Clown Porn

Ever heard of clown porn? Google it, see what comes up. Or head down to the Red Room to catch Animalparts’ fun production of Miranda Huba’s Dirty Little Machine. It’s a play dealing with, laughing at, possibly even warning about the depths of influence pornography has reached in this country, performed in an imaginative form of clowny physical theater. You’ll be surprised how a perfectly mimed threesome (performed by two actors) can tickle your (funny) bone. Huba kicks the play off with one of many narrated monologues, told in a mildly seductive fashion by the young and talented Joanne Wilson (Jane). She describes finding a disturbing pornographic novel at age thirteen (apparently a true event in Huba’s life), which eventually leads her toward the following decision: She will “seek out the most degenerate, repulsive, douchebag she can find and date him- in order that she may either fulfill her deep-seated sexual fantasies OR renounce all disempowering desires and become a true feminist.”

As we know, weasels are not hard to find, and Jane swiftly finds Dick (the exuberant Ben Mann) and promptly has silhouette sex with the loser. As the relationship between the couple develops, director Nathan Schwartz smoothly moves the scene from one location to the next, making clever use of the limited space of the Red Room. We watch Dick gradually lose his sex drive, openly watching more and more porn on Jane’s computer. Whenever things take a turn to the worse, Jane chooses to resign herself to further humiliation. It comes to a climax with Dick’s delightful question: “What are you going to do for me to get you an abortion?” Jane’s naughty response: “Anything…”

Aside from a few funny moments in the script, Schwartz manages to infuse the play with outrageous physical humor and other clown techniques. There is a sense of physical exploration and freedom that gives even the weightier moments an airy comic undertone. Both actors seem comfortable moving from narration to dialogue to physical buffoonery.

For Animalparts, one of the most interesting young theater companies to emerge on the scene in the last couple years, this play marks a transition. The play employs their frenetic blend of physical theater, wild video and sound design, and oddly touching bits of quasi-realistic insanity. This time, however, they are daring to use it toward a piece of more direct commentary.

Just when the storyline begins to lose its immediacy, Huba adds a smart subplot. Borrowing from the novel the author found when she was thirteen, Jane recounts the story of a young girl who learns to enjoy her uncle’s sexual manipulations. The blending and interplay between the relationship of Dick and Jane, and that narrated in the story of the pedophile uncle, give the evening renewed strength, and challenge the audience’s sense of decency.

Still, however dark, the play fails to shock us in an unfamiliar way, by dreaming up new horrid forms of domination and fantasy (although it does offer some funny scenarios, like a porn scene between a sleepy middle-aged husband and his boring wife). Instead of taking us further, there is a sense of stating what we already know about porn and society.

The play seems to be exploring feminism through the lens of fantasy and domination. How does pornography, and the tremendous freedom to humiliate and be humiliated by the other gender, play into contemporary feminism? Is there any form of female liberation inherent in porn? Does the humiliation of men in the form of dominatrix, another aspect of pornography portrayed in the play, tell us anything about women’s empowerment? Probably not, says the play, since even those scenes tend to end in a facial cum shot.

The evening does end with a warning of what these games of domination, explored so thoroughly online, can lead to. I walked out feeling as though the play was intended to be some new form of feminism, but actually worked the other way. There is a falseness to the premise, which the lead character never understands – “A true feminist,” as Jane thinks she might become, does not ignore and repress her natural inclination toward dominating and being dominated. She accepts that domination is part of her inner world and works with that to empower herself. Instead, in the play, she allows those impulses to lead to her ultimate disempowerment.

Still, Huba has drafted a rich offering, and Schwartz, Wilson and Mann flesh it into an enticing evening of theater.

Leave the Nazis Alone

Contessa’s brother Dexel suddenly reappears after an absence of twenty-one years. “I’m SO Sorry,” he says with pained sincerity – for raping and impregnating her at their last adolescent encounter. A noise is heard from the bathroom, where Contessa’s wife, Jackie, has been locked up, prompting Dexel’s next line: “Does Jackie have a big pussy?” The Amoralists' newest work, now playing at PS 122, provides a curious journey. It jolts back and forth from melodrama to farce, from high-brow political nuance to low racist jokes. Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter keeps you repeatedly asking yourself the same question – Is this for real? Whether they are or not, The Amoralists have put together a fine, stimulating evening of theater.

It begins with a sentimental mulatto, Contessa, (Mara Lileas) crying in an entirely naturalistic apartment set to the tune of an old Afro-American blues song. “My hair is wooly,” wails Nina Simone, weep weep weep goes Contessa. Both are cut off by a message on the answering machine, a stranger threatening to kill the “lesbian whores.” Alarm bells go off – self-important issue play, yikes! Shortly after, however, Jackie enters, and the tone of the play is sharply reconstructed. She’s drunk, and keeps yelling things about their daughter, the cannibal. Anna Stromberg is hysterical as Jackie, both in the funny sense and the loud sense, and the story line seems to follow her lead toward the outrageous.

But it isn’t until the next “dramatic” interlude between Contessa and (half) brother Dexel, described above, that a mock drama begins to take form. Perhaps it is the continuous references to Streetcar - Contessa’s strong southern accent and her riff on whether “Polak” is a racial epithet, Jackie’s over-the-top alcoholism, the presence of rape and bizarre sibling relationships – that make the play seem like a comment on American drama more than anything else. Adding to that are writer/director Derek Ahonen’s bold strokes, juxtaposing cartoon-like clowniness with quiet attempts at naturalism.

The result is mixed. While eliciting stellar performances from his cast (Jordan Tisdale especially is a delight from the moment he enters the stage), Ahonen stumbles directorially at some key moments, straining to reach emotions this frenetic piece cannot sustain. But Ahonen and the cast do succeed in holding our attention for nearly two intermission-less hours. They also leave us brimming with thoughts, questions and memories of many funny moments. Here’s one good image: A plastered, weirdo-clown-faced Lesbian Jew mumbling “Leave the Nazis alone. They’ve suffered enough.”

Bring Us the Head is a play of substance (abuse?), that, while over-shooting at times, is not afraid to engage deeply with the moral, political and theatrical landscape of our time.

Frankenstein Comes to Church

Many of Off Off Broadway’s most successful companies present their work in a heightened theatrical acting style, which seems to be poking fun at the entire dramatic enterprise from the Greeks to Law and Order. It has become a rarity to see a play in which high dramatic acting is performed in earnest. As if calling on the spirits of the ancient actors who first got on a stage to perform, or on the practitioners in far corners of the globe who still perform their ancient methods today, Rabbit Hole Ensemble valiantly goes there. In so doing the company sheds some light on why that kind of acting is shied away from by virtually every living western theater director. One of the best moments in Doctor Frankenstein's Magical Creature is entering the space. A large room inside the Old First Reformed Church on Carroll Street in Park Slope is sparsely, elegantly set up. One long, curved row of chairs is book-ended by an actor on each side. In front of them sits a cloth with several objects sitting on it: a drum, a pistol, and more. When the lights go down on the audience the only light in the room is that coming in from the decorated church windows high above the stage. One of the two actors who were sitting with us picks up a light fixture and flashes it on the narrator’s face. These simple, hand held lights are the only ones we will encounter all evening.

In that spooky bottom lighting, as if we’re all seated around a bonfire, Emily Hartford begins telling the story of Frankenstein, through the voice of the (female in this production) creature, not the (female) doctor. The story-telling is enhanced by effective work from the ensemble, which surrounds the audience with sound, physically acts out the narration, and handles the seamless motion of the simple and pretty lighting design (by director Edward Elefterion). The haunting story, however, quickly becomes something akin to a Greek tragedy, in which we watch the creature (Jocelyn O'Neil) grow from a sad but hopeful, peaceful being into a vengeful murderer.

