Everything is Disappearing

The haunting leitmotif of British playwright Jez Butterworth’s dark and compelling new play, Parlour Song, which is receiving its world premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, is of things disappearing from a man’s home. “It starts small” -- the sole words of the play’s prelude -- with a pocket watch, an old set of golf clubs, other household items and things scavenged from garage sales, but progresses to include early, significant gifts exchanged between the man and his wife. That trajectory of loss tracks the dwindling of the couple’s 11-year-old marriage. Ned (Chris Bauer) and Joy (Emily Mortimer) find themselves in their early 40s living in a cookie-cutter house in a new subdivision in suburban England, alienated from their own past, from the natural environment, and from each other.

Ned, fleshy and emotional, is devoted to Joy but terrified that she has drifted away from him, while Joy, skinny and brittle, is the quintessence of opaque detachment, unable or unwilling to respond to Ned’s tentative overtures. Into their lives walks their next-door neighbor, Dale (Jonathan Cake), brawny, self-confident and restless.

What catapults this domestic drama into a work of far greater force and scope is Butterworth’s savage wit, his vivid imagery and his mastery of stagecraft and story-telling.

Parlour Song nimbly zigzags from realism to the netherworld of sleepwalking and nightmares. The petty household thievery triggers a nightmare for Ned so terrifying that he refuses to sleep; only in the play’s final moments do we learn the lineaments of that nightmare and its counterpart in Joy’s mind.

The play gains further resonance from the connections that Butterworth draws between his characters’ unhappiness and a world in which nature is in retreat, history holds no value, and sex and Youtube substitute for intimacy and culture.

Ned, a demolitions expert, sits at home watching over and over again video clips of buildings that he and his crew have sent tumbling. He has a project on deck to blow up the town’s Arndale Centre, the community's shopping center, to make way for the New Arndale Centre. When pressed by his wife for a valid reason for tearing down the old building, Ned nonchalantly reminds Joy that there was a forest five years ago where their house now stands. “It was here for a 1,000 years. Now it’s gone. We’re here. Everything has its time.”

Butterworth is adept at capturing the oblique, coded conversations that take place between close friends or family members. Joy, Ned and Dale rarely say outright what they think or feel. Joy carefully praises the roast duck that Ned has prepared for her, while her tone of voice and diffident, little bites communicate something quite different about the dinner – and their relationship.

Parlour Song marks the most recent collaboration between the 39-year-old Butterworth and the Atlantic Theater Company and its artistic director, Neil Pepe. Under Pepe's sure-footed direction, the three-member cast is outstanding. If there is a flaw in Butterworth’s play, it is the implausibility of the love affair between the schlumpy Ned and the gazelle-like Joy and the odd friendship that Ned and Dale strike up. Yet, the three actors’ personal chemistry wash away any doubts about these relationships.

Chris Bauer brings great emotionality as well as comic finesse to the role of Ned. Emily Mortimer is equally convincing as the suburban housewife come unhinged by depression. And Jonathan Cake, coming off a startlingly similar role as lady-killer Iachimo in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Lincoln Center this fall, is magnetic as the cocky yet amiable Dale.

The design team likewise does impeccable work. Of particular note are Kenneth Posner’s sharp and lucid lighting, Robert Brill’s suitably sterile set, Dustin O’Neill’s evocative projections of catch phrases and video on the house façade at back, and Obadiah Eaves’ bold sound.

The events of Parlour Song occur during an uncommon six-week drought. It’s not giving up too much of the plot to reveal that its satisying ending features a rain shower. But in keeping with the play’s dark tenor, the water offers tenuous relief.

I Am Woman, Hear Me Rap

“What are you, a feminazi?” Florida comedian Suzanne Willet’s answer, in the form of a solo-performance piece, is a resounding yes. Dressed in black, wielding a riding crop, and speaking in a cartoonish German accent, the title character of The Feminazi is a personification of the misogynist term. It’s a neat tactic of reclamation, if not always a successfully comedic one.

At the Players Theater in the Village through May fourth, The Feminazi flanks its title character with three women, all portrayed by Willet: Fran (“the older woman”), Sarah ("the middle class white female”), and the Virgin Mary(“a Jewish mother”). Each of the characters struggles with a unique feminist issue: maintaining cultural visibility (Fran), balancing family and career (Sarah), questioning how to best raise a child (Virgin Mary). In keeping with the conventions of solo performance, each character lives in a different area of the stage, with shifts in lighting, designed by Janna Mattioli, separating the scenes.

Of the four characters, only the Virgin Mary addresses the audience in direct-confessional style, alternating between motherly boastfulness over her son’s successes and anxious concern over his struggles. Willet imbues the Virgin’s scenes with large doses of sweetly amusing anachronism that grow tiresome over the duration of the performance.

In contrast to the Virgin Mary’s direct address, Sarah and Fran’s scenes are consciously performative musical acts. Sarah’s scenes take place at a series of singer-songwriter open mic nights that span her college days through her arrival at middle age; Fran’ scenes are set at a rally in Florida, where she endeavors to bring visibility to the plight of older women in America through motivational speeches and rap music. Filled with impassioned rage, Fran serves as an interesting counterpoint to Sarah, whose tentative complaints (“I'm a middle class white female/ I smile when I hear crap”) form the heart of her music.

With both women, Willet has given herself a challenge: characters who love to sing their hearts out, despite the fact that the size of their hearts is considerably greater than breadth of their musical abilities. It’s clear that Willet loves these characters, and even at their goofiest – or especially then – treats them with the utmost respect. She belts out Fran’s fiery bad rhymes (“that Coldwater Creek/ Prints that make you freak/ And hey, LL Bean/ Drop the aquamarine”) with abandon. At best, the absurdity of their music, and the painstaking intensity with which they perform it, is itself entertaining. One imagines these are women with YouTube followings.

Of course, YouTube clips last only a few minutes. Even with Sarah’s maturing into motherhood and Fran’s struggles to persevere in the face of adversity, their stories, as told through their music, rarely feel worthy of full-length performance. Nor, unfortunately, does the Feminazi herself, as she goes about her mission instructing the audience in the disenfranchised state of women and purports to suss out and condemn “sexist pigs.”

Along the way, the Feminazi treats audiences to a humorously angry deconstruction of Snow White (“Even if you are small, if you are a white male, you will still be the power structure of the story!”) and a tamely phallic consumption of a banana: techniques as tired, oversimplified and silly as the notion of a feminazi itself.

At just eighty minutes, the production feels long: each of the characters would benefit from more concise scenes. Still, moments of the production are bound to delight. All of the women Willet portrays possess an endearing earnestness and a goofy form of self-expression that make them hard not to like.

Audiences will be particularly engaged in the Feminazi’s scenes, which utilize a lot of audience interaction. Yet ultimately her audience affects her more deeply than she affects it: by the end of the performance, the Feminazi is openly flirting with a male audience member. That abrupt shift feels artificial and unneeded. Instead, it would be a welcome change if Willet allowed the Feminazi to contemplate the space that exists between the wild extremes of man-hating fury and school-girlish crushes: to stop talking about feminazis and start talking about feminism.

Well-Beaten (Socio)paths

"When a famous person crashes their plane or skis into a tree, everyone cares," muses one of the two nihilist heroines of US Drag, a new play by Louisville Festival playwright Gina Gionfriddo, now playing at Off-Broadway's Beckett Theater. The heroines, cute, dolled-up, unemployed and cynical recent college grads Angela (Tanya Fischer) and Alison (Lisa Joyce), take on New York City, determined to achieve fame, fortune, or, at the very least, their monthly rent on the room they are subletting from socially inept Wall Street broker Ned (Matthew Stadelman). Angela and Alison take a picaresque tour of an absurdist underworld that's definitely recognizable in our own world. Picked up at a bar by wealthy trustafarian and disturbingly obsessed amateur crime historian James (James Martinez), they find out that the police have offered a $10,000 award for a serial attacker’s capture. They turn bounty hunters, and join an awareness-raising group called S.A.F.E., whose leader Evan (Lucas Papaelias) warns people to stay safe by refusing to help strangers, under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, Angela is courted by egotistical and cruelly inventive "creative nonfiction" writer Christopher -- a wannabe Dave Eggers. Alison, disturbed by a dream, decides that she must find a husband immediately, and goes after the character who most should remain single in the interest of public safety.

