Blood Feast

The young grad students who populate Dan Rosen’s delightfully absurd The Last Supper are left leaning, sometimes shallowly, and often overbearingly sanctimonious. For entertainment, they tune in to an extremist conservative commentator who makes Bill O’Reilly look like a bleeding heart. Mr. Rosen, who wrote the screenplay for the 1995 film of the same title (Ron Perlman and a young, painfully unskilled Cameron Diaz were notable cast members), now brings his tale to off-off Broadway. Whereas the film is filled with dark psychopathic tension, the stage play is wackier and more balanced, and the actors reveal depth that is notably absent in the movie version. An Arsenic and Old Lace for a new generation, The Last Supper first pits the grad students against Zach (played by a convincing Joe Beaudin) who assists one of them when his car fails during a storm. The grateful students invite Zach to dinner and, fatefully, Zach accepts. The menacing and racist Zach, a gung ho Iraq War veteran, promptly insists on saying grace, pays homage to George W. Bush and spits out the tofu turkey in disgust.

Worse, Zach is a rabid history denier who scoffs at the Holocaust. He mimics Jews in a clueless voice that resembles that of Roseanne Roseannadanna. Insults fly around the table and Zach, illustrating his point that these entitled brats couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag, suddenly pulls a knife on Mark (Michael Bernardi) who, when Zach attacks another student, grabs the knife and plunges it into Zach’s back. This invites recriminations, and some fairly funny dead guy jokes. The students even fret about how a murder conviction will look on their resumes. Guilt soon morphs into rationalization and self-satisfied zeal; soon, these nascent killers are off to the races, welcoming new Sunday dinner guests—an otherwise endearing minister (played perfectly by Larry Gutman) who happens to be a vicious homophobe, a misogynistic author, and a woman who believes J.K. Rowling is satanic.

Mr. Rosen, for the most part, tracks his screenplay, updating it to the time of the Bush II administration. The material is still fresh because little has changed in the decade or so between the film and the time of the play: rabid pundits rule the airwaves, the Hillsboro Baptist Church rails hatefully against homosexuals, and in many communities the term “family values” remains code for odious intolerance.

Set designer Jak Prince does a great job of replicating a grad house dining room, and lighting designer Dan Jobbins expands the set parameters considerably with his clever work. Cast standouts are J.L. Reed as Luke, a roommate with ice water in his veins, who steers the others down the path of murder, and Mr. Bernardi, who commands the set as the group’s liberal thought leader. Fight Director Turner Smith has trained the actors well; the several physical scenes are realistic and even chilling.

Because the talented cast rotates (I saw Cast # 1), you may catch another capable troupe, but I certainly recommend The Last Supper. It’s funny, lighthearted, absurd and perfect for a summer evening in the city.

A Woman's Work

Tina Modotti is certainly a colorful public figure whose life, on paper, makes for a compelling story. Unfortunately, Wendy Beckett’s play Modotti, now playing at Theatre Row’s Acorn Theatre, turns out to be a misguided attempt at dramatizing such a colorful life. Modotti (portrayed by Alysia Reiner), nee Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini in Italy, immigrated to the San Francisco area as a teenager. She flirted with acting and modeling after getting involved with a bohemian crowd. Soon she embarked on a more successful career as a photographer.

However, Beckett, who directed as well, emphasizes the more dramatic events in Modotti’s romantic life, notably her tempestuous relationship with fellow photographer Edward Weston (Jack Gwaltney). Eventually, Modotti ends up in Mexico, where she begins rallying for political causes, and gets entangled with Communists like muralist Diego Rivera (Marco Greco) as well as writers Bertram (Mark Zeisler) and Ella Wolfe (Dee Pelletier).

The play becomes little more than a chronological catalog of events in Modotti’s life – the men that came and went, her stint in jail due to her activism. Modotti’s scenes provide a sketch of the facts (some, at least) of her life, but it doesn’t dig particularly deep into her personality. Beckett appears to have a lot of respect for the woman, but gives her little personality to demonstrate. Where does her fire come from? Does she ever feel a sense of loss for anything of the ideas or people on whom she turns her back?

Part of the problem with Beckett’s structure is that, by now, it feels tired; the linear narrative no longer possesses much dramatic power. There are a couple of options that would make Modotti stand more on its own. For one thing, she could focus on a specific period in the artist-activist’s life. The specific drama would provide a more contained dramatic structure as well as provide ways to elucidate Modotti’s personality.

Another choice would be to create a more subjective show instead of sheer biography. Does Beckett have her own theories as to what motivated the woman, why she treated men the way she did, or what really happened during her ambiguous final years? Giving this show more of a thesis would also give it more personality.

And yet Modotti should in no way be written off entirely, if for no other reason than the skilled performance of its leading lady. Reiner holds the stage for the play’s entirety, and even when the script doesn’t do justice to the character, the actress certainly does, showing how her insatiable appetite for life made her magnetic to anyone who came near her. One hopes she rebounds with a stronger theatrical vehicle soon. The other actors in the ensemble turn in serviceable work – Gwaltney, in particular, is a very charismatic presence.

I hold out hope for Modotti. It’s an imperfect look at an important woman, but it is not too late to bring this look into focus.

Couples Retreat

Remember how Bernard Slade’s play Same Time, Next Year caught up with its characters every several years to depict changing morals – and mores – over the course of time? (For those in need of a more recent example, I recommend the movie When Harry Met Sally, in which the titular couple met every five years until they were finally ready to fall in love). Alan Ayckbourn’s Joking Apart attempts a similar feat by having its four central couples meet over the course of a dozen years, shown in four-year intervals. His goal is to show how these various characters come to terms with their love lives, what’s attainable and what’s merely a pipe dream, and while it is similar terrain to that which has covered in better-known works like Bedroom Farce and The Norman Conquests, the playwright stumbles quite a bit in finding his footing here. Nonetheless, T. Schreiber Studio’s current production, directed by Peter Jensen – the New York premiere of this play – does an admirable job bringing this work to a new generation of audiences.

Richard (Michael Murray) and Anthea (Aleksandra Stattin) Clarke are a fairly modern couple. He’s a successful businessman and father, and she is a loving mother; the two, though unmarried, appear to be perfect partners. They are great cooks and hosts and love convening with their friends, old and new. But the more they interact with these friends, the more the cracks in everyone’s relationships begin to show.

For starters, there are the neighboring Emersons. Hugh (Michael J. Connolly) is a vicar who never knows quite what to say, and Louise, his worried wife (Alison Blair), feels resentment every time Hugh dines with the Clarkes, because she feels inferior about her own cooking prowess. Sven Holmenson (James Liebman) is the antithesis of Hugh; as Richard’s business partner, he’s an insufferably arrogant blowhard, but his wife, Olive (Stephanie Seward), too feels jealous of Anthea.

Then there’s Brian (Sebastian Montoya), who works with both Richard and Sven. His character feels like Ayckbourn’s most calculated creation in Joking. Each scene finds him visiting with a different girlfriend (always played well by Anisa Dema), but even though the program credits Dema as playing multiple roles, it takes a while to realize that each of her characters is indeed a distinct one from scene to scene. No matter, though, since Brian secretly pines for Anthea. And, as it turns out, so does Hugh.

But it is hard to imagine that this grass-is-greener story – purportedly Ayckbourn’s personal favorite of his works – was ever truly fresh. Joking is a fairly idle work; it is hard to feel a sense of urgency for these characters as the years go by. The play faces physical hurdles in addition to emotional ones. Despite Matt Brogan’s top-notch scenic design and Eric Cope’s lighting effects, several climactic tennis matches occur partially offstage, making it difficult for one to fully invest in the obscured action.

