History as Dessert Course

The making of a successful musical comedy seems to require the following: A catchy title, a good mix of ballads, chorus numbers that lend themselves to snappy choreography, and some pop music, easily modifiable with hints of country, rock and a little blues thrown in for flavor. The story should be short and reduced to a few essentials, with just one or two easily overcome obstacles, and, of course, some heartfelt moments with hints at tragedy to give the piece heft. Honestly, Abe follows these instructions, and the result, I am happy to report, is utterly inoffensive. We follow young Abe Lincoln through several episodes of his formative teenage years, spent mostly reading, splitting logs (well, so we are told on many occasions, though not to worry: no logs are split here), in school learning spelling rules (a bit late at 17, but hairs shall not be split here either), and finally on his way to Indiana, where his father and stepmother move in search of better farming. All this and the death of his beloved sister in childbirth are told with lovingly choreographed song and dance numbers.

I cannot fault a young, enthusiastic cast of able singer/actor/dancers, the fluid direction (Joshua A. Kashinsky) nor the competent, sometimes even inspired choreography by Amy Klewitz. A handsome, suitably simple unit set by Joseph C. Heitman is nicely lit by Duane Pagano. So why, with so much good will and talent at hand, is the result so irritatingly saccharine, a most superficial portrait of a person who we would not take another look at if he were not named Abe Lincoln? Robert L. Hecker, who here signs for book, lyrics and music, has made it his business to pile cliché upon cliché; every song has a “dream”, “rainbow,” "hope" and “tomorrow” in it, words that should be banned from the (musical) stage for the next ten years.

There is a certain irony in the presentation of such an empty-headed piece of feel-good, anodyne theatre at a time when Lincoln’s party has perverted so much of what it stood for when he was at the helm. But never mind, Honestly, Abe springs right out of the naïve, innocent heart that makes America such an optimistic, positive country. Abe Lincoln is a trademark; the name will sell tickets, whether it is a grantor of anything worth considering or not. After all, who, in these harsh political times, cannot use some uplift.

Sixth Night – Getting Shakespeare Half Right

Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, gets a middling reading by The Seeing Place Theatre. The cast, under the direction of Brandon Walker (who also plays Malvolio), has internalized the story of this play well through long improvisational study of the script. As a result, the actors are comfortable with most of their scenes and present the text intelligently in a conversational tone and with an easy manner. However, as promising as this seemed in the first moments of the presentation, the lack of conceptual clarity and purpose, and of a directorial vision, paired with a glacial pace (the play took three hours, with a ten-minute intermission), soon defeated the good beginning.

Twelfth Night is one of the identity-confusing, sibling-lost-at-sea, misdirected affection plays of Shakespeare’s that seem to have been the Renaissance equivalent of the soap-opera. Here these tropes are conjugated in two main plots: 1. Count Orsino (David Sedgwick) loves Olivia (Anna Marie Sell) who loves Cesario, who is really Viola (Lindsay Teed) in disguise. Viola loves Orsino but serves him disguised as a man so she has to conceal her affection; 2. Olivia’s steward Malvolio loves her, and she is also pursued by Andrew Aguecheek (Nathan Ramos), a minor nobleman recruited as a suitor by Sir Toby Belch (Jorge Hoyos), Olivia’s relative who loves and eventually marries Maria (Erin Cronican), Olivia’s maid. The free agent in this brew is Feste (David Arthur Bacharach), Olivia’s clown, who provides comic by-play, songs, and the occasional stirring of the pot for our and his own amusement. Oh, and did I mention that Viola and her identical twin-brother Sebastian were shipwrecked and think each other drowned?

A further subplot concerns the dislike and disapproval of Sir Toby Belch by Olivia’s Stewart Malvolio, and the cruel practical joke Belch, Aguecheek, Maria and Feste play on Malvolio.

As is often the case with shoestring Shakespeare, the setting and historical timeframe is left vague in this production, in a kind of near-contemporary eclecticism. This is too bad, because a more stringent adherence to a historical time might have forced more specific choices of design and behavior. The play unfolds on a cluttered stage, in lighting that in many scenes is murky, leaving actors in unintended shadows.

The actors' behavior is sometimes as murky as the lighting. For instance, Olivia, deep in mourning, is presented on a deck chair showing much leg and cleavage (through under black lacy undergarments) and pulls the money she gives to Cesario out of her bra. Malvolio struts about with his hand in his pocket, more cock-of-the-walk than stern butler. Aguecheek seems to be in an entirely different play and sounds as if he has memorized a foreign language phonetically, and the drunk Toby Belch moves in and out of drunkenness at will. Feste, a role difficult to make truly humorous in a modern setting, has a pleasant voice, and the final song particularly (he also accompanies himself ably on an electric keyboard) is affecting. But the song (and music) choices do nothing to locate the play either historically or culturally.

The most satisfying scenes are those involving the main players: Orsino, Viola (who delivers the confusions and pain of her longings well), and Olivia, who, once past her sluttish phase, gives her character dignity and strength. Here the mostly psychological approach works because the scenes do not rely on outdated comedic conventions and stock characters, as is the case in the secondary plot.