Gionfriddo explores a popular theme in the contemporary theatre: spoiled, unemployed middle-class beautiful young things behaving amorally (by the author's standards) in the Big Apple. Popularized in Jonathan Larson's cult Broadway musical Rent, the subject also dominates Michael Domitrovich's Artfuckers, currently running Off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth. Gionfriddo adds nothing new to the tradition. Angela and Alison carp about women who buy "thirty-five dollar mascara and drink two lattes a day"; Christopher claims that his "creative nonfiction" is true because his parents abused him "symbolically."

Gionfriddo saves her sharpest barbs for self-proclaimed activists whose activism constitutes mere ego-aggrandizement, bereft of any genuine concern for the victimized or oppressed. James stalks crime victims whose names he finds in the news in order to offer them consolation.

Evan tells S.A.F.E. that apprehending the attacker is not their mission. When the characters watch a didactic, downbeat documentary about refugees, Alison decides it would be far better if the "massacre" were accompanied by music by Nine Inch Nails.

The costumes, by Emily Rebholz, playfully mimic the "trendy" apparel of the New York young, wealthy, and pretentious. Trip Cullman's direction is adequate, though in some scenes characters talk while lined up in a horizontal row, forced into presentational poses, and a transition in which one of the heroines strips and changes costume onstage right next to the exit seems unsupported by thematic, plot, or practical demands.

Sandra Goldmark's set is dominated by several lampshade-covered lights that jut horizontally from the upper reaches of the upstage wall, reminiscent of the furniture-museum set of Moises Kaufman's production of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife. The purpose of these lampshades is not clear, but they look very whimsical when they turn on and off in unison.

Underscoring US Drag is Gionfriddo's conviction that in our society, or perhaps only in Manhattan, empathy is uncommon and unpopular. This is stated — or, rather, overstated — throughout the play. "A good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan," preaches Evan to S.A.F.E. When Angela first meets Christopher, he signs a copy of his book and admits that it will only be worth much when he is dead. "How much?" she asks, comically calculating her potential profit.

"A sociopath lacks the capacity to empathize. The only pain they notice is their own,” someone says, informing the audience unambiguously that most of the characters are sociopaths. This didacticism causes the play to ramble on the same track without ever developing or allowing the audience to puzzle anything out for themselves.

More problematically, Angela and Alison are only vaguely defined characters, with costume changes more complex than their changes in outlook and character. The world they inhabit is interesting, but they are its twin black hole, a vacuous vacuum that sucks all life and energy away.

Producing company The Stage Farm's motto is "we make plays for play-haters." Possibly, then, US Drag will appeal to people who wish to see characters who are stock types, and hear clearly stated messages. If you go to the theatre because you like theatre, because, at its best, it challenges your horizons and you appreciate a challenge, you might find US Drag a bit of a drag.

However, in the real New York City just as in Gionfriddo's version, there are all types of people. If US Drag gets the "theatre-haters" into the Beckett Theatre, Stage Farm will have accomplished the kind of altruistic act that is so sadly absent from Angela and Alison's world.

F*@#ing 'A

We’ve all been there. A ticking clock on the wall counts the hours that you’ve been trapped in this small room, waiting for some sign. Waiting for the door to open and for your fate to be pronounced. You size up the people around you, who are all either a joke to be ridiculed or a giant to be conquered. Meanwhile, a woman dressed in a black leotard puts her head between her knees, her butt in the air and says “Butter Baby Basket,” over and over again. Okay, so maybe not ALL of us have been there.

But even if you’re not one of the thousands of actors diligently reporting to open calls in New York, you’ll find something in Push Productions’ hilarious Actors are F*@#ing Stupid that addresses humanity’s universal obsession with attention, praise and, most importantly, seeing the other guy fail. Don’t bother to look for characters connecting on any genuine level. As in life, so it goes in the vicious acting community — it’s every narcissistic moron for themselves.

Ian McWethy’s new play surveys the broader landscape of audition culture, by bringing into focus four actors at a volatile try-out for an unnamed MTV movie. The auditions in question are being run by ill-tempered producer Bill Lawrence (think Scott Rudin on steroids) and Doug, a writer/director who takes his dumb teen comedy way too seriously. When the A-list celebrity slated to star in the picture bails, Bill and Doug decide to cut their losses (and their budget) by casting two unknowns in the lead roles. Enter Amy, Jennifer, Johnny, and Steve: four actors, at varying levels of baseness, who will do anything to get the part.

A realistic sense of anxiety saturates McWethy’s characters, and you get the feeling that he’s definitely been through at least a couple of “cattle calls” in his day. The ambling way a polite conversation about agents, day jobs or technique can escalate into a shouting match within minutes is quite funny. More importantly, each character seems to represent a different school of “actor marketing.” There’s the one with rich parents, the one with nothing but looks, the one willing to sleep with any producer in town—you get the picture. You won’t find any Lawrence Olivier’s in this catty crowd. But these different… ahem… viewpoints give the play an unpredictable atmosphere, where potentially any character can pop off at a fellow actor for no more reason than that they’re more marketable.

Director Michael Kimmel and the discreet Ben Kato (who designed both set and lights) keep any signs of their handiwork to a minimum, preferring instead to let McWethy and the splendid cast tell the story. Thankfully, there was no distracting splendor in Kimmel’s practical environment — just a few necessary pieces of furniture. With the exception of at least two awkward scene transitions, the show clicked along without interference.

As actors playing actors, it’s difficult to imagine someone NOT having a good time in this show. Roger Lirtsman, Susan Maris, Heidi Niedermeyer, and Wil Petre all – of course – have an intimate knowledge of the world McWethy is addressing. No doubt, they have all met some pretty similar characters in their careers. While they all nail the humor and subtlety of the piece, Petre’s clueless Johnny is particularly genuine. As manic producer Bill Lawrence, the tremendous Tom Escovar is probably the star of the show and is always appropriately loud, sleazy and sexist. Josh LaCasse almost proves himself worthy of sympathy as Doug, but in the end he delightfully proves to be just another loathsome Hollywood hack. In fact, only Carrie McCrossen’s character deserves any actual compassion here, as the vigilant casting assistant and punching bag.

So, after years of hard research on the acting circuit, McWethy’s thesis-like Actors are F*@#ing Stupid arrives at an honest, obvious and entertaining conclusion. Yes, actors are probably pretty stupid. They work so hard for years just to get a job for one day, selling sneakers or pretending to be a murder victim. But don’t blame them! Producers are stupid, too - they throw billions of dollars at dumb projects that will only make them millions back. Don’t forget about the stupid directors and writers! If they're not on strike to demand more money, they’re egotistically revising history or toying with our emotions. And you know what? We pay top dollar for all of it. That’s the point. Sure, they look dumb, but we’re giving them our money.

I guess we’re the ones who are f*@#ing stupid.

Bubbling Poetry of the Everyday

Dylan Thomas was right – you actually can hear the dew falling. Listen properly and you will even hear time passing. Sound difficult? It’s not. All you have to do is bring your ears to Theatre 3 for Intimation Theatre Company’s lovely production of Under Milk Wood. Thomas’ “Play for Voices” is an ode to sound. Written for the radio, or simply to be read as opposed to fully staged, the piece takes its listeners, or in this case its wide-eyed viewers, through a night and a day of a sleepy Welsh seaside town. Like a landscape painter, Thomas penned the characters of Llareggub to life, gently leading us from their nighttime dreams to their spring morning routines and all the way back to bed. His language is as bubbly to the ears as it was when he wrote the play more than fifty years ago.

Director Michelle Dean uses the bare set and her company of actors to bring out much of the comic brilliance of Thomas’ script, which could otherwise remain hidden. True to the text, much of the actors’ character building seems to have stemmed from voice work, only then wearing their physicalization over the sound like a cloak. The eccentric locals of Llareggub are given bold life in this production.

The company on the whole is strong, and Dean keeps the tempo of the evening fast-paced and steady. John Mervini provides the most captivating performance, with a commendable comic intensity and commitment to all three of his roles. “Let me shipwreck in your thighs,” he pleads straight-forwardly as Captain Cat to one of the ladies still alive only in his memory. Jesse Tandler is endearing as Willie Nillie, and Betsy Head is charmingly seductive as the singing, scrubbing Polly Garter who laments the various male organs (and the men attached to them) that delighted her senses long ago.

