Sympathy for Mass Suicide

The Laboratory Theater’s entry into The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival, Le Mirage, is a rich and rewarding exploration of the vicious extremities of faith and outlier thought systems where religion is nothing but a fatal intellectual virus. Le Mirage dramatizes the story of an intricately ritualized, self-annihilating religious sect, The Order of the Solar Temple, using pre-existing theological tracts and dissonant choreography. The text of the hour-long performance piece is taken from lecture transcripts and texts published by this bizarre French Canadian extremist group.

The cult’s beliefs incorporated a confluence of the rituals of ancient esoteric secret societies (like the Knights of the Templar and the Rosicrucian society), Holy Grail legends and fervent ecological purification ideals. The end goal of this sinister theology was to persuade the cult members to purify themselves by transmitting their soul to the planet Jupiter via mass suicide and ritual murder.

The cult’s history is bloody and malignant. In 1994, one of the group’s founders allegedly labeled the infant son of a follower the antichrist and ordered that the baby be stabbed to death with a wooden stake. The cult members obeyed with enthusiasm and shortly thereafter began a series of “Jupiter transit ceremonies” that ultimately left behind 74 bodies, neatly arranged in star patterns.

Since plastic supermarket bags were a symbol of the ecological pollution the Order believed was corrupting humanity, many of the suicides involved members tying the bags around their necks to suffocate slowly.

A talented and beautifully committed trio of actors (Corey Dargel, Sheila Donovan and Oleg Dubson) convey a range of vivid impressions within the taut, abstract framework constructed by director Yvan Greenberg. The trio portray a fictitious Las Vegas chapter of The Order in the last stages of preparation for departure to Jupiter.

The cast’s French-accented readings of the Order’s writings are underscored with a satisfying soundtrack (designed by Greenberg) that includes ethereal New Age music (composed by François B. Nouvel-Ậgel, Richard Wagner and Gabriel Fauré), bursts of jolting static and ominous rhythmic pounding.

The easy choice in a production of this sort would be a didactic condemnation of the group that dismisses the feverous devotees as aberrational lunatics. But the immediacy the actors bring to their recitations and the purposeful purposelessness of their intriguing ritual dances somehow make the cultists’ piteous need for connection sympathetic. These lunatics come across as real people willing to believe that a personal invitation to a degrading death will erase lifetimes of unfilled longing.

Moments in the performance suggest that the Laboratory Theater is working to be inheritors of 1950s beat poets. During a long section at the beginning to the piece, the cadence of their voices and the hypnotic movement are slow to transform into deeper forms and Audrey Hepburn’s endless beat poet parody in Funny Face comes unpleasantly to mind. And the elements the group incorporates to depict the Las Vegas setting are never interesting and consistently unbeneficial. But once the structure coalesces into a decidedly sinister invitation to join the Order on a journey to “a new world made of other times, other heavens” it is hard to look away.

Dargel, Donovan and Dubson are compellingly genuine through the piece, and the final images of the cult's painfully deliberate suicides are especially searing and potent. The lasts few minutes of their performances will haunt you long after you leave the theater.

Le Mirage is an unforgettable and chilling experience of religious fervency that should not be missed during its short festival run.

For tickets and showtimes, consult The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival website at www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.

Food for Thought

There’s never been a family quite as tight as the foursome at the center of Derek Ahonen’s The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side. There is Billy (James Kautz), a would-be revolutionary with a substance-abuse problem; Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore), a young runaway who emerges from an abusive background; Dear (Sarah Lemp), a former lawyer whose utopian ideals make her the de facto “mother” of this group; and the volatile but impassioned Wyatt (Mathew Pilieci). As we find out over the course of stiflingly hot week in the studio apartment they share above the vegan restaurant (from which the show gains its title) in which they work, this quartet is bonded by more than just home, job, and shared philosophies on life. Hearkening back to the communal families that emerged in the 1960s, Billy, Dawn, Dear and Wyatt are more than just a nuclear group – they also share each other. They are involved with each other sexually, and have frolicked together in every possible permutation. Their arrangement works for them, and needs no judging until two outsiders enter the action and throw all of their beliefs into question.

The first of these characters is Billy’s younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson), whose conservative beliefs serve as a stark contrast to the lifestyle his brother and his friends have enjoyed. Though the substance of the play, echoes of free love, fight the power, and antiestablishment come straight from the 1960 and 1970s, the play’s structure stems from an earlier era. The idea of the outsider entering a group and being introduced to a different way of life is a classic – Kaufman and Hart employed the “fish-out-of-water” theme all the time.

What is so remarkable about Pied Pipers, though, is that Evan – the “fish” in this story – isn’t the protagonist with whom we need to identify. It is to Ahonen’s credit just how quickly he and his cast get the audience to identify with the show’s main characters. By the time of Evan’s entrance, we are firmly on the side of these tenants, and though we may find some of their decisions flawed, we want to understand more about where they came from.

Part of the reason why may be that the Amoralists, the production company mounting Pied Pipers, have lived with these characters for a long time. The production, currently staged at P.S. 122, played a previous run at the Gene Frankel Theater in 2007, and everyone involved possesses a palpable love and respect for the play’s characters.

More important, though, is the amount of discipline and trust the actors have among each other. Ahonen’s script calls for his cast to endure many emotional and physical demands (which is why, despite a nearly three-hour running time, Pied Pipers always feels electric and never boring), and they all rise to the challenge with performances that feel full of conviction.

Kautz is extraordinary. He makes Billy a font of disappointment, stripping away the character so we can see how his regret over actions both taken and never taken have led him to drugs and alcohol. I love Moore’s pixie-ish qualities (though think her character’s attraction to Evan felt a little unjustified), and Lemp somehow manages to make her character’s speeches explaining their lifestyle feel authentic, when they could have felt merely didactic. Most astonishing of all, though, is Pilieci’s powerful work, which can best be described as Pacino-esque – full of both vitriol and vulnerability at once.

There are two more names that must be mentioned. The first is Malcolm Madera, another wonderful actor who joins the play’s second act as Donovan, the landlord who has allowed Billy, Dawn, Dear and Wyatt to commune in their apartment for free in return for work at the Pied Pipers. Donovan, a wealthy man with a wife and child hidden off in the suburbs, has supported these characters for his own purposes. As these emerge, Ahonen’s themes and questions come into a focus. I loved the bits Madera employed to show how slick Donovan was, trying to come off as a friend but showing that he was the dominant member of their relationship at all times. As he stomps around their pad, he uses everything he can to show that he, in fact, owns them. Alfred Schatz is also to be praised for his note-perfect set, which effectively becomes a seventh character.

Ahonen’s play is never one-sided. We understand why Dear’s thinking is hopeful but flawed, and why Donovan’s philanthropy is so self-serving. He asks important questions and, while Pied Pipers offers plenty of reasons, leads the audience to arrive at their own answers to them. What is abundantly clear, however, is how important all six of Ahonen’s characters are to him as people. Love stories don’t come any purer than this.

Arsenic Kills Me

Arsenic may not have a place in everyone’s cup of tea, but Horse Trade and the Dysfunctional Theatre Company serve up a wickedly delicious brew with their production of Joseph Kesselring’s chestnut Arsenic and Old Lace. Director Eric Chase has assembled an outstanding cast who manage to make even the most dated material in the 1939-penned farce fresh and enjoyable. Of course it is hard to figure out why anyone would stage this community theater warhorse in the heart of the hip East Village. I suppose the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Kesserlring’s writing of this classic is reason enough. And if the play seems out-of-place and slightly irrelevant today, the faithful direction and the true-to-period acting make it a satisfying look back at an edgy black comedy from the 1930s.

The tightly constructed plot revolves around the nefarious murdering duo Abby and Martha Brewster (Marilyn Duryea and Vivian Meisner, respectively), sisters who lure lonely men to their home pretending to have a room for rent. Vivian serves the men an elderberry wine concoction made from her own recipe. “For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide.”

On the day that he becomes engaged to the girl-next-door, Elaine (Jennifer Gill), the Brewsters’ nephew Mortimer (Rob Brown) discovers a freshly killed body hidden in the window seat at his aunts’ home. A brother that believes he is Teddy Roosevelt (Teddy played by Peter Schuyler) and a brother recently escaped from an institute for the criminally insane (Jonathan played by Justin Plowman) add further madcap mania to fill out the three acts of the play.

Jonathan and his accomplice Dr. Einstein (Ron Bopst) show up with a dead body of their own to be rid of, and the case of mistaken corpses keeps everyone entertainingly baffled. A dizzy swirl of police officers, a prospective lodger, and visiting doctors swell the cast size to an impressive thirteen. Notably, there is not a single false note in Chase’s casting. Even the small detail, repeated in the script, of Jonathan bearing a resemblance to Boris Karloff is happily met in Plowman’s scowling mug.