The production works with Rabbit Hole’s signature minimalist aesthetic, focusing the piece on the physical abilities of the actors. Director Elefterion handles the ensemble well, but his insistence on relating the acting style to a more grandiose form of drama, such as Japenese Noh, is the play’s downfall. While some of the actors seem uncomfortable sustaining this heightened style, perhaps the main reason it turns flat less than halfway through the (under an hour) evening is the seriousness with which the production seems to take itself. It is a gravity which does not translate into an emotional experience for the audience. Instead it comes across as self-conscious and slight, and leaves the spectators disconnected.

The script has strong moments, especially early on as writer Stanton Wood connects us with the emotional landscape of the creature. However, the play tries to be something akin to a classical tragedy with very little of the tool classical plays utilize most, dialogue. Adding to this is the way in which this rather intellectual piece occasionally slips into tiring cliché, as when the creature despairs: “I just want to be accepted.”

It’s refreshing to see a company be straightforward about the drama it is creating. But the dramatic has already been abducted by bad television, leaving theater artists with a burning need to re-invent it. Successfully plowing ahead with “drama” as if it hasn’t changed in 3000 years, even if you are adding some contemporary touches, would require an act of genius. Even the Greeks are performed small these days.

Eternal But Not

Attention theatergoers: Another play about how hollow life is in these post-post days is now playing at the Vineyard Theatre. It’s drawl, depressing, occasionally funny and ultimately pointless. And it’s two and a half hours long. To the credit of the talented cast and crew of Will Eno’s latest offering, Middletown, those hours go by rather quickly. What happens? A bunch of characters introduce themselves to the audience, say funny things, choke each other, say some more funny things, go to the library, and top it off with saying some funny things. Then comes intermission, which for me consisted of a chat with a fellow spectator, who succinctly summarized what the play is saying: “Some things are eternal, but not.” He nailed it. At this point, the play still seemed like it could be hiding something under its celebrated cloak of mundanity.

Quickly after resuming the action, however, the direction of the piece becomes clear – depressing philosophizing replaces humorous chit-chat. The second act shows each of the rather endearing characters we met in the first act (James Mcmenamin is especially sweet as the prospect-less George Gibbs) deteriorating into depression and death. We end up in a hospital, where all of them converge for one reason or another. The only exception is the delightful librarian, played with sweet, compassionate detachment by Georgia Engel.

The set, costumes (David Zinn) and lighting (Tyler Micoleau) all work coherently to convey the drab simplicity of contemporary life. The acting style also is simple and to the point, and director Ken Russ Schmoll aptly does what the script demands. Mr. Eno is clearly talented, drawing his audience along with little action and bouncy dialogue, swinging the play cleverly back and forth between the realities of Middletown and that of the present moment in the theater.

However, the play makes the mistake of constantly calling attention to its relation to its mythological ancestor, Our Town, and never comes close to living up to that comparison. The one aspect of Eno's adaptation that does draw from Wilder in a way that adds color and depth to the production is the actors' ongoing interaction with the audience. The first act, for example, ends with us watching a theatricalized version of ourselves - actors playing audience members talking about the first half of the play, texting, and wondering what will come next in the second act. "Oh, it's starting," they say, at the end of their five minute dialogue. We watch the lights go down on the actor-audience, and feel the lights come up on us - intermission.

Still, the evening amounts to a sad conclusion, one which is actually far from true: that our day and age is not only far more hollow than the time when Wilder wrote his masterpiece, but also incapable of creating its own stories, instead relying on adapting those of past times.

Fishing for Identity in The Passion

In the second part of the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s excellent production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, currently playing at the Irondale Center, a group of Bavarian locals are rehearsing the famous Oberamergau Passion Play. Dressed in various traditional racist depictions of Jews (horns, gold, general ugly), the Hebraic rabbis of the Bible demand the death of Jesus, moments before they dive to the ground in search of falling coins. Spectators immediately recognize the humorous tone. The question, however, is what it is exactly that we recognize – is it the classic stereotypes themselves, now outdated, or at least socially taboo, or is it our own relationship with those images today? In other words, are we relating to an iconic image from the past, or to a breathing part of our own intellectual world today? Or in Ms. Ruhl’s words from her playwright’s note – “Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?” The playwright’s question is alive in this production, in large part due to the fact that her producers at ETE insist that the theater should strive to blur the line between its role as performance and its social role in the community. Playing in a church in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, the three and a half hour play, often followed or preceded by public discussions about religion and public life, functions as a type of modern day direct democracy gathering. True, the main speakers seem not to come from the Evangelical right, but they do come with a (critical perhaps) love of the Good Lord, and an appreciation for how people have felt about Him at different moments in history.

The three plays that make up the evening, however, are not designed to be didactic. They are, in fact, poetic explorations of the relationship between Church and State, and of the purpose of the theater in times of public strife. Under the competent direction of Mark Wing-Davey, each of the plays drags the spectator’s imagination from simple stories to dreamy theatrical imagery, from Jesus to Ronald Reagan.

“When I close my eyes I see a parade of dead fish coming at me,” says Pontius the Fish Gutter in part I one of the cycle, just a moment before a parade of enormous fish silently fill the stage, Bread and Puppet style (the mobile sets and huge puppets by Allen Moyer and Warren Karp really bring the plays to life) . A short moment later Queen Elizabeth shows up (the marvelous T. Ryder Smith) to shut down the play. Explained in greater clarity in the program than in the play (where she talks about very thick make-up), the 16th century Protestant queen forbid depictions of the Christ, forcing the local actors to sell all their costume pieces but the clunky angel halos.

In Part II we are in pre-WWII Germany, and for the second time we witness the actress playing the Virgin (the lovely Kate Turnbull) get knocked up. This happens in each of the three plays. The reaction to it, however, is different each time, keeping the audience engaged in the similarities and differences between each historical moment.

The rehearsals for the Passion, which we witness as well in every one of the plays, are interrupted during the first two by the irritating Village Idiot. It is unclear what Ms. Ruhl was attempting to do with this character, and despite a valiant attempt by Polly Noonan, one feels quite annoyed at the actor playing Jesus (Hale Appelman), when he lets her out of the cage she was confined to by the play’s director. The worst moment in the cycle belongs to this Bavarian Village Idiot, at the close of the second play. She remains the only one standing for sanity against the Nazi wave, and her speech at the close of that play (right before the generic picture of a stage full of actors standing erect staring out at a fascism dazed audience) definitely presents a challenge for spectators’ desire to come back for part three after the second intermission. Nor does it help that Mr. Wing Davey directs the style of Part II away from the pageantry of Part I and towards tedious melodrama.

But hold tight – Part III brings it all together, and even makes the flat choices in its predecessor seem mildly significant to the sum total offering of the company. At last we’re back in the US of A, in the Badlands of South Dakota. We watch another virgin slip, this time onto the lap of the brother of her war-bound husband. Fifteen years later the husband is still suffering from trauma, even as Ronald Reagen shows up, Hitler makes an appearance and even Queen Elizabeth graces us one more time with her divine presence (“I don’t see why anyone would give their life for anything less than a monarch.”).

By the end of the third play we have reached present times, and that is when the actor playing the traumatized soldier (Dominic Fumusa, who gives a strong performance in Part III of the cycle) can speak some lines to the audience about religion and the state. By this point we are eager to sponge in what the writer has to say. It’s unfortunate that her grit escapes Ms. Ruhl at this critical juncture, and all she has to say is “I don’t know if this country needs more or less religion.” What is fortunate is that she has already given us over three hours of sweet and bitter thoughts to take out of the theater with us, and perhaps even allow them to seep into our daily lives.

