Blood, Love, and Rhetoric

Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's most enduring antiheroes, was famously obsessed with being, or not being—as well he might have been, given the way his world had been turned upside down. But in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard doesn't ask for our sympathy for the moping Prince of Denmark. The focus instead is on two of Hamlet's university friends, who are drawn into the strange events in Elsinore and perpetually bumbling around the edges of the drama, unsure as to what they are supposed to be doing and kept in the dark as dark currents swirl around them. In the Milk Can Theater Company's production of Stoppard's 1966 play, action is the name of the game. Whether it's the titular characters tossing coins (85 heads in a row) or the bawdy, dissolute troupe of tragedians comporting themselves around the scaffolding that serves as a set, the characters are a mass of restless energy. Director Julie Fei-Fan Balzer shows us a northern kingdom where almost everyone is frantically trying to outrun, outfight, outscrew, or outmaneuver his own fate.

The play presents us with two very sympathetic leads. Rosencrantz (Avery Clark) is boyish and playful but with a pensive, melancholy streak; he hides his heartbreak over the inevitability of time passing with games and action. Guildenstern (Walter Brandes) is wiry and warier, brooding over the twosome's situation and how they got into it.

But the show belongs to the troupe of Players, under the direction of their wry and lascivious pitchman, the Player. Accompanied by drumbeats and noisemakers and juggling and swaggering, these Players of the "blood, love, and rhetoric school" fill up the stage. Playing kazoos and wearing codpieces, they offer entertainments both over the top and under the covers, if you catch their drift. Encountering the two courtiers on the road to Elsinore and again within the castle—as well as on later voyages—the Players are a maelstrom propelling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on their way.

Played by Zack Calhoon, the Player is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead's beating heart—the lewd, earthy, and surprisingly wise voice of reason. He and his troupe of fallen tragedians know all the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune has to offer. They—and apparently only they—realize that in their world, they are all just following the path they were set on. As the Player says, "We are tragedians, you see? We follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

Also, and by no means should this be discounted, the Players do the most engaging and enjoyable re-creation of Hamlet's play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, that I have ever seen. Great use of kazoos.

The title of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead being what it is, the fates of the two hapless courtiers from Shakespeare's most famous tragedy should come as no surprise. But it's a testament to this production that when the third act begins to wane and it begins to dawn on the characters (and the audience) that death is how things will end for these two, the effect is heartbreaking.

Just as in Hamlet, Stoppard's play ends as Fortinbras enters to announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But the playwright does pay his two hapless characters tribute: they are no longer lost in the carnage of a royal bloodbath, and the audience can shed a tear for two innocent souls who followed their paths to unhappy ends.

Running Amok

Babies With Rabies has an awesome title. It rhymes, for starters, and it has a delicious, campy, trashy-movie feel to it. Just hearing the title makes you think, "Oh, man! Babies with rabies! Running amok! So totally cool!"

But there are almost no babies with rabies in this production. Instead, there is an extraordinarily convoluted story about a play within a play (within the play), and a lot of shouting. As best as I can figure out, after a detailed examination of my notes and some informal diagramming, the plot of Babies With Rabies is this:

A writer (Erwin Falcon), a producer (Rob Moretti), and a group of actors are working on a play about the residents of an insane asylum who are putting on a play as part of their therapy. Some of the resident crazies plan to use this play to distract the guards and doctors so they can take over the asylum and allow their madness to achieve its fullest flowering. However, some of the residents are against this.

The play the inmates are putting on (the third-level play) is about a kingdom afflicted by a mysterious plague that attacks children and turns them, according to the script, into "crazed homicidal zombies" prone to "fits of cunning and terror." (Here, at last, are the babies with rabies.)

As written out, this story line would seem to promise, like the play's title, all sorts of wacky high jinks and high-camp melodrama. But the script, written by Jonathan Calindas (co-artistic director of Cuchipinoy Productions, which produced the show), begins in the middle of the action, with proclamations that the audience is about to see "a play that will blow your mind," a play that will "question what is real and what is pretend." And while it may be that my mind was blown, I found the show utterly baffling.