The company has managed to create a delicate balance between character and actor, imagined reality and the plain one of gathering in midtown for a play, between Wales and New York City. The skipping nature of the writing, rapidly hopping from place to place and scene to scene, demands an ability to flow in and out of character. The offstage actors are visible standing in the wings, and at times even hand costume pieces or props to one another as they glide into their next role. Not shying away from acknowledging that we are in the theater provides a richer experience for this play. It is the awareness that the audience is sitting together like a bunch of children being caressed to sleep with a soft lullaby that puts a smile on your face as you walk out of the theater.

The production errs when it does not trust Thomas’ sound waves, and overloads the eye with activity to drown out the Welshman’s ear candy. Thankfully this only happens a couple of times over the course of the evening and so does not mar the experience. Dean does reference directly the fact that the play was written to be read, not physicalized. Voices One and Two, who function as narrators, move around the stage with script in hand, communicating directly with the audience. Nonetheless, a simple way to address the sonic purpose of the play would have been to hear voices in the darkness, which the spectators never get to a chance to do in this production.

The poetry of the everyday, about which Dean talks in her program’s note, is a theme explored more and more these days on New York’s Off and Off Off Broadway stages. It is enlightening to see how this was handled by a poetic great of another place and time. Much like Wim Wenders latest film, Lisbon Story, another inquiry into the humming noises of the everyday, this production finds ways to talk about the nature of sound through a visual medium. It is indeed a promising inaugural production for the Intimation Theatre Company.

Camping Out

After “singing” her opening number, Dina Martina self-deprecatingly tells the audience that she discourages expectations whenever she can. She then asks those assembled if they’re ready to have an “adequate time.” That’s just about what you get with Dina Martina: Off the Charts!. Don’t expect the cerebral. Expect a lot of bawdy cracks about, well, cracks, and other anatomical features. Expect spastic dancing. Expect plastic bag juggling. She’s been described, perhaps charitably, as a “train wreck in heels.” Dina Martina is a niche comic, catering to a devoted and largely middle-aged gay male audience. This Seattle-based drag cornball hallucination has ardent followers in New York, Provincetown and other cities with large gay communities across the country. She tells the audience that she’s so glad to be back in “The Cuttin’ Rooms” that she’s saving up money to buy the club. This provokes warm applause which she immediately deflates by adding, “Yeah, I’m gonna flip it.”

Ms. Martina sports a balloon-decorated gift bag because “balloons are always festive. Except when it’s the Hindenberg.” Dina soon wades into the audience and distributes off-the-wall chachkas: packages of Trivial Pursuit Ketchup, Saved by the Bell collector’s cards and "gummy T-bone steaks." To her credit, the always-amiable Dina never singles out audience members for cruel or rough treatment.

Some in the audience laughed wildly at nearly every gesture she made. Now, Dina Martina is funny. But she isn’t that funny. Specializing in deliberately lame jokes, and flaunting her grotesque appearance and trademark screeching, she’s tossed a fair number of what can only be described as charity laughs from a loyal audience that simply adores her. It’s like seeing Don Rickles in Las Vegas. You know where most of the jokes are heading but you laugh anyway, because you feel like you know him. And because he looks funny.

Much of Dina’s comedy in this installment involves her caterwauling along with former chart hits such as “Rio” by Duran Duran, Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” and even a sappy selection from the soundtrack of the melodramatic 70s film, Ice Castles. When she tires of a track that goes too long, she simply abandons her earnestness with a wave of her hand and starts munching from a bowl of spaghetti. She strings together off-the-cuff jokes with machine-gun timing and gets unbelievable laugh mileage from deliberate mispronunciations of words like “city.”

Only rarely does Dina attempt to elevate this camp extravaganza above ribald entertainment. I wish she had done so more often. After conning the audience into believing she’s starting a theater for at-risk youth, she drops her bomb: “I have to tell you, these kids are just…useless.” She’s at her best when she fails miserably to comprehend the world around her. Suddenly turning her banter to the topic of “global warning,” Dina gets a lecture she’s heard all wrong, concluding in a fit of twisted logic that fish displace the oceans by taking up space and therefore must all be killed. Here’s Dina's take on global ice melts: “All the ice is melting. All of it! Check your drinks—that’s just while you’ve been sitting there!”

Dina Martina is comfort food for the camp appetite. She’s not groundbreaking—anyone who has seen a couple of John Waters films can imagine what Dina Martina is all about. She’s an agreeable offense to the senses, an endearing nightmare, a fun hour of the absurd.

If you’ve never experienced this type of comedy before, or if you’re simply looking to have a few drinks along with a heavy dose of the ridiculous, then Dina Martina: Off the Charts! is just the show for you.

Stripped

Promoting her latest pop conservative book, Ann Coulter asserted that children of single mothers grow up to be "strippers, rapists and murderers.” The suspect validity of that statement aside, her conflation of rape and murder (crimes!) with stripping (not a crime!) went unremarked upon during her interview on Hannity & Colmes last month. Fittingly, That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, the latest from provocative playwright Sheila Callaghan, addresses such incongruities by featuring heroines who are strippers turned murder-rapists. A loopy meditation on rape culture, That Pretty Pretty is sometimes shrewd and sometimes silly. The play makes its points elliptically rather than directly and has a lot of fun with its own conceit: a screenwriter works through his own gendered emotional baggage while harboring under the delusion that he is creating a feminist screenplay. It’s a sneaky device that allows the play’s loosely connected scenes to cover a wide array of styles, excuses textual inconsistencies, and permits plot lines to wholly change course at whim. The mutability of the play’s world will frustrate audience members eager to know the rules from the get-go; better to sit back and enjoy its horrific humor while allowing the play to explain itself.

Callaghan is an inventive playwright most at home in goofy scenes that build toward incisive political statements. In the hands of director Kip Fagan, who understands exactly what Callaghan is getting at, the misogynist fantasy that women (or certain types of women) are criminally sexy and vicious beyond redemption is broad comedy. The production also takes satirical aim at the notion that male artists who perceive themselves as sensitive have a free pass at writing female (and male) characters however they please.

The versatile cast shifts with boundless energy between genres that range from high comedy to kooky melodrama to torture porn and back again. Connecting the diverse styles is the fact that they are all performed in virtual quotation marks, with the threads of every scene threatening to unravel at any moment. That they don't is a credit to Fagen, who trusts Callaghan's script enough that, without losing control of the production, he pushes each scene to its edges of cohesion. Doing so underscores all the fun with an effective sense of unease. It's as quietly unsettling as the play's subject matter is blatantly upsetting.

In addition to its impressively broad, boldly stylized sequences, That Pretty Pretty contains moments of realism. The realistic scenes, which feature screenwriter Owen and his buddy Rodney, help separate the real world (set primarily in a hotel room) with the scenes that exist within Owen's screenplay (set in a hotel room, a posh restaurant, a mud wrestling pit, and a wartime hospital, among other locations) in its various stages of development. That concept is enhanced by Narelle Sission's set design, which depicts a fully rendered, identifiably generic hotel room. Various set pieces (a fancy chandelier, a tarp) drop in and out of that generic space to suggest the play's more outlandish settings.

Inside the hotel room, the Owen/Rodney scenes get the narrative job done, but offer little in the way of dramatic insight or fresh perspectives of gender and power. Callaghan is more in her element in the compellingly outrageous segments that comprise the play's most indelible scenes. Part of the pleasure of the play comes from the sacrilege of seeing vile subject matter treated as light farce, yet there are no cheap laughs in That Pretty Pretty and little is included for shock value alone. Rather than confrontationally attack audiences, the production invites audience members to delight in its squirm-inducing irreverence. The ability to wildly push boundaries without sacrificing its warmth make That Pretty Pretty a welcome piece of powerful theater.

A Difficult Balancing Act

In Carla Cantrelle's romantic drama Looking Up, aerial performer Wendy (Cantrelle) flies through the air with the greatest of ease, to the wonder and amazement of vocationally frustrated bartender Jack (Bryant Mason). For the daring young woman on the trapeze, the really difficult balancing act is love. Cantrelle's aerial ballet, choreographed by Tanya Gagne, is both hair-raisingly risky-looking and graceful. Lurking in the background of the romance are difficult and frightening suggestions. When Jack meets Wendy, he makes a joke about Peter Pan. In that legendary play about of children in flight, which has provided employment to generations of rigging specialists, little Wendy Darling learns that when you grow up, you aren't any longer allowed to fly, so growing up is scary. Will this apply to our Wendy, and her boy who won't clean up? It's a good question, but the play drags a bit in the middle, where Wendy and Jack's lovers tiff seems transparently constructed to supply plot and conform to rom-dram formula. However, by the end, Cantrelle recovers her footing with aplomb, with a humorous yet rivetingly suspenseful test of both Wendy and Jack's trust in each other and their ability to come down to earth, as well as their physical coordination.

