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dream about. Filloux is the Fulbright senior specialist in Cambodia
and Morocco, the recipient of the Kennedy Center Fund for New
American Plays' Roger L. Stevens Award, and the Eric Kocher
Playwrights Award from the National Playwrights Conference at
the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.
Her
published work reveals her penchant for exploring the world.
Whereas her father sailed from France to New York Harbor in
a catamaran, Filloux uses her plays to traverse the choppy
waters between nations and cultures. Something of an adventurer
herself, she has had her work produced in Cambodia, France,
Algeria, Turkey, and Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
"We
grew up in San Diego in this kind of schism of Algeria, France,
and San Diego," Filloux explains. "So it made for
a background of not really knowing where one belongs and feeling
like an outsider."
Filloux's
"outsider" status encouraged her to look outside
of the United States for inspiration. "In France and
Europe, there is more fighting and conflict than was visibly
apparent growing up in this country. I was drawn to conflict,
which is an appropriate thing for playwriting."
International
and cultural conflicts are always at the heart of her writing.
Eyes of the Heart is an exploration of the psychosomatic
blindness that afflicted Cambodian women after witnessing
the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in the late 70's.
The Beauty Inside examines the Middle Eastern tradition
of honor killings, where a woman who is raped and impregnated
before marriage can be killed by her family.
"Both
of these plays have repressive regimes and dire situations,"
Filloux says. "They're about tradition and family and
utter evil. Honor killings are based on traditional tribal
beliefs, but they happen all the time all over the world.
They're happening right now."
Filloux's
mission in theater, she admits, is to expose these evils.
"For a while, these crimes were the 'best-kept secrets,'
but they're not even secrets. They happen all the time, and
nobody cares. And that's the problem on some level with doing
this kind of theater. There's just a little wall that's been
built up against these things, and to write theater about
them is part of the challenge."
Her
latest challenge is Lemkin's House, based on the life
of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-American lawyer who invented
the word "genocide" in 1944 and spent his life striving
to have it recognized as an international crime. The play
is set in Lemkin's afterlife, where his final rest is disturbed
by those who have lived through modern atrocities.
"Lemkin's
House comes from having explored a specific genocide,
which is Cambodia, for many years and then realizing that
genocide happens continuously all over the world and especially
in the 90's with Rwanda and Bosnia," Filloux says. "These
were enormous genocides."
Jean
Randich, director of the 78th Street Theater Lab's production,
points out that "a major task of Lemkin's House
is to sensitize an audience to imagine crimes of both commission
and omission that abet genocide."
"Catherine
presents in short brutal scenes actual events from the Rwandan
and Bosnian genocides," Randich says. "Interlaced
with these are imagined scenes, sometimes politically provocative
scenes, in which the reluctance of the West to get involved
is addressed."
Randich
adds, "One can't play the play without absorbing the
historical background of three separate genocides-the Holocaust,
Rwanda, and Bosnia."
Filloux's
body of plays might suggest that she views such horrors objectively
for the purpose of her writing, but that isn't the case. The
strength of her work comes from the depth of her connection
to those who suffer from these crimes. "I'll never get
over the series of events that occurred with Rwanda,"
she says. "It was such a travesty on the part of the
United Nations and its member states. In a hundred days, 800,000
people were hacked to death."
She
finds great significance in juxtaposing the Rwandan massacres
with Lemkin's quest to establish genocide as an international
crime, which the United Nations did in 1949. As she notes,
"The U.S. ratified Lemkin's treaty in 1988, and Rwanda
occurred in 1994."
Still,
Filloux understands audiences' reluctance to see plays that
explore such topics as mass killings. "I think that people
feel guilty," she says, "and they're not always
able to enter those kinds of stories very easily." But
in the case of Lemkin's House, she believes New York
theatergoers are in for a different experience.
"What's
interesting about Lemkin's House is that it's going to be,
on some level, a comedy. There are a lot of ways of dealing
with the subject matter," she says. "The comedy
comes from the sort of absurd quality that occurs when we
try so hard to do something against all odds. Those odds are
human."
The
78th Street Theater Lab's production follows the play's world
premiere in Sarajevo and a reading at the Holocaust Museum
in Washington, D.C. "It's amazing because it was a reading,
but I have to say it was one of the high points in my theater
experience," Filloux says. "At that reading was
the biographer that knows more about Lemkin than anyone. He
was very supportive, and I was honored to meet him."
She
finds the play's international production history most appropriate.
"Lemkin believed in a world. The play is about forgiveness."
Filloux
seems happy with her place in the world. Working in both Off-Broadway
and Off-Off-Broadway settings, she has found the perfect vehicle
to pilot her course from country to country. As Randich says,
"Catherine is a tremendously ambitious writer, which
is both the joy and the challenge of the work."
But
even stronger than Filloux's passions about injustice and
atrocities is her devotion to her chosen art form, which she
hopes will carry her through many more uncharted regions of
the human experience.
"The
love affair I've had with theater is really something that
I feel is strong after 20 years," she says. Yet she also
notes with some concern that "it's so sad on some level
that the theater is challenged and fragile right now."
The
future of theater, Filloux believes, can be found in the noncommercial
scene. She has worked as a playwriting professor at Bennington
College in Vermont, the New York University Dramatic Writing
Program, and Ohio State University, where she seeks out fledgling
writers who share her passion for exploring Lemkin's "world."
"I'm
so attracted to young playwrights who make that commitment,"
she says. "To me that's exciting."
Lemkin's
House, directed by Jean Randich, is playing at the 78th
Street Theater Lab through Feb. 26. Performances are Thursdays-Saturdays
at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be
reserved by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444 or online at
www.smarttix.com.
When David Auburn's Proof first premiered in 2000, it took the theater world by storm. Quickly transferring to Broadway from the Manhattan Theater Club, it garnered five Tony Awards, including Best Play, and won the Pulitzer for drama. Auburn's compelling work about trust, sacrifice, and the wonder and madness of mathematics captured the popular imagination and critical attention. It was an intensely captivating play that deserved all of its accolades.
