In a sea of Off-Off Broadway productions, each vying for the same theatergoing audience, it is difficult not to be drawn in, or repelled, by a publicity line. For example, Firebrand Theory's production of Venus in Furs may suffer as much as it benefits from its proudly declared themes. As described, these themes
Life in the arts, particularly in theater, can be glorious, uplifting, and life changing. Of course, with this high that blesses so many hopefuls also comes the potential for extreme disappointment, exploitation, and devastation. Theater and film are littered with stories about life in theater and film, and among the examples of the glittery rise and fall tale are A Chorus Line, Gypsy, Rent, A Star Is Born, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Or, for another instance of this dramatic arc, see 21 Stories: A Broadway Tale, now at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. Written by G.W. Stevens, directed by Michael Berry, and co-starring Stevens and Marilyn Rising, 21 Stories is often appealing and sometimes touching. But it does little to improve upon the genre, filled as it is with navel-gazing artists.
Set in 1984, the play chronicles the experiences of two young people who move to New York City to pursue their dreams. Billy Youngblood, played by Stevens with a consistent look of wide-eyed hopefulness and a toothy half-smile, is a native of Yorkshire, England. Back home he was a popular football enthusiast, but in New York he is an aspiring Broadway dancer. Margaret Evans, played by Rising, is from Texas. Abandoned by her father at a young age after he instilled in her a love and talent for the piano, she runs away to New York to find her father and perhaps become a great pianist.
Both are living on the 21st floor of a Manhattan high-rise, and they become friends who support each other through their trials: Margaret's Vicatin addiction and Billy's relationship with a drug-abusing playboy.
The set is mostly decorated with two elements: impressionistic images of New York and an ensemble of dancers who create the ambience for most scenes. Mostly wordless throughout the show, the nine dancers rush onstage to create crowded city streets, a busy club scene, small pieces of big musicals, and unfriendly swarms of cattle-call auditioners.
The dancers' presence, and the way they engulf Billy and Margaret and enrich their environments, is one of the most engaging and remarkable elements in the production. And the fact that every Broadway song is lip-synced and no one ever sings (except Billy, who sings in spurts and usually just for emphasis) may be simply for convenience, but it also adds a ghostly quality to the ensemble.
Because those emotional, half-sung moments go to Billy, he clearly owns the show, even though 21 Stories is billed as a look at a "couple of misfits." Understandably, Stevens, one of the co-writers, spends more time examining his character, who (spoiler alert) by the end succumbs to the despair of having contracted AIDS from a callous lover and then kills him and himself. Margaret, who we learn through a brief hint has prostituted herself for Vicatin, also kills herself, apparently for no other reason than her failure to find her father and the fact that she didn't get into Juilliard.
Stevens, while unquestionably charismatic and energetic, becomes a bit of a one-trick pony, relying on his considerable charm and watery blue eyes to create a sympathetic character. And while Billy's story is interesting, it doesn't give enough new insight into the tragedy of AIDS (or into broken hearts and dreams) to sustain a two-person show. Anyone who saw the semi-autobiographical Jonathan Larson musical Tick, Tick
This season on Broadway, testosterone has been as prevalent as the New York City summer heat. What is perhaps most remarkable about this phenomenon, however, is not the noticeable dominance of male-heavy shows but the significance of their content and the frustrating lack of comparable significance in shows featuring all-women casts. Steel Magnolias may be a diverting enough play, but it withers next to the drama and sheer power and urgency of Democracy or Twelve Angry Men. For those seeking a play about female empowerment and strength, one not focused solely on the drama of getting married or giving birth, there is a welcome respite in the current Off-Off-Broadway production of Kevin O'Morrison's Ladyhouse Blues at the Linhart Theatre. Directed by Marc Weitz and produced by 3 Graces Theater Co., a theater company "committed to exposing and exploring the power of women's experience through theater," the play revolves around the issues facing the four Madden sisters and their mother, who live in St. Louis in 1919. At times a bit overstuffed, Ladyhouse Blues is nevertheless a charming and touching look at a family of women who are close enough to lean on each another, but strong enough to stand on their own.
