The British theater company Filter joins the seemingly endless list of groups that bill themselves as exciting, new breeds of theater collectives for the single reason that they collaborate across disciplines. Granted, Filter
Instant Karma
On-Air Alien Invasion
You'd be hard pressed to find a piece of theater that ignited more mass hysteria than the now-infamous 1938 production of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Transforming the fictional story into a realistic-sounding radio broadcast, director Orson Welles convinced listeners all over the country that aliens had invaded a small New Jersey town called Grover's Mill, and the result was widespread panic. The story's general premise is most likely something that most audience members will know when they walk into the Kraine Theater for the performance of Dan Bianchi's take on the tale. But what he does with it
Love Stories
The Blue Heron Theatre closes out its 17th season with the world premiere of John Dufresne's earnest new play, Trailerville. A small story with big ideas, Trailerville aspires to extraordinary heights, with Dufresne presenting an intimate story of life, love, family, obligation, and the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. Set against the backdrop of Labor Day weekend, Trailerville follows the intersecting lives of nine characters in a small-town Louisiana trailer park. At the heart of the play are four very different love stories. Merdelle Harris struggles to hold on to love and the man she loves as she cares for her husband Bobby, who suffers from Alzheimer's. Merdelle and Bobby's neighbor, the oft-married Arlis, grapples with his love for Merdelle, longing to pursue her but not wanting to take advantage of Bobby's condition.
Arlis's daughter, the hard-living Pug, is finding love again with the good but ill-tempered Bromo. Pug's young son, Theron, is experiencing the pains of first love with Kristie, a sweet girl who is about to leave town.
Dufresne is an accomplished novelist. With Trailerville, he proves that he has a gift for narration and storytelling. However Trailerville is a play, not a novel, and therein lies the problem. Dufresne has overwritten the play. It's show and tell
Down the Generations
We all know that blue eyes and baldness are determined by our genes, and that even some mental illnesses are passed on by our parents. However, is something as un-diagnosable as loneliness genetic, or is it simply a result of growing up among lonely people? ANDHOW!'s production of Andrew Irons's tragic play Little Suckers examines this idea and more through the story of a family torn apart by hurricanes, both physical and emotional. The tale starts off in the present, and travels occasionally back in time, through a series of flashbacks brought about by the "youngest" twin Lindsay's reading of her mother Morrie's memoirs.
She soon finds that while the document does much to capture her mother's deep lonesomeness, it has its flaws. It is, after all, her mother's point of view, sometimes told the way she would have liked for things to have gone rather than relaying facts. Another layer is added by the fact that it was transcribed by Morrie's late-in-life true love, Bucklin. His editing and writing style often distort truths to cover up for his sweetheart's past indiscretions.
The flashbacks tell the story of a family turned inside out. Lindsay and her "older" twin brother, Kennedy, are haunted by their parents' late-night fights, and so they use their wild imaginations to escape. Kennedy dreams of becoming a samurai warrior, and Lindsay spends most of the play having tea with her imaginary friends, using them as a sort of familiar audience for her tales.
It is clear that Kennedy is the self-starter of the two; even in her recollections, Lindsay takes a backseat to Kennedy's wild adventures. When her parents split, Lindsay is forced to take on the motherly role, while her mother resorts to childishness, using retorts like "Make me" and squealing like a teenager when she receives a letter from Bucklin.
Meanwhile, Kennedy takes off to search for his father, leaving Lindsay and Morrie alone to fend for themselves, only to return many years later expecting to be received with open arms and a big "I haven't seen you in 14 years" hug.
Although the stage space is laid out well and the acting is all around very good, it is sometimes difficult to tell when you are watching a flashback and when you are in real time. This is exacerbated by the fact that the characters wear the same costumes throughout, with Lindsay and Kennedy forever clad in children's clothing. And while the beautiful set is intriguing to look at and employs levels and retracting curtains to create various scenes, the characters move freely between the "worlds," which only adds to the confusion.
