The Desperate Howl of a Dead-End Life

Move Andy McQuade and the paper detritus surrounding him on the stage at the Independent Theater down the stairs and out to Eighth Street, and he would be indistinguishable from any of the muttering homeless people one can find there. Most people in the audience would cross to the other side to avoid this snarling, flailing, unwashed specter. But in William Whitehurst’s disturbing Pigeon Man Apocalypse, McQuade’s great achievement is to make this character deeply sympathetic. He might still seem menacing by the end, but the audience knows where he is coming from and cannot simply forget him or dismiss him as subhuman, as they might otherwise have done. McQuade plays Arthur Cork, whose “personal apocalypse” has arrived with a family moving into the building where he has been squatting for years. The sound of drills and hammers and people’s voices in the floors below his filthy hideout impels him to tell the story of how he got there. Apart from the fact that it’s made up, the main thing that separates the unsettling rant that follows from those one usually hears from mentally ill street people is the neat, chronological way it’s presented. Arthur starts with his own birth-memory and works on through the wrenchingly sad, lonely years of his childhood to the rush of awful events that landed him where he is now. It’s a story that will be familiar to anyone who has read memoirs lately, marked by early abandonment by his father and then years of brutalization by his cruel mother. Arthur impersonates her frequently as he tells his story, and a cutting hatred fills his voice as he recounts the way she never let him leave the apartment and abused him in all ways imaginable, physically and emotionally.

By the time he brings things up to the present, no one in the audience can be surprised that things turned out for him this way, or blame him for his disgusting appearance and uncivilized bearing. McQuade has inhabited the character fully and insists, often by speaking to them directly, that the audience not avert their eyes from Arthur Cork’s destruction. Unfortunately, the noisy fans in the theater drown out some of his lines, since he occasionally lowers his voice to just above a whisper. But even so, when the lights go down at the end McQuade’s powerful performance has given the audience more than enough to break their hearts and make them furious about this pointlessly ruined life.

Note: This production is part of the 2007 NYC International Fringe Festival.

Viva La Revolution!

Until they succeed, revolutionaries are often dismissed as unrealistic dreamers. So it’s appropriate that Adam Mervis’ terrific new play, The Revolutionaries, is full of people’s descriptions of their dreams, both the sleep kind and the aspirational kind. But unlike many plays that use dreams as a device, Mervis’ smart, funny script never takes the easy route. And even when they’re talking about these intangibles, the actors are so strong in their roles that the audience readily goes along with them. The engaging first-level plot of The Revolutionaries tracks what happens when two childhood friends get into the cutthroat energy business. One of them, Chevy, has invented solar panels that are inexpensive but highly efficient and will allow users to go off the power grid. Given a wonderfully apt Peter Pan-like boyishness by Robert Yang, Chevy seems naïve and idealistic with his wild dreams of changing the world and giving power to the people. By contrast, Frank acts the part of the hard-nosed, savvy businessman who builds the new power company with money from his own trust and know-how from his prior career on Wall Street. Brought to intense, jumpy life by Mervis, Frank brims with big plans that he refuses to see thwarted by consideration for others. As a result, his relationship with his girlfriend Jean (the excellent Desirée Matthews) deteriorates rapidly, since getting the company off the ground is more difficult than he anticipated and she misses the life they left behind in New York.

Once the little company’s fortunes do turn for the better, it’s not long before the “practical” Frank begins to seem out of touch, drunk on power and endlessly spouting aphorisms about leadership. And the sweetness of success lasts for just a short time: part of what makes The Revolutionaries so propulsive and entertaining is Mervis’ ability to evoke the non-stop, roller coaster feel of working in a start-up. The first act is nearly perfect in terms of pace and suspense leading up to the intermission. The second act is slightly weighed down with a few too many subplots, but the writing doesn’t lose its edge and the actors delve more deeply into their characters.

The Revolutionaries pulls viewers in quickly and keeps them captivated throughout, wondering what will happen next. The cast presents the combination of straightforward interpersonal dramas and serious thought nearly seamlessly under Megan Marod's intelligent direction. It is a complete package of a quality unusual for the Fringe.