Ground Up Productions is now reviving Proof at the Manhattan Theater Source. Its production, which is much more modest in scale than the original, further proves that this play has all the makings of a modern classic. Its early success cannot be attributed to the size of the house (Manhattan Theater Source has a few hundred fewer seats than the Walter Kerr Theater) or whether household names are in the show (the Broadway production starred Mary-Louise Parker; this production stars four relative unknowns). Proof works first and foremost because of Auburn's brilliant writing. Still as engaging as ever, the play, directed by Adam Gerdts in this revival, does not disappoint.
The story begins when Robert (Stuart Marshall), an acclaimed mathematician, startles his mathematician daughter, Catherine (Kate Middleton), who is asleep on the porch in the middle of the night. He wakes her so they can celebrate her 25th birthday with a bottle of cheap champagne. But when his former student Hal (Guy Olivieri) appears, Robert vanishes.
Actually, it is the night before Robert's funeral, and Catherine has only dreamed that she saw her father. She wakes from her slumber when Hal emerges from the attic after poring over notebooks filled with Robert's nonsensical writings scrawled during his years of mental breakdown. The young mathematician is determined to find any shred of brilliance left among these scribblings.
Eventually, Catherine does show him a work of unquestionable genius, but its authorship is called into question by Hal and her sister, Claire (Amy Heidt), who is in town for the funeral and to convince Catherine to live with her in New York. Claire, a mildly successful, even-keeled urbanite, thinks her sister inherited both her father's intelligence and his susceptibility to insanity. With no concrete proof as to whose work it actually is, Hal, a man of science, is forced to realize the unpredictability of true brilliance.
Catherine sacrificed college to care for her ailing father, and Middleton's performance captures the social awkwardness and gruffness that comes with such isolation. But Middleton fails to display the quality of madness that Auburn equates with genius—an insanity, it's implied, that Catherine may also succumb to, like her father. Rather, Middleton is depressed, mopey, and withdrawn. It makes her all the more human, but forces one to wonder whether someone without a hint of madness could in fact be truly brilliant. Middleton's performance begs the question without convincingly answering it.
Olivieri, Marshall, and Heidt are all strong in their supporting roles. Olivieri's Hal is passionate—about math and Catherine—but he is ultimately limited by his work and mediocre career. Even in his distrust of Catherine, he is kind and motivated by his feelings for her, yet he remains aloof, as one would imagine someone obsessed with numbers would be.
Marshall embodies Robert's manic brilliance, which is illustrated in Catherine's flashbacks when he switches from lovable and caring to frenzied and possessed. Heidt's stability and assuredness as Claire balances out Middleton's Catherine. Claire has spent years working endlessly to pay the bills for her father and sister once her father could no longer work. She is smart and successful, but in a bland way when compared with her sister and father, Still, Heidt conveys this without giving a one-note performance.
The production is guided by Gerdt's deft directing, which keeps the pace from flagging. Travis R. McHale's lighting design helps maintain a sense of timing and rhythm, as all the action takes place on a quaint and intimate back porch at varying points over a long weekend.
Overall, Ground Up's Proof shows what makes this play a classic in the first place: it is intense, intelligent, and thoughtful. If you've seen it before, it deserves a second viewing. If you haven't, definitely go to the Manhattan Theater Source for this worthwhile production.
Four Women masquerades as a play. Playwright Cheever Tyler has assembled four unrelated monologues and ineffectually linked them together under the broad themes of love, loss, and destiny. But the monologues' only true connection is that they are told from the perspective of women. Under Christopher Carter Sanderson's pedestrian direction, the monologues meander and grow tiresome, failing to reach a point and often getting lost within Tyler's unpolished writing.
The evening begins with "Dixie Glitter," a convoluted, mildly amusing piece about an uneducated trailer-trash yokel (a favorite type of woman in Tyler's monologues) who finds herself playing host to the spirit of Carry Nation.
Who? Exactly. Carry Nation was a quasi-famous prohibitionist during the early part of the 20th century. Her claim to fame was that she would take a hatchet and smash bars to pieces. The monologue spends a lot of time explaining this, as do the program notes. One day Dixie, a would-be psychic, has Nation's spirit passed on to her by another crazy local. The trouble is that Dixie is a good-time girl who loves her drinking as much as she loves her men.
Suffice it to say, she and Carry are quite the odd couple, and hilarity ensues…or is meant to ensue. Robin Benson throws herself into the role but can't overcome the flawed writing and lame jokes. After almost half an hour, even she appears to want the piece to end.
In the second monologue, "Albany Drive Thru Pawn Shop," a Southern belle named Celeste finds herself trapped in the past with her fragile sanity teetering on the brink. She is unable to recover from a soured love affair, and her problems are further compounded by the hardships of the Depression, which force her to sell off her family's beloved belongings to make ends meet. The monologue seemingly takes place over decades, but the time line is annoyingly unclear, and the resolution is a train wreck of psychobabble. As Celeste, Ninon Rogers is all demure Southern accent and genteel affectations, but little else.
The most troubling piece of the evening is "Inventory," featuring Charlotte, a physics professor struggling with the deaths of her husband and son. The monologue is an unfocused debate on the roles of science and religion, as Charlotte tries to reconcile her profession with her faith. Speaking to an unseen therapist, she calmly rails at the gods for taking her family while calling upon her scientific background to provide answers. Debbie Stanislaus does very little with the piece, aimlessly circling the stage and occasionally raising her voice beyond a calm whisper to show anger or confusion.
The show concludes with "Trip to New Jersey," an unfunny and borderline racist monologue about another trailer-trash heroine, Trumpet Vine, on the verge of marrying a much older Middle-Eastern man. Trumpet waxes philosophical about love and, more important, money as she explains why she is marrying her rich sugar daddy. Seduced by jewelry and his endless wealth, Trumpet decides life in a burka can't be all that bad.