Duryea and Meisner anchor the show with wonderfully understated and nostalgic presences. Duryea and Meisner effectively invoke a sense of aging Victorian matrons with old, classic movie voices and expressive hauteur. It is a wonderful treat to see women over 50 on the stage, as that seems rarer than seven-legged frog sightings, unless, of course, said actresses are terrible. But Duryea and Meisner never disappoint and remain luminous highlights of the production.

Equally effective, Rob Brown seems lifted from a screwball 30s or 40s comedy as Mortimer Brewster. Mortimer, an unwilling drama critic who delivers scathing reviews to Broadway dramas, finds himself caught up in a private, domestic drama that leaves him dizzy and desperate. Brown plays Mortimer’s bewilderment and frantic aimlessness to brilliant comic effect. Plowman and Bopst are delectable in their roles as bumbling villains who invade the house, unwelcome, and insinuate themselves by force of will. Gill’s spunky take on the forgettable, miffed girlfriend Elaine and her charming 40s mannerisms are a welcome and lively surprise. And Yanni Walker makes magic as the drunken Officer O’Hara, a frustrated playwright/policeman who forces Mortimer to listen to the plot of an outrageously implausible and painfully long idea for a play.

Chase pads two of the play’s smaller roles, Officer Brophy (Michael DeRensis) and Officer Klein (Craig Peterson) with a sort of narration that starts the play off with a slapstick turn-off-the-cell phones speech and act closers and introductions that are surprisingly effective. DiRensis and Peterson sell these bits with panache and personal charm. They must be charming, because padding a two and half hour play is usually deadly and infuriating.

If you are anxious to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the penning of a seminal American dark comedy (and who isn’t?), Arsenic and Old Lace is a satisfying, nostalgic indulgence that shouldn’t be missed.

For tickets and showtimes, consult SmartTix at www.smarttix.com .

From Russia With Laughs

From Russia With Angst, the new production from the WorkShop Theater Company, takes on one of the theater’s all-time greats – Anton Chekhov. Rather than reviving one of Chekhov’s oft-done dramatic works, the company instead chose to adapt five of his short stories for the stage, reimagining them in the context of our twenty-first century world. The result is a joyous, thought-provoking, modern re-envisioning of these classic stories, one that speaks directly to the times in which we live. The performance is broken down into five vignettes, each using a different story as its source. “Death of a Government Worker,” adapted by Jonathan Pereira and directed by Katrin Hilbe, centers around a man who cannot seem to bring himself to ask his government employer for the raise which he, his wife, and his newborn, enormous son desperately need. Instead, he finds himself consistently sneezing, spitting on, or otherwise mistreating his important, albeit potentially shady, boss. The piece is dark and humorous, and honors the poetry of Chekhovian writing. The story arc, which slowly but surely unveils the possibility of corruption within this regime, rings true in a modern world. The scene is most effective when it is least realistic; its true beauty lies in its stylized moments.

The next scene, “We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet,” written by Scott C. Sickles and directed by David Gautschy, takes us back to New Year’s Eve 2000. We meet a Central Park carriage driver attempting to pick up some fares and confronting the pain of the recent loss of his young son. This scene is perhaps the least powerful of the five – it lacks either the acerbic wit or the overwhelming social relevance that the other scenes have in bounty. Still, it is moving and sad, a solid reflection on the difficulties of human connections in a world motivated by rapid advancements.

“Joy,” by Robert Strozier and directed by Elena Araoz, focuses on a young girl who has found recent Internet “fame” on YouTube. She comes home gushing to her parents about a video of her singing topless on a table at a party which was filmed and recently released for broadcast on the popular website. This scene is the most overtly hilarious; Sutton Crawford, who portrays the young Ginger, is appropriately shameless and charming in her description of the video’s contents. Joseph Franchini and Carrie Edel Isaacman could remind any viewer of his/her father and mother, alternately supportive and embarrassed, depending on the moment.

Timothy Scott Harris’s “In Country,” which he also directed, is the most dramatic of the scenes. It starts out as a humorous interlude about a middle-aged woman being set up on a date by her father with a man he met in a bar. However, this seemingly innocent encounter ends up revealing much more than just an attraction between the two. The man, Steve, is grieving a son who died in Iraq, leading to questions of what exactly American ideals are in this day and age, what it is to be American, and what precisely it is that one fights for in this country.

The final scene, a condensed five-act play entitled “Misery, Apathy, and Despair,” is the true gem of the evening. John McKinney has done a brilliant job incorporating various references to Chekhov’s dramatic works into a parody that is both effective and hilarious. Richard Kent Green’s direction is reminiscent of so many Chekhov parlor dramas, grounding the piece as a Russian period piece and then subverting the genre. The piece is charming and witty, being both true to the storylines of Chekhov\'s plays and honest to the sorts of reactions audiences often have to these works.

From Russia With Angst provides a wonderful night’s entertainment. The only aspect of the production that did not quite work was the projections between scenes, displaying text from the original Chekhov story and then from the impending adaptation. Although it was interesting to compare the two, I am not sure what this device added to the overall presentation. However, this is a truly minor comment in light of this enjoyable and compelling work of theater. Chekhov is alive and well in this play, if a little reconfigured.

Impossible Beauty

It's painful not to measure up to society's ideals. The ever-present modern media gorges its viewers on a steady diet of impossible beauty and unreachable standards. What's worse is that the standards against which women judge themselves are almost exclusively images of white beauty – a false example which leaves out a huge segment of the population. Is it surprising, then, that it's next to impossible for young women to develop a healthy self-image? Black Girl Ugly, a performance piece by Ashley Brockington, Nicole Cain, and Lee Avant which the authors are currently performing at the WOW Cafe, explores their own experiences in a culture which puts white beauty on a pedestal and pushes everyone else aside. Through monologues, scenes and movement, they transform their own personal stories into a kind of Everywoman account of growing up black in America. The resulting production, although rough around the edges, provides a touching, amusing and ultimately thought-provoking evening.

The show is composed of a succession of thematically-related scenes and skits tied together by movement sequences and voice-overs. Among the strongest scenes are those which cut through the polite, neutral surface which we show to the public to reveal the pain which simmers underneath. Particularly successful sequences include a church sermon in which the minister extols her parishioners to examine their roots and straighten their hair in order to be more like Jesus, and a hilarious sequence which pits a conforming corporate drone against a Black Pride job applicant. More brutal is a skit called “Someone Knocked Me Down” in which a young woman (played by Brockington) recites her exceptional academic accomplishments only to have them repeatedly torn to pieces by her onlookers, until she is literally bound and gagged by their judgments.

Black Girl Ugly's text-based scenes are generally stronger than the movement sequences. Although some are evocative, like the one in which the three cast members rhythmically twitch in front of a flashing TV screen, reacting to the unreachable ideals of the white media, at other times the dances seem unspecific. Their shape and flow are not fully polished, which undermines the story the performers are trying to tell. For example, a potentially excellent scene which reveals the interior monologues of the above mentioned corporate sell-out and very black applicant as they size each other up is marred by imprecise movement: because their gestures are generalized and don't perfectly match the voice-overs, it isn't always clear who is thinking what.

Black Girl Ugly would have benefited from stronger direction than Kiebpoli Calnek provided. The show's flaws are of the kind which usually arise when performers direct themselves without the aid of an off-stage critical eye. The director should have clarified the physical storytelling and might have improved the flow and rhythm of the piece as a whole, which was heavy on movement for the first half and on monologues for the second. Opening the show with one of the excellent monologues -- such as the one in which Brockington compares growing up in America as a black woman to having a disease, commenting “there are so many signs of your inferiority, if no one is telling you differently, how do you grow up strong?” -- would have established the thrust of the show much more quickly and cleanly.

The design elements for Black Girl Ugly are simple and functional. The set design -- a black box dominated by a downstage stool covered with identical white baby-dolls – is a suitable frame for the show. The sound design by Brockington and Rob Paravonian – which is dominated by echoing voice-overs – is weaker, for although it establishes a dreamy, self-reflective tone, it also occasionally makes the text difficult to understand.

Performers Cain, Avant, and Brockington form a solid ensemble and are all appealing. Brockington, however, stands out for her magnetic presence and heart-felt acting. Her material is also the most rawly personal and thus the most compelling in the show.

Black Girl Ugly is the kind of theater which places demands on its audience. Viewers must be ready to absorb and respond to the experiences of others – experiences which many, if not all, of the audience shares. For those who wish to laugh at the familiar and ponder the tragicomic situation of black women in America, it's a good choice. Black Girl Ugly is an earnest piece, and its brief one hour running time feels like the prologue to a much longer conversation.