Dancing on the Plates of Memory

There is very little plot to Kinding Sindaw’s new production, Pandibulan, Bathing by the Moonlight. Framed as a memory, the Philippine dance drama shows the rituals surrounding a Yakan (a southern Philippines island) couple’s marriage, and the birth of their first child. And yet, bringing a taste of the richness of a far-away aesthetic, the dancers manage to convey a movement painting of the emotions surrounding the act of marriage. The play opens with a short scene, the only one in the play using spoken dialogue, between a US customs officer and a non-English speaking Philippine woman. As he belittles her we scroll back to an earlier time and place in her life. We are quickly introduced to the characters and themes that will lead the play along, as well as to the slightly mimetic dance language they will speak through. The lovely traditional music of gongs, drums and flutes begins the accompaniment as well, which will cue the audience into the emotion of each scene until the end of the play.

Evening falls as the women finish harvesting the rice, and the full moon rises, just in time for Dayang and Hassan’s parents to meet and arrange their marriage. Alternating female dances with male ones, we watch the bride and groom prepare for the ceremony. The women dance gracefully, the men with more vigor. While the leading dancers (Emil Almirante, Diane Carmino, R. Alexander T. Sarmiento, Nodiah Biruar and Joseph Ocasio – particularly charming as the monkey) carry the exactitude of the movements elegantly, one does wish for a slightly more rigorously trained supporting cast.

What brings the play to life is the imaginative use of inanimate objects. Each stick, carriage or sword fills the stage with a new idea. The unspecified symbolism of each object fills the dance with meaning. In Pandibulan, it is the plates that most successfully carry the audience both into the Pacific island aesthetic, and right into the present moment on the stage – how could you not be present to the site of six female dancers in elaborate costumes (by Flor De Chavez) dancing on and off of high piles of ceramic plates?

These plates play an important part in the marriage ritual, and these acrobatic dances give the drama a clear focus - ritual, to my mind the heart of the entire evening.

After the wedding the bride and groom are left alone, and quickly they turn competitive, each trying to stay awake longer than the other. In order to win, they tell stories, which we get to see danced in front of us. We watch fishermen, clam, crab, turtle, seahorse, monkey and even mermaid dances. It turns out that the bride and groom didn’t only tell stories that night, and in the following scene we re-encounter the wife, this time pregnant. In a touching shadow scene we watch the moon eclipsing, and the danger felt by the Yakans at this celestial event is expressed through demonic dance and music. The program (an extremely helpful guide to this near-wordless drama) explains the reason for the fear – Yakans believed the lunar eclipse causes fetal abnormalities. Some protection rituals ensue, and then the baby is delivered.

However, then arrive the less mythical troubles, in the form of video projections: soldiers, blood and tears, which force the couple out of their idyllic island. While the attempt of Director/Choreographer Potri Ranka Manis to charge the ancient movements with contemporary immediacy is applauded, the clash of beautified three-dimensional movement with generic news war-feed takes away from the emotional character of the play, unlike her more successful integration of modern strife in her last piece, Bembaran.

In a post-performance event Ms. Ranka Manis spoke beautifully about how she “brought her home with her” to this country. The work is alive, and is authentic to this time and place; but like so many New Yorkers, the tugging of nostalgia on the strings of this place is an integral part of the present experience, and often plays as big a role in our conception of the past as the experiences of the past itself.

American Nothing

It’s a truly American creation. Grab an inspiration here, a pulpy reference there, plug in a badly sung song, a dance or something resembling one, some sexy violence and lots of lights and screens (way more screens of course) – and you got a play. But don’t forget the most important thing – even if you’re actually trying to say something about the world make sure to bury it deep under layers of irreverent hollowness. It is Art after all. This is the cutting edge of American theater. And Radiohole is at its forefront. Whatever, Heaven Allows is a 90 minute multi-media art installation about Americana. It draws on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and on Douglass Sirk’s 1955 film All That Heaven Allows. The five performers (all interesting, but none attack the material with as much punch as Eric Dyer) lead the audience from one type of rush to the next, with nothing but the life of the performance itself at stake. This is a performance about performance, and its main contribution is in its exploration of performance. One might call that in itself a reflection of society, which of course it is, but this show’s meta-nature overpowers its statement. Just like America!

Here’s another American experience for you – mid-way through the show, just as I was losing interest in the extravagant action on the stage, an aging man sitting next to my friend began fondling himself, occasionally elbowing my friend in the process. I’m only relating this experience because my first thought was that perhaps it was part of the play. Anything could happen, it seemed. The lights had already come up on us spectators once or twice, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find an actor or two join our side with the various colored globs of food coloring they had just splattered all over their faces. A gently masturbating man making spectators feel uncomfortable could easily be another odd moment that goes along with the collective beer chug, the mopping of the floor and other eclectic images.

Would it have meant something if it were part of the play? Again, no, but clearly the play has succeeded in opening the playing field of what might happen in the theater.

What the piece does not do as successfully is to explain the reason for its existence. It tries. The last quarter of the play takes on a stronger narrative quality, detailing the love affair between a mother and her gardener, and its disapproval by her children. We see images of classic domesticity, and watch the American dream trashed and belittled. While it is gratifying to see the troupe attempt some social commentary, it comes too late and so is lost in the sea of whimsicality that comprises the first three quarters of the play.

Nonetheless Whatever, Heaven Allows stays with you, making you wonder about the nature of art today, and what that says about the world we live in.

Aging of the Cool

These two guys were probably once pretty cool. Now they’re aging, and sit around till late at night on the porch talking about nothing, or about the past, or about the approaching eclipse of the moon that they may stay up all night to see. It’s all good, except when they break out of the Shepardesque to speak about their loss, their regrets, and the emotional make-up of their hollow lives. It’s at those points that Ages of the Moon, Dublin’s Abbey Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard’s new play at the Atlantic Theater, loses its cool. It’s when this play becomes “A Play” that it falls from an edgy portrait to a contrived drama, aging several decades of theater history as it falls. The good news is that this only happens toward the end of this highly competent execution of the script, with two delightful performances by Stephen Rea and Sean Mcginley. All of this demands the question - what was Shepard supposed to do, just let his characters keep talking about “minor blow jobs” and other such nothings for the entire 75 minutes of the play? In other words, how does a playwright avoid contrivances but still give his/her play substance? These questions are at the heart of the current theatrical moment in this city, and it is to his credit that Shepard does not veer away from recognizable content entirely, in an attempt to stay “cool,” as so many recent theatrical experiments here have done.

But perhaps Shepard has made it too glaringly obvious what his play is about – aging; coming closer to death as the world keeps turning and life keeps randomly ebbing and flowing around you. The characters are aging along with the playwright, and their stories are less about cars or hammers, and more about their own loneliness, the women they loved and lost, and their ongoing jealousies.

While the emotional revelations of the characters come across as tedious, director Jimmy Fay does make the most of their effects on the dynamic between the two. The strongest moment in the play, which is itself worth the price of admission, comes soon after such an outburst by Ames (Rea). After kicking his friend Byron (Mcglinley) out - whom he called in the middle of the night begging him to drive out to his cabin - he goes into the house and comes out to the porch a moment later with a rifle. The “finicky” ceiling fan that wouldn’t work ten minutes earlier is now inexplicably spinning in high speed. In a fury Ames aims (no pun intended) and fires. Sparks shoot out of the fan. He shoots again. This time the fan comes crashing to the ground smoking. Now there’s some awesome stage action.