Set in the kitchen of the Madden home, the play starts while the audience is filtering in, with actors in turn-of-the-century working-class garb passing out fans and fruit and hawking their wares from the wings. Designed by Alexis Distler, the set, a skeletal frame of a large kitchen, is cleverly suggestive enough to provide a homey setting where the Madden family convenes to discuss all-important family business, yet sparse enough to allow the ensemble to create ambience-setting, between-scenes montages of wartime and struggle.
Indeed, the Madden sisters are products of their hard times. Eylie, the youngest, is a waitress who, along with her suffragist sister Terry, brings in the only income. Helen, who is married to a man of German descent, has consumption, is not allowed to see her young child, and can barely leave her home. Dot, a New York transplant and former model, is pregnant with the second child of her socialite husband, whose family does not approve of her. Liz, their mother, has had to raise her six children alone since she was 26, after the death of her husband, and her only son, Bud, is fighting in the Great War.
If this sounds like a lot of plot points, it is. And yet, the travails of these very different sisters weave a tapestry of love and labor that becomes engaging and heartwarming.
Weitz does an admirable job of attempting to meld both the elements of societal influence and private values. Yet his direction sometimes gets muddy, as when the ensemble, whether peddling wares or singing with a visiting revival, frequently overpowers the dialogue. Weitz also fails to rein in the play's focus in the second act. The play's most dramatic event, involving the sisters' brother Bud, fails to resonate as it perhaps should, because there is so much left to resolve or even address.
This lack of resolution also lies in a lack of focus for at least some of the characters. Most of the sisters' love and strength and rebellion come from their mother Liz, played by Kathleen Bishop with a little too much aw-shucks, quirky-yet-strong, "Southern" cartoonishness. And as the matron, she is given the play's most whopping one-liners, which she delivers without restraint, such as "God, I can't help but feelin' if you was a woman, you'da done it different."
Yet her performance is also paired with some wonderfully nuanced ones. Annie McGovern's Dot, the ailing, pregnant wife of a New England aristocrat, is wonderful to watch as she uses her dainty features to full comic potential, and to also show her suffering. Nitra Gutierrez fills the stage with energy and warmth as Eylie, and Dorothy Abrahams as Terry, the suffragist, is full of charm and passion.
Ladyhouse Blues is not a perfect production. Weitz's direction sometimes lacks delicacy, and some of the acting at times feels heavy-handed and overwrought. Despite those small flaws, the play will touch you in unexpected ways. "Ladyhouse" is an old word for a house full of women waiting for their men to return from war. Perhaps it would be appropriate to find another title for this play about a group of strong women who are so engaging to watch.
In times of great political or social unrest, sometimes there's solace in drawing parallels to similar periods of unrest in history. Sometimes we use these comparisons to make a note of our current mistakes and learn from them, and sometimes we use these parallels to lampoon those who dare to make the same mistakes again. The latter is the case with Waterwell's new production, The Persians...A Comedy About War With Five Songs. A lively, modern adaptation of Aeschylus's tragedy The Persians, this play draws less than subtle and less than favorable comparisons between a current Middle Eastern conflict and the ancient Persian Empire's squandering of wealth and force on a war steeped in vanity. Performed by four talented young actors with tongue-in-cheek bravado, along with an in-house band of two, the play is often funny and artful.
Yet it also suffers from the now common presumption in current Off-Off-Broadway plays that jokes about the ludicrousness of war are easy to make, since their audiences consist primarily of young New Yorkers who will readily agree. Selling this self-righteous, two-year-old joke with a new twist detracts from the impact of an otherwise fresh show and makes it feel largely like watching an inside joke.