Brandon Walker, as Malvolio, shows talent as an actor, but as a director he may have been handicapped by the split focus, and by choosing a rehearsal method that works against a strong conceptualization. Shakespeare, I find, often seems accessible enough but turns out to be difficult both in his structural complexities and in the challenge of bringing his work into a present-day form that is compelling. This production would be helped greatly by a more energetic delivery and by a rethinking of the power and class structure of the play.

Upper East-Side Dybbuk

In Yiddish, “besharet” means soul-mate. The soul-mate in question in Besharet, by Chana Porter, is the restless ghost of a girl who died many years before the actions of Besharet take their course. Drawing from Yiddish mythology – the Golem and Dybbuk legends in particular, and invoking anti-Semitic prejudice, the Holocaust and the 5000-years of suffering of the Jewish people, this play attempts to fuse all these elements in a work of magic realism, the Jewish edition. Samuel (William Tatlock Green) and Renee (Tia Stivala), his law partner, hire a new assistant, Eli (Macleod Andrews), who charms his new employers and inserts himself into Samuel's life. Eli fascinates and spooks Samuel with his knowledge of past events. Eventually Samuel convinces himself that Eli is “inhabited” by the ghost of his first love. At the same time, Eli inspires (and possibly impregnates) Ruth (Olivia Rorick), Samuel’s sickly wife. When Samuel disappears for several weeks, Eli manages the law office together with Renee, who is very pregnant.

By Act Two Ruth has recovered her health and female vitality. Dancing around the apartment, she holds forth to Renee about the nature of Jewish suffering and to Samuel about his uselessness as an emasculated (he had a vasectomy) man who cannot give her the child she craves. In a final tableau we find Ruth, Samuel, Eli (now in a woman’s dress in acceptance of his female soul) and Renee at the lake-side cottage where the love of Samuel’s youth had died and where she was given a water burial by Samuel and his father, who feared anti-Semitic persecution if the girl was discovered dead in their cottage.

Besharet kept my interest through the end of Act One, where the intrusion of Eli comes to its dramatic high point and Samuel’s anguish and guilt about his past reaches the point where he can no longer go on with his current life. In Act Two Ms. Porter attempts to show us the effect of the possessed Eli on the other characters, in scenes that are unconnected to the world of her characters as introduced. Some are outright dream scenes that are supposed to reveal the unmoored states of her characters. In others, Ruth, who at this point seems to be the author’s spokesperson, holds forth in long monologues about Judaism, its history of suffering, the power of women and their liberation from their emasculated male appendages (certainly no besharets there). It is not clear to me if Ruth has also become possessed as well, or at least discovered magical powers – she talks at length of her ability to create a child without a man.

The actors battle this unwieldy material bravely, with intensity and undeniable skill. One regrets that their efforts are not in the service of a better vehicle. The unit set designed by Eric Berninghausen is evocative, opening with an office setting that has the reeds of the lake-side cottage in the background; the many scene changes, however, executed by the actors, encumber the flow of the evening.

Besharet suffers from the author’s anxious attempt to fill it with all she holds dear and important. Since she lacks, despite a certain knack for story telling and dialogue, the skill to forge her ideas into dramatic scenes, she lets her characters tell us about them in long speeches. What is at its core a simple skeletons-in-the-closet with mysterious-stranger-as-catalyst domestic drama becomes overloaded with invocations that are rendered clichés here - 5000 years of Jewish suffering, blood libel, the holocaust, female power and the grace of forgiveness. True as they may be somewhere, they are used here to give a melodramatic story unearned gravitas.

How He (almost) Killed His Lover

It is not so easy, in our all-embracing media culture, for the ardent theater maker to find an untouched taboo. Incest? Cannibalism? Defacation on stage? Nudity? All have been done, some already by Shakespeare. So it must be with some satisfaction for a playwright to find a subculture of human behavior that has, up to now, not been explored on stage. Terra Nova Collective’s Feeder: A Love Story by James Carter, directed competently by José Zayas, explores “Feederism,” a fetish for fat people. Noel, a nerdy web-designer (Pierre-Marc Dienett), connects via a chat room with Jesse-Marie Scott, a large woman (Jennifer Conley-Darling). Her size and her willingness to let him take control of her body excite him; she, for her part, is thrilled with the enthusiastic attention she receives. He becomes her feeder, committed to her continued expansion; she his feedee, willing to accept his “goal” of increasing her weight to 1000 lbs. When she passes 700 lbs. and is no longer able to stand, let alone move about or leave the apartment, her condition frightens her into contacting a former employer, a TV showhost, who rescues her and brings her to an upstate clinic where she begins to reverse the process she and her now-husband Noel (they married along the way) had initiated.

Feeder: A Love Story, told from the moment when Noel finds Jesse gone, alternates his and her narrations, much of them in flashbacks. Both speak into “webcams” that become parts of video-blogs of their meeting, their life together, the progress toward his goal, and her decision to quit the process. In the last scene they meet in a pizzeria, where the finality of their separation becomes clear and acceptable to both of them.