As the night rolls on the stage gets darker, a nice touch by lighting designer Paul Keogan. Ames and Byron make up, accuse each other of weakness, drink more bourbon and finally descend into one more physical clash that leaves Byron with something resembling a heart attack. At last he reveals his ultimate secret - and his total loneliness in the world. Ames is too drunk and old to carry his friend to the car to take him to the hospital. So instead they watch the moon disappear, saying: “That,” - the earth that is, coming between the moon and the sun to bring darkness - “is us.”

Theater of the Fantabulous

Before I start I’ll just say this - my review might be tainted by the fact that the star of the show kissed me on the lips in the last scene… We ask ourselves what our goals as theater artists are. What do people expect us to do in this day and age? Some want entertainment, others look to be moved. Some come to watch an idea processed in a new way, to return for an evening to something concrete and physical in the midst of the digital age. Aristotle said theater should “delight and instruct.” Others have said that a play should drive people to political action. Or just to join a few people’s consciousnesses for a couple hours in a space – to create community. Nowadays it seems that often an audience wants to see an artist's process, to watch him work through his issues in front of them. In The Lily’s Revenge Taylor Mac and his grandiose crew of 40 performers and 80 collaborators provide all of the above.

They have plenty of time to do it, too, in the five hours (not a typo) of this fantabulous saga. What allows for these five hours to not feel long is the sensible way in which the evening is structured. There are three long intermissions, with activities, a dance floor and a bar. There are five different parts to the play, each helmed by a different director, and as such a new artistic feel every time you come back into the theater to watch the next part. Each part is of a slightly different genre, ranging from a poetic Theater of Flowers (perhaps a nice definition for the entire evening), to dance theater, to video, to Japanese-influenced morality tale.

What makes it all gel is that it never feels like high art. While each one of the beautiful, outrageous costumes (reason enough to come to HERE Arts Center to see the show) is a work of art by itself (design by Machine Dazzle), and the musical accompaniment (composed by Rachelle Garniez), the singing of the actors, and the movement of the dancers are all graceful and strong, Mac makes sure to keep his crew firmly on the level of his spectators. Even when the play addresses grand philosophical questions – the basic setup of the plot is a contemporary comment on Heidegger – it does so with an American simplicity that keeps everyone feeling included. How could you not when the actors’ dressing room turns into a disco at every intermission? Or when you walk into the bathroom and find Taylor serenading you with a ukulele as you urinate?

Theatricality aside, the evening deals with the question of marriage. The writer, it seems, has struggled with this one, so much so that he needed five hours to express his feelings about it. In one of the Kyogens, or intermission activities, audience members are invited to let their rage out on a specific marriage related issue. They are handed a stick and get to pound an inflated rubber doll with name-tags like “gay marriage,” until the doll gives in and stops trying to rise back to her feet.

The story the play tells is about a lily (played by Taylor Mac with his usual magnetism) who decides to become a man in order to marry a woman. The woman (Amelia Zirin Brown) gives him the course of the play to succeed or she will marry her other suitor (Frank Paiva), a plain heterosexual male that sings the memorable line: “I think of pornographic images when I make love to you.” The lily then goes on an epic journey, meets other flowers, makes her way to Ecuador and all the way back to the woman, only to realize she (or rather he at this point) would rather not.

Mac makes his peace with marriage by the end of the play, but the demons must be exorcized along the way. The third part of the play, directed and choreographed by Faye Driscoll, is a powerful wedding nightmare expressed brilliantly through the movement of six talented actor/dancers. This part brings back a character from the first part of the play, the villain of The Lily’s Revenge, Curtain, the God of Longing and the son of Time. In this scene Curtain (a delightfully Wonderland James Tigger Ferguson) shrinks from an entire wall to a red napkin (barely) covering his penis.

The Curtain does make a resurgence in the final part of the play, but only to lose to Lily’s here and now, as the entire cast gathers on the stage to make merry, and Taylor Mac himself appears, this time not as a flower, and speaks to us earnestly as a person (if you’re lucky you might get kissed too - sit in the front row if you want it, further back if you don’t). Then this five hour community disperses, and we each carry our little thoughts and joys away.

The Lily’s Revenge is the type of show that New York City makes, and makes New York City. Just as Mr. Mac is paying tribute in his work to the downtown greats of the 1970’s Theater of the Ridiculous, so will theater artists in this city’s future be building upon his theatrical contributions for years to come.

In Toronto It's Half the Size

When you open the newspaper in Toronto, you are likely to find the front pages filled with what New Yorkers might call "little things:" a handicapped man who had to pay a fine for using his wife's handicap sticker on his car; an op-ed urging the legalization of prostitution; a state environmental law slowly moving through the initial stages of confirmation by Parliament. Not much talk of war, corruption, lies and greed on the vast scale we're used to in the New York papers. In these same newspapers every July you'll also find listings for the dozens of plays at the Toronto Fringe Festival. The majority of these plays also come from a smaller perspective. They are plays about little things, sometimes about nothing at all. Those plays at the festival that do seem to be in dialogue with world events manage to be so in an understated way, without screaming out their timeliness and relevance in frenetic Big Apple style.

Out of the half dozen plays I caught at the festival, perhaps the most authentic Torontonian experience was sitting at the Pauper's Pub on Bloor Street with a pint of Keith's, watching the charmingly disarming Opera on the Rocks. Out of the midst of the drinkers, a group of four, their eyes glued to the hockey game on the TV screen, break into operatic song. He's open, pass the puck! Go, go, go, down the wing...oh shit." Using the mundane language of hockey spectators, the plain contemporary English of BFF's meeting for martinis on a TGIF, and the small talk of a horny bar fly, the company of talented singers make the most of this overly-dramatic theatrical form. Reminiscent of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's contrasting simplicity of language with grandeur of form, the opera takes the drama we all feel our lives infused with, and turns it into a collective joke. The result is a bar full of happy people laughing to their heart's content. In the funniest and most out-there scene in the opera, we witness a Lavalife date between two people whose online profiles enhance their height by a couple feet, their profession from nobodys to surgeons and even their skin color from one race to another. After the discovery of the mutual lies, the couple unites through their love of the local hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Within minutes he's on top of her on the bar dry humping as they orgasmically release names of Maple Leafs players to the air in operatic fervor.

On the other side of the vernacular spectrum, Pericles Snowdon's Bluebeard uses heightened poetic language, along with seasoned, controlled acting, to tell a grim version of a dark fairy tale. One of the strongest theatrical evenings at the festival, this imperfect British play arrived in Toronto after a run in both London and New York. From its description, Bluebeard seemed to be one of the few plays in the festival that directly addresses world events. Though it was written before the incestuous Austrian family had been revealed to the press and released from its twenty four year underground imprisonment, it is hard to ignore the story's echo in Bluebeard. The female ensemble portrays the story of four girls brought up in an underground dungeon, never allowed out by the girls' mother, Blue. Featuring the best acting I saw in the TFF (stand out performances include Andrea Runge as Piglet and Kat Lanteigne as Rooster), Snowdon's poetic control of the language drives the dark mood of the play along, touching along the way on issues of political subjugation, gender politics, and environmental disasters. The main question of the play, "Isn't it better to be put away somewhere safe than to get sent out to a world without a heart," is spoken too bluntly by the characters, and this thrusts the audience out of the play. In general the play is best when it is doing what the Fringe was created for - exploring new avenues for storytelling in a theatrical setting - and weakest when it follows the traditional path of the dramatic writer - tying up loose ends and providing explanations for characters' behavior, leading up to a culminating event. In David Metheson's production, these moments come across untidy and confusing, and pale in comparison to the rich, playful theatrical world created in the first half of the evening.