Dysfunctional Family Feud

Except for the front two or three rows, the black box seats for Ivanov at The Gene Frankel Theatre are roped off. Audience members sit in chairs along the stage walls, as if they were guests in the parlor of the Lebedev family, where much of this classic Anton Chekhov play takes place. Here’s a brief synopsis of the plot, for those unfamiliar with it. Thirty-two-year-old Nicholas Ivanov owns a large estate, a farm, which has yet to turn a profit. He’s in debt to the Lebedevs, a genteel family who put on airs about their wealth. Five years earlier Ivanov had married a young woman, Anna (Emily Robin Fink), a Jew, who converted to Christianity because of her love for him. Abandoned by her parents, and now dying of tuberculosis, Anna is a double victim: Nicholas has lapsed into an unfathomable and mysterious depression, and has lost his love for Anna and even for life itself. Sasha, the Leberdevs’ 20-year old daughter, is secretly in love with Ivanov, who seems indifferent to her overtures.

Anna looks great—for a consumptive, that is—Anya Klepikov does a fine job with her costuming and makeup. And most of the actors are quite skilled and enthusiastic; I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more of them. Standouts are Brad Lee Thomason as the endearing rascal, Borkin; Tim Martin, who perfectly straddles the line between humor and drama as the preoccupied card player Koshyk; the sassy Avdotia (Emily Jon Mitchell); and the jolly Jonathan David Marballi as George, another guest of the Lebedevs’, who keeps the snarky festivities going. When the entire party teases Sasha for her inexplicable defense of Ivanov, her frustration and embarrassment are palpable.

Yet, main cast members are not uniformly suited for their roles. William Bogert as Shabelski, a down-at-the-heels Count, comes across as alternatively mean-spirited and pathetic, and never quite finds his character’s balance. Matthew Scanlon was, at first, self-conscious in the role of the young doctor, Lvov, but his confidence grew noticeably as the play progressed. The biggest problem, though, is Jeff Barry’s portrayal of Ivanov, the melancholic protagonist of this play. Barry’s Ivanov is less morbid than the rest of the cast—he’s angry, workman-like and in control; ultimately, though, he’s simply neutral. He’s competent when he should be hopeless.

Another problem with this adaptation by Barry and Knoll is that they take unnecessary-—sometimes simply ribald but occasionally even disingenuous-—liberties with the text, almost as if they are deliberately reading too much into the 27-year old’s first play, or worse, attempting to change it. In my translation, Shabelski denounces lawyers and doctors “frauds” and “swindlers” (not the “c” word). Barry and Knoll are going for laughs but what we get is bathos.

Another gratuitous bit is where Chekvov’s “fragile” Martha Babakina (Stephanie Bratnick), plants an extended full on kiss on Sasha’s lips for no reason other than to spice up the script. Nonetheless, Ms. Bratnick is the best actress in the bunch, with great range and emotion. And, at the end of Act II, Chevhov’s Sasha and Ivanov simply kiss. They don’t writhe around on the floor, nearly pre-coitus, as the adaptors have them do. These are not harmless tweaks to the text.

A final problem is Knoll’s direction. It’s as if he has instructed the actors to speak their lines hysterically and turn their loudness knobs to "11." So, everyone screams at each other, all the time. This is not particularly pleasant if you’re an audience member cursed with a seat twelve inches from said screaming. Overall, I cannot recommend this play to either those familiar with Chekhov’s work or those looking to become familiar with it.

The Good Whistleblower’s Mother Wears Out Her Welcome

Theatre Askew’s entry into The Brick’s Antidepressant Festival features an amazingly able company of actors that manages to create a memorable performance with a forgettable script. The Tale of the Good Whistleblower of Chaillot’s Caucasian Mother and Her Other Children of a Lesser Marriage Chalk Circle is an ambitious, musical attempt to meld characters and themes from Brecht, Albee, the musical Mame, Giraudoux and about a dozen other sources with an ironic tirade against the pharmaceutical industry.

Playwright Stan Richardson begins the evening fairly promisingly as we meet a delightfully droll set of family and friends dealing with the overdose of John. John is a character we never meet and find out little about because everyone in his life is amusingly and compulsively self-absorbed. Ensemble members Tim Cusack, Matt Steiner, Sara Alvarez and Brandon Uranowitz make this opening scene one of the highlights of the evening.

The dialogue in this section, and some dialogue sprinkled occasionally throughout the rest of the musical, is sparkling and sharp. But, Richardson wanders off into less impressive comedic landscapes as we get further into his labyrinthine plot.

Reverend Cindy (Joanna Parson) is awkwardly introduced as a guitar playing narrator. The unfortunate Parson valiantly tries to entertain the audience with an extended one-sided conversation with her belligerent guitar which falls depressingly flat. Debbie Troché, who is introduced as John’s Mom, tries desperately to sell an unlikable character who does strange things to an increasingly indifferent audience. Actually, that is not just for the character of Mom, poor Troché does this all night.

Reverend Cindy then begins to sing a nice ballad (written by Rachel Peters, and providing a delicious sense of fun and camp to Parson's otherwise thankless role) about the eponymous whistleblower and his mother. The origins of the evils of the big pharma industry are explored with an 1800’s apothecary, Dennis Courage (Cusak) who runs the largest “medicants” supply company in his native Chaillot and perhaps the world. He is happily giving free drugs to the rich and gouging the poor until a trio of Gods (Steiner, Alvarez and Uranowitcz) visits him and offers to sneak him into heaven if he can only give the poor a break on their rabies and syphilis treatments.

Cusack does an admirable job when called upon to perform an interpretive ballet about tortured lovers to convince the company’s board to show mercy to the poverty-stricken. Then Troché is re-introduced as “Mame Courage,” an uncomfortable meld of the mad woman of Chaillot, Mother Courage and Auntie Mame.

Troché’s character becomes the focus of an increasingly dissolving narrative. She spends long moments taking straining dumps into a large planter on stage (not really defecating, but a soundtrack of dissonant farts helps fool the ear), spouts lines like “By Saint Bab’s quim!” repeatedly, and ends up somehow living with a bear in a cave and bleating like a goat. Troché, a gifted and laudably willing performer, almost succeeds in pulling all this together (believe it or not) but the material is eventually unsalvageable.

Steiner, Alvarez and Uranowitz manage to spin feces-covered straw into gold several times with their appearances as Oopse, Krapp and Fuckk – Dennis’ triplet step-siblings who speak only in unison. There is really no weak link in the fine ensemble of actors. The script, however, lets them down so often, the main dramatic question in the play becomes, “How did they convince these actors to do this?”

The Tale of the Good Whistleblower’s . . . might entertain fans of bizarre scatological humor and the winning cast and inventive musical score are endearing. But though it is certainly a wild ride and an utterly unique journey, it doesn’t really take you any place you want to go.

For tickets and showtimes, consult The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival website at www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.

A Dose of Reality

Playwright Theresa Rebeck draws on her vast experience in television—she was a writer/producer on NYPD Blue and Law & Order: Criminal Intent—for her fierce, cautionary satire of television and the distortion it wreaks on American life. Words like “real,” “reality,” “true,” and “fact” spew out of Michael Mayer’s viscerally uncomfortable production like chunks of rock from a volcano, but ultimately Rebeck’s passion is stronger than her dramaturgy. Rebeck intercuts two stories: In the first, the head of a network, Wes (Christopher Evan Welch, masterfully employing his gift for playing distasteful characters), is obsessed about numbers and advertising. He’s also having an affair with svelte, ambitious newscaster Jennifer Ramirez (Morena Baccarin) and is determined to advance her career. More than that, he’s wildly paranoid and pretentious. In a funny early scene he demonstrates to Jennifer what he knows about examining wine as he wafts the odor to his nostrils with his hand: “What is that, pear, some floral, maybe some crushed stone?” One moment he’s lauding Edward R. Murrow—“a great personal hero”—and the next he’s dropping f-bombs on his idol.

Wes assigns Jennifer to host the network’s new reality show, Our House, while she continues as news anchor. His decision appalls his assistant and liaison to the news division, Stu (a fine, intense Stephen Kunken). Wes wants to have Jennifer report on who gets kicked off the reality show. “The news division doesn’t think that what happens on reality television is news,” warns Stu. “It’s reality,” responds Wes. “Why shouldn’t it be news?”

Meanwhile, in a house in St. Louis, a quartet of people share a house. Grigsby (Mandy Siegfried) is a medical intern, Alice (Katie Kreisler) works as a legal secretary, and Vince ( Haynes Thigpen) is a computer troubleshooter. The fourth is Merv (Jeremy Strong), a layabout who has no job, mooches off the others, doesn’t do housework, and is behind on rent. But it’s his addiction to television that particularly irritates Alice, who has lived in a section of Vermont that had no television reception. “It was like freedom … because there was no television,” she tells Merv, who dismisses every criticism she has.

Although the depredations of television have been dramatic fodder for a long time (the Oscar-winning Network, after all, came out in 1976), Our House resonates with Rebeck’s passion on the subject, which lately encompasses reality TV. It’s unfortunate, though, that her characters aren’t terribly sympathetic, and they seem to exist in a vacuum. Wes has impulsive sex with Jennifer in his office, for instance, although Derek McLane’s all-gray set has clouded glass partitions that aren’t so opaque that a secretary couldn’t discern what was happening. Yet there isn’t a sense that anyone else is around. Wes, too, seems to know what the chat rooms say about Jennifer but doesn’t know that people pay for the Internet. Whether Rebeck’s reading of the way executives think, as embodied by Wes, is accurate or exaggerated, Wes’s behavior doesn’t register as authentic.