And yet Jensen’s cast respects the people they portray so much that ultimately, so do we. Stattin is a luminous presence, projecting both beauty and depth; it’s easy to see why she might be the object of such intense male affection as well as female derision. Blair and Seward both excel at projecting insecurity with comic finesse, and Connolly outdoes Ayckbourn’s own script to connect all the dots needed to justify some of Hugh’s incongruous actions.

All together, though, something feels absent from Joking. Slade’s show entwined comedy, drama, reflection on changing times and charming chemistry; the passage of years meant something had both been lost and gained for its two characters every time they reunited for another twist.

The four scenes in Ayckbourn’s work lack the same richness. There isn’t a dramatically compelling reason – or even a comedically diverting one – to substantiate a reason for each time these characters commune. While one would understandably want to watch these actors in a different piece, in this case, one also wants to run up and tell them that the party’s over.

Brawl in the Family

In the last few years, The Amoralists – a passionate group of players that includes founding members Derek Ahonen, James Kautz, and Matthew Pilieci – have created quite a name for themselves on the downtown scene with their blend of traditional storytelling structure and in-your-face comedy. Those who have missed their previous works are in luck, though: their 2010 season includes revivals of such recent works as The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side and Amerissiah, which just opened at Theater 80. Amerissiah, written and directed by Ahonen, falls slightly beneath the benchmark set by such shining lights as Pipers and the recent Happy in the Poorhouse. The play, still steeped in over-the-top yuks, probes fairly deeply, but Ahonen isn’t able to answer all of his questions as satisfyingly as one might hope. And yet a nearly perfect cast makes the experience a worthwhile one.

George Walsh is Johnny Ricewater, a used car salesman cum mini-celebrity whose questionable finances have gotten himself and business partner daughter Holly (the typically outstanding Sarah Lemp) into some trouble with the law. But Holly has even more pressing matters to deal with, including her estranged lawyer husband Bernie “the Attorney” (Kautz) and the impending demise of eldest brother Barry (Pilieci).

Barry has returned to the Ricewaters’ childhood home on Long Island in anticipation of his death as cancer gets the best of him. He’s comforted by the fact that he thinks he is the Second Coming (Ahonen’s title is an amalgam of the words “American” and “messiah”), a notion shared by an interracial couple (Nick Lawson and Jennifer Fouche) who arrive from the Midwest convinced that Barry can save their souls. Meanwhile, third Ricewater child Ricky (William Apps), a recovering addict, has come home with his new girlfriend Loni (Selene Beretta), also feeling the ache of rehabilitation.

Ahonen has assembled a team in the truest sense of the word. His ensemble is a group of talents that work incredibly well together, and their intimacy easily translates into a warts-and-all look at one seriously dysfunctional family. Amerissiah runs the gamut of humor to pathos, from scatology to spirituality, and these actors fulfill all of Ahonen’s demands with vivid brushstrokes.

But the show is also a little too dyspeptic for its own good. Ahonen’s works start out at a higher decibel than most shows and only continue to get louder and more hyper. This has worked in other shows but has a bit of a diluting effect on the material in Amerissiah; it is easy to gloss right over the show’s more inward, reflective moments because the play isn’t slow and silent enough in pockets. It is a two-tone show that should feel more blended together.

That is not to say that this dedicated cast eschews realism. On the contrary, the performances in Amerissiah provide plenty of gravitas in addition to mere entertainment (and they certainly entertain, with aplomb). Apps and Beretta navigate through thick subtext to shed extra light on their troubled characters. Pilieci and Walsh both convincingly portray men looking for more meaning, more connection, than their lives have provided to them, regardless of their accomplishments. And Fouche is a marvel as Carrie, the quintessence of devotion.

Additionally, Kautz and Lemp share a special chemistry as the exes who cannot untangle from their bond. The two are comic delights, with Kautz playing the milquetoast and Lemp engaging in full-throttle hysteria throughout the show. Lawson, too, as a closed-minded, epithet-spewing yokel, is a laugh riot. Only Aysha Quinn, as Barry’s ethereal wife, Margie, feels a little too meek and disengaged for this gang.

Still, despite stumbling through some of Amerissiah’s heavier tropes, Ahonen has excelled in another area. He has created another unorthodox family of chaotic characters. And in loving them even more than they love each other, he has managed to make them unforgettable.

Light Blue

Buddy Cop 2 sounds similar to the recent box office bomb MacGruber, like a spoof of 1980s action genre tropes. And it’s true that the play, written by co-stars Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and developed by director Oliver Butler, takes place in the 1980s. But beneath the polyester pants and Aquanet hair, there are a lot of smart, unexpected, and even dramatic surprises to be found. Buddy, presented by the Debate Society with the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator, takes place in the local police station of Shandon, Indiana. Though it’s currently August, Officers Novak and Olsen (Bos and Thureen, respectively) are making sure things are beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Local girl Skylar (Monique Vukovic) is suffering from cancer and might not live to see the actual holiday, so the townspeople are singing and parading in her honor; the governor even makes plans to visit.

Meanwhile, the officers go on with their daily routine. Novak practices for a physical ability test that her male colleagues have never had to take. Olsen bides his time by playing bingo along with the radio. And fellow Officer McMurchie (Michael Cyril Creighton) stews at being passed over to work security for the governor’s visit.

Everything about Buddy seems to shriek “comedy!” And in the beginning, it seems to be playing along those lines. Novak gallops toward the front door every time a delivery arrives. The officers dig at each other and their quotidian routines engender knowing laughter from anyone who’s whittled time away behind a desk. An early scene in which Novak knocks down a shelf had me laughing harder than I had at a show in weeks.

But eventually, Buddy moves in a different direction. This isn’t at all a play about people acting funny, this is a play about a community coming together and how easy it is for people to understand one another without words even being said. Novak, for instance, appreciates McMurchie’s feeling slighted, and also makes some keen observations about Olsen.

Buddy, shrewdly paced by Butler, is also a play where the devil lies in the details, and boy do the talented actors in this show have those details down pat. Bos, Creighton and Thureen are able to fold the funny bits of the story into characterizations that carry real dimension. The outrage Thureen brings to losing at bingo is both humorous and scary at the same time; the forthright manner in which Bos has Novak describe her short-lived marriage is simultaneously endearing and heartbreaking. And the way the officers take turns lowering the volume on the radio when a phone call comes in is the kind of deft touch that shows respect and familiarity not found in a more run-of-the-mill slapstick comedy. And Creighton wields a mean slow burn.

Furthermore, Laura Jellinek’s design is also spot-on, recreating a claustrophobic office environment. (The actual Shandon police station has flooded, so the action takes place in a converted recreation center that comes complete with a functional racquetball court.) Mike Rigg’s lighting design also contributes to the realistic effect.

The one place where Buddy seems to falter is in the monologues that break up the scenes depicting the officers’ monotony, delivered by Vukovic as Skylar and another character, Brandi. The way these are interwoven with the police station scenes never fully gels, and sometimes it creates an eerie effect. These speeches confuse rather than clarify the show's ultimate tone.

Still, the overall effect of the play is a very tender one. I went to this play to watch several strangers, and I left it feeling as though I had made several friends.

Hard Times, No Hope

In the early years of the Great Depression, Hallie Flanagan, who would later lead the Federal Theater Project, wrote a play with a student of hers at Vassar, Margaret Ellen Clifford, based on a short story by Whittaker Chambers—the same Whittaker Chambers who later exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist spy to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Chambers as a young man had been an avowed Communist, and his story, published in March 1931 in the left-wing New Masses, was adapted and expanded by Flanagan and Clifford into a scathing indictment of inaction by the government and moneyed classes in the face not only of the Depression, but of a record drought in the Midwest and South. Can You Hear Their Voices? is being revived by the Peculiar Works Project in a space taken over specifically for the production. Sometimes riveting, sometimes awkward, the play is more than a historical curiosity, but not as dramatically polished as one would like. The original premiered at Vassar, and at times it feels a bit too collegiate in spirit. A projection assures us that “every episode in the play is factual,” and indeed, the chief incident in Chambers’s story occurred in England, Ark., in January 1931, when starving farmers looted a Red Cross distribution center. The resulting play, staged in May, was about as immediate as theater can be, and Voices may be the first agitprop play in American history.