The plot is a standard, dependable romantic machine. Tending bar at a club, Jack dares to look up at the evening's performance act -- Wendy -- and is smitten. She comes down to earth, chats with him, and wins the keys to his apartment, ostensibly so that she can take a nap, but they both know that they really want each other. They have pleasant conversation, great sex, and a common interest in rope. (No, not like that -- Jack's grandfather was a New England sailor; before meeting Wendy, who periodically replaces her rigging, Jack's knot-tying knack was unappreciated by the world.)

A period of domestic bliss follows, slowing the plot somewhat. Of course, all is not perfect in Wendy and Jack's lives: he still hates his job and his crackhead boss Skeeter; she is grieving for her recently deceased mentor, Mario, and for her former life in a circus. Both stress over the difficult balancing act of limiting commitment versus unpredictable freedom, in love and work. Then the relationship hits a rocky patch, for apparently random reasons. Jack makes a mistake that is never foreshadowed or even shown, only discussed. Wendy makes a mistake that reveals insecurities that are, again, never foreshadowed, and which could have been avoided with a little communication.

Cantrelle's acting is solid. Directed by Giovanna Sardelli, she navigates the earthbound bits of the play with equal grace and ease. Mason also rises to the difficult challenge of holding up half of a two-hander. Physically and emotionally, Mason's Jack seems more held down by gravity than most earthlings, contextualising his desire for not only his “Tinker Bell,” but the powers she has seemingly wrested from physics and fate.

Aerialism is a beautiful art and, as Cantrelle shows, a wonderful language for the elucidation of the human psyche's invisible leaps and falls, risks and flights of fantasy, transcendence, and love. Bogged down by a plot that, very unlike a trapeze artist, avoids even the appearance of real danger and aesthetic risk, Looking Up nevertheless has some lovely moments, mostly involving Cantrelle's aerial performance. Furthermore, devoted fans of romantic relationship drama may find Looking Up a fresh new take on the genre. I look forward to seeing Cantrelle find or invent a story on which she truly can soar. I am sure that she will soon.

(Re)Writer's Block

Before I saw Walt Stepp’s Mark Twain’s Blues I re-read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Huck might have said, I’m mighty glad I did. Walt Stepp’s re-imagination of Twain’s most famous work begins with the depressed author preparing for one of the humorous speaking tours that made him an international celebrity. Twain’s excursions were launched to pay off his bills, his expensive house, and debts amassed from misguided investments in various inventions, including a typesetting machine quickly rendered obsolete by superior technology. Stepp imagines that Twain is despondent in large part because he views himself as a caricature and feels particular guilt over the trite ending of his masterpiece.

Against this backdrop, Stepp brings to life the central characters of the book: Huck Finn and the runaway slave, Jim. When we meet them, they are now some twenty years older and wiser, and both have their own ideas about how the novel should have ended. They suddenly appear onstage and berate Twain for selling them out in what many consider a woefully disappointing and manipulative ending to his Great American Novel. Jim, now 50 and Huck, about 32 and with an odd resemblance to Kid Rock, aren’t playing anymore.

You must re-familiarize yourself with the novel to understand and enjoy this play. Unless your memory is unusually strong, high-school recollections of the plot won’t suffice.

The novel ends with the insertion of Tom Sawyer into the action. Tom, knowing that Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, has died and freed him in her will, nonetheless — and strictly for the pursuit of boyish pleasures — withholds this information and helps Huck try to gain freedom for Jim. Tom’s farcical antics, in which Huck often acquiesces, stand, for many chapters, in stark contrast to the very dramatic and life-threatening ordeals endured by Huck and Jim as they rafted down the Mississippi River. Twain’s ending also miraculously ties up loose ends: for instance, we learn that Huck’s drunken and abusive father has conveniently died.

Walt Stepp’s play takes Twain to task for his cop-out ending, but Stepp’s ending is not necessarily a better one. It’s simply different and permits greater psychic freedom and growth for the two main characters. Yet, to understand his creation, one must know where Twain ends and Stepp begins.

The mature Huck and Jim act out a number of altered scenes from the book with Twain himself as their rapt — sometimes skeptical, sometimes humble — audience. Theirs is a more psychologically complex and brutal ending, halting the nauseating innocence in which they believe Twain enshrined their adventures. This time around, Jim won’t stand for being the good-natured and grateful slave, humoring the whims and pranks of a pubescent white boy. Huck won’t let Twain make their raft miss Cairo, Illinois, in the fog, where Jim would have been able to gain freedom.

The text of the play is a combination of Twain’s own words and those of Stepp, who puts many of them into a total of 19 songs, often with dance, all competently performed with the aid of an onstage pianist, by the three men and actress Bonne Kramer, who plays Twain's mother and several of the novel’s female characters. As Huck and Jim sing their accusations at Twain, the author admits, among other things, that he had to finish the book quickly for the money and could not contrive a better ending.

Cathy Smalls' costuming admirably evokes the period. Actor Bill Tatum is a dead ringer for Twain and the staging ably elicits a dressing room in a Southern theater at the turn of the twentieth century. Tom Herman directs with imagination and resourcefulness; for example, he comes up with a nifty onstage trick to simulate canoe rowing. Unfortunately, though, at two hours the play becomes tedious.

Mark Twain’s Blues is, above all else, a labor of love written by someone clearly enthralled by Twain and his canon; it’s often esoteric and concerned with minutiae. The fact that there is little or no historical support for some of Stepp’s assumptions about the reasons for Twain’s state of mind requires the audience to indulge Stepp’s imagination in a way not dissimilar to how Huck indulges Tom’s.

Twain fans will find Mark Twain’s Blues energizing and provocative. General audiences will find it pleasant but ultimately enervating.

Duel Identity

Those looking to be among the first to discover a new, fresh theatrical voice should be sure to head to Chelsea’s Sanford Meisner Theater, where Cherubina, a remarkable amalgam of well-researched historical fact and perfectly crafted narrative, currently heralds the arrival of Paul Cohen. Cherubina, which calls to mind Warren Beatty’s Reds with just a soupcon of Edmund Rostand thrown in, toes the line between humor and sentiment so well, it practically pirouettes over it. Cherubina derives its title from the alter ego of Elisa (Amanda Fulks), a schoolteacher and aspiring poet living in St. Petersburg in 1913, just before the dawn of the Russian Revolution. Down on her luck in the areas of both love and career, Elisa is no stranger to rejection. After Nikolai (Teddy Bergman) denies her submission to his literary magazine, Apollon, Elisa adopts a new persona with the help of her university chum Max (Jimmy Owens): the spirited Cherubina de Gabriak.

Elaborate plotting and the use of a photograph of a former student of Elisa’s leads Nikolai to become obsessed with this enigmatic writer, not only publishing her but creating a celebrity in the process. Nikolai writes letters to Cherubina, and Elisa replies in order to keep up this façade. But the question of how much the content of her letters come from the heart tears more and more at Max, who carries a long-burning torch for Elisa. Max has not only longed for Elisa, he respects her. He pleads with her to come clean, but having tasted success and, more importantly, adoration, she cannot.

Those who think this triangle sounds a tad too rote will be pleased to hear that it is not. Cohen has created one of the rare equilateral love triangles, where all three sides are equally flawed and sympathetic, making this a far more relatable tale than adult audiences often see. Nikolai is the character who initially holds all the power, and yet as Cherubina unfolds, Bergman plays him as both self-absorbed and well-intentioned, a man-child who thinks he has finally connected with someone. He is matched scene for scene by Owens, who creates in Max a lower-class, slightly disabled editor, whose intellect and dignity protect him from ever being seen as an unappealing nebbish.

Perhaps most impressive is Fulks, who subtly imbues her character (some might say, dual characters) with traces of insecurity, virtuousness, self-satisfaction and impetuousness in less than 90 minutes. She underscores a gradual transformation for Elisa both as talented artist and confident woman, and we are able to see how the drastically different Max and Nikolai might both be drawn to her. As a result, one feels equally for all three characters, none of whom ask for too much.

