Real Love

What impact do clashing worldviews have on relationships? The Double Murder Plays, an ambitious yet often confusing series of scenes written by Scott Klavan, uses a wide variety of styles to examine that question, from psychological realism to theater of the absurd. The six 10-to-15 minute scenes feature a man and a woman (Klavan and Harriet Trangucci), who in all but one scene are involved in some sort of romantic relationship. Each scene presents characters struggling to connect with one another, despite their often oppositional outlooks on life.

At best, the scenes –- the title calls them plays but few feel complete enough to stand on their own –- express variations on intimacy and love. Unfortunately, the connections between the scenes –- and sometimes even between the characters themselves –- are not clearly articulated by either Klavan’s text or Stephen Jobes’ direction.

With a simple but sufficient domestic set used for most of the scenes, the production opens with a well-dressed woman (Trangucci) carefully arranging a white linen tablecloth when a mentally ill homeless man walks into her dining room. At first frightened by the man’s bizarre behavior, she ultimately welcomes him to her table. Despite the committed performance of the actors, the reasons she does so –- Has she recognized him? Has something he said struck a cord? –- are never illuminated.

The first scene’s depiction of the man as a free thinker and the woman as his restrained, practical counterpart is replicated in several subsequent scenes. In one, a woman struggles to persuade her aging hippy husband that they should medically treat their son’s behavioral disorder. In another, involving two socks engaged in a delightfully whimsical exchange that lends a unique dimension to the concept of a mate, the sock played by the male actor pontificates on the nature of the universe and quotes Dostoyevsky while the sock portrayed by the female actor worries excessively and begs her mate to think practically. The cartoonish, human-size socks, designed by Caitlin O'Connor, fit over each actor's heads and keep their arms pinnned to their sides, leading to some fun physical comedy.

The scene for which the play is named is the most astutely directed and, therefore, its best: a husband and wife chat about their days and their careers, each secretly poisoning the other’s martini. By balancing realism with absurdism, the scene incorporates elements of the prior scenes. And by depicting a couple bantering as they kill each other, it has the most complete message. It would make a fitting conclusion for the evening.

Instead, the production closes with a confusing scene between a woman wondering if she wants kids and a bureaucrat who inexplicably appears in her home. The only scene not about a romantic relationship, it sends the show off course. The production would have done better to skip it and devote more work to the previous scenes; they need it.

Ties that Bind

With its small cast, minimal technical requirements, and heart-stopping storyline, Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Beauty, and Truth makes a great Fringe show. In this fast-paced, 45-minute one act, a pair of teenage sisters struggles to escape their drug-addled mother with help from a favorite uncle. Through a series of wholly organic yet startlingly unexpected plot twists, by the end of the play nothing – not the characters, not their situations – is how it seemed when the play began. Up, Down…, written by veteran off-Broadway playwright Edward Allen Baker, is receiving a well-deserved reprisal by casa 204 productions after premiering at the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s annual one-act marathon eight years ago.

After short-work festivals, stellar new plays like Up, Down… can have a difficult time finding appropriate venues for subsequent productions outside of acting classes, where the scripts live on as teaching tools. So it’s good to see it find a home at the Fringe Festival alongside premiers and work in early stages of development.

Director Diana Basmajian ably sustains the play's brisk pace and the three-member cast brings nice energy, if inconsistent working-class East Providence accents, to their portrayal of the characters. Linnea Wilson and Megan Hart maintain a believable sisterly rapport, while Greg Drozdek nails complicated Uncle Danny’s self-perception as a down-on-his-luck funny man.

Costume designer Lynn Wheeler provides instant insight into Uncle Danny as a working-class man living alone and into little sister Marley as an honor student from the wrong side of the tracks. Wheeler has less success with Steph, whose white tanktop and neat ponytail don’t convey what should be a disheveled appearance.

According to its press release, casa 204 productions aims to produce work featuring “characters and narratives that are not commonly seen on stage in order to bring a broader and deeper definition of humanity to contemporary American stage.” Given that mission, Up, Down… is a curious choice; there is no dearth of American drama about scrappy, blue-collar families desperate to improve their lot. As a quintessential example of that genre, however, Up, Down… is an arresting production.

Nine Lives

It’s become trendy in recent years to take seemingly disparate storylines and explore the volatile ways in which they connect. Paul Haggis’ 2006 Oscar winning Crash followed a diverse array of characters as their segregated worlds collided in Los Angeles; the following year Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s film Babel applied the same format to an international scale. How appropriate, then, that the New York version of this story is not a Hollywood blockbuster but a crackling piece of downtown theater. Publicity materials describe Unconditional, by Brett C. Leonard as “nine New York stories [that] converge in a racially and sexually charged tale of rage, love, justice and betrayal.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a piece that would better typify the LAByrinth Theater Company’s mission of “producing new plays reflecting the many voices in our New York City community.”