However, when watching this year's choice for Best New Play at the Fringe, you can't help but excuse the more interesting playwrights for trying to keep their work within a traditional frame. Rachel Blair's Wake is a well structured yet bland play about three brothers coming together at their father's funeral. The play's greatest strength lies in its oscillation between the present and the past, slowly revealing the memories that make up the emotional content of the brothers' relationship. Blair successfully uses her structure to portray the experience of a wake. And Frank Cox O'Connell gives a memorable performance as the shy Shane. Still, it's hard not to hope for more emotional engagement, as well as theatrical experimentation, from the winner of a major Fringe Festival.

One theatrical event that stood out as an interesting contemporary form was Barry Smith's American Squatter. More a presenter than an actor, Smith uses a projector connected to his laptop to tell the story of how the son of an L.A clean freak ends up squatting in London in "a zen-like state of disarray." Engaging and funny, Smith, a comic journalist from Boulder, Colorado, is in full control of his unique form. His ongoing use of video and photo footage, accompanied by entertaining PowerPoint-like amusement, gives American Squatter a twenty first century zing. In this moment, when the memoir seems to be encroaching upon the novel's status as king of the published word, Smith's theatrical memoir made a lot of sense inside the walls of Toronto's Factory Theater.

In the same space, I caught Balls, a two hander by Rob Salerno. Perhaps in a more American fashion than the vast majority of plays at the festival, the program for this Canadian play spoke directly about its political drive. A male response to The Vagina Monologues, Salerno felt that if the monologue is the appropriate form for women, the male experience is one of duality ("masculinity is not a one man show.") So the two characters play off of each other like boys do, cracking jokes about kicking each other in the nuts, about screwing each other's mothers, even going so far as the off-putting visual of a magazine dedicated to that singular type of sexual perversion, Clown Porn. But Balls does not stay in the mundane for long. Instead it travels to a challenging place for these male prototypes. Early in the play we watch Paul (Salerno) discover that he has testicular cancer. His buddy (Adam Goldhamer) helps him through the chemo, operations and other heavy ordeals, until, and this is where the play takes an unnecessary turn, he discovers that he too is sick with the same disease. "A real man needs only one," the play's T-shirt reads. Similarly, one case of testicular cancer would have been quite enough for the one play. Nonetheless, Salerno's staging is simple and direct, and the play ends with the moving picture of one man alone without his friend.

Balls is typical of many of the Canadian plays at the TFF in that it is on the Canadian Fringe circuit, making its way west from Montreal all the way to British Columbia. It's a summer of low budget stage fun for these little troupes, many of whom are making their first steps on the Canadian stage. The opportunity that the TFF, as well as the other Fringe Fests around the country offers is invaluable to many young theatricians. Also, all box office proceeds go directly to the companies.

The Fringe Fest culture in Canada has a long and wide-spread history, and you definitely feel it standing in the long lines to get into the shows. The festival is well established here, and most of the play-goers I spoke with were long time Fringe viewers who had already seen at least a handful of shows this year alone. The 2008 TFF had just under 150 shows, and sold close to 60,000 tickets. That's an average of almost 400 viewers per run. Unlike the New York Fringe, here every show helps spread the word about other performances in the Festival. Whether it's that helpful community vibe or the strong Fringe history in this country, audiences are sizeable, and in large part supportive.

Many Canadian theater professionals speak more highly of the upcoming Summer Works festival, showcasing new Canadian plays. That festival is juried, and so they say the quality tends to be higher. Acceptance into the Fringe, on the other hand, is by lottery (around one out of four submissions accepted), no jury involved, a system with its obvious pros and cons.

For someone who's been in the loud New York theater scene for close to a decade now, there is something enticing about the subdued quality of plays here (as well as the way they are presented and talked about.) While at moments it feels like they are just chickening out of saying what they have to say about the world, it also makes you look harder to find the meaning of the piece. Granted, often there's not much there to find aside from some cutesy dialogue or a gag, but when done properly it functions as an invitation for the audience to engage in the material in whatever way they choose. Everything doesn't have to be so damn big. Only in the US is a small coffee actually huge. In Toronto, it's half the size.

How do you fit twenty five actors on a ten foot stage?

The play opens. We hear some party music, and all the actors filter onto the stage for the final moments of the year. After the party we are left with the hosting couple drunkenly cleaning up the mess, as they talk about their failure to have a child. From that scene we move on through the year, one scene for each month, going through Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July and other such monumental calendar events. In each month we meet another one or two, sometimes more characters with no relation to any of the others we’ve already met. What does it amount to? A cute evening of theatre, which easily brushes off the surface of your consciousness. A Year in the Life of Twenty Five Strangers Living in a City by the Lake, is an attempt by playwright Matthew Fotis to pull some of the non-theater-going masses out of their living rooms and into the public space. From the opening moment, which recalls the atmosphere of the sitcom Friends, this is a play written for a generation who expects its art to reflect the easily digestible content of its more mind-numbing forms of popular entertainment. And Fotis should be commended for trying to lure his generation with what they are looking for, while sprinkling some deeper material into the mix in order to take them beyond the box.

However, in his collage of 20-30-year-old life in Chicago, the playwright makes no real demands of his audience, allowing them too much distance to reflect upon the scenes and characters, without ever pulling them in to engage in the images emotionally. And aside from a few select moments, the material fails to continuously stimulate the mind toward challenging reflection.

That said, it’s a fun evening. Director Shaun Colledge makes good use of the tiny space of the intimate Parker Theatre, into which, in certain moments, he squeezes all of his twenty-five actors. Colledge manipulates his large cast to provide a sense of space when it is needed, or to heighten the claustrophobia of other moments. In one of the funniest scenes, a back room party mess erupts between two intermingled couples, and Colledge nails the comedic setup of the clever moment, which could easily be interpreted as bad drama.

The acting on the whole is good, although it is the scenes where the actors feel most comfortable in which the play flourishes. David Stadler and Michele Rafic are perfectly at home in their scene as a married couple on vacation in Paris. The familiar bickering over whether what will revive the relationship would be another tourist attraction or an afternoon on the bench in the park (guess which gender wants what!), flares into delightful comedy with Stadler and Rafic’s concise exacerbations. Jennifer Bishop and Ben Rosenblatt are endearing as the young couple in love, about to separate as they head to different colleges. Corey Shoemake and Adam Ferguson are funny as the gay meteorologist and the waiter he hits on in an emergency room.

It is interesting to see this bouncy production, with its light touches and easygoing atmosphere, as another attempt of theater artists to find a voice for their art form in this generation. I can’t say that Ten Grand Productions succeeds in taking today’s sensibilities and infusing them with greater depth, but they do offer some sweet little dishes to munch on as theater artists search for the way to reflect our present onstage.

One on One Cruelty

It has its way of sucking you in. Starts off in a café, fun little chat with a friend over coffee, why not? Then out into the streets of the East Village, a spring stroll to get hooked up with some good times. But then it starts getting gradually heavier, more uncomfortable, with nasty revelations about your friend coming one after the next, until you’re not sure whether to walk away when she looks you in the eye and asks if you understand her. But the search for heroin continues. Street Limbo Blues suggests that it doesn’t take a particular type of person to become a junkie. Or, as director Taurie Kinoshita writes in the program, “Addiction is a sickness, not a choice.” It all sounds a bit cliché. We’ve been through this lesson in high school, we’ve seen it on TV and read it in the newspapers. We get it. But when has this issue ever made a demand for you to face it, and the way it is treated in this country? The Hawaiian based Cruel Theatre forces its audience to confront this major societal question, through use of some of the ideas of the twentieth century’s greatest theatrical minds.

