Open Bar

Free beer is always good. At the Little Big Theater on the Lower East Side, the audience waiting for Happy Hour to begin is given free Pabst Blue Ribbons in cans and margaritas in clear plastic cups. The whole event underscores the old saying "They always look better at closing time." Based on Joelle Arqueros's compilation of monologues titled Sex, Relationships...and Sometimes Love, Happy Hour is a sloppy but fun incarnation by producing director Michael Horn. The 40-seat black box gets full of rowdy late-night theatergoers. The show plays at 10:30 p.m. and, if it starts late, lets out at midnight. By the witching hour, the audience is bubbling with booze, giddy from 18 vignettes about sex, and ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting Houston Street.

The cast flips through the short scenes—all are humorous and all are less than two minutes long. The opening vignette, "I Love You," features Meghan Reilly and Matthew Gologor in a slow dance. She faces the audience as they embrace and whispers in her lover's ear, "When I go to sleep, I wake up loving you more and more. It is like we have been blessed." As they turn in their dance, his petrified face turns toward the audience as she strokes his neck.

They meet again in one of the final scenes, "I Hate You," in the same embrace, Reilly facing out. She whispers, "It is like I have been cursed by your existence on this earth, and the world would be so gracious and cleansed if you were gone." The man's face remains unchanged from the first scene. How fickle is woman indeed.

The set is minimal—a bar and some tables and chairs against black masking. The cast is similarly costumed in all black, with the exception of Chala Savino, who dons a flowered red skirt to play a woman hungry for a new "flavor" of man in "Flavor Wheel."

The monologue "So Bored With You" is performed by Lisa Crisci in an exaggerated French accent that would make Pepé Le Pew proud. "Yes, I sought you were hot," she admits, "but now zee more that I know you, not a sing about you motivates me."

Horn does well to loosen the audience members up during the pre-show. The cast incorporates them often, especially the men. Their names are used, their laps are sat on, and their friends are propositioned. (That may sound like fun, but ultimately the joke's on them.) Derived from improv styles like that of Second City TV, Happy Hour has a rotating cast, some of whose members stay with the show and perform different roles; others are swapped in for actors with outside gigs. The show will run indefinitely.

All in all, Happy Hour is as significant as a one-night stand. The production is light and silly, and makes no weighty proclamations regarding romantic love or human emotion. It is fun to see this lively bunch crack some jokes while you crack open another free PBR.

Editor's Note: The original review of Happy Hour contained factual errors which were edited on June 6, 2006.

Club Scene

Three-year-old Tajmere Clark died an unnatural death on a recent Sunday. While on a drunken rampage, a crazed gunman shot and killed the African-American toddler in her East New York home. When Melvin Van Peebles wrote his 1971 musical Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death: Tunes From Blackness, he must have hoped that things would be different by 2006. No such luck. Two days before the Brooklyn shooting, Van Peebles stood in the back of the club T New York in Midtown. There, the Classical Theater of Harlem is reviving his Broadway musical for a rapacious city where black citizens still die unnaturally every day. Yet in spite of the topical title, the production feels more like a parody of a Fat Albert episode than a social commentary on urban violence and struggle.

The characters are Shaft-era stereotypes, including pimps, prostitutes, bag ladies, drug dealers, and cops. Or, more specifically, "Fatso," "Big Titties," "The Dyke," and "Sweet Daddy," among others. Interestingly, Van Peebles penned Ain't Supposed to Die at the same time he was working on Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which has been called the first "blaxploitation" film. The connection between the two is undeniable.

The production takes place in a nightclub where audience members sit at banquettes surrounding the dance floor, at bistro tables in the middle of the floor, and in a balcony overlooking it. The actors climb over and around the audience and play off of the people seated closest to the center. Two-for-one drink tickets can be purchased at the box office window, so you can sip your Tanqueray and tonic while watching street violence re-enacted near, or sometimes on, your table.

Songs ranging from "Lily Done the Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail" to "Come Raising Your Leg on Me" remind the audience that Van Peebles may have been less concerned with racial equality than with having a good time. (He did perform the hardcore sex scenes in Sweet Sweetback himself.)

Alfred Preisser directs for thrills here, mostly at the expense of the female cast members. Violence against women and forced prostitution is as serious today as it was 35 years ago. Instead of using the vicious and the exploitative to provoke disgust and dialogue, Preisser allows the pole dancing, sexual assaults, beatings, and draggings to continue for so long in so many scenes that one wonders if he is disgusted by these acts or intrigued by them. (Judging by the faces of some men in the audience, it may have been the latter.)