Playwright Tyler makes sweeping generalizations about the Middle East, conceiving Trumpet's beau as a stereotypical "evil doer" complete with henchmen, oil fields, and a harem of beauties waiting at his beck and call. Kelly Tuohy revels in Trumpet's trashiness, almost making the audience forget how thin her monologue is. Ultimately, though, Tuohy succumbs to bug eyes and "golly gee whiz" deliveries.
Sanderson provides little direction for his actresses, most of whom wander helplessly about the stage wearing out the same 5-by-5 patch of space. Although hindered by Tyler's amateurish writing, the director fails to provide a beginning, middle, and end for each monologue, leaving his actresses stranded and stuck.
Four Women suffers from many problems, but its biggest obstacle is the script itself. Stale situations, underdeveloped characters, and empty dialogue prove too difficult to overcome and too uninteresting to care about.
Presidential pomp and circumstance has always been a surreal spectacle. How bizarre was it when "Dubya" searched under his Oval Office desk looking for lost weapons of mass destruction in a self-satirizing skit for a press gala? Of course, the Clinton years provided their fair share of sideshows in the Oval Office, too.
Our current political climate contains enough levels of dramatic irony to plunge even the most casual political observer into the spinning vortex of partisan rancor and the warped rhetoric of media manipulation. Who needs theatrical send-ups of political life when our real-life political theater sends itself up?
In the Brick Theater's revival of Richard Foreman's 1988 play, Symphony of Rats, directed by Ian W. Hill, the president gets sucked down the rabbit—or, in this case, rat—hole of paranoid schizophrenia. The media have swarmed around the president's sex life like a pack of frenzied rodents scavenging in a back alley for a piece of garbage to gnaw on. The president cracks up. He imagines he's communicating with voices from outer space. As his delusions of grandeur grow, he believes he's been beamed to another planet where angels, aliens, dancing rats, and comic-book monsters run amok. Each delusional episode blurs together into a jumbled pastiche of sci-fi freaks and screwball comedy that portrays the president's increasingly manic imagination.
Alyssa Simon, playing the First Lady with the "reptilian smile," however, deserves special mention among a crowded supporting cast for the subtlety with which she makes a "straight" character appear more strange and sinister than the fantasy creatures that too often appeared like benign waxwork figures around her.
Many of the vignettes are visually arresting. The president—played by a hyperactive and often cross-eyed Hill—hears voices that tell him he's "lost his swing." As golf balls pop out from between his beret-wearing mistress's wide-open legs, he crushes them underfoot as if they were eggs. In another vignette, he watches in terror as his symbolic mistress, the Statute of Liberty, gets spread on the dinner table and raped.
The most powerful man in the world suddenly has his mojo go awry and his god-like abilities desert him. A paraplegic asks to be miraculously healed, only to rise up and turn into a towering demon with claw-like arms.
The president gets replaced by a cardboard cutout with a happy-face balloon for its head. He whisks scissors from his pocket and becomes a barber as the inner self seeks vengeance on the outer "suit." The suspense created by simply flashing a sharp object in the same visual space as a balloon is palpable.
Like a bad acid trip, events accelerate as they become more detached from reality. A character spoofing a film noir detective comes to investigate the president, the president boogies at a disco crowded with mindless ingénues, and he plays a life-size game of whack-a-mole.
Eventually, though, the incoherence and over-stimulation of these lavish spectacles get somewhat tiresome. Endless sight gags can hold our attention only so long, and one gets the sense that each outlandish scenario, funky costume, or entrancing prop exists merely to one-up the zaniness of the last. The production shares the aesthetic of the music video, the metaphysic of the short attention span, and the psychology of media saturation. Its first principle is "I think, therefore I—oh, heck, what's on the next channel?" Any sense of narrative or momentum liquefies into a sensual kaleidoscope of ever-changing sexual cartoons.
Because the president in this production is portrayed generically, any satire in the original production has been blunted, with no attempt to update the jokes to fit our current commander in chief. The play, therefore, is not so much about politics as it is about the thin line between sanity and schizophrenia.
In fact, the production embodies many of the dramaturgical ideals of that true paranoid schizophrenic, Antonin Artaud. At one point, an exasperated president, slouching behind his desk far upstage, asks the audience if anyone wants a glass of water, then realizes he can't give somebody one because he's supposedly on TV and not in a theater. Conversely, a few minutes later the president strides right up to the audience during an intense monologue where some of Hill's sweat dripped onto my notepad. Like Artaud's proposed "theater of cruelty," we experience an orchestration of pure theatricality that unfetters itself from narrative conventions and textual supremacy in favor of a savage attack upon our senses.
My own tastes, however, incline toward spectacles where the visual slapstick and visceral stunts hang on—or at least by—a thread of narrative. Films such as Fight Club and Schizopolis, for example, do a better job at conveying the schizophrenic nature of reality because they are able to represent the funhouse of a character's mental life without the story itself getting lost in it.
Norman & Beatrice: A Marriage in Two Acts makes an extraordinary demand on its two actors: they play an elderly man with dementia and his loving wife in 2001 and return after the intermission to play the same characters as newlyweds in 1947. Directed by David Travis, this traditional new play by Barbara Hammond, featuring veteran actors Graeme Malcolm and Jane Nichols, soars in the first act but stumbles badly when it leaps back in time in Act II.
The opening act captures the texture and rhythm of lived experience shaped into a satisfying dramatic arc. According to the program notes, Hammond wrote it after a visit to her parents' home in the months before her father died. Set in the kitchen of the couple's modest, small-town Wisconsin home (the splendid set design is by Luke Hegel-Cantarella), the 40-minute act is a closely observed, poignant rendition of the havoc that Alzheimer's disease inflicts on the victim's sense of self and history, and the vigilance and patience required of the caregiver.
Norman, the former mayor of his small town, inhabits a confused, anxious mental state in which fantasy and reality blur, the familiar often turns strange and disconcerting, and the past devours the present. Malcolm astutely conveys Norman's fractured reality while never losing touch with the old man's humanity. Beatrice, meanwhile, spryly maintains the thread of a "normal" conversation, patiently filling in the pieces of himself that Norman has forgotten. Nichols's matter-of-fact Beatrice takes her new circumstances in stride without self-pity.