Perhaps, however, director Jessica Davis-Irons has done this intentionally, and the lesson here is that loneliness is not central to one generation; as it moves through the various sets, so, too, is it carried on from parents to children. Kennedy follows in his father's footsteps by running away, and Lindsay imitates her mother's suicide attempt. Their mistakes are destined to be continually repeated.
All of the actors are notably adept at transforming Iron's terse iceberg of a script into a living, breathing piece of theater. As it is written, very little is said, but there is so much behind every word. Not a breath can be wasted when one's entire life must be laid out within an hour. Therefore, the actors are forced to tell the story through subtext.
Most successful at this is ANDHOW! newcomer but Off-Off-Broadway veteran Ryan Bronz as Kennedy. His physicality in the flashback scenes is adorable, making his character quite lovable. Everything from the exhilaration in his voice to his explorative movement invokes his character's adventurous nature. Margie Stokley (standing on only two legs in this production
Love and Politics, American Style
Screen Play is a theatrical revelation. Now receiving its world premiere at the Flea Theater, the play is A.R. Gurney's brilliant look at the American political system
Brothers and Rivals
Sam Shepard's True West is a story about the dichotomy of human nature, as expressed through the struggle for dominance between two brothers of seemingly polar-opposite dispositions. First produced in New York in 1980, it opened without the approval of the author, garnering lackluster reviews. Two years later, it was revived off Broadway by the now-famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Critical praise abounded for the text and for the acting of the play's two stars, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich. Now Brooklyn's Charlie Pineapple Theatre Company has brought True West back to life in a performance that
Debating Terrorism
The ethics of terrorism are on a lot of minds these days. With the constant media barrage of tragic news from the Middle East, questions of "what's it all for" come easily. Can the murders committed by Palestinian or Iraqi bombers be justified if their actions lead to greater peace and freedom for their children? And if we somehow found ourselves in their places, would we do the same, or do nothing? Bombings and assassinations are not unique to the post-Cold War world, of course, and the last few years have seen a rash of plays, both new and revivals, that approach terrorism from a historical perspective. Many of them draw on those most famous of 20th-century terrorists: the French Resistance fighters of 1940-44. Armand Salacrou's Nights of Wrath (1946), making its English-language premiere with the Horizon Theatre Rep., is such a play, putting the ethics of terrorism up for debate in harsh detail through the lens of Nazi-occupied France.
The story of Nights of Wrath revolves around a reluctant Resistance fighter named Jean (Rafael De Mussa) who is captured by the Gestapo after blowing up a gasoline train. His old friend Bernard (John Gilligan), who betrayed him to a collaborator, is murdered by Jean's Resistance group, who in the process are killed themselves. But the dead come back to life to tell their stories to each other, looking back at the events to reveal the truth behind Bernard's betrayal and each of their roles as collaborators or terrorists.
Salacrou wrote Nights of Wrath in 1946, only two years after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. While that immediacy would have struck a chord with French audiences at the time, the writing and plot now feel uncomfortably dated, which mars the enjoyment of the philosophical questions at the center of the play. These debates are its strongest quality, examining with at times very personal detail the ethical paradoxes of terrorist action and the impossibility of staying truly neutral in a polarized "us versus them" world.
The play, however, takes far too long to develop these ideas (it's a two-hour-long one-act) and along the way smothers them under a story line that to modern audiences appears hopelessly, almost laughably, melodramatic, sexist, and didactic. Not even moments of intense violence and emotional anguish can wrench the play out of these ruts, and the cast and director offer little in the way of original acting moments to help out.