Going Out With A Whimper

Larke Schuldberg has a powerful subject to work with in BANG/whimper, her brief two-character suspense play. Tensions in the former Yugoslavia haven’t faded with the end of war in the 1990s and the death of Milosevich. As a result, the stakes are bound to be high when Goran (Drew Bruck), a Serbian working as a painter in Berlin, brings Sabina (Risa Sarachan) back to his apartment with the intention of painting her and maybe getting some play, and instead she confronts him about what he did in the war. Unfortunately, neither actor seems fully invested in the conflicts (the immediate one between the characters or the distant ethnic one that provoked the other). As a result, the play mostly falls flat, in spite of all the threats and shouting that erupt. As the show begins, Sabina refuses to tell Goran her name. She has good reason beyond coyness for being evasive, the audience finds out later, but to reveal that here would ruin much of the nervous energy that the play possesses. As Sabina poses in an armchair, she asks pointed questions about Goran’s past and mentions that she is searching for her beloved older brother, who disappeared some time ago. Both these fixations point toward the eventual revelations about her own history, but when those come they are nonetheless surprising for the audience.

Though Schuldberg’s writing at times lacks nuance, the surprise is caused more by Sarachan’s utterly nonchalant, indifferent presentation of the character. At the outset, Sabina is supposed to be acting normal, so there such casualness is warranted to some extent. But even when Sabina shows all her cards, Sarachan seems detached, which makes it difficult for an audience to feel engaged by and concerned about the character she portrays. Bruck brings more urgency to his role, but still fails to effectively and consistently communicate his haunted, lonely persona.

It’s admittedly hard for most people outside the region to comprehend the conflict in Yugoslavia on more than a news-based, intellectual level; it has been going on for centuries. However, it is an actor’s job to feel foreign emotions personally and to cause audiences feel them in turn. This doesn’t happen in BANG/whimper, so its potentially provocative ending does not reach its potential, and neither does the show as a whole.

Hamlet Lives Again

Given all the bloodshed that brings Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a close, there would seem to be limited opportunities for a sequel. However, as the box office success of countless horror movie sequels, and the artistic success of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead have shown, there is no reason to let a pile of corpses get in the way of spinning off a new story. In her ingenious but difficult new play, Isabelle Assante took that lesson and extended the life of Hamlet past the title character’s death. She did so using Shakespeare’s text: cut up and rearranged, the original play’s lines, plus a few incidental additions, have become Horatio. The new production is born from a verse spoken by the dying Danish prince to his friend Horatio, in which he implores him to tell the world the story of what has happened. This scene is reproduced by a group of five actors who form a sort of chorus for the play and whom Horatio (Richard Gallagher, in an outstanding performance) has engaged to fulfill his dead lord’s request. Horatio plays his own part, but it is visibly hard on him. Afterwards, he decides he can bear the pain no longer, and before long he and the chorus are in the cemetery. When Hamlet (John Pasha) enters he’s crazier than ever, and not happy to see Horatio; Pasha, wild-eyed, terrifies those on stage as well as everyone in the audience.

Although the lines and characters are familiar to anyone who has read Hamlet, Horatio can be hard to follow. Elizabethan theater conventions are challenging anew, and the Shakespearean diction is as puzzling as the first time a viewer sees one of his plays. Hamlet is a part of the English-speaking world’s cultural consciousness, but Horatio doesn’t have that familiarity to aid comprehension. The lines are not totally reshuffled – a few scenes appear nearly whole, like the play-within-a-play The Murder of Gonzaga, the apparition of the king’s ghost, and Hamlet’s soliloquy. But in new contexts and on different lips, the words are utterly changed in meaning.

This is exciting, but challenging. Shakespeare scholars and anyone who enjoys parsing difficult plays should plan to attend at least twice in order get the most from the experience that is Horatio. Others who don’t have such interest or patience for a production that doesn’t reveal everything upon first viewing will be frustrated. Assante’s bold experiment with the hallowed Hamlet will linger in the mind long after its much less bloody conclusion.

Playing the Game of Life 2.0

If Brian Bielawski, the co-writer of and solo actor in Gamers isn’t a player of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), he must have done some intensive research for his role. As Steve, a drop-out from MIT working in tech support for a software company, Bielawski has the stereotypical gamer look, mannerisms, and lingo down frighteningly well. But unlike many gamers, Bielawski has a good sense of humor about the MMOG phenomenon and the people caught up in it, and he makes the short play very entertaining to watch. The set consists of Steve’s tiny office cubicle, its walls papered with anime and sci-fi posters and its desk cluttered with toys and Mountain Dew bottles. He would seem to be just another office drone, irritated by his “jack-in-the-box” cubicle neighbor, an annoying boss who keeps insisting for some reason that he work, and, of course, by the idiots calling tech support. But Steve is actually the leader of what he believes is the best MMOG army ever assembled. Today he’s leading that army into enemy territory to reclaim a “relic” stolen the previous month. At least, that’s the plan, if he can avoid getting sabotaged by inconvenient intrusions from the real world, such as his girlfriend.

