Living Walls

Before New York’s financial world caved in on itself, the most ubiquitous enemy to the city’s longtime residents was its series of aggressive redevelopment projects. Its five boroughs may have risen in stroller-friendliness over the past decade, but the family businesses and community-specific traditions that once characterized its neighborhoods have now given way to drug store chains and luxury condominiums. A collective need to resist gentrification prevails as New York’s defining cause of social activism, and consequently is reflected in art projects conceived within the city’s borders. Such is the case with redevelop (death valley), a frenzied blend of video, photography, spoken word, dance and music playing at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. The scope of the project is ambitious to the point of feeling exhausting as it attempts to use this mishmash of artistic genres to create a parallel between local redevelopment projects and the impact of ghost towns on the American psyche. In its strongest moments, redevelop (death valley) reads like a cleverly conceived museum installation, but its lack of narrative clarity does more to jumble the goals of the piece than to inspire moments of a-ha.

Five performers roam about the stage during its roughly hour-long running time, but for most of it they are literally upstaged by an assortment of hanging, translucent panels that serve as projection screens and obstruct the audience’s view. Isolating the company’s performers with a plastic wall and offering the audience a partial, distorted view is a strategic choice that appears to be designed to trigger frustration. Just as the endless construction of sterile condominiums muffles the spirit of a neighborhood, these white panels invoke our curiosity, ruthlessly control our viewpoint, and distance us from the flesh-and-blood element of the piece. The metaphor is effective, but its execution also keeps the audience at a needless distance.

While most of the video and still photography images projected onto the panels depict elements of the performance space itself, from the five dancers’ quivering legs and hands to extreme close-ups of light beams, windows and radiators, the work is also punctuated by two lengthier, pre-taped segments. An interview with a longtime Long Island City resident opens the first half of the work, and the second half in turn begins with a series of video clips, images and commentary depicting abandoned desert towns.

While the opening interview suffers from sloppy editing that makes its subject appear excessively long-winded, the second documentary segment is arguably the most affecting part of redevelop (death valley). There’s an unexpected beauty to its images of abandoned houses, stripped of everything valuable and blending, like fossils, into the landscape around them. In this segment one can’t always make out the voice of the interviewee, but as the recorded sound of a distant highway grows almost unsettlingly loud, these words lose their importance.

Perhaps the only clear arc in Rogers’s piece is the gradual removal of these obstructing screens. Its five characters occasionally shut out one another’s access to the audience by putting up additional panels, but as the piece draws to a close, they move these screens, one by one, onto a pile on the floor. As we begin to see the oblong, tile-walled room in its entirety, another memorable image is revealed: the five performers have gathered around a dinner table in the far end of the space, chatting and pouring glasses of wine underneath a yellow light. In the center of the room is a pile of unidentifiable rags, and in front of the audience a narrow beam of rain pours on an abandoned tea set. Even if one isn’t quite sure of the meaning of this visual moment, it's difficult to forget.

Although the visual and audio elements of the performance appear to be carefully orchestrated, its use of words is its most notable weakness. When the five characters speak, it’s often almost impossible to make out their words, and when one does hear them, their context is unclear. The performance also tries to make use of a variety of spoken-word recordings, including FDR’s fireside chats and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, but their meaning remains obscure and their presence only contributes to a viewer’s confusion.

It’s difficult, of course, to fault the Chocolate Factory’s artistic director Brian Rogers for his ambition, and I’m not sure that I would want to. Love them or hate them, works like redevelop (death valley) continue to challenge and expand the ways in which we perceive theater. The work itself may not always be relatable, but the artistic passion behind it certainly is.

A Lonely Hearts Club Band of One

“There are seven levels.” So says Paul McCartney anyway, upon discovering the true nature of reality the first time he smoked pot, which was with Bob Dylan. This and other fascinating, impromptu anecdotes make up the majority of johnpaulgeorgeringo, Dave Jay’s live action wiki of all things Beatle. And Paul is right – there are probably seven unique levels of enjoyment awaiting audiences in Jay’s magical mystery tour.

