Chalking It Up

When Bertolt Brecht fled Germany for Hollywood in the early 1940s, he was commissioned to write a play for the actress Luise Rainer. The play was The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Rainer, though a devoted admirer of Brecht’s, eventually passed on the work. “I am Brecht!,” he reportedly sneered at the two-time Oscar-winner, “and you are nothing!” Despite this early hiccup, The Caucasian Chalk Circle represents one of Brecht’s richest and most popular works. The Pipeline Theatre Company takes up the Brechtian torch in its current revival of the piece at Theater for the New City, rendering a superb production that hits all the right notes in style and stride. With spry pacing, compelling brio, and a host of laughs, director Anya Saffir leads a savvy, resourceful ensemble. In the wrong hands, Brecht can easily slip into ho-hum heavy-handedness and didacticism, a danger that never threatens this production. Without skimping on the material, Saffir surges Brecht’s two hour and forty five minute tale ahead with remarkable command.

Replete with techniques and devices, from its projected captions to its bare set, that embody the tenets of Epic Theatre (a theatrical movement that Brecht developed and made famous), Saffir embraces the Brechtian model but is not intimidated by its shadow. She allows her cast to realize their roles with heightened vigor and ingenuity, resulting in a canvas of engrossing heroes, charlatans, villains and divas. Rather than resembling mere mouthpieces for Brecht’s themes, which still come across just fine, Saffir’s ensemble injects an impulsive zest into its array of characters that makes the work all the more flavorful and, yes, flat out funny. The Caucasian Chalk Circle offers more moments for humor than is typically found in a Brecht play, and the company takes great advantage of this asset.

Set during civil war, the play concerns two disparate storylines. The first centers on the heroine Grusha, maid to the powerful Governor and his wife. When war breaks out, the Governor is deposed and beheaded while his wife flees in terror, leaving their baby son behind. Finding the child, Grusha risks her life to protect it from the merciless hands of the uprising. The first half of the play traces her journey as she seeks safety for the young boy she’s grown to love. The other storyline involves Azdak, a borderline bum who, in the fluky chaos of war, is thrust into a position as an influential judge, where his wisdom and virtue reveal themselves in many verdicts that side with the poor over the corrupt elite.

The storylines converge when the civil war ends and the Governor’s opportunistic wife returns from exile to demand her child back from Grusha. They go before the judge, Azdak, who must choose the child’s mother. To do so, he places the child within a chalk drawn circle and, not unlike the tactic used by the Biblical Solomon, asks the two women to grab the child’s arms and yank him out of the circle in a potentially calamitous tug-of-war bout.

The ensemble, working together in near perfect step, is among the finest you will encounter. It seems unnecessary, and un-Brechtian, to single out actors from such a capable collective, but there are some standouts. Maura Hooper’s Grusha and Gil Zabarsky’s Azdak exhibit a steady calm and endearing earnestness as the play’s moral agents. Jacquelyn Landgraf is hysterical as the Governor’s Wife, and Chloe Wepper, Alex Mills, John Early and Brian Maxsween are all exquisite in a series of minor but highly memorable roles. Still, it is Michael R. Piazza’s performance as the Singer/Storyteller that holds the piece together. He sings and narrates us through the performance, serving as both an entity within the play and a conduit to the audience. A play like this, with so many characters, short scenes, and split storylines, needs an anchor. Never quaint or indulgent, Piazza grounds the action wonderfully.

Many of the actors also double as musicians, playing an assortment of instruments ranging from drums and piano to trumpet and banjo. Composed by Cormac Bluestone, the music in the piece is more than just an afterthought; it is at the core of the play and is performed expertly. Katja Andreiev’s many costumes achieve a lot with little, and Eric Southern’s set and lighting designs are stark, minimal and, in keeping with the Brechtian tradition, unafraid to reveal the guts of theatrical artifice.

“Terrible is the temptation of Goodness” is one of the more striking lines in the piece. Illustrated in the struggles of Grusha and Azdak, the line reflects the play’s central thematic question: Can virtue thrive in a society so conditioned to do wrong? With levity and pathos, the Pipeline Theatre Company takes us on an absorbing ride toward the answer. For those on the prowl for a hidden gem, this production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a promising place to start.

River of No Return

Harry Appleman, the dying poet of Jovanka Bach’s play Nightsong for the Boatman, is seldom at a loss for words. He rails against his unfair predicament, and seeks to hide from his imminent fate. The untidy drama that unfolds, like Harry’s life, resembles a sloppy rough draft, offering allegory in place of real character development, and lacking any variation on the “washed up” writer archetype that is all too familiar. Directed by John Stark, the play opens with Harry (John DiFusco) playing dice with an unnamed bloke on the outer docks of an undefined city. It soon becomes clear that the bloke is actually the boatman of the River Styx, the mythical river of the dead, and that Harry is playing the game for his life. He loses, in short order, and is instructed by the boatman to report back to the docks in one week’s time for his farewell voyage to the undiscovered country.