The army’s progress to and through battle provides a convenient dramatic plot hook that keeps the audience on the edge – will Steve’s team win, or will his newbie protégé mess things up? But the game also offers a backdrop to the exploration of slightly more serious subjects. As Steve hunches in his chair, clad in a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, typing frantically away on his computer or juggling his cell phone and work phone headset, one can’t help but contrast this weak, skinny gamer with someone who might have led real army legions in the past. Have humans actually evolved? Less subtly, Gamers shines a critical light on Steve’s inability to grow up. He concentrates all his energy on a fantasy world instead of working on his relationship or reapplying to MIT and figuring out a real career.

Bielawski’s acting is good enough and Gamers moves along well enough that he and his co-writer Walter G. Meyer could have conveyed this message without spelling so much out, but in the end they take the easy route of telling rather than showing. Fortunately, audiences will be too busy laughing at Steve’s grandiosity and geeky antics to care. Gamers manages the neat trick of making the isolated MMOG player’s world into something others can enjoy watching.

Confusions of Theater and Adolescence

The most striking aspect of Thom Pasculli’s FREEDOM! And the Sticky End of Make-Believe is its sheer physical energy. The show, a surreal account of a boy coming of age in a war-mad world, is the first production of a holistic U.S.-South Africa arts education program called <a href= “http://www.thesavannahtheatreproject.org/” The Savannah Theater Project . The cast puts enormous effort into portraying the characters in this absurdist movement theater piece, so that even though the plot wanders, the actors’ efforts go a long way towards maintaining viewers' attention. As they sing, play instruments, dance, and invent “soldier” games, the actors are all riveting to watch. If the viewer looks beyond the abstract movement bits, an actual plot sequence can be discerned. Events are bounded within the three days that remain before the boy, Conner, is to be sent off to military school. He lives with his uptight father Jack and wildly imaginative tag-along kid sister Carly, and across the street from Mildred and her rebellious 23-year-old son Salvatore. Conner is pulled in all directions by the other characters, each of whom has their own idea of what he should be doing. Jack wants him to be a hero in the war on terror army; Salvatore wants him to be a hero opposing the war; Carly wants him to play make-believe with her; Mildred wants him to ignore everything and reach his true self’s full potential, whatever it may be. Not surprisingly, Conner quickly gets confused and disoriented by all these opposing plans for his future.

Even understanding the general outline of the action, one’s head starts to spin while watching it. With random segments of athletic dance, dolls that come to life, and Jack racing around on stilts and skates, the play feels like a hallucination or fever dream. Movement theater can be effective in conveying things that are too difficult or strange to say in plain language. However, since it is frequently developed in workshop classes, there is always a danger that a show relying heavily on it will become an uncoordinated combination of parts that aren’t accessible to someone who wasn’t in the workshop. FREEDOM! And the Sticky End of Make-Believe often falls into this trap. While the physicality is fun to watch, it provides too little of the extra meaning it could, and one leaves feeling exhilarated yet dissatisfied and nearly as disoriented as Conner.

A Cupboard Full of Questions

Something is rotten in the home of Mrs. Hubbard. At first it seems messy children are the problem plaguing the exasperated title character of Mark Jay Mirsky’s absurdist, playful black comedy. Mrs. Hubbard is a plainspoken housewife played by Jennifer Bayly with a sly smile shifting beneath her weariness. Early in the production, a woman in nurse whites (given an expertly evasive manner by Jill Helene) shows up asking about “Filthy Child” and her brother, and Mrs. Hubbard lists all the cleaning she’s had to do. Then a foul cursing booms down from upstairs, the last syllables drowned out by a recording of the opening chord from Beethoven’s Fifth. The filth must be metaphorical, the audience thinks.

Ophelia and Fortinbras, the siblings in question, are played with a wicked glee by Lynn Mancinelli and Israel Mirsky. They do use dirty language, but when they enter it’s clear that they are not children but immature twentysomethings. The audience has been misled in another way too: the real problem is evidently Mr. Hubbard, described as a despicable rodent who is in hiding and should be exterminated. This is where the visitor in whites comes in: she is actually a representative from the pest control company the children have called. Mrs. Hubbard is soon on board with the plot as her anger toward her husband outweighs her irritation with her immature children.

