Dressed To Impress

Imagine a governor who admits to hating funerals because they darken his wardrobe. Now imagine a governor who will not cancel a party for the Queen of England in a time of political unrest because he just sold South Jersey to pay for his dress. Imagine a governor who refuses to run from an angry mob arguing, “I’m not dressed for walking!” This man is Edward Hyde, also known as Lord Cornbury, the cross-dressing governor of New York and New Jersey who reigned in political office between 1702 and 1707. Hailing from England, Lord Cornbury (David Greenspan) is not the ideal choice for a political office. After accumulating a staggering debt, his advisor, Spinoza Dacosta, (Ken Kliban) begs him to at least consider paying back some of his creditors. Africa, (Ashley Bryant) his beautiful and sassy servant, scolds him for scaring a Dutch pastor’s son (Christian Pedersen) sent to spy on his behavior. He shocks the pious boy by confronting him in a long blue gown and wig of brown curls. “What?” he asks as the boy staggers backwards. “You don’t like blue?”

In his time, Lord Cornbury may not have been a popular politician, but in William M. Hoffman and Anthony Holland’s historical comedy, Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor, his charisma and conviction to his beliefs – wayward as they are – paint him in a more loveable light.

Greenspan has a playful nature and a charming magnetism. He appears to be having fun with his eccentric character, much to the credit of Holland and Hoffman’s witty dialogue, costume designer, Jeffrey Wallach’s exaggerated gowns and set designer, Mark Beard’s unique scenery all of which give him great material to have fun with.

Beard has created some amazing things with cardboard. His set pieces are painted with intricate details and cleverly paired with tangible objects to enhance their realistic appearance. For example, a barmaid picks a real towel off a cardboard bar and pulls a real glass out of a cardboard cabinet. But the finest set piece is the elaborate cardboard boat docked offstage that is later used for one of the best visual gags in the play.

Watching Greenspan glide across the stage draped in outrageous fashion designs also delivers a series of hilarious visuals. Wallach has dressed the flamboyant governor in huge puffy gowns with waistlines supported by baskets tied to each of his hips. His necklines glitter with an overabundance of tiny diamonds, and at one point, Greenspan wears a wig made entirely of flowers.

But despite these eye-popping costumes, the play examines more than just a former governor’s cross-dressing legacy. Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor spotlights a time in New York history that is very pivotal to the city’s evolution, a time when the English ruled much of the land and the Dutch lamented their small piece of the pie.

In a playbill article Hoffman points out that many people do not realize how “Dutch the city of New York was, and still is in some ways,” citing the names of Delancy Street, Van Cortland Park and Staten Island (once Staaten Eylandt) as a few examples.

And for all of Lord Cornbury’s cross-dressing antics he did embrace diversity, and encouraged the growth of a city where many nationalities could peacefully intertwine and thrive. The facts and hearsay surrounding his tumultuous reign as governor may have cast a shadow on the validity of his vision, but there is no ignoring that the New York we inhabit today still retains bits and pieces of the civilization he started centuries ago.

Artists at Work - and Play

Virginia Woolf’s one and only play, Freshwater, was written for and performed by her artist friends and family members in her sister Vanessa Bell’s London studio. The Women’s Project and SITI Company have joined forces to present its New York premiere, directed by Anne Bogart. The little-known script presents some real challenges, and the production does not quite rise to meet them. According to the program notes, the presenters’ goal is to bring the audience “delight during these uneasy times,” a perspective justified, in part, by Woolf’s own recollection of the original performance as an “unbuttoned, laughing evening.” Bogart’s direction emphasizes the play’s lightheartedness and wackiness at every opportunity. In her view, and apparently also the producers’, there is no hint of any darkness or purpose to its composition. However, while Freshwater is undeniably both less developed and lighter in tone than many of Woolf’s other works, this interpretation is overly simplified, and the production is the weaker for it.

For one thing, the text does have a clear point: it is about the ascension of the Modernist Bloomsbury Group over its, as of 1935, still considerably more established Romantic-era forebears. “Where shall we live?” the young ingenue Ellen Terry asks her strapping sailor lover. “In Bloomsbury,” he replies, where they will feast on bread and butter, sausages and kippers, and presumably have much better sex lives than Terry has had with her elderly husband. It also probes the conflict between artists’ need for creative introspection and their need for the companionship of other human beings, in order to both generate art and to experience personal happiness. Freshwater’s exploration of these two ideas can be related to those of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Young Jean Lee’s The Appeal, neither of which could be accurately described as frivolous plays.

In spite of all their efforts, not one of the artist characters in this play succeeds in creating anything from the beginning to the end of the play. Tennyson does nothing but read and reread poems he has already written; his one attempt at new composition is foiled. Watts is confounded by his picture’s central symbol, and Cameron’s photographs are ruined by Terry’s departure, a strong-willed donkey and other factors. In spite of the fact that these artists are supposed to be each other’s closest friends, they are incapable of listening to each other, much less assisting in solving each other’s various crises. The text is full of images of stasis and entrapment. The portrait of Terry is to be of her about to be crushed by a giant foot. The Camerons want to leave for India, but cannot until their coffins arrive – while this was a true incident in the real Camerons’ lives, its inclusion and ongoing repetition is eerie.

The acting style and staging are highly active and physicalized, as is typically the case in a Bogart/SITI production. There are moments when this direction works with the play, in the first act, particularly, when the whirling movements grind to a halt, and the characters stare at each other, grasping for an idea of what to do next, how to move forward with their lives. However, the energy of Freshwater lies primarily in its language, which is lush with imagery and wordplay that are consistently underexplored. If Bogart and her cast had paid as much attention to developing the spoken text as they did to the developing the piece’s physical vocabulary, it would be a much stronger production.

As it is, the actors are absorbed in their mission of presenting the play as if it is the lightest of all possible fictions. Frequently, their efforts are irritating. There are no developed stakes in this world to animate them. The role of teenage Ellen Terry is curiously miscast with a clearly much older actress. While Kelly Maurer does an admirable job of acting suitably girlish, she is a distracting choice. In case any viewers have missed the point that Freshwater is fun, they are hit over the head with anachronistic and wholly inappropriate punk rock music at the play’s conclusion.

On the other hand, the production’s visual design elements do an effective job of transposing a play conceived for an amateur home performance to an Off-Broadway environment. The quilted pastel curtain is a charming touch, and the costumes and wigs convey both the Victorian setting and the play’s inherent oddity. The stage is always well-lit and the lighting assists in creating an outdoor setting for the brief seaside scene.

Fans of Freshwater or Woolf’s other work may want to attend for the purpose of seeing a live performance of this rarely produced play. Fans of experimental theater or language-oriented plays are best off looking elsewhere.

The Media is the Message

With meta-news programs in the vein of The Daily Show and satirical press a la The Onion as much a part of the media establishment as they are its subversive critics, conversations about the state of American media are integral to political discourse. The years of the Bush Administration saw a number of political protests in the form of downtown theater productions, many of which tackled the subject of partisan press. Complaints of media bias, from people on all sides of the political spectrum, are as commonplace as media consumption; channeling that frustration into suave, startling theater is considerably more rare. The Spin Cycle, a collection of five thematically linked short plays by Jerrod Bogard, falls squarely into the category of plays that do exactly that. The five directors of each of the plays deftly locate terrific comedy in each of Bogard’s scripts. The program opens with Copper Green, a short play directed by Anthony Augello, in which a tourist family eyes the statue of liberty from the Staten Island Ferry while an Arab man looks on. A less sophisticated play would include bigotry and outright conflict; Copper Green merely presents quiet tension in the characters’ near-interactions. It’s an appropriate opening to each of the subsequent plays, which tend more toward critical observation than judgmental condemnation.

Copper Green is followed by Hedge, which features a pair of Hollywood devotees bemoaning the paparazzi even as they obsess over celebrity, irony earnestly embodied by Melissa Johnson and Lauren Bahlman, and Just Your Average G.I. Joe, in which a war vet explains the job of being a soldier. The short solo performance piece, which Bogard performs, has the most meandering scope of the plays that comprise The Spin Cycle. With direction by Kristin Skye Hoffman, the likable soldier's varied perspectives are appropriately grounded.