Level one – history. No other rock band can quite summon up feelings of weight and importance like the Beatles. No doubt, the legend of four working class blokes from Liverpool who, through pop and psychedelia, rocketed to the top of music charts is already a familiar one. But in his analysis, Jay takes great pleasure in scraping stories out of often-unrecalled nooks and crannies. That drummer Ringo Starr lived on canned beans while in India, for instance, or that the boys all had stripper girlfriends in Hamburg, Germany. More impressively, Jay’s interactive opus takes the form of a lively examination rather than a pedantic thesis. Real questions from audience members are required to prod “the band” into talking, so every yarn emerges genuinely from Jay’s comprehensive knowledge of Beatle trivia. The relaxed atmosphere the show creates is quite amazing, with theatergoers likely falling into two camps: those who simply forget that they’re not actually talking to the Beatles and those determined to trip Jay up in obscure minutia. Either way, it’s a blast.

The second level of enjoyment is performance – the sheer skill with which Jay executes artful dodges and mellow recollection. His precise characterizations of all four Beatles spring forth quite organically, even if Mr. Jay trends towards caricature. After all, history remembers these musicians as larger than life, so Jay doesn’t tarnish that image. He does well to work in broad, recognizable strokes; his George is quiet with a capital “Q” and his Paul is a high-pitched fruit loop.

Unsurprisingly, music is another pleasure here. During Q&A dry spells, Jay frequently grabs a guitar and plays. Some of the compositions are his originals, styled after Lennon and McCartney to good effect. This is a slippery slope, because there are probably some who would balk at the suggestion that Jay’s songs are of “Beatle quality.” But Jay covers his tracks, occasionally belting out quirky, but entertaining versions of Beatle material (Shhhh!). Standouts at the performance I attended were a version of “Yesterday” with “scrambled eggs” replacing the chorus and Ringo’s laughable attempt at “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

Those interested in more current gossip, ranging from Heather Mills to Lennon: The Musical will also find something to like in johnpaulgeorgeringo. Jay offers some nice reflections on how the band members and their legacies have been tainted over the years. If asked, Lennon will honestly confront allegations that he had a homosexual relationship with manager Brian Epstein or address his failures as a father. Sometimes, Jay’s decisive admissions were so blunt that audience members skeptically asked, “Really? Is that really true?”

It is also important to consider marketing when seeing a piece like this and its success; originating in last year’s Fringe Festival, johnpaulgeorgeringo is now making the rounds at comedy clubs (like Ha!) and Off-Broadway theaters. Jay and his co-creator Brad Calcaterra have successfully fashioned a low-maintenance event that is accessible to a wide audience. Everyone has at least marginal interest in the Beatles and their story. Predictably, each audience member at the performance I attended had at least one question – myself included. Perhaps the only disappointment in this respect was that this big, accessible audience wasn’t there. For a Saturday night at a midtown comedy club, it was shockingly unpopulated. (It seems even the Beatles aren’t immune to economic instability.) One wonders what a larger, rowdier audience might have coaxed out of Jay.

But I didn’t mind the intimate gathering, as it increased the profundity of casually hanging out with these iconic day-trippers. This is the sixth level I found appealing: the spiritual aspect of the show. For all its humble trappings – there are no tech or sound cues – the johnpaulgeorgeringo experience manages a complex simulacrum of closure. Even though you know it isn’t real, it is as if you can finally close the book on all those idle musings or dorm room arguments. “Wait, they’re not saying ‘I get high’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand?’” Or, “see, I told you – Yoko did eat George’s cookies!” In this Dave Jay proves a high artist, because his glib portrayal of these all-too familiar stories feels definitive.

And there is the final layer to Jay’s performance – the recognizable, but unknowable allure we each found the first time we heard John Lennon’s voice treated with an echo effect or the crackle of guitar in “Revolution.” Jay has all but bottled “Beatle” in a digestible one-hour container. In the words of Sgt. Pepper, “sit back and let the evening go.”