To the farmers’ potent story Flanagan and Clifford added scenes of high society. Based on fact or not, their contributions are loaded with ham-fisted irony, though it sometimes hits home. “Congress is a body of wise, elder men who have the country’s good primarily at heart,” says a phlegmatic congressman (Ken Glickfeld, channeling one of those great ’30s character actors, like Lewis Stone or William Frawley). “It’s true we’re in the grip of a severe crisis, but just for that reason we have to proceed with caution.”

Flanagan and Clifford’s sections focus on the congressman and his daughter, Harriet, a young debutante (Tonya Canada) who feels for the people affected by the devastating drought, and tries to persuade him to do something for them. But he’s more absorbed in his newspaper and his plan to give her a smashing coming-out party.

Played like broad sketch comedy, the scenes of toffs and dowagers with foot-long cigarette holders are meant to serve as counterpoint to the debates among the farmers about whether to seize Red Cross stores of food and milk, and whether to use firearms. The production doesn’t encompass both styles effectively, however. “Come out of the fog, old dear,” Harriet says to her father, in a speech that sounds like a promotion for Vassar. “I’m one of the country’s educated women. I go to college. I take a course in government and one in charities and corrections.”

The play is given a committed—if unevenly acted—performance by its cast. Among the standouts are Christopher Hurt as Wardell, a desperate, left-leaning farmer, and Rebecca Servon and Mick Hilgers as a Russian immigrant couple. There’s also nice work from Ben Kopit and Sarah Elizondo as Frank and Hilda Francis, a young couple with a baby for whom they cannot find enough milk. Yet even in the scenes drawn from Chambers’ story the irony is laid on pretty thickly: “We’ve got the government in back of us,” says Wardell’s wife, Ann, but, of course, they don’t.

Under the direction of Ralph Lewis and Barry Rowell, most of the cast double and triple in roles, frequently with gender- and age-blind abandon. In some scenes there are women in suits as well as men in gowns. It’s a bizarre misjudgment that produces a sort of alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the proceedings just when one longs to be pulled in by the forceful sincerity inherent in the piece.

In fact, Voices is at its most powerful when at its simplest: projections (used by Flanagan in the original production) of dusty plains, cracked earth, and abandoned tires evoke the misery of the drought and the sense of despair, as well as the champagne high life of dancers throwing themselves into the Charleston. Superb musical accompaniment, written by Seth Bedford, intimates the emotional tone, whether apprehension or frivolity. Ultimately Flanagan and Clifford come down on the side of democracy, but the play is a warning that armed violence remains a possibility, even a right, if a government ignores and abandons its citizens in times of crisis.

Crooks in the Piney Wood

Lillian Hellman’s prequel to The Little Foxes continues her indictment of unrestrained capitalism, showing the rise of a ruthless, post-Civil War mercantile class built on the exploitation of impoverished fellow Southerners and emancipated blacks. But the script for Another Part of the Forest is so laden with greed, snobbery, betrayal, madness, and incest that its serious intent is often masked. If Dan Wackerman’s production for Peccadillo Theater Company isn’t always convincing, much of the problem lies with the writer. At least Hellman was smart enough not to just rehash Foxes. Even if audiences wanted to see more of the cold, grasping Regina Giddens and her brothers, the wily Ben and the manipulated, doltish Oscar, Hellman’s focus here has changed. Another Part of the Forest is about the rise of Ben, Regina’s archrival in Foxes, though for long stretches the center of attention is their parents, Marcus Hubbard, and his wife, Lavinia, a religious woman determined to go on a mission. (Their names are a nod to Titus Andronicus, another potboiler by a writer who did better work elsewhere.)

Marcus (Sherman Howard) is a distant parent, a self-made tycoon happy to squeeze anyone for money—and he’s made his on the blood and sweat of others. He’s a tyrant to his family and disdains his sons, as many self-made men do, while emotionally abusing Lavinia and exhibiting an unhealthy attraction to Regina.

Marcus controls his family's purse strings tightly; that allows him to summon Ben to work on a Sunday and claim he can’t remember why Ben was called. Capricious and cruel, Marcus also refuses Ben money to make a shrewd investment and Oscar the funds to get married. Played with a mix of petulance and comic exasperation by Ben Curtis, the blundering Oscar is the only one of the men who is emotionally open to loving. Unfortunately his sweetheart has been a prostitute, and Oscar gives voice to some pre-feminist ideas about a woman having to do what she must to survive, declaring that society ought not to judge her harshly for that.

Through most of the play Marcus blusters and bullies his family and others. He is also obsessed with Regina, who secretly plans to flee her Alabama home with John Bagtry, a young ex-Confederate soldier (the time is 1880), and live in Chicago. “Your people deserved to lose their war and their world,” Marcus tells Bagtry. “It was a backward world, getting in the way of history. Appalling that you still don’t realize it.”

Although it’s as inevitable as Greek tragedy that Marcus will be thwarted, the character becomes tiresome long before it happens. In the meantime it’s satisfying to hear Ryah Nixon’s bumptious Laurette, Oscar’s ex-hooker, take him down a peg. “I’m not better than anybody, but I’m as good as piney wood crooks,” she declares after he’s belittled Oscar and her.

Happily, though, Matthew Floyd Miller gives a sly, nuanced performance as the louche Ben, complete with mustache and soul patch. One sympathizes with his frustration: he can outsmart anyone, including his sister. Their rivalry ought to be stronger than it is, but Stephanie Wright Thompson’s Regina isn't really his equal—she'll marry the man he chooses before she gets the upper hand.

Though Amy C. Bradshaw provides smart costumes, Joseph Spirito’s set is disorienting. Characters exit the house via French doors onto a patio, then walk up steps at the side of the patio back into an inside room. Though the back wall of the set is broken in half, as if the indoor and outdoor parts were separate, some scenes flow uninterrupted from one area to the other, so that the viewer is periodically distracted by the bewildering architecture of the house.

Wackerman has made a couple of crucial changes to the script, turning Regina’s goodnight kiss to her father into a full-blown incestuous response, which is dramatically dubious. But his changing the stage direction at the final moment of pouring coffee, so that Regina more forcefully abandons her father and throws her lot in with Ben, is much cannier—it is now the moment of transformation for the Regina we will come to know in The Little Foxes.

Peccadillo’s mission is to reexamine American classics, and Another Part of the Forest has certainly languished. But whether the play deserves renewed attention remains an open question.

A Women's War

“This is how men are,” repeatedly remark the cast of Hudson Warehouse’s current production of Trojan Women. The play relates a relevant and piercing narrative of war, both between the sexes and on the international scale. This is a strong adaptation of the work of Euripides, reflecting an important theme in a meaningful dramatic manner. Nicholas Martin-Smith’s play is based on the original Euripides text, but he updates it with contemporary motifs. We meet the women of Troy, who have already been wrecked and ravaged by the invasion of the Greeks. Their men have all been slaughtered save one, and they are without recourse to protect themselves from being thrown into slavery or worse. Talthybius, a Greek political figure, has come to inform the women of their fate. They try to share the horrors of what they have experienced while also attempting to fight back against their circumstances.