First Base Coach the penultimate show of the program, is the least explicitly related to media or politics, although it has a lot to do with innocence: a pair of school children, played by adult actors Hoffman and Ben Newman, figure out the ins and outs of rounding the bases. Adults playing children, especially children learning to practice the art of flirtation, risks coming across as either overly precious or uncomfortably inappropriate; First Base Coach does neither. Bogard’s script works in pop cultural references that are both wholly organic and wonderfully silly. Costume Consultant Hired Guns makes its best contribution to the evening by not putting Hoffman in pigtails, the most obnoxiously routine way of broadcasting a character’s little-girlness. This character is not a pigtailed sort of little girl, and Hoffman and Newman deserve a lot of credit for lending their characters heaps of specificity rather than playing vague children. The result is a touching, extremely funny scene that is a pleasure to watch.

Throughout the program, each of the short plays are threaded together with clips of segments from The Spin Cycle, a TV program styled after Fox news shows, hosted by the Bill O’Reilly-esque Dan Dillinger. Played with bombastic showmanship by Justin Ness, the Dillenger segments, directed by Brian Bernhard, succinctly link the short plays while demonstrating Bogard’s point about the tenuous relationship between partisan press and political truths.

Jerome Via Satellite, the final play of the evening, unites the mediated TV segments with live performance. The play depicts an episode of the news program as it unfolds live, with satellite feeds from an American living room and a U.S. military base in Iraq; the TV show purports to unite an overseas soldier with his family on the home front. Early on, it becomes clear that the news program is influencing the story as much as reporting it. As the play progresses, the full extent of the media manipulation becomes clear as the evening of plays climaxes with its strongest indictment of mediated politics. The large cast conveys a startling, powerful eeriness that is undone only when the script spells out exactly what has transpired.

Ness’ direction of the final piece renders the situation clear; exposition that occurs after unsettling revelations is not only unneeded but, in attempting to wrap up the story, weakens the effects of the evening’s most climactic moments. Until then, the plays do an impressive job of assuming a smart, savvy audience. Anyone interested in the intersections of pop culture and politics, and the media spin of it, will be happy to be part of it.

Lost on the Levee

The title may be the most engaging thing about Mark Sam Rosenthal’s exploration of Tennessee Williams’s greatest creation negotiating the aftermath of the 2005 storm. Blanche DuBois finds herself disheveled and in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. But her experience seems refracted through that of author Rosenthal, as the play begins with him wandering through the debris, putting on yellow gloves and a filter mask to start cleaning up. Amid the muddy debris of the hurricane (Kevin Tighe’s willy-nilly piles of artifacts include an ornate portrait frame, a child’s bicycle, a blue rubber dildo, and Carnival beads), he discovers a pale green, pristine valise. When he opens it, a bright red, surreal light shines out. Inside he finds a blond wig and tiara; when he dons the wig, he becomes Blanche, riffing on her adventures with Stanley and Stella before the hurricane, in the Superdome, and with a FEMA roommate named Chandria d’Africa who is separated from her boyfriend Tyrece. The solo show becomes a dramatic stream-of-consciousness effort that not everyone may follow as Blanche encounters an assortment of characters and experiments with crack (and indulges in alcohol).

Blanche Survives Katrina… isn’t a drag show, though it reeks of camp. Rosenthal doesn’t trying to disguise his masculinity (at one point, his bare, hairy chest is covered only by a ragged shawl). The script is merely a meditation on the character in different circumstances, and one may surmise that Blanche embodies poor New Orleans itself.

Although Rosenthal's Blanche borrows phrases from Williams's heroine ("It just buzzes right through me," she says of the booze), the language here is determinedly high-falutin’. In an imaginary encounter with Jean Lafitte, for instance, she remonstrates, “No! Unhand me, you rascal pirate! I warn you, my sisters will track you down—and you shall have the wrath of the archdiocese upon you if so much as one blonde hair upon my head is harmed! Yes, you will steer your masted schooner through the murky waters of the bay at Barataria, you will secret me to your lair where you and your merry band of brigands intend to perpetrate all manner of mischief on me! And you think that I’ll enjoy these degradations because you’ve heard stories but I won’t because they are not true.”

A little of that goes a long way, but there’s no crude, brawny Stanley Kowalski to offset the feyness and flightiness—and his impatience with her in A Streetcar Named Desire very quickly becomes understandable. Anyone who attends Rosenthal's sequel may well decide that Stanley had every right to put Blanche away.

In Rosenthal’s script, Blanche has been released from the asylum, to which Stanley committed her, in order to seek shelter from the storm. She returned to their home to ride it out, and while she clung to the top of the stove, “They died. Drowned ... there in that house on Elysian Fields,” she says. After Katrina, Blanche has encounters with various characters, as well as drugs and alcohol. Surrounded by black refugees in the Superdome, she muses, “In a pot full of café, I seem to be one of the few drops of au lait!”

Later she acquires Chandria d’Africa as her FEMA roommate. The scenes with Chandria are played in a strange, dreadlocked blond wig that Blanche finds in a second green valise—the how and why of these spotless valises are points left unanswered—and puts on. The wig suggests the look of Chandria d’Africa, but Rosenthal isn’t Chandria. He’s always Blanche, and yet it's not a wig Blanche would ever wear. Director Todd Parmley hasn't helped clarify such confusing moments. Later, Blanche is transported to a new life in Phoenix, where she is aided by Christ the Avenger Church (one of the few really funny gags) and serves fried chicken at a fast-food restaurant.

If Rosenthal has a point to all this, other than an extended riff on the character, it’s not clear. It may be that Blanche embodies New Orleans, the elegant lady brought low, struggling against the ravages of the storm, scrambling just to survive and doing things no one should have to do. But Parmley invests no tension in the piece, no urgency about what happens next to her. It just plays out as a rambling streetcar heading nowhere.

Someone Give Me Some Rotten Fruit to Throw

Is theater dead? Stolen Chair's latest production, Theatre is Dead and So Are You thinks so. And if it is not, then the show does its best to give the knife one final twist. Designed to be an “irreverent funeral for the stage,” the play is a eulogy for the deceased emcee, Leonard J. Sharpe, of a vaudeville troupe. The troupe performs monologues, sketches, and songs, all focused on death. The point of the show seems to be clear—it's about death—but what never becomes clear is why the performance feels the need to exist in the first place. The introduction to Theatre is Dead is long and slow. The stage is littered with theatrical debris—a drill, a curtain, a sawhorse. One performer enters and slowly removes the articles from the stage, one by one, while the audience watches, some laughing nervously, some impatiently awaiting the start of some action. Then a coffin is wheeled onstage and a woman, Hazel, enters, and opening the lid, wails. She closes the lid. Then opens it again and once again, wails. And then repeats the actions, until she finally takes flowers out from her skirt and begins littering the stage and coffin with them. Finally, other performers begin climbing out of the coffin, which is a neat trick, and it looks like the actual show is ready to begin.

Except that it doesn't. What instead occurs is more introduction—who the performers are, who is in the coffin, and the all important question: how did theater die? Instead of answering the question, the performer decides to question why the audience is at the show. After all, don't we have something better and cheaper to be doing? At this point, the audience most likely is wondering why they sacrificed their evening to see the show, but since not much had happened yet, it is still eager to see some action.

The preliminaries take so long that once the actual acts start, it is hard to get into them. And like the intro, the acts have a lot of air in them and could move much more quickly. Certain choices made the show physically difficult and painful to watch. A number of acts took place on the catwalks behind the balcony, so that the audience had to turn and crane their necks to see them. Making full use of the space is an interesting choice, but it is wise to reconsider such choices when it makes the show a pain to watch. Also, a source 4 positioned upstage center was swiveled around on occasion and shone directly into the audience's eyes.

The strongest skit in the show, a re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet's death scene, using the corpse of the emcee as Romeo, was truly funny and made good use of physical comedy and gesture. But it came too late in the performance to save the production from its own death.