Scary Times Are Here Again...

So much of what defines terror can be summed up in one word: Atmosphere. Vagabond Theatre Ensemble’s production of The Wendigo, based on the story by Algernon Blackwood, has Atmosphere in spades. It is positively dripping in it, starting the moment you walk into the theater; from the dim lighting and snow crunching underfoot, to the air filled with smoke and spooky ambient sound, to the actor rocking back and forth onstage, clutching himself in what could be considered abject terror. The expectation established in those few minutes before the lights dim is that the audience is in for one roller-coaster thrill ride of a journey, and thankfully Vagabond delivers on their promise masterfully. The sound design was the first thing that really stuck out to this viewer. Designed by M.L. Dogg, the audience was subjected to creepy music, eerie ambient sounds, and sudden jolting noises in the best horror-film tradition. Combined with Brian Tovar’s brilliant lighting design, which really strived to do something a bit different from what one might expect, there was more than one moment of nearly jumping out of one’s seat.

The set was gorgeous, designed by Nicholas Vaughan, and evoked beautifully particular passages from the original story. The production was held together by projections created by Gino Barzizza, which not only served to fix the action in a particular time and place, but meshed all the other design elements nearly flawlessly. I say nearly, because the only thing that took me out of the play were the costumes, which were very pretty. Too pretty, in fact. Although costume designer Candice Thompson chose or built spectacular pieces, the pressed seams in the rugged adventurer’s pants kind of broke the illusion of these hardy men living out in the woods for several days, if not weeks. Everything was a little too clean, and could have used a bit of distressing, which can be understandably problematic with borrowed or rented costumes. Because of this, the piece that was the most believable was the ripped shirt belonging to the Native guide, Defago.

The play itself, written by Eric Sanders and directed by Matthew Hancock, was a fitting tribute to one of the masters of modern horror. The language flowed naturally, without having the stilted feel that some period pieces possess, and the actors seemed to relish every word. All of the performances were rock solid, with nary a weak link in the group.

The story is told in flashback, partly through the eyes of Simpson (played by Nick Merritt), a young man going on his first moose-hunting expedition in the wilds of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. He is accompanied by noted anthropoligist Doc (played by Erik Gratton), and their two trackers and wilderness experts, Hank (played by Graham Outerbridge) and Defago (played by Kurt Uy). Without saying too much, the men get separated in the woods and things go horribly wrong.

Although there were a couple of unintentionally humorous moments (most notably when a particular sound effect and the manner in which a couple of the actors were standing made it seem like they were relieving themselves, which was even funnier later in the play when Hank actually is supposed to be relieving himself), the overall vision and artful staging by director Matthew Hancock was quite stunning. Since this is my first exposure to his work, and it was on the shorter side (coming in at about 45 minutes), I would like to see if he can sustain this sort of intensity over a longer period of time; I have a feeling I would not be disappointed.

There are far too few adaptations of the great writers that actually do them justice out there, so when one comes along it should be greatly lauded. The Wendigo is one of these plays that is truly inspires the viewer either to pick up a book and read a great work, or pick up a pen and create one. At the very least, it should inspire you to double-check your doors and leave a light on.

Look Back in Awe

It was a logical choice to adapt E. L. Doctorow’s novel saluting Americana, Ragtime, for the Broadway musical stage in 1998. Doctorow’s ambitious tale, interweaving a prosperous New Rochelle WASP family, African-American servants and Eastern European immigrants during the early years of the 20th century was ripe for an introspective millennium audience. And the skilled team of Terrence McNally (who wrote the book), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and Stephen Flaherty (music) was able to capture the pulse of the book, lovingly translating its ups and downs to rich musical effect. (All three won Tony Awards for their efforts). But how can one scale down such a show, big in every way, around the budget and size of an Off-Off-Broadway theater? Such a question does not seem to have deterred Tom Wojtunik, who directs Ragtime for the Astoria Performing Arts Center. Wojtunik makes such good use of his performance space in Astoria’s Good Shepherd United Methodist Church that one could easily think it was conceived for that exact space.