Despite the classical tale, the piece feels very twenty-first century. Its costumes are predominantly reflective of current styles and the narrative is sprinkled with modern references, from popular music to current events. Although the performance’s strongest moments are those that are deeply connected to the original Greek text, the details that are included which refer to contemporary society keep the piece feeling relevant. This play is not meant as a museum piece or a historical document. It is a clear reflection of this particular moment in time.

The chorus of women, led by Hecuba, is pitted against the Greek men. The players all give powerful renderings of their characters and Ruth Nightengale’s Hecuba is exceptionally heart-wrenching in her performance, particularly in the play’s final moments. All of the actors bring an intense amount of believability to their performances and engage the audience in the narrative arc. The men are rough, even when they are smooth politicians, which brings a complexity to the work. There is great conflict created between the groupings of characters. We can feel the anxiety of these two groups being forced to come face-to-face with one another. The sexes cannot find common ground and neither can the Greeks and Trojans. They are on separate sides and will not find a way to make peace.

The play uses its outdoor setting well. There is the sense of witnessing an ancient Greek tragedy in the manner in which it was originally designed to be presented: in the open-air, lit by the waning hours of daylight. The stone stage space is littered with the detritus left behind after the attack; there is trash everywhere, especially the remnants of devices once used to make contact, such as telephones and a computer. The women (and men) are also marked by the war’s devastations – their bodies are covered in blood and dirt, their clothes are torn, and their general appearance is disheveled. No one has been left untouched by this war.

This production is a work of political theater, but one that operates in a manner that is neither didactic nor heavy-handed. It uses the form of drama to convey a theme about the dangerous consequences of warfare. At its heart, however, this work is about human beings and what they are capable of doing to one another. They can kill one another brutally, but they can also love one another deeply. It is a choice which force wins out over the other.

Date of the Undead

Love never dies... sometimes, it is undead. In My Boyfriend is a Zombie, a teenaged girl falls for the unique charms of a local zombie boy. The events of this bizarre romance lead to an exuberant, if at times overly silly and kitschy, 1950's-style rock musical. The story begins with four schoolgirls hanging out at a sleepover party. The girlish festivities are interrupted when a zombie comes knocking outside. At first, the girls are frightened; they believe the zombie intends to eat them. However, after running into him again at school and the local soda shoppe, Paula is faced with an odd realization. This zombie, by the name of Grrr, may wish to eat other humans, but in her case, he only desires to take her to the Halloween Hop high school dance.

The piece rolls along with a charming exuberance. The fairly ridiculous tale, somewhat reminiscent of the campy style of The Toxic Avenger musical, is punctuated with many humorous bits and gimmicks. Many of the jokes are built upon clichés; some hit as comic gems while others are perhaps less effective. The overall mood of the play is light and fun, so it is easy to get swept up in this tale of first love and zombie fear.

The music is catchy and is all well-suited to the 1950s motif. As a viewer, it is easy to think of yourself as witnessing an off-beat Grease, one where the young people are both charming and somewhat idiotic simultaneously. There is a particularly fantastic zombie tap dance, which is a highlight amongst the well-sung and excellently danced collection of musical numbers. These are the kinds of tunes you can find yourself still humming hours after the play is done.

The production aesthetics are slight: just three downstage microphones, walls full of records, and an on-stage band. Locations are suggested by iconic set pieces and the descriptive dialogue. This show may have benefited from a more over-the-top theatrical setting. The piece feels about to explode with its playful energy, but this is not mirrored in the on-stage space. The use of the microphones is hard to justify: they were not incorporated into the scenic world of the various moments nor were any of the characters, with the exception of Zombette, who acts a narrator, addressing this fourth-wall breaking practice. Singing out loud and doing large-scale dance numbers are just what these kids do, no further explanation necessary.

Despite its oddities, My Boyfriend is a Zombie makes for a very enjoyable night in the theater. It gives its audiences the opportunity to have some good laughs and listen to some fine music. It is not hard to be charmed by this zombie. It may be a little rough around the edges, but it is lovable nonetheless.

A Play is a Play is a Play (is a Film)

Note to experimental theater directors: when audience members pass one another glasses of wine between acts, it goes a long way toward creating camaraderie. By the second act of White Wines, a four act meditation on Gertrude Stein’s short, mystifying play, playing under the title Now Repeat in Steinese, the house begins to feel as much like a quirky cocktail party as an audience at a play by an esteemed avant garde writer of the early twentieth century. Under the guidance of producer Drew Pisarra, the program forgoes pretension by staging a delightfully scrappy celebration of one of Stein’s earliest works. The evening is great fun. The so-called Mother of Modernism, Stein’s wordplay goes beyond mere cleverness and into a dreamlike stream of consciousness where sound and meaning blur. (“Modify the brave and gallant pin wheel,” goes a line from White Wines, “Show the shout, worry with wounds, love out what is a pendant and a choke and a dress in together.”) Despite the elusiveness of Stein’s writing – or because of it – she continues to be a staple of downtown theater. What enterprising experimental director could resist such a delicious challenge? The Wooster Group famously juxtaposed Stein with a soft-core bondage film for “House/Lights,” produced in 1999 and restaged it in 2005. Still more recently, the list of theater companies to that have produced Stein’s work includes The Atlantic, Target Margin, Horse Trade, Medicine Show, and Judson Church.

Pisarra himself is no stranger to Stein, having spent more than a decade staging her material. He last produced an evening of short Stein plays at The Red Room in 2007. Whereas his previous Now Repeat in Steinease provided audiences with exposure to a smattering of her little-known work, this time he ups the Steinian ante by literally repeating the same play four times. Taken as a whole, the evening inventively suggests a multiplicity of ways to stage the strange material. Textually broken into three portions, White Wines has no concrete characters, marked dialogue, or obvious plot. The sheer repetition of the evening helps elucidate the text; the later acts are also the evening’s strongest.

The first White Wines of the evening, under the direction of Kurt Braunhohler and Laura Sheedy, is also the most neutral, which is maybe to say the most nonsensical. They split the text into two characters, one played by Sheedy and another by Lucas Hazlet. She wears two white frocks and goggles on her forehead; he a gray suit. It’s a suitable embodiment of the text's looseness, if (like the text) hard to follow.

Ryan Bronz’ film version of White Wines, which constitutes the second act of the evening, makes clear how well filmic techniques can capture the play’s disjunctures. Just as the repetitive nature of Stein’s writing makes it at once easier and more difficult to hear, his editing choices, heavy on looped images and jump cuts, are both mesmerizing and faithfully confusing.

The third act makes the clearest choices of the evening, and consequently yields the most crystallized results. The roles are played here by two women, Rita Marchelya and Amy Dickenson, who bring a suburban desperation to the perplexing text. Director Andrew Frank hones in on references to “a clutch,” making the first portion of the text about two friends out shopping. In the next scene, the lights are lowered and they sit at opposite ends of the stage, on the phone with one another as they thoughtfully sip drinks and engage in a late night chat. We recognize these scenarios from countless romantic comedies (the female version of a buddy movie), but, here, something is off.

Rather than make the play’s bizarre use of language obvious or awkward, placing it in an easily recognizable context heightens its gleeful unease. In one particularly compelling moment, Dickerson tears through a stream of dialogue like the world’s most enthusiastic but clueless actor doing Shakespeare. Her emotional intensity is undeniable, but in this case, the words she’s given to say really are nearly gibberish. Feminist critics argue that Stein’s writing is an intervention in patriarchal language; here it suggests the failure of rom-com dialogue to speak to the lives of contemporary women.

The final installment of the evening splits the action from the text, to great effect. Three aproned women, Susan Slatin, Dorit Avganim, and Heidi Carlsen, go through the motions of baking bread (and also the motions of some Kabuki-slow hand gestures). Meanwhile, the recorded text of the play, read by a succession of three young children, plays on the sound system. To the uninitiated, Stein’s writing can come across as pretentious and inaccessible. Having her words read by children is a brilliant way to locate its inherent playfulness. Alex Confino, Slater Klahr, and Allison Johnston dutifully make out the text with childlike earnestness, rendering words illogical to everyone accessible to anyone.

