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Unbeknownst to average theatergoers and Broadway-dazzled tourists,
most Off-Off Broadway productions have spectacular sets, catchy
original songs, and elaborate costumes, while those that lack
those elements compensate with brilliant acting and spellbinding
stories.
Unfortunately,
neither type of production has Broadway's deep pockets for
advertisements and publicity. Most Off-Off Broadway artists
accept this hurdle and work around it. But after seeing superb
shows play to only a handful of people while others closed
without so much as a listing, three members of the theater
community, Jason Bowcutt, Nick Micozzi, and Shay Gines, decided
it was time for a change. They brainstormed for a solution
to the problem and came up with this: create an Off-Off Broadway
awards show to generate publicity and honor its deserving
theaters, artists, writers, and designers.
"Thank
God!" Off-Off Broadway actor and director Christopher
Borg exclaimed upon hearing their idea for the awards. "Finally,
someone is looking at this incredibly diverse, talented, and
large community of New York artists and taking them seriously."
To
get the wheels in motion, Bowcutt, Micozzi, and Gines set
out to enlist the help of the large but scattered members
of the Off-Off Broadway community. They decided the best way
to unite their colleagues was to throw a party.
In
June last year, they invited every Off-Off Broadway theater
they could find for drinks at the Tank Theatre. To their surprise
and delight, more than 250 people attended.
The
threesome explained that judges chosen for their impressive
accomplishments and contributions to the theater community
would be assigned to view and nominate Off-Off Broadway shows
for various awards.
On
Sept. 1, 2004, the judging process for these awards officially
began. After attending their respective productions, many
judges reported back that it was a thrill to visit theater
companies they never knew existed.
Inspired
by the positive feedback, Gines, Bowcutt, and Micozzi along
with members of United Stages launched an Off-Off Broadway
Symposium at the Drama Book Shop in October. They displayed
posters and memorabilia from historic Off-Off Broadway shows
and featured prominent Off-Off Broadway actors, writers, directors,
and theater founders as guest speakers. It wasn't long before
the event became standing-room-only.
These
impressive turnouts proved that the community was ready and
willing to come together to participate in the creation of
the awards show called the New York Innovative Theatre Awards.
The show is set to debut in the fall of 2005.
Two
types of awards will be given: Production Awards and Honorary
Awards. The former are judged by volunteers and audience members
who vote in such categories as best actor, best actress, best
musical, best ensemble, best lighting, and best original soundtrack.
Honorary
Awards are more prestigious and can be voted on only by selected
members of the theater community. There are three types: the
Artistic Achievement Award, the Stewardship Award, and the
Caffe Chino Fellowship. The Artistic Achievement Award will
be given to the individual who has made a significant contribution
to the Off-Off Broadway community. The Stewardship Award will
be given to the individual or organization that has contributed
to the Off-Off Broadway scene through service, support, and
leadership.
The
biggest award, the Caffe Cino Fellowship, will give a $1,000-$5,000
grant to the Off-Off Broadway theater company that has consistently
produced outstanding works. The grant is to be used to help
this company's future productions.
Borg,
who is currently directing the Off-Off Broadway show TONYLUST:
The Broadway Bloodbath of 2006, playing at the West
Village's Duplex Theatre, was thrilled when asked to be an
Honorary Award judge.
"I
have enjoyed the IT Awards judging process immensely,"
he says. "The IT awards staff is extremely organized
and efficient. The scoring system is well designed; it gives
each judge a lot of room for detailed personal assessment
and encourages a thoughtful evaluation. I have seen some fantastic
shows and a couple of terrible shows, but each experience
has been interesting if not downright enjoyable."
"Off-Off
Broadway runs on passion," says awards show co-founder
Gines. "Most of the artists aren't getting paid, and
they are working rehearsals and performances around other
jobs. Yet despite all of these challenges, these dedicated
people still manage to create some amazing theater."
Gines
is a native of Utah with a dual degree in theater and marketing
from the Actor's Training Program at the University of Utah.
She moved to New York to pursue a career in theater and, of
course, to check out the Broadway scene. The first show she
saw was the long-running Cats, which left her shrugging
her shoulders at the hype. "I wasn't wowed," she
says.
One
day she passed a tiny hole-in-the wall theater a few doors
down from her apartment. Since it was both cheap and convenient,
she decided to return later that night to see its main attraction,
a low-budget show called Green Light.
Gines
left the show stunned by its storytelling and inspired by
its production. Looking back, she says, "I don't remember
who the playwright was, and I never saw any reviews for the
show, but it was very influential for me."
It
was then that she both discovered and fell in love with Off-Off
Broadway's hidden world of spectacular little plays that defiantly
break the conventions their Broadway neighbors are building
their success on.
"In
Off-Off Broadway, anything goes," Gines says enthusiastically.
"You never know what to expect-there is always something
new and something to challenge you. It is inspiring and passionate
and funny. It is courageous and crazy and raw. It is limitless
and hard and worth every single second."