In Artaudian fashion, the interaction between the performers and their audience is direct. Your best friend (if you’re as lucky as I was you’ll get Brazilian beauty Juju - a lively, convincing performance by Nancy Valeria Rendal) walks in to find you in Café Pick Me Up on Ave. A. She speaks to you about herself, her problems, and then leads you out to find your fix for the night. On this depressing adventure you’ll meet a drug dealer or two and a crew of young junkies. You’ll cringe as your best friend uses her body to try and hook up some angel dust. But, ultimately, the tone of the evening is up to each spectator. Building on Augusto Boal’s concept of the Spect-actor, the actors are trained to play with whatever they get from their intimate audience. This way, each performance (the play lasts one hour and is performed several times every evening to one to three audience members at a time) is guaranteed to be different. Artaud’s disgust with theatre that is dead before the curtain even opens is relieved.

As may be appropriate for a play about drug addiction, it begins fun and quickly goes downhill. The politics of the piece remain unclear until after it is over, when the spect-actors are handed their program. If they are moved enough to read the director’s “Diatribe on the Drug War” then their political conception about it may be challenged. Otherwise, they are likely to leave with the same denial-based distaste for junkies with which they walked into the café. The strongest moment of my evening came on the subway on the way home, when I found out from the program that sixty-eight percent of all crimes committed in the US are drug-related. More than two-thirds of our corrupt privatized prison system thrives on an un-winnable war, one which Kinoshita believes could be fought much more successfully through legalization. Perhaps there is a wiser way to spend the enormous amounts of money that go from our pockets to the prison lords of this country.

The Cruel Theatre lives up to its name, and provides a difficult experience which is likely to sit in your stomach or dreams for some time after. In that sense, their exciting theatricality works to do what they set out to do, and there is much to be learned from their play with the under-used theatrical ideas of the company’s three main influences, Artaud, Boal and Grotowski. Perhaps, if the play itself didn't make you want to get out of there as soon as possible, the political message would have come across more clearly as well. Nonetheless, this is a type of theater that audiences will find hard to ignore, and most likely they will find themselves engaging in the questions the play raises.

Bubbling Poetry of the Everyday

Dylan Thomas was right – you actually can hear the dew falling. Listen properly and you will even hear time passing. Sound difficult? It’s not. All you have to do is bring your ears to Theatre 3 for Intimation Theatre Company’s lovely production of Under Milk Wood. Thomas’ “Play for Voices” is an ode to sound. Written for the radio, or simply to be read as opposed to fully staged, the piece takes its listeners, or in this case its wide-eyed viewers, through a night and a day of a sleepy Welsh seaside town. Like a landscape painter, Thomas penned the characters of Llareggub to life, gently leading us from their nighttime dreams to their spring morning routines and all the way back to bed. His language is as bubbly to the ears as it was when he wrote the play more than fifty years ago.

Director Michelle Dean uses the bare set and her company of actors to bring out much of the comic brilliance of Thomas’ script, which could otherwise remain hidden. True to the text, much of the actors’ character building seems to have stemmed from voice work, only then wearing their physicalization over the sound like a cloak. The eccentric locals of Llareggub are given bold life in this production.

The company on the whole is strong, and Dean keeps the tempo of the evening fast-paced and steady. John Mervini provides the most captivating performance, with a commendable comic intensity and commitment to all three of his roles. “Let me shipwreck in your thighs,” he pleads straight-forwardly as Captain Cat to one of the ladies still alive only in his memory. Jesse Tandler is endearing as Willie Nillie, and Betsy Head is charmingly seductive as the singing, scrubbing Polly Garter who laments the various male organs (and the men attached to them) that delighted her senses long ago.

The company has managed to create a delicate balance between character and actor, imagined reality and the plain one of gathering in midtown for a play, between Wales and New York City. The skipping nature of the writing, rapidly hopping from place to place and scene to scene, demands an ability to flow in and out of character. The offstage actors are visible standing in the wings, and at times even hand costume pieces or props to one another as they glide into their next role. Not shying away from acknowledging that we are in the theater provides a richer experience for this play. It is the awareness that the audience is sitting together like a bunch of children being caressed to sleep with a soft lullaby that puts a smile on your face as you walk out of the theater.

The production errs when it does not trust Thomas’ sound waves, and overloads the eye with activity to drown out the Welshman’s ear candy. Thankfully this only happens a couple of times over the course of the evening and so does not mar the experience. Dean does reference directly the fact that the play was written to be read, not physicalized. Voices One and Two, who function as narrators, move around the stage with script in hand, communicating directly with the audience. Nonetheless, a simple way to address the sonic purpose of the play would have been to hear voices in the darkness, which the spectators never get to a chance to do in this production.

The poetry of the everyday, about which Dean talks in her program’s note, is a theme explored more and more these days on New York’s Off and Off Off Broadway stages. It is enlightening to see how this was handled by a poetic great of another place and time. Much like Wim Wenders latest film, Lisbon Story, another inquiry into the humming noises of the everyday, this production finds ways to talk about the nature of sound through a visual medium. It is indeed a promising inaugural production for the Intimation Theatre Company.

Blind Symbols

Oedipus at Colonus is a play in which the viewer gets the sense that behind every action, object, even emotion, lies a whole world of hidden significance. Even death, the grand subject matter of one of Sophocles’ final dramatic explorations before his own trek to the netherworld, is secret in this play. Handcart Ensemble’s current production of this rarely produced masterpiece represents this symbolic hidden-ness too well, allowing the words of Eamon Grennan and Rachel Kitzinger’s new translation to breathe, while the dramatic juice of Sophocles’ story remains hidden under sleepy layers of symbol. What remains is an aesthetically pleasing meditation on death, family and forgiveness which never translates into emotion. While the depth of feeling available in the writing is largely lost in this production, it is a worthy one in that it provides a sense of what one of the creators of our theatrical sensibilities had to say about three of the themes that continue to permeate our stages.

Oedipus at Colonus tells the story of Oedipus’ final hours. The blind old man has spent his life wandering homeless, and has finally come to a field in front of Athens, led by his faithful daughter/sister Antigone. He has come to terms with his own horrific mistakes (“If someone tried to kill you would you stop to inquire if he was your father, or would you strike back to revenge the blow?”), but still holds pains and grudges against his son and brother-in-law, both of whom make appearances in the play.

While many things take place over the course of the evening - characters come and go, arguments, persuasion and acceptance, a curse or two and some blessings – the drama is set up as the end of a journey, both physical and spiritual, of one of the world’s most pitied men. The action itself as if does not matter. Kreon kidnaps Oedipus’ daughters, and a moment later they return. Antigone (a strong performance by Emily Rogge) convinces her father to give audience to his son Polyneices, during which the blind man stands firm in his stubborn position. Oedipus comes into the play knowing its end, and his own, and the plenty of coming and going is simply a philosophical playground for a great writer to splash around in.

The production emphasizes the symbolic nature of the play, making the costumes, set and even the acting style stand out, thus continually pulling the audience in and out of the story. Director Karen Lordi-Kirkham stresses the ritualistic element of Greek theatre, and of this play in particular, through an imaginative treatment of Sophocles’ Chorus. A prayer bowl, myrtle branches, hand gestures toward the heavens, all remind us time and again that the theater was a religious place for the Greeks.

However, Lordi-Kirkham’s attempt while admirable, is muddied by her need to couple the ancient sensibility with an occasional catering to the aesthetics of a modern audience. As such, in the production certain scenes from the ancient tragedy bring to mind our own generation’s imagery for the future. The big showdown between Kreon and Theseus, for example, could have easily been a Star Treckian intergalactic dispute. The Chorus is transformed from one of elderly citizens of Colonus in the script, into a young female triplet that seem to conjure Buffy the Vampire along with the Furies, the ancient goddesses of the field, in Handcart’s production. The flaming red costume of Kreon, another symbolic choice that leaves its meaning backstage, could have possibly been further enhanced by a pair of Spock ears.