Feeder tells its story in simple terms, often with humor, and with little attempt to judge the characters' behavior. Yes, she leaves him in the end, and the very real possibility that continuing on to 1000 lbs. might have led to her death is alluded to. But his encouragement on the way to their goal, and the affection they have for each other, are portrayed straight by the capable Mr. Dienett and the very charming Ms. Conley-Darling, without moralistic editorializing. Ultimately, their story is that of any couple fascinated by each other to a point, and who then go separate ways. The particular details of their attraction and eventual separation could almost be exchanged for any other shared interest which one partner eventually outgrows – no pun intended.

What makes Feeder: A Love Story interesting to me is the way in which the electronic media are used to tell the story. The set, a large square with a projection screen on one side, is surrounded by 10 monitors, in which the audience can see, captured by cameras, what they see on stage, with only slightly changed viewing angles. The “blogs” both characters are “feeding," the chat rooms, the community of like-minded fetishists who buy the films that Noel produces about his and Jesse’s project -- these are always present. This makes the audience and its voyeurism part of the much larger virtual world. We are participating in something that, to a large degree, owes its existence to the web. The excitement of their relationship is that it is not only a private experience but also one instantly shared. In fact, Noel does not fully comprehend Jesse’s need to get out into the world again, because thanks to the Internet, they ARE out in the world.

Ultimately, a small, private story is enlarged by its presentation, by appealing to our interactions with social sites, blogs, and web-cams. It could be told without all these trimmings, and would be a minor voyeuristic excursion into a taboo world. Told as it is, it assumes the semblance of importance beyond its simplistic core. Ambivalent as I often am about the use of all this technology, which relies upon a type of viewing to which we are now very accustomed, here it is an apt visual metaphor. Screens become the grantors of reality [guarantors of authenticity?], the avatars of the larger world, as a small story is “fed” into the world wide web and takes on a social presence beyond the lives of the characters.

Burning Pestle Neither Hot nor Bright

The Queens Players present (apparently for the second time around) a seldom-produced comedy by Francis Beaumont,The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Despite all the noisy clamor and much running about, a cast that does not lack talent fails to make the case for this revival. A theater company is about to begin its presentation of “The London Merchant” when a rich grocer and his wife noisily disrupt the proceedings and insist that they not only insert Rafe, their apprentice, as actor, but also provide a new plot for the evening. The company half-heartedly agrees, while trying to continue the performance of their play, a hackneyed domestic comedy which contains elements of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Inserted into this story are the disruptions of the noisy grocer and his noisier wife, and the plot performed by their apprentice and his two helpers, a Don Quixote-like play about the Knight of the Burning Pestle and his adventures. The stories occasionally cross paths, with the company attempting to keep the apprentice off-stage as best they can, with little success.

Director Richard Mazda, working with a large cast of actors of varying comedic skills, attempts to bridge the several divides which separate us from this piece by encouraging his actors to perform in the most broadly farcical style they can muster. This creates a number of problems: The mugging acting style erases the distinction between the three story centers that collide here and deprives the play of its bones. The eclectic choices and contemporary touches, performed with great skill by some (notably the comedically talented Alexander Styne), and the wildly divergent performance styles set up separate worlds for individual characters without these “worlds” ever coming together as an ensemble performing a single play.

The humor Beaumont finds in the burning pestle, making its appearance here as a wooden phallus mostly attached to Rafe’s belt, and the double meaning of the burning pestle as a symbol of sexual prowess as well as of syphillis, might be great fun to explore with teenagers, but such “bawdiness” no longer provides the humorous punch it may have once possessed.

Mazda dresses his actors mostly in moderd duds with some hints at "period" (short capes, hats etc.). The grocer's and his wife's costumes are the most elaborately period-suggestive. Here, as in the acting approach, the director misses an opportunity to distinguish the three groups of characters that are at odds in this play. The empty space set (with pieces that are rolled on and off by the actors) works well, as does the eclectic mix of props (Alexander Styne rides in, in his first entrance, on a child's tricycle), though again, the eclecticism does not support the structures of the play but simply adds random schtick to individual characters.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a much drawn-out evening (at over two and a half hours, despite the economical, empty stage setting which allows for quick scene transitions), where the actors work furiously at their various comic bits to a mostly stone-faced audience. The impression is that of an under-conceptualized production that relies on the text as given by Beaumont, in a production that is painfully overacted and fails to make a case for its existence.

How to Survive the Holidays (for the Near-Suicidal)

For anyone who feels disheartened by the Christmas decorations going up earlier and earlier every year and the thought of spending this holiday once again with boilermakers in an Irish bar, Lonesome Winter by Joshua Conkel and Megan Hill may be just the ticket. Winter Lipschitz (Megan Hill) is a shopaholic and social recluse who barely interacts with anyone except for her cat Sparkles (Joshua Conkel), a surly, demanding animal with lots of attitude and some unusual talents: he makes crank calls to her at her job as a phone operator at a home shopping channel and texts unflattering messages about her to her relatives. Living in a cluttered house filled with clothes she bought but never wore and other treasures, in debt over her eyeballs, and reduced to eating cat food on her lunch sandwich, Winter decides to end it all. Mercifully, Sparkles dials 911 and saves her life. Avery Lipschitz (Kirsten Hopkins), her sister, takes it upon herself to call in life coach Debbie (Nicole Beerman), who proceeds to make the sinking ship of Winter’s life again somewhat seaworthy.