The scene is not maudlin or depressing. The enduring bond between Norman and Beatrice leavens the sadness of this final chapter. "We should get married," remarks Norman at one point. "We are married," Beatrice reminds him. "We are?” replies Norman. "Holy Toledo! I'm a lucky guy."
This first act stood alone as a one-act play for five years, until, Hammond says in the program notes, she was inspired to write a prelude after she unearthed a short film of her parents' wedding. Set in the same kitchen, stripped of the accretions of a half-century of living, this second act finds Beatrice pregnant with her first child and Norman setting out on his political career.
The second act, a pale derivative of the first, has the feel of a writing exercise. In it, Hammond shoehorns in one snippet of dialogue after another that we heard previously in the first act, but the echoes rarely achieve resonance. Instead, we discover that the non sequiturs that Norman utters in the throes of dementia are the remnants of surprisingly banal conversation.
Perhaps trying not to present too idyllic a view of the young couple, Hammond veers too far in the opposite direction. The misunderstandings and personality differences that come to light make it hard to believe that this man and woman got married in the first place, let alone stayed together for more than 50 years. It doesn't help matters that Malcolm and Nichols are mature actors. Nichols has the toughest time. In a drama that strives for realism, it seems unfair to ask an actress probably closing in on age 60 to play a 21-year-old woman.
Ultimately, it's a shame that the intricate story of a marriage that we glimpse in the first act must remain buried there.
The American Clock, Arthur Miller's paean to those who lived through the Great Depression, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed portrait of Americans' plight during the turbulent early 1930's. Although the Brooklyn-based Sackett Group, in only its third production, tries to weave together the play's multiple strands, we get mostly shreds of stories that too easily unravel, and the overall effect leaves the audience chilled.
Most of the play, an early Miller work, concerns the Baums, a Jewish family living well in Manhattan during the 1920's. But when the stock market crashes in 1929, Moe Baum (Steven W. Bergquist), the father, loses his finance job, and the family begins its long spiral into poverty. Bergquist is appropriately understated as the proud patriarch, genuinely concerned for his family but unable to accept his reversal of fortune.
The Baums are forced to move back to a dilapidated section of Brooklyn, their former home. A whole generation, it is noted, returns to live with its parents—now Bubbys and meshuggah grandfathers—only to be ensnarled in petty domestic disputes while facing dwindling prospects.
Rose Baum (Susan Faye Groberg), Moe's troubled wife, notes with chagrin that sometimes you can go a whole year in Brooklyn and "never go back to Manhattan." Groberg, with humility and sincerity, brings to the production a personal touch that is sorely missed in the other performances, where many of the actors seem to be simply going through the motions.
A large portion of the narrative focuses on Lee (David B. Sochet), Moe and Rose's young son, whose coming-of-age story takes him through the years from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Alabama. Sochet has the difficult task of playing Lee at 13, 15, 18, and into his early 20's. Though his portrayal of Lee's earlier years is a bit too naïve and earnest, he comes into the part more when he's older and working as a journalist.
Strangely, The American Clock presents, along with the Baums' story, short narratives concerning a Midwestern farmer who loses his property and travels east; a loosely aligned group of newly unemployed financial kingpins; an African-American hobo who travels the country in search of work, singing all the way; and a wealthy, socialist CEO who realizes the error of his ways. There's also a dance competition that seems to have no real connection with the other scenes.
All of this is narrated, stiffly, by a clever financier who realizes, before the crash, that he needs to withdraw all his money from banks and instead buy gold—or, at the very least, carry thousands of dollars around in his shoes.
The play's multiple plot lines leave too little room for the development of the individual characters. As a result, there is little crucial empathy created for the characters and their stories. Ultimately, the only characters the audience cares about are the Baums, whose story is more nuanced.
The Sackett Group's choice of The American Clock was an audacious but dangerous decision, and unfortunately the company has fallen victim to many of the risks inherent in mounting the work. Aside from being too overarching and in need of drastic cutting, the play is not particularly well suited to Off-Off-Broadway. With its large cast of more than 30 characters, musical numbers, and major changes of setting, it would be much more effective as a well-funded Broadway or Off-Broadway production. On the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse's vacuous proscenium stage, with a stark, black backdrop and spartan set, the characters seen dancing and singing onstage appear small and distant.
The director, Robert J. Weinstein, makes the interesting choice of having all the actors, when they are not playing in scenes, seated onstage and watching from the sides, as in Our Town. This somewhat compensates for the massive, empty space that so wants to be filled.
The American Clock is a relatively unknown Miller work that is seldom chosen for production, and the Sackett Group's daring venture reveals some of the reasons why. With a more appropriate lineup for the rest of the season, brighter things should be expected from this new company in the future.
"Apathy, baby!" proclaims Fabian, one of 10 New Yorkers portrayed in the Narcissists's production of C. Commute. "Frozen apathy."
At once aware of the pitfalls of his generation's malaise and eager to "gloss it" into artwork that can get him the big break he believes is "just around the corner," this twenty-something captures the paradoxical sentiments of his peers. The 10 urbanites in this new play by Alexander Renison Holt are at once apathetic and hopeful, jaded yet still idealistic, setting the tone for a generation just as Fabian believes his art will. Theatergoers in their 20's and early 30's will no doubt recognize themselves in these characters, identify with their struggles, and laugh in the process.
The play is structured as a series of 10 monologues, the first of which is presented as a voice-over. Besides sharing the city and the zeitgeist, the nine characters who appear onstage also share the same subway car, suggested in Brett Dicus's elegantly minimalist set design by two benches and poles set on a diagonal upstage. The car functions as a holding pen as the actors take turns presenting their monologues downstage.
Director Ryan Colwell deftly choreographs their entries, subway-riding time, and exits to resemble the randomness of being in a true public space, ensuring that what could have been merely a convenient theatrical device actually contributes to the play's urban ennui. The audience sees the characters literally "in the same boat" (or subway car), but remaining in isolation from one another, which is expertly conveyed by the actors' body language and introverted stage business.