Now Repeat in Steinese runs Tuesdays in June at Under St. Marks Theater in the East Village. Stein aficionados will relish an opportunity to see the multiple possibilities of this singular work, while newcomers will find a friendly invitation to join in the Steinian fun.

Mother Courage, Remixed

In her one-woman show Red Mother, Muriel Miguel takes the stage in order to invoke the spirits of the past. These otherwordly guides range from the souls of her ancestors, to the victims of war from many historical battles, to Bertolt Brecht. By mixing aspects of an epic theater aesthetic with an emotionally significant work of political performance, Miguel is able to create a poignant work about the devastating effects of war on the psyche of the individual. Throughout the play, we see a woman negotiate the cluttered space around her, finding enough conflict within herself and the story she must tell so as not to need any other characters on stage. The work subtly suggests Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children without being a mere retelling of that story. Miguel uses aspects of Courage’s experience–the need to sell the items she carries on her cart, the loss of her children, her aversion to and dependence on the surrounding war–in order to manifest a unique theatrical mother figure of her own. The woman we meet on stage is at times sarcastic, tough, and sentimental. Miguel gives her all in making each one of these distinct personality traits resonate in a believable fashion. When we see her comical side, we believe this woman is bundles of fun. When we confront examples of her suffering, we empathize with her. Miguel does a superb job at balancing all of the emotions without coming across as overly frenzied or frenetic.

The piece itself is equally as well-balanced. The Brechtian spirit is manifested not only within the narrative frame but in the technical aspects of the show as well. There are various projections that work acutely to alienate the spectator from an emotional engagement. There are musical numbers that regularly break the narrative frame. There are movement and dance sequences that punctuate the text-driven drama. There is even a specific breakage of the fourth wall that addresses the audience’s presence in the theater space. The upstage curtains are a nice touch; the wire on which they are hung is always visible, allowing the audience never to be fooled into thinking that they are anywhere but in a theater.

The Brecht motif is cleverly woven into the rich and dense material. There are really meaningful moments–such as her speech regarding her daughter’s fate–juxtaposed against laugh-out-loud bits of comedy. The sporadic sounds of falling bombs add the right punch to the work; the war is never far away nor is it ever gone long enough to be forgotten.

The message about war is perhaps the play’s most important one. The battles that affected Native Americans are constantly evoked, but the connection is also made to current warfare. War is never able to be viewed as a historical event. It is always distinctly a part of the present moment, in the here and now. War is also never a force that only affects some “them” who are “over there.” Although Miguel gestures to a war that is being fought someplace just out of sight, its effects are abundantly obvious on the small stage space which we are viewing. This woman may have survived the specific battles, but she is not intact. She will carry the effects of this war–perhaps of all war–with her forever. She, too, is a victim, even if she will live to pull her cart another day.

Miguel’s piece is an example of what theater should be: challenging artistic work that raises relevant questions without providing clear solutions. Despite its somewhat difficult to follow narrative threads, the overall package is a worthwhile experience. Red Mother will leave its viewer with lasting images and plenty of fodder for discussion. In its abstraction it is a concretely important work of theater.

Bob Bless America

bobraushenbergameirca is the love child of playwright Charles Mee and director Ann Bogart, and what a joyful happy child it is. A tribute to American Artist Robert Rauschenberg, Mee describes the play as “A wild road trip through our American landscape—in a play made as one of America's greatest artists, Robert Rauschenberg, might have conceived it if he had been a playwright instead of a painter.” Siti Company’s production is an altogether delightful and splendid event. Under the artful eye of Ann Bogart, cast and crew have created a dazzling spectacle, and just like on the best road trips, one surprise whizzes by right after the other. Playing at DTW, bobraushenbergameircais a collage of moments, a series of events some of which are related. It is an exploration of the art of life where everything is imminent; unexpected danger could be delivered along with your pizza, or love can show up in the face of someone you don’t even like.

It is not a biographical portrait. The first person we meet is Bob’s mom, played by Kelly Maurer. It is through her that we are introduced to her son. As she leads us through a collection of photos, what she describes is not what the audience sees. Bob’s mom, as narrator, is an unreliable witness so when she proclaims that, “art was not a part of their lives,” we have reason to doubt.

What is undeniable is the spirit, finesse, and charisma that fills the performance. Throughout the production, one can see a loose narrative of couples meeting, breaking up and getting back together again. The characters walk the line between reserve and release, between holding back and letting loose. Standout performances include Ellen Lauren as Susan and Will Bond as Allen. At one point Susan explains the difference between men and women while devouring a cake. “Women feel what they feel when they feel it and then when they don't feel it any more they don't feel it," she says. "Unlike a man who won't know what he feels when he feels it and then later on he'll realize how he felt and so he'll talk himself into feeling it again.” This episode is a moment of unexpected comic genius. Will Bond as Allen is magnificent. Elastic in his physicality, every gesture is larger than life and yet perfectly suited for the moment.

Ultimately that is the gift that is SITI company’s bobraushenbergamerica. Even in its exuberance, there is an economy and restraint. No moment is wasted and each episode is thoroughly satisfying. Bogart and her team tap into what seems to be an essential quality of the play—delight, and they infuse every moment of the evening with that feeling.

At Sea

The miraculously flexible 3LD Art and Technology Center is best known for productions with nontraditional sets (last season's Wickets transformed the theater into a passenger airplane) and inventive media (its Eyeliner video projection system allows companies access to cutting edge technologies). In New Island Archipelago, veteran avant garde theater group The Talking Band utilizes both aspects of signature 3LD shows: the theater is cleanly converted into the deck of a cruise ship; passengers' dreams are depicted in video on a cabin wall. Written and directed by Talking Band artistic director Paul Zimet, New Island Archipelago's plot is reminiscent of mid-century musicals, or else Shakespeare: happenstance places long lost family members on the same boat, cruise passengers don disguises, entrepreneurs scheme about land purchases. But the Talking Band mixes things up with suavely jovial musical numbers and story arcs which don’t quite resolve themselves – and then there are those dreams.

Shot in black and white and projected against the back wall, the video dream sequences, by Simon Tarr, depict each characters' subconscious sleep with an eerie beauty. As the play progresses and the characters confront one another on the increasingly claustrophobic cruise ship, so too do their dreams reveal the impact of their encounters with their shipmates. Fantasy, reality, and anxiety begin to converge, without pointing to obvious questions or convenient answers.

With 35 years of theater making under its collective belt and roots in Joseph Chaiken’s famed Open Theater, The Talking Band skillfully girds New Island Archipelago against oversimplification, or worse, vagueness. Up and coming downtown theater groups would do well to look toward the high standards set by this production, a serene meditation peppered with quirkiness. Founding member Ellen Maddow’s musical score heightens the production’s sense of whimsy; she also delivers a spot-on performance as worry wart cruise passenger Dot. The rest of the ensemble is similarly engaging, especially Todd D’Amour as Lem, cruise waiter and crusader for the proletariat, whose presence during the outlandish passenger talent show is at once generous, wordless, and very, very funny.

The production design extends into the 3LD's lobby, adorned with shuffleboards and photo ops. Once inside the the house, Nic Ularu’s sets and Nan Zhang’s lighting encapsulate the space in light colors suggestive of the seas' openness while also managing to induce the claustrophobia of an overcrowded cruise ship. Costume designer Olivera Grace does a terrific job dressing the characters to playfully suit their archetypal roles; a tiny hat worn by violist Beth Meyers is a particularly nice touch. Meyers and musician Harry Mann round out the off-kilter cruise as the ship’s band.

