Call to Action

Writing a play about a subject like genocide raises innumerable obstacles. If the tone is oppressively "serious," you risk either losing the audience members altogether or letting them off the hook with self-congratulatory tears rather than moving them to discussion and action. If the work is too stylized and "clever," the piece itself might come across as self-congratulatory, and you can lose an emotional connection with the audience. If the play is too "light," you might be interpreted as glib and as not giving the requisite weight to the material. With Lemkin's House, playwright Catherine Filloux has opted for humor and stylization, with mixed results. Her reasoning for this strategy is sound, and likely threefold. The subject itself is so potentially overwhelming that there is no way to "do justice" to its horror through realistic representation. Even if it were possible to evoke such horror, in fact, it may not be desirable; well-established theories of political theater suggest that neither bombarding audience members with unbearable images nor moving them to cathartic moments of emotion is likely to lead them to engage an issue politically. And make no mistake: Filloux intends this play to be a call to action. Finally, the play is in part a tribute to and celebration of its titular hero, Raphael Lemkin; as such, too oppressive an atmosphere would probably not have seemed appropriate.

Lemkin, who lost 49 relatives, including his mother, to the Holocaust, is credited with inventing the term "genocide," authored the first draft of "The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven times. He suffered a fatal heart attack in 1959, at age 59. Filloux, who has been writing plays about genocide since the early 1990s, says she found Lemkin to be "a historical soul mate on [her] journey."

The play itself is set in Lemkin's afterlife, which Filloux has conceived as his "house." Visitors from the past and present occasionally wander through the house, enlisting Lemkin's help in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. "When I was alive, I was haunted by the dead," Lemkin says. "Now that I'm dead, I'm haunted by the living." These visitations, and his relative impotence in effecting real change, lead Lemkin to question the value of legislation and treaties, but never to turn his back on his possibly quixotic quest to end large-scale atrocity.

Given the unassailable agenda and inspiration of the piece, and its heartrending relevance to ongoing events, it feels both curmudgeonly and politically regressive to point out that neither the play nor the production works very well. The best of intentions often fail to result in good art, and Lemkin's House is no exception. The jokes are only intermittently funny, and some of the dialogue intended to be touching is strained and awkward.

The design and direction felt uninspired. Furniture was arranged in a standard acting-class configuration, with everything tilted at a 45-degree angle from the audience. The "house" dutifully fell apart as per stage directions, but these and other moments were interpreted quite literally and with little consideration for aesthetic impact. If there was a certain Dada-ist poetry in rice and shoes falling from the rafters of Lemkin's posthumous home, it was undermined somewhat by this dutiful and dogged approach.

As Lemkin, John Daggett delivered his lines in an almost vaudevillian manner, partly in reaction to descriptions of his character as "annoying" and partly in service of the script's self-conscious theatricality. The supporting cast moved from character to character competently enough but ultimately didn't leave much of an impression. One suspects that both the cast and the director were so concerned about serving the playwright's vision that they missed the opportunity to put their own creative stamps on the production itself. While many directors say their job is to "respect the playwright's intentions," there are times when this approach can paradoxically do a disservice to the script by watering down the play's impact in production.

The most compelling aspect of this text and its performance are the pieces of information that filter through the action and encourage further research. Don't expect great theater if you go to Lemkin's House, but if you're looking to network with activist-minded peers, you might want to check it out anyway. Many of the performances are followed by talkbacks and panel discussions with anti-genocide activists and politicians, and if the audience at this performance was any indication, many of the theater's patrons will be there as much for the panel as for the play.

On the Edge

I'm not sure whether Chad Beckim's 'nami is a good play, but its inaugural production is a very good piece of theater. With layered and passionate performances, evocative and polished design elements, and expertly paced and composed staging, Partial Comfort Productions has demonstrated that ambition, craft, and determination can overcome the logistical and financial difficulties that so often lead us to make excuses for unfinished, substandard work from Off-Off-Broadway companies. The play's plot is difficult to summarize. Publicity materials describe it as the story of two women who begin to suspect that their landlord is going to sell a young Indonesian refugee girl into sex slavery, but this plot point comes fairly late in the play's action. Beckim's play is really a character study of two downtrodden couples who live next door to each other in a rundown apartment building in a very bad neighborhood. The story's more sensational elements are actually among its weakest, while the carefully observed interactions between four shattered people are what lends this piece its considerable power.