Colwell also performs, his delivery highlighting Holt's rhythmic wordplay. He creates a sense of frenetic boredom in the voice-over monologue of Damon, an office worker who time-kills his workdays Web surfing. Dalane Mason is convincingly erratic and creepy as Haberdasher, a nattily dressed pickpocket who spews advice and prophecy, invades commuters' personal space, and causes all to avert their eyes to avoid conversation. Matthew Simon is deliciously jaded as Christopher, an actor and gigolo who just wants his own show on HBO. It is to Simon's credit that Christopher's declaration—"We all sell ourselves for something"—seems organic rather than pedantic.
Jessica Jolly is feisty and fun as Jennifer, a woman written to be somewhat past her prime, though the actress herself is not. Bemoaning the recent trend in straight men becoming effeminate, the character is lively and timely, though she does veer toward the stereotypical as she ponders her physical appearance and the options of breast enhancement and blond hair dye. Holt creates a more multidimensional character in Jude, a gay man pondering the step of leaving the comfort of his neighborhood to move in with his partner. In David Michael Holmes's performance, Jude's ambivalence is heartbreakingly palpable, even as the audience laughs with recognition at his deadpan musing ("Of course, I know he wants me, but how do I know I'm done with all the others?").
Chugging Colt 45 in his cut-off jeans, black T, and red bandana, Fabian surprises with his shrewd theories about the commercialization of art. Patrick Craft conveys the character's no-nonsense attitude and astuteness with equal conviction. Holt indulges in the bittersweet with Greta, a young woman awash in the "unspoken misery that is bliss." Becky Lake easily captures Greta's fragility and resignation, though she occasionally allows the rhythms of the playwright's words to direct her performance rather than wielding them as gracefully as she handles the piece's emotional content.
Salvatore, written as the melodramatic one of the lot, is "a show man, a vampire." Brad Danler's performance vacillates between understated and emphatic, though it's unclear whether this is the result of directorial choice. A more consistently seething delivery would have been more meaningful. Danler, with his hypnotic voice and lithe build, could surely have handled the demands of depicting someone so darkly fascinating, and the realism would have been heightened, not hampered—there are very calculating people who think of themselves in such dramatic terms and comport themselves accordingly.
Tom Picasso portrays Edward, a man financially supported by his wife and suffering feelings of emasculation, with touching vulnerability, while Janine Barris is idealism incarnate as a transplanted farm girl, Donna.
The urban motif is notably enhanced by the sound design of Daemon Hatfield, who has turned the recognizable sounds and rhythms of the subway into eerily evocative electronica that accompanies the intercalary scenes. Kate Haugan's urban-savvy costume design subtly underscores each monologist's persona.
In C. Commute, the Narcissists have delivered on their mission statement to provide "theater as a form of therapy," reflecting the struggles, vices, and vulnerabilities of a generation. The audience will delight in what they see onstage, but will they like what they see in the mirror? Whatever the answer, C. Commute makes for entertaining and thought-provoking theater.
Babies With Rabies has an awesome title.
It rhymes, for starters, and it has a delicious, campy, trashy-movie feel to it. Just hearing the title makes you think, "Oh, man! Babies with rabies! Running amok! So totally cool!"
But there are almost no babies with rabies in this production. Instead, there is an extraordinarily convoluted story about a play within a play (within the play), and a lot of shouting. As best as I can figure out, after a detailed examination of my notes and some informal diagramming, the plot of Babies With Rabies is this:
A writer (Erwin Falcon), a producer (Rob Moretti), and a group of actors are working on a play about the residents of an insane asylum who are putting on a play as part of their therapy. Some of the resident crazies plan to use this play to distract the guards and doctors so they can take over the asylum and allow their madness to achieve its fullest flowering. However, some of the residents are against this.
The play the inmates are putting on (the third-level play) is about a kingdom afflicted by a mysterious plague that attacks children and turns them, according to the script, into "crazed homicidal zombies" prone to "fits of cunning and terror." (Here, at last, are the babies with rabies.)
As written out, this story line would seem to promise, like the play's title, all sorts of wacky high jinks and high-camp melodrama. But the script, written by Jonathan Calindas (co-artistic director of Cuchipinoy Productions, which produced the show), begins in the middle of the action, with proclamations that the audience is about to see "a play that will blow your mind," a play that will "question what is real and what is pretend." And while it may be that my mind was blown, I found the show utterly baffling.
For starters, a number of the actors/patients are identified, at different times, by a) their actor names, b) their character's asylum ID number, and c) the names of the characters they are playing within the play. One of the characters (played by Dennis Lemoine) plays identical twins with reversed numbers (45 and 54) and rhyming names (Larry and Gary). Another (Andrew Rothkin) suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning that he is constantly switching personas, from an unctuous giggler to a lisping Satan to Sigmund Freud.
With everyone in the cast playing so many roles, keeping track of who's who—and whether they are being "themselves" or performing in one of the other plays—is no easy task. Also, to underline the fact that these are bad actors portraying crazy people who are themselves bad actors, all of the lines are given a full-camp, full-volume treatment, punctuated with much dramatic gesturing.
Keeping track of what's going on is exhausting amid all the deafening talk. By the second act, when your ears have adjusted and the structures of the many plays within the plays start to become apparent, it's too late to become engaged. There are a few funny lines that send up absurd, pulp-movie conventions and Off-Off-Broadway. (Kelly Rauch, who portrays Tina, an actress inexplicably in possession of an Equity card, shouts, "I know this is Off-Off-Broadway and you're doing the best you can, and you don't have any money, but I'm not used to working under these conditions!") But these lines get buried in the wall of sound.
Babies With Rabies seems to have had ambitious goals. But with the weight of its plot machinations and the heavy-handedness of its subject matter, it never takes off. And there wasn't even a baby with rabies in sight. Now that's disappointing.
Richard Foreman fancies himself avant-garde. In an article he wrote in 2001 to commemorate his 50th production at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, he claims that in the 60's he created "an unusual kind of theater that many people found strange."