At the May 25th performance of New Island Archipelago, in a convergence as surreal as any depicted over the course of the play, costumed actors, shuffleboard playing audience members, and throngs of protestors carrying placards with incendiary messages all mingled in the lobby of the 3LD. In the next room, lower Manhattan’s monthly Community Board meeting was taking public comment on a proposal to construct a mosque near the World Trade Center site, bringing the production’s themes of community and obligation into sharp focus. The mash-up felt very New York: with space at a premium, islands can produce a lot of tension. New Island Archipelago controls that tension and uses it to craft a fine performance. Outside the theater, the tension is less controlled.

Canaries in a Coal Mine

I have a confession to make. I’ve been waiting to see The Burnt Part Boys since I first read about it last year. My expectations for this particular show were high. My father grew up the son of a coal miner, who was in turn the son of a coal miner himself. So you could say a production like this about a fictional mining town in rural West Virginia is in my blood. I am happy to report that The Burnt Part Boys not only lived up to expectations, but exceeded them. My barometer for musical theater is different from that for straight plays. Whether tragedy or comedy, my main criteria for dramatic accomplishment comes from temporarily forgetting that I’m sitting in a theater amongst a crowd of strangers, losing myself in the story being told on-stage. But with musical theater, if I don’t experience at least one spine-tingling moment during one of the musical numbers, I cannot consider it a success. The Burnt Part Boys contains a number of such profound moments.

A co-production of Playwrights Horizons and Vineyard Theatre, The Burnt Park Boys has been kicking around for a couple of years, including incarnations in 2006 in the Berkshires and a 2009 public lab production at the Vineyard. Created by a trio of NYU Tisch graduate students and protégés of lyricist and composer William Finn (Falsettos, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), the show is now a lean intermission-less 100-minute delight sure to resonate with lovers of musical theater.

Ostensibly a double coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old schoolboy and his 18-year-old miner brother who have lost their father in a coal mining accident, The Burnt Park Boys is a rich, moving theatrical experience that has more in common with opera than with the bombast of the current Broadway musical. With a book by Mariana Elder, music by Chris Miller, and lyrics by Nathan Tysen, the haunting score features a mix of pop, country, bluegrass, and gospel with a heaping dose of spine-tingling harmonies. The show is economically and brilliantly staged by Joe Calarco (Shakespeare’s R&J) on wooden planks against a backdrop of smoky mountains with only a couple of ladders, some chairs, and a handful of rope.

Al Calderon (13) as younger brother Pete and Charlie Brady (South Pacific) as older sibling Jake are sensational, conveying depth and passion in both their dramatic and singing roles. Their individual solo numbers, “Man I Never Knew” and “Disappear,” respectively, are the emotional highlights of the show, which had audience members wiping tears from their eyes.

Jake’s best friend Chet, played by Andrew Durand (Spring Awakening), wins the award for most authentic accent and has a glorious, bell-clear tenor that blends beautifully with Jake’s silky baritone. And Pete’s doughy sidekick, Dusty, played by the phenomenally talented Noah Galvin (Ace), gives a star-making performance, blending schtick with pathos, culminating in his own electrifying moment in the spotlight, “Dusty Plays the Saw.” Molly Ranson (August: Osage County) in the sole female part, that of “hillbilly trash” Frances, has a lovely singing voice as well and makes the most of a slightly underwritten part. High praise should also be heaped on As the World Turns star Michael Park, who deftly embodies multiple parts as not only Pete and Jake’s dead dad, but also the father figure heroes of Pete’s rich fantasy life, including Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie.

I haven’t divulged much of the plot of The Burnt Part Boys because I think audience members should discover it on their own. Suffice it to say that the narrative is a timely tale about the perils of a life in a mining town that could have literally been torn from recent headlines. The ghostly quartet of miners that open the show and the beacons that emanate from their caps precipitate both the darkness and light to come.

I simply cannot applaud this innovative, distinctive production enough. After seeing the Saturday matinee, I immediately ordered another set of tickets for this weekend. My parents will be visiting from out of town. And I want them to experience the theatrical magic of The Burnt Part Boys for themselves.

Not Cool Enough for the Obies

After having covered the Obie Awards for the past three years, offoffonline has been denied a press pass to the 2010 event, to be held this Monday, May 17, at Webster Hall.

“The management of the Voice has chosen to deemphasize online coverage of this year’s awards,” explains press representative Gail Parenteau, “due to the large number of blogs that are currently discussing New York theater. If you really want to cover the event, you can buy a $25 ticket.”

This intriguing change of position raises a number of questions.

Is it possible that Village Voice Media, having already antagonized numerous members of its own news staff upon assuming management of the paper in January 2006, is now seeking to alienate journalists affiliated with other alternative publications?

An alternate explanation is that the Voice truly does feel threatened by the expansion of online arts coverage, and, rather than fortifying its own contributions, is seeking to weaken perceived competition.

It is no secret that the print media has been hard hit by the recession. On one hand, it’s hard to blame the Voice for attempting to raise obviously needed funds by selling the privilege of writing about its flagship annual event. On the other, it’s still incredibly tacky.


Addendum
After a second conversation with Ms. Parenteau, I have come to understand that her initial intentions were not to snub offoffonline or online media outlets as specifically as my article suggests. In fact, due to the scarcity of press passes for this year’s event, the suggestion to purchase tickets was made to other publications as well.

Poisoned Pen

“Write what you know” is the most common advice given to would-be authors, and Adam Rapp has drawn on his own experience with a vengeance in what may be his best play yet, The Metal Children. In 2005 a school in Pennsylvania banned Rapp’s young adult novel The Buffalo Tree, and he has transformed that incident into a dense, rich meditation on what it means to be a writer and what moral responsibilities that may carry, along with a host of other questions that ripple out from his plot. He is abetted by a superb cast, anchored by a magnificent performance from Billy Crudup. As the writer under attack, the matinee idol has managed to deglamorize himself (with the help of costumer Jessica Pabst and some subtle makeup by Erin Kennedy Lunsford) for a part that he clearly has dug into deeply. Pasty and disheveled, Crudup’s Tobin Falmouth is reeling from his wife’s abandonment of their marriage for a younger writer. Tobin is nine months late delivering his latest novel, and his editor, Bruno (David Greenspan), hopes to shake him out of his moping inertia by having him personally engage a school board in a middle American town, Midlothia, that has banned his successful young adult novel, The Metal Children. Moreover, teenage girls are going missing and their images being replaced by metal statues, as in the book (a bizarre twist that’s left unexplained).

When Tobin arrives in Midlothia, he is immediately caught up in the repercussions of the school board battle. Supporting him are Stacy Kinsella (Connor Barrett), an English teacher; Edith Dundee (Susan Blommaert), the motel proprietress; and most important, Edith’s niece Vera (Phoebe Strole), a ringleader of a group of young women in town who have modeled their actions on the novel’s heroine, Meredith Miller. Tobin barely remembers the incidents from his early work, only gradually comprehending that the book, written years before, has affected the townspeople beyond what he could have imagined.

After discovering that vandals have broken into his motel room and spray-painted the words “Gone for now” on the walls, it’s Vera who reminds Tobin that the words come from his book, and that Meredith painted herself gold and bleached her hair blond, as the determined Vera and her clique have. And someone is telephoning Tobin and running a vacuum cleaner when he answers—another dire reference to the book.

But Rapp has a sense of the absurdity as well as the vehemence of the culture clashes. A masked faction called the Pork Patrol has been terrorizing the book’s advocates; one of their methods of intimidation is to throw pork products, like head cheese, at the doors of supporters. “What do you think it means?” Edith asks Stacey. “I assume it represents the same thing it did in Mr. Falmouth’s novel: the inviolable fetus,” he says. “Sounds good to me,” says the clueless Tobin.