This love story is actually the conduit for Cohen to relay a fascinating, if forgotten, chapter in world history, as the events depicted in Cherubina are historical fact. Max and Nikolai ultimately engaged in a famed duel, which provides the framework for the events of Cohen's play. However, the plot is so accessible it never feels like a lecture, which is also a credit to director Alexis Poledouris, who has paced the play perfectly, never allowing any scene to linger too long but also making sure key moments get their due. That is one of the most impressive aspects about the play; not only is the story enticing, but there is not a wasted moment in it. All of the scenes are dramatically necessary and rich. Cohen’s writing is not only fluid, it is often quite funny.

Cherubina is that rare show that has it all: top-notch writing, outstanding performances, careful direction, and quality production values. The only news greater than to hear that the Meisner was extending the show’s run would be for Cohen to announce that he has another new play ready to premiere.

Laughter from the Third Floor

There is an inherent challenge in adapting novels to the stage. The novel, particularly when it is published serially or in volumes, is constructed in such a way as to be enjoyed over an extended period of time. An evening at the theater is just that—an evening. N.G. McClernan had a difficult task before her in turning Jane Eyre from a 400 page Victorian novel into a two hour play. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphan girl who is sent by her nasty aunt to a horrid school in order to train to be a governess. Jane survives and thrives, eventually taking a position at Thornfield Hall, home of Edward Rochester, his ward Adele, and the mysterious woman locked away on the third floor, who Jane hears laughing from the moment she arrives at the Hall. Ignoring the fact that they are from separate classes, Jane and Edward soon fall in love and decide to marry. On the day of their wedding, important, yet unfortunate information is revealed to Jane that causes her to run away from Edward.

There is a lot that occurs in the story of Jane Eyre and the play struggles to convey the novel's depth and breadth. Watching the play jump from place to place and from past to present makes one wonder if the neoclassicists were somehow right to enforce the unities of time and place so strictly. Several scenes are flashbacks, which are initially confusing, due to actor doubling and the fact that not much is done to suggest that we are leaving the present world of the play and traveling back to Jane's past. Something seems to be missing as the play progresses; there are gaps in the story that are meagerly filled in by exposition, often a monologue that begins with Jane writing in her diary.

The performances of the actors are occasionally stellar. Alice Connorton brings the necessary sternness of demeanor to her role as Alice Fairfax and is downright scary in her role as Aunt Reed. Mary Murphy purses her lips and holds tension in her arms and shoulders, suggesting that her Jane Eyre is both plain and proper. Her enunciation is good, and is believably what a Regency-era governess should sound like. Greg Oliver Bodine falters a bit initially by seeming to inject a bit of postmodern insincerity and sarcasm into his early flirtations with Jane. Bodine strengthens in the end, when his character has lost everything and is in the depths of despair.

Jane Eyre questions the role of women in society. Jane refuses to be a kept woman, and does not return to Rochester until she has secured financial independence. The woman in the attic, named Antoinette in the stage version, represents the domination of men in the nineteenth century. Is she really insane or is her insanity a result of being used as a pawn and her resulting loveless marriage? The production does not portray Antoinette sympathetically. She draws blood after biting her brother's neck, sets fire to Rochester's bed curtains, and tears Jane's wedding veil. The portrayal of Antoinette, a character who should be pitied, seems at odds with the portrayal of Jane, another strong woman, who has been allowed her independence, and therefore will avoid the fate of Antoinette.

It is best for fans of Bronte's novel to stick to the book, as even the best of actors cannot replace the beauty that is to be found in there. McClernan makes a valiant effort in transplanting the sprawling work to the confines of the stage, but in the end, as our high school teachers always said, it's best just to read the book.

Restoration Redux

I really wanted to like Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko. Aphra Behn’s problematic but groundbreaking 1688 tale of slavery and rebellion is one of the earliest English novels, and certainly the first to treat indigenous Africans sympathetically. Oroonoko, a prince of Coramantien (present-day Ghana, though, as Bandele points out in a program note, other elements of the tale suggest that it is set in Nigeria) falls in love with Imoinda, a woman whom the lecherous king (Oroonoko’s grandfather) wants to add to his own harem. After a series of related misadventures, Imoinda and Oroonoko are both sold into slavery and taken to Surinam, where Oroonoko’s royal carriage and innate nobility quickly set him apart. Oroonoko helps the plantation owners defeat outside invaders but then organizes a slave revolt and is eventually killed (after he kills Imoinda to prevent her further disgrace.)

While some claim Behn's Oroonoko as an abolitionist novel, others disagree and assert that her strong royalist sympathies are what drive the plot. Oroonoko, after all, is of royal blood, and it is his nobility rather than his humanity that renders his enslavement perverse. Regardless, the character is seen by many as the quintessential noble savage, seemingly without flaws, innately good and noble, worthy of great admiration but not sophisticated enough to prevent his own tragic fate or that of his beloved.

Working in part from Behn’s novel and in part from Thomas Southern’s 1695 dramatic adaptation, playwright Biyi Bandele intends his version of Oroonoko as an act of reclamation. Born and raised in Nigeria and living now in England, Bandele was commissioned by the RSC to write a new prologue for a production of Southerne’s play but ended up instead writing a whole new adaptation. Bandele’s most important contribution to the story of Oroonoko is to allow his protagonist to make some ill-advised decisions, and to show that he feels pain. Behn’s Oroonoko calmly smoked a pipe while being beaten to death, but Bandele’s Oroonoko bleeds, cries, and falls victim to his pride.

Unfortunately, while seeking both to humanize Oroonoko and to lend some authenticity to the tale’s African-ness, Bandele and director Kate Whoriskey have instead crafted a production that doesn’t quite know what it is or what it wants to say. The humor isn't all that funny, the eroticism not all that sexy, the tragedy not all that moving, the ideas not all that provocative, the poetry not all that elevated, and the danger not all that thrilling. This new Oroonoko, I’m sad to say, makes for a better press release than it does a play.

Whoriskey’s production, mounted by Theatre for a New Audience at the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street, is competently staged and features a number of successful performances. Particularly strong are Albert Jones as Oroonoko, Toi Perkins as Imoinda, and Christen Simon as Lady Onola, Imoinda’s guardian. The lights, costumes, and choreography are all professional and polished, but provide few truly memorable moments. Juwon Ogungbe’s percussion-heavy score, performed live by a small ensemble of musicians, is clearly meant to add momentum and excitement but instead ends up feeling, like so much else in this show, more like a gesture in the direction of a good idea than a fully-realized piece of work. Given all of the bland professionalism on display, it is little surprise that the aspects of the production that stick out most are those that are the least successful, like fight director Rick Sordelet’s strangely ham-fisted stage violence.

The end result is a mediocre production of an ambitious but disappointing play, a play unlikely to find an audience. With Theatre for a New Audience’s sky-high ticket prices (unless you are under 25) and a steadily mounting collection of negative reviews, Bandele’s well-intentioned adaptation of Southerne’s well-intentioned adaptation of Behn’s well-intentioned novel provides little more than, well, good intentions.

Curtain Up, Pants Down

Making theater in New York is a tricky process, especially for small theater companies on shoestring budgets. But necessity is the mother of invention, and these artists often find extraordinary ways both to cut costs and to lure new audiences. The Play About the Naked Guy boldly announces one fictional company’s latest attempt to make ends meet: to fill seats, they take a break from their traditional focus on the classics (their mouthful of a mission statement preaches their devotion to obscure, noncommercial projects) to bring in a more splashy production that will show more guts—and much more skin.

Writer David Bell channels both the backstage wit of Noises Off and the over-the-top hilarity of Waiting for Guffman. But despite the nimble, inventive direction of Tom Wojtunik and a handful of memorable acting performances, The Play About the Naked Guy quickly stretches its jokes too thin. Its insider-y, cheeky humor, stylized physical comedy, and outsize personalities could be lifted directly out of a sitcom, which isn't entirely a bad thing. Within a 30-minute time slot, the story would be a predictable yet endearing diversion; but at an intermissionless (and often arduous) two hours, the humor eventually dries up and withers away.

Still, once you steel yourself for the repetitious ride, there’s plenty to enjoy in this good-spirited production. Married couple Dan (Jason Schuchman) and Amanda (Stacy Mayer) run the idealistic, struggling Integrity Players, and their sole company member, Harold J. Lichtenberg (Wayne Henry), hits a gay club one night and returns with a flamboyant director in tow. Eddie Russini (Christopher Borg) prances on the scene with his two sidekick pixies (Christopher Sloan and Chad Austin), as well as a daring proposition: he suggests that the company let him direct the next production, which will star Kit (Dan Amboyer), an infamous porn star.