A solid performance by Peter Judd as Oedipus does keep the production grounded. It is a somehow soothing experience to watch nearly two hours of a lead actor in blindfold who seldom moves from his seat. One can almost see a hint of Beckettian minimalism in Sophocles here. One of the evening’s strongest moments comes from a silent, still Judd, angrily listening to his son’s attempts to elicit his support in war.

The sum total of the evening is a pleasantly boring experience of a truly great play in a steady new translation. The opportunity to catch it may not return anytime in the next few decades.

In and Out of Time

“Man is man and that is why we had to shoot him.” Well, if that’s the case, why write an anti-war play attempting to prevent man from shooting another man? There is a tremendous tension between human nature, shown at its simplest and worst in the action of Brecht’s Man Is Man, and our attempts to subdue it in favor of a saner world, expressed through the action of writing and staging such a play. This tension gives the play its urgency in times of war and uncertainty such as these, when people struggle with their own passivity in the face of destruction and cruelty. The Elephant Brigade and director Paul Binnerts capitalize on this tension and bring this 1926 play into the present moment. Man Is Man tells the story of Galy Gay (charmingly portrayed by Natalie Kuhn), a poor porter on a simple mission. He wants to buy a fish. But being the gullible, opportunistic man that he is, he quickly finds himself posing as a soldier in exchange for some good words from the troops and a bunch of beer and cigars. Over the course of the play he will lose his identity entirely, and the jolly man we met at the opening will have become a heartless war monger.

So now you know what happens at the end, which could ruin it in some plays. This one, on the other hand, is not about the result, but about the process, about the experience of falling into a war – or that of falling into apathy about it. When Galy Gay’s wife (the excellent Lauren Blumenfeld) ends the first act singing “My Forgotten Man,” it sits in your stomach along with the pain for the hundreds of fresh American widows of the current war, which, you realize, you haven’t even contemplated in quite some time.

In order to better express this experiential component of the script, Binnerts puts the play in what he calls “real time theater,” a technique which is designed for the actors to “function as intermediaries between the play and the audience.” Throughout the two hours of the production the actors are always on stage, either as themselves or as one of the characters. They manipulate video cameras projected onto large screens around the stage, they click on a laptop to create sound effects, they hang scenery and they change costumes. When they speak they do not ignore the spectators but address them often, in what feels like an intermediary zone between self and character. Brecht himself was far from naturalistic with the acting style he employed with his own acting troupe, and it is exciting to witness a contemporary attempt to address both the material and the presentation in a stylized manner that seems like a distant cousin of Brecht’s attitude toward performance. Some of the young Elephants in this new Brigade have a stronger grasp on Real Time acting than others, putting more of themselves into Brecht’s words than what they learned in acting school. When the “acting” appears next to a more sincere presentation in real time by a person being herself onstage, its fakeness throws the spectator out of time, out of story, and back into his mind.

The strengths of this production overtake its weaknesses, and as Brecht would have wanted, the audience walks out thinking about what it means to live in times of war, about the great big machine of recruitment and bombs - Binnerts makes the most of the play’s theme of military recruitment techniques, bringing to the theater a major issue in the American public debate – about the experience of being rolled along by life as if we have no grip on anything, until we become people we once were not, perhaps even people we are not today.

Pacific Island Winds

In one of the many touching moments in Bembarang, Kinding Sindaw’s delightful Philippine dance drama now playing at La Mama’s Annex theater, an island princess struggles with one of the several colorful cloths that make up her costume. As she dances she moves it from her stomach to her chest, brings it above her head and back down, and finally rolls it off into her hands in a bundle. Now she holds in her arms her newborn baby boy. The imaginative treatment of the production elements, from costumes through music, props and set, all drawn from the dramatic tradition of the Philippines, give this performance a breath of fresh ocean air which is so rare even in this multi-cultural coastal city. Bembarang is a successful amalgamation of an ancient Philippine tale of love and loyalty, Darangen, and a historical event from the turn of the twentieth century, known as Perang sa Bayang. The evening opens with a glimpse of the latter, which takes place behind the risers of the beautiful Annex. American soldiers in drab uniforms hold local women in fiery colored dresses in captivity. They treat them in a rough, demeaning and insensitive manner as the children cry aloud. The tone is set for the rest of the piece, far from the realistic acting style that permeates our city’s stages. It is this distance that allows the spectator to observe how history repeats itself in our own time, rather than to be offended by an overly simplistic portrayal of a political event. After this prologue the audience is led to their seats, the islanders are led to their onstage place of captivity, and the ancient drama begins.

There are few words spoken. Some are sung in Tagalog by the talented dancer/narrator. The story unfolds through movement, accompanied by a strong ensemble of musicians on gongs and drums. We watch a courting scene, a wedding celebration, some juicy scenes of female rejection, a double birth that smoothly rolls into the next scene, years later, in which the kids are acting up as kids do. We even get some battle scenes to complete our craving for that kind of excitement.

Like other theatrical forms from the east, the story is not confined to one place and time. The clever use of props and costumes is all that is needed to transport the scene not only from one locale to another, but also from one emotional state to the next. In one scene each of the twenty dancers holds a tall bamboo shoot up from the ground, as the princess (the poised and concise Amira Aziza) wanders through a forest. The bamboo shoots sway like trees in the wind and the music fills the space with mysterious sensations. Suddenly there is a break, the rhythm accelerates and all the ten-foot-high shoots fall gracefully to the ground, adding punctuation to the drums as they hit the floor on beat. The bamboo now becomes a dangerous field which the princess must cross. She dances, as if walking on snakes, evading the danger. The long poles then rise from the ground to surround her. She is caught. But there is one more transformation for these props. They form a chariot and raise the princess to bring her back to the prince, as the scene's tone of fear gives way to one of relief.

By the time the American soldiers come back into the picture, we feel like we have a full picture of what life was like in the Philippines when the US army showed up in 1902 and committed the massacre in the Battle of Bayang. When the heavy soldiers dance their way into this ancient epic they seem like a grotesque bunch of clunky aliens floating into a planet to which they do not belong. The political point that director/choreographer Potri Ranka Manis is making presents itself viscerally as the intruders crash the beautiful party of the traditional dance form. In opposition to the soldiers, we watch a different attitude towards battle, that of the island men who honorably and regretfully prepare themselves for war. The word “defense,” as in ''Ministry of,'' suddenly takes on meaning. The men dance their war gear on, sword, shield, bandana, and begin to practice the only kind of battle they know, face to face combat. The bullets come flying at them from behind.

Go get a breath of some Pacific Ocean air, and see Bembarang. While the dancers vary in talent, Ranka Manis has put together a stage picture that tickles the senses, and provides a different way of thinking about theater, one which has the capacity to enhance the work witnessed on our stages here in what we like to think of as theater headquarters of the world. Through a classical form, she uses her tradition to make an important statement about what we see happening in our world today.

Terrorism Reaches Thebes

Take a wild guess which world leader this line describes: “His brilliant emptiness shines throughout the land.” Well, alright, it could be a great number of them, but New Moon Rep and Roust Theatre Company’s I Kreon leaves no room for doubt which W we’re talking about. The play focuses on one of the most important questions that the War on Terror has brought to the forefront – how must we treat our enemies? Between Guantanamo and Saddam Hussein’s ugly end, most Americans have this question floating around the landscape of their political consciousness, and adapter-director Aole T. Miller does well to bring his feelings on the topic into the shared space of the theater. However, this adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, one of our most basic reference points in creating political theater, ultimately chooses a tactic of mocking over serious debate. By the time Kreon, the thinly veiled equivalent to our own authoritarian leader, comes around to realize the error of his dogmatic ways, it is too late for him to rectify his actions. At that same point in I Kreon it is already too late for the talented company to produce a lasting impression on its audience.