To give away much of the show’s plot would be as criminal as some of the more gut-wrenching acts that drive the show’s powerful three hours, so I’ll abstain. Instead I reflect upon the way that Doctorow has his stories intersect and entwines the lives of characters both fictional and historic (including activist Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini) seemingly with a minimum of effort.

Wojtunik builds upon these exchanges in a wonderfully literal way. Choreographer Ryan Kasprzak has the characters parade through the auditorium, moving throughout the audience (who are seated in five sections around a de facto thrust stage and also must face each other). In the first act, the characters from the three different groups find themselves integrated among each other; early in the more racially-charged second act, these characters march through the same movements, but in a more segregated manner. Wojtunik’s point is simple but profound: these characters represent us. Their problems are our problems, and we cannot escape them.

One of the elements that make Ragtime a rarity is that it is never simply one character’s musical. The central love story between Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (D. William Hughes) and his erstwhile paramour, Sarah (Janine Ayn Romano) has a ripple effect that forever alters the lives of her employer, Mother (Anna Lise Jensen), her Younger Brother (Ricky Oliver), and Tateh (Mark Gerrard), an enterprising Jewish immigrant whose paths keep crossing with that of Mother’s.

All of this may sound a bit dark, and while Ragtime has its heavy moments, it is also full of uplift, thanks to a catalog of songs that rank at the very top of the modern canon. Hughes and Romano have the unenviable task of taking on theater royalty in reprising the signature roles of Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald, but they do so with absolute confidence. Witness Romano’s chilling take on “Your Daddy’s Son,” or their harmonic convergence on the show’s biggest number, the duet “On the Wheels of a Dream.”

Jensen also drives the show in her own right. Mother undergoes a sea change of emotional realizations throughout Ragtime, which the actress underscores with subtlety and grace. Jensen also has a gorgeous voice, put to great use in the number “Back to Before.” Rare is the actress who can take a few minutes of standing still and alone on stage and turn it into a command performance.

If Jensen provides the show’s heart, then Gerrard is every a bit its soul. Mother may just be waking up to the dangers in the world, but Tateh knows them all too well, and the actor’s full-bodied performance aches at both possibility and regret. The role of Younger Brother is the one that suffers the most in McNally’s adaptation from the novel, but Oliver makes every moment count. He is certainly an actor to keep an eye on. The show’s ensemble chorus also comes through time and again, particularly in such numbers as “He Wanted to Say” and “Till We Reach That Day.”

Ragtime is a technical marvel as for an Off-Off-Broadway show. Though Hughes had a few projection problems (particularly when singing “Make Them Hear You”) at the performance I attended, overall Kristyn R. Smith proves to be a resourceful sound designer. David Withrow’s costumes, too, are all first-rate. There is simply no weak link in this show under Wojtunik’s hand.

And all of the pieces come together to make for a harrowing, unforgettable night of theater. While this show is sturdy enough to be an evergreen, it is nearly impossible to watch Ragtime and not think about the nation’s specific historic moment. Passionate and bursting with talent, APAC’s production is a towering testament to the angels on whose shoulders we now stand.

Good to be Bad

What might it look like for a theater group to stage the worst plays it can imagine? In the case of You're Welcome, currently running at the Brick, it looks terrific. Dubbed "A Cycle of Bad Plays by The Debate Society," a Brooklyn theater group better known for magical literary adaptations than for campy lampoons, You're Welcome resonates with The Debate Society's signature off-kilter enthusiasm as the play cycle moves from theatrical disaster to theatrical disaster. The production opens with a self-described "very laughable sketch," The Bathroom. Ostensibly a farce in the manner of old timey drawing room (bathroom?) comedies, The Bathroom gets conveniently cut short due to a longwinded director's talk by an excellent Michael Cyril Creighton in the guise of a pleased Oliver Butler, who actually directs the show. Theatrical hi-jinx continues in A Thought About Ryan, perhaps the sharpest play of the evening, which is introduced by Paul Thureen as a play which tours "High Schools and Youth Centers all over everywhere near here." A cheeky nod at Debate Society play A Thought About Raya, here the titular Ryan is a teen killed when drinking and driving. You're Welcome's treatment of the genre's predictably awful conventions, including didactic monologues to dead friends, will tickle anyone ever made to sit through such skits, which traditionally make for both bad plays and ineffective teaching tools (so if you weren't made to watch one, and are now an alcoholic, don't worry.)