David Looseley's English translation does little to help either, suffering from the constraints of trying to be slavishly loyal to the original text while also trying to update the dialogue wherever possible. The play sounds stilted in the actors' mouths, and they often find themselves in the awkward position of having to use French idioms and speech patterns with colloquial English words like "sure," "OK," and "guy"
Going Nowhere Fast
Airports can be absurd places. They are the starting point of a much-anticipated journey, and yet travelers are often stuck waiting in them, motionless until the journey begins. It is with this paradox in mind that Adam Beechan wrote Transit
Balkan Memories
Name Day, Jovanka Bach's moving portrait of two Serbian families living in the United States, is a lesson in how not to deal with the past. The play focuses on two women, one of whom is incapable of living in the present because she is so obsessed with a moment in time that can never be changed, and another who has spent her entire life trying to forget that exact same moment. Mikel Sarah Lambert stars as Kara Mitor, a Serbian who, with her husband Velko, immigrated to California after World War II. The Mitors have one son, Michael, who at the beginning of the play announces to his parents that he is engaged. It turns out that his fianc
Alone Together
In Theatre Lila's debut production, The Waltz of Elementary Particles, nine actors illuminated like fireflies encounter one another much the way I imagine electrons would if electrons were human bodies. After what can only be described as a birth sequence of sorts, these free-flowing entities of light and purity put on the trappings of modern city-dwellers, primarily through very simple, bold costume additions. From there, through increasingly frenzied, repetitive gestures, each of these individuals reveals what drives his/her day. In all cases, they are driven by media that tell them to buy more, to be more, to achieve more. Ultimately, the particles lose their particle-ness and in exhaustion confront the unknown: the audience.
Sounds a little sci-fi, right? A little artsy, maybe? Well, it is, in its way. But this is one of the best pieces of theater I have seen in five years, and it takes a little explaining as to why.
There are arguably two types of theater: narrative and experiential. While most theater contains aspects of both, the narrative kind dominates our expectations. Most of us expect to be told a story, because written plays with clear story lines dominate our concept of what theater is and should be. But what of this other, shape-shifting thing called experiential theater?
Experiential theater is as it sounds: an experience. While stories can be thrilling or insightful or subject us to rapid-fire ideas or emotions, theater can have a higher calling beyond being a story's vehicle. Experiential theater taps into forces of nature, rhythms deeper than our consciousness, and a collective sense of being. Heady stuff indeed. But the hallmark of a piece that works is actually an absence of muddled thought
Persian War Parallels
In times of great political or social unrest, sometimes there's solace in drawing parallels to similar periods of unrest in history. Sometimes we use these comparisons to make a note of our current mistakes and learn from them, and sometimes we use these parallels to lampoon those who dare to make the same mistakes again. The latter is the case with Waterwell's new production, The Persians...A Comedy About War With Five Songs. A lively, modern adaptation of Aeschylus's tragedy The Persians, this play draws less than subtle and less than favorable comparisons between a current Middle Eastern conflict and the ancient Persian Empire's squandering of wealth and force on a war steeped in vanity. Performed by four talented young actors with tongue-in-cheek bravado, along with an in-house band of two, the play is often funny and artful.
Yet it also suffers from the now common presumption in current Off-Off-Broadway plays that jokes about the ludicrousness of war are easy to make, since their audiences consist primarily of young New Yorkers who will readily agree. Selling this self-righteous, two-year-old joke with a new twist detracts from the impact of an otherwise fresh show and makes it feel largely like watching an inside joke.
The play opens with its cast bantering softly as the audience members walk in to take their seats. The set and costumes are coolly stark. The four actors, one woman and three men, wear black suits and hats, which they shed and add pieces to while playing various characters throughout the show, including "themselves."
Elizabeth Payne's costume design is clever and malleable, as when a wholly suited Hanna Cheek makes a sexy transformation onstage to Queen Atossa by adding just a tie and gloves. Sabrina Baswell's lighting design makes the most of the small space, heightening the most dramatic moments in the show, from the return of Xerxes from battle to the tight spotlight on the Fosse-inspired opening musical number. And Lauren Cregor's original music is excellent, referencing known styles from jazz to 70's funk.
The actors themselves bring vigor and confidence to their highly personalized lines. As Darius, the deceased former Persian king who returns to life to sing a greeting to his wife Atossa, Rodney Gardiner has a rich baritone voice and a self-mocking charm. Cheek plays Atossa with slinky elegance. As Xerxes, Arian Moayed exudes both intensity and goofiness as he slips between classical text and reality TV-type confessionals, and between English and the Iranian language of Farsi. And Tom Ridgely as the Herald is untiringly dynamic.
