Pavol Liska must be fascinated with the human crotch. As the director of
Fuggedaboutit, Fraulein
Fat Man and Little Boy
Grotesquerie is proudly on display in Jessica Jill Turner's new play, Charlie Moose Makes His Move, onstage until April 10 at the Looking Glass Theatre. The titular character, played by Corey Patrick, is the worst kind of unbearable, egotistical bastard: he is convinced that he is a creative genius of unequaled brilliance, when in reality he can barely write for a bad soap opera. Charlie barks orders at his only friend, Simon, a fidgety, socially awkward 12-year-old, played with nervous abandon by Brian Sacca. And he is convinced that somewhere there is a coked-up stripper waiting patiently for his love, despite the fact that he has no evidence of this at all. Charlie is also disgustingly obese, weighing over 300 pounds, and has not left his chair in over a year.
If the sight of a giant lump of a man giving dictation to the most socially retarded boy imaginable isn't enough to give you a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, then perhaps a few other members of Turner's demented menagerie can raise the hairs on the back of your neck. There's Simon's mother, Nancy Tarbox (Kelly Eubanks), an aspiring sociopath whose path to enlightenment includes adventures in unwanted pregnancies and slamming her fingers repeatedly in a filing cabinet drawer.
There's also Gene Schiffer (Adam Tsekhman), Simon's twisted school psychiatrist, whose attempts at shepherding his students to proper mental health are offset by his Russian sexual repression. And then there's Honey Blank (Marci Adilman), who is, quite simply, the worst stripper in the world.
All of these widely careening elements, barely held in check by director Ashiln Halfnight's able hand, add up to one of the oddest, most hysterical, and most original pieces of theater I've seen in a long time. This is not because Turner and Halfnight trot out a few strange characters
Seeing Other People
The stage is almost too small at Jewel Box Space, where Alex DeFazio's hauntingly beautiful new play, Radium, is being produced. And this is exactly how it should be. At the opening, six actors (who play five characters) walk to and fro onstage, at times narrowly avoiding bumping into one another. The effect is one of cramped claustrophobia. The inhabitants of DeFazio's world barely have enough room to negotiate their way through life and are incapable of taking a course of action without knocking someone else off his own course. Radium follows the lives of five gay men who fall in and out of love and lust, and break each other's hearts, over the course of a year. We see three different strong relationships form and fall apart, in most cases for no real reason that the characters can understand. They cling to each other desperately but are equally quick to toss away their lovers if they don't fit into the carefully sculpted world they have devised for themselves.
The first thing we see, once the stage has been emptied of bodies bumping into one another seemingly at random, is J. (Bobby Abid) and Alexis (Nathaniel P. Claridad) loudly and graphically having sex. J. cruelly stops their lovemaking before either of them can find release and callously kicks the frail and fragile Alexis out into the night. The difference in their attitudes is as striking as the contrast in their physiques: J. looks as if he were sculpted out of stone, while a strong wind could blow Alexis over.
The human body, and a person's relationship to his physicality, is one of the main subjects of this lyrical and erotically charged play. J. can literally see only himself, and his body is
Deadly Games
The cloudy difference between fantasy and reality is the subject of Jeff Tabnick's new play, I Found Her Tied to My Bed, an hourlong one-act about the fine line between true romantic love and ritualistic murder. Lounging around a set dominated by nothing more than a large bed, two young female roommates play games of love and death, pressing each other's buttons until they have no choice but to make their fantasies a reality or look elsewhere for someone to share the rent with. This spare but affecting production, playing every Wednesday night at Under St. Mark's until the end of the month, examines a not-so-healthy relationship between two roommates, sometime lovers, and occasional murder accomplices.
"I'm not a lesbian. I'm a killer," says Jan (played by the severe Shannon Kirk), a rebellious nurse at a retirement facility, who has taken to amusing herself at work by speeding up the turnover rate at the facility's critical wing. A pair of damp cloths her only tool, she views herself as something between an avenging angel and an agent of mercy, killing in a seeming act of euthanasia only the sickest patients
Enjoy the Silence
I don't care how cold it is outside. You need to get onto a train and travel to Williamsburg, Brooklyn (otherwise known as the Fourth Dimension), and go see Bizarre Science Fantasy, which is playing at the Brick Theater until Feb. 5. Yes, I know the city is covered in a blanket of unforgiving snow and you can see icicles forming in your breath with every exhale. Those excuses for not leaving the house and seeing this wonderful piece of theater are not good enough. Inside the cozy, brick-lined black-box walls you will be offered a bottle of beer or a glass of whiskey before being whisked away to a place where your darkest nightmares become real.
Under the direction (and
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
In these troubled times, sometimes the most therapeutic action that you can take is to meet up with a few close friends, share a couple of drinks, and complain about the world to your heart
Curse of the Chattering Class
A play about the depression and the precocious mid-live crises of the overeducated socialists and their bourgeois parents just will not work unless the play is funny. Especially if the said depressed socialists and their bourgeois parents are Russian. There is a reason why Chekov had the wherewithal to call his most depressing stage dramas comedies; he understood that spending two hours watching a bunch of self-absorbed rich people complaining about how they never work is an absurd situation, regardless of whether or not the fourth acts were legitimately tragic. However, the necessary combination of the comic, absurd, and the tragic is just not present in this production of Maxim Gorky