Despite the large number of recent show closings and this shaky economic time, theater is not dead. We should be celebrating the fact that people are still drawn to theater, not attempting to “suck the pleasure” out of the remaining days of life as Theatre is Dead intends to do (according to the director's note). Anyone with any vested interest in the form is advised to stay away from Theatre is Dead and So Are You.

Deadly Serious?

At a funeral for actress Stacy Mayer, her eulogizer might say she was a charismatic comedian with great confidence and energy—almost enough to carry a clichéd show about funeral traditions. Though her performance in The Funeralogues is, at times, an admirable struggle, she perishes in the effort. I hope, for her sake, this is not what she will be remembered for. In the giddily irreverent hour-long Funeralogues, Mayer, as performer, and Robert Charles Gompers, as writer, cover the familiar, yet bizarre territory of public mourning, charting the progression of Mayer’s morbid obsession throughout her life. As in the brief eulogy above, Mayer dwells on the way she will be remembered. She also spends some time commenting upon the grief of strangers, but these parts lack the breezy, self-deprecating humor that Mayer excels at.

Adding to the irreverence, The Funeralogues is staged in the All Souls Unitarian Church. The church is outfitted with a “Quiet: service in session” sign, a guest book, hymnals, and its own piano player (Manny Simone, filling in for Jim Lahti) who provides plaintive renditions of songs like "Forever Young" and "Runaway Train."

The show gets off to a somewhat rocky start. Mayer takes some time to get comfortable, as does the audience, which tries to grapple with the awkward comedy of a highly polished monologue. By nature the monologue is self-obsessed, but in this show it can come across as woefully indulgent. Some of Mayer’s preoccupations are dull; in particular, her flashback to a Barbie funeral over which she presided as a girl is uninteresting and cloying. However, when Mayer’s humor takes a turn for the catty or self-effacing, she garners more laughs from the audience. For instance, when she considers the reckless possibility of saying what we really feel at funerals: “Let’s face it; you don’t get struck by lightning because God loves you.”

The show isn’t without charm, but Mayer and Gompers try to take on more than they can collectively chew. When the show tries to tackle the complex emotion of grief, it falls back on clichéd characters and perspectives. Mayer is capable of providing convincing turns of character—an elderly woman, the lone survivor in a large family; a crankily sad old man; a military officer and “death specialist” are given vivid life by Mayer, but they don’t really have a place in this show.

In the program, The Funeralogues is described as “a drop dead comedy,” and, at its best, it can be funny. The overall tone of the show is in keeping with this description, which makes the notes of melodrama ring all the more false. It is especially strange when Mayer recites an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s eulogy for two girls who died in an Alabama church bombing. Mayer frequently refers to funerals as “downers,” with the apparent intention of mocking the sometimes silly gravity we attach to our traditions. The MLK speech, as well as another one dealing with the death of two soldiers in Iraq, asks the audience to care in a way that the rest of the show does not.

It’s too bad The Funeralogues lacks focus and consistency; Mayer is likable as an actress and comedian, however, when she introduces serious outsiders into her warped world, it’s hard not to wish it would come to a quick end. Of course there is comedy in tragedy and tragedy in comedy, but here they make terribly strange bedfellows. Mayer, a leader of MC², or Manhattan Comedy Collective, has the enviable skill of making people laugh, but she squanders that all too readily here. Perhaps, for everyone’s sake, it would be best if this show went gently into the good night, while Mayer continues to rage.

BFF

The Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, widely believed to be among the world’s oldest surviving pieces of written literature, tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his wild friend Enkidu (NK). To adequately stage the Gilgamesh saga, which includes god-kings and bestial creatures, opulent palaces and apocalyptic floods, lush wilderness and foreboding underworlds, a production would need either a Broadway-level budget or the solidly minimalist production aesthetic of the Rabbit Hole Ensemble. The Brooklyn-based group, which describes its work as “strong stories, told simply and theatrically, without much technology,” is well suited to the task of depicting the ancient story onstage. Under the direction of Rabbit Hole Artistic Director Edward Elefterion, Shadow of Himself, playwright Neal Bell’s Gilgamesh adaptation becomes a sharply poignant meditation on masculinity and friendship.

As per Rabbit Hole’s signature style, the five-person cast creates much of the production’s effects, from reciting chants and beating a small drum to forming scenic structures with their bodies, which enhances Shadow of Himself’s mythic nature. Whenever they are not central to the action, the actors’ presence along the sides of the bare black stage further supports the production’s spirit of collective storytelling.

Each of the male actors portrays a single primary character, while Emily Hartford, the sole actress of the cast, plays a smattering of female roles. Adhering to gendered casting in a production that emphasizes the versatility of its ensemble focuses the story’s epic scope to issues of gender, specifically of male power and the impact it has on companionship. The main characters include Gil (Matt W. Cody) the powerful king, and NK (Mark Cajigao), the only individual who matches Gil’s strength and beauty. Prior to the arrival of NK, in keeping with the Gilgamesh story, Gil is an unrepentant rapist who terrorizes his subjects until he finds his match in NK, at which point the two become best friends who travel the world on epic quests. It’s literally the stuff of legends.

Shadow of Himself echoes the relationship between Gil and NK with a pair of soldiers (Daniel Ajl Kitrosser and Adam Swiderski), a fun and effective means of examining friendship in different forms. Though neither relationship becomes explicitly sexual, both are alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) violent and tender. According to the mythology, Gil is part god and NK is part beast; in Shadow of Himself, their otherworldliness manifests itself in elevated language. This sets up a contrast between them and the more mundane soldiers, who call each other dude like Bill and Ted, and throw around the f-word like Rod Blagojevich. Similarly, the soldiers are more cognizant of sex than are Gil and NK. Once the business of raping brides comes to an end, Gil and NK are too focused on their love for one another to become embroiled with women.

Yet if the relationship between Gil and NK isn’t consummated, it’s not exactly platonic either. They may be too gallant or too naïve to consciously sexualize each other, yet they fall asleep in each others’ arms and cannot imagine a life apart. When their inevitable separation occurs, the play’s focus on coping with loss emphasizes the depths of their friendship.

The actors bring a disciplined sense of commitment to embodying specific characters while creating the effects that bring the world of the play to life. Still, at just an hour and a half, the production feels overlong. It’s easy to see where the story is headed, a common challenge of staging archetypal legends, and though the actors do their best to keep the energy up, the unchanging austerity so central to the production eventually grows repetitious. Though occasional prop pieces, designed by Michael Tester, add welcome flourishes, audiences who prefer lavish productions may want to wait for the upscale production value version of the Gilgamesh story before they see its depiction onstage; fans of epic legends and energized experimental theater should see Shadow of Himself.

Putting a Spin on Drug Education

When one attempts to produce theatrical works for teenage audiences, it doesn’t get much more difficult than the anti-drug play. Most of us may have put the traumas of high school behind us, but few still have a clue about how to win the approval of the cool kids—especially when it comes to telling them that they shouldn’t do something. When staging a production for teenagers, the most effective rule of thumb is also the most paradoxical: The moment you attempt to please, you’ve lost your audience. As an anti-drug work, Cranked is about as good as they get. A one-man show about the life-threatening crystal meth addiction of talented freestyle rapper Stan (Kyle Cameron), the one-act work inserts a cautionary tale into a hip-hop formula. On paper, this pairing comes across as too eager to please, but the result is effective to the point of shocking. Stewarded by Cameron’s remarkable performance, Cranked lacks all pretention, and as a result is truly frightening.

Cranked originated at Vancouver-based Green Thumb Theatre more than two years ago, and since then has toured at high schools and theaters around North America. The script has a heavily autobiographical flair (at points, it brings to mind a hybrid of 8 Mile and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), but Stan is, in fact, a fictionalized character assembled from the experiences of several real-life addicts.