Van Peebles's songs rival Lenny Kravitz's for repetition. Most consist of one line repeated over and over. (The show is touted as a precursor to choreopoem, spoken word, and rap, so three cheers for evolution.) The cast is dedicated and energetic but lacks any real vocal power. The opening song, "It Just Don't Make No Sense," is sung almost entirely off-key. John-Andrew Morrison, as an unemployed man who sings "Mirror Mirror on the Wall," is one of the better vocalists, however.

The singers get no help from the orchestra because this live musical doesn't have one. The score is pre-recorded and played by DJs in a booth overlooking the club floor. Visual aspects make up for aural sloppiness. Some costumes are fun and playful, like the money-hungry pimp in a light-green leisure suit, while others are spot-on realistic, like the homeless woman (played very convincingly by Kimberlee Monroe) who could have easily been lured into the club from Eighth Avenue.

Ain't Supposed to Die ran on Broadway for nearly a year, from 1971 to 1972; racked up Tony and Grammy Award nominations; and laid the foundation for some of the most important styles in African-American music. This revival should have either made the rowdy relic pertinent to today's issues or simply let it die a natural death.

Silence Is Golden

In a time when you can download movies to your cell phone, a retreat into the world of silent film is refreshing. Take Love Is in the Air, the Pig Brooch theater company's quirky staging of a silent movie at the 14th Street Y Theater. An energetic cast of 10 (supported by an orchestra of four) plays out a simple tale of love gone awry against the backdrop of 1920's society. Dustin Helmer plays Hapless Henry, an earnest tramp whose libido follows the elegant and snobbish Aimee LaBlatte (Anna Moore) while his heart should belong to the shy and warm Plain Jane. In the style of Buster Keaton, Harry dashes about the stage in his bowler, avoiding the malevolence of Boffo Mysterioso and Aimee's dapper boyfriend Valentino.

The cause for the hullabaloo is an upcoming New Year's Eve dance, to which Henry hopes to take Aimee. Plain Jane has fallen for Henry in a typically zany love triangle. As Jane, Jennie Smith is sweet in her brown dress and pigeon-toed shoes. The tall and dark Seth Powers has an attractive brooding quality (something like Sawyer on TV's Lost) as Boffo Mysterioso; he brokers a Faustian bargain with Henry, who will go to any length to gain Aimee's affection. And, of course, we know what happens when you sell your soul to the devil.

With a round face and puppy-dog eyes, Helmer wins over your heart as the show's underdog. Petite and blond Anna Moore aptly plays spoiled socialite Aimee, with the best costumes of the bunch: a yellow silk flapper dress for the day, followed by a red beaded number for the New Year's dance.

Overall, the cast is adept and quick, and the high quality of the work begs for equally high production values somewhere Off-Broadway. Helmer created the ambitious piece, and he's well cast as the star in his own show. This production also boasts a fantastic properties manager, who goes unnamed. Giant restaurant menus and baseball-sized diamond rings are some of the creative props employed.

Scene changes are handled by a quartet of clowns billed as Slow Joe, Sleepy Sue, Saucy Seppy, and Stage Manager. The bits are at times entertaining; at other times, tedious. Genevieve Gearhart as Sleepy Sue makes the most of her small role, milking her stage time as best she can.

While the play is almost entirely silent, a ragtime underscore led by pianist Laura Blau keeps the audience's ears perked up. The cast and musicians are all well clad in Prohibition-era attire by Amelia Dombrowski.

Under Paul Peers's direction, the show is both charming and concise, clocking in at under an hour. The concept is muddied, though, by the theater company within a theater company gag. The real Pig Brooch company has concocted the Kiek in de Kök Players, who are the actors, clowns, and musicians from Estonia who decided to make this silent film into a stage play. (Why Estonia? That's never revealed.)

Still, it is interesting to see one genre transformed into another, namely silent film into a stage play. The show doesn't gel entirely, but with lines from the script projected onto the black backdrop and the actors' Chaplin-like pratfalls, Love Is in the Air remains endearing.

Our Daily Bread

Man cannot live by bread alone. He also needs puppets. If there is any doubt about that fact, the inimitable Bread and Puppet Theater dispels it with its current two-part offering, The National Circus and Passion of the Correct Moment. Lured in like kids to a candy store, the audience is delighted with The National Circus's opening scene with a white-bearded man on huge stilts. That is Bread and Puppet founder Peter Schumann, outfitted as Uncle Sam. He ambles in to "When the Saints Go Marching In," played with much verve by a little bouncing band. This isn't a nationalist pep rally, however.