Under the competent direction of Meg Sturiano, who moves the many blackout scenes (I would have preferred to have the scene changes happen in enough light) along at a decent pace, Lonesome Winter takes aim at a great number of our beloved traditions. The main one is the heartwarming “true to life” Christmas special, where a lost soul is pulled back from perdition by the beneficent forces of the universe, here a platitudes-spouting life coach who may or may not be an angel, who stages karaoke parties and make-overs, and works overtime to boost the down-on-herself Winter. The tone of the play is less one of satire than one of parody. This allows the playwrights to stay close enough to the matrix of their targets; one could imagine that they are not just knowledgeable but aficionados of the kitsch they are skewering.

The performances are all excellent, and never too much over the top. Lonesome Winter begins with a very amusing fantasy sequence in which Winter imagines herself the host of the home shopping show, which sets the rules of the game perfectly. In light of what follows, it sets up the hope and desperation of the title character as a gap so wide that it would take a miracle to overcome it. Even Sparkles the cat, played as a bitchy queen, knows to skedaddle off stage seconds before we get exasperated. When Sparkles o.d.'s on pain killers and poinsettia leaves and “goes to the heavy-side lair” to the music of “Memories” from Cats, his performance has earned this last laugh and the silly pay-off. Bobby (Nick Lewis) gives a fine performance as Bobby, who is as much a social misfit as Winter, but cannot fully give her what she needs.

The music covers every rendition of Christmas songs we will hear during this and every holiday season, and the sound design and use of this music is excellent (Meg Sturiano, sound design). Sound makes the final scene, which I liked for its minimalist choice and sweet bow to both the parody and the real emotional side that this play touches on.

A small parody in a small theater, Lonesome Winter is delightful - if perhaps not as biting as it could be - but entertaining throughout so that it is a very apt trifle for this season of charity, kindness and suicidal tendencies.

Bloodbath on Bond Street

Mortal Folly Theatre presents Macbeth by William Shakespeare in an enthusistically performed production of Shakespeare’s own Sweeney Todd, the demon tyrant of the Scottish Highlands. Directed by artistic director Katherine Harte-DeCoux, this production takes its conceptual cue from the line (quoted as a subtitle on the program) “blood will have blood.” And we get plenty of it, dripping, squirting, splattering the walls and floor, running down daggers and broadswords. Apart from this, the production aims for a straightforward presentation that does not so much illuminate as illustrate the Bard’s Grand Guignol. Do we need to summarize this play? Macbeth, a reluctant Scottish thane (Matthew Rini), inspired by three (here) rather pretty witches (Hannah Sloat, Alyssa Borg and Melanie Stroh), casts off his qualms about using the bodies of his betters as stepping stones to power. His wife (Liz Sklar) hardens the vague predictions of the witches into a specific plan for her husband. As the survivors of the murderous spree that catapults Macbeth to power gather forces in exile to overthrow him, and his wife is overcome by madness, the increasingly paranoid ruler goes for a second helping of advice from the practitioners of the dark arts. He misinterprets their oracle and is finally slain by Macduff.

Katherine Harte-DeCoux has assembled a talented cast of young actors, and, with the capable fight direction by fight director Nathan DeCoux, has them nimbly move from one broadsword bout to another. She also creates, aided by excellent lighting design (Bekah Hernandez) and sound (composed and sound-designed by Amanda Gookin), some moody, emotion-filled moments, and has a good hand with scene endings, letting them complete in an unhurried fashion yet without losing tension.

For anyone who is completely unfamiliar with this play and has had little exposure to Shakespeare, this might be a very exciting, action-packed rendition of Macbeth. The acting is fine. Matthew Rini in the title role and Liz Sklar as Lady Macbeth are particularly excellent, and David A. Ellis gives Banquo complexity and importance.

For those who know the play, though, this may not be quite enough. Illustration can be fine, but this is still shoestring, even if it is an expensive shoestring, where the set and costumes are lovingly prepared and there are swords aplenty,. With such a familiar text we crave for illumination, for the profound or at least clever insight. The athletic Rennaissance Faire-style presentation can be fun for the novice, but this production was good enough to leave me wanting for something more.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep at 3LD Art & Technology Center

The short answer, given in this adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s eponymous novel, is yes. What this does, or should, mean to us, however, is a different question. Philip K. Dick’s questions about what it is to be human have not lost their urgency, and many of his devices (the mood manipulator, the empathy box) while perhaps amusing in their crude realizations, can be found in every household, briefcase and pocket. The quest for an end to a potentially all-annihilating war is not over, and one could easily replace the designation “android” with one like “Taliban” and find many who would prefer their confinement or annihilation. Rick Deckard (Alex Emanuel), a bounty hunter in a post-nuclear-war world, is faced with hunting down six androids, humanoid robots that are used as slaves on Mars but are forbidden to come to Earth. His pursuit of the six escaped androids leads him into a maze of moral and practical questions about the difference between humans and robots that can remember but not feel empathy, have sex without love, and might be more perfect in terms of beauty and intelligence than their creators. He is suspected by others to be an android himself, particularly due to his ability to kill with little empathy for his prey. In the end he escapes death and resumes life with his wife Iran (Uma Incrocci).