But Rebeck’s warning that TV is creating a schizophrenic society and that reality is blurring because of it doesn’t let viewers off the hook either. Strong creates a magnificent, if one-note, character in the sociopathic Merv. As he glibly avoids doing anything useful or respecting others’ property, you’ll probably loathe him—but, like the TV shows he’s addicted to, you can’t look away. Is his problem that his housemates are too busy with their lives to engage in conversation with? Is the art of conversation dead in “our house,” i.e., America? Decent people like Grigsby and Vince are manipulated in the house meeting, and one senses they’ve been too busy with their lives to notice the danger in their midst or discuss the problems until they reach a tipping point. Only Alice, shaped by the lack of TV in her recent life, is alarmed by the fraying social fabric.

Act I ends with an act of violence and a hostage situation in the house, and Jennifer is assigned to cover it, though even Wes recognizes that “this isn’t television, this is real.” But Rebeck’s satire becomes too strained thereafter and doesn’t feel real either. The police allow Jennifer access to the house to interview Merv, and even after the situation ends, Wes is permitted a private interview with Merv. There are no cops, no SWAT teams, no hostage negotiators to have a say—the world outside doesn’t really exist, it seems. Even a dark, pact-with-the-devil ending doesn’t achieve credibility, and that’s unfortunate, because Rebeck clearly feels the stakes are high. As Alice says, “There is no liberty here, not to mention intelligence. This is the opposite of the American dream!”

Earning Their Dough

The New York City Food Riot of 1917 is a culturally fascinating, socially significant, but little known blip on the city's historical radar. Occurring in the same period as World War 1, The Food Riot seems to have slipped quietly through the cracks of its time. As the war raged overseas an increasing number of immigrants fled to America. Give Us Bread examines the ones that migrated to Manhattan and populated the growing neighborhoods on the Lower East Side. Location is everything, and The Anthropologists (actresses Jean Goto, Sonja Sweeney, Jennifer Moses and Katy Rubin) along with artistic director Melissa Fendell Moschitto have chosen an ideal venue for their historical drama. Give Us Bread is staged at the CSV Cultural Center, centrally located in the same Lower East Side neighborhood the play's characters inhabit.

In 1917, with the world at war and immigration bursting at the seams, prices for basic food items such as milk, onions, bread and potatoes were inflating faster than the average worker’s wages. Demand far outweighed supply, forcing pushcart peddlers to raise their prices, first steadily, than sharply until items that once cost .11 suddenly cost .19.

These prices were being gouged from a working class that was 80% female with 90% originating from a foreign country. Men were disappearing from the scene, either abandoning families they could no longer support or dying of illnesses associated with poor factory conditions.

Women who could work toiled in sewing factories from daybreak to sundown while those who couldn’t pawned goods or sold handcrafted arts. Unfortunately, with all the diseases spreading through the tightly packed homes, the distribution of handcrafted items was soon banned, leaving many women with little to no means of income.

“What will I do? What will I do?” widowed Irish mother Elizabeth (Jennifer Griffee) asks herself while rocking manically in her chair. This is the question on all the womens’ minds as the prices continue to climb with each new day.

The immigrant women spotlighted in Give Us Bread include a plucky Asian orphan named Jenny (Jean Goto), the aforementioned Elizabeth (Jennifer Griffee), a fiery Italian, Concetta (Shayna Padovano), Rivka (Katy Rubin), a Jewish woman raising her talented daughter, Hannah (Sonja Sweeney) and Marie Ganz (Jennifer Moses), a character based on the real life anarchist and rebel.

The fresh-off-the-boat women are not proficient in English and are often childlike in their attempts to understand their new world. Still, the actresses play their respective roles with strength and intelligence as they work to overcome language barriers and find a common bond.

However, it is not until Marie Ganz’s rousing call to arms that the women are finally stirred to take a unified course of action. Ganz is clever. She plays on America’s gender stereotypes and sympathies. She garners public support, and in a poignant, powerful moment her character stands front and center on a box while a slide show of real faces from the 1917 Food Riot are projected behind her.

Post performance, Hasia Diner, Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, gave a brief background lecture confirming the validity of the historical moods, attitudes and facts touched upon in the narrative. In fact, every performance is followed by a contribution from a guest author or visiting historian.

With an impressive lineup of knowledgeable lecturers, a website filled with research blogs and a playbill crammed with statistics and timelines, The Anthropologists live up to the meaning of their name. The company has effectively resurrected a lost revolution from New York’s past and given it a chance to shine in such a way that it will never be forgotten again.

I've Got A Secret

Bigger Than I, directed by Nick Sprysenski and currently playing at Under St. Marks, is composed of vignettes centering on the notion of secrets. These short glimpses into the personal lives of certain individuals range from the childish anecdote to the perversely sexual and are presented in varying forms: some performed live, some played over the sound system from canned recordings, and others presented on screen. The filmic presentations are perhaps the most powerful and therefore meaningful. The stories seem to be the confessions of the individuals seen on screen, making their pronouncements come across as deeply intimate. Yet the camera lens only reveals the person’s eyes or lips, or a small corner of his/her face at any given moment, reminding the viewer that no matter how much we share it is virtually impossible to ever fully know another human being.

The mix of multimedia into the performance is an interesting choice, though it is not entirely integrated. It feels almost as if these filmed scenes are part of a related project on a similar theme and not a seamless element of this production. The idea of interviewing and presenting individuals' own stories from their own mouths in their own words also potentially subverts the power of having actors portray the secrets of others. The sense of authenticity that is felt when one tells one’s own story is lost when it is clear that the scene has been interpreted, and thereby altered, by an actor.

The stage scenes vary in effectiveness from the profoundly touching to the tritely over-simplistic. These performed secrets, embodied as deep dark places of the human psyche, are often too preoccupied with surface levels of humor and shock value to really move the spectator. One particularly compelling sequence involves a young Jewish man venturing to confession with a Catholic priest in order to attempt to absolve the guilt he feels over his father’s death. This scene is uniquely touching because both the young man and his confessor come across as fully human – flawed but ultimately sympathetic.

Despite the inconsistencies, the overall effect of the piece – the sum total of its disparate parts – is acutely felt. In light of all the humorous moments in the piece, I found myself leaving the theater in a state of thoughtful sadness. The play addresses real issues about interpersonal relationships, yet offers no solutions to the problems we all face in connecting with others. The play grapples with feelings of loneliness and isolation in light of our increasingly technologically connected world. The play begs the question of how alone we all really are – and not because we all have cell phones and Facebook, but because we all share one fundamental thing in common. We all have secrets. And we can continue to reveal these – be they funny or painful, performative or previously recorded – in order to gain closeness with one another.

What better art form to represent this material than theater? Theater is, after all, live, and built upon the connections between live actors and live audience. Although we may be separated by the infamous imaginary fourth wall, all of us who partake of Bigger Than I can share an experience, unique and profound. Perhaps we can even be moved to begin to disclose some secrets of our own. But maybe not all our secrets.

Newsflash from Agincourt

If Warlike Harry was alive today, then he had better be photogenic. While the hero of William Shakespeare's Henry V existed far from the prying eyes of the public, Jessica Bauman's multimedia retelling of the play, Into the Hazard, broadcasts its hero and its politics onto the small screen. The resulting production succeeds as a solid version of Henry V, but fails to make its intended political point. For all intents and purposes, Into the Hazard is a streamlined version of Henry V which uses Shakespeare's text almost exclusively. Like in Shakespeare's play, the newly crowned English monarch, Henry, shakes off his former reputation as a ne'er-do-well and leads a ragtag army to war in France. On the battlefield, the young king proves himself against overwhelming odds, defeating a field of French foes and claiming large swathes of France for himself. Often, Henry V has been staged as uncritically patriotic, such as in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, but the text itself is far more ambivalent about the justice of Henry's actions. Bauman underscores this aspect of the text, ending her production with the Chorus' lines about England's subsequent bloody loss of all its newly won French lands.

Bauman was inspired to undertake her adaptation of Henry V in response to the relentless media spin which accompanied 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Into the Hazard is intended to provoke audiences to question the insidious interplay between the organs of the news and the actions of the state, Shakespeare's play does not lend itself to the reinterpretation.

Bauman's concept places a TV screen center stage. Upon entering the theater, the first thing one notices is a large television set playing a game sequence from a first person shooter set on an urban, Middle Eastern battlefield. With the help of video designer Austin Switser, Bauman has transformed certain scenes and speeches from the play into newscasts, reality shows, and documentaries, which she intersperses between the live-action scenes. Helpfully, she has added a prologue between a stuffy academic and a star-struck reporter which explains the play's complicated backstory. The video interludes are amusingly incongruous, but also occasionally illogical. For example, when a TV newscaster publicly announces the treachery of two of Henry's associates and broadcasts their mugshots, one wonders why the traitors are so shocked when they are apprehended by Henry in the next scene.