As the weight of patchouli hangs in the air, a rumpled group of mostly college-age students enters the bare-bones stage at Theater for the New City. Their liberal earnestness is palpable

Paradise Now

One always seems to exist in the worst age in human history. Whether you wish to have been a milkmaid in a quiet Italian village or just a bumbling caveman in pelts, contemporary life is clouded by romanticized views of a "simpler" time, a better time. Parisian writer and director Pascal Rambert, however, posits the opposite in his current work, Paradis (Unfolding Time). What if we are living in paradise right now? Or, in his own words, "what you're now watching you will someday remember as a marvelous world, while today you think it's hell because paradise was what came before." As part of the five-month Act French festival, which brings new theater from France to New York, Paradis poses grandiose, existential questions in its four-night stint at the Dance Theater Workshop.

Eleven actors enter the wide, black stage wearing winter coats, jeans, boots. They slowly remove all of their clothes and stand naked before the audience. (The reverse Edenic gesture is one nod throughout the evening to images of paradise.) Upstage, a flag of yellow, green, and pink waves tirelessly for the duration of the show. The actors unfurl a large, yellow mat and place it center stage. This motif is the first of three, which follow as green and then pink.

This "yellow" scene is splashed with other colors—blue swivel chairs, multicolor blankets, black and silver microphones that dangle from the ceiling. The stage is lighted with fluorescent lights both above the stage and upstage, facing the audience. The naked bunch dart about the space, scattering like lost children in search of their mother. One beautiful woman stands on tiptoes to speak into a mike. A succession of rapid-fire questions begins in French-tinged English, "How do you begin? Do you begin like that? What do you think we want?"

Paradis is enervatingly frenetic and endearingly French. Few traces of American "comic relief" are found in this heavyhearted piece. "Why are we so alone?" is asked more than once. The second segment, noted by a green mat placed center stage, carries the weight of the work. Two small projection screens flank the mat—one of famous paintings of nude women, the other a video of an escalator with random riders. This postmodern work (or is it "late"-modern now?) pays homage to France's best existential thinkers from the theater wings: Sartre, Artaud, Lecoq.

Kate Moran stands out as the only American actress and as one of the central "characters" in the ensemble. It is she who has her heart literally torn out during the green scene. There is much tumbling and various headstands. Some movements are done in sync, but there is little in the way of overt choreography.

Rambert wants to make a terribly beautiful statement, and to some level he succeeds. Still, feeling the loss of paradise—or confronting the possibility that we are blind to a utopia within our grasp—should seem more harrowing and less clinical. The sparse, cloying text is interwoven with movement, and words are passed from actor to actor like a hot potato.

The final, pink scene begins with a few statements, one of which is "You are the product. It's scary. You will see." Even more questions are posed toward the end: "Do you love me? Could you? Would you? Why did you expel me from the center?" Rambert's text alludes to Darwin and Copernicus as those whose findings have pushed human beings out of the center of the universe to the fringe. He adds that genetic engineering is the next step in removing us farther from the coveted middle. As fringe theater, Paradis seems to have found its proper place in the theater universe.

Ol' Man Robeson

The media's darling of the day is rapper 50 Cent, whose face is splayed across movie screens in the bio-pic Get Rich or Die Tryin'. The publicity poster encapsulates that tough trajectory with an image of the tattooed rapper, a baby in one arm and a gun in the back of his jeans. If we take our cultural cues from the media, that is the face of African-American ambition in 2005. Not too long ago there was another popular recording artist who showed, in quite different colors, how difficult and precious the rise to popular success can be for a black man in America. The New Federal Theater is mounting Phillip Hayes Dean's 1978 play with music, Paul Robeson, whose Broadway debut starred James Earl Jones. The son of a former slave turned an all-American athlete, Broadway star, lawyer, and global activist, Robeson remains one of the most stellar individuals of the 20th century.

New Federal is making its home at the Abron Arts Center, tucked just a few blocks under the Williamsburg Bridge on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Known as the breeding ground for some of the best black actors in America

Hurts So Good, Ja?