Edward Einhorn’s adaptation (he also directs) stays close to the novel, which is – as so often with adaptations – a blessing and a curse. The dramatic scenes are short but require long expositions to be comprehensible, making the play feel longer than its 90 minutes. The post-apocalyptic world Dick envisioned in 1968 becomes here a postmodern jumble of visual elements from the fifties (the pre-show film snippets of instructions of how to behave in a nuclear attack), music (by Henry Akona, performed live by Michael Midlarsky on cello and Moira Stone, soprano) that seems inspired by Schoenberg and Berg in its haunting dissonances, and costuming that suggests anything from current thrift shop to film noir detective outfits.

That this novel also served as the starting point for the iconic film Bladerunner makes Einhorn’s task no easier, and many lines of dialogue and scenes from Ridley Scott’s film ghosted in my mind while watching this play. But in the end, and particularly thanks to the strong acting by Alex Emanuel as Deckard, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep found its affecting conclusion, and the answer to the question in the title. The need to preserve life is strong, and even an electric sheep’s destruction can be painful. And while this, as one character in the play states, may be an egotistical emotional need, it feeds our hopes and dreams.

PTSD, Danish Style: Home Sweet Home at PS122

In the United States, where the field is crowded with plays about the veterans of wars from WWII to Vietnam to Iraq, the bar is set high for plays about those damaged by war. So the Scandinavian American Theatre Company is not in an enviable position in bringing Andreas Garfield’s Home Sweet Home to New York audiences. The play does not overcome this handicap, despite able direction by Christopher Berdal, a set fashioned amusingly from cardboard boxes by Marte Johanne Ekhougen, and an energetic cast of three (Brian Smolin as Kim; Albert Bendix as Carsten, the vet returning from Iraq and Kim’s best friend; and Lisa Pettersson, also its translator, as Iben, Kim’s girlfriend). Kim and Iben have invited to dinner Kim’s childhood friend Carsten, now an early-thirties career officer who just returned from Iraq. Even with their stuff still in boxes and their newly bought house still under construction, they do their best to make the evening special, and Kim, both anxious and excited, cautions Iben not to challenge Carsten’s participation in the Iraq war. Carsten’s arrival (in full dress uniform) and his increasingly erratic behavior over dinner leads to the tragic ending we might expect from a play entitled Home Sweet Home.

The playwright seems most at home with the uncomfortable dynamic of two old friends whose years apart do not easily lead to renewed common interests. Both are performing – posturing, really – for Iben, who for her part jumps at the first opening Carsten gives her to challenge him on his participation in the war. All this raises tensions and hints at traumatic events in Carsten’s past, but Garfield is on less certain ground here and leaves much of Carsten’s experience wrapped in vague suggestions, making it difficult for us to understand the climax of the play.

The extensive use of video projections also makes the play less harrowing than it might be. By filming important scenes rather than finding a way to present them full-bodied in real time on the stage, the writer and director eliminate the element of changeability and spontaneous creation that make theater "theater" and not cinema. This is especially true of the play's climax, which is projected rather than performed. While I can appreciate the narrative efficiency of this move, it removes the heat of immediacy and leaves us, for no aesthetic or intellectual reason, watching the representation of a representation, and thus distanced from its emotional power.

Home Sweet Home takes the horrors of war and their aftermath, both national and personal, and renders them distant by its dominant production device of a cool newsmagazine rendition. The dramatic presentation of the characters, their motives, and their emotions could be much more engaging. That it is an Iraq-war-inspired play originating in Denmark could be of great interest to American audiences. This aspect, however, is not dramatized in this production.

From the Warhorses Mouth

59 E 59th Theatre, together with Fallout Theatre, presents Personal Enemy, the world premiere of a lost 1953 play by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. Set in the United States in the year of its writing, the play was rediscovered in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives. Written in the year Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was first produced, it takes a fascinating look at the paranoid world of the McCarthy era and ultimately makes a powerful case as a play for our time as well. On the morning of her birthday, we meet Mrs. Constant (Karen Lewis), attended to by her husband (Tony Turner), daughter (Joanne King), son-in-law (Mar Oosterveen), and son Arnie (Peter Clapp), along with her Polish neighbor Mrs. Slifer (Genevieve Allenbury) and, later on, the Reverend Merrick (Stephen Clarke, who also plays librarian Ward Perry and an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee). On this day, the world is in order; even the pain over the loss of the older son Don in the Korean War has given way to the comfort of hero worship.

However, the domestic idyll is soon shattered, from within and without, when a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass turns up with the dedication “To Arnie, with love from Ward.”