Under the direction of Mark Wing-Davey, Unconditional is staged in the round at The Public Theater, where the issues of perspective so central to each character's trajectory are slickly embodied by Mark Wendland’s scenic design. The set is comprised almost entirely of white peg board, with peg board dividers sliding in and out to frame different areas of the stage. The dividers are highly effective in delineating divisions of the performance space; still more effective is their conspicuous absence as the play reaches its meaty center and the character’s stories become increasingly intertwined.

Though the layout of the space is uniquely theatrical, at times the play runs like a tightly-packed television program, covering a lot of ground in a necessarily short amount of time. Bart Fasbender’s sound design underscores otherwise silent scenes with music that goes a long way toward creating ambiance. That furthers the production’s cinematic sensibility, as does Japhy Weideman’s light design. When the peg board dividers disappear, lighting directs audience focus, often creating brief moments with enough intensity to feel like complete scenes.

But then, nearly every scene of the production is marked by both brevity and intensity. At just over two-hours, the convergent storylines pack in a lot: lynching, battery, drug abuse, spousal abuse, theft, racism, fetishism, loneliness. The actors do well with the material most of the time, especially John Doman, who nails the difficult role of Keith by balancing bitter anger and dry dejection with dark charm. Other standouts include Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Keith’s occasional lover, who exudes ambivalent power shaded with quiet desperation, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr., whose sheer conviction rescues the play’s most didactic monologue.

But it’s Elizabeth Rodriguez’s Jessica, the character with the least drama-filled trajectory, whose final scene best exemplifies the hopeless isolation faced by each of the characters. As a spirited, opinionated friend, Rodriguez takes a role that might otherwise serve simply as welcome comic relief – and the play’s sole voice of optimism – and infuses it with a sense of loss that matches those of the other, more wildly tragic characters.

Yet, the fact that the character with the least substantive storyline has some of the play’s most heart-achingly poignant moments indicates a problem. At best, the problem is structural. Balancing nine characters and numerous storylines is a difficult task, and the team behind Unconditional deserves credit for making a play with such a bleak outlook so consistently entertaining. Audiences need not worry about getting bored over the course of the production, and anyone looking for a dark winter evening at the theatre will probably enjoy it. Still, Unconditional suggests that witnessing a likable character suffer subtle loss can prove both more potent and more sophisticated than violent murders and gritty sex scenes. At least, that’s the case here.

Full Circle

Nonlinear structure is a hallmark of avant-garde theatre, yet there has probably never been a production that celebrates the nonlinear like – at the risk of sounding redundant – In Circles. Obsession with circles is one of few explicitly unifying themes in Al Carmine’s musical adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s A Circular Play. Stein wrote A Circular Play in 1920, early in her professional writing career; still earlier in her career as a playwright. Aiming to accomplish in text what her contemporaries achieved through cubist painting, Stein considered her writing to be an evolving experiment in structural manipulation. A playful early example, A Circular Play reads like a collection of loosely rhymed non-sequiturs.

Al Carmine’s lively musical arrangement of the text is a stunning achievement that earned him a 1968 Obie for Best Musical and helped usher in the experimental style that found a home in early Off-Off-Broadway. Such experimentation is no longer as revolutionary as it was in the 20’s or 60’s, and much of the production feels like something from another era. Interestingly, that’s not a bad thing for the piece. In the dedicated hands of director John Sowle, what might otherwise come across as dated instead enhances the play’s other-worldly ambience.

That ambience is strongly supported by Mike Floyd’s delightful 1920’s-esque costumes, which help audiences to distinguish between characters, and Joe Novak’s arrestingly beautiful light design, which helps to distinguish between scenes. Appropriately, the production is staged in the round, yet given the show’s singular emphasis on circles, it’s odd and frustrating that Sowle rarely has the cast play to all sides.

The ensemble is both playful and polished, a remarkable accomplishment given the apparent lack of specificity written into each role. Stein’s text lists no characters and contains no real dialogue; In Circles assigns lines to an ensemble of ten, with characters loosely influenced by Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends from the years surrounding WWI. It’s an inspired choice. The onstage manifestation of how Stein perceived her world is a pleasure to watch.

Even when the characters take their names from Stein’s real-life acquaintances, they are amalgamations. Mildred, for example, comes from a textual reference to Mildred Aldrich, Stein’s good friend and fellow expatriate, credited by the French government with helping to convince the United States to join WWI. Certainly, her understanding of the inter-related nature of the world makes a fitting lens through which to contemplate circles. Yet the character Mildred, played with grounded flourish by Noelle McGrath, is shaded with layers of Stein; she and Mabel (Robin Manning) play hostess to the rest of the characters just as Stein and Alice B. Toklas did in their Parisian salon.

As a key figure in the burgeoning Paris art scene in the early part of the 20th century, Stein’s circle included prominent international artists, among them Matisse and Picasso. Sense of community pervades In Circles, from the performers’ unified enthusiasm in executing Jack Dyville’s dizzying choreography to the delight they take in one another’s singing. Even at the play’s least comprehensible moments, the warmth of the performers and their dedication to the material should keep audiences not just at ease but enraptured.