Given
the multitude of shows playing at any given time, there is
a wide variety of productions to see, especially for someone
as passionate about theater as Gines. Off-Off Broadway can
appeal to people of all ages and tastes with its array of
inventive children's theater, brilliant adaptations, clever
improv shows, uniquely original plays, campy dinner theater,
and toe-tapping musicals. In fact, as many as 100 productions
are often running at one time, with many theaters featuring
a different play on each floor of their building.
Still,
many of these productions never receive the coverage they
deserve from influential media. While some magazines and newspapers
spotlight the higher-profile shows, a greater number shy away
from the entire scene. When a publication needs to cut back
its arts section, Off-Off Broadway coverage is often the first
casualty.
It
is disheartening for Gines, who complains, "Everywhere
I turn, it seems the opportunities to help promote our productions
are drying up."
This
is where the Innovative Theatre Awards hope to have the most
impact-generating publicity. Brilliant shows should not play
to less than 10 people, outstanding performances should not
go unrewarded, Off-Off Broadway's rich heritage should not
go unrecognized, and talented performers should not go unpaid
because theaters can barely make ends meet.
Gines
hopes the new awards will bring Off-Off Broadway enough recognition
to change this, but concedes that if she and her co-founders
can accomplish even a fraction of that objective, they will
be happy.
"In
our dream world," she says, "Off-Off Broadway artists
would make a living playing to full houses while they still
had the freedom to explore, create, and challenge-and their
efforts would be valued."
But
even if this never happens, Gines knows Off-Off Broadway will
still survive and thrive on its creativity alone. She quotes
writer David Crespy, author of The Off-Off Broadway Explosion,
who says, "Off-Off Broadway is a theater where even on
the barest of stages and usually on a shoestring budget, a
poverty of means fuels an explosion of imagination."
To
its credit, Off-Off Broadway has always held true to its creative,
nonconformist roots. When the Innovative Theatre Awards are
presented next fall, the ceremony will mark the first time
this offbeat and dedicated community has been in the spotlight.
Through this show, hardworking artists, writers, designers,
and theaters will finally be honored for the gifts of laughter,
tears, and inspiration they have given to thousands of unsuspecting
theatergoers throughout the years.
For
more information about the NYITA Awards, visit: http://www.nyitawards.com.
Contemporary political satire can be powerful, exciting, controversial, and, most of all, hilarious. But political satire in the theater can suffer from some innate impediments
Mark Finley's new play, The Mermaid, is a story about two people: Judith, a simple and virginal college co-ed who is coming of age in 1962, and Martin, a gay man approaching his midlife crisis in 1998. Finley draws thematic inspiration from classic authors, quoting Shakespeare's Pericles, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, as well as Jean Girandoux's Ondine. And though The Mermaid does not live up to its own lofty expectations, it is nonetheless an enjoyable tale about the far-reaching consequences of the decisions that people make.
The play begins in 1962, with Judith practicing her audition piece for her university's upcoming production of Ondine. She is interrupted by Lee, a young gay actor with Broadway aspirations, and Reid, a clueless but charming athlete looking to boost his grade point average so he can stay on the team. Both Judith and Lee soon find themselves smitten with Reid.
Meanwhile, in 1998, Martin shares a drink with his actress friend Amy, who has just finished a rock opera version of Pericles. She is somewhat upset that Martin, an orphan himself, did not enjoy the classic tale of the Prince of Tyre's quest to find his orphaned daughter. Before long, Martin's boyfriend Ken joins the duo. A few years Martin's senior, Ken is ready to settle down and adopt a child, and he has found the perfect one. But Martin wants to try to find his birth mother and come to terms with his insecurities before becoming a father.
And so Judith and Martin stumble forward, making decisions that influence those around them
Some of New York's best one-person shows are never seen. Every day, hundreds of hard-working actors are rigorously rehearsing monologues, isolated in their apartments.
Now the time has come for these actors to bring their work to the stage, face an eager audience, and maybe even advance their careers. The Manhattan Monologue Slam is a monthly event held at the Bowery Poetry Club, a downtown haven for spoken-word performance.
This is the American Idol of monologue performance. Ten performers have three minutes to impress industry judges and the packed-to-capacity crowd, which cheers or jeers the judges' tallies.
The crowd buzzes with energy. It's an eclectic mix of friends and family (including children), industry people, downtown enthusiasts, and, of course, a slew of fellow actors
The Milk Can Theatre Company is tackling George Bernard Shaw's multifaceted Arms and the Man, and it's a noble endeavor. Currently being presented in repertory with the world premiere of Anne Phelan's Mushroom in Her Hands, Arms and the Man has the potential to be a sharp, funny satire about love and an important commentary on mankind's obsession with war. However, under ML Kinney's schizophrenic direction, this Arms and the Man sinks under the weight of its underdeveloped concept.