The problem is that Bauman has grafted modern assumptions onto an antique work. Speeches that were written to be played out in public (such as Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech to the troops) have been shoved into dark back rooms, drastically reducing their power. Others, which were written for private communication between the Chorus and the audience, are broadcast to the world, slathered with an irony which undercuts their poetry. In the end, the only media sequence which effectively does what Bauman intended – that is, raise questions about media spin and its relationship to war – comes at the end of the play. Immediately after a scene which portrays Henry's attentions to Katherine as akin to rape, a press conference plays in which the King of France announces the couple's marriage. The image of the blank-faced couple standing in the background is truly chilling.

The production is not helped by Nick Dillenburg's performance as Henry V. Although he cuts an appealing figure, his thoughts and motivations are impenetrable and his line delivery flip, no matter what the content of the text. Although this may suffice for playing contemporary leads, it is not satisfying in Shakespeare. Henry's lack of internal conflict and passion make the second act – which contains the king's most rousing speeches – drag. Dillenburg is much better as the callow French Dauphin, slouching, whining, and bragging his way into a disastrous war.

Fortunately, the five actors who share the rest of the roles – Erin Moon, Trevor Vaughn, David McCann, Luis Moreno, and Scott Whitehurst – are all strong. Vaughn as Pistol is both believable and charismatic, while Moreno steals every scene he is in as the garrulous Welshman Fluellen. Moon's performances of both a boy soldier and the Princess Katherine are exceptional.

Bauman has done a fine job directing her ensemble, staging the play cleanly and formally on Christopher Akerlind's spare set. Using nothing more than a metal platform, a door, two chairs, and buckets full of soil, she creates interesting and elegant stage pictures. The ensemble's methodical stacking of dead soldiers' shoes after the battle of Agincourt is particularly moving. Akerlind's simple, warm lighting design is both attractive and understated and Emily Pepper's costumes are effective and clearly delineate the many characters, even when the whole cast changes into desert fatigues for the second act.

Viewers hoping for a radical re-envisioning of Shakespeare will be disappointed. However, although Into the Hazard has not fully succeeded as a retelling of Henry V in a media age, it is a perfectly enjoyable, well-performed and carefully directed production of Shakespeare's play.

Simple Machines

The self-indulgently titled machines machines machines machines machines machines machines is knowingly dim-witted and absurd, but not “deeply profound,” as billed by its creators, rainpan 43. Within 75 minutes, I strenuously fought at least two nearly overwhelming urges to leave the theater. The only thing going for machines… is the maze of clever and sometimes astonishing contraptions that envelop the stage. Ropes, strings, wheels, bowling balls, boxing gloves, and any number of pulleys are employed so that the characters can, with less than aplomb, do things that could be done more simply by just getting up: cooking an egg, for instance, becomes an embarrassingly difficult exercise with a 10-foot long spatula.

“Phineas,” “Liam,” and someone Phineas calls “Your lordship” could pass for three ultra-nerdy college students on the 10-year plan, suffering from severe cases of cannabis-induced paranoia. With far too much time on their hands, even cooking breakfast becomes an excursion into silliness. Coffee is called “black effluvium,” and an egg is a manna-like “ovum” bestowed from a “benevolent goose;” looking into a refrigerator is a gaze into “icy regions.”

machines… is a hybrid of a poor man’s Blue Man Group and one long, bad, Monty Python skit that tries way too hard to please. Liam (Trey Lyford) wears a mechanized mask that makes all of his verbal communications sound like radio dispatches. Like Michael Winslow in Police Academy, he is dubiously gifted with the ability to make all kinds of annoying mechanical noises with his mouth. Phineas (Geoff Sobelle) sports a kilt and World War I pilot’s goggles. The third (Quinn Bauriedel), who we learn is the “Chief Commander,” sounds like a cross between George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Stewart at his dopiest.

Of course, with machines made from rubber bands and boxing gloves, inevitable breakdowns occur. The actors are more than willing and able to ad lib as they struggle to retrieve an egg or use their contraptions to return a bottle of orange juice to an icebox. On the night I saw the production, the egg fell to the floor, and the audience let out a giant, thrilled sigh of frustration.

As if unable to tell their Dungeons and Dragons game from reality, the characters have constructed a hermetically sealed and alarmed world where they gird for an eventual fight against some unseen enemy. Needing to “fortify” themselves for the long battle ahead, they decide to, for instance, eat some cereal and bananas. Of course, if they just got up and got it themselves, there would be no reason for this show. So, with the help of some ropes and chutes, they inexpertly pour their Cheerios from the top regions of the stage into bowls at their table. Crazy, man!

The real stars of this production are machine designers Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala, Technical Director Derek Cook and Marlon Hurt, the Master Electrician. Creating a stage-world of working contraptions and low-tech gadgets is not easy, and their creativity is often staggering. Yet, the performers, left to their own...er...devices…fail to do anything with this world other than weave a trite story around it. machines… would be quite fascinating in a college talent show, and it would probably win. But, I expect more from productions at HERE.

At one point the characters realize that their unseen “enemy” is among them. Phineas interrogates the Chief Commander with a torture machine made from wires and clothespins. The Chief Commander winced as the pins were clamped on his lips and ears. He really did look like he was in pain, perhaps almost as much as I was.

Happy Talk: The Antidepressant Festival Spreads Cheer at the Brick

"The world financial markets have collapsed," begins the promotional video for the Brick Theater's annual summer play festival, and continues with a litany of current crises. "But you know what? That's great."

Dubbed "The Anti-Depressant Festival," this year's festival aims to cheer. With seventeen fully mounted productions rotating in a month-long repertory, there is much off-kilter escapism to be had. "We wanted to talk about 'the downturn,'" explains Michael Garder, Co-Artistic Director of the Brick, "without calling it The Recession Festival."

Even in a year when securing funding for the arts poses a bigger challenge than it usually does, New York has its standard abundance of summer theater festivals. There's a bevy of free outdoor Shakespeare, most famously the Public Theater's star-studded Shakespeare in the Park, which draws long lines to Central Park's Delacorte Theater. For some reason, Shakespeare festivals seem to concentrate in upper Manhattan: there's also the Inwood Shakespeare Festival, presented by Moose Hall Theater Company in Inwood Hill Park, and the Hudson Warehouse's Shakespeare productions at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Riverside Drive. Other, non-festival opportunities to catch some free Shakespeare this June include two traveling productions: New York Classical Theatre's King Lear uptown at Central Park West and 103rd Street and downtown in Battery Park, as well as TheaterSmarts' Much Ado About Nothing, performed in parks across Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

The Bard aside, many summer theater festivals have an emphasis on developing new work. The multitudinous New York International Fringe Festival, with its 200+ productions that range from re-imagined classics to cabaret burlesque, features companies of all stripes performing shows of all genres, subgenres, hybrid-genres, and genres as yet undefined. Other annual favorites include the Ensemble Studio Theater Marathon, which debuts ten-minute plays in Hell's Kitchen this May and June as it has each summer for more than three decades, and the Summer Play Festival, at The Public Theater in July and August, which is devoted to work by early-career playwrights.

One of the great pleasures of a theater festival is the opportunity it provides to see singular work within a larger context. The EST Marathon, for example, celebrates the ten-minute play by showcasing a variety of forms that exist within the time constraint. What sets the Brick's festival apart is its thematic focus; The Antidepressant Festival is as likely to spark audience rumination on subject matter as it is on form.

Theme-based festivals also help curb the tendency of audiences and critics alike to focus on finding the "best" play of festival. Rather than trying to identify, say, the sharpest young playwright, a festival with a thematic focus perhaps better emphasizes the shared energies that accompany putting together a diverse collection of shows. Each of the plays in The Antidepressant Festival has its own, decidedly unique slant, yet functions in a sort of conversation with the rest of the fest.

A lot of ground will be covered by the festival's eighteen productions, in part due to The Brick's affection for the unexpected. In considering prospective plays to showcase in the festival, Gardner notes, "If the application raised the question 'why the hell would you put that in an Antidepressant Festival' it was already tantalizing." Part of the fun that the festival promises will be an opportunity to see many disparate, light-hearted takes on the problems of our age. Two different productions, dance-theater piece WILM 690: Pirate Radio as well as Afternoon Playland, which features sock puppets, address the impending doom said to accompany the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. Other issues addressed by the fest include amnesia (Cabaret Terrarium), serial killers (Your Lithopedian), and the pharmaceutical industry (The Tale of the Good Whistleblower of Chaillot's Caucasian Mother and Her Other Children of a Lesser Marriage Chalk Circle, a title that will delight competitive charades players everywhere), among others.