Rather than keeping his appointment, Harry hides out. The problem is he has told his daughter Jessie (Amanda Landis) to come to the docks to see him off (a complication that, not unlike other plot points, is never justified or explained). Once Harry realizes the mix up, he sets out to undo his misdeed and save his little girl.

The play’s premise, though plenty hokey, is not helped by its staid structure and stock characters. Through a series of cluttered flashbacks, and copious blackouts, we revisit Harry’s debauched life. We meet his considerably younger girlfriend Sheila (Nicole Gabriella Scipione), his jealous colleague Larry (J. Lawrence Landis), his fed up ex-wife Emily (Donna Luisa Guinan), and a sniveling doctoral student named Gordon (Geoffrey Hillback). Though these characters serve as bystanders to Harry’s spiraling off the tracks, it is never apparent what we, or they, are supposed to like about Harry in the first place. His character is the textbook cliché of the flawed, hack writer: womanizer (check!), smug academic (check!), creatively blocked (check!), disdainful of family life (check!), heavy drinker (you know it!). After all this, his crossing the Styx doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. About the only redeeming aspect of Harry is that he was once a brilliant poet, but Bach mars this pretense when she has the character recite his breakthrough poetry aloud. Harry’s poetry is not the stuff of the National Book Award, as the character mentions having won. Sometimes, it is best to leave “brilliance” to the audience’s imagination.

Joe Morrissey’s lights and John DeYoung’s music do a fine job of underscoring the mythical undertone of the piece. Considering the multiple locales of the play, and the limited stage space, Jaret Sacrey’s painted backdrop of a set is unobtrusive, if not particularly inventive.

At its heart, Nightsong for the Boatman is a Faustian tale of a writer forced to confront death so that he may see the wrongs of his ways, and how, contemplating these wrongs, he could become a better man and artist. There’s clearly a lot of soul to squeeze out of this conceit (forgive the quip), but Bach’s script provides little variation or nuance on the theme.

Stark and his cast pull together and move things along at a steady clip. Bach’s dialogue is compressed and never stagnant, but the thread of the piece is too thin to deliver a meaningful end.

The Grand Guignol Comes to Queens

There is plenty of ghoulish theatrical fare to go around this time of year. Even the most zealous horror buffs would be hard pressed to see the full array of Halloween-inspired productions popping up across the city. No other holiday elicits the kitsch, camp and blood-curdling screams like All Hallows Eve. The Secret Theatre throws its hat into the cauldron with Theatre du Grand-Guignol: Tales of Horror and Fear, five short plays adapted from the notoriously gory Grand Guignol Theatre of Paris. Ranging from the macabre to the farcical to the grotesque, the evening has its potholes but is never ponderous, serving up an ample platter of blood, guts and yuks. The Grand Guignol is a late 19th century Parisian theater known for its naturalistic representations of the lurid and grisly. Literally meaning “big puppet show”, the theater shocked audiences with its stark (if at times overblown) portrayal of violence, psychosis and eroticism. Anything was fair game. Dismemberments, beheadings, and scalpings were just some of the more common torments one could witness at the Grand Guignol. Playing on themes of insanity, revenge, lust, drugs, death and the fear of outsiders, the theater continued to operate, despite rabid censorship, until World War II.

Ably directed by Ariel Francoeur, Theatre du Grand-Guignol seeks to maintain a similar thematic and tonal structure as its original source. All of the themes mentioned above are reflected in the five tales. And, in the Grand Guignol tradition, the production flips from a dramatic piece to a comedic piece, from dark to light, to allow a respite from the savage by mixing it with the frivolous.

Two of the pieces on the bill, “The Final Kiss” and “Coals of Fire," are prototypical Grand Guignol. Both involve people seeking vengeance through extreme means. In “The Final Kiss”, heavily bandaged Henri (Christopher Jack Rondeau) has had his face melted with sulfuric acid. The culprit? His girlfriend, Jeanine (Jeni Ahlfeld), who returns offering Henri her apology. As you have perhaps guessed, Henri is in no mood to forgive. “Coals of Fire” is a two-character play about a wife (Elizabeth Heidere) confronting her husband’s mistress (Jeni Ahlfeld). The mistress pleads with the wife to divorce her husband so they can marry and consecrate their true love. The wife, blind and elderly, seems harmless enough, but we soon learn she is not interested in love for love’s sake.