One of the nicest things about You're Welcome is the good humor with which the company undertakes its mockery. A Thought About Ryan is not so much a biting critique of well-intentioned educational theater groups as an indulgence in the peculiarities (rhyming mantras, pom-poms) that have come to define the genre. Similarly, The Bathroom revels in the absurdities of elaborate theatrical productions even as it satirizes them. Sure, The Debate Society is savvier than to require scene-length set changes ("Broadway 'Style' Scene Change" gets its own scene listing) or to rely on faulty technical equipment (a finicky fog machine figures heavily into the second half of the production), but indulging in such storied conventions is still a lot of fun. Happily, The Debate Society has the prowess to invoke bad theater and, winking and grinning, make it good.

As the evening progresses, the company makes its way through a staged reading (in which "reading" is more operative than "staged"), a series of playlets each centered around (yes) fog, and a contemporary play in which young adults ask themselves important questions (New York or San Francisco? Arts management or publishing?). Although You're Welcome is intentionally indulgent, Butler keeps the pace up as the production hops from play to play, and sometimes back again. Totaling just under seventy-five minutes, the self-professed bad plays cover an enormous amount of territory really well. Or perhaps, skillfully poorly. Sometimes it's good to be bad.

Desperate Doings

Laugh, Damn Ya, Laugh! carries in its title a strong ambiguity: the promise in that repetition of “laugh” that humor will be forthcoming, and a curse that laughter isn’t happening. Unfortunately, it’s the curse that Walter Corwin’s strange “comedy” labors under, and it’s a heavy one. The play falls into three sections. In the set-up, Sam (Tony King), a formerly potent force in TV comedy production, and somehow the only person in America who can make people laugh, faces a crisis. Why? Reruns of his hit show, Sex in the Rural Areas (a cute, if obvious, reference to Sex and the City), have hit rock bottom: four viewers in the country, down in one week from 10.5 million. His explanation: “People are in church.” Now, why is a rerun the linchpin of humor across the entire country? And would it really air on a Sunday morning? Think about it. Reruns of Sex and the City may draw viewers, but its creators had better have moved on to something else to keep up their reputations. If Sam is such a comedy genius, he’d be worried about his latest creation, not one in reruns. And he’s hardly responsible for the program schedule. He reports to higher-ups known as “the seven samurai.”

Even so, Sam is a Type A personality (King invests him with sangfroid and stoic rationalism). He has fired Sybil (Jessica Day), a former dalliance and a brilliant comedy writer who specializes in social satire. Now he must lure her back. The despondent Sybil, in a robe and curlers, is discovered at home talking to a circle of chairs, whose occupants are the spirits of Oscar Wilde, George S. Kaufman, Aristophanes, George Bernard Shaw, and Woody Allen. She’s invited them with the expectation of Sam’s visit. Her character carries more than a little promise of looniness, but the scene quickly falls flat. Sam enters and explains to Sybil, “I put so much canned laughter into our shows, the machine broke.” So people aren’t laughing because there was too much canned laughter on the shows? Or is it because some “machine” that supplied the canned laughter broke? Or were the shows just not funny? Corwin’s writing is vague and sometimes impenetrable, and feels slapped together.

The midsection features Sam and Jess, his secretary (Samantha Mason), watching auditioners try to be funny—in particular Jack, played by Oliver Thrun, a lanky, bald fellow who injects vital energy into his scenes but is undermined by three laborious monologues that include potshots at historical figures (e.g., Jefferson: “His private life was nothing to write home about”). To be fair, the point is that even this comic genius Jack can’t produce laughter, but that point registers pretty quickly.