Stein wrote A Circular Play just after WWI, with her displaced community struggling to put itself back together, and even as the characters of In Circles declare that they “must remain in a circle,” impermanence sets into their world. A soldier, identified only as Brother (Michael Lazar), is killed in the army. Does his absence leave a hole in the circle or make the circle tighter for those who remain? In Circles inexplicitly raises the question but doesn’t bog itself down in conclusions.

Other life cycle events inform the transience of In Circles as well. “Mrs. de Monzy has adopted a child” sings the cast in an early musical outburst while jovially encircling a baby. Much later family is brought up again in the context of a young couple (Megan Hales and Michael Lazar) whom audiences encounter first surrounded by the rest of the ensemble and then alone onstage together. It’s one of few times the stage holds only two performers, and as a result the intimate romantic moment feels strangely lonely; what will happen to the circle? It’s easy to miss the cohesion of the group even as it’s touching to see the beginnings of young love.

“Circles stretch,” say the characters in the face of change. Yet in the final moments of the play, a character notes in true Steinian fashion: “klim backwards is milk.” It’s not palindromic; not everything continues forever.

In Circles oscillates between the inspired exuberance and the melancholic desperation associated with both the Lost Generation of the 1920’s and the activists of the 1960’s. Anyone nostalgic for such a time – and anyone seeking a powerful theatrical experience – would do well to see In Circles.

Antigone Rides Again

With its vivacious chorus, original score, live orchestra, Balinese dance, aerial choreography, and video projections, Fire Throws invokes layered, mythic grandeur in retelling Sophocles' Antigone. Yet, narrated by an older, wiser, introspective Antigone, the production is oddly reminiscent of the final scenes of Our Town. That juxtaposition makes the play well situated within the current off-Broadway season. A Chicago transplant of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town opens this month downtown at Barrow Street Theatre while adaptations of the Greeks are enjoying representation on a number of New York stages this year. The New Group’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s epic reimagination of Aeschylus’s Orestia which sets the play cycle in Post-Civil War New England, also opened this month. Rising Pheonix’s Antigone adaptation, Too Much Memory, which drew heavily on both Sophocles’ text and Jean Anouilh’s 1944 adaptation of it, as well as other sources, earned raves in December at New York Theatre Workshop. Now the cultural prevalence of iconic Greek characters is itself the subject of interdisciplinary theater company Ripe Time's Fire Throws.

The production's intrapsychic interpretation of Antigone posits that Antigone's contemporary status as cultural icon is among the most dynamic aspects of the Sophocles play, yet Fire Throws never fully makes good on that supposition. Erica Berg leads the production with disciplined calm as “Antigone who is” or, as described by writer-director Rachel Dickstein, “the 2400 symbol she has become, looking back on her story and searching for the person inside the icon.”

Berg creates appropriate contrast with “Antigone who was,” imbued by Laura Butler with the youthful, passionate righteousness traditionally ascribed to the character. Yet contrast between the two Antigones never develops beyond that static dissimilarity. Antigone reliving her story from the outside functions less as a cathartic device than as a narrative one.

Happily, the story she narrates is a unique, graciously rendered depiction of the drama. Under Dickstein’s direction, the crossing of multiple disciplines creates a textured, cohesive whole that enhances the epic nature of the story. Jewlia Eisenberg’s original score, performed by music ensemble Charming Hostess, creates a soundscape that both accompanies the production’s Balinese-inflected choreography as well as its spoken-word scenes. Striking lighting, designed by Tyler Micoleau, adds splashes of bright color to Susan Zeeman Rogers’ set design.

In nearly every scene, the athletic chorus maintains a watchful presence, with occasional performers stepping out of the chorus to play the familiar characters of the drama. Kimiye Corwin delivers a well-drawn performance as Antigone’s pragmatic sister Ismene while the rest of the chorus frames their interaction. In the following scene, she and Antigone watch as the chorus performs a heated dance of the mythic battle that killed their brothers. Having characters witness their story unfold before them enhances the production’s emphasis on the fact that the drama is widely known. It also makes Berg’s presence as the omniscient Antigone less obtrusive than it might otherwise be. When she comments on the dramatic action or addresses its participants, her interjections feel organic rather than incongruous.

Video projections, designed by Maya Ciarrocchi, literally cast larger than life images of Creon, the ruler, and Tiresias, the seer. A particularly evocative image early in the play shows Creon upstage, delivering the story’s central edict, while Antigone, downstage of him, runs in place in disobedience of it. Across the backdrop, we see an enormous silhouette of Creon’s profile and crossing that: Antigone's shadow. The production is at its strongest when using its extensive visual vocabulary to depict mythic conflict in such bold, concise images.

“If you only knew there was more to her than this one act,” says Antigone who was, watching Creon condemn her former self. Yet, for or better or worse, her defiance defines her, and in that respect Fire Throws is no exception. In its vibrant, multidimensional depiction of her story, it’s a remarkable achievement.