Arms and the Man follows the romantic entanglements of Raina Petkoff (Meghan Reilly); her betrothed, Sergius Saranoff (Avery Clark); the heroic soldier Bluntschli (Kirsten Walsh); and Raina's headstrong handmaid, Louka (Sarah Bloom). Misunderstandings and missed connections abound: Raina loves Bluntschli but is engaged to Sergius, who loves Louka. Set against the backdrop of the Bulgarian-Serbian war, Shaw's play has his characters wax philosophical about love, the conventions of war, class struggle, and the responsibilities of man.
It is a difficult play
"Hip hip tiger tiger tiger!" cheers the Princeton fraternity in The Pursuit of Persephone, a musical inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Prospect Theater's production is an admirable composite of the writer's life and work. It cleverly combines Fitzgerald's youthful antics and a crucial failed romance with thinly veiled autobiographical selections from his fiction, making for a charming night of theater.
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise are indisputable classics in the American literary canon, and his work helped shape our conceptions of the "lost generation" of the Roaring '20's. The premise of Persephone is that Fitzgerald's fiction all springs from the pain and loss of his first love, Ginevra King.
The show is effectively framed as a memory. After many years, Older Scott (Daniel Yates) is about to reunite with his college flame, Ginevra (Jessica Grov
Last year, the Great Jones Repertory Company presented Seven, seven classic plays in repertory, from a restaging of Andre Serban's 1972 Medea to the world premiere of Ellen Stewart's Antigone. Individually, the pieces succeeded to varying degrees, but taken as a whole, they made a fascinating and beautiful cycle, the kind rarely seen on contemporary stages.
Stewart's new staging of Perseus with the Great Jones company very much belongs to this series, serving as a sort of "prequel" to last year's events. (Perseus is the great-grandfather of Clytemnestra, who, as the wife of Agamemnon, is at the center of most of the Seven stories.) Perseus is also clearly related to the company's previous works in its triumphs and tribulations: at moments visually spectacular while at others plodding and uninteresting.
The character of Perseus has always been overshadowed by his greatest accomplishment: slaying the snake-haired Medusa by cutting off her head. Here the audience is given the full story. Perseus is fated to kill his grandfather, King Acrisius. So the king, upon the birth of his grandson (fathered by Zeus, of course), sends him and his mother, Danae, out to sea in a locked chest.
Perseus grows up and slays Medusa as a gift of thanks to King Polydectes for not wedding Danae, a union he had not approved of. Perseus also slays a sea monster, saving the life of Andromeda, the princess of Ethiopia, and the two are wed. As in all Greek mythology, none of these stories occur without angry gods, rivalries, or battles.
The music is what shines the most in this production. Composed by Elizabeth Swados and Michael Sirotta, along with Heather Pauuwe, Yukio Tsuji, and Carlos Valdez, it provides a magnificent, sweeping soundtrack that greatly augments (and, at times, inadvertently overwhelms) the action onstage. The musicians are a pleasure to both listen to and watch.
And no discussion of the piece would be complete without mentioning, with complete awe, the talents of the Storyteller, played by Benjamin Marcantoni. His voice is at once beautiful and frightening, adeptly modulating from a solid tenor to an uncanny and sublime soprano in the same phrase.
Stewart wrote the text, adapting it from and including excerpts by Ovid, Hesiod, Apollodorus, and Pindar. Her staging, which includes many collaborative efforts by much of the cast, crew, and other artists, has characteristically amazing visual moments
It is no small challenge to give a new lease on life to French playwright Edmond Rostand's 1910 allegorical drama Chantecler, even for the title-bestowing rooster who believes that his song can call forth the dawn. The Adhesive Theater Project makes a valiant attempt in its low-budget production at the Teatro LA TEA on the Lower East Side, but the company gets bogged down in the script's honeyed lyricism and the unwieldy menagerie of more than 100 talking birds and animals. Director Cory Einbinder has trimmed about a half-hour from the three-hour play, but it still feels about an hour too long.
Part social satire and part barnyard fable, Chantecler is considered a minor play in the oeuvre of Rostand, who achieved international acclaim as the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. The play ran for nearly 100 performances in its first English-language production in 1911, based largely on advance ticket sales generated by the gender-bending casting of the popular stage actress Maude Adams as the rooster. This is its first New York City revival in a new translation by Kay Nolte Smith, who sacrificed natural speech rhythms
When Americans think of British entertainment, they invariably think of Merchant-Ivory dramas and Monty Python craziness. But those expecting period costumes or silly walks at Brits Off Broadway's newest production, Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters, will be in for quite a shock. Writer/performer Russell Barr's solo show is set in the seamiest sections of Scotland
The Milk Can Theatre Company clearly likes a challenge. It prides itself on producing works that combine language, emotion, story, and audience to create a unique theatrical experience. It embraces the possibilities of heightened language and emotion, and it believes in works that tell a story and engage the audience. So it is odd that the company would choose Anne Phelan's Mushroom in Her Hands, a rehash of Alice in Wonderland written as a series of disjointed vignettes.
According to the playwright's muddy program note, Mushroom in Her Hands is Phelan's speculation about what might have happened between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and his young muse, Alice Liddell. The play opens promisingly with an intriguingly perverse scene between Dodgson and Alice involving