Some critics do everything in their power to craft a review from which no one can pull a quote for marketing purposes. Others, though they may not admit it, yearn to see their name emblazoned under an exclamatory phrase on a city bus or in a theater company's season brochure. I have been neither of these thus far in my reviewing career, but be forewarned. The following review of Soir

Call Me Crazy

One-person shows are difficult. One-person shows about mental disorders are even harder. In Gary Mizel's play Memoirs of a Manic Depressive, Dexter Brown journeys through the ups and downs in the life of a man with bipolar disorder. From riding high in a red Porsche to being terrified by alien voices in the living room, Mizel's story is at once disconcerting and heartening. The show takes place at the Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street, named for the Broadway director and Off-Broadway champion. (Best known, perhaps, for his controversial staging of Jean Genet's The Blacks in 1960.) His theater school, where the motto was "You don't just get the Gene Frankel technique, you get Gene Frankel," closed upon his death this past April. The theater has continued producing, and Memoirs features two of his disciples: Brown and director Lorca Peress.

This is Mizel's first foray into playwriting, and as a man with bipolar disorder himself, it is clear that this is one way he can portray the ever-changing world in which he lives. Lucky for us, he has a sense of humor: "See, bipolars used to be called manic-depressives, but I think a better euphemism would be 'the sanely challenged.' "

Brown has spent far more time in the theater world than Mizel has; plus, he personally trained with Frankel. It is odd, then, that it is Brown's pacing that allows Mizel's script to often drop precipitously. That said, he does a commendable job at evoking deep emotions, such as the wracking grief of his mother's death or the excessive elation of a manic episode.

While the play's title may be daunting, the content is actually peppered with candid humor, especially to audience members who know people with bipolar disorder and understand the power of understatement. At one point, the character "Gary" admits, "I take drugs. Specifically, Zoloft, Lithium, Trilofon. With them I get to be human. But before I was diagnosed as bipolar, I was, shall we say, 'moody.' "

Evidently, Mizel's life has been quite a challenge--from his mother's suicide to his own mental illness. This is a brave play, publicly airing the inner struggles of a man with a trying disease. Dale Wasserman made some strides in this area with his 1963 stage version of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Tennessee Williams's shaky little Laura in The Glass Menagerie arguably has a mental illness; and, of course, Jessie Cates in 'night, Mother is anything but well. But the man in Memoirs finds a happier ending than those characters, thus making mental illness less of a spectacle and more of a difficult struggle that can end in victory.

Unlike those other full-length plays, too, Memoirs demands a virtuoso solo performance. While Brown is capable enough to get the audience through the 90-minute piece, he moves less than gracefully through the tumultuous scenes. A tough job, though, to be sure. In his worn-out jeans, white sneakers, and blue button-down, he does not embody the Manhattan stockbroker the character is meant to be.

Peress has also encouraged a lot of direct addresses to the audience, which is always a bit disconcerting if the fourth wall is not broken early on. In this case, it is especially disconcerting because this is a one-man play, not a comedy routine or a tell-all. Her sound design, however, is spot-on, with apt entrance music and well-done voiceovers as the voices in Mizel's head.

While bipolar disorder affects only about 3 percent of the world's adult population, those who have it suffer mightily from the auditory hallucinations ("hearing voices"), delusions, and severe swings between mania and depression. If these Memoirs leave us with anything, though, it is the confidence that such an affliction can be overcome.

Trying It Out

The Theatre-Studio Inc. offers aspiring theater artists something incredibly unique in New York City: free space in Midtown. If a play is chosen as part of the TSI/PlayTime Series, it will receive at least two performances free of charge at 750 Eighth Avenue. What this means to the audience, however, is something less exhilarating. TSI provides one of the few spaces south of Manhattan's 110th Street where actors, playwrights, directors, and producers can experiment with their art without cramming a cast of 10 into a roach-infested living room or taking on three more bartending jobs to pay for a black box rental. TSI and producing and artistic director A.M. Raychel are to be commended for that.

In addition to its Main Stage productions, the company offers a PlayTime Series, a year-round offering of various one-act plays that change almost every weekend and are produced with minimal production values.

On May 11, the Series offered three short plays, A Blooming of Ivy by Garry Williams, Feeding Ducks by Lindsay Newitter, and Lost and Found by Denis J. Harrington. It was clear that each piece was just stumbling to its feet as a solid work of theater, but a few redeeming moments in each mollified the spectators.

A Blooming of Ivy was conceived by Indiana-based writer Garry Williams, with Michael Menger at the helm of the 20-minute staging. Letty Serra plays Ivy, a 60-year-old widow who is a strong farm worker and a strong woman, having raised two daughters since her husband's death 20 years ago. Her next-door neighbor, George Thomas, is a feisty widower, and both are struggling with grief and loss. The show explores the possibility of companionship after a long and forgotten absence of it, and offers an Off-Off-Broadway audience a story from outside of the city streets.