The final scene is a screamfest among three “characters”: Hap, the spirit of comedy, represented by a performer in a mask of the Brooklyn Bridge; Traj (tragedy, if you can’t guess), in a mask showing subway cars; and Victory Man (King again), limping in a tattered superhero costume with a “V” on his chest—he's Voteman. Had King not shown competence earlier on as Sam, one might be appalled to find his work so amateurish (as is much of the other acting). The women fare particularly badly under director Jonathan Weber, who doesn’t seemed to have challenged the writer about the many inconsistencies or given any shape to the scenes. Even Thrun and King, who both have strong, resonant voices, only give a glimmer of the promise they might deliver with better material.

Corwin has a weakness for showing off erudition that doesn’t advance the plot. Early scenes contain references to Greek tragedy, from the Furies to Thyestes, Sweeney Todd, and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But when the ghost of Oscar Wilde misquotes his own line from The Importance of Being Earnest, you know you’re in trouble.

Last Writes

The Funeralogues, Stacy Mayer’s tragicomic solo show, is less about death than it is about how different people lament the dead differently. The show, which Mayer conceived with writer Robert Charles Gompers, lifts quotes from various peoples' eulogies, famous and little-known, real and fictional. And by virtue of being performed in a real place of worship (the Upper East Side’s All Souls Chapel), Funeralogues feels like an actual service. I know I left feeling lifted. Early on in the show and periodically throughout, Mayer acts out a fictionalized version of herself in order to trace her curiosity with death and the traditions attached to it. She recalls, in the voice and mindset of a five-year-old, a funeral she held for a Barbie doll as a child. She explains that she has crashed many a funeral and adopts the guise of various mourners she has met over the years. Mayer even performs her own hypothetical, idealized eulogy, in which she has lived a perfect, philanthropic existence.

Director Molly Marinik keeps the tone of Funeralogues on an even keel so that as Mayer’s vignettes veer off into more serious territory, the material never feels too manipulative or morose. The material certainly does, though, shift to the more serious side. Mayer portrays an elderly woman who has attended the funeral of thirteen siblings. She recites text from a member of The Casualty Assistance Calling Operations, eulogizing soldiers killed in Afghanistan (it falls on him to console the soldiers’ grieving parents). She quotes from a eulogy written for a deceased fireman by a Midwestern teacher. Mayer even remembers a prayer that her own grandfather distributed in life, later read at his funeral by the actress’s mother.

Perhaps one of the most moving and dramatically impressive moments of the Funeralogues occurs when Mayer takes on the role of an African-American man who read from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the several little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Mayer’s diverse skills are on display throughout her show – she can play young, old, male, female, humor, grief, all with equal conviction.

The Funeralogues is structurally sound. Marinik has Mayer’s character speak with the other characters before inhabiting them. And it is to her and Marinik’s credit that every shift of character and scenario is done gracefully; the audience never suffers from whiplash on this clever ride. A show that could have easily felt bipolar instead feels amazingly coherent.

Marinik’s physical staging is also to be commended. The All Souls Chapel is a small performance space not ideally suited to theatrics. However, the director’s blocking kept Mayer moving around enough so that she never seems glued to the lectern in the center. As a result, the audience never gets a chance to feel restless and Marinik solves the problem of tricky sight lines. I very rarely had to lean around the woman seated in front of me to catch what Mayer was doing.

Additionally, several of the technical members of the Funeralogues crew are crucial to the experience. Lutin Tanner’s lighting goes a long way to helping Mayer achieve the play’s necessary funereal feel. Jim Lahti, the pianist, also does deft work.

More than anything, though, Funeralogues is Mayer’s show. Though this is a major showcase for the talent, she knows better than to ham it up. The actress has the talent and the timing, but she also has that something extra that separates the good from the extraordinary. There is an extra inimitable spark that makes her unendingly watchable for the duration of the show; she endears herself to the audience from the first moment she walks up to the lectern and has them in her thrall in each scenario until the play’s end.