Participation in the Antidepressant festival was open to the general public, by application. Although a few companies may have had cheer-up plays already in the works, by setting a prescribed topic, the Brick's festival served as a prompt for artists to create productions that, when performed in repertory, play as variations on a theme. According to Gardner, selecting play submissions for inclusion in the festival is primarily about finding good material, adding that, "anyone who knows us recognizes our affinity for weird and twisted." Such projects are a specialty of the Brick's, which is home to The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, an annual winter festival of new, yuletide-themed short plays and The New York Clown Theatre Festival, an acclaimed festival of (yes, that's right) clown theater in New York.

Of all the festivals at The Brick, it's the annual summer festival, with a new theme each year, which attracts the most attention. The Antidepressant Festival follows last year's cheekily titled The Film Festival: A Theater Festival, which challenged theater practitioners to use film in constructive ways. Though the resulting plays were hardly uniform - in addition a lot of mixed media pieces, there were plays about cinephiles and film scripts performed solely as live theater - the link between the festival's shows fell more heavily on approaches to form. This year The Brick's summer festival returns to the irreverent, content driven themes of The Pretentious Festival in 2007 and The $ellout Festival in 2006. With its acknowledgement of a recession-driven need for escapism, The Antidepressant Festival also marks a return to the politically driven Moral Values Festival of 2005, developed in the wake of so-called "values voters" dominating the polls during the national elections the previous fall.

The Antidepressant Festival opens Friday, June 5th, following the previous evening's kickoff cabaret, and runs through Saturday, July 4th, at The Brick in Williamsburg. Tickets are a helpfully inexpensive $15 per show, in keeping the festival's downturn-inspired, don't-worry-be-happy theme. "It's interesting," says Gardner, "putting on a festival about happiness. You start to realize that every play is about happiness."

For a complete listing of plays in the Antidepressant Festival, the performance schedule and other helpful festival links, visit www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.

Learning Curve

Forget Juilliard and the Pasadena Playhouse. Why waste your money on an expensive acting program, when you can have the brainwashed members of Theater Mitu guide you through the eight canonical acting philosophies in their inventive, but ultimately off-putting multi-media project Dr. C (Or How I Learned to Act in Eight Steps), now playing at the 3LD Technology Center? Based equally on the written treatises of theater luminaries as disparate as Aristotle, Stanislavski, and Anne Bogart, and the jerky, overexcited gesture acting of the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Theater Mitu presents an Orwellian machine dance of incredible deft and magnitude. Eight company members (designated to play theater abstractions like “acting,” “audience,” or “critic”) are prodded around by a robotic voice as though they were mere algorithms in a grand computer program, commanded to compute “acting.” Projections of text, lights, music, and movement are used to calculate each theatrical philosopher in his or her own aesthetic idiom, and along the way the troupe of singing actors lament their fate as cogs in a robotic system.

If conceivers Ruben Polendo and Jocelyn Clarke set out to achieve a stimulating new type of sensory experience, they’ve done a laudable job. But if they also hoped to offer some larger comment on the theater, or even “convert” anyone to the joyous practice of theater, they have fallen quite short. This notion of conversion is inescapable – most of piece exudes a perplexing religious air, as though one has stumbled into some strange cult of theater clerics mid-ritual. True, there is some spirituality inherent in the art form, and the question of how artists interact with these “holy” texts is broached well here, as the performers literally commingle with projections of that text. But frankly, this text was never intended to be sung, chanted or shouted. For Peter Brook to suggest “theater is life” in the book The Empty Space is one thing, but to have it intoned repeatedly by eight wildly gesticulating, sweat-drenched actors in close proximity will likely scare off even the most devout theater apostle – case in point, me.

I have been a theater artist and critic for about five years now and I love the theater intensely, but once Eight Steps passed the succinct Aristotle introduction and moved into the more elegiac Adolphe Appia step–singing phrases like “Music is the direct expression of our inner being,” my initial response was one of embarrassment. This is what the normal people think of us, I said to myself: a bunch of self-aggrandizing hippies that roll around on the ground together, orate about how great they are, and then charge admission. Admittedly, this first response is too harsh and probably an unfair reply to what Polendo, Clarke and Theater Mitu aim to accomplish, but nevertheless, I couldn’t shake my feelings of discomfiture until the rousing Bertolt Brecht segment.

Along with the all-too-brief transitory scenes, the explosive, self-aware Brecht cabaret entertains enough to make up for the other flowery mumbo jumbo. Adam Cochran gives an exhilarating performance, swinging from a tangled knob of microphone cords, as hilarious texts such as “be alienated” or “one of the cast members is secretly gay” or “Matt Carlson voted for Bush” are projected around the stage. Here the pretentious mood is shattered, affording, in my opinion, a more honest expression of the theatrical experience.

Polendo, also the director, certainly stages the piece impeccably. The convention of the computer program is expressed clearly and we quickly learn the rules of the operation – an introduction to the philosopher, a frenetic reading/representation of their text, and finally an analysis of video footage. Throughout, Kate Ashton, Alex Hawthorn, and Jake Wilten deliver the mechanized environment faultlessly as respective designers of lights, sound, and projections. Candida K. Nichols' unique costume designs also deserve special notice. The company members are all intrinsically committed to the piece's demands, with Justin Nestor and Cochran leaving particularly lasting impressions of zeal.

In a lot of ways, Dr. C (Or How I Learned to Act in Eight Steps) presents a complete picture of the theatrical world. When I say that I’m embarrassed by the more egotistical “method-y” aspects of this production, it’s certainly not Theater Mitu’s fault – I’m really embarrassed that artists in our medium are sometimes encouraged to take themselves so seriously. It’s hard to blame a brave company for having the ingenuity and courage to dust off our more self-important old texts and have some fun with them. Especially Brecht – that was IMMENSELY FUN.

I Dream of Jimmy

Marie Brassard’s New York premiere of her one-person work, Jimmy is an absolute "must see." Short yet potent, it’s a small masterwork— a time, gender and genre bender that exemplifies the best of experimental theater. Imagine existing in another’s erotic dream, coming to life when someone conjures you up, changing form according to that dreamer’s whims and then being dropped into a dormant existence at dream’s end—to be resurrected again only when you are next dreamed of, possibly decades later. Imagine silently pleading that someone dream about you just so that you might fully exist once again, even though you might find yourself in a horrible place. That’s the universe of Jimmy.

The set is sparse, elevated—a non-set, really. As the audience filters in, Jimmy is already sitting, almost cowering on the stage, his back to the audience. He has long hair, is half-dressed and looks as if he has been defiled or violated in some manner. As the play begins, Jimmy rises, dresses and addresses the audience. Special effects are sparse but powerful, and consist mainly of background lighting and voice alteration.

“Jimmy” calls himself a “homosexual hairdresser” who came into existence in the erotic dream of a homophobic general in 1950. Jimmy is not a “person,” but an entity. In the dream, he was about to kiss Mitchell, a salon client, but the dream was interrupted when the General suffered a heart attack at the moment of orgasm. Fifty years later, resurrected in the unwanted dream of an actress from Montreal (Brassard), and stuck in an airplane toilet when she awoke, Jimmy spends his “existence” trying to unite with Mitchell, who himself may be a person or a persona. Jimmy does not know. In Jimmy’s world there are dreamers and those who are dreamed. It’s a kind of death to be dreamed and forgotten, much like how the dead must wait for someone to remember them.

In unskilled hands, this quasi sci-fi premise might veer into the merely silly. Ms. Brassard, however, makes this tale almost plausible, imbuing it with heartbreaking poignancy, poetic lyricism and even humor—a combination so very rare these days. A consummate artist, Brassard, with the assistance of P.S 122’s design team, alters her voice with special effects, deepening, slowing it down and slurring it to play the other-worldly Jimmy, and changing it at other times to sound like the effeminate prepubescent boy that the General had previously dreamed up—Jimmy as a child. At 60 minutes, the show lasts just long enough to sustain the content. Brassard wisely keeps it short, masterfully capturing and guiding us through the illogic and malleability of the dream state.

There has been a springtime spate of impressive plays featuring personas that operate in the fertile ground between being and nothingness; two that immediately come to mind are Nerve Tank’s A Gathering and Christina Campanella and Stephanie Fleischmann’s Red Fly/Blue Bottle. We should now add Jimmy to that distinguished company. Stop daydreaming and go see it.

Occupational Hazards

It’s inevitable that some of the more revered works in the theatrical canon will be performed more than lesser-known ones. What theater company that can get its hand on Edward Albee or Sam Shepard work can resist the urge to perform it? It is a blessing, then, when a theater troupe decides to breathe life into a more forgotten work. Such is the case with Project: Theater’s’s current production of The Five Lesbian Brothers’ barbed mid-1990s work, The Secretaries at the 78th Street Theatre LAB. The Five Lesbian Brothers remain a rather well-kept secret from the last twenty years of underground independent theater. Comprised of Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron (she is perhaps the group’s most famous alumni, having scored a Tony nomination for Well), this Obie-winning group emerged in 1989 at the WOW Café.

