincy Dunn-Baker, Claire Siebers. |
And the scenes, inevitably, when car troubles appear on the
road back home, only confirm what you’ve been expecting all along. Whatever incredulity
you’ve been feeling here rises to the plane of exasperation.
Alexis Distler’s multipurpose set, efficiently lit by Cat
Tate Starmer, encompasses both interiors and exteriors, consisting of dark-toned
walls that allow props or wall hangings to identify specific locales. Since much
of the action takes place on the road, there’s a central section that opens to
reveal two rows of car seats, backed by the unchanging image of a rural
highway.
 |
| Claire Siebers, Diana Oh, Layla Khoshnoudi. |
Giovanna Sardelli (Finks, one of my fondest EST
memories) provides crisp staging, at one point introducing a clever sequence
of film-like jump cuts, with blackouts and rock music helping to move quickly from
one tableau to another. She hasn’t found a way, though, to deal technically with
a prop car lacking seatbelts or to cover for why Gretchen has to go through all
sorts of contortions squeezing her baby boulder into the rear seat, as if cars
with movable front ones for just such situations hadn’t been invented.
GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD isn’t as far gone as the
person in its title, but it survives more because of infusions from its able
cast than from the nutrients in its dramatic bloodstream.
Ensemble Studio Theatre
545 W. 52nd St., NYC
Through October 27
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