The usual calamities and misadventures ensue, led by the preening presence of Amanda’s mother Mrs. Anderson (Ellen Reilly), a vicious personality determined to foil the production and drag her daughter back to her idea of civilization: Westchester. Another major snag surfaces in the disapproval of Dan, who doesn’t want to see his theater company—or his wife—compromised by such blatant, lewd commercialism.

Ultimately, Bell's writing tries to focus on too many scenarios. Will Amanda and Dan save their theater company (and their marriage)? Will Kit become a more “serious” actor and be redeemed by the wisdom of acting legend Uta Hagen? Will Harold—who comes out of the closet early in the production—become more confident in his sexuality? And—most importantly—will the show go on? Adeptly intertwined, these stories might create a cohesive (and coherent) whole, but here, the scenes are strung together too tangentially to be fully tantalizing.

The acting is similarly uneven: Mayer is all winsome sincerity as the amiable Amanda, but as her cloying husband, Schuchman’s over-earnestness quickly becomes wearing. Clad in animal prints and towering heels, Reilly makes an old stereotype fresh and ferocious as the fearsome Mrs. Anderson. Borg and his sassy duo make a delightfully catty trio, even with such campy, "Will and Grace"-esque exclamations as “Heavens to Oprah!” and “Sweet Hillary for President!,” and Henry consistently connects as the nervous Harold, especially in his uncertain yet determined “strip-off” with Kit, who threatens to unseat him from his usual leading role. Amboyer’s Kit is appropriately easy on the eyes, but his soft voice and distracted presence get a bit lost amid the scaffolding-heavy set.

The glitzy final performance provides a bit of a pay-off, but the road to the finale is paved with tedious material. Filled with theater references (Charles Isherwood, Actor’s Equity, the Tony Awards, and Patti LuPone all get shout-outs), The Play About the Naked Guy speaks to the struggling (naked?) theater artist in all of us, especially as it asks that most unsettling of questions: What are the consequences of “selling out”?

Don’t expect any serious answers here, but perhaps an overextended sitcom about the tribulations of theater people is just the diversion and release needed to stimulate and inspire artists to move beyond the usual, tired fare—and The Play About the Naked Guy.

Anyone Can Play Accurately, But I Play With Expression

Everyone knows The Importance of Being Earnest . In Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners, confusion and insults fly when two men pretend to be named Ernest and propose to two women. The play has become such a staple on the syllabi of literature and theater courses that it does not seem to be a play to actually go out and see performed. The Importance of Being Earnest is a relic, suitable for study but not enjoyment. Or is it? From the reaction of the audience at Theater Ten Ten's production of the play, it appears it is still possible to sit and laugh uproariously at Wilde's script. Wilde's witticisms leap off the stage, still fresh and slightly odd after over one hundred years. It is the jokes that carry the play and the production, under the direction of Judith Jarosz, realizes this fact.

In a theatrical culture that has come to expect some form of psychological realism, some form of the Method from its characters and productions, it can be startling to see realism missing from a production. So many modern productions of Wilde's plays, including the film versions, insert realism into the text, giving the characters a breadth that is actually not truly present. The actors portraying John Worthing, Gwendolyn, Cecily, and Algernon in Theater Ten Ten's production at times seem as though they are automatons, in possession of the ability to project but not the ability to emotionally connect with their characters. As one listens to what they are saying to each other, the way in which each sentence or speech is punctuated by a trifling turn of wit, it becomes clear that it is difficult if not impossible to make such fluffy characters into actual people.

Many of their lines are delivered as the characters face the audience. It is not a form of direct address, per se, as they seem unaware of the audience's presence. The presentational style appears to be used more because the characters are performing for each other. They realize what they are saying is ridiculous and witty, intended to make one laugh. Occasionally, the laughter was so loud that the next lines were drowned out. As it turns out, the play is possibly the Victorian era's version of stand-up.

Unfortunately, not all scenes hold up in Theater Ten Ten's production. The tea scene, in which Gwendolyn and Cecily discover that they are both engaged to someone named Ernest, lacks the bite it should carry. It was as if on this particular evening, the actors' timing was off, creating an odd pace for what should be a fast paced, catty scene. Further, it was hard to notice the fact that vindictive Cecily gave Gwendolyn tea cake when she asked for bread and butter, because the cake and other food props were so small as to be nearly invisible to the audience.

Otherwise, the play holds up nicely. It is possible to still see reflections of contemporary society (one thinks of celebrity culture) in Wilde's flippant, fluffy characters. The costumes, by Kristin Yungkurth Raphael and Lydia Gladstone, are beautiful and truthfully recreate the styles of the Victorian era. In a culture that likes to adapt and meld classic works to fit its own current needs and attitudes, it is nice to see a play left untouched, performed as it was written. The Importance of Being Earnest is a simple show, and is worth seeing for anyone with an appreciation for the styles and mores of the Victorians.

Grace Notes

Are you tired of the endless hours of presidential candidate debates, in which important issues seem to vanish into personalities, egos, and pundit prattle? Free yourself from the vicious election cycle and dive into the fresh approach of Grace, a captivating new play that doesn’t merely give a nod to timely issues; instead, this expert cast—led by the mesmerizing Lynn Redgrave, in a fiercely powerful and devastatingly potent performance—attacks, engages, flips, and wrestles with the timely topic (and inherent problems) of contemporary religion. An acclaimed import from London (you even get to leave the country!), Grace sets up a provocative dialogue, but not between nations or candidates. Instead, writers Mick Gordon and AC Grayling construct a rift between two warring forces within a timeless construct: a family. On one side, Grace Friedman (Redgrave) is a rigid rationalist and a determined atheist; an outspoken professor and lecturer on the “absurdity” of religion, she finds solace in reason and the indisputable evidence of scientific facts. So when her beloved son, Tom (Oscar Isaac), announces his disillusionment with practicing law and his intention to become an Episcopalian priest, he doesn’t just shake up Grace’s world, he throttles it.

Before Tom’s momentous announcement, we get a sense of the Friedman family life: stark candidness is encouraged (“Mom! Too much information!” Tom protests when Grace shares one of her torrid youthful sexual encounters), everything is up for debate, and there are no rules against chemical experimentation (Tom gleefully remembers the time when he spiked his father’s dinner with a crushed Ecstasy tablet). Most significantly, this is a family alive with intellectual energy and affection: when Tom arrives with his fiancée Ruth (K.K. Moggie), the foursome immediately swings into the easy rhythms of familiar conversation.

But Tom’s disclosure throws the group into their own corners—Tom’s father, Tony (Philip Goodwin), who is Jewish, attempts to play peacemaker between his wife and son, who launch into fiery, emphatic, and exhilarating debates. “It’s faith or reason,” Grace argues, but Tony protests that there is not simply religion and non-religion; instead, he aspires to turn “bad religion” into “good religion”—a faith that will appeal to thinking, moderate, self-critical people.

Gordon and Grayling move the arguments beyond oversimplification: when Grace accuses Tom of being nothing more than a “salesman,” he retorts that he was more of a salesman when he was practicing law, and then accuses her of being the fundamentalist for her rigid devotion to the laws of science.

The scenes vault back and forth across time, overlapping and often seeming to tear away at each other. As director Joseph Hardy has brilliantly conceived it, this potent topic may be cerebral, but its animation is both hauntingly acute and brutally visceral.

And his fantastic cast is well up to the task, attacking the material with extraordinary articulation and sophisticated depth. Redgrave and Isaac’s verbal duels are thrilling duets of vigorous elocution, and as the doting father figure, Goodwin offers an unforgettable, generous performance steeped in dry wit. On the periphery of the family, Moggie is commanding as the no-nonsense Ruth, a pragmatic lawyer who doesn’t believe in God. As Ruth navigates the minefield of issues in the Friedman family and struggles to understand Tom’s decision, Moggie carefully peels away Ruth’s layers to reveal a core of surprising complexity.

Tobin Ost’s sleek, spare, and modern set provides an elegant canvas for these vibrant debates, and Fabian Obispo’s punctuated sound design crisply launches the characters into each scene.

When a tragic event intercedes and further unravels the characters’ lives, ideological dilemmas shift into personal crises. This careful attention to an issue’s power to inform both your heart and your head makes Grace an emotional and cerebral firecracker of a show—unlike most political debates, this drama will leave you satiated yet itching for more.