Although Serra is an Actors' Equity member who studied with the inimitable Stella Adler, her performance as the proud and lonely Ivy does not reach above mediocre. Yes, the piece is short, but neither actor sufficiently sinks his or her teeth into the part to make this simple and sweet play as full as it yearns to be.

Feeding Ducks is a 15-minute piece, far more esoteric than A Blooming of Ivy. Newitter is a New York-based playwright, and it shows. Her work is sharp and cynical with an absurd bent. The action centers around a duck pond, perhaps in Central Park, where New York characters

Flashback

In Brooklyn's refreshingly roomy St. Ann's Warehouse, the Wooster Group is remounting its 1999 creation House/Lights. The city's champion of the avant-garde has temporarily abandoned its snug Manhattan home, and, while the breathing room is welcome, one cannot shake the feeling of being dead-bolted into an asylum. A conflation of Gertrude Stein's 1938 play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph P. Mawra's 1964 "lesboitation" film Olga's House of Shame, this 75-minute multimedia trip takes the audience on a mind-searing journey through sound, space, psychology, and sex. One of the Wooster Group's founding members, Kate Valk, plays both Stein's Faustus and Mawra's Elaine in a seductively manic performance. The nimble and gorgeous actress defies age, time, and space

Go Uptown, Young Man

If you expect a certain ethnicity among the actors at the National Black Theatre in Harlem, drop that illusion right now. Among the multi-talented cast of nine in the Harlem Theater Project

Island Hopping

The current production at La MaMa E.T.C. bears some resemblance to its name: ArchipelaGo! could represent some islands off of which you would like to get voted. Constructed in a series of personal vignettes and "performance art" interludes, the hour-long piece recounts fascinating family tales to little effect. The nine-year-old performance group, SLANT, is comprised of three Asian-American men: Richard Ebihara, Wayland Quintero, and Perry Yung. The show begins with a prolonged prelude of white fog billowing under blue and red lights--with the bare-chested, goggle-wearing trio jaggedly slicing the clouds with their flashlights. Then they gather around a circular table and strap on Asian micro-gongs to continue the wordless scene with music. Before long, though, the action gives way to the text and the mystery diffuses with the fog.

Each performer's family hails from an island (or at least spent some time on one). Yung's Chinese grandfather was imprisoned on Angel Island off of the coast of California; Quintero's Filipino family worked on Hawaiian plantations; and Ebihara's forebears ran a diner on Terminal Island in the Pacific until they were forced out with the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The stage, then, is literally set with three powerful, personal backgrounds that all Americans (save the Native ones) can connect with as immigrants. The men are physically-fit, apt musicians with a history of explosive, original work as a collective. Perhaps they are resting on their laurels this time around.

Wayland Quintero is a sweet but unsure storyteller, who divulges fond childhood memories of an unmarried Filipino worker who had to pay the famous "ten cents a dance" just to be near a woman. The background is edifying and horrifying: Filipino immigrants, most of whom arrived in Hawaii and California between 1911 and 1920, were not allowed to bring their wives with them to the U.S., and anti-miscegenation laws further prevented them from socializing with white women. Many were left without any companionship or families. Quintero's story is fascinating, but his shaky storytelling is not.

A few scenes later, Richard Ebihara performs an original piano piece about Terminal Island (whose first few notes sound strikingly like Mark Cohn's "Walking In Memphis"). He pauses between verses to tell the story of his grandfather who owned a diner that catered to the early-morning cannery workers, shipyard men and other hard laborers. He was given 48 hours to evacuate when the U.S. government began interning Japanese Americans during WWII. Again, this scene has promise as a history lesson, but never catches fire as a piece of theater.

It is the wiry Perry Yung who finally ushers some magic onto the stage. In a children's show sketch, he creates an ancient shakuhachi flute onstage. Traditionally carved out of bamboo and punctured with a hot stick, this flute is created out of "local" materials: a plastic pipe and a power drill. In the creation of this instrument, Yung captures the history of his heritage and yanks it into a contemporary experience--a swirl of ancient Chinese flutes reverberating with the city subway's warm wind. It is beautiful.

As their seventh original production, ArchipelaGo! was designed for audiences of all ages--a new demographic for SLANT. When they began in 1995, the group's premiere gig was Big Dicks, Asian Men and their repertoire was clearly edgier and more flamboyant. "To adapt to the needs of family-friendly theater," La MaMa explains, "SLANT is a bit heavier on the puppetry and toy monkeys, and light on the language. Gone are the double-entendres." Unfortunately, while letting the kids in, SLANT has let the charisma out.