Pure Joyce

If they had been stupid, this would have been easy. Had the people behind Medicine Show's production of Finnegan's Wake simply been inept, a review would have been simple to write.

However, there is an intelligence behind the show, a calculation behind every prop, every gesture, every song and piece of choreography. Someone went through a great deal of time and effort to present Finnegan's Wake exactly as I saw it. This makes my job harder.

Why was such a well-constructed piece of theater so awful?

Let's start with the basics. The show was adapted from the James Joyce novel of the same name

The Fight's the Thing

One good thing right off the bat: A Beginner's Guide to Deicide, like The Brothers Karamazov and Tess of the d'Urbervilles before it, stands proudly in the great literary tradition of spiritual discovery through buxom redheads with pointy weapons. Huh? In all fairness, I dozed in English class.

Nonetheless, there is a singular event occurring at Center Stage: the continuing evolution of a completely original theatrical aesthetic. The play surrounding it is terrible, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go.

A Beginner's Guide to Deicide tells the story of Lucy (Andrea Marie Smith), a redheaded schoolgirl who wields the aforementioned weapons. Lucy and her sister, Skeeter (Caitlyn Darr), travel through time on a mission to kill God (Dan Deming), along the way murdering the big guy's allies (Joan of Arc, Dante) and his enemies (Nietzsche, Martin Luther, Henry VIII). A stage manager (Nathan Lemoine) keeps things humming along.

The play is Kmart theology at its worst, the kind of half-formed ideas a rebellious parochial-school student concocts during Bible study

Simply Wasted

Wasted has a fabulous concept. There is a nameless genre of theater I am fond of, in which a show presents a condensed version of a huge topic, like the history of America or lessons in Western literature. Wasted is subtitled The History of Public Education in the United States and How It Got That Way, which heightened my expectations. I guess that was my mistake.

Playwright Michael Goodfriend, working from a concept by Jim Niesen and the Irondale Ensemble, constructed his play as a film noir. The beginning introduces us to private detective Sam Slate, who is hired to find Jimmy, a missing schoolboy, and investigate the ominous Big Red Schoolhouse.

Private detective? Missing people? Ominous? Huh?

It was a trick, you see. In the subtitle, the word "history" is crossed out, and "mystery" is substituted instead. In fact, Wasted matches the plot of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep pretty much point for point, right down to the retired military man who is the detective's client and the blond femme fatale.

So Sam Slate asks some questions around the Big Red Schoolhouse, which is actually a bizarre mishmash of every education figure and concept of the last century. John Dewey, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, is there, along with teachers from segregated classrooms and the author of the "Dick and Jane" readers. Heck, there's even a phrenologist.

There are villains, too, who usually represent businessmen who have sinister intentions toward the school and mutter ominous phrases like "No child left behind!" while cackling with glee. (I couldn't tell you what their intentions are, because they're never really made clear

With Its 'Heart' on Its Sleeve

First, a confession. I missed three performances of The Hasty Heart in a row before I finally saw it. I nearly missed it entirely. The loss, clearly, would have been mine.

The Keen Company and director Jonathan Silverstein have assembled a cast of impressive talent and let them loose. The group has an old-soldier ease, the familiarity of an Elks lodge during happy hour. Their interactions are so affectionate and look so much fun that I was tempted to join, to get out of my seat and play solitaire with the boys.

John Patrick's The Hasty Heart takes place in a British Army hospital in South Asia, during the waning days of the Second World War. We see a single wing with six beds, occupied by five soldiers from the disparate colonies (and former colonies) of the Empire: the gentle Blossom (Chris Chalk), an African native who speaks little and understands less; compulsive gambler Kiwi (Paul Swinnerton), from New Zealand; the stuttering American, Yank (Chris Hutchison); tubby Englishman Tommy (Anthony Manna); and Digger (Brian Sgambati), the Australian.

One bed is empty, to be occupied by Lachie (Keith Nobbs), a Scottish soldier dying of kidney failure. He has, at most, a few weeks left, and the stuffy Colonel (Stephen Bradbury) asks the raucous men and their lovely nurse (Emily Donahoe) to look after him. A dying man, he says, should have some friends by his side.