Suspicion about Arnie’s sexuality and Ward’s influence over the son mushrooms into obsessive investigation when it is discovered that Ward (an atheist and former member of the Communist Youth) had given a copy of the same book, with a similar inscription, to the lost son, who, as the family finds out, did not die in Korea but decided to join the small group of American POWs who, though able to return home, elected not to come back.

The confluence of (never explicitly mentioned but much hinted at) homosexuality, communist ideology and atheism leads to a climate, in the Constants’ household and the small-town world around them, where everyone is suspected and suspicious, and the mother’s mantra of “live and let live” turns into “attack everyone in sight.”

John Osborne and Anthony Creighton’s play, written in 1953 but not produced until 1955 (and then in a version severely censored by the Lord Chamberlain), is a long play overloaded with narrative expository detail. But just when I began to tire of the many stories that make up its narrative, Personal Enemy began to grab me again. The corrosive energy of the anti-gay, anti-intellectual attitudes, the viciousness with which anyone thinking differently from the powers-that-be is subjected to attack, the intolerance towards the non-believers (whether in God or in the American way of life) that drives this family to ruin suddenly struck me as the stuff of today’s politics.

David Aula’s brisk staging, an excellent cast of British actors with near flawless American accents, and an interestingly designed space (a scrim invokes the mountains of Korea, allowing for “out of focus” moments that make the set appear deeper than the small stage allows) create a complex world. Sound was used to enhance the set (cars arriving and driving off) and, in several moments on TV, to invoke the early folk-music, Beat generation of the fifties.

The costumes clearly place the play in the fifties, although I felt that the Act 2 dresses of mother and daughter, made from an urban camouflage print fabric, emphasize in a perhaps too obvious manner one of the flaws of this play. Osborne-Creighton have the two women shoulder most of the hard-driven, shrill hatred and intolerance, while the men, with the exception of the Reverend and the Investigative Agent, are the sensitive ones ultimately victimized by a hatred that mirrors, in a single household, the lynch-mob violence of a town and a country.

Expecting a literary curiosity, I was gratified that this production presents a play that is very relevant to today’s political and social debates. It is a play that would benefit from a larger stage, and deserves to be seen by anyone concerned about the obdurate anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy, and intolerance against those who are different that fuels tea- and other parties.

Expats on Parade

Letter from Algeria, by Michael I. Walker, could be a comedy of manners save for the tragic turn at the end of the play, the subject of the letter in the title. But Walker, a writer with a great facility for witty dialogue filled with literary and pop-culture allusions, reaches for weightier stuff, and that’s a pity. A play that begins as an amusing romp, with a bit of mystery about all four characters thrown in to keep us on our toes, ends with a dirge of a monologue (the letter of the title) and a tragic ending that undermines the amusing manipulations of the first act. Tim (JD Taylor) and Walter (Patrick Murney), two American students on their year abroad in Brussels, Belgium, allow Hugo (Rufus Collins), heir to a waffle fortune, to treat them to expensive gifts, meals and trips to Paris and Amsterdam. Goaded on by Ali (Amanda Jane Cooper), an American acting student who seems to be the mistress of and procurer for the bisexual Hugo, the quartet travels to Hugo’s estate in Algeria, where a fatal misfortune visits Ali and Hugo.

The playwright invites the audience to a game of fast-paced scenes, driven mostly by the excellent, highly energetic Ali, who seduces, flirts, pouts, charms and bullies Walter, an innocent from a strict household (clearly the fish-out-of-water here); Tim, a homosexual with a secret that is never quite revealed; and finally Hugo from one hedonistic adventure to the next. Except nothing in this play is quite as it appears. Ali’s attempts to make Tim and Hugo jealous by sleeping – or pretending to have slept – with Walter fall flat in the face of Tim’s and Hugo’s lack of interest in her. And Hugo’s Algerian Shangri-La is surrounded by hostile natives.

What begins as an amusing farce (even the locale of the first act – a dorm room in Brussels – is funny as the direct opposite of a romantic European place) turns in the end into maudlin melodrama. Walker does not allow us into the lives of his characters – Hugo remains a complete cipher, Tim and Ali’s motivations, beyond their need for money, remain obscure, even the revelation that Walter’s parents have died in a car accident and that he writes letters home to assuage his anguish does not inspire sympathy for a character who otherwise remains a blank. With essential information about the characters withheld, and the pivotal events in the play happening off stage, the play does not earn the emotional weight it claims.

The production of Letter from Algeria, briskly directed by Adam Fitzgerald and beautifully designed by Travis McHale (set and lighting), Amanda Jenks (costumes), Alex Wise (composer), and Ian Wehrle (sound), and expertly acted, could be a triumph if the play did not collapse onto itself.

Talking Hearts

The Storm Theatre Company, together with the Blackfriars Repertory Theatre, presents Paul Claudel’s Noon Divide in an elegant, minimalist production co-directed by Peter Dobbins and Stephen Logan Day. Paul Claudel’s agony-filled ménage-à-quattre is given a competent reading in a theatre located, perhaps appropriately so, in the basement of the Church of Notre Dame on 114th Street. Noon Divide opens with the four characters - Ysé (Kate Chamuris), her husband De Ciz (Brian J. Carter), Mesa (Peter Dobbins, who also co-directs) and Amalric (Chris Kipiniak) - on the deck of an ocean liner on its way to China. Mesa and Amalric both have known and harbored passions for Ysé, while her marriage has lost the spark of passion. Several months later they are in Hong Kong, where De Ciz pursues, with ultimately fatal consequences, his love of money, leaving Ysé behind. Ysé and Mesa engage in a passionate relationship that leads to the birth of a child.