The play itself is not perfect; I do not think that it would suffer by shaving off several later anecdotes Either way, the conclusion of The Funeralogues, which provides a bit of a twist, is certainly earned. The show is a meditation on life, love and death. And its star, Stacy Mayer, is the sweetest angel one could ever want to lead them to the pearly gates.

One in a Million

Who doesn’t move to New York to strike it rich? Whether you’re hunting for money, a job, or romance, making it in the city has always been all about luck and pluck, even in 1922. And when Millie Dillmount strides into town, she’s already got the pluck—she’s just ravenous for the luck. In 1967, the daffy film Thoroughly Modern Millie starred the chipper chirper Julie Andrews in the title role; the Tony-winning Broadway adaptation featured megawatt rising actress Sutton Foster, who, in a dazzling shot of luck, went from understudy to star during the show’s out-of-town tryout, stoking the hopes of struggling actresses toiling in temp jobs everywhere.

And now, in the footsteps of Andrews and Foster, comes Alison Luff, an eminently watchable young actress who more than fills Millie’s high heels—she makes them her own. A warm and welcome tonic for these cold winter months, the Gallery Players’ winning production of Thoroughly Modern Millie is a must-see mostly for her exuberant performance.

On Broadway, Millie more than filled out the massive Marquis Theatre with its zippy dance numbers and shiny scenery, so I was initially skeptical about how the show would work in a more intimate, Off-Off-Broadway-sized space. But tucked into this smaller venue, the show’s charms are only more obvious—there’s still plenty of dancing and gleaming grins galore, but the characters and the comedy are all the more vivid when viewed from a cozier seat.

A hybrid of classic Broadway storytelling and delectable new music—Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan wrote several terrific tunes to round out the film’s score—Millie was initially criticized for its relentless can-do attitude and traditional structure. The story is certainly a familiar one: Fresh from her “one-light” hometown in Kansas, Millie quickly reinvents herself with bobbed hair and a shorter hemline, and nothing can stand in her way—that is, of course, until she is mugged and loses her purse (and one of her shoes).

It’s this screwball sequence of highs and lows that makes us root for Millie, and the show also has an intriguing time-capsule quality to it. The self-proclaimed “modern” Millie is determined to make it on her own in the big city … by marrying her boss? As old-school as this may seem, the love vs. money decision at the center of Millie’s story often feels all too 21st-century modern (see “The Bachelor”). Millie’s choice hinges on two men: her playful, penniless pal Jimmy Smith, who keeps her laughing (and on her toes); or her elusive, inscrutable boss Trevor Graydon, who calls her “John” (and makes her swoon).

Like Millie, her comrades at the Hotel Priscilla are also making their perilous way as stenographers and actresses—that is, until they start mysteriously disappearing. It turns out that the manager, Mrs. Meers, sells orphaned girls into white slavery in southeast Asia. (“So sad to be all alone in the world,” she maniacally sympathizes.)

The white-slavery subplot veers between awkward and uncomfortable: Mrs. Meers is a failed actress (badly) playing the part of an Asian woman, and she keeps strict command over her two employees, Ching Ho and Bun Foo, who hope that she’ll rescue their mother from China. That Mrs. Meers “performs” the stereotype keeps it at a safe remove from reality, but Justine Campbell-Elliott’s rather lukewarm performance never gets quite big enough to show how Mrs. Meers is really, in fact, exploiting herself.

At the center of it all, Luff makes a thoroughly marvelous Millie—she shows us both Millie’s confidence and insecurity (sometimes simultaneously), and she nails the triple-threat demands of the role. She is both a confident dancer and an impeccable singer, but what makes Luff’s performance most distinctive is her natural, nervy sense of humor—particularly in her exchanges with office manager Miss Flannery (the scene-stealing Katie Kester), who joins her in the infectious tap-dancing tirade “Forget About the Boy.”