The problem is that if Foreman's theater appeared strange in the '60s, it has become institutionalized into a museum piece today. The self-proclaimed "daring" aesthetic sensibility he developed over 40 years ago to shock looks like a self-parody now. With his newest work, ZOMBOID! Film/Performance Project #1, he cobbles together the same old props out of his surrealist toy box with inarticulate catch phrases lifted from sophomore philosophy class to create what is, essentially, a multimedia dance theater piece with a circumscribed repertoire of gestures.
His piece makes us feel comfortably smart and artsy without challenging any of our preconceptions. We know what we're going to get, and Foreman delivers: abstract nonsense spoonfed to us on feedback loops, tableaux that feature oversized, gimmicky props that have an equally over-determined symbolism, and a mishmash of random "nonevents." For all the disembodied eyeballs, dice with letters on them, Hebrew scrolls, piles of books, sledgehammers, blinding lanterns, and blindfolds that he drags into his diorama, we are left neither moved nor amused, or more contemplative.
The central motif of ZOMBOID! is a human-sized stuffed donkey and the blindfolded young people who interact with it. There is also a film playing on two screens in back of them, featuring other blindfolded people and occasional text. The text, with bludgeoning redundancy, proclaims such things as "suppose I were to postulate..." and "the inevitable donkey." These phrases, along with a few other pseudo-poetic epigrams, sound more tendentious the more they get repeated in a cloyingly smarmy voice.
The film aspect is new to Foreman's work, and he talks about it in his notes as if it were revolutionary. But it ends up seeming like just one more element of his predictably theatrical mise en scène. The stage itself is already behind a thin panel of Plexiglas—making it resemble a TV screen, though that is not Foreman's intention—and so the flatness of the film screen appears as distanced and unreal as the live action.
The live actors engage in prayerful posturing, jockey for sexual favors on all fours, play with the props, look out a lighted window in the wall of the set, and sometimes simply watch the film with the rest of us. All of this, I took it, could be a parable for the history of Western metaphysics. The game of pin the tail on the donkey might be a trope for philosophy's search to pin down the thing-in-itself, the truth of which we are categorically blind to.
The rationalism of the Enlightenment, for example, is depicted with a searchlight attached to a clock tower, while the so-called "linguistic turn" of early 20th-century philosophy is represented by a character proudly singing her ABC's. The whole show ends with a Kabbalistic revelation, as Hebrew scrolls appear to float through the set's window in an angelic flood of light. This seems a bit upbeat for the existential dark humor that Foreman often aims for.
Then again, one might read the piece as a political statement: the film of silent, blindfolded persons at times resembles hostage videos; the toy soldiers lined up along the stage front may be an obvious comment on our society's culture of war. But none of this is supported by the context of the play, which strikes a mockingly disinterested and cerebral tone. The play simply exists as an aesthetic "nonevent," a sterilized object of meditation, a cluttered space devoid of point or purpose.
In fact, the program states—in shrill, self-congratulatory prose—that one should try to avoid compositional procedures. Of course, Foreman studiously fails to avoid his own. The program also proclaims, "Ah—this moment starts to be interesting?—Toss it away!" The tone of the play, like his manifestoes, is of a mind that discards its genuine insights—a mind that has trouble taking itself seriously because it suspects it takes itself too seriously. Foreman's hyperventilating manifestoes are evidence of this, since they attempt to justify his style with theoretical explanations even though his art must succeed or fail on its own merits.
The contrived zaniness inside the Ontological-Hysteric Theater cannot compete with the reckless theatrical anarchy of real life outside on St. Mark's Street. Take the costumes, for example. The tutus, fetish gear, piercings, and berets that the characters wear look tepid compared with the costumes of the gutter punks and drifters a block away.
While Foreman has garnered nine Obies, a MacArthur "genius" award, and countless grants from public and private foundations, ZOMBOID! does not advance anything significantly innovative or interesting. By democraticizing his so-called "elitist art" to validate everyone's interpretation, he has emptied it of all intrinsic meaningfulness. To believe it meaningful, then, is merely a form of pretentiousness.
Lenny & Lou, a new play by Ian Cohen receiving its New York premiere at 29th Street Rep, bills itself as a "brutal" comedy that takes a raunchy look at family dysfunction. Cohen and 29th Street Rep are quite taken with being "in your face." And while words like "demented," "debauched," "disturbing," and "shocking" are bandied about in the production's advertising to promote this supposedly edgy work, Lenny & Lou amounts to little more than a third-rate situation comedy at best, and an unfunny exercise in forced acting and weak direction at worst.
Polar-opposite brothers Lenny (David Mogentale) and Lou (Todd Wall) can't get a break. They tend to their Alzheimer's-afflicted mother Fran (Suzanne Toren), bound together by obligation as they while away the days of their empty, meaningless lives. Irresponsible Lenny dreams of being a rock star. Stuck in a loveless, emotionally destructive marriage with mafia princess Julie (Heidi James), Lenny is nothing more than a pathetic, middle-aged wannabe rock 'n' roller.
The tightly wound Lou hasn't fared much better. Haunted by a love that got away, he hasn't had a date in 15 years. He works as an accountant, obsessing over his job to the point where he works through his vacations. When the inappropriate Fran goes too far, Lou finally snaps, sending the family smashing into a million little crazy pieces.
The problems start with Cohen's astonishingly unfunny script. Plagued by ill-conceived caricatures and a contrived plot, Lenny & Lou never has chance. Each of the five characters fits neatly into a stereotypical, and disturbingly ethnocentric, compartment. Lenny, Lou, and Fran are typical stock Jewish characters out of Neil Simon by way of Woody Allen. Lenny is the slacker. Lou is the neurotic. Fran is the crazy mother. Julie is the loudmouthed, pushy, domineering Italian princess. Fran's nurse Sabrina (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a Haitian immigrant, is the deeply religious, sane one caught in the crossfire. Not one of the characters ever amounts to anything beyond being a superficial type.