The play opens with its cast bantering softly as the audience members walk in to take their seats. The set and costumes are coolly stark. The four actors, one woman and three men, wear black suits and hats, which they shed and add pieces to while playing various characters throughout the show, including "themselves."
Elizabeth Payne's costume design is clever and malleable, as when a wholly suited Hanna Cheek makes a sexy transformation onstage to Queen Atossa by adding just a tie and gloves. Sabrina Baswell's lighting design makes the most of the small space, heightening the most dramatic moments in the show, from the return of Xerxes from battle to the tight spotlight on the Fosse-inspired opening musical number. And Lauren Cregor's original music is excellent, referencing known styles from jazz to 70's funk.
The actors themselves bring vigor and confidence to their highly personalized lines. As Darius, the deceased former Persian king who returns to life to sing a greeting to his wife Atossa, Rodney Gardiner has a rich baritone voice and a self-mocking charm. Cheek plays Atossa with slinky elegance. As Xerxes, Arian Moayed exudes both intensity and goofiness as he slips between classical text and reality TV-type confessionals, and between English and the Iranian language of Farsi. And Tom Ridgely as the Herald is untiringly dynamic.
Yet these actors, for all their successful work as an ensemble, cannot escape the odd unevenness of the play's dialogue and theme. Frequently, the performers, having assumed their characters, recite long classical speeches, only to follow with an ironic self-reference. In one early scene, Cheek, as Atossa, recalls a dream she had, which is re-enacted by the other three actors in a balletic dumb show. The weight Cheek gives the speech as Atossa is lost when she switches to a light, contemporary, vernacular style.
The same is the case when Moayed enters as Xerxes to lament the loss of "Persia's sons." The care and import he gives to that moment of tragedy at the end of the play is simply odd because it seems to come out of nowhere.
Though only an hour and 15 minutes, The Persians is an excellent showcase for young talent and creativity at work on an ambitious, if generic, theme. The contrast between a classical text and a contemporary style has been used countless times before, often with success. Yet while the personalities here shine onstage, the context is far too uneven to be poignant, and far too serious to be really funny.
Out of context, Machinal is an astonishing and unique portrayal of one woman's battle with the crippling forces of poverty and social expectations and an unwilling dependence on a loveless marriage. Yet even more remarkable is the story of this play's growing popularity and the emergence of its protagonist, a nondescript, middle-class young woman, as a universal figure. Written by Sophie Treadwell, a reporter, in 1928, Machinal was unlike anything American theatergoers had experienced before. Treadwell loosely based the story on the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of Ruth Snyder, who was convicted, with her lover Judd Gray, of murdering her husband. Produced on Broadway in 1928, the play was immensely successful with its shocking subject matter, abstract and robotically lyrical language, and popular leading man, Clark Gable.
Yet the play was largely forgotten until the 1990's, when it had a number of revivals. It was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, starring Fiona Shaw; Off-Broadway by Naked Angels in 1999; and in a number of Off-Off Broadway productions in 2001 and 2003, not to mention countless national and college productions. One reason it has enjoyed such popularity is that it has lost little of its original resonance. The story of the Young Woman, who is forced by fear of poverty and loneliness to marry and start a family with a man she doesn't love, is a familiar one. As she struggles with a different kind of loneliness, that of being married to a stranger, she finally explodes with sadness, anger, desperation, and self-destruction. She is a powerful character, perhaps as notable a down-and-out Every(wo)man as Willy Loman, and with her frequently lengthy monologues about terrifyingly mundane subject matter, she draws you into her head and leaves you struggling not to empathize with her.
At least, that is the play's potential. Mishandled, it becomes at first a cartoonish take on the burdens of industry and domestic life, and at last an absurdist spin on a Chicago-like trial drama. Unfortunately, albeit with some notable exceptions, the Dreamscape Theatre's new production is a little too much of the latter.