Yet these actors, for all their successful work as an ensemble, cannot escape the odd unevenness of the play's dialogue and theme. Frequently, the performers, having assumed their characters, recite long classical speeches, only to follow with an ironic self-reference. In one early scene, Cheek, as Atossa, recalls a dream she had, which is re-enacted by the other three actors in a balletic dumb show. The weight Cheek gives the speech as Atossa is lost when she switches to a light, contemporary, vernacular style.
The same is the case when Moayed enters as Xerxes to lament the loss of "Persia's sons." The care and import he gives to that moment of tragedy at the end of the play is simply odd because it seems to come out of nowhere.
Though only an hour and 15 minutes, The Persians is an excellent showcase for young talent and creativity at work on an ambitious, if generic, theme. The contrast between a classical text and a contemporary style has been used countless times before, often with success. Yet while the personalities here shine onstage, the context is far too uneven to be poignant, and far too serious to be really funny.
The Virgin Deicides
Only in the most fanatical believers do the twin monoliths of faith and religious doctrine always stand in unison and not occasionally at loggerheads. As anyone who has been caught between the two can attest, from Martin Luther on down, when the message of one's heart and of one's church disagree, the spiritual pain can be excruciatingly acute. The greatest accomplishment of William S. Leavengood's ruminative new drama, Little Mary, is that it manages to translate that friction undiminished across religious and denominational divides. For the politically progressive Archbishop Tivoli (the wonderful Ron Orbach), head of a small Catholic mission situated in the desert some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, this friction is more painful than most. He has taken as his cause overpopulation and the ever-increasing strain it places on the planet's resources. Birth rate reduction, however, is not exactly in accord with the divine command to be fruitful and multiply.
This is made abundantly clear with the arrival of Tivoli's mentor, the kindly Cardinal Gian (Jeremy Lawrence), who admits he has been dispatched from Rome to either dissuade Tivoli from preaching the subject or, failing that, to have the archbishop excommunicated. However, such censorial considerations are quickly supplanted by the announcement that Tivoli's 15-year-old star pupil, Christina (Monica Raymund), is pregnant, that she is still a virgin, that God is the father, and that she carries not one but seven unborn saviors. The message that Christina says the children represent, told to her through dreams, sends shockwaves that stir even the powerful College of Cardinals in Rome.
Leavengood wisely mirrors the New Testament only once or twice, and then only faintly. (The most blatant instance that I noticed was when Tivoli's assistant, Mother Lulit, played by Robyn Hatcher, tries to cull the "truth" from Christina
Real Estate Camelot
Almost everyone in New York has a few apartment horror stories, whether they're the "what's that thing that just scuttled across my floor" kind, or the "I'd rather pay the extra thou per month in rent than have to search for a place again" kind. Between the cast's friends and family, real estate people, and disgruntled renters, a show like Co-Op: A Comedy of Epic Pretensions, now playing at the Producers Club, is pretty much guaranteed a solid audience. But it takes more than a strong hook to make a strong show, one of the many neglected details in this underwhelming musical production. Anyone familiar with the Arthurian legend will quickly get a handle on the plot. HouseProud Towers, a grand apartment building on the Upper West Side, once had a great co-op board president named Uther Pendragon. When Uther was killed in his sleep, the building fell into disrepair. During these dark times, Uther's secret son, Arthur, was growing up in the basement, raised by the Scottish janitor Codger.
When Arthur turns 26, he inherits his father's apartment and assumes his rightful place as the board president. This news does not sit well with Omelet du Mal, Uther's secret lover and the mother of his son (and Arthur's half-brother) Morton. Will Omelet realize her plan to topple Arthur and seize control of the building? Will Arthur discover his wife Galleria's infidelity with fitness guru Litmus the Pure? (Do you remember how the King Arthur story ended?)
Of course, the point of a homage is not to change the story but to tell it in an interesting or amusing way. John Cecil's version suffers from too many words and jokes that don't go anywhere. The conceit of mixing details from the Middle Ages and the present day is tricky to achieve, and is not achieved here. His script would have been more effective if he had committed fully to modern times.