Shel Shocked

Throughout his life, Shel Silverstein has been able to effortlessly slide between genres, making a name for himself as both a Playboy cartoonist and popular children’s author (The Giving Tree and Where The Sidewalk Ends are his most famous works). He is also a songwriter, author of the Johnny Cash hit, Boy Named Sue, which he once performed alongside Cash. His play, Shel’s Shorts is so named because it contains a string of fourteen short plays written with hilarious wit and vulgarity for the enjoyment of his more mature audiences. Project: Theater fully embraces this hilarity in their production of Shel’s Shorts. They had to. The material is too difficult to survive a half-hearted effort. There are many scene changes, a large ensemble of actor’s and long difficult monologues about strange and ridiculous topics. Silverstein’s dialogue is hard enough to wrap your mind around, let alone your tongue. Actress, Amanda Byron, in particular, seamlessly delivers an unbelievably challenging monologue in her skit, Gone To Take A… that seems to go on forever while twisting and turning in surprising new directions. Throughout the course of the play it was not uncommon to hear the audience applaud both the cleverness of a monologue and the actor’s ability to recite it.

The fun is not only in the words. It is also enjoyable to observe the many different tricks that resourceful scenic designers J.J Bernard and Francois Portier used to create fourteen different sets in a tight, limited space. The most creative invention of all is a bathtub where styrofoam peanuts piled on top of a bathing girl creates the illusion of a bubble bath.

There is not a clear unifying factor tying all fourteen plays together, though the usage of signs is apparent in all but three pieces; Dreamers, Hangnail, and Garbage Bags. Signs, in this collection of plays, stand for rules that some unknown entity sets and then applies to the world, apparently for the world’s own good. The side walls of the theatre reinforce this theme, displaying a collection of small signs from the standard “One Way,” “Keep Left” to the less traditional, “No Shirt, No Service,” and “Real Men Wanted.”

The collection of stories urge us to question a sign before blindly obeying it, even if it turns out that the sign is right after all. For example, a sign reading Do Not Feed The Animal, is most likely referring to a dangerous creature whose mouth you do not want your fingers near. On the other hand, a sign reading Duck, could mean look out above for a low awning, or look out below for a biting bird. Silverstein’s logic would have you believe that the sign only refers to the bird. A sign, he argues, should only tell you something that you can not see for yourself.

In another skit, two friends stare indignantly at an Abandon All Hope sign, yelling, “Just because you tell me to abandon all hope doesn’t mean I’m going to!” Even a sign as well meaning as No Dogs Allowed is challenged by a woman so adamant on having her dog by her side that she covers him in a towel and insists he is a Ringling Brothers Circus performer that goes by the name, “Jojo the Dog-Faced Man.”

Needless to say, Shel’s Shorts is the kind of play that comes with a built-in audience. Silverstein made a long career out of thrilling children with his whimsical stories and adults with plays that are so raunchy the playbill comes with a list of bold-faced warnings. Fortunately, in this off the wall recreation of Shel's work, Project: Theater did more than just stay true to the beloved author’s words; they also stayed true to his spirit.

HELL HATH NO FURY

Arthur Miller's brilliant play The Crucible , as seen with its sizeable cast of nineteen electric (if not equal) performers in a packed house at the ArcLight Theater, is a terrific show that offers its audience what is best about live theater – a palpable experience. From the moment spurned teenager Abigail Williams (Sherry Stregack) is caught in the woods with a gaggle of young friends performing a secret voodoo love ceremony to eliminate her married lover’s wife, Miller’s account of the 17th century witch trials in colonial Massachusetts builds to a natural frenzy.

To avoid punishment by Reverend Parris (a fierce Keith Barber), the young women begin-- in escalating fashion-- to accuse their neighbors of trafficking with the Devil. Outside metaphysical experts are brought in, like Reverend Hale (a nuanced Kevin Albert), to determine whether Black Arts are indeed afoot, until generalized hysteria swells and the misguided search leads many townspeople to needless execution.

Skilled direction from Pamela Moller Kareman aids this spirited cast (in a regional transfer from Croton Falls) to explore the pervasive dynamics of groupthink. A powerful allegory for the Senate Sub-Committee hearings on Un-American Activities, Miller’s small-town Salem residents undergo parallel conflicts of conscience – is it better to stand in truth and avoid devastating consequences (blacklisting?) or to name names and confess to imaginary crimes?

Standouts of the cast include the mesmerizing Sarah Bennett as Elizabeth Proctor, the upright wife of philanderer John Proctor (a hearty Simon McLean), and a wily John Tyrell as Gilles Correy, the lawsuit-bent farmer who famously cries out “more weight” as he is being pressed to death by heavy stones.

Also logging in with impressive work are Cheryl Orsini as Ann Putnam; Jennifer Hildner as Mercy Lewis, one of the young women in the accusatory posse; and Tyne Firmin as the implacable Judge Hawthorne. Kimberly Matela’s period costumes, David Pentz’s lighting and Matt Stine’s sound all add to the evening’s enjoyable effect.

Absent from the show, however, is the necessary sexual chemistry between John Proctor and an (otherwise very credible) Abigail. Also, the Barbadian nurse, Tituba (Walita) who spearheads the inciting voodoo ceremony (and choreographed the lovely opening dance sequence) is rather jarringly portrayed as being the same age as the other young women.

The Crucible is an excellent and still relevant play -- to think, a human rights group is currently appealing to the Saudi King to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft in the town of Quraiyat. The play is currently being presented with committed and energetic acting by its entire cast at The ArcLight. Go see it.

A Family Affair

With the outbreak of ethnic violence in Iraq and now Kenya, Swedish playwright Lars Noren’s War, which examines the devastation of ethnic cleansing through the prism of one family’s experience, is timely. Yet relevance and social purpose do not always equal satisfying theater. Noren, whose work is widely produced and celebrated in Europe but rarely seen in the United States, was scheduled to direct this Rattlestick Theater’s production, but when illness prevented him, director Anders Cato and dramaturge Ulrika Josephsson, fellow Swedes, stepped in with mixed results.

Cato and Josephsson can’t seem to decide if they are staging a naturalistic drama or Brechtian social theater, with the actors and production team pulling in competing directions. Instead of stinging our conscience, this schematic play tests our patience, especially at 100 minutes with no intermission.

After two years in a prison camp in an unnamed land (presumably Bosnia) during an outbreak of ethnic conflict, a man (Laith Nakli) presumed dead returns home to his wife and two daughters, who have settled into a daily life marked by scarcity, rape and cruelty. The man, blinded by torturers, also proves blind to the changes that have occurred in his absence.

In the zeal to depict the brutalizing impact of war, all gentleness has been blasted from the play. In moments that don’t always ring true, one member of the family lashes out at another with vile obscenities, while every embrace contains an undercurrent of suppressed violence.

Making War memorable despite its flaws, Nakli is mesmerizing as the brutish father who is intent on reconciling with his family, even if it means imposing his will on them, and on regaining his place as head of the household despite his impairment. He burns with intensity while never shedding the empty gaze of sightless eyes.

Cato fails to elicit any consistency of style from the rest of the multi-racial cast. Alok Tewari, as Uncle Ivan, is the only actor to deliver a naturalistic performance. Flora Diaz, who is not up to the daunting challenge of believably portraying a 12-year-old, plays Semira as a high-strung, whiny child who twitches and fidgets constantly. Her unlikely older sister is the boyish Ngozi Anyanwu, whose brash Beenina has the demeanor of an urban American youth. Rosalyn Coleman, a star of August Wilson plays on Broadway, is disappointing in the pivotal role of the mother. Always angry and sullen, she never demonstrates the emotions that bind her character to her daughters, the father, or his brother.

Noren deftly exploits the theatrical possibilities inherent in one character’s inability to see the others – from mistaken identities to deliberate deceptions. But War, translated with occasional awkwardness by Marita Lindholm Gochman, would have benefited from some modulation of tone (a short episode about the family dog’s untimely death hints at how dark humor might have been effectively deployed) and a plot with more unanticipated turns.

Scenic designer Van Satvoord evokes this war-torn wasteland with a colorless, austere set containing a handful of threadbare household objects. Costume designer Meghan E. Healey does serviceable work with flashes of ingenuity, such as the bright yellow bra straps visible underneath Beenina’s shabby clothes.

Lighting designer Ed McCarthy curiously ignores the play’s opportunities for innovative lighting. The lighting remains largely unchanged, whether the family is sitting out in the hot or inside their dwelling without electricity during the evening. Indeed, in one key scene, when the blind man asks his brother if it is morning or night, the audience is at a loss to know the correct answer.

