Oscar Wilde may have inadvertently offered an explanation for the failures of Nosedive Productions
Fishing for Meaning
A Cosmo With Your Cosmos?
It is a skill to deliver complex ideas simply. It is a talent to do so with a sense of humor. Happy Hour at the Event Horizon, Redshift Productions's latest effort, now playing at the Blue Heron Arts Center Studio Theatre, has no lack of skill. With pluck to spare, the show breaks the immense advances of 20th-century physics into bite-sized, easy-to-swallow pieces. Proving they also possess a healthy portion of talent, Happy Hour's creators make these pieces wonderfully fun to chew on. The setting is the Event Horizon, a bar hovering just on the edge of a black hole, where, theoretically, the collapsed star's massive gravitational pull slows time almost to stopping. The barkeeps of this unique establishment are, appropriately enough, Albert Einstein (Josh Wallach), father of the theory of relativity
Twisted Sister
The work of 27-year-old Polish theater troupe Gardzienice might properly be called Theater of Intoxication, as every sound and motion seems to both invoke the invisible and be possessed by it. In their performances, word truly becomes flesh. It is no wonder, then, that the late Susan Sontag called them "one of the few essential theater companies working anywhere in the world today." With Elektra, Gardzienice's latest "theatrical essay" adapted from the Euripides play of the same title, the group once again proves her right. The ancient story of Elektra and her brother Orestes begins with their father, King Agamemnon, returning victorious from Troy, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Orestes is smuggled out of the city before he meets a similar fate, but Elektra is not so lucky: Aegisthus, worried that a royal offspring would seek vengeance for the murder, forces her to wed a peasant. Though the marriage remains chaste, Elektra is consumed with grief and anger
Inaction Figure
A classic is a resilient thing. Those who would seek to bend one to their will
Lost in Space
The dangers of creating a piece of theater through collaboration are as numerous as the potential rewards. When the process works, the result is an organic fusing of many different artistic voices into a single, overarching vision. As with a choir, the power and nuance of such a synthesis can be staggering. When the process fails, however, what emerges is a disastrously confused and meandering hybrid of intentions, divided and unable to stand. Unfortunately, The Astronomer's Triangle, the latest communal effort from CollaborationTown, now playing at Studio 5, runs afoul of many of the process' snares and offsets these with too few of its benefits.
Our narrator and protagonist is a prim cartographer (Jordan Seavey) who professes that things as intangible as love can be mapped. He has devoted himself to the welfare of an old friend (Geoffrey Decas), an astronomer despondent over his failure to cull from the stars clues about life's origins. In the breaks between forcing his astronomer friend to get out of bed and eat, the cartographer manages to strike up a relationship with a quirky local waitress (Boo Killebrew), who claims she communicates with her own private star.
When pressed, the cartographer learns that this star occupies not only part of her body
Shooting Up the Charts
There are two basic camps in the debate over art's purpose. The first, basically idealist, argues that art should enlighten. The artist's sacred duty is to present the truth of our reality, or, at the least, the truth of the artist's reality, no matter how bleak or brutal. The second camp, however, tends more toward escapism. It contends that reality in all its misery is ever-present. Why use art to deliver a second dose of it when art is the only means most people have to momentarily step out of it?
In Marc Spitz's new comedy, The Name of This Play Is Talking Heads, now playing at Under St. Marks, the two factions again take up this never-ending skirmish. The difference here, as opposed to the debates that ceaselessly appear in publications and programs devoted to the arts, is that one of the two parties has the added rejoinder of a loaded firearm.
The battlefield, appropriately enough, is the studio of a TV music channel where a typically vapid segment, called the "Top 100 Most Rockatrocious Moments in Rock History," is being taped. (Think of such watersheds of vulgarity as Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his teenaged cousin, or the revelation that Michael Jackson's penis is multicolored, to use just two of the examples Spitz himself cheerily points up.)
The idealist thrown into this escapist stronghold is Pete (Brian Reilly), a writer for Headphones magazine. Initially under the impression that he has been invited on the show to share his knowledge of music and the culture surrounding it, he is quickly disillusioned when he sees the channel's staple comedian, Frankie (Matt Higgins), being force-fed his opinions by Tom (James Eason), the show's director. However, Pete's disillusionment quickly gives way to outright rebellion
The Obscenity Heard 'Round the World
When used correctly, the profane actually serves a very sacred social function, one that is too often lost in the shock of the profanity itself: it forcibly tears away the veil of unthinking habit and empty tradition. In this sense, French playwright Alfred Jarry was a master of the profane. Indeed, his finest creation, the infamous Pa Ubu of the play Ubu Roi, is nothing but a vessel for all that Jarry considered base and cowardly in humanity. (Appropriately enough, Ubu's famous first line in that play is simply, "Puh-shit.") Yet Elizabeth Swados's sharp new musical Jabu, based on Jarry's life and using healthy portions of his Ubu play cycle as illustration, shows us just why this high priest of blasphemy is still so sacred to modern theater.
From his childhood in Laval, France, in the late 1800's through his bohemian life in Paris and a rather messy self-destruction
Who's Your Daddy?
The issue of paternity occupies a hallowed place in Western drama. The topic's draw, of course, is the intuitively satisfying idea that such intangibles as fate are just as inheritable as the more concrete, biological traits passed from father to son
The Sound of Silence
For most playwrights, the music of a play is in the words. Harold Pinter, however, has made his indelible mark on our modern theater not only through his use of words
The Misfortunes of Being Earnest
It is the sad case that works of art that would otherwise move us are greatly reduced in their ability to do so because of their earnestness to do so. The latest example of this is the Oberon Theatre Ensemble
Que Syringe, Sera
You know you are in for a more unsettling type of comedy when the plot's kickoff is an AIDS-afflicted heroin addict jabbing a 7-year-old girl with a contaminated needle. Even more unsettling is that you find yourself laughing at this. But such is the infectious way of Jamie Linley's Dirty Works, Stiff Upper Lip's sophomore effort now playing at the Greenwich Street Theatre. In a kind of British answer to Trainspotting, Linley takes us to the heart of a London slum and a small crew of nobodies eking out their short lives through a haze of petty crime, promiscuity, and all manner of intoxicants
Sex, Lies, and Internships
An older man sits with a younger woman in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. The man looks respectable in his suit and tie. The woman is fresh and attractive. We soon discover, if we have not already guessed, that the two are lovers. And if the barely subdued panic in both their eyes has not led us to the next logical conclusion, the young woman soon states it plainly: she is pregnant. What sets this scene apart from its Jerry Springer-level ilk, however, is exactly what captured the nation's prurient attention back in 2001: he is a U.S. congressman, and she is an intern who is about to go missing.
Or are they? In Rob Handel
Cursed Are the Poor
W.H. Auden once mused that the act of murder is the one crime that concerns society as a whole because in that act the injured party is destroyed. Thus, with the victim being deprived of his own voice, it is left to society to speak for him and demand redress on his behalf, whether through punishment or forgiveness. In Georg B
The Overlord's Guide to the Galaxy
I found it very appropriate that Salt Theater's production of Conquest of the Universe begins with a patchwork curtain
Love: Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth
The
The Imperfect Storm
It is a rare thing when every single part of a show
Beware the Risen Woman
The violence of armed revolution has traditionally been the province of men. After all, in nearly every country men hold the levers of power, men make up the armies that exercise that power, and it is primarily men who band together to oppose that power. Yet, as Ken Urban