During the segues from speech to song, the cast is hindered by prerecorded music that doesn't provide the warmth or correct timing of a live band. The actors would sometimes have to wait for the tape to kick in, and the music was unappealingly tinny, like songs that came preprogrammed into 1980s Yamaha organs. Choreography was minimal, with the exception of the silly "Can I Kiss the Bride?" number, which featured Litmus's exercise-inspired dance moves.
The cast seemed lost, with each actor trying his or her own take on the style of the production. Some were a little over the top, and some were too realistic. Orion Simprini (as Litmus) and Jenn Marie Jones (as Galleria) had a few funny moments but were not able to sustain them. This can be attributed to letting the writer also serve as director. An impartial observer would have given the actors more to do, instead of arrogantly assuming that the dialogue would carry the show on its own.
The producers of Co-Op put advertisements in the real estate section of a newspaper, a cunning tactic that brought in several people. Their Friday night performance was completely packed, and the audience was ready to enjoy the show. It's a shame that this good fortune was squandered by putting on a show that wasn't ready for an audience.
War Profits
Despite temporal and spatial distances, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and most recently Ground Zero share something unique. In addition to being sites of pivotal conflicts and horrendous losses of life, they are places that enter history through a peculiar practice perhaps best labeled "battlefield tourism." In a tangled web of commerce, nationalism, and mourning, former battlefields are transformed into sanitized, consumable tourist locales. The destruction and murder of the past become a showpiece and presumed lesson for the present.
The Wreckio Ensemble's impressive production of Gravediggers takes on battlefield tourism, and the wars that precede it, in the most satirical of ways. Collaboratively developed by the ensemble and written and directed by Karly Maurer, Gravediggers offers an enjoyable, if sometimes ranting, riff on the commerce of war.
In a land not unlike Iraq, two women gravediggers (Michelle Diaz and Dechelle Damien), dressed head to foot in black and sporting mouth-contorting headgear, dump body after body into a pit. The profoundly bleak set (also by Damien) is scattered with white building blocks that ooze the body parts of fallen soldiers. The personless appendages are painted an eerily vibrant green, like fresh grass.
But that's not the only fresh thing in this land of death. An entrancingly lush, red object is growing from a tree over the pit, and later hatches into Phoenix, played by Tara Grieco. The starving gravediggers thirst for the object's richness, but it is soon stolen away by an opulently maniacal woman, Mother (a hilarious Randi Berry), in a feather boa-lined coat. Oana Botez-Ban's creative costumes are both enigmatic and a treat for the eyes.
Mother's effete son, petulantly played by Nicholas Bixby, is a draft dodger who falls in love with a corpse (Dimitra Bixby) that he manipulates like a puppet. Son's monologue, on how the "unthinkable" nature of war fosters blind spots of inhumanity, is admirable, but this is also where Gravediggers begins to go awry: the surrealism becomes literal, and ridiculous satire slips into pedantic theatrics.
"Don't be absurd!" one gravedigger screams to the other. "That's the only way I know how to be!" the other responds. The show's self-referencing is clever. If only it were true and consistent. Gravediggers' slippage from the abstract to the obvious is no more apparent than in the character of Rep, the capitalist war entrepreneur ably played by Benjamin Spradley.
Here, Rep, a tie-and-suit embodiment of war profiteering, bombastically preaches about his conquests, including a barely veiled allegory about two escaped chickens. Little room is left for the viewer to make his or her own connections to today's geopolitical climate. Gravediggers does not leave much work for the audience. Rather than staying in the realm of surrealist ridiculousness and undermining accepted beliefs, the show gets in its own way and points to its own immediacy. Without this, an otherwise brilliant production would stand on its own.