By act three, Ysé has left Mesa and joined Amalric, the earthiest of the three men. China is in the turmoil of the Boxer Uprisings, and Ysé and Amalric have prepared to blow up their house and themselves to avoid death at the hands of the rebellious Chinese. Mesa finds the two. A struggle ensues in which Amalric takes Mesa’s free pass but drowns trying to board the boat to freedom. Mesa and Ysé, in the final moments before the house blows up, come to reconciliation with each other.

Theater always involves translation – from text to stage, author’s intent to director’s concept, casting and scenic realization. In a play that originated in a foreign language and culture, such as this one, additional challenges arise. Will the poetry of Claudel’s writing, his framing of characters as archetypes, and his negotiation of the conflicts among them in long, rhetorical passages translate to a stage in a church basement in 2010? (Incidentally – no translator is credited in the program!).

The production here is respectful. The bare center stage with a starry-sky surround behind the audience allows for more movement than the directors use. The interesting sound design is subtle (too much so – indicating where it could provide substantial texture and even information), and the well-executed lighting provides atmosphere for each of the scenes.

However, rhetorical theater, with its long tradition in French theater, is not the strength of American actors. Chris Kipiniak, only slightly hampered by a too-tight suit that contrasts with his not so comical character, gives Amalric power and vocal presence, and Peter Dobbins as Mesa provides a serious performance that errs only in investing too much in the self-flagellation that Claudel offers as a form of love. Ysé has the thankless role of the Madonna-Whore who becomes the object of the three men’s projections, a character given little agency by its author. She is underplayed by Kate Chamuris, who looks the part, but only in brief moments in Act One gives her the vivacious energy that would explain her desirability to the men who adore and revile her, often in the same sentence.

I don’t know if a case can be made for the production of this play, with its psychologically, morally and even theologically questionable search for the reconciliation of the love of God with the love of the pleasures of the flesh. This production, keeping all the passion above the neck, fails to make the case. Mesa, as Claudel’s stand in, is too tortured (he suggests that Ysé is the cross he crucifies himself on). The middle act – set in a ruined graveyard – provides the most passionate language, but the directors chose not to invest in the physical possibilities of the scene, and as rhetoric it fails to generate the heat that would warm our talked-out hearts in this cool presentation.

Ghost Stories and Stout

The Folding Chair Theatre Company presents a thoughtful, engaging production of The Weir by Connor McPherson at the Access Theatre. Ably directed in a simple loft space by Marcus Geduld, this poetic piece unfolds at the leisurely pace of bar talk among seasoned drinkers. Four men and a woman gather in a bar. The woman, Valerie (Lisa Blankenship), arrives last with Finbar (Richard Ryan Cowden), who is showing her the sights of this small village where she has moved. The bar, run by Brendan (Ian Gould), a gathering place for tourists during summer, is hanging on during the rest of the year thanks to a few regulars who gather there. As Valerie arrives, the regulars engage in a round of telling ghost stories that are woven from popular lore and personal experiences. Finally Valerie offers here own, painfully personal story, which moves the men to accept her as one of their own, offering friendship and comfort, along with copious amounts of beer and whiskey.

McPherson’s play is much like a shaggy dog story – entertaining if you get into the spirit, without amounting to too much in the end. But the telling, broken up as much by the drinking rituals as by interruptions where the characters reveal their pasts, their aspirations and their personalities, makes it easy to get drawn into its small world. The audience becomes eavesdroppers to this vanishing world where folklore still lives.

The Folding Chair Theatre, true to its name, presents the play in a simple setting: a few props, the characters appropriately dressed, candles placed around the large stage in an open loft space suggesting the flickering of swamp lights, the set otherwise lit with a few light bulbs and lamps placed on the set, create the apt atmosphere. The one sound effect is a howling wind whenever the door is opened. (No designers are credited in the program). The play opens with Brendan turning on lamps, cleaning tables, dusting frames of photos on the wall, his turning the lamps off closes it. These simple actions make us feel part of the place, invite us in, and indeed the audience, at the end of the play, is asked to step up to the bar for a pint or a short one.

Geduld’s staging is thoughtful and makes the best use of the space, while giving the actors room to let their characters evolve. The actors, using Irish accents that to my ear sound close enough if not perfect, are all excellent, well suited each to their roles.

A small play, without pretensions beyond its open-ended pointing to the possibilities of mysteries that may be part of our existence, The Weir could be dismissed as lightweight, but in this rendition it offers a lovely evening in the theater that leaves one with a smile and a longing for a boilermaker or at least a pint of Guinness.