The use of a multiracial cast and the decision not to name Bosnia may have been intended to widen the play’s significance to all genocide in our age. Instead, these tactics backfire by robbing the play of the specificity of time, place and culture that might have given it the resonance of authentic history – and the power to move its audience.

Party People

Creativity struck twice during the 2000 theater season, when two dramatic adaptations of the Jazz-Age poem “The Wild Party” surfaced in New York. On Broadway, composer Michael John LaChiusa’s version nabbed a handful of Tony nominations but closed after only 68 performances; Off Broadway, Andrew Lippa’s incarnation met with a similar fate, snagging several awards but playing only 54 performances. Were audiences resistant to this edgy source material, or were they simply confused by having two parties to choose between? Whatever the reason, the lights went out on both shows in 2000, but now, eight years on, Brookyn’s ever-reliable and always ambitious Gallery Players have revived Andrew Lippa’s slick and seductive send-up of The Wild Party; with no competing garish galas in the area (aside from the occasional Park Slope street festival), perhaps audiences won’t shy away from the deliciously decadent production this time around.

The titular party is born, as so many problematic ideas are, out of nagging boredom. Queenie, the blonde and leggy half of a vaudeville couple living in 1920s Manhattan, persuades her boyfriend Burrs—a stage clown with a volatile, violent temper—to throw a spontaneous and gargantuan bash. Their relationship has soured, and she’s hungry for an influx of new and familiar faces to stir up some drama.

When her old pal Kate arrives with her latest catch, Mr. Black, in tow, Queenie immediately goes on the hunt. Shrugging Burrs off on Kate, she falls into a fierce flirtation with Black, who is an all too willing partner in this toxic mix of jealousy, love, and desperation.

Lippa’s almost completely sung-through score carefully traces the paths of the central characters, who perform the bulk of the material. A writhing mass of decadence, the party is laced with acts of debauchery (alcohol and drug use, sexual couplings), but it is also peopled with an extraordinary collage of juicy supporting characters. And in this production, the featured players nearly pull the rug out from beneath the principals.

Not that the leading characters don’t have some exceptional talent. As the calculating Queenie, Nicole Sterling has a distinctive voice and puts forth an instantly provocative presence and an imposing silhouette, but her tough-as-nails demeanor never registers the vulnerability that makes Queenie such a tragically trapped figure. In contrast, Jonathan Hack’s performance only skims the madness that would transform Burrs into a truly menacing, maniacal, and just plain terrifying persona. He has an explosive voice that handles this demanding material well, but it’s hard to believe that his Burrs wouldn’t be crushed by Queenie in two seconds flat.

The other leads fare better. Michael Jones turns in a smooth and enigmatic performance as the elusive Mr. Black, and Julia Cardia brings a delightfully zany energy to her thrilling performance as the devious Kate. In fact, her appearance midway through Act One was enough to kick the entire production into a higher gear—she explodes onto the stage like an uncorked bottle of champagne.

The most frustrating part of this Wild Party, however, is the tantalizing tease of being introduced to entrancing supporting characters who, after saying hello, don’t say much ever again. As the sexually ravenous Madelaine True, Tauren Hagans stops the show with an avalanche of perfectly fired one-liners during her saucy solo “An Old-Fashioned Love Story” (just guess which kind). As the dim boxer Eddie and his pint-sized girlfriend Mae, Theis Wekessser and K.C. Leiber turn in a sweetly comic—and adorably choreographed—duet on “Two of a Kind,” while composer brothers Phil and Oscar D’Armano (portrayed by cunning comedians Justin Birdsong and Zak Edwards) generate peppy panache as they guide the partygoers through a performance of their latest project.

Although these characters get a bit lost in the shuffle, this is still a hypnotic and intoxicating party in which to lose yourself. Director Neal J. Freeman keeps his ensemble on their toes—they are both interested and interesting—throughout the production, and Brian Swasey has created some exceptional, infectious choreography that uses the claustrophobic confines of the on-stage apartment to great advantage. And although the brassy band frequently threatens to overpower the actors (and, more perniciously, to obscure the show’s lyrics), they keep the show jumping under the solid direction of Jeffrey Campos.

The production also provides sumptuous visuals through the evocative and provocative designs of Summer Lee Jack (costumes), Hannah Shafran (set), and John Eckert (lighting).

Although the original Wild Party is now a distant echo, the best parties never lose their steam. Composer Andrew Lippa sat across the aisle from me during the production I attended, and judging from his reactions to the show, both he—and the responsive audience—are happy to have this Wild Party back in the city.

Sound and Fury

Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double has exerted immeasurable influence on recent generations of theatre practitioners and scholars. His “Theatre of Cruelty,” derived from surrealism, focuses on spectacle, gesture, and ritual, rejecting both psychological realism and the primacy of text, and seeks to overwhelm the audience with a multisensory experience that will free them from their quotidian state of mind. As a theorist, he is widely considered to be one of the two most important figures in twentieth-century theatre (the other being Bertolt Brecht.) As a playwright and director, however, Artaud is generally considered to have been less successful. The Cenci, his loose adaptation of a nineteenth century verse tragedy by Percy Shelley, ran for less than two weeks in 1935 and was a commercial disaster. The reasons for this failure are the subject of significant disagreement: perhaps the audience was not ready for Artaud’s revolutionary staging techniques, or perhaps Artaud was not able to, on his first attempt, realize his vision for the Theatre of Cruelty. On stage, The Cenci seems to have been received as a hybrid of tragedy and Grand Guignol and audiences rejected it soundly. The production’s notoriety, along with a notoriously stiff translation into English by British surrealist Simon Watson Taylor, have imbued the play itself with the forbidding air of one of the greatest flops in theatrical history.

John Jahnke’s company Hotel Savant has set out to redress this state of affairs by securing the rights to the first American translation of Artaud’s Cenci and incorporating the aesthetics of Cruelty into the postmodern staging paradigm that owes so much to Artaud’s theoretical writings.

There is much to admire in this new production, including Richard Sieburth’s clever new translation, which inserts some much needed irony and humor into the stilted text; Kristin Worrall’s densely layered and sophisticated sound design; Peter Ksander’s simultaneously spare and complex set, which transforms the Ohio Theatre into a sort of maze for both audience and performers; Jahnke’s elaborate and fluid staging, with simultaneous action and metatheatrical flourishes that update many of Artaud’s ideas; and mostly compelling performances from a skilled and physically beautiful cast. There is little question that this team of collaborators have given their all with this production, and that most of them feel they are working on something special and possibly even important.

The problem is that the play, despite Sieburth’s considerable efforts, just isn’t very good. Artaud wanted to de-emphasize the text in his work, foregrounding the sensory, real-time impact of liveness on stage, but The Cenci is still a text-based play and therefore the text needs to provide a strong foundation for the production. Instead, it feels like the product of a fevered adolescent imagination, perhaps an adolescent who had only recently discovered the writings of the Marquis de Sade. This kind of work has its charm when framed as a B-budget horror film but when presented with the self-importance of ground-breaking theatre it collapses under the weight of its grand pomposity.

The story of The Cenci, inspired by a real-life family of sixteenth-century Italian nobility, is a lurid one. Francesco Cenci (Anthony Torn), the family’s patriarch, is a licentious libertine who abuses his family and servants psychologically and physically. When some in the family report his crimes, which include an incestuous relationship with his daughter Beatrice, he is treated leniently by the papal authorities and subsequently removes his family to a castle outside of Rome, where they take matters into their own hands and murder him rather than continue to live under his tyranny. The crime is discovered and the family are put to death.

The sensational and scandalous tale of the Cenci family has been the subject of novels, plays, operas and films by artists ranging from Stendhal, to Dumas, to Hawthorne. The problem with Artaud’s version is that his oft-stated rejection of simplistic psychology and specifically character-driven motivations lead him to embrace the idea of Evil with a capital “E,” an idea that is meant to make the story something more but paradoxically makes it seem smaller and somehow absurd. Even if an audience were to embrace the suspect idea that Evil is a primal force, it is unlikely that any actor or actors could successfully embody such an abstraction, even when aided by sound and light and gesture. The power of the story of The Cenci is that it really happened; attempting to elevate to the realm of the “universal,” Artaud instead rendered it kind of silly.

Still, for theatre history enthusiasts, Hotel Savant’s production represents a unique opportunity. It is unlikely that another rendition of Artaud’s play will pass our way any time soon. It is well-worth the $18 price of admission to witness a skilled and enthusiastic ensemble grappling with one of theatre’s most ambitious failures.