More baffling is the ensemble's self-branded actor-babble concept of "Physical Realism" outlined in the program. Employing contradictory clich
On the Job
The Flea Theater is making people laugh. Its latest production, the New York premiere of Charlotte Meehan's Work, is not just funny
Tabloid Rabbitry
Blank verse: it's not just for Shakespeare classes anymore. That, at any rate, is the statement made by Todd Carlstrom's wickedly inventive new comedy Bunnies: Part I, presented by breedingground productions at its Spring Fever Festival. With more than a wink toward that most famous of theatrical versifiers, Carlstrom has worked up a rollicking ramble of a play that is at once unashamedly archaic and deliciously contemporary. Oh, and one more thing: it also features simulated bunny sex. The plot of Bunnies runs like something snatched from the dubious headlines of the Weekly World News, yet it's all based on historical (but still dubious) events that supposedly took place in England in 1726. Mary Toft (Laura Esposito) is a pregnant peasant woman who suddenly starts giving birth to deceased rabbits. Her bizarre births are verified by a small-town midwife named John Howard (Richard Bubbico), who, while skeptical at first, soon spreads Mary's story to an ever-growing number of onlookers and learned experts. The scandal gets out of hand and eventually reaches the ears of the King, whose curiosity about the "Preternatural Bunny Births" (P.B.B.'s) leads to fresh complications for everyone concerned.
That ridiculous 18th-century tabloid scandal of a story is, however, only the tip of the carrot in this quirky and high-spirited production. Director Tomi Tsunoda and her cast have done a phenomenal job in taking the already wild script and cramming it full of all manner of oddball humor. The resulting performance resembles a Shakespearean blank verse comedy invaded by a downtown sketch-comedy troupe that's been watching too many Monty Python reruns.
There seems to be no end to Tsunoda's inventiveness in propelling Bunnies along from one laugh to the next. Even the birthing scenes, which might otherwise have tread dangerously close to reality, become truly bizarre, as Mary's rabbity offspring are represented by small, reddish balls that shoot like projectiles out from between her legs. Anachronisms of all kinds abound in Tsunoda's version of the 18th century and provide an atmosphere of creative irreverence to the show. Other highlights include a ranting expert on unnatural births (Rory Sheridan) who berates the audience about the use of the word "vagina"; an audience with King George (Jay Gaussoin), who speaks in an unintelligible faux-German dialect while wolfing down handfuls of Swedish Fish; and a no holds barred showdown between two "personified abstract concepts." You get the picture.
What makes these moments of comic madness really shine is that they seem to emerge naturally from the plot (or about as naturally as anything that involves humans giving birth to rabbits can be). Carlstrom has chosen to write in a form that could hardly be more archaic, but his play about a 300-year-old scandal comes off like a play about a piece of juicy 21st-century gossip. The language and verse flow smoothly for the most part (a tribute to writer and cast), and the self-conscious theatricality of writing in an outdated style turns out to be well suited to the theatricality of the tabloid-pages subject. Writing in verse could easily have doomed this play to boredom, but instead it makes it funnier.
There are certainly some hiccups in the course of Bunnies, but that may be expected with a new work. The play takes a while to get going, as the audience has to get used to the language and conceit of the whole thing, and it's not until about a third of the way in that everything's firing on all cylinders. The acting also shows some rough spots between laughs, and there are lapses in concentration until the next bit gets going. More important, there are several times when the madcap antics of the production mask the play's underlying ideas a little too much. It's a ton of fun, but there are several good ideas and clever digs at contemporary scandals that get lost in the shuffle. When all is said and done, there is more depth to Bunnies than is necessarily on display in Tsunoda's production.
That said, Bunnies is a hoot and definitely not to be missed if you're a fan of zany humor, classic English plays, or, better yet, both. Carlstrom's highly unusual ideas seemingly could not have fallen into better hands than Tsunoda's, as the production and script play well into each other's strengths. A few new-play jitters aside, this irreverent romp is proof enough that you don't have to be Shakespeare to write a blank verse comedy. Bring your carrots and give this one a try: you may just find a new appreciation for the delightfully wicked world of tabloid scandal, which seems to have changed very little in 300 years.
Lives, Interrupted
In the summer of 2001, writer, actor and monologist Spalding Gray was driving home from his 60th birthday party when a minivan struck him in an accident so devastating it sent the car's engine flying into the passenger seat. Spalding's hip was broken, his right leg paralyzed, and a major nerve running from his back to his feet was ruptured, causing the toes on his right foot to drop down every time he lifted them to walk. After numerous days in the hospital it was discovered that his skull had been fractured, leading to the insertion of a metal plate that inexplicably shifted, causing his forehead to cave in. Several operations and dozens of prescription pills later, Gray returned to his career as a monologist. He would stand before an audience describing his life in blunt, honest detail with nothing but a black wall and dim lighting to illustrate his tales.