In preparing for the role, Cameron had to learn to manifest many of the clinical effects of crystal meth, including the characteristic fidgeting, sweating and paranoia. It’s a physically taxing role, and Cameron succeeds admirably; he is an equally charismatic and frightening presence on stage, and it’s difficult to take one’s eyes off him. Cameron shows remarkable control of his voice and movements, from his twitchy reflexes to the play’s several freestyle rap segments, and his pale complexion and skinny frame lend themselves effectively to the image of physical exhaustion.

Stan’s story is framed by a performance that the rapper gives after checking out of a rehab clinic. Stating that he is not yet ready to go onstage, he throws himself into a series of flashbacks that narrate his early teenage years, his short-lived success in hip-hop, and his decision to check himself into rehab. Most vividly, however, Stan describes what it feels like to crave the drug, comparing himself to a zombie. “I’m rotting from the core,” he says in one segment. “I’m gutless, I’m soulless, I’m dead,” he later describes.

The impact of Cranked is strengthened by its thoughtfully executed stage design. In order to believably channel an underground hip-hop show, a microphone stand is the only prop on the otherwise empty stage, and a backdrop of graffiti art provides a canvas for both gritty realism and drug-induced fantasy. The background depicts several ghoulish figures standing underneath rows of speakers and a white, skull-like face. On occasion, this face serves as a video screen that alternately shows close-ups of Stan and stylized images recalling a meth trip. Combined with flashing, red lights and a bass-heavy music track, the overall effect is appropriately surreal.

Because Cranked has an obviously educational goal, it doesn’t offer a traditional theater experience. It’s more likely to attract school groups or families wishing to learn about drug addiction than casual theatergoers, but within its notably limited framework, the show is at the top of its class.

A Pledge of Allegiance

‘Silent’ is the description collectively assigned to the cast of characters in Linda Escalera Baggs’ play about military wives, but throughout its seventy-five minute running time, it was the word ‘trapped’ that most frequently snuck its way onto my notepad. The play’s cast of women, each of whom reveal their own unsettling secrets as they wait for their husbands’ fighter jets to return home, appear to be confined to the point of hopelessness—inside their marriages, inside lives that lack grounding and agency, and inside the paradigms of the small, unchanging set. The premise of Silent Heroes is rich with tension: one of six fighter planes has crashed just moments before the play opens, but it’s not yet clear whose husband has perished in the accident. Bracing for heartbreak, the group collects into an underground room at the base to wait. A sense of dutiful camaraderie is obvious between the six women, but each of their attempts to remain calm in the face of death causes underlying conflicts within the group to burst onto the surface. In a situation such as this, is it possible to not secretly wish for the death of a friend’s husband?

Silent Heroes is a success, thanks largely to its affecting premise, its bouncy, entertaining dialogue and its strong performances. Baggs’ attempt to give all six women a moment to share their individual traumas feels too calculated at times, but outstanding performances across the board allow the narrative to maintain its momentum.

Set in the 1970s, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, Silent Heroes brings a notably diverse group of individuals onto the stage, highlighting the circumstantial quality of their bond. Be it not for the fact that their husbands are pilots, these women, different in backgrounds, ages and worldviews, would have been unlikely to have established such an intimate rapport with one another.

The most obvious standout from the group is young Miranda (Sarah Saunders), whose politically rebellious background is a topic of debate and discomfort within the group. Patsy (Julie Jesneck), meanwhile, is quickly established as the wife with the most outward and immediate struggles—she’s the only wife not looking forward to her husband’s return. Jesneck’s performance is difficult to watch, but for all the right reasons; her instinct to make excuses for her aggression-prone husband and avoid eye contact as she explains her choices is likely to ring authentic to anyone who has ever confronted a friend in an abusive relationship.

Rosalie Tenseth as Eleanor, the most outspoken member of the group, is also a joy to watch and delivers the funniest lines of the production, but it’s Kelly Ann Moore as her best friend June who is most likely to inspire chills in her audience. Because she is the most nurturing and least confrontational member of this collective, her eventual burst of anger is genuinely shocking, and Moore delivers this punch with a fearless sense of emotional wisdom. It’s a controlled performance that’s difficult to shake.

The set, designed by Nick Francone, adds to the necessary sense of claustrophobia. Furnished with a worn couch, a modest coffee station and photos of soldiers on the back wall, the room is appropriately void of spirit. During the second half of the play, when the six characters take turns stepping onto a chair and peering through a small, rectangular window near the ceiling, their sense of entrapment becomes all the more pronounced. The fate of their invisible husbands will define their destinies, and one gets the sense that ‘Silent Heroes’ is, quite literally, their only moment in the spotlight.

Beyond the Sea

In the same way Herman Melville experimented with language in Moby-Dick, Carlo Adinolfi, in his one-man stage adaptation of the novel, manipulates his voice and body. With similar playfulness, The Whale, presented by Concrete Temple Theatre, addresses the ways and means of storytelling, producing an elaborate dance that pays homage to the awesome, but graceful power of the sea and to Melville’s original text. Adinolfi’s interpretation of Moby-Dick’s themes is a physical take on Melville’s tale which weaves the mysteries of the deep and the mysteries of man into a complicated linguistic and psychological web. But what it lacks linguistically, The Whale makes up for with stunning staging that draws parallels between the shapes fashioned by man and by God. However, like Melville’s maniacal Captain Ahab, Adinolfi takes on an impossible task. In excerpting from an intricate novel, Adinolfi cuts key details and the plot points that make a coherent story. For those unfamiliar with the text, the play can be confusing, jumping from monologue to action scene without narrative exposition. For audience members who have read Melville, The Whale, while bursting with energy and imagination, pales by comparison. Still, this exciting journey is worth embarking on—just as men are drawn to the ocean, they are drawn to good storytelling.

To the sound of ominous groans, the opening scene introduces a minor and forgettable character from Moby-Dick, the Sub-Sub Librarian. Melville makes this “poor devil” a meaningless creature by necessity, claiming: “Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong… Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!” (Moby-Dick, xxxix). Whereas Ishmael narrates the novel, Adinolfi uses the Sub-Sub as his narrator, giving greater emphasis to the structural frame of a story within a story, but losing Melville’s characterization.

As in Melville, the Sub-Sub is there to contextualize the mythical significance of the Whale in social and literary history; the creature has captured man’s imagination for centuries, but is still mysterious. For this reason, he is the ideal subject for a story. Adinolfi’s Sub-Sub fantasizes about whaling voyages, bringing the drama of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a giant and valuable sperm whale to vivid light with enthusiastic recreations. While the distinctions between the various characters in this drama are unclear, the rough transitions are smoothed over by Adinolfi’s child-like energy.

With equal fervor, Adinolfi stages the battles between predator and prey, in ever-changing relationship to each other, by morphing into both sailor and whale. To evoke the shape of the beast, he turns his back to the audience, flexing his broad back and twisting his legs into a fluke. His transformation demonstrates that storytelling is about more than words. All of his characters are bathed in ominous lighting (by Tyler Micoleau), and their speech is echoed with a portentous score (by David Pinkard). The set and sounds demonstrate the intoxicating but terrifying beauty of the sea.

The most stunning aspect of The Whale is its staging. Adinolfi, his crew and director Renee Philippi transform the stage into the limitless sea, showing scale through the use of model boats. As Adinolfi morphs into various characters, blocks of wood onstage take on different meaning: they are boat prows, library shelves, a pulpit and pews, and perhaps coffins. Adinofli also creates a boat skeleton from strips of wood, which is later shrouded in a white sheet to become the elusive Leviathan. The effect is lovely and eerie. The Whale is ghost-like, but the sheet ripples with the natural beauty of fins underwater. Compared to the other props, the white whale is enormous, and the projections of Adinolfi’s shadow onto a screen behind seem ridiculous.

The climactic meeting of Ahab and Moby-Dick shows Adinolfi at his feverish best. The story line is at its clearest, the metaphors too. Bathed in a red light, wrapped in the tangled ropes from his own ship, Ahab goes down spectacularly. Yet, as life rises from the Pequod’s wreck, the Sub-Sub Librarian re-emerges. The Whale has won the epic struggle, but the narrator retains control of the tale.