Touring Gangland with Julius Caesar

The Queens Players' Julius Caesar offers Shakespeare’s play in a well staged, physically vigorous production. Set in an unspecified urban gang environment, the production makes good use of the Secret Theatre’s space, and nearly pulls off this updated version of the play. Director Richard Mazda, working in one of the more interesting off-off-Broadway spaces I have encountered of late – a former industrial space with a large, flexible theater, a loading dock and a number of ancillary spaces used for this environmental production – tricks Shakespeare’s play out with the combat-booted, ripped-jeans-and-leather-jacket look that has become the expected attire for disaffected youths. An odd mix of machetes, daggers, shot guns and martial arts weapons has everyone in this production ready to go to work on each other. A cast of mostly young actors, with many of the roles played by women, is headed by the very competent Gil Ron as Julius Caesar, Alex Cape as Marcus Brutus and David J. Fink as Mark Antony.

Mazda choreographs and paces his actors well, and creates a credibly excited, physically urgent atmosphere. Making excellent use of a simple lighting setup (no designers are credited in any of the design areas) and adding some well chosen sound effects, this production is almost convincing. Why then did I feel like I was attending a high-school project, intent to make Shakespeare palatable to urban kids who might otherwise skip the class?

The culture clash between Shakespeare’s text of political assassination and fight for succession and the concerns of Street Gangs of Queens never quite works for the play. Even though the actors have mastered Shakespearean Language 101 well enough, they (with Caesar, Mark Antony and Sarah Bonner’s Portia the notable exceptions) rush through the intricate arguments and oratories of the text in a uniform shouting style that renders the text hard to follow. And the issues of the play – assassination as a tool of political idealism versus murder as a stepping stone to power, fear of tyranny versus fear of losing clout -- do not strike me as the concerns of teenage and twenty-something gangbangers. On the other hand, many opportunities are missed where believable imagery might have steeped Shakespeare’s characters much deeper into a contemporary world.

The use of Johnny Cash for pre-show and intermission music is an odd choice in that it suggests the world of the parents of these actors. The environmental staging is slightly irritating, not only for the awkward tour guide role of the soothsayer (“follow me…”) but also because it does not contribute in either lending atmosphere or meaning anything more than the main stage area implies.

Dressing Caesar in a floor-length white gown – vaguely Islamic looking – is a jarring choice, though it does make the blood look prettier than on the black costume of his first appearance. But it also makes him appear the innocent victim, the lamb brought to slaughter, which seems inconsistent with the rest of the gang concept.

Ultimately, in spite of its flaws, this attempt at giving contemporary relevance to a text by dressing it in new duds is still entertaining to watch, perhaps less for the text than for the worthwhile intent and boisterous enthusiasm of the young troupe.

Vanya on East Fourth Street

The Boomerang Theatre Company presents Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanyat in a straightforward production that aims to let the play speak for itself, with minimal interpretive interference: an important play, well cast, overcomes the shortcomings of a well-meant production. The arrival of Serebryakov (Ed Schultz), a retired art history professor, and his twenty-seven-year-old beautiful wife Yelena (Lauren Kelston) on a country estate managed by Vanya and his niece Sonya upends the balance of their life. Vanya falls hopelessly in love with Yelena, (Yelena: “When you speak to me of love I simply grow numb”). Astrov (Richard Brundage), the district’s doctor, feels that Yelena’s beauty lifts him out of the dull routines of his life and falls in love with her as well. Sonya has long loved Astrov who ignores her. When Vanya surprises Astrov and Yelena in an embrace – and, moments later, the professor proposes to sell the estate to invest the proceeds for a better return, Vanya reaches the end of his tether and attacks the professor.

Serebryakov and Yelena decide to move back into town. In the end the plain, unloved Sonya and the defeated Vanya resume their work, resigned to live with their failures at love and life.

The director, Philip Emeott, has assembled an excellent cast (including the smaller parts of the permanent houseguest Telegin (Bill Weeden), the nurse Marina (Sara Ann Parker) and Voynitskaya, Vanya’s mother (Dorores McDougal). His respect for the text leads to a naturalistic style suggested by the first production. Crickets, birds, sounds of horses trotting in the yard, costumes that approximate the Russia of the 1890s set the atmosphere. But then he encourages his actors to perform in a frantic, overly emotional style, with large gestures and a hurried pace better suited to farce.

The empty picture frames on the walls - a symbolist cliché that I have seen it in several Vanya productions – lack justification in the text; having actors break the fourth wall in several of the soliloquies jars the audience for no dramatic gain.

While the spare unit set works well, lighting and costumes are just serviceable with many missed opportunities. The music choices seem arbitrary – Beethoven’s Ghost trio, a twentieth century guitar piece, a piece of music that, I assume, the sound designer composed present a stylistic mix that is puzzling, while on the other hand, the guitar playing of Telegin is well-conceived and adds life and humor to the production.

However, this rendition Uncle Vanya, in its final moments, distills the meandering, almost plot- and action-less story into the poignant, existentialist contemplation of loneliness, pain, suffering, and the willingness to go on living in the face of a life that has lost all meaning and promise for happiness. And director Philip Emeott has the good sense to leave the actors and the text alone for long enough to allow this essential moment to unfold.