For starters, a number of the actors/patients are identified, at different times, by a) their actor names, b) their character's asylum ID number, and c) the names of the characters they are playing within the play. One of the characters (played by Dennis Lemoine) plays identical twins with reversed numbers (45 and 54) and rhyming names (Larry and Gary). Another (Andrew Rothkin) suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning that he is constantly switching personas, from an unctuous giggler to a lisping Satan to Sigmund Freud.

With everyone in the cast playing so many roles, keeping track of who's who—and whether they are being "themselves" or performing in one of the other plays—is no easy task. Also, to underline the fact that these are bad actors portraying crazy people who are themselves bad actors, all of the lines are given a full-camp, full-volume treatment, punctuated with much dramatic gesturing.

Keeping track of what's going on is exhausting amid all the deafening talk. By the second act, when your ears have adjusted and the structures of the many plays within the plays start to become apparent, it's too late to become engaged. There are a few funny lines that send up absurd, pulp-movie conventions and Off-Off-Broadway. (Kelly Rauch, who portrays Tina, an actress inexplicably in possession of an Equity card, shouts, "I know this is Off-Off-Broadway and you're doing the best you can, and you don't have any money, but I'm not used to working under these conditions!") But these lines get buried in the wall of sound.

Babies With Rabies seems to have had ambitious goals. But with the weight of its plot machinations and the heavy-handedness of its subject matter, it never takes off. And there wasn't even a baby with rabies in sight. Now that's disappointing.

Sock Puppets Gone Wild

Everything you need to know about Harvey Finklestein's Sock Puppet Showgirls is contained in the title

Wedding Bell Blues

Marriage, at least as it is presented in Soul Searching, a new rock opera running in workshop at Theater for a New City, is a mixed bag. In "Married," one of the opening numbers, Brenda, the show's single protagonist, asks her friends, "What's it like to be married?" The responses? "All my dreams have come true / I wouldn't wish it on you." It's not exactly a ringing endorsement, but in Soul Searching it is what being married is all about. Marriage isn't necessarily happy, but happiness lies in marriage. Soul Searching, running through Oct. 2, tells the story of Brenda, a contemporary Jewish woman in New York searching for a man of faith and substance. She's looking for someone, she sings, "charming and sweet and spiritually deep." As the program notes put it, "Although she wants to share her life with someone, she also wants to share her life with an accepting community of people."

Brenda's trials unfold Friends-style as she and her girlfriends sit and gab over coffee. Her married friends Rachel, Becky, and Sara want her to find someone, and set her up with three versions of their husbands

Behind Every Good King...

The old line about who invariably stands behind every good man is often quoted. But how often do we stop to ponder the reverse notion

Hello, Brooklyn

Holding up a "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt, Deanna Pacelli, star of the one-woman show There Goes the Neighborhood, looks at it with embarrassment. "O.K., I bought this in 1996 when it was ironic," she says. "I can't wear it now. I'd look like an [expletive]."

Pacelli is speaking as Peter, a white, thirtysomething architect living in Carroll Gardens. A resident of the neighborhood for more than a decade, the affable Peter is one of the early invaders of what not long ago was a close-knit, working-class Italian neighborhood. He is also one of the 10 characters of varying ages, races, and sexual orientations whom Pacelli inhabits to recount the story of Carroll Gardens's rapid gentrification.

Written by Mari Brown and based on interviews with neighborhood residents that she and Pacelli conducted over a two-year period, There Goes the Neighborhood, playing at P.S. 122 through May 29, weaves together the perspectives of nine residents and one outside observer to create a complex and insightful portrait of the neighborhood. At the same time, it offers 10 dead-on portraits of these people who live and work there. Smart, wickedly funny, compassionate, and insightful, There Goes the Neighborhood is a brilliantly written, brilliantly performed piece.

Pacelli, who carries the entire hour of the play on the strength of her characterizations, switches effortlessly, almost breezily, between characters like Peter; Vinny, a lifetime resident of Carroll Gardens and third-generation owner of Cositini's Pork Shop ("Bringing You the Best Pork in Brooklyn for Over a Hundred Years!"); and Mike, a nightclub owner from Hong Kong with an enthusiasm for the nouveau in culture, music, and art.