At the core of the production's success are the actors, particularly the women. As Keesha, Quincy Tyler Bernstine turned a series of stereotypes on their heads by balancing the aggressively gritty backstory of her former prostitute/recovering crackhead character with grace, intelligence, and strength. Eva Kaminsky, as the psychologically unstable Lil, conquered a series of challenges to her technique—in addition to her emotional disorder and paranoia, Lil is sometimes heavily medicated—while maintaining the character's emotional core.

Both actresses dove into the extreme situations and reactions demanded of them by the script while still contributing to the story's urgency and momentum. As a direct result of their performances' discipline and energy, the production never bogged down in onstage histrionics.

Alfredo Narciso and Marc Rosenthal were similarly successful as Roachie and Harry, respectively. Rosenthal in particular stood out, finding a number of quirky but entirely believable idiosyncratic gestures to fully humanize his performance as Lil's beleaguered husband. Michael Gladis, clearly a competent actor in his own right, was a little less successful as Donovan, the slumlord/pimp/crack dealer who rules with violence. He wasn't quite able to convincingly pull together the menace, charm, and entrepreneurial intelligence that are all necessary components of the character; in a daunting, all-or-nothing situation, he was neither seductive nor frightening in a role that requires both in equal measure.

Director John Gould Rubin worked with his design team to construct a convincingly appalling world of barely suppressed desperation that threatened to burst into violence at any moment. Set designer Heather Wolensky and lighting designer Jason Jeunnette integrated their work seamlessly to evoke grunge and dilapidation while achieving a surprisingly beautiful visual poetry. Sound designer Zach Williamson rendered tangible the claustrophobic nature of low-end apartment living by allowing sounds to seep through the walls of the onstage apartments and into the audience, without their sounding canned and artificial.

Rubin and Williamson did make some questionable choices in scene-change music, however, which was set too loud and had little to do with the world of the play. Presumably, these jarring sound cues were meant to further underscore the extended moments of silence that punctuated the production. But, as my companion at the show said, they seemed more like selections from a hipster's iPod playlist than an integral part of the design.

Far too many of this production's strengths were actually solutions to problems built into the script. The playwright has indicated in interviews and press materials that he wanted to show audiences a world they have had little or no contact with, but it's difficult not to suspect that the world of 'nami is similarly alien to Beckim himself. While he delineates the characters with distinct psychologies and vernacular tendencies, too many of the details feel as if they were borrowed from a particularly seedy episode of Law and Order: SVU.

To be fair, though, the strengths of the performances and of the production would not have been possible were there not something beautiful in the text itself. At its core, the play is about people in danger of being crushed under the weight of their personal histories, and finding some hope of redemption in the possibility of helping a vulnerable stranger. With another rewrite to burn away the clichés and the false notes, Beckim may well have a play that earns the beauty and polish of this production.

School Days

With the success of Broadway's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, among other shows, and given that Generations X and Y seem to have never recovered from the trials and traumas of junior high, a post-punk, post-ska, pop-rock musical about, as publicity materials describe it, "love in the eighth grade" probably seemed to be a strong idea. Despite its promise, though, Shawn Northrip's Lunch, part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, fell short in production. Many of the songs are clever ("A Change in Me"), and a few of them ("Dead Dad") come close to capturing the kind of anarchic adolescent energy Northrip was apparently aiming for. Yet the tongue-in-cheek style that pervades the show fails to capture how very serious adolescence seems when you're in the middle of it. We are supposed to laugh at these characters because we recognize ourselves in them, but the show spends so much time pushing the "look how ridiculous they all are" angle that it's hard to have any empathy. One notable exception, the almost jarringly touching "For Mikey," sung by Ben (Rich Hollman), is written—and was performed—with such irony-free sincerity that it threw the rest of the production's superficiality into sharp relief.

The two-dimensional, caricature-like style adopted by most of the cast only exacerbated this problem; when adult actors play kids, it's all too easy for them to come across as condescending toward their characters' emotions. The actors were mostly in fine voice, but some had difficulty keeping up with the relentless, drum-driven pace of the music.

