Offoffonline — Off Off Online

Edward Karam

, , ,

The Hunting Gun

, , ,
The Hunting Gun

The Hunting Gun, an avant-garde piece of theater by Serge Lamothe, is a remarkably mesmerizing work, but it also presents challenges to a viewer: only one of its two performers speaks, and then it’s entirely in Japanese (there are surtitles in English). Adapted from a novel of the same name by Yasushi Inoue, the work begins with a prologue. An author, heard over a loudspeaker, recites a poem called Hunting Gun—written about a man with “a double-barreled Churchill.” The author subsequently received a letter from Josuke Misugi, who claims to be the man who inspired the poem. Out of the blue, he tells the author, he is sending him three letters in the hopes that he (or perhaps just someone, anyone) will understand his life.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Conversations After Sex

,
Conversations After Sex

The racy, come-hither title of Mark O’Halloran’s 70-minute work disguises a fascinating drama en déshabillé that explores the loneliness that underlies anonymous sexual encounters and a desire by participants to connect more fully than only with sex. Though the conversations follow intercourse, they reveal more about the characters’ lives up to that point than what happens afterward. Staged with simplicity and power by Tom Creed, O’Halloran’s play is thought-provoking, sad, and thoroughly engaging.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , ,

Black Odyssey

, , ,
Black Odyssey

In Black Odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley has undertaken an ambitious conflation of Homer’s epic poem with the history of Black people in America. In this lively, overstuffed and often bewildering fantasia, Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) struggles to find his way back to his family in Harlem after a discharge from the war in Afghanistan. He ends up homeless and then in a mental hospital, while his journey is overseen from Olympus by his allies Deus (i.e., Zeus, played by James T. Alfred) and Athena (Harriet D. Foy), and from the ocean by his enemy Paw Sidin (i.e., Poseidon), who is determined to kill him.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , ,

Sugar Daddy

, , ,
Sugar Daddy

Shortly after launching into his solo show Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison talks about being mugged. The thief, armed with a gun, demanded his cell phone, and Morrison resisted because it had pictures of his late lover Jonathan on it. “I know we just met,” Morrison tells his audience, “but I think we can all agree that was off-brand.” (It’s clear from the audience’s ebullience that they know perfectly well what his brand is. The mostly young crowd in fleeces and pullovers and trainers have been boisterously waiting for him, even drowning out the pre-show music.) “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” explains the comedian. “We’re not known to excel in moments of crisis.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Becky Nurse of Salem

,
Becky Nurse of Salem

Becky Nurse of Salem is a showcase for Deirdre O’Connell, long one of the unsung heroines of New York theater. The actress may have won a Tony this year for her performance in Dana H., in which she lip-synched to a recording, but in Sarah Ruhl’s new play the audience is treated to the full O’Connell, including her voice.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , ,

A Man of No Importance

, , ,
A Man of No Importance

The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Winter’s Tale

, ,
The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale poses two huge challenges to any director. One is that Leontes, the king of Sicilia who has been hosting his bosom buddy Polixenes, king of Bohemia, for nine months, suddenly and without reason suspects his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his old friend. The other is a jump in time between the first three acts—steeped in tragedy—to a fourth act of pastoral comedy, and a last act of redemption. Director Eric Tucker’s production of The Winter’s Tale for Bedlam seems to have taken its approach from the company’s title: it’s almost all bedlam.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Dodi & Diana

,
Dodi & Diana

The come-hither title of Colt Coeur’s Dodi & Diana is essentially a bait-and-switch. For the most part, the characters in Kareem Fahmy’s two-hander are not the lovers whom one expects. They’re a married couple, Jason and Samira, who are well off and a bit New Age. Samira does kundalini, while Jason sees an astrologer, Vincent, who has told him that he and Samira are “astrological doubles” for Diana Spencer and her Muslim boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. Happily, Fahmy’s tricksy title masks a play that’s interesting and well-performed.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Strings Attached

, ,
Strings Attached

Early in Carol Buggé’s new comedy-drama, Strings Attached, one of the author’s characters name-checks British writer Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, about an actual 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Danish capital. Buggé’s reference is a two-edged sword: her own work doesn’t come close to Frayn’s, but it does indicate that she has a passion and knowledge of physics that she wants to share with audiences. Frayn’s treatment is a rare instance of making science dramatically interesting, but Buggé’s overstuffed play is less viable.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis

, ,
Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis

Near the opening of Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis, Colin Mochrie refers to himself as “international comic icon,” but if you haven’t ever seen What’s My Line, Anyway? you might be skeptical of his sweeping claim. (Mochrie’s wry delivery suggests that the description is a bit of a spoof.) Nevertheless, the Canadian native is definitely the funnier half of Hyprov, which combines two disciplines into something unusual and raucously entertaining.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