Hopefully they will remain a secret no more. The Five Lesbian Brothers’ plays subvert such strong ideas as politics and sexism in a darkly comic structure. Both subject and style have been embraced wholeheartedly by director Joe Jung and the rest of Project: Theater’s immensely talented ensemble.

Patty Johnson (Jessi Blue Gormezano) is new to the secretarial pool at Cooney Lumber Mill. While quickly promoted by enigmatic and intimidating boss Susan Curtis (Tara Franklin, creating a perfect ice queen), Patty finds it takes a bit more work to fit in with her three long-standing administrative colleagues, women who seem to know everything about each other’s secrets, and, as Patty quickly learns, hers as well.

One of the great joys of this production of Secretaries is watching this trio both enact and defy automaton stereotypes. Dawn (Karis Danish), Peaches (Laura Dillman) and Ashley (Jenny Schutzman) may address the audience wide-eyed and speak in unison, and they all may subsist on a diet consisting solely of strawberry diet shakes, but each woman has her own freak flag, and the actresses wave them high.

It’s hard not to laugh, for example, at Danish’s mannerisms, some deliberate, some a bit more subtle, but all sustained throughout the show, as Dawn harbors a hysterical same-sex crush on Patty, one that circumvents Susan’s odd requirement of celibacy among her charges. And who can resist laughing as Schutzman, hair apparently drowned in an Aquanet bath so that she resembles something out of a Whitesnake video, makes her character increasingly duplicitous? Meanwhile, it’s worth the wait as Dillman makes Peaches’ deep-seeded insecurities rise to the surface.

Jung moves Secretaries along at a great pace, with scene changes that are done nimbly without calling attention to themselves, and a great attention to detail (including the song choices playing in the background of the secretaries’ local watering hole). Gormezano perfectly embodies the Madonna-whore complex: she has Patty walk a fine line of immersing herself in some of her cohorts’ behavior, including submitting her tampons to Susan for review (yes, the play is edgy, but it works best when its humor is the most pointed), while carrying on an interoffice romance with lumberjack Buzz (a hilarious Brian Frank).

Eventually, Patty catches on to the fact that her colleagues’ hijinks are more than merely wacky, that they might, in fact, involve a more sinister plan. This comes as no surprise to the audience, however, and, if there is any disappointing element with a show as supremely well-executed as Secretaries, the fault can be traced to its source material. The show may be a suspense comedy, but as irreverent as the Five Lesbian Brothers’ work is, it is lacking in the suspense department. There is no great thrill or twist as the show approaches its climax.

Yes, this is a satire about what the women warriors in a male-dominated working world can be driven to, but it never quite reveals what drives them in the first place. One catches on to what the secretaries have up their starched sleeves early on, but there is no reveal as to what motivates them. Nonetheless, this particular production is great fun, and its excellent cast deserves a lot of credit for keeping the ride a fun one.

And I’d be lying if I said this isn’t a show that somehow gets under your skin: I bought a strawberry shake on my way home.

Pots and Pans

A bustling, upscale restaurant may be filled with sunlight and laughter, but beneath the patrons' feet is another world they will never know: a dark, grimy, steam-filled cellar where three dishwashers clutch their sponges and wait for their next shipment of dirty, food-stained plates. Morris Panych’s bleak, yet deeply profound comedy, The Dishwashers, focuses on the lives of these three dishwashers: a terminally ill old man named, Moss (John Shuman), a veteran dishwasher and liaison to the world upstairs, Dressler (Tim Donoghue) and a newbie college drop out, Emmett (Jay Stratton).

The men work through the festivities of Christmas, scraping cigarettes out of mashed potatoes, and through the excitement of New Years Eve, hoping that after the ball drops they will find an unfinished flute of champagne in the bus tray.

Charlie Corcoran compliments the mood with a visually capturing set that pulls the viewer into the cellar with the dishwashers. There is no sign of ventilation – not even a ceiling fan – the paint on the wall is peeling and the wooden stairs leading up to the restaurant are moldy and rotted. Emmett’s outfit is too short; the arms barely come past the elbows and the pants end at his knees.

The setup of the room and the condition of their work clothes gives a clear indication of the dishwashers' status, both in life and in the eyes of the restaurant.

Jill Nagle’s lights also add another layer to the story. When the dishwashers are on their lunch break the lights are sharp and piercing, but when they return to work the room dims. Slivers of light seep through the ceiling, casting stripes on the dishwashers' aprons. The result is an image that eerily resembles three inmates toiling away in prison uniforms.

But is their little corner of the world a prison? That is the question bouncing between Emmett and Dressler with a clueless Moss caught in between. Emmett thinks Moss needs to live a little before he dies. Dressler disagrees. Moss was born for this life and he’ll die in this life.

Saddled with emotional problems of his own, Emmett is unsure of his place in the world and wholly susceptible to Dressler’s hard-nosed mentality that anyone who ends up in this cellar will never have the fortitude to work their way out of it.

Dressler is a difficult character to like but a fascinating one to listen to. While Emmett and Moss openly despise their situations, Dressler embraces his. He loves seeing the silverware sparkle in the morning light, even though no one will ever credit him for its shine. “I love this job,” he tells Emmett proudly. “Not because it’s a good job, but because it’s my job.”

Aside from this passionate declaration, Donoghue reveals little about his character’s true nature. He catches himself before the conversation turns personal and throws in a crude joke if he feels the moment getting too chummy. He also shows no remorse for brainwashing Emmett into accepting a life that he is desperate to get out of.

When Dressler first meets Emmett he asks his name. When Emmett tells him Dressler barks, “Wrong! It’s New Guy. You have to earn the right to be called Emmett.” Dressler believes respect is earned by remaining in the cellar, while Emmett feels it lies at the top of the stairs.

The Dishwashers does not lean to one side or the other. There is no heavy-handedness and no clear resolution. Instead, Panych leaves room for the viewer to decide who is at peace with his place in the world and who will always see himself as a prisoner, trapped in a restaurant cellar.

Pale Imitations

I’m not quite sure why some newer playwrights presumptuously put their plays on bills along with even the lesser ones of acknowledged masters, but it’s a bad idea. Even if these playwrights don’t overtly suggest that their plays can stand alongside classics, it nonetheless appears that this is precisely what they’re doing. Almost always, it’s an unequal match. This is so even if the play is “classically inspired,” which is how Eric Parness, Artistic Director of Resonance Ensemble, describes three new plays sandwiched around and between short plays by Beckett and Chekhov. The Ensemble’s Reflections is an evening of five “short plays” that could try the patience of the kindliest of theatergoers. Two of the newer playwrights could learn a thing or two about economy and succinctness from the masters. In Ian Strasfogel’s light and ultimately ingratiating "Compromise," a pretentious producer, annoyingly played by the vampy Christine Verleny, tries to convince a conventional Beckettian director (Bill Fairbairn) to set a production of Happy Days in Rwanda because, she opines, Samuel Beckett never really “got it.” Throughout their exchange, a statue of Beckett makes faces at them: approving ones for the Director and nasty ones for the Producer. In the end the Director agrees, against his better judgment, to mount a production set in Afghanistan, and the statue has something to say about that.

Next up is "Catastrophe," a slight and historically over-analyzed, yet effective later play by Beckett himself, written for Vaclav Havel, and around which "Compromise" has been modeled. In "Catastrophe" a fur-wearing, domineering Director (David Arthur Bachrach) overrules every idea his Assistant (Nicole Godino) has regarding the arrangement of the Protagonist (Grant James Varjas), a mute man on a platform, completely at their mercy. The Director is not satisfied until the shivering man has been nearly stripped. The play is an allegory of totalitarian government, stripping its cowed citizenry of their identities. Yet, the play contains a small and successful surprise: the man looks up at the audience, if only for a moment.

Alvin Eng’s overlong "Their Town" is mostly pointless. Based nominally on Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, it’s the story of Harry Cloud (Todd Butera) and Terry Cave (Bill Fairbairn), two irritating ex-American Communist party members who meet again in the afterlife, replete with heavenly garb. In life they stabbed each others' backs and sold each other out; now they’re trying to find atonement, or “at-one-ment,” as Terry not so cleverly quips ad nauseum. I soon lost interest in this boring and hollow story of Harry and Terry’s karmic debt, and so did the man snoring quietly next to me. Mercifully, a 10-minute intermission followed.

Anton Chekhov’s "Swan Song" comes next. The play is a sketch of a drunk, elderly actor (Bill Fairbairn) who bemoans having dedicated his life to the theater and fears the approach of death with no family to support him. It’s a minor work that still packs a punch as the old man slowly regains his bearings and realizes he had no other mission in life quite as fitting as his chosen profession.

Wrapping up the evening is Michael Feingold’s smart but ultimately ridiculous "What Happened Then," a play which takes place in the early 1700s and tells, or at least attempts to tell, the story of two Englishmen whose tragic lives come together and apart, through unbelievable twists of fate, over the course of two decades. Mr. Feingold has a gift for the era’s vernacular, and his characters are convincing even if their stories are not. As Mr. Feingold piled on the unlikeliest of scenarios with a straight face, some in the audience snickered and I was reminded of the far-fetched tales of Commander McBragg from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Should Mr. Feingold cultivate the obvious comic potential of this story, it might be a better play.