As the title suggests, the production focuses not on Antigone (Claire Siebers), but on her uncle, king Kreon (played with an intelligent flare by James Luse). To a modern audience Kreon’s actions seem debatable at best. He refuses burial rights to his own son because he feels that he betrayed the homeland, in this adaptation by attacking and destroying two Theban towers. Kreon would rather leave Polynices’ body to the dogs. In one of the many strong lines spoken by the masked Chorus, Miller hints at the comparison he is drawing between the death of Polynices and that of Saddam Hussein: “What honor is there in killing a man after death?” the Chorus asks the obstinate king.

The Chorus, with their touching repetition of poetry, accompanied by the haunting recorded soundscape of the piece, do manage to provide some emotional depth to the production. Their fine Balinese masks and fluid movement conjure some of the Greek spirit of the play. But the adaptation’s “Greekness” - and while aiming to please a twenty first century audience, I Kreon definitely attempts to find a fifth century BC Athenian vibe - falls short with its main exploration, that of the character of Kreon. Where Sophocles gave the hard lined king un-ignorable strength of argument, Miller gives him laugh lines taken from various twentieth century villains. It is undeniably funny to watch James Luse's odd triple amalgamation of King Kreon, Dr. Evil and George W. spew lines such as "There is no compromise between the rights of slaves and those who rule the modern world." However, Antigone survived this long, and indeed is one of the classics that most interests modern audiences (this is at least the third production of the play this year in New York alone) because of the dual nature of the play. It is both subversive and traditional. It presents the establishment’s point of view while questioning it in the deepest possible way. It thrives on the tension between right and wrong, and on the complexity of every political act. This production’s great need to take a stand chokes the complexity out of the classic, and presents Kreon alone with the mess he created and deserves. It is for this reason that the emotions never quite grip, even when he finally does see that he brought disaster on himself, his family and his country.

The attempt to use a classic in order to let out a loud cry in opposition to our present political situation is to be applauded, as is the playful theatricality, the tasteful design (set and costumes by Shana Mckay Burns, lighting by Andrew D. Smith) and the well-rounded ensemble. But when your villain does not seduce you with his arguments, watching his downfall will not be the tragic experience Antigone was written to be.

The Well Done Play

The stage looks nice. The actors are skilled. The director has done her job well. The script itself is well crafted. Everything is well done. So why do the spectators walk out of The Sunshine Play mildly entertained but unsatisfied, an hour and a half of their lives that will slip out of their consciousness within minutes? There are two answers to this question - form and content. The form is traditional realism, adhering to Aristotle’s unities, scene building upon the previous scene, with entrances and exits at the predictable moments that enhance the comedy or drama, according to its needs. Realism has been the prevalent mainstream theatrical form for the past six decades or more. At least as far as this critic is concerned, it is in dire need of an update. As for the content of this play, it’s difficult to answer the critical questions every artist must ask himself before plunging into his art, ‘what am I doing this for?’ ‘How is this play going to help the people who come see it?’ As I’ve heard theatrical legend Judith Malina say many a time ‘If you have nothing to SAY don’t do theater.’

This new play from Romania by Peca Stefan, directed by Ana Margineau, tells the rooftop story of two young Romanians, one Bulgarian, and the woes of their entangled relationships. The attractive red set by Ina Isbasescu provides the stomping ground for the quirky romantic triangle that will unfold over the course of the night. Cosmin Selesi is funny as the Eastern European alpha male, Isabela Neamtu acts nimbly as a Romanian Carrie Bradshaw, and Daniel Popa adeptly portrays the complexities of a sensitive marijuana addict making the transition from husband to divorcee. It adds up to a respectable but forgettable evening. And one can not help but wonder what a play like this, which would fit well into the repertoire of most conventional theaters, and refrains from exploring new types of theatricality, is doing in a festival of plays on the fringes of the theatrical order.

Hurricane Party

It starts and ends with a party. The pretentious attitude of the theater is not there. Instead the people in the room, on stage and off, are sharing a warm, though at times difficult, experience. Sharing, such a rare value in the theater, is what this gem of a play is about. Sharing the experiences of our compatriots down south who suffered the devastation of Katrina and its aftermath, and the life embracing wisdom they gained by it. Through a collaborative process, which included over forty Louisiana artists as well as the personal stories of many other Katrina survivors, Sustained Winds freely maneuvers between realistic scenes, dance, live video, poetry and music to tell the tale of a city bombarded by nature and abandoned by the state. Through the personal lens the wider political picture is revealed as the piece unfolds. A man hears the voice of New Orleans mayor Roy Nagin ordering the population to evacuate, but he simply can not spare the extra few hundred dollars he would have to spend on leaving. The audience sits with him through the storm as a group of people would sit through a New Orleans hurricane party, where people join together to support each other into the night.

But the storm itself is just the first chapter of this revelatory mythical saga. As the insurance dealer tells a man whose home is still broken down eight months after the disaster (fine actor/musician Andy Cornett), the storm is only partly to blame. This, the audience learns through comedy as the people of New Orleans learned through tragedy, is the truth about the entire Katrina picture. In one of the toughest moments of the evening, actor Katie Keator makes use of her explosively honest acting talent to portray a woman driven to rage by watching private militias lead a small group of rich affiliates out of New Orleans. ‘When did this happen,’ she’s asked by a news reporter (the excellent Lian Cheramie). ‘Several days before FEMA showed up.’ And the audience along with the reporter can now see clearly the third world that was taking place within the US.

In the political heart of the play a drunk Ms. USA is showered with words describing her true nature, as experienced by this ensemble of Americans: “corruption” “pollution” “nepotism” “cronyism.” ‘Let’s face it,’ say the chorus of dancing women to the audience, ‘this is what it is.’

However, what is most remarkable about this show, and by extension the process of mourning and rebirth of the people of Louisiana, is its ability to move beyond the negative into a dance of self-exploration in the face of destruction. Sustained Winds is a moving and fun theater experience that should be shared by people all over the country, expertly crafted by director Amy Waguespack and her gifted group of multi-disciplined, heart-felt artists.

Sexuality Abused

The best moment of To Be Loved is walking in and seeing the interesting arrangement of space at the provocative Lafayette theater. Little stages hang to the sides and back, and a big deep space in front is inhabited by two actors on a ladder. Actor Deena Jiles moves about seductively, like an African princess, on a platform to the left. Shadows hang about the walls of the theater, and people fill the rows of the theatre. The first scene is interesting to watch. A monk and his young lover move about together in a sweet flying motion as they make their way off their ladder. Beyond this scene, there are interesting stage configurations, ominous mood lighting by Chris Ghaffoor, and attractive costumes designed by Mark Richard Caswell and Kate Pinner. But the play unfortunately meanders into meaninglessness within minutes.

Inspired in part by Japanese Kabuki,To Be Loved, written by Alex Defazio and directed by Jody P. Person, tells the story of a monk confronting the reincarnated soul of his dead lover, a young male prostitute. The story, although unclear and overly acted, is relieved by moments of interesting physical movement and shadows cast on different parts of the stage. This long show (2h 15m) does pick up somewhat in the second act. Nevertheless, To Be Loved is an exploration of sexuality, gay and straight, that leaves everyone but its creators out of the loop. The ongoing sexual action and innuendos, including actors gyrating on each other, young boys seducing older men, women seducing monks with twenty dollar bills, ultimately left this spectator decidedly dis-aroused, sexually and otherwise.