As for the plot, it is tedious. The first three scenes, where the characters are slowly introduced, establishes very little. The play only becomes engaging, albeit briefly, in the fourth scene with Sabrina's arrival. As Lou plays a cat-and-mouse game with her, the play and the actors momentarily spring to life with crackling dialogue and a fast-paced urgency.
The second act is overcome by too many subplots. What happened to Sabrina? Will Lenny and Julie work it out? Will Julie kill Lenny? Will Lou be found out? Will Julie and Lou find true happiness? The disturbing incest subplot is best forgotten. All this leads to the "surprise" ending that is anything but a surprise.
Much of Cohen's would-be humor comes not from the limp dialogue but from broad, stale situations. Unfortunately for him and the audience, this leaves the ball firmly in director Sturgis Warner's court. Under his anemic direction, Lenny & Lou flounders. The staging is pedestrian, and attempts at sight gags fall flat. Of particular note is a blatantly unfunny sex scene between Julie and Lenny, complete with gratuitous nudity that comes off as offensive and uncomfortable. Warner allows his actors to run amok, offering little if any guidance.
Mogentale and James suffer most from Warner's lax direction. As a sexually explosive, bickering couple who hate as much as they love, their chemistry fizzles. Mogentale struggles to find his footing as the immature Lenny, but ultimately succumbs to the script's many failings by relying on bugged eyes and cross-dressing to score laughs. James's Julie screams a lot and squints her eyes in anger, but manages a great accent and a well-executed tough-girl façade.
Wall finds a few moments of honesty in the loud script. He imbues Lou with an appropriately lost stare and an unwavering conviction that almost makes the character likable, despite his actions. As Fran, Toren makes the best of her largely underwritten role. Her character is decidedly unlikable, yet Toren commits to every moment, however salacious they may be. In one of the play's few bright spots, Carolyn Michelle Smith turns in a funny and engaging performance in the all too brief role of Sabrina.
Lenny & Lou wants so much to be shocking. From every trite vulgarity to each hackneyed scenario, it begs its audience to applaud its daring indecency. But in its efforts to provoke, the only thing brutal about this play is having to sit through it.
Sleeping Booty. Throbin Wood. Snow White and the Seven Sailors. These were the characters and stories that captivated 11-year-old Andrew Goffman, and, as you may suspect, this was not the stuff of innocent fairy tales—instead, Snow White and her Seven Sailors were engaged in full-blown, hard-core pornography.
In his one-man show, The Accidental Pervert, Goffman blends standup comedy with drama to tell his personal story of coming to terms with an (accidental) addiction to pornography. Although he successfully displays his extensive knowledge of the genre while managing to land a number of well-timed jokes, the show fails to deliver on its promise and potential. Instead of delving more deeply into more substantive questions about his addiction and its consequences, Goffman contentedly skims over the surface, reducing the show to a rather sophomoric exercise in easy jokes and bathroom humor.
"None of us start out to be a pervert," Goffman asserts. "It's life that does it to you." Life, in this case, turns out to be dirty videos and a VCR. When his father moves out, Goffman's idyllic family life is shattered. Longing to feel close to his father, he scours his closet, discovering a hidden cardboard box filled with porn. The videos become addiction and escape for Goffman, warping his mind and skewing his expectations of what both women and sex should be.
That pornography has the power to manipulate one's thoughts is hardly new information, and Goffman's retelling of his sexual awakening as influenced by pornography lacks shock value. Instead, his stories are often conventional, predictable, and tiresome. Yes, his mother forbade him to masturbate ("Don't touch yourself down there or your hand will stick to it"). Yes, he played doctor with a young female friend so they could see each other naked. Yes, his first real sexual encounter (at 15) was a disappointment. We've heard these stories before, and we'll hear them again.
Unfortunately, the fresh and potentially enlightening story Goffman could tell is left largely unexamined. When he meets his future wife, Maria, he tells us, he changes from a womanizing, self-destructive cad into a straight-laced, responsible man. And when they have a daughter, Goffman throws away his porn collection for good. Regrettably, he does little to explore exactly why and how these transformations take place. He does tell us that he suddenly realizes the women in the porn videos could be his wife or daughter, but it seems unbelievable that the revelation could be so instantaneous and complete. And why, for example, didn't he have this revelation when he fell in love with his wife (a "good girl," as he describes her)?
While Goffman hits the mark on a few of the more humorous aspects of adolescence and childbearing (his take on conceiving a child is particularly witty), director Charles Messina would do well to excise or shorten many of the silly, protracted porn fantasies and dance sequences in favor of a more detailed exploration of Goffman's choices and character. Surrounded by an old recliner, a large TV screen, and a hefty jar of Vaseline, Goffman makes an amiable confidant. His self-portrayal, however, most often feels paper-thin. Adding dimension and depth to his characterization would make us sympathize with him more (as well as explain why his wife—presumably so intelligent and accomplished—would fall in love with him).
The Accidental Pervert is, as intended, a story about pornography and the dangers of projecting fantasy onto reality. Its noticeable gaps, however, are the most intriguing parts of Goffman's story, and many powerful questions go unanswered. How did his wife react to his obsession with porn? How did his "kinda-sorta" twisted view of women begin to change? How did pornography influence his ideas about manhood and masculinity? And if pornography was a "legacy" or "rite of manhood" unwittingly passed down from his father, what does this say about societal expectations for men?
Raised on Woodcock Lane in Blue Ball, Pa., near the town of Intercourse, Goffman seems almost absurdly well suited to telling a story of unintentional perversion. While at times endearing, The Accidental Pervert is too often cutesy and contrived, and the image Goffman projects is less of a grown man who has dealt with an addiction and more of a mischievous boy who still revels in discussing its depravity. Although he claims to have thrown out the porn for good, you get the feeling he might still have one copy of Sleeping Booty stashed away somewhere, just waiting to be discovered. Accidentally, of course.