The show's narrative strategy is a surprising departure from the musical theater rulebook. After each exchange of dialogue, a short song expands on, and makes a joke out of, the characters' emotions but never moves the plot forward. I can only assume this was a deliberate move by Northrip, who holds a graduate degree from N.Y.U.'s Musical Theater Writing program and is the author of the well-regarded Titus X. Nevertheless, it felt like a major flaw.

Lunch probably came across as very funny at the early read-throughs and workshops. A paying audience and a full production, however, demand more from a show than potential. Lunch serves as a sometimes uncomfortable reminder that what seems brilliant and hysterically funny when shared with friends over a bottle of wine can still fall flat when the lights dim and the curtain rises.

Life Is a Dream

The rise of existentialism is often attributed in part to the aftermath of two world wars, one of which was devoid of any morally compelling narrative and one in which the scale of atrocity was shocking to the public imagination. After senseless cruelty and violence, how can we maintain any faith in the essential goodness of man, or in any of the platitudes whispered to us as codas to childhood bedtime stories? These thoughts entwined with new developments in psychology, biology, and physics to destabilize attitudes toward religion, nationalism, and identity itself. It should come as no surprise that events of recent years have had a similar impact on some writers and thinkers. In the program note to Bethany Larsen's new play, The Uncertainty Principle, director Julie Fei-Fan Balzer writes that "three forces collided" as inspiration for the play: Sept. 11, 2001, "an old physics textbook and a TV special on string theory," and "an apartment fire on the next block, which prompted the question: What would life be like if you lost everything?"

The Uncertainty Principle is not a perfect play by any means, but it deals with "Big Ideas" without being boring or (for the most part) overly pretentious. The largely successful script is a testament to the young Milk Can Theater Company's commitment to developing new material through workshops, readings, and constructive critical dialogue with emerging playwrights.

The play's central character is Cassie (Lauren Gleason), a young New York City temp whose apartment—along with everything she owns—is engulfed in flames. Onstage action alternates between scenes of Cassie trying to put her life back together and dream sequences involving The Ringmaster (Casey McClellan). He's a hybrid trickster/angel/tough-love counselor who urges Cassie, who is some kind of high-wire performer in her dreams, to perform without a net and, if she falls, to embody the possibilities implied by Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle by simply passing right through the floor. (Yes, the play acknowledges, and plays with, the fact that this is something of a misreading of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. His principle says it's impossible to discern simultaneously and accurately the position and momentum of an atomic or subatomic particle.)

When not dreaming, Cassie is struggling with listlessness and depression, much to the consternation of Jason (Chris Kloko), her gay best friend (obligatory for any twenty-something straight girl in New York); her possibly drug-addled mother (a hilarious Judy Chesnutt); and her charmingly geeky potential boyfriend Robert (Tim Downey.) To some extent, these are all stock characters, but enough little details are provided for them to walk convincingly in three dimensions.

The division between Cassie's waking life and her dreams breaks down enough for her to question her own sanity. The Ringmaster starts talking to her while she's awake and then, even more alarmingly, interacts occasionally with her friends and family. He helps her find an apartment and manipulates her physical surroundings in various ways. It's not always clear precisely what his agenda is, but he consistently urges Cassie to act with confidence and take chances, encouraging her to embrace uncertainty and instability as the source of life's exhilarating sense of possibility.

The actors all inhabited their roles well, but Chesnutt stole the show as Cassie's mother. Her performance was both gloriously over the top and extremely clever; she interacted with The Ringmaster, made contact with the audience, and, in a demanding meta-theatrical moment built into the script, acknowledged the artifice of her character and the theater itself while still gleefully throwing herself into the role.

The production's design team, doing double duty by also working on the extremely demanding Trojan Women 2.0 (running in repertory with this show), efficiently sketched out the slightly exaggerated world of the play. David Withrow's costumes allowed for Gleason's quick onstage costume changes as she moved between dream scenes and waking scenes, and each character was given an almost iconic look: a tight, slightly sparkly sweater for Jason, a pert, Florence Henderson-inspired dress for Mom, etc. Set designer Carrie Mossman was limited to a few rehearsal cubes and some flats that also had to serve for the other show's set, but the minimalist flexibility worked well with Balzer's fluid staging.