As you might expect, the offerings that come out on top in Reflections are the likely suspects. Short and to the point, the plays by Beckett and Chekhov are perfect examples of economy and conciseness. Those of Mr. Eng and Mr. Feingold are not. Mr. Parness’ direction of these plays is confident and professional, but it can’t help the material. Colleen Kesterson’s costume design is one of the more convincing aspects of this production. Sarah B. Brown’s movable stage design is serviceable and frequently clever. All in all, though, I cannot recommend that readers see this production.

2009 Obies - Congratulations

The 54th Annual Village Voice OBIE Awards were presented on Monday, May 18, 2009 at a ceremony held at the newly landmarked Webster Hall in Manhattan.

Co-hosted by former OBIE winners Martha Plimpton and Daniel Breaker, the awards were presented by Anne Hathaway, Brian d'Arcy James, Gavin Creel, John Shea, Karen Olivo, Kate Mulgrew, Marc Kudisch and Nilaja Sun.

Highlights included Anne Hathaway's presentation of the Lifetime Acheivement Award to Earle Hyman, and his touching, humorous acceptance speech, in which he detailed his early obsession with dramatic literature and the playwrights and actors who influenced his choice of profession. Ruined, Lynn Nottage's intense examination of rape in the Congo, was named Best New American Play. Several of the production's actors, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, and Russell Gebert Jones, also received performance awards. Stephen Sondheim, whose works have been more commonly seen on Broadway, was awarded a Music and Lyrics Obie for his Off-Broadway musical Road Show and accepted it in person.

The Obie Grants, cash prizes awarded to organizations, went to new Long Island City venue The Chocolate Factory, The Classical Theatre of Harlem and the Lark Play Development Center. HERE Arts Center received the Ross Wetzsteon Award.

A new feature of the ceremony this year was Creative Block, a separate event occuring simultaneously in a separate part of the venue and eventually merging with the Obie after-party, also held at Webster Hall. Tickets to this multidisciplinary arts event were available to the general public for purchase.

Congratulations to all those whose theatrical achievements and contributions were honored this year. We look forward to seeing more of your work.

For more information about the Obie Awards, visit the official website www.obies.villagevoice.com.

The Winners:

Lifetime Achievement Award
Earle Hyman

Best New American Play (includes a cash prize of $1000)
Ruined by Lynn Nottage (Manhattan Theater Club)

Performance
Francois Battiste, The Good Negro (Public Theater)
Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Ruined (Manhattan Theater Club)
Kevin T. Carroll, sustained excellence of performance
Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Ruined (Manhattan Theater Club)
Jonathan Groff, Prayer for My Enemy (Playwrights Horizons) and
The Singing Forest (Public Theater)
Birgit Huppuch, Telephone (Foundry Theatre)
Russell Gebert Jones, Ruined (Manhattan Theater Club)
Aaron Monaghan, The Cripple of Inishmaan (Atlantic Theater Co.)
Sahr Ngaujah, Fela! (37 Arts)
Lorenzo Pisoni, Humor Abuse (Manhattan Theater Club)
James Sugg, Chekhov Lizardbrain (Pig Iron Theatre Company)
John Douglas Thompson, Othello (Theatre for a New Audience)

Music and Lyrics
Stephen Sondheim, Road Show (Public Theater)

Directing
David Cromer, Our Town (Barrow Street Theatre)
Katie Mitchell, The Waves (National Theatre of Great Britain / Lincoln Center Great Performances <"New Visions Series")
Ken Rus Schmoll, Telephone (Foundry Theatre)

Design
Toni-Leslie James, sustained excellence of costume design (w/special reference to Wig Out, Vineyard Theatre)
David Korins, sustained excellence of set design (w/special reference to Why Torture Is Wrong... Public Theater)

Special Citations
Sarah Benson (director) and Louisa Thompson (set designer), Blasted (Soho Rep)
David Esbjornson (director) and Christian Camargo (actor), Hamlet (Theatre for a New Audience)

The Ross Wetzsteon Award (includes a cash prize of $2000)
HERE Arts Center

OBIE Grants ($10,000 divided equally among three theaters)
The Classical Theatre of Harlem
The Chocolate Factory
Lark Play Development Center

Faster, Pussycat!

In Sean Gill’s Go-Go Killers!, we find ourselves in a New York City of the future, a post-apocalyptic landscape (both financial and environmental) into which stomp a legion of rogue go-go chicks, who have created an underworld of their own, in response to the wealthy white male-dominated society which rules them. At once retro and futuristic (like comic books of the 1950s), Rachel Klein’s proficient direction and skilled choreography channel the cult films of Russ Meyer, (largely Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!) complete with cinematic transitions, mod costumes and make-up, and a 1960s-era surf music soundtrack. This is the latest Gill/Klein collaboration, and again, their styles and sensibilities seem to blend together perfectly. We follow one girl gang called the Furies, led by Electra, and played, well electrifyingly, by Elizabeth Stewart, as they seek revenge against their former captors and venture into the “Old Jersey desert.” By her side are a feisty Pam Grier-esque Pandora, played by Reagan Wilson; the romantic Godiva, played by Jillaine Gill; and newbie Marietta, whom we watch earn her new name – Bloody Mary, played by Kari Warchock. With a cock of the hip, a toss of the hair, stomp of a boot, or even taking hits as well as they dish them out, these women are fierce; and moreover, they know it. Much amusement ensues as they attempt to upset the balance, taking two of their blue-blood tormentors, Kevin G. Shinnick’s smarmy Nelson, and the sheltered Eugene (and Marietta’s former fiancé), played by Joe Stipek, captive and into the wilds of old New Jersey.

In this new/old world, the girl gangs are aggressive and competitive, amongst themselves and others, leading to many entertaining dance-off beat-downs along the way. Their main rivals are the sassy Gorgons, appropriately dressed in sparkling sea-green and blue tones, who give them a good run for their money. Featuring Dana Perry as Gypsy, Robyn Nielsen as Ginger, Megan O’Connor as Jezebel, and Marna Kohn as Georgette, the tough Gorgons keep popping up at the most inopportune moments, adding to the conflict at hand. There are also golden go-go’s (led by Dance Captain Michelle Cavallero), silver go-go’s, and even boy go-go’s, played by Preston Burger, Freddy Mancilla, and Brian Rubiano, all dancing with aplomb. These multi-chorus assemblages are also evocative of the cult film genre and are fun to watch as they layer and/or unfold from every direction. Don DiPaolo gives a great, goofy performance as another supporting character, truly earning his “wife-beater,” as The Wop. And for effect there’s also the ubiquitous butler, Godfrey, embodied by the lithe Michael Porsche.

The dialogue is snappy and amusing. Gill’s script sounds equally stylized, even with hints of more emotional depth for the characters than one might suspect. However, by the third act, with the arrival at the Queen’s Lair, the narrative kind of falls apart, as does the kick-ass road movie vibe by way of too-long speeches involving backstory and a certain amount of tidying up, which feels unnecessary. Even the once-fierce main characters seem dulled down. It’s understood that they’re now in the manipulative hands of the reigning underground monarch, but the loss of Electra’s power and strong lead, for example, saps the energy and leaves us hanging. The Queen is played extravagantly by Leasen Beth Almquist, but the character feels more out of a Kenneth Anger film landscape, showing more style than substance. Or maybe it’s just a switch of leads too late in the game.

The go-gos' 60s-style costumes, designed by Emily Dorwart and coordinated by Jillaine Gill and Rachel Klein, and the hair and make-up are all put together wonderfully, with the gangs coded by color and/or theme. The rousing surf music soundtrack, designed by both Klein and Gill, further reveals their “wonder-twin” powers and complements the vibe and motion. The spacious set-up of the Sage Theater, with some nightclub-style seating up in front, nicely frames the stage’s extended runway, to fully exploit the space for dancing and flourished entrances/exits. The minimalist props, designed by Lizz Giorgos and Joey Nova, like the cocktail glasses/serving trays; cacti/tumbleweeds; and scads of flying money, blend well into the choreography, while also providing maximum impact.

The Sage Theater is an interesting venue for this piece, used for off-Broadway theater, comedy shows, and other events since about 2002. Before that time, according to the Cinema Treasures website, it had a bit of a checkered past (as do many theaters in New York City), serving since the 1970s as a Spanish language movie theater, gay porn house, commercial cinema twin, and then back again to a porn theater, before the legendary Times Square clean-up beginning in the late 1990s. Go-Go Killers! brings back a fun and less-naughty shimmy-shake into the once-grimy Times Square, with a strong sense of nostalgia, a simultaneous nod to past and present, and all just a few kick-steps off-Broadway. So what are you waiting for, Pussycat? Go-go!