Actor and writer Michael Brandt expertly takes this same approach to storytelling in his beautifully poignant play A Spalding Gray Matter, currently playing at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Education Center.
Brandt survived a painful, near-death experience when he was misdiagnosed with a cold the day after his 33rd birthday. He endured severe back pain for days before returning to the hospital demanding X-rays. To his surprise, the X-rays showed a frightening amount of fluid in his left lung. Brandt was sent to intensive care, where doctors explained that the fluid caused his kidneys and liver to fail.
As the monologue progresses, Brandt occasionally breaks from his narrative to spotlight the chilling similarities between his own misfortune and Gray's. Both men were celebrating with their families shortly before they were admitted into intensive care. Both suffered through unforeseen medical complications, both survived difficult operations, both were forced to live several months in pain, and neither man ever felt the same afterward.
This is where Brandt hopes the parallels will end, for Gray committed suicide on March 8, 2004.
The fact that this is Brandt's story told by Michael Brandt to a room full of people who increasingly fall in love with his sharp, self-deprecating sense of humor makes this production an overwhelmingly emotional experience. While you are reassured that he sits before you alive and well, he darkly reminds you that Gray's life seemed fine the day he bade his family goodbye and later jumped off the Staten Island ferry.
Still, Brandt's tales of harrowing medical procedures are so funny and relatable that you cannot help but laugh at him the way the world once did at Spalding Gray. After all, who has not struggled with that annoying doctor's question: "How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?" And how many patients cannot look at their surgeons without wondering, "What if he sneezes while he is holding the scalpel?" And who doesn't worry about waking up from a routine surgery with one leg missing while the nurses chirp, "Sorry. Judgment call."
Everyone is scared of hospitals, everyone hates the helplessness of being in one, and everyone can relate to a horror story about them. In this way, everyone can relate to Brandt. With expressive blue eyes and a captivating charisma, he is the kind of guy anyone would want to sit next to at a dinner table. His likability is the play's greatest strength because he makes the audience care about him to the point where they genuinely want him to overcome his demons.
At the same time, Brandt forces the audience to consider their own demons. He stresses that surviving a traumatic experience is the easy part. The hard part is living with the memory of it, something Gray was unable to do.
Brandt asks, How do you return to life as if nothing has happened? How do you listen to a song on the radio without thinking of all the songs you thought you would never hear again? How do you call a friend without thinking of all the conversations you two might never have had?
When you leave the theater, stunned speechless and unsure about whether to laugh or cry, you may not be able to answer these questions. But you should sense that Brandt will pull through because he is too powerful an actor, too likable a guy, and too wonderful a storyteller to end up like Spalding Gray.
Slackers
For the last dozen years, from the peak of Generation X to the lesser-known Generation Y (or whatever branding the pundits eventually decided on), there has been an ongoing discussion about the apathy of America's youth. Our society's elders have commented on young people's laziness, and it appears that young people have now embraced these low expectations and wear them as a badge of honor. How else could one explain Richard Lovejoy's play Tiny Dynamite, which seems to get off on its own obnoxious contempt for and dissociation from the world? At the start of the show, a young woman begins a monologue as she pulls props out of a large wooden box. She speaks in cheerful terms about her sad life, as if she's talking to an ex who is not in the room. One gets the feeling that she's leaving somewhere. The date on a calendar onstage says, "December 31st."
The calendar is flipped to January, and we are 12 months before that first scene. The woman (Liz) is moving in with her bland ex-lover (Jon), his bratty sister (Jen), and their lazy friend (Ben) in an undersized apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Liz has a hard time adapting to their carefree, party-heavy lifestyle and begins to have feelings again for Jon. Jen and Ben interpret Liz's seriousness and desire to spend more time with Jon as selfishness. Their living situation begins to unravel, and Liz decides that she'll kill herself on Dec. 31.