The implication that The Ringmaster is not entirely a figment of Cassie's addled imagination muddies The Uncertainty Principle's philosophical outlook somewhat. Embracing chance, accident, and uncertainty is an admirable goal, but the revelation that there really is a man behind the curtain doesn't quite support it. Throughout the play, The Ringmaster urges Cassie to work without a net, but by giving her trickster flesh and blood and prescience, Larsen has unwittingly implied that there is a kind of metaphysical net after all.

Overall, The Uncertainty Principle is a fun and entertaining exploration of serious themes and a refreshing reminder that existentialism and optimism don't have to be mutually exclusive. It is also, in the play's own words, a "New York story," a celebration of life in a city that has suffered substantial blows in the early years of the 21st century but shows no sign of giving up its high-wire act.

Love and Death

Trojan Women 2.0 is part of Charles Mee's ongoing "(re)making project," in which he has "pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the Internet" to create new plays of his own. This text draws primarily from Eurpides's Trojan Women for its first act and Berlioz's Les Troyens for its second, but also incorporates various other sources. Mee mashes his source material together with references to contemporary history and popular culture to create a beautiful and often devastating mosaic that is simultaneously an antiwar play, a tone poem to erotic love, and a meditation on sex, class, and gender. A text this emotionally and philosophically complex is an ambitious undertaking for any theater company. For a small Off-Off-Broadway company with limited resources and two shows in production simultaneously, it's an almost impossible feat. Despite this production's several strengths, the Milk Can Theater Company has failed to pull off the impossible this time out. Nevertheless, at a time when commercial and institutional theater has largely failed (with notable exceptions) to engage with the events and issues dominating what remains of public discourse, Milk Can should be applauded for taking on the project at all.

The play's first half is set in a Troy shattered by both the invading Greek army and the anachronisms Mee so gleefully scatters throughout the script. A chorus of grieving women, led by Hecuba (Mary Ellen Toomey), is in mourning for their husbands, their children, and their city. There is a ragged dignity in their sorrow, but it is soon interrupted by the arrival of Talthybius (Kenneth L. Naanep) and two Greek soldiers (Malachy Orozco and Joe Sevier), who announce that each of the women will be given to a Greek soldier or nobleman to do with as he pleases. The stakes are high and the tragic tone unrelenting, with the exception of a few moments of comic relief.

Some of the actors were more up to this challenge than others. In general, the chorus of women performed admirably, particularly Toomey, who presided over their grief in an appropriately regal manner. Mary Greenwalt's comically narcissistic Helen recalled Paris Hilton, while Satomi Blair's Pat Benatar-like Cassandra brought a welcome rock 'n' roll energy to the production.

The actors playing the interloping Greeks were somewhat less successful. Naanep struggled to infuse the businesslike Talthybius with some degree of pathos by affecting a quavering and breathless vocal quality that robbed him of his authority without actually winning him any sympathy. His companions appeared so relatively meek in the face of the women onstage that it seemed the soldiers, rather than the widows, should fear for their lives. Many of the actors seemed overwhelmed by the sustained and heightened emotion required by Mee's long monologues and the plot's tragic dimensions. The result was far too much shouting for far too long.

In general, the actors fared better with the lighter and shorter second half, but the production never quite recovered from the difficult first act. Some of director Lauren Reinhard's choices were problematic as well: her "feminist utopia" Carthage at times resembled an old Evian commercial, with white-robed women performing yoga-like choreography to comfort and seduce the bewildered soldiers. As in the first act, the female lead was, appropriately, the strongest presence. In this case, Lindsay Drew presided over the stage with her multivalent portrayal of a torch song-singing Dido.

Still, there was much to admire in the coherence and scope of the production. Michael Gugliotti's ambitious and aggressive lighting created several distinct moods with a handful of instruments; Mick Moore's sound design was similarly effective. Costume designer David Winthrow employed a variety of suits, robes, belts, and tatters to reference both past and present while still contributing to the sense of a consistent onstage reality.

The actors looked exhausted during the curtain call, no doubt the result of a difficult rehearsal process leading to a sometimes frustrating opening-matinee performance. As flawed as the performance was, an ambitious failure is in many ways more rewarding than a safe bet. At the end of the show, a fund-raising pitch included the daunting statistic that only 3 percent of Off-Off-Broadway companies make it to their fifth season. The Milk Can Theater Company, at the beginning of its fourth season, took on more than it could accomplish this time around, but I can't help hoping it beats the odds and gets the chance to try again.