On That Day in Amsterdam

,
On That Day in Amsterdam

On That Day in Amsterdam begins on a morning in 2015, after two young men have hooked up at a dance club in the Dutch metropolis. One of them, Kevin (Glenn Morizio), an American of Filipino extraction, is impatient to depart: he has a flight back to America later in the day, and he feels no emotional connection. The other, Sammy (Ahmad Maksoud), hopes to know Kevin better and nudges him to have breakfast. A heavy snow delays Kevin’s trip, and what ensues in Clarence Coo’s emotionally reverberating play expands to far more than a gay love story: it is a moving drama about life’s fleeting encounters, loss, nostalgia, home, art, and memory, told in scenes that skip through centuries.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Mister Miss America

, ,
Mister Miss America

Neil D’Astolfo’s Mister Miss America provides many pleasures beyond its nifty title, even though the material treads some pretty familiar ground. In the solo show, the beauty pageant obsessions of gay hero Derek Tyler Taylor (D’Astolfo) take center stage. DTT wants to share the story of his attempt to break the gender barrier at a beauty pageant in southwestern Virginia, where the contestants mostly hail from obscure burgs, such as Bristol, Galax, Martinsville and Radford, and the announcer uses descriptions like “She’s hotter than your pappy’s pistol!” as an introduction.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Reverse Transcription

,
Reverse Transcription

For theater aficionados, the summer visits of Potomac Theatre Project to the Atlantic Theater are bracing—weighty pieces rather than fluffy fare. British writers, often well-represented, comprise one evening this year, but two American plays comprise the second. A revival of Dog Plays, a 1989 one-act with snapshot scenes that focus on the AIDS crisis, is by Robert Chesley, who wrote it after receiving “the diagnosis.” (He died in 1990.) It has been dusted off and paired with a new play, A Variant Strain, by writer-director Jim Petosa and Jonathan Adler, that is indebted to the older work.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Prince Charming, You’re Late

, ,
Prince Charming, You’re Late

The title of Billy Hipkins’s solo show promises lighthearted fun, and the actor often has a twinkle in his eye as he performs it. However, in spite of the elfin charm of Hipkins himself—a sixtysomething gay man who has worked in theater as a dresser and occasionally an actor—Prince Charming, You’re Late strikes many of the darker notes of a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Soft

, ,
Soft

At its core, Donja R. Love’s powerful drama Soft has a certain familiarity. It is a variation on The Blackboard Jungle or Up the Down Staircase—but with a more ruthless, 21st-century demeanor. Its teenage characters have moved beyond the troubled inner city to incarceration, and their mentor has a darker past than either Glenn Ford or Sandy Dennis’s characters, respectively, in those films. In this facility, students wear prison jump suits and are part of a correctional program designed to save them from a criminal career—or is it?

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Cyrano de Bergerac

, ,
Cyrano de Bergerac

When Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac opened in 1897, it was hailed not only for its poetry but for its elaborate sets—one for each of the five acts, from bakery to battlefield—and for its poetry and grandiose passions. Martin Crimp’s version of the story of unrequited love, produced and directed by Jamie Lloyd at BAM, has only the faintest glimmers of any exaltation. More often it’s simply disappointing.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

To My Girls

, ,
To My Girls

In his new comedy-drama To My Girls, playwright JC Lee adds to a subgenre of plays about gay gatherings in which groups of friends thrash out problems and settle old scores with comic bitchiness. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is the forerunner of them all; later touchstones include Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg, Chuck Ranberg’s End of the World Party and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! Lee’s To My Girls, under the direction of Stephen Brackett, is a respectable entry, reflecting a sea change in racial politics and behavior.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Jane Anger

,
Jane Anger

Poking fun at Shakespeare has been a fruitful pastime for more than a century. George Bernard Shaw enjoyed taking the Bard down a peg in his reviews of Victorian productions. In the 1950s Richard Armour wrote cheeky synopses of the plays in Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, and in 2015 the Broadway musical Something Rotten made fun of Shakespeare himself. Now actress and playwright Talene Monahon has done her bit to twist the dagger a few more times into the playwright with an often funny and splendidly acted Jane Anger.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Prayer for the French Republic

,
Prayer for the French Republic

Issues of Jewish identity, religion, heritage and oppression are given a fresh spin in Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, a work of considerable length and intellectual heft. Harmon has set his drama in France, America’s oldest ally, which shares its values. Although it is a country closer geographically and emotionally to the harrowing experience inflicted on Jews by World War II and the Holocaust, it stands in for the United States as well. Incidents of anti-Semitism have increased in both countries in the last decade.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Alchemist

,
The Alchemist

The Red Bull Theater Company was founded in 2003 to present the talented playwrights of Shakespeare’s time who have been overshadowed by the Bard and bring their plays to new audiences. Among its productions have been The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley), Women Beware Women (Middleton alone) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), as well as the occasional Shakespeare. In the years since, the mission has evolved into “classics” outside the 17th century as well—the company’s The Government Inspector, a Nikolai Gogol play of 1836, was one of its most exhilarating triumphs. Now Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted the Gogol, has given an assist to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post