There is just one problem

Eat the Taste? Don't Mind If I Do!

Several times during Eat the Taste, I seriously contemplated yelling, "Is there a doctor in the house?" The Barrow Street Theater should consider adding some sort of emergency medical technician to their staff, in addition to ticket-takers and ushers; there is, a very real possibility that, at the end of Eat the Taste, your gut will be busted and your sides permanently split from laughing too hard.

Eat the Taste is the latest venture by playwright Greg Kotis, who wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics for the Tony Award-winning musical Urinetown. It stars Mr. Kotis and his writing partner, composer Mark Hollmann, as themselves. It takes place several years in the future, at the end of a second Bush administration, as three agents of the Department of Homeland Security and Attorney General John Ashcroft

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' on the Bus

There is a groove going on uptown at the Harlem School of the Arts; there is rhythm and there is blues, there is soul and there is funk, heck, a couple of times there is even some good old-fashioned musical theater. Buy a ticket and get your booty on the D train. Nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in its original 1971 Broadway production, Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, the Classical Theater of Harlem tells us, paved the way for the choreopoem, spoken word, and rap music. Legendary impresario Melvin Van Peebles has concocted a great bluesy, jazzy, and above all, poetic paean to a specific time and a specific place�most specifically black urban neighborhoods of the early 1970s.

Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death is about the comings-and-goings of this neighborhood, a pointillist portrait of a community using no drama save its residents� daily lives, no antagonist save a general malaise called "the man." In a series of musical monologues, the residents sing their fears, frustrations, criminations, recriminations, and regrets�all blending together into a unified cry of pain.

(l to r) Carmen Barika and Ty Jones in Ain't Supposed to Die A Natural Death Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg
Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg

But that is not to say it is not any fun.

In the opening scene of the show, Sunshine (the ebullient D. Rubin Green) walks onstage appearing mighty annoyed as he watches something go by, looks toward the audience, and cries "It just don�t make no sense how these corns are hurtin� me!" Sunshine gets on the bus and is joined in rapid succession by his neighbors, running and winding across the stage in a snaky conga line; an exciting beginning, and also the best impersonation of careening public transport this reviewer has ever seen.

That is only one of several songs, of course, and one of several characters; there is a pimp and his prostitutes, a country boy-turned Nation of Islam proponent, a drag queen and an angry lesbian, a convict on Death Row, a sad, fat man, and more. Each character has a song, each character has a moment, and almost all of it is arresting.

	(l-r) Rashaad Ernesto Green and J. Kyle Manzay in Ain't Supposed to Die A Natural Death
	Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg

There are highlights�the aforementioned Sunshine; the lesbian, Dyke (Tracy Jack) who sings a plaintive song to her unseen lover, pleading that she go to a dance with her; The Con (J. Kyle Manzay), singing to lover, Lilli, the girl he murdered; the crooked Black Cop, gleefully abusing a prostitute on his beat. Perhaps the loudest accolades should go to set designer Troy Hourie, whose urban sprawl of a set is as bleak as the characters' lives.

Some may be put off by the show; as a poem, like Ntozake Shange's Obie award-winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf, much of what is spoken is often incomprehensible, but as a poem, its chief concern is not content, but tone; to put it more plainly (and to paraphrase Roger Ebert), it is not what it is about, but how it is about it. Like Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Mr. Van Peebles� landmark Sweet Sweetback�s Badasss Song (famously "rated X by an all-white jury") is another endeavor remembered more for its attitude than the intricacies of its plot.

The complaints are few, but the biggest is that in the relatively small theater space of the Harlem School of the Arts, director Alfred Preisser chose to have his actors wear microphones. This amounts to gross overamplification, giving the performances a tinny, pre-recorded quality, jarring at 20 feet away. When Wino�s (Ralph Carter) microphone cut out during his performance, the natural sound of his voice energized his song�until the microphone came back on.

Perhaps that is quibbling. Even with the microphones, the alchemy is still there, the music (under the direction of William "Spaceman" Patterson) still jives, and the actors just do their thing.

Oh, yeah.