|
Design Credits
Rights and Policies
Staff Login
Rent
the Helen Mills Theater for performances, screenings, and readings.
|
|
Extreme Makeover
by Deidre McFadyen
Man Is Man reviewed April 23, 2004
|
|
|  | |
| Brad Heberlee (Galy gay) and Jennifer Bruno |
| Photo Credit:Prospect Theater Company |
| How malleable is identity? Can a man shuck his name and history at will? Do social forces have the capacity to grind him down and rebuild him as someone else? And if identity is interchangeable, does that make each individual ultimately dispensable? Those are the questions at the heart of Bertolt Brecht’s Man is Man, which has been given an illuminating staging by the Prospect Theater Company.
The setting is 1925 colonial Kilgoa, a funhouse version of Kipling’s India. The happy-go-lucky porter Galy Gay (the delightful Brad Heberlee) sets off one afternoon to buy fish for dinner for his wife. Meanwhile, four carousing soldiers ransack a pagoda for beer money, abandoning one of them on the property in a drunken stupor. Using alcohol and cigars as an enticement, the trio convinces the witless porter to impersonate their waylaid comrade. What starts as a lark turns sinister as the porter is compelled to forsake his old identity and then, in a creepy sequence of events, comes to embrace his new, brutal self.
 | | |
| Marnye Young in the foreground and Patricia Spahn in the backgound |
| Photo Credit:Prospect Theater Company |
| Director Jackson Gay’s staging, using a lucid new translation by Marcella Nowak, observes Brechtian conventions. Erik Flatmo’s set is no-frills: a makeshift, wooden riser with two clotheslines to hang crudely painted canvases that signal scene changes. Thomas Dunn’s assertive lighting, Jenny Mannis’s whimsical costumes, and Aaron Meicht’s inspired sound combine to create the overheated theatricality of the production. The acting is broad and flamboyant, dissuading the audience from easy empathy with the characters.
The power of this stagecraft reaches a peak in the play’s goose-bump-inducing final tableau of the war machine, with the former porter and his fellow soldiers astride a rolling tank, whose fearsomeness is not diminished by the fact that it is fashioned from bicycle wheels, a set of handlebars, and a packing tube.
|  | |
| Brad Heberlee (Galy Gay) |
| Photo Credit:Prospect Theater Company |
| The acting in this 15-member ensemble is top-notch. Charlie Chaplin’s influence on Brecht is palpable in the fine physical comedy of Paul Paglia, Mark Mattek and Austin Jones as the three soldiers, whose varying sizes echo Laurel and Hardy, and in Dara Seitzman’s droll turn as the enterprising Widow Begbick, whose seduction of the tyrannical sergeant Bloody Five (Frank Liotti) is one of the play’s standout scenes. Matthew Humphrey as the lost soldier, Jeraiah Jip, shines in a scene featuring a T-bone steak that he is conflicted about devouring.
Also excellent are the choreography (by Nathaniel Nicco-Annan) and the original music (by Aaron Meicht), particularly the Widow Begbick’s signature song about survival that Seitzman performs in an Edith Bunker warble.
Brecht wrote an early version of Man is Man in 1920, at age 22, and then revised it at least ten times between 1924 and 1938, which accounts for some of its discordant threads. Gay wisely does not try to reconcile the tensions, letting the notes of farce and political didacticism both sound. “Life on this earth is perilous play,” warns the Widow Begbick in the prologue to Act II. The Prospect Theater Company’s Man is Man to its credit, captures both the peril and the play.
 Click here to view the printer-friendly version of this review
|
|
West End Theatre
|
Category: Drama
Written by: Bertolt Brecht
Directed by: Jackson Gay
Produced by: Prospect Theater
Opened: April 24, 2004
Closed: May 16, 2004
Running Time: 2 hrs. 30 mins.
Theater: West End Theatre
Address: 263 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
Yahoo! Maps Directions
| |
|
Tickets: $15.00
|
|
|
Creative Team
Written by: Bertolt Brecht
Translated by: Marcella Nowak
Directed by: Jackson Gay
Assistant Director: Jeff Stanley
Produced by: Prospect Theater Company
Light Designer: Thomas Dunn
Assistant Lighting Designer: Marnie Cumings
Original Music and Sound Designer: Aaron Meicht
Set Designer: Erik Flatmo
Assistant Scene Designer: Jeewon Paek
Costume Designer: Jenny Mannis
Assistant Costume Designer: Brian C. Peeke
Choreographer: Nathaniel Nicco-Annan
Dramaturg: Marcella Nowak
Cast
Nathaniel Nicco Annan as Mah Sing
Jennifer Bruno as Galy Gay's Wife
Brad Heberlee as Galy Gay
Matthew Humphreys as Jeraiah Jip
Austin Jones as Jesse Mahoney
Frank Liotti as Bloody Five
Mark Mattek as Polly Baker
Paul Paglia as Uriah Shelley
Dara Seitzman as Widow Begbick
Joe Vena as Mr. Wang
Sarah Elliott as Pin-up Girl
Robyn Ganeles as Pin-up Girl
Lisa Louttit as Pin-up Girl
Patricia Spahn as Pin-up Girl
Marnye Young as Pin-up Girl
Crew
Stage Manager: Terri Anna Ciofalo
Assistant Stage Manager: Kevin McCafferty
Technical Director: Ronnie Tobia
House Manager & Spotlight Operator: Brian C. Peeke
Spotlight Operator: Sherod Green
Sound Operator: James H. Wiggins III
Wardrobe Supervisor: Pam Cane
Master Electician: Ji-Youn Chang
Graphic Designer: Michael G. Hemmenway
Carpenter: Ames Adamson
Carpenter: Aaron Lemon-Strauss
|
|
|
|
|
|