Unfortunately for the children, their plot does not unfold according to plan, setting up gruesome ends that will not surprise anyone who recognizes the children’s names from Hamlet. And when the audience finally meets Mr. Hubbard (Jeremy Johnson), a kindly-looking old man toting a leather-bound Shakesepeare folio, it feels as though it has been steered wrong yet again. He claims he absented himself from the family merely because he wanted some privacy and quiet. Having met his wife and children, it’s hard to blame him. So what’s going on?

Mirsky’s writing is precise and vivid (one passage when Mrs. Hubbard remembers her mouth being washed out as a child is especially memorable), but the story’s meaning is stubbornly elusive. The uncertainty is even written into the script, since Mr. Hubbard addresses the audience to ask with whom it will side. Viewers who prefer endings to be wrapped up neatly will be turned off by this aspect of Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, in spite of the strong acting and tight staging. However, the production's many open questions will please those who enjoy puzzles.

Three Ways of Looking at a Break-Up

Emma Fisher’s new drama is as straightforward as a relationship, which is to say not very straightforward at all, especially beneath the surface. In a setup reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s famous film <a href= “http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/” Rashomon , which presents the story of a crime from different points of view, the events of Diving in December are told three times over, from the perspective of each participant in a youthful love triangle. It’s an interesting approach, but most of the scenes are overlong, giving the play a bloated, sluggish feel even though the acting is generally on point. The unconventional triangle consists of a lesbian couple, Georgie and Max, plus Austin, Georgie’s best guy friend from college (portrayed with endearing awkwardness by Patrick Shaw). He’s an aspiring chef. Max works as a sommelier in her family’s restaurant. Georgie, on the other hand, is enrolled in Stanford’s mathematics Ph.D. program. As one of only two female students, the pressure to prove herself by proving a difficult theorem is eating Georgie alive and creating great friction with Max. Lillian Meredith has just the right mixture of confidence and anxiety to play Georgie, while Kymberlie Stansell has a pitch-perfect take on Max’s haughty, demanding personality.

Since Georgie has little time for her and is always hopped up on Adderall, Max begins to hang out more with Austin, who has been nursing a crush on her. Tensions come to a head one night when Max can no longer take Georgie’s insensitivity and inattention and runs into Austin’s arms. Then she leaves for good, an event the audience has seen coming since the play's beginning, as it opens with Georgie reading Max’s farewell letter.

If a viewer fails to read the advance materials about the show, it will take some time to figure out how the play's structure works because of how long it takes for each segment to play out. To be effective, the multiple vantage approach requires crisp, quick takes, and the plot of Diving in December would have lost nothing with some strategic deletions. The dialogue, in particular, tends to drift. Fisher’s writing has definite potential, and the well-chosen cast helps to enliven the production, but it’s not a quality play yet and would benefit from further development.

Four Characters In Search of a Laugh

For the past few weeks and months, casts from the small theater companies around the country and world that are taking part in the Fringe have been feverishly memorizing lines and rehearsing blocking. Not the talented actresses of Naked in a Fishbowl, an entertaining improv sketch comedy about the lives of four young female New Yorkers. While these ladies didn’t have to memorize anything, they aren’t totally free to invent. Each night brings a new scenario, but the specific, detailed character histories established over the course of several years and incarnations of the show inform the actresses' reactions. In addition, three of them have been in the show before and have grown familiar with the characters. So instead of working from a blank slate the actresses assume alternate personalities in order to deal with unexpected events – reality theater, in a way. In the show's Fringe opening, for example, the friends are heading to a play that Bonnie (Lauren Seikaly) is producing, which stars the new wife of Sophie’s (Brenna Palughi) ex. The first scene, however, consists entirely of the women chatting as they finish getting ready, in a clear reminder of why the earlier versions of the show were called What Women Talk About. For instance, Sara (Katherine Heller) is dating a Republican, a situation Jean (Lynne Rosenberg) can’t comprehend. Then Sophie drops the bombshell that she is moving to Italy in two weeks. After the play, the other three women try to decide how to break the news to Bonnie that they thought it was horrible.