Adinolfi’s interpretation is powerful due to the performer's ability to go beyond words and to experiment with physical formations that demonstrate the profound shared relationships between all beasts. When the Sub-Sub Librarian sketches a whale skeleton on his arm, he is playing with this connection, just as Melville, in his introductory material, uses quotations to emphasize the whale’s influence. Though maybe not the letter, the spirit of Melville is very much alive in this staging, which likewise pays respect to its subject with a vibrant telling.

What's Up

Fefu and her Friends, Maria Irene Fornes' 1977 play that examines the fraught nature of female friendship in 1935, was perhaps most notable for its roving staging. Originally produced in a SoHo loft, the second act of the three-act production required audiences to split up and move throughout the performance spaces, watching simultaneous scenes play out between pairs of characters. Although Fornes later revised the script to permit staging in more traditional venues, Fefu and her Friends has long served as a source of inspiration for innovative productions. Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers of Trick Saddle have recently adapted the play into their own quasi-environmental Wickets. With the time period transposed from the mid 1930's to the early 1970's, the characters from society ladies to stewardesses, and the locale from a country home to a passenger airplane, Wickets combines Fornes' original text with additional source material to create a performance piece that is at once retro and contemporary. In the spirit of Fornes, much of the pleasure of Wickets comes from the care taken with its scenic design. High quality production values that include curved white walls, narrow aisles, and partitioned sections of chairs make sitting inside set designer Rogers' cleanly constructed craft about as close to a commercial airplane as you can get without first going through security checkpoints. Beyond the plane's porthole windows, light designer Burke Brown effectively creates the hues of a changing skyscape. Yet for all the delight derived from the quirky realism of Wickets' set, the aircraft contains elements of the surreal; how many passenger planes have floors lined with AstroTurf? Its consciously idiosyncratic aesthetic is indicative of the entire production, which balances a kitschy celebration of sisterhood with an examination of the turmoil that incited feminism's second wave.

The characters of Fefu and her Friends belong to the ladies who lunch set; converting the characters into working class women in a feminized service profession adds interesting friction to their relationships with other women while making the audience implicitly responsible for their servitude. It also works toward undoing the notion of feminism as belonging to the providence of upper middle class white ladies, a smart choice that would be further enhanced by a more diverse cast.

The fun that Wickets has with its stewardess ensemble makes itself apparent before the opening lines of the play: upon arriving at the 3LD Art and Technology center, audience members are asked to form a line, "boarding passes" in hand, so that the stewardesses can check them off clip-boarded passenger lists. The strong cast, led by the superb Lee Eddy as a dignified yet gruff Fefu, forms a seamlessly supportive ensemble, including standouts Jessica Jolly, Elizabeth Wakehouse, and Christianna Nelson.

Over the course of the play, the stewardesses confide in one another their deep-seated fears as they engage in both cattiness and comradery. Curiously, a number of cast members employ inconsistent accents that are as distracting as they are unneeded. Like a long airline flight, Wickets isn’t always smooth. When it soars, it’s a thrill to be part of it.

Keeping It (Un)Real

Only two years ago, Joseph Biden, our Vice President-elect, made this questionable comment about Barack Obama, America’s soon-to-be first African-American president: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Mr. Obama obviously forgave this comment, although you can bet it stung.

While this exchange does not appear in her new play, The Shipment, it’s the type of racism that Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee sees just about everywhere in our society. The fact that it raises its ugly head even in high-level American politics, where every word is—or at least should be—carefully weighed, would seem to be confirmation of its ubiquity.

Though a book of Lee’s collected plays will soon be published, they must be seen to be fully experienced. As she tells us on her web site, “Every word I write is written to be performed.” She collaborates with her actors throughout the development process. Her satiric plays benefit from generous dollops of the absurd and her willingness to involve her company in most aspects of their creation.

Lee’s aesthetic is to create powerful theater that makes herself and the audience uncomfortable—she’s at her best as an irritant. She likes to get under your skin (after cutting her way in) and poke around in there. “Does that hurt? How about that?” she asks, before rubbing in a whole lot of salt and then fleeing mischievously. The results are only sometimes healing, but they are always provocative.

Lee calls The Shipment, an “African-American identity politics play.” The Shipment might strike viewers as a kinder, gentler Young Jean Lee. The blows are still there and the audience still squirms, yet the punches are softened by recognition of shared humanity. And comedy. Yes, this is a very funny show, even side-splitting in parts, and the laughs only increase as it goes along.

The actors in the all-black cast are multi-talented—each play multiple characters, and sing and dance with formidable skill. Standouts are Prentice Onayemi as Desmond and Mikeah Ernest Jennings as a variety of characters. Most of the actors were part of the cast that premiered this work last year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. They command their roles and imbue the characters—with a gesture here, a wave of the hand or a self-conscious glance there—with a compassion that’s often not apparent from stripped down dialogue on the written page. That’s why Lee’s plays must be seen rather than simply read.

A variety show of sorts, with segments featuring stand-up comedy and dance, The Shipment is divided into three major parts. The first features a comic, Douglas Streater, who is a less funny and more vicious version of Chris Rock. He is fixated on the perverted and scatological, and, between rants about both white and black people, occasionally drops his “keeping it real” guard, even intimating occasional suicidal ideation. Streater gets in the audience’s face and makes them feel uncomfortable—Lee goads the unsure audience into laughing at intentionally bad jokes— frequently made at its own expense. I found myself hoping that Mr. Streater would inject a little bit more of the despair that his sometimes sagging façade belied.

The second part of the production is a sort of black face minstrel show. Framed almost as a teenage morality play—a cautionary tale about gang violence and drug use that you might see at a middle school—replete with a requisite drive-by shooting and imprisonment, it portrays black people in the hopelessly one-dimensional way whites often view them.

The third major segment of the show, a sometimes-surreal sitcom with an ending that might come as a surprise, is the funniest. This segment underscores what Lee seems to think are certain privileged, educated people’s capacities for meanness, even for psychological torture. Mr. Onayemi is hilarious and utterly shines as the wound-up but taciturn Desmond. Mr. Jennings is physically masterful. We feel his embarrassment with each awkward tic and facial expression.

A special treat comes after the second major segment, where cast members Amelia Workman, Okieriete Onodowan and Mr. Onayemi sing, beautifully and a capella, what I initially read to be an oblique and cleverly worded paean to equality. I was a little disappointed when I found out the lyrics are actually from a Modest Mouse song, and not Lee herself, but the subject matter seems oddly appropriate nonetheless.

Performed in a black-box setting, with black walls, floors and curtains, The Shipment is often visually stunning. The characters are dressed in formalwear, a device that lends an air of nobility, but simultaneous brings to mind the era of Mr. Bojangles. Mark Barton’s lighting focuses on the characters’ faces, fleshing out every painful or betrayed look.

The Shipment doesn’t cohere in the way that conventional plays do but, for Lee, that’s the point. It takes work and collaboration on the part of the audience to put its meanings together—any two people might come away with different interpretations. Lee has confessed on her blog that, during its development, sometimes even she didn't know where the play was going. Race relations are often thorny and jagged as well as subtle, and the content and structure of her work track that prickliness.

The Shipmentis another milestone in Lee’s still very young career. This is exciting work, liberating and vital to new American theater.

Such Sweet Sorrow

Filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh’s works are often exercises in endurance. His works cover the quotidian, the everyday lives of everyday people, with a healthy mix of social observation thrown in for good measure. He rarely adds even a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down. And yet his catalog of work is so rich, every minute is worth sitting through, which is why theater companies time and again excavate his shows to perform. This is also largely the reason why Horse Trade Theater Group and Black Door Theatre Company have chosen to revive Leigh’s 1979 play Ecstasy. While the blueprint with which the companies work is an excellent, insightful play, the individuals involved in this current production, directed by Sara Laudonia at the Red Room, deserve much of the credit for revisiting this work so successfully.

Jean (Mary Monahan) is the fulcrum upon which Ecstasy pivots. The show looks at only two nights in her life, but it clear that Jean wants more for her life and doubts that she will ever have the resolve to seek it out. In one sense, not much happens. She has an affair with Roy (Josh Marcantel), a volatile married man whose wife, Val (Lore Davis), later arrives to wreak havoc. She shares tea with her friend Dawn (Gina LeMoine) and discusses her humdrum life.