The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater touts itself for specializing in affordable, high-quality comedy shows, seven nights a week. It's hard to get more affordable than free, and Wednesday night's final show, School Night, is just that: free. As for quality, the show has its finer moments as well as its lesser ones.
Emceeing the evening was Justin Purnell, who hyped the show up to high levels of expectation. His naturally likable personality made him more convincing than most emcees, but his between-skit banter tended to drag on too long, slowing down the show's pace and forcing the comedians to spend too much time trying to bring back the crowd's enthusiasm. Purnell's consistent use of "um" and "uh" betrayed a bit of discomfort in the spotlight, which also sapped the audience's energy.
The show's opener, Tony Camin, came on strong with some potentially offensive but truly clever jokes, but then quickly sank into witless grade-school humor. While his sex jokes were merely unoriginal, his material mocking people with mental retardation was offensive. His efforts to point out that retarded people are indeed retarded merited neither laughter nor applause.
Billy Merritt and Pam Murphy increased the laughs with their improvised show called "Bicker." Taking a key word from the audience, the two portrayed numerous bickering couples, cleverly weaving each couple's story line into the next couple's story line.
Daily Show correspondent Miriam Tolan and her skit partner, Jason Mantzoukas, exemplified improv at its best as they too portrayed a couple in a situation taken from an audience member's suggestion. Tolan and Mantzoukas seemed completely comfortable as their characters, easing into joke after joke while simultaneously building the world their characters inhabit. As a young married couple who met in rehab, Mantzoukas was a lovably homicidal and hilariously neglectful husband/father of two, while a deadpan Tolan doted on every one of her beau's psychotic flaws.
While attempting to introduce the night's next act, emcee Purnell was interrupted by his overbearing girlfriend, Sara Schaefer. A clearly obsessed Schaefer bounded onstage, stopping the show and producing a slide show of imagined romantic moments between the two lovers before strong-arming Purnell into a disturbingly well-choreographed ribbon dance that was like Olympic rhythmic gymnastics.
Chris Gethard played a slow-witted and comedically challenged Queens restaurateur named Uncle Billy. His terrible delivery of unfunny jokes was riotous, rivaling Tolan and Mantzoukas as School Night's best performers. Gethard was not just a comedian delivering his material but an actor giving a carefully scripted and brilliant performance.
Aziz Ansari entertained with his personal style of self-deprecating yet self-obsessed humor, and the duo of John Conroy and Rachel Hamilton closed out the show with another portrayal of a bickering couple. Conroy and Hamilton had some funny moments but found themselves at a distinct disadvantage, having followed two pairs of performers who were more adept at the same game.
The show started 20 minutes late, and with seven performances and emcee banter in between, it dragged on about 20 minutes too long. The comedians ranged from good amateurs to bad professionals to seasoned pros. As is the nature of improv, School Night is guaranteed to be different every time, with any number of performers appearing.
Still, at the unbeatable price of zero dollars, the show is worth the risk, especially if you find yourself bored, broke, or looking for an excuse to stay up late on a school (or any other) night.
"The world is getting more brutish," trophy wife Gloria Temple tells her estranged daughter, Marcie. "And that makes art even more important."
Temple's reasons for saying this are selfish: she wants her daughter to abandon her happy bohemian life in New Mexico to take over the family's New York business, a foundation for the performing arts. But her quote feels resonant outside its context, especially in regards to this production of December Fools, playing at the Abingdon Theater Company. Perhaps playwright Sherman Yellen has expressed his own feelings in this dialogue, for this funny, touching and inspiring story of a mother and daughter coming to terms with their past is a perfect illustration of why art is important.
Temple, played by the distinguished stage veteran Elizabeth Shepherd, is the vivacious, driving force in this story. Though she is a sick, elderly woman dependent on her trusted housekeeper, Mrs. Hogan (Celia Howard), to help her get around, she carries herself with a stunning grace that can come only from one who has lived an upper-crust lifestyle. There is a spark in her eyes and a fire to her personality that give us a glimpse of the kind of lady she must have been many years ago when she married a philandering Broadway composer.
Her wayward daughter Marcie (Arleigh Richards) has inherited her inner fire, if nothing else. The rift between them is visually obvious. Gloria is a graceful, refined woman often clad in furs and silk shawls. Marcie stumbles around in jeans and a sweater, hardly what one would expect from the privileged daughter of a celebrated Broadway composer and his elegant wife.
But despite their image as a prosperous Broadway legend's picture-perfect family, neither Gloria nor Marcie has led a happy life. Both women were wronged by the men they loved, betrayed by those they trusted, and hurt by the tragic, senseless loss of a family member. Marcie has no hesitations in vocalizing her disgust with the world around her, but Gloria can express her feelings only by writing letters she never plans to send.
Her nonconfrontational approach comes back to haunt her the day Marcie accidentally stumbles upon her collection of indictments against family, friends, and acquaintances. One letter hits particularly close to home, as it involves a hurtful secret her mother has lied about for years. Determined to right this injustice, Marcie mails the letters.
When December Fools opens, it appears the main conflict will be Gloria's efforts to keep her daughter in New York to run the family business, but as the play unfolds, it is clear there is much more at stake. Gloria and Marcie are two divided souls trying to find a common ground, not only because they are family but also because they need each other. When they face off, they are evenly matched, as only a mother and daughter can be. Their verbal battles are laced with telling one-liners and weighty revelations, but in the end there can be no winner. Both women carry a heavy amount of baggage and will never be fully relieved of the burden.
Their history feels deeply rooted and real. Shepherd and Richards are thoroughly convincing in their roles, especially in the climactic final fight where stifled emotions bubbling beneath the play's surface explode in a flurry of hurtful accusations. The conclusion spares us a neat resolution. The characters continue on, shouldering their burdens and harboring their resentment, yet acknowledging that in the end none of this matters when all they have is each other.
In a beautiful and touching line of dialogue, Gloria says, "Memories make such bad company. They come uninvited, overstay their welcome, and leave a mess when they go." Indeed, these memories have left quite a mess. Fortunately, Marcie and Gloria reach a place where they find it in themselves to clean things up together.
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