At every step someone reminds Tobin of elements in his nearly forgotten work, and it’s a credit to Rapp as director that he never lets one’s interest flag, even during several passages of reading in the play. The most impressive is Tobin’s own speech at the school board meeting, in which he ramblingly tries to describe why he wrote the novel—but succeeds only in demonstrating a messy life and confused state of mind. The shy Tobin scarcely looks at the audience at first, yet as he gradually unloads his emotional baggage, the actor transmits Tobin’s unhappiness, bewilderment and psychological pain.

Nowhere does Rapp settle for easy point-counterpoint arguments. Tobin is a deeply flawed protagonist with no moral compass. In addition to his drug-taking and self-pity, he allows himself to be seduced by the 16-year-old Vera. And he lashes out at the people who oppose his book, particularly Roberta Cupp, played with heartfelt concern and confident decency by Betsy Aidem.

“One of our jobs as community leaders is to facilitate opportunities for our young people to connect with the world in positive ways, to help mentor them toward making sound moral choices as they approach adulthood,” Roberta says in her speech, and it’s hard to argue with her “It takes a village” attitude. The notion of Tobin as a mentor is appalling. But all the characters are layered: even First Amendment firebrands may find themselves sympathizing with Cupp or Otto Hurley, the school board bigwig invested with authority and a sense of fairness by Guy Boyd.

When Tobin finally realizes the way his work has affected other people, he becomes a more sober, discreet, and perhaps better human being, and Rapp suggests that the freedom to write carries some kind of obligation, some awareness of the dangers inherent in the work—though not responsibility for interpretations. That’s a powerful, daring message in this complex examination of the culture wars.

Oh yeah, what about the war?

Witness Relocation is playfully presenting the English language premiere of Five Days in March, written by Japanese writer/director Toshiki Okada and translated by Aya Ogawa. Written in 2004, Five Days in March is an almost love story set in the days leading up the US invasion of Iraq. Two strangers, Yukki and Minobe, meet at a rock show and spend five days in a love hotel, leaving only to grab a meal and purchase more condoms. Much of the escapades are re-told to the audience. The bulk of the play is direct address and the production is an intimate combination between stand-up comedy and open-mic night. While Will Petre and Kourtney Rutherford eventually portray Yukki and Minobe, the other actors tell us about Yukki and Minobe long before we meet them. Mike Mikos sets up the evening for the audience, trying to open the story in a very casual roundabout monologue. In fact, the specter of the casual is evident throughout the production—casual sex, a casual anti-war protest, a casual war.

Overall, this is a well-crafted event under the direction of Witness Relocation’s artistic director Dan Safer. Heather Christian gives a divine performance as Miffy, the overly awkward and intense young woman who moves to Mars after being snubbed for the last time. Christian brought the most range, nuance and variety to her role. I would have enjoyed a greater balance between the actor’s conversation with the audience and the inclusion of the ensemble work and dance numbers. The production was weighted more to the extended monologue, which came close to tedious as the ensemble dance numbers were infrequent.

It is not until second act that we actually have the opportunity to see Yukki and Minobe in conversation at the said Shibuya love hotel and this moment is a splendid theatrical blurring of time and space. Mikos is telling us about the couple and then finds himself in conversation with Minobe. Next, they both find themselves in the hotel room with a sleeping Yukki. Mikos then can only try to make himself inconspicuous, sitting atop the hotel fridge sipping his beer.

Throughout the production, the audience is reminded that the events in discussion happened on and around those five days in March when the US went from threatening military action on Iraq to being at war. What is lost and is perhaps purposely tangential is the war itself. There is a moment in the play when Minobe muses, “This is probably my estimation, but probably after three days we’ll leave this hotel and each of us’ll go back to our lives, but, by then, probably according to my estimation I think that the war is going to be over.” Minobe and Yukki decide that for the duration of their liaison, they will not turn on the news to find about the war. Minobe, like many of us, wished for something that was quick, easy, casual. Five Days in March is a reminder that we are still at war and that, since the beginning, this war has been a side note, something that has been happening outside and away from us. The production prompts us to wonder how long we can hide out and divert our attention.

A West of the Imagination

As in most of Sebastian Barry’s plays, the characters at the center of his 1992 drama, White Woman Street, are a group of outcasts: hard-riding, train-robbing bandits of the Old West. Give Barry marks for focusing on a milieu that virtually no other playwright has written about. Unfortunately, Barry’s conception of 1916 Ohio (heavily industrialized, even before World War I) as akin to the Wild West gets the play off on the wrong foot. Barry acknowledges his geographical misstep in his preface to Plays:1: “Now as any person knows who has their bearings in this world, Ohio is a couple of states east of Iowa, as one of the actors gently pointed out to me.” And even Iowa in that period wasn’t the Old West; just imagine Harold Hill and the traveling salesmen in The Music Man being attacked by train robbers.

But director Charlotte Moore has recognized that White Woman Street is more an impressionistic meditation on values and roots, memory and myth, than a historical document. Her production provides a fascinating look at the young Barry’s strengths while accepting his weaknesses.

The leader of the bandits is Trooper O’Hara (Stephen Payne), a man aching to return to his home town of Sligo in Ireland. En route to the East, Trooper has planned the robbery of a gold train passing through the town of White Woman Street, named for the “only white woman for five hundred miles of wilderness.” Trooper hasn’t been there in 30 years, but he remembers the brothel where she “used to see to business” and a secret that he cannot shake.

Indeed, none of Trooper’s ragtag band—an assembly of natives and immigrants—can escape their pasts. They include the gruff Moses Mason (Gordon Stanley), who left his Amish sect in Ohio as a young man; the simple Nathaniel Yeshov (Evan Zes), of mixed Russian and Chinese parentage but raised in Brooklyn; Blakely, a voluble Brit from Grimsby, England; and Jim (Charlie Hudson, III), a black man from North Carolina. Their hardscrabble backgrounds are evoked by Hugh Landwehr’s set, a combination of vertical slats and scrim fronting black plastic that resembles an abandoned prairie barn about to collapse.

Though the melting pot is a bit schematic, Barry seems to be taking a leaf from Nathaniel’s description of Easter celebrations in Russia. Blakely asks him, “How come you know that, Nathaniel, that never was in Russia?” Nathaniel answers, “I seeing through my Pa’s eyes now for you. See, I shut my own, and seeing through his.” Thus Barry imagines the places and incidents in his plot, sometimes persuasively, sometimes less so. (For instance, how does Trooper know there’s a train passing through White Woman Street, and at what time, when he hasn’t been around in three decades?)

The men ride (on high stools with reins, albeit with real excitement provided by the galloping hooves in Zachary Williamson’s sound design), hunt, and spill their stories in monologues and conversations. Mo remembers when he and Trooper met up with Blakely and the two men had a comical interchange, and Greg Mullavey’s affable Blakely easily accepts the joke on himself. The hard-bitten Trooper claims to have been in the Indian Wars, but he denies having killed any Indians: “Said I was in them since I was…. Didn’t say never that I was shooting Indians.” (Barry’s broken syntax attempts to approximate the grammar of semi-literate men, and he gives each character a different mode of speech, but the syntax never carries the ring of truth that, say, Charles Portis’s vernacular in True Grit does.)

Trooper’s denials don’t wash with Blakely, however, who speaks unaccountably in even choppier English: “He think I believing him! He were a full-pay trooper then—a-course he shot himself Indians.” In the town, which has grown, the men visit a chapel, then a brothel. Trooper reveals his secret to Mo, and the men then set out to rob the train, with fatal results.