“Tics, or Doing the Deed” is undoubtedly the most successful of the plays. Little more than a straight up sex romp, the premise is appropriately silly. A regal dinner party spins out of control as husbands and wives bed other husbands and wives only to have their lewd exploits revealed by nagging postcoital tics. To give away the individual tics would divulge the play’s payoff, which is worthwhile and well played by the ensemble. Sean Demers as Monsieur de Merlot, Amie Lytle as Madame de Merlot, Jenny Levine as Madame de Martin, and Kirsten Anderson as Venus are particularly game at milking the comedy out of this sardonic little slapstick.

The final two plays are “The Ultimate Torture” and “The Old House.” Originally written by Andre de Lorde, the most prominent of the Grand Guignol writers, “The Ultimate Torture” follows a band of survivors holed up and hidden away from an army of zombie-like creatures on the prowl. As the evil undead encroach on their lone refuge, the group is forced to make a series of desperate decisions concerning sacrifice and mercy. “The Old House," easily the most ludicrous of the five, presents two teens wandering into a haunted house only to be kidnapped by devil worshippers. As the worshippers prepare to sacrifice one of the virgin youths, The Devil (Greg Petroff) and Jesus (Timothy Lalumia) show up to banter whimsically over who should receive the virgin’s soul. It is unclear in the program how this piece is derived from the Grand Guignol and, given the content, it seems as though it was created in-house and slapped on to fill the evening. The goofy twists wear thin and the sketch-like quality of the piece cheapens an otherwise respectable slate.

By their very nature and age, works of the Grand Guignol have become parody. Culturally, with dime-a-dozen films like Saw and Hostel, and even TV shows like CSI and Dexter, our shock tolerance is much greater than it was a hundred years ago. This is why Theatre du Grand-Guignol is most effective when it is seeking laughs instead of gasps. When the material is played earnestly, rather than embracing its inherent melodrama, it comes off as heavy handed and absurdly tepid. Much in these plays is egregiously ridiculous. Contemporary productions of the Grand Guignol should consider heightening their approach to the work in order to meet the loftiness of its clichés, rather than beat it into realism and lose what’s fun and lively at its core.

Dickens with a Twist

Brevity is not a word customarily used to describe the works of Charles Dickens. Writing in serial form, and essentially paid by the bulk, Dickens’s wealth and celebrity were the result of some of the most sprawling narratives in English literature. And so, condensing the most familiar qualities of the Dickensian formula into a spoof of little more than an hour in length is no small feat. Impressively, Emerging Artists Theatre’s production of Penny Penniworth is able to do just that, with good fun and more than a few laughs. Written by Chris Weikel, Penny Penniworth hews (for the most part) closely the requisite Dickens tale. After Penny’s true love is banished, Penny and mother become destitute. An anonymous benefactor provides for Penny while a relentless villain tries to marry her. Ultimately, secret identities are revealed, heirs are uncovered, villains are vanquished and loved ones return from oblivion. The Dickens recipe is unmistakable, which makes its ingredients ripe for riffing. Just as the Broadway production of The 39 Steps was a romping homage to the Hitchcock brand, so is Penny Penniworth to the Dickens brand.

Mark Finley directs a game ensemble of actors, made up of Christopher Borg, Jamie Heinlein, Lee Kaplan and Ellen Reilly. Each actor takes on an array of characters, from Mr. Pinchnose to Mrs. Havasnort to the Dodgeful Archer. Each actor inhabits these roles with great gusto, flavor, and dialects aplenty. They succeed in playing the buffoonery without cheapening it to the point of tedium. Outside of what’s called for in the text, they do not wink through their roles and the bits they are asked to play. With material like this, such restraint is refreshing.

Some of this credit should go to Finley, who keeps the action moving while maintaining the script’s clarity. He is aided by Tim McMath’s functional set and, in no small part, by G. Benjamin Swope’s lighting design. The play spans a number of years and transitions to countless locations. Swope’s efficient design helps the audience make these transitions along with the play.

The production makes little use of props. Morphing from one character to another, actors rely mostly on vocal and physical changes. The ensemble no doubt pulls this off, making the most of the costume each wears throughout by simply modifying some aspect of it to fit their shifting characterizations. Still, while the play is admirable for its adherence to economy, there are points that crave for more fun to be had with wild wigs or distinctive props that would playfully enhance the outrageous brio in some of Dickens’s archetypes. Such flair and variety may help prevent a flat sparseness that sometimes causes the play to sag. The production is at its best, such as with a splendid sequence involving a costume ball, when it incorporates more of these elements.

Minor quibbles aside, Penny Penniworth makes for a brisk and delightful evening. Even if you are a novice to Dickens, the play should still be accessibly pleasurable. And if you are a Dickens aficionado, be assured that some very juicy, very un-Dickensian surprises await.