There is more talking later, as Jean takes Dawn, Dawn’s husband, Mick (Brandon McCluskey), and Len (Stephen Heskett), an old friend who has recently moved back to town, back to her small London flat following a night of drinking. They have arrived under the pretense of fixing Jean’s bed (Val broke it during her melee), but the unspoken motivation also seems to be to pair Len up with Jean. The drinking continues, as the characters smoke, sing, dance, and reminisce.

There is a lot of talking in Ecstasy, and Laudonia’s production achieves an incredibly intimate effect. Though its size and poor acoustics sometimes make The Red Room a difficult venue in which to perform, it is perfect for this show. The audience has the perfect fly-on-the-wall perspective to watch Jean and her friends. Additionally, the music that sometimes creeps through the theater walls only adds to the lack of privacy and need to escape that Jean must feel in her solitary existence. (Ecstasy would benefit, though, from an intermission before the play’s long, last scene).

Monahan is extraordinary as Jean, anchoring the show with the character’s combination of regret, indifference, and surrender. Pay attention to her in the character’s “in-between” moments, when Jean is quietly reacting to another character’s comment or thinking of what to say or do next. This is a performance in which the wheels are clearly always turning.

The lead actress is matched by each of her peers. LeMoine proves Dawn to be a loyal friend and nimbly talks a blue streak, while balancing the additional challenge of looking progressively more inebriated. Heskett makes Len, a bumbling man, warm and charming, and McCluskey continually breathes life into the show with his energized comical delivery. Davis’ and Marcantel’s work is also solid. Page Clements is credited as the dialect coach for Ecstasy, though I have no idea which actors required such training; the English and Irish accents employed in this show sounded universally authentic to me.

Laudonia’s attentive, crisp direction has breathed new life into Leigh’s play. She has found a way to make the bleak lives originally depicted three decades earlier just as relevant today as they were then. A production like this makes a life of dissatisfaction seem somehow quite satisfying.

Winter of 69

Breakups are a serious state of affairs, and usually both parties bear some responsibility for the end of the relationship. The couple that reaches a tipping point in <I<Stay Over, directed by Matt Morillo at the Theater for the New City, can blame their problems on a single source: a middling script that has no identity of its own. Though they’ve been together in the neighborhood of a decade, Mark (Tom Pilutik) and Michelle (Lori Faiella) can’t seem to move forward in their relationship, so the two have gone on a break for several months. During this time, Michelle has allowed Mark one opportunity to stray with one girl. Michelle returns to Mark’s apartment, #69, on a severe wintry night to reconcile.

First, though, she wants to hear the details of his dalliance, punishing him for something she had given him permission to do. It’s not much later that we learn Michelle, too, has strayed in her time apart from Mark, and the fact that he doesn’t put her through a similar line of questioning makes Michelle not only a hypocrite but also just plain cruel.

I have a feeling that audience sympathy in Stay Over will fall along gender lines. One reason for this is that both a male and a female pitched in on the writing. Morillo (of last year’s relationship comedy All Aboard the Marriage Hearse) and Maria Micheles adapted Micheles’ own Sleepover, a more dramatic version of a New York love triangle, and yet Stay Over still feels as though it is in draft form. It is hard to root for any single character, almost as though the writers were friends of the couple, too afraid to commit to taking a side.

Early on, Michelle comes off as the affronted party, having been betrayed after what may have just been a test of Mark, and Faiella goes a long way toward making the audience share her anguish, especially as the character appears more vindictive than wronged. Pilutik’s performance, meanwhile, is both age- and character-appropriate. He makes Mark, an actor, seem rational, moderately narcissistic, and possessive of a healthy sexual appetite, rather than merely a hedonistic cad. This makes it harder to hate him, and easier to care about the two of them.

Perhaps these hard-working actors would be helped if Micheles and Morillo gave at least a little background about the characters’ pasts. The script leaves many questions unanswered (what finally pushed Michelle to let Mark cheat? What had kept them together for all the years prior to that?), but watching the two actors at work, I found myself investing in what these two had and hoping to find out more about what made them work as a couple and what complicated the matter.

At least for a while. Then Lilly (JessAnn Smith) enters the play as the other woman, and Stay Over began taking crazy turns, some of which I even mean literally. Lilly, it turns out, not only had an affair with Mark, but also has a surprising connection to Michelle. The dynamics of the triangle that ensues is funny and unpredictable only to those who have never seen an episode of Three’s Company. Each character tries to outsmart the others as though this were some twisted episode of Survivor in which the winner gets to be in a relationship, but Lilly, Mark and Michelle increasingly appear to care only about themselves, making the audience care less and less about who might end up with whom.

Part of the reason for this is because Lilly doesn’t quite fit in. Faiella and Pilutik look and act like people in their early thirties, suggesting a believable balance of experience and confusion when it comes to relationships. Lilly, on the other hand, is supposed to be in her early twenties, but Smith’s vocal intonations suggest someone even younger, weakening this pivotal triangle. It is bad enough that she doesn’t seem to post a viable threat to Michelle, but she actually comes off as jailbait for Mark. A dance Lilly performs late in Stay Over (choreographed by the actress herself) comes off more clumsy than seductive.

Morillo’s staging also leaves something to be desired. The downstairs theater at TNC is a small space, but I spent roughly two-thirds of the show contorting myself in an attempt to see the action onstage around the people seated in the rows in front of me. Perhaps Morillo could have blocked more of the action upstage to allow his audience to see more given the confines of the venue.

As hard as Faiella and Pilutik may try, without further repairs, Stay Over is currently one affair not worth remembering.

Trevor and Judy and Tony and Sarah

New House Under Construction is a puzzling play, perhaps because it feels like several different plays in one. Alan Hruska has built his plot around four characters comprising two couples. However, the members of each couple, and what each character wants, undergo as many revolutions as the set of the title. It’s enough to give the audience a case of whiplash. It doesn’t help matters much that the playwright’s characters play an odd game of give-and-take with the audience of 59E59 Theaters. Almost from start to finish, Hruska has every character exposit startling amounts of his or her history through their dialogue, spelling out major details from their lives. But they withhold important kernels of information that would be beneficial to the development of the play, giving the audience no real reason to connect to anyone in the show.

For instance, why are Trevor (Anthony Crane) and Tony (Kevin Isola) lifelong rivals? And if so, why are they still in close contact? Information like this would go a long way toward explaining why Trevor is building a new house for the man. Trevor, who appears to be the play’s lead, or at least its most sympathetic character, is a short story writer who moonlights as an architect. Though married to Judy (Nancy Lemenager), Trevor years ago dated Sarah (Shannon Koob), who is now married to Tony.

Hruska may play mum on that subject, but he doles out plenty of other tidbits. Judy admits to Sarah that she has sexual feelings for her, and is interested in pursuing them. Judy tells Trevor that she used to see Tony, and still has feelings for him. Tony reveals to Trevor that at age nineteen, Sarah aborted the child she had conceived with Trevor. (This particular unveiled secret holds a lot of dramatic potential that remains unrealized.)

Both couples swap partners, and in the space of one of Hruska’s overused scene changes, an entire year has passed. But it isn’t that Hruska, who also directs the play, hasn’t given his audience time to catch their breath. Rather, the problem is that the audience is never breathless in the first place. The revelations come so quickly and so early that they are rendered meaningless.

Perhaps sensing that Construction needed additional shaping, Hruska then introduces a fifth character to shift the entire play in a new direction. Sam Coppola is Manny, an analyst for, ultimately, all four of his fellow characters. It is unclear what Hruska tries to accomplish with the addition of this therapist, aside from creative laziness. Giving each character a sounding board allows them to soliloquize everything that is on their mind, thus merely stating what is going on inside their heads instead of playing those emotions.