Throughout the episodic piece, Barry shows a mastery of lyrical monologues; a gift for rhythm and poetry that vividly charts the penury of the characters’ lives; and a sense of man’s spiritual floundering in the cosmos. Any particular theology is nebulous at best, and Moore’s final tableau, which evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà, doesn’t clarify anything. Still, it’s enough that they have souls. White Woman Street shows the promise of Barry’s works to come, like The Steward of Christendom and The Pride of Parnell Street.

Hours in the Attic

Family ties are known to bind, but they’ve rarely been as constricting as they are in August Schulenburg’s challenging new play, Jacob’s House. Serving as both historical fiction and Biblical allegory, Schulenburg sets the bar high, and at times this very talented playwright’s heavy lifting feels like a bit of a reach. In this play, a Flux Theatre Ensemble production directed by Kelly O’Donnell at the Access Theater, Dinah (Jane Lincoln Taylor) and Joe (Zack Calhoon) are sorting through their father’s possessions in the attic of his house following his funeral. Since Joe is significantly younger than Dinah, his memories of Jacob, his father, filter through a different prism than the perspective of his older sister. Dinah fills him – and the audience, as well – in on some of the many stories of Jacob’s life.

It turns out that with the help of his mother, Rebecca, Jacob (Matthew Archambault) tricked his father, Isaac (Johnna Adams), into blessing him and tricked elder brother Esau (Anthony Wills Jr.) out of his birthright. Later, though he loves Rachel (Kelli Dawn Holsopple, Jacob ends up being manipulated into marrying her own older sister, Leah (Tiffany Clementi). Jacob eventually assumes an awesome amount of responsibility and power.

Do these stories sound familiar? Perhaps the names ring a bell? They very well might, since they come straight from the Old Testament. In House, Schulenburg takes these events and stretches them out over an elongated period of our nation’s history, covering everything from the American Revolution to the First World War.

The events set in the past are the ones that capture the audience most, not just because these are well-known tales, but because the stakes are so much higher. Even the entrance of Tamar (Jessica Angleskahn), a modern-day antagonist who becomes an obstacle to Dinah and Joe’s inheritance, feels more contrived than urgent. Tamar becomes too much of a storytelling tool, a device used to offer lots of exposition and instigate some of Dinah’s more confessional revelations to Joe. (This choice may be due to the fact that Schulenburg reportedly had little time to write the piece; when the rights to another intended show fell through, he drafted House in just a few days.)

Other aspects of the plot still feel somewhat undercooked – how exactly are these parables, so lovingly lifted from Genesis, supposed to inform the contemporary tragic story at the center of the show? And because Dinah, Joe and Tamar spend so much of the play introducing new information, one never gets the sense of any familial connection. They feel more like strangers telling their life story and finding random coincidences than demonstrating the intuitive understanding, both good and bad, that comes with the intimacy relatives share with each other.

And yet, as always, Flux has such sterling talent onstage and behind the scenes that their professionalism makes House an effort worthy of serious attention. O’Donnell proves to be a visionary, able to stage the historic and modern day scenes around each other without confusing temporal perspective. And Jason Paradine’s detailed set accurately recalls the effects that might litter a truly lived-in home.

Most of all, O’Donnell’s acting ensemble raises the game. The women have what I found to be the far more intriguing roles -– they are the ones connected to most of the show’s secrets and duplicity, after all -- and Angleskahn and Taylor sink their claws into their meaty roles. But while they get to drive most of their scenes, Calhoon has trickier terrain, since almost his entire role is reactive. It’s easy to get lost in such a part, but the actor navigates it quite convincingly. Archambault captivates as Jacob, charting the man’s most peculiar journey and shading in the character developments required to bridge one scene to the next. (Another choice, though, in which featured members of the cast play multiple roles, takes a while too long to catch onto.)

While I review House, I very much still see Jacob’s life as an unfinished one at this juncture. Schulenburg has his work cut out for him, but is clearly off to a great start. In continuing to build House, he couldn’t ask for a greater team of architects.

Two Be, or Not Two Be

Now playing at HERE Arts Center in Soho, The One Man (two man (not quite)) Hamlet is a fascinating journey through one actor’s attempt to stage Hamlet solo — well, not quite solo, as the title implies. As written and performed by the charismatic Kevin Brewer and tightly directed by Ross Williams, this multilayered inaugural production from the New York Shakespeare Exchange mixes Shakespeare’s poetry with contemporary language. It's is a clever, entertaining, and unique spin on William Shakespeare’s magnum opus — but don’t go expecting the Bard’s tragedy intact or even abridged. The evening begins as the traditional red curtain parts. A second curtain appears, covering a proscenium-encased widescreen TV. Once that curtain parts, the word “PLAY” appears onscreen and the show begins. As bells chime, a figure materializes on the monitor. It is “V” (the video version of Brewer), playing the guard Barnardo. “Who’s there?” he shouts, as “K” (the real-life Brewer), playing Horatio, enters the stage for the opening scene of Hamlet..

But as in the Shakespeare play, something’s rotten in this state of Denmark as well. As the action progresses through a humorous sequence of a double-faced King Claudius/Queen Gertrude brought hilariously to life by “V,” with “K” sulking admirably as the melancholy Prince, things go awry. “K” is dropping his lines and missing cues. Soon the two “actors” have let go of the façade of recreating Hamlet and begin dissecting exactly why “K” can’t get through the show without making mistakes.

In an effort to pinpoint the problem, “K” and “V” do a riotous speed-through of the opening scenes that is one of the highlights of this production. But the main charms of One Man Hamlet lie in the interaction between the flesh-and-blood “K” and his video counterpart “V,” which brings to the forefront not only the duality of Hamlet’s character, but also, for that matter, all human beings.

Brewer does an outstanding job of creating two distinct personalities in “K,” the insecure lead actor, and “V,” the cheerleading supporting player. Of course, you are led to believe they are two different entities, but the reality is that they are two sides of the same coin: the id and ego of Mr. Brewer himself, with some super ego thrown in too for good measure. It is a credit to both the performer and director that the interaction between “K” and “V” seems truly organic. This is a nimble production that has dexterously combined live and filmed performances into a cohesive whole.

There is a lot of humor in The One Man (two man (not quite)) Hamlet and the audience I attended with laughed a lot, especially when the befuddled “K” addressed the audience directly, even though he did not truly believe we were there. (See the show for what that means exactly.) “V” also had many funny bits, including the play-within-the-play, where he utilized a hand puppet to great comic effect, and his spot-on characterization of a hipster-esque Rosencrantz.

Precisely and fluidly choreographed, One Man Hamlet is an ingenious production that only falters in the last 20 minutes. While everything up to that point has the freewheeling, manic energy of a comedy, the final quarter of the 80-minute show changes gears abruptly to tragedy. “K” begins exploring his fear of failure as an actor and his desire to be not only good in this role, but good — period. These series of (mostly) monologues may correlate directly to Hamlet’s own inner turmoil in the play that bears his name, but they turn One Man Hamlet from an inventive work exploring a singular production of Hamlet into a pop psychology piece about the travails of the acting profession. The tone changes from mirthful and merry to maudlin and morose. “Nothing and no one is perfect,” asserts the video doppelgänger to his real-life counterpart. Future versions of this show might consider cutting down this overly long section. As Queen Gertrude retorts to the loquacious Polonius in the original Hamlet: “More matter with less art.”

Regardless, The One Man (two man (not quite)) Hamlet is a terrific show that offers a fresh take on the Shakespeare classic and an inside look at the mindset of an actor struggling to break through — both personally and professionally. For Shakespeare and Hamletfans of all stripes, it's highly recommended for its originality and humor. “Remember me,” “K” says at the lights black out. I’ll surely remember The One Man (two man (not quite)) Hamlet.