The play starts off with a bang. With director Morgan Anne Zipf's decisive, traditional interpretation, complete with Mara Canlas's period costumes and music and Carlton Ward's fluid, imaginative lighting design, the first "episodes" of the Young Woman's journey are engrossing. Yet as these episodes progress, and set pieces from each scene are piled in a corner of the stage, the production loses steam and begins to feel sloppy. It also loses its edge and self-awareness, and finally settles for a cringe-worthy misuse of the Law & Order theme before the dramatic trial scene at the end.
The play's backbone, undoubtedly, is the Young Woman, and Molly Pope does a formidable job with this difficult role. She makes sense of the character's long streams of nonsequential dialogue, and endows the Young Woman with a tragic combination of frailty and strength-imbuing frustration. But this strange world is constructed out of a dramatic irony. The audience is the only listener privy to the Young Woman's reflections on how her world is treating her. In the context of her existence onstage as an isolated character, it is understandable that she is alone and relates only to the audience. However, in the context of her life onstage, she must relate to the other characters; otherwise, her point about loneliness in even a social setting is flawed.
Pope, though compelling to watch, often seems as if she is onstage by herself. She vehemently decries her boss-turned-husband's "fat hands" and overbearing demeanor, yet in actuality her husband, played by Richard Lovejoy with childlike bounce and insecurity, doesn't seem nearly as intimidating as her many cringes and sidelong glances would imply.
Pope's engrossment with her own character, however, is not singular. Most of the ensemble members, though bringing a number of colorful characters to life, often lose sight of the play's tone. The most notable example is the shouting match of a trial scene that seems completely out of sync with the rest of the play. Zipf's staging might have been more successful had she reigned in the ensemble to create a more consistent world.
Machinal is a great play that presents a tremendous amount of challenges both in production and performance. Zipf and the Dreamscape Theatre, though not entirely successful in confronting these challenges, deserve credit for such an ambitious production.
Contemporary political satire can be powerful, exciting, controversial, and, most of all, hilarious. But political satire in the theater can suffer from some innate impediments
As different as they are delightful, the new plays that are part of EATFest: Spring 2005 make a strong showing. The festival's first selections, those of Series A, range in theme from an estranged middle-aged couple sharing a holiday in a hostile, Third World vacation spot, to a young girl trying to connect with her parents at her greatest moment of fear and separation, to a zany look at the dating destiny of a gay man at 40. Though varying in theme and tone, what the plays share is a vein of sweet and sad acceptance. With humor, irony, and sensitivity, each is touching and unique.
In the first, Foreign Bodies, it is clear from the start that Victoria and Maz are incapable of leaving behind memories of their cold British lives long enough to enjoy the first moments of their holiday abroad. In fact, the extremes to which they go, popping "harmony pills" to forget their dreary home life, numb them to the point of oblivion.
Written by Andrew Biss and directed by Dylan McCullough, Foreign Bodies is a gleefully dire, tongue-in-cheek look at how we lose our perceptiveness the more we try to smooth out the edges of our lives and relationships. Kurt Kingsley as Max and Laura Fois as Victoria are sharp and very funny as their characters, wide-eyed and unconcerned, banter casually and eventually turn a blind eye to imminent dangers.
In Asteroid Belt, Carly, a young college student on her way home from a play rehearsal, realizes in the play's opening minutes that she is about to die in a car accident. In that moment, she attempts to logically reflect on the illogical elements that placed her in such danger. In doing so, she also tries to connect with her parents by following them in spirit through the routine of worrying about the late-night whereabouts of their child.
Writer Lauren Feldman creates impressively touching characters with her simple use of detail. Carly's father, Jay (Sam Sagenkahn), tries to distract his anxious wife, Sue (Valerie David), by poking fun at her dislike of Mary Higgins Clark. And Carly reflects that she is ill equipped to handle her accident because she was "never good at spontaneity," and that if she had been, she would have gone into "firefighting...or improv."