As a foil to Millie, the wealthy Miss Dorothy is looking for lower-class diversions—including “winter in Hell’s Kitchenette.” Played with panache by Amy Grass, Miss Dorothy is a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque coquette with a glossy head of curls, and Trevor Graydon (the excellent Andy Planck) immediately falls in love with her in (what else?) a witty send-up of operetta at its most overbearing. In his swoony, oafish romantic gestures, Planck uses his lush voice and expert comic timing to fantastic effect.

Jay Paranada and Roy Flores are immensely charming as the beholden brothers, and Debra Thais Evans turns in lovely vocals as jazz singer Muzzy Van Hossmere. Despite some vocal struggles, David Rossetti makes a sweet, affable Jimmy—and finds palpable chemistry with Luff.

The ensemble does excellent work with Katharine Pettit’s jazzy choreography, and director Neal Freeman has made some clever, cheeky choices that wink at the theater’s limitations: instead of fancy subtitles, the Hotel Priscilla’s bellhop (stage manager DaVonne Onassis Bacchus) appears with “Hotel Translation Service” placards. Bacchus also makes humorous cameos in several set changes, which earned some of the biggest laughs during the performance I attended.

Led by the plucky Luff, this Thoroughly Modern Millie is a scrappy fighter with personality. Merely surviving in New York sometimes takes everything you’ve got, but here it looks like fun—provided you’ve got the sense of humor (and a little bit of luck) to go with it.

A Woman's Work

Pioneering artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life spanned nearly a century. The mid-Westerner’s best-known paintings accomplished the feat of merging abstract and real images in conjuring the images of such inanimate objects as flowers, rocks, and animal bones, in addition to landscapes. After bringing her distinctly American style to Europe, she eventually settled in New Mexico later in her long life. It is at his point in her life that we meet O’Keeffe in Retrospective. This work was created as part of the InGenius workshop series at the Manhattan Theatre Source in the Village. Joan Tewkesbury, the beautiful mind behind the Robert Altman film Nashville, has written and directed this look at the personal gains and losses incurred by an artist.

Tandy Cronyn plays O’Keeffe, who spends much of the play talking to the ghost of her late husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Sam Tsoutsouvas), as she labors on an essay to write for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 retrospective on the man. Though these conversations, which often delve into heated arguments, are among the more enjoyable parts of the play, Tewkesbury saddles Cronyn with the unenviable task of carrying Retrospective largely through a series of monologues in which O’Keeffe bemoans what she has seen and done.

Retrospective is perhaps best suited for students of art and art history. Much of the show is reliant on some basic outside knowledge of the painter’s life and her work. A lot of the play centers on recollections and accusations between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, as they recall various affairs. For the art newcomer, however, this play can feel a little foreign, and even redundant as one tries to make sense of the leads’ marriage using context clues. To add to the confusion, occasional peripheral characters appear and re-appear with no real cause, adding to the disjointed feel of the play.

Cronyn does much to make Retrospective work. She makes every bit of O’Keeffe’s struggles – the woman’s body, sight, and creativity are all failing her – palpable. The entrance of a younger character, Frank (Michael Wolfe), a young potter who courts O’Keeffe despite the fact that he happens to be married, is a smart choice in that it helps break up the play and allows the audience to see a less guarded side of O’Keeffe. Personally, I wish that Tewkesbury had pushed this subplot further; both it and the character of Frank have more potential, and it could have shown further evidence of the artist’s vulnerability.

As the two men who alternate in O’Keefe’s life, both Tsoutsouvas and Wolfe are dynamic presences. I fully believed in Tsoutsouvas’ scenes with Cronyn that the two shared a history, and an intimacy, that she could feel long after his death. The actor also carefully measures Stieglitz’s volatile temper. Wolfe impresses as well, though since he has less to work with, I was left to wonder what the actor could do with a more enhanced role.

Ultimately though, Retrospective is a mixed bag, full of good intentions, excellent actors, and potential. With some further honing, Tewkesbury can make good on its promise.

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.

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.