For example, moments after making her confession about the "Brooklyn Rocks!" shirt as Peter, Pacelli has pulled a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball cap on her head and is standing with shoulders back and chest puffed out while she booms in Vinny's classic Brooklyn Italian-American dialect, "Hello? Hello? What is this? What is this, 'Brooklyn Rocks'? Who rocks? I'm Brooklyn, do I rock?"

Inhabiting all of her characters with equal poise, Pacelli delineates each one with a few well-chosen mannerisms (adjusting her bra straps, putting on Chapstick, pushing her glasses up her nose), a prop or two, and a handful of linguistic tics.

It helps, of course, that Brown's script gives her pitch-perfect lines to deliver. In an article published in The New York Times in 2003 (There Goes the Neighborhood was first performed in Carroll Gardens in 2003), Brown says that when she began waitressing in a local bar back in 2003, listening to her customers talk was like hearing lines of dialogue.

But even if she owes some of the natural richness of the script to a good ear for conversation, Brown has taken her raw material and arranged and polished it to perfection. The rough and smooth, the bad and good, the complaints and the paeans all fit together to make a deep and compelling portrait.

In fact, the "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt is a fine metaphor for the show. Some of the characters hated it. Some loved it. A lot didn't understand all the fuss--Carroll Gardens, heart of Brooklyn, was their home, whether it rocked or not. There Goes the Neighborhood is a window into that world, and for the space of the play, it's easy to feel as if it's your home too.

Futility, Loneliness, and Death, Oh My!

You have to give Morris Paynch credit. Way back in 1989, well before the Internet was a household word, the Canadian playwright had the foresight to imagine Friendster. Witness this exchange, taken directly from the text of 7 Stories, Paynch's 1989 one-act play currently being staged by Rocketship Productions at 78th Street Theatre Lab: Percy: "I wouldn't have a single friend. As it is now, I have nine hundred and forty."

Man: "Friends?"

Percy: "Yes."

Man: "You have that many friends?"

Percy: "Yes. Isn't it fabulous? People are always saying, 'I can't COUNT the number of friends I have!' When what they actually mean is that they only have a handful. Maybe two, three hundred. But I can, and I've got nine hundred and forty."

Man: "I didn't think it was possible to be intimate with that many people."

Percy: "Who said anything about being intimate? I couldn't care less about most of them."

Sadly, this prescient view of a socially networked future is the deepest insight the play has to offer. The inability to communicate, ennui, alienation

Love Is All You Need?

Love, they say, is a many-splendored thing. Love is patient, love is kind. Love means never having to say you're sorry, love is as much a light as a flame. There is no shortage of definitions for love, but The Bitterness of the Meringue, the new show at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, proposes a few more. Love is "a tortuous word." It is a "round business," it is where "everybody loses out." It is "vertigo at the abyss." Love is also, if I understood the play right, "salt that seems sweet, sweet that seems salt

You've Got to Laugh, Haven't You?

There is a Russian proverb, so I am told, that says,

Come on, Feel the Noise

Life among the upper crust is so stressful, no? On stage, at least, being wealthy and idle means having a lot of time to construct elaborate plots and desperate social intrigues. In farce, and in its descendent screwball comedy, the play maintains a frantic pace as it rushes from outlandish situation to even more outlandish situation, with its characters charming their way from one self-created near-disaster to another with breezy quips and witty observations. At least, that is what happens when both genres work well. When they fail, they often disintegrate into a lot of rushing around to no good end, leaving the audience wondering how they muster up the energy to care so much about something so trivial. In A Scrap of Paper , the three-act comedy running at the Greenwich Street Theater, the cast stretches to achieve the kind of giddy chaos that makes the genre work, but their heavy-handed approach smothers the light and airy feeling they are aiming for.

A Scrap of Paper was originally written by French playwright Victorien Saradou in the mid 19th century. Mary T. Boyer, the director and adaptor, sets her version of A Scrap of Paper in the 1930