Directed by Caden Hethorn, these characters all come to life with warmth and realism, particularly Carly (Rachel Eve Moses), who gives the most affecting performance of the evening.
The final play, Invisible, written by Marc Castle and directed by Mark Finley, is the most absurd and the most fun. In a gay nightclub, Jerry (Jack Garrity), who has just turned 40, is perplexed when his advances on younger men are worse than ignored
Faith is an awfully open-ended subject on which to base a play. Faith in God, faith in relationships, faith that human beings are essentially good
The good news about Texas Homos is that it isn't as bad as it sounds. The bad news is that it is not even within spittin
No matter how they are reinvented, there are certain elements of the best-known Greek tragedies that are simply unavoidable. We hear their names and immediately make associations. The familiar story of Medea, the mother who murdered her children to punish her husband Jason for leaving her, is no exception. Yet La MaMa's current production of The Medea, conceived and directed by Jay Scheib, makes admirable strides in changing our concept of the play by addressing not just its emotional content but its structure as well. Performed in reverse chronological order, this Medea pays homage to the modern detective novel and attempts to circumvent the audience's anticipation of the play's end and instill a fresh sense of suspense in the text. As a means to a cataclysmic end, Scheib uses this method, as well as such multimedia as operatic live music and edgy video, to heighten moments in the play that often get overlooked.
Frequently successful and always engaging, The Medea provides a new way of looking at a classic. Though sometimes confusing and tangential, this Medea takes a bold look at a succession of small events and how they add up.
At the start of the show, the nurse, who throughout the play acts as a meditative and horrified observer, stands at the back of the stage. The set that the audience sees consists of a dark mess of chairs, brick walls, and a large mirror. There is also a haphazardly constructed, ceilingless room onstage.
Michael Byrnes's scenic design offers an interesting contrast of environments and action. The inside of the room, visible only through video cameras that selectively broadcast the room's happenings on two large onstage monitors, is usually a calm, warmer place than outside onstage. Lined with a panoramic picture of tropical islands, the room offers a respite where music is played and where Medea can gather her thoughts. One of the most interesting moments, when Medea seduces Jason one last time in a violent, graphic sex scene, is simultaneously coupled with images of the nurse and Medea's sons smiling and eating apples with casual enjoyment in the room.
Mostly, though, the scenes evolve simply. Interestingly, with the Medea myth stripped of its natural progression, its moments come in short bursts, and the most powerful moments are revealed not by Jason or Medea but by the character whose perspective comes the closest to being comprehensive: the nurse. Played by Aimee McCormick, the nurse stands bent and in awe of the happenings around her. Though the chronology is reversed, one senses that the nurse understands the ominous nature of each moment.
This is a privilege that is taken away from Zishan Ugurlu, who plays Medea with a series of slow-burning stares and violent, physical outbursts. Without the play's natural build, this Medea loses her decision process and feels falsely violent.
One of the most provocative and surprising elements to surface from this spin on Medea's family relationships is the reaction from her sons, played by Dima and Oleg Dubson with alarming, heavy-eyed detachment. Their laissez-faire attitude toward the chaos around them and their willingness to comply with the biddings of their disturbed mother are at once hilarious and horrible to watch. The consistency with which the sons move through each scene, as if not caring about what their eventual ends might be, is bizarrely intriguing.
The Medea is well acted and very interestingly conceived. Scheib's detective-story format provides an unusual method of building suspense and drawing focus to perhaps overlooked moments of this epic myth. Yet what he loses in this retelling is the characters' self-reflection, and the motivation behind the chaos.
Simply put, International WOW Company
If you could meet any person, dead or alive, who would it be? We have all been asked this conversational ice breaker at one time or another, perhaps at a party or a less-than-ebullient first date. In Spike Jonze
Dan Rather, longtime CBS new anchor, is a monument. Before his recent brush with the faulty records regarding George W. Bush, he was a paragon of media