Construction makes yet another tonal shift rather late in the game, when Sarah and Trevor are and always have been married, and Judy and Tony are currently married for the second-go-round. Sarah and Tony are trying to adopt a baby, and Judy and Tony find themselves in a position to assist them. These scenes are a case of too little too late, but are also a source of confusion. Have we entered an alternate reality? Is this a dream? Is everything that preceded it a figment of one character’s imagination? Instead of adding up to a creative aggregate, Hruska’s creative manipulations only serve to fragment the play.

The five performances go a long way toward strengthening Construction. Crane makes Trevor as full-bodied a character as he can with his limited material. I genuinely cared for him; I felt sorry for him when he felt deprived, and was happy when his character seemed to be so. Both Koob and Lemenager are stuck playing conceits. Neither Judy nor Sarah is a person one might encounter in the real world; they merely exist and say things to move the play forward. However, both actresses imbue their characters with nuance and credibility where they can to suggest the possibility that these women might actually possess emotions like desire and regret.

Isola has a more challenging job, since Tony is such a dolt. He’s a substance-abusing womanizer who doesn’t care who he hurts with his brutal words. Unlike the other three leads, Tony possesses no sympathy factor. Despite the many changes affecting his character, he remains unfazed and unchanged. There never seems to be anything lurking beneath the surface. Coppola, on the other hand, plays Manny, and, later, a representative from the adoption agency, taking straightforward characters and adding layers of compassion and understanding.

Hruska would have done good to turn a more objective eye to his play and do a more aggressive editing job. The scribe creates many scenes, some of which last as long as a scene change, thus fragmenting the play to an extreme degree. Additionally, the major changes in tone contribute further to an overall episodic feel. Construction plays like an experiment that escaped from a theatrical lab still in rough form. (Though Kenneth Foy’s set is certainly a sturdy thing of beauty.)

Construction’s varying relationships require some quick mental mathematics on the behalf of the audience, but I’m not sure that they are rewarded for their hard work in the end. Hruska’s play gives plenty of answers, but it has yet to define what the questions are.

Mommy & Me

“Sometimes leaving home can be a greater act of love,” says the title character of Perdita, “than staying.” An internationally recognized human rights activist, her complicated notions of familial responsibility are rendered still more complex by the knowledge that Perdita is written and performed by the title character’s son. Neither childish tirade nor sentimental portrait, Pierre-Marc Diennet’s moving new play tells the story of his mother’s remarkable life as seen (if not always witnessed) by her devoted son. The smartly structured text consists of a series of scenes that jump between a loosely chronological history of Perdita’s life as an international activist, fighting injustice, and a present day that finds her back in the United States, fighting cancer. Nick Francone’s scenic design includes dates and locations, in the form of postmarks, projected against the set at the start of each scene. It’s a creative design choice that roots each scene in time and incorporates the theme of long distance connections so important to the story; oversized postcard fragments and foreign cityscapes form the production’s backdrop.

Under director Linsay Firman, the disparate scenes of Diennet’s carefully constructed script flow organically into one another. Avoiding the solo-performance convention of directly addressing the audience, Perdita contains only scenes of dialogue between characters. Playing himself, he is refreshingly free of irony and self-deprecation. He treats himself, as a character, with the same integrity and critical eye that he does with all of the characters he portrays. Particularly arresting is a scene of conflict between himself at 15 and his mother just before she leaves him in Geneva; the scene plays like a standard scene of a realistic family drama; not formally acknowledging Diennet’s personal connection to it is an effective choice. His ability to depict personal conflict onstage, and to play both sides of it without wrapping it into a neat conclusion, is in itself a gift to his mother.

While the mother-son drama forms the heart of the story, Diennet includes a host of other characters along the way, and masterfully portrays all of them. He shifts easily from role to role, granting each character extraordinary degrees of specificity. While a scene where he plays a distraught African woman praising Allah in the wake of her daughter's wartime death, comes perhaps a bit soon in the production -- other intense moments that occur later feel more appropriate -- he nonetheless depicts her, like all of his characters, as someone with a meaningful perspective. He's his mother’s son.

The care Diennet has taken with his mother’s story is itself a heartwarming gesture. That he does it so powerfully, and with such substance, makes it not just a gesture but a breathtaking piece of theater. In the second act of the production, Diennet has Perdita tell a Sri Lankan with whom she wants to study nursing in Africa that living the life you want to live is itself a way of loving your family; it’s not hard to imagine that the same is true of storytelling.

Where's the Beef?

Criticizing A.R. Gurney’s plays for lack of depth is like criticizing your Toyota Prius for not winning NASCAR—you should know what you’re buying right from the start. Gurney has always written slightly behind the curve, illustrating the dynamics of new societal mores for The New Yorker set when their controversy is waning in the rest of the world. Gurney is at his best when he's light. His plays are nearly always entertaining—sometimes even exhilarating, if not quite profound. Yet, A Light Lunch, currently enjoying its World Premiere at The Flea Theater, feels like a throwaway, a diversion. At one point it alludes to itself as an aborted work. It’s light, even by Gurney’s standards.

In A Light Lunch, Gurney is good-naturedly-- sometimes even painfully--aware of his pigeonholed reputation as a cataloguer of the foibles of the privileged upper classes. He pokes fun at himself throughout the play, almost as if he’s trying to inoculate it from criticism. Even the title suggests that we’re not going to get full-on Gurney here.

A Light Lunch is set in a nondescript Italian restaurant frequented by “theater people,” replete with checked red and white tablecloths; there are no set changes. The wall is decorated with Paul Howard caricatures of playwrights whose work has been presented at The Flea. That’s the most interesting part of a set that we see for 80 minutes in this intermissionless one act.

Shortly after George W. Bush has left office, Beth (Beth Hoyt), a young lawyer from Texas, working for the Bush family, flies to New York to meet Gary (Tom Lipinski), Gurney’s agent. The Bush family, through a mole, has learned that Gurney has written an unreleased play highly critical of the former President, and has authorized Beth to offer an obscene amount of money to the playwright to make sure it “will never see the light of day.” From an administration that was hopelessly oblivious to the arts, this, alone, should be the most absurd part of the play.

The action should be as preposterous as the plot but, incongruously, it isn’t. Directed by Jim Simpson, Hoyt and Lipinski can’t seem to find the ridiculous in their roles and play their characters too straight.

It takes the likeable but apparently dense Gary almost half the play to figure out that Beth is working for Bush and not against him, while the rest of us have known that from the start. Throughout the play, the audience is so far ahead of the characters that I found my mind wandering until they caught up. “There’s Mac Wellman!” “Is that Young Jean Lee?” I asked myself as I squinted at the caricatures. I also noticed from my vantage point that, while Beth is served actual food, there is nothing in Gary’s soup bowl. “C’mon, propmaster, take a chance! It’s only liquid!” I caught myself muttering.

The pair’s waitress, Viola (Havilah Brewster), an aspiring actress in perpetual audition mode, with an incorrigibly exaggerated New York accent, succeeds in being as annoying as she’s meant to be, interrupting negotiations just when they’re about to get tense. For every joke that works there are about three warmed over late night television clunkers, like this exchange that takes place when it appears that Beth will be returning to Texas empty handed:

GARY (to BETH): I assume the Bush family will reimburse you for the full amount...

VIOLA: Don’t be too sure. Did you read Bush's proposal on Medicare?

A new character, Marshall (John Russo), Viola’s boyfriend and a drama professor at The New School, arrives near the end of the play to help devise an appropriate ending to what we learn is an unfinished play. Russo, who is the only actor seemingly tuned into the absurdity of the premise, turns in a terrific performance, but it’s all too little, too late.

Unfortunately, in the end, A Light Lunch is about as satisfying as an empty bowl of soup.