Thanks to the two seasons of “webisodes” of What Women Talk About and its prior stints onstage in New York, Naked in a Fishbowl already has a fan base that is familiar with the characters’ back stories. But the actresses are skilled at dropping clues about themselves into their comments so that even the uninitiated will quickly feel up to speed. As the women grapple with the night’s designated challenge and the curveballs they throw each other as it goes, there’s naturally a fair amount of spluttering and hesitation and interruption among the actresses. But since they have established characters to fall back on, the show never goes too far out to sea. To the contrary, the actresses’ good cheer and spontaneity encourage viewers to attend future performances in order to find out what happens next.

Of Pigs and Cows and Monkeys and Men

Humans can build computers and launch rockets and think of themselves as having a privileged place in the universe, but in the end, people are just animals. Or so Ryan O’Nan reminds us in several ways in his funny if uneven Animals. The play is not so much a unified, concrete work as it is a series of vignettes with certain commonalities. The most important continuity is a talented cast of three, each performing a wide variety of parts with irresistible energy. Particular recognition is due to Mortensen’s stand-out performance – her aptitude for animal mimicry proves that she, at least, understands her fellow animals, and she can do a mean Jersey accent. The first act is a loose arrangement of snapshots in a New Jersey diner. It begins inside the diner, where two overworked waiters (Michael Hirstreet and O’Nan), whose uniforms include fake pig snouts and tails, get into a bizarre spat and threaten each other with ketchup bottles. O’Nan’s character subsequently sits alone and reflects on his existential malaise, wondering about life’s purpose. Even this seeming seriousness is lightened by the fact that his comments are directed to a ham sandwich. The segment segues cleverly into a scene between two customers, then to pigeons on a wire above the customers, and finally to a pair of flies, a species that featured prominently in the customers’ earlier discussion (a woman coming off a bad break-up compares men to flies).

In the second act, the pace picks up with three separate vignettes. An alien arrives on Earth and mates with an ape, spawning Adam and Eve, who get together, in spite their father’s warnings, after he returns to the mothership for an audit. Next, we learn the real reason unicorns didn’t make it onto Noah’s Ark. Finally, three fed-up cows plan to escape their Texas dairy farm and make their way to India to be worshiped as gods.

In spite of the animal theme and pseudo-existential remarks that the vignettes have in common, they don’t hang together well, and may disappoint viewers who expect movement towards a conclusion. But for those who are open to seeing a production whose flow may lead to some head-scratching, Animals is great goofy fun. While much of its serious message is obscured, the subtle reminder that humans should exercise humility prevents the play from being just another loopy comedy.

Getting Over Happily Ever After

Lusia Strus’ compelling solo show is modern in most ways, especially her predilection for unflinching personal confessions and ability to make them very funny. Yet it also draws on time-honored principles of oral storytelling. The result is a strikingly well-written and flawlessly performed piece. The show began as a commission from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 2002 when she was about to get married for the first time, but the production has evolved as her life has. Thus, as her biography sheet puts it, there is now “bonus divorce material!” The beginning half of the show remains exactly as it was created, introducing the audience to Strus through her reflections, as she prepared to marry, on what wedding vows really mean. This leads her to relate her Ukrainian immigrant parents’ story: their two-date courtship followed by years of quiet devotion until her father’s relatively young death. The show’s second half brings the audience up to date, since regardless of her best intentions when saying her own vows, Strus and her husband divorced in 2004, in circumstances she describes honestly but briefly, the pain still clear in her voice.

Throughout the show, she frequently repeats certain key lines, lending them a lyrical effect and evoking the ancient bards who incorporated such phrases or descriptive epithets to help them memorize epics. Also, while Strus mostly stands still or perches on a stool on the bare stage, she uses a few simple gestures multiple times, enriching the minimalist setting. She has excellent stage presence, using her gaze to reach to the back of the house and draw everyone in. Most important is her polished yet emotional delivery of her mother Eugenia’s story – as when Eugenia kneels at her husband’s casket screaming at him for leaving her – and her own, as when she recounts details of her simultaneously deteriorating marriage and state of mind and how her rage and confusion were manifested in trips to Home Depot to buy bread.

In spite of the tough situations that comprise the subject matter, the production is often very funny. Strus might still be in pain over some of her problems, but she laughs at herself and her craziness makes the audience laugh with her. While anyone who enjoys autobiographies will love it ain’t no fairytale, even skeptics and those weary of the genre will likely be won over by Strus’ hard-won, skillfully articulated insights.