The script, with its faithful re-creation of the stilted dialogue and dull situations of real life, does no favors for the cast. When Lovejoy strays from the everyday and tries to inject some drama into the proceedings, it comes across as ridiculously clich
Domestic Miseries
Out of context, Machinal is an astonishing and unique portrayal of one woman's battle with the crippling forces of poverty and social expectations and an unwilling dependence on a loveless marriage. Yet even more remarkable is the story of this play's growing popularity and the emergence of its protagonist, a nondescript, middle-class young woman, as a universal figure. Written by Sophie Treadwell, a reporter, in 1928, Machinal was unlike anything American theatergoers had experienced before. Treadwell loosely based the story on the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of Ruth Snyder, who was convicted, with her lover Judd Gray, of murdering her husband. Produced on Broadway in 1928, the play was immensely successful with its shocking subject matter, abstract and robotically lyrical language, and popular leading man, Clark Gable.
Yet the play was largely forgotten until the 1990's, when it had a number of revivals. It was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, starring Fiona Shaw; Off-Broadway by Naked Angels in 1999; and in a number of Off-Off Broadway productions in 2001 and 2003, not to mention countless national and college productions. One reason it has enjoyed such popularity is that it has lost little of its original resonance. The story of the Young Woman, who is forced by fear of poverty and loneliness to marry and start a family with a man she doesn't love, is a familiar one. As she struggles with a different kind of loneliness, that of being married to a stranger, she finally explodes with sadness, anger, desperation, and self-destruction. She is a powerful character, perhaps as notable a down-and-out Every(wo)man as Willy Loman, and with her frequently lengthy monologues about terrifyingly mundane subject matter, she draws you into her head and leaves you struggling not to empathize with her.
At least, that is the play's potential. Mishandled, it becomes at first a cartoonish take on the burdens of industry and domestic life, and at last an absurdist spin on a Chicago-like trial drama. Unfortunately, albeit with some notable exceptions, the Dreamscape Theatre's new production is a little too much of the latter.
The play starts off with a bang. With director Morgan Anne Zipf's decisive, traditional interpretation, complete with Mara Canlas's period costumes and music and Carlton Ward's fluid, imaginative lighting design, the first "episodes" of the Young Woman's journey are engrossing. Yet as these episodes progress, and set pieces from each scene are piled in a corner of the stage, the production loses steam and begins to feel sloppy. It also loses its edge and self-awareness, and finally settles for a cringe-worthy misuse of the Law & Order theme before the dramatic trial scene at the end.
The play's backbone, undoubtedly, is the Young Woman, and Molly Pope does a formidable job with this difficult role. She makes sense of the character's long streams of nonsequential dialogue, and endows the Young Woman with a tragic combination of frailty and strength-imbuing frustration. But this strange world is constructed out of a dramatic irony. The audience is the only listener privy to the Young Woman's reflections on how her world is treating her. In the context of her existence onstage as an isolated character, it is understandable that she is alone and relates only to the audience. However, in the context of her life onstage, she must relate to the other characters; otherwise, her point about loneliness in even a social setting is flawed.
Pope, though compelling to watch, often seems as if she is onstage by herself. She vehemently decries her boss-turned-husband's "fat hands" and overbearing demeanor, yet in actuality her husband, played by Richard Lovejoy with childlike bounce and insecurity, doesn't seem nearly as intimidating as her many cringes and sidelong glances would imply.
Pope's engrossment with her own character, however, is not singular. Most of the ensemble members, though bringing a number of colorful characters to life, often lose sight of the play's tone. The most notable example is the shouting match of a trial scene that seems completely out of sync with the rest of the play. Zipf's staging might have been more successful had she reigned in the ensemble to create a more consistent world.
Machinal is a great play that presents a tremendous amount of challenges both in production and performance. Zipf and the Dreamscape Theatre, though not entirely successful in confronting these challenges, deserve credit for such an ambitious production.
I Am Not a Camera
"So overdone, you know what I mean? The photographic image. As memory thread, 'window into the past'