Big Boots, Little Emperor

It is not faint praise to say that Horizon Theater Rep’s production of Caligula (by Albert Camus) is better than one might expect. Phrased in almost entirely philosophical terms, Camus’s script, translated by David Greig, is “set in an unspecified country during the twentieth century” and features a self-obsessed ruler named Caligula. Camus is obviously indebted to the specific legacy of Gaius Julius Caesar’s extravagant madness. Like the real-life Caligula, director and star Rafael De Mussa’s ambitions are large, and it is not surprising that he falls short. However, Caligula’s actions make for a literally spectacular show, at times as gruesome and uncomfortable as a gladiatorial match. The twisted ironies—perversions that become normal through repetition—provide the humor that makes the show an entertaining, if ponderous, diversion. Taking inspiration from the strange history of Caligula’s reign, Camus’s play gives an explanation for his random acts of madness. After several years of respectable reign, Caligula began to exhibit the bizarre capriciousness for which he is remembered, in history and art. Among some of the more fantastic claims: that he treated his horse as consul; proclaimed himself Venus; and executed according to the nonjudgmental laws of logic. For example, when Caligula was reported to have fallen ill, a patrician offered to give his life for the improvement of the emperor’s health. Upon his recovery, Caligula took it. This sort of reasoning gives the play its shape and its voice.

Delighting in Caligula’s diabolical mania with a relish similar to that of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, De Mussa manages an ironically whimsical gravity. His deadliness is clear, but also desperately funny. The murderous acts are so extreme that there is no appropriate reaction—but it’s hard not to laugh at the absurdity.

However, because Caligula’s actions are based on a dogged commitment to the logical, each grotesque act is equally terrible. The plot, therefore, neither advances nor picks up speed. There are moments of tension, but overall it can be disappointingly dull. When nothing makes sense, everything makes sense—the play becomes so caught up in its twisted logic that everything is a bit too straight. As Caligula becomes depressed, claiming: “everything comes to the same thing. A little sooner, a little later,” the audience experiences a corresponding letdown.

If the other actors were as charismatic and energetic as De Mussa, perhaps the lack of tension would be a less glaring flaw. As it is, there is a general greenness and discomfort among the actors portraying the aristocracy. When they are plotting, Camus’s words feel about as dull and heavy as a Roman column. Among the other stars orbiting Caligula’s planet, Romy Nordinger as his wife, Caesonia, and Ben Gougeon as his henchman, Helicon, stand out for their performances. Still, there is no character to identify or sympathize with, just a powerful overarching concept.

The set likewise contributes to the show’s stagnancy. There is only so much room for the actors to move and interact when a table dominates center stage. This table is occasionally used to clever effect: to establish hierarchy, to show disrespect, to stand between two dueling personalities; however, it is just an object and in the end it takes up a lot of space that might be put to better use.

The table is part of a festive set that uses more modern examples of lavishness to echo the excesses of Rome. Little is done to explain or emphasize the particular music, wardrobe or set choices, but there is little about this interpretation that adds insight to a text that seems to prefer the power of the word above all else.

In the end it is Camus’s observations and wit, as well as Caligula’s fascinating story that provide the show’s highlights. However, though the writing is precise and perfect as a logically reasoned construction, the play’s failings are mostly due to the fact that the logic of absolute power is self-sustaining and fatalistically circular. When Caligula asks: “what god could fill a lake so deep?” the ensuing silence is profound. Certainly the gods of theater are not up to the task. Though he grasps at meaning, Caligula is left blinking at the void, with no more significance than when the curtain lifted. The theory of absolutes is complete, but at the cost of story and character.

Baby, It's Cold (and Deadly) Outside

While multiple deaths on frozen tundra might not be everyone’s idea of holiday cheer, the Brick Theater’s dark comedy, The Granduncle Quadrilogy: Tales from the Land of Ice, makes for good morbid fun. Much to the chagrin of any characters in his vicinity, the aging Granduncle (played at various ages by Richard Harrington) has decided to share the stories of his past – stories that manage to incorporate stabbing, drowning, slave labor, and a rather inappropriate use of a mammoth trunk. For the most part, the cast tackles the twisted plot with such whimsical innocence that tragic moments rarely seem so. This is particularly the case with Harrington’s warm, yet tone-deaf narration as Granduncle, which provides a hilarious counterpoint to the grim content.

It’s no surprise that Granduncle’s memories are a tad depressing: his home is a frigid, barren landscape (simply rendered by a draped white backdrop) plagued by war. As a result, he and his fellow Land of Ice inhabitants cling as tightly to their religion – centered on a belief that they will join their child-messiah beneath the ice in the afterlife – as they do their furs.

Jeff Lewonczyk’s script so extensively crafts entire cultures with their own lexicons, traditions, and histories that it feels like fictional anthropology. Whether it’s the mating rituals (do a little dance, choose a mate, go to war, and if she doesn’t get pregnant, she joins you) and recreational drugs (huffing albatross eggs) of the Ice folk or the surprisingly expressive hiss-based language of the foreigners who capture Granduncle, the play nicely pulls you into its own world.

In the cast’s capable hands, even the most peculiar traditions or phrasings (describing smell as “taste for nose” was a favorite of mine) seem natural. Playing multiple roles, they make convincing natives of these societies. A particular standout is Fred Backus, who plays both a goofy child and sociopathic foreman with equal conviction.

With such inventive storytelling, it’s unfortunate that the play grows boring by the end, due to its length. Sure, we’ve all had to sit through a long-winded tale from an old relative, but I don’t think grandpa would ever be so cruel as to subject us to a quadruple-header. If anything could be trimmed, it would be the third segment about the construction of a giant ice wall by citizens-turned-slaves. While the kooky, fairy tale plots of the other stories make their fatalities digestible, this one mirrors our world too much.

Still, Granduncle largely succeeds in telling a good story well—a simple goal, but one too often overlooked or unnecessarily complicated by aggressively experimental or ironic productions. Such a uniquely imaginative show as this is enough to put you in the holiday spirit – no matter how many bodies pile up.

Theatrical Potatoes

The potatoes have brains. Two women stand center furiously peeling potatoes, the skins flying every which way. They seem to be preparing dinner for their two husbands, who are out hunting. The common scene is interrupted when one of the women, Bethy, looks more closely at her potato and realizes it has organs and is a sentient being. So the kitchen sink scene is shattered. The other woman, Fern, turns to Bethy and asks her to “kill me and eat me quick, before the men get back” and then tell the men that she ran off with another hunter. She repeats her plea several times before fleeing the stage. Sibyl Kempson's new play, Potatoes of August is a fugue. The program kindly provides both definitions of “fugue”: in music, “a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others, and developed by interweaving the parts.” In psychiatry: “a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment. . . “ The content and structure of Potatoes of August follow both definitions of fugue. The characters have matching costumes, yet are different people. The opening scenes feature Fern and her husband Buck in their living room, followed by Bethy and her husband Gordon in their living room. When the potatoes speak (accompanied by stop motion video of dancing potatoes), their voices are kind of in unison, but it doesn't match up so that their speech is overlapped and almost indiscernible.

The play is highly theatrical and demonstrates an understanding of theatrical theory. The acting style takes a cue from Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect—the actors' are not emotionally involved in their characters and thus, the audience never becomes so either. Their lines are delivered in banal tones; the acting could be called terrible if you didn't know it was on purpose. There are video projections explaining where the action is taking place. The accompanying songs are melodic, but the voices singing them are terribly off key. Instead of limiting themselves to the stage area, the characters make use of the entire space, running up into the balcony, and around the audience.

The characters' beliefs are thrown into question. Fern lies in her thoughtscape, remembering how people behaved when she was a little girl. Gordon constantly mentions the astronomer Carl Sagan, reminding Bethy of his ideas and principles. Bethy runs around the perimeter of the audience, wondering what is happening, and what is she supposed to be feeling. The show is heavy embedded with philosophy, with a short reading list provided on the back of the program. However, one does not need to be familiar with Swedenborg or Sagan to understand and the enjoy the play.

Potatoes of August will probably be most enjoyed, however, by someone with a background in theater. While there is a linear plot embedded in the play, it is ultimately more about its form. The story comes through and is given a boost by the theatricality of the piece. The piece is very exciting to watch, provided you know what is going on. However, its theatricality may be inaccessible to someone only familiar with the commercial theater and its ilk. Which isn't a bad thing, but it does make one wish that more works of theater would embrace their theatricality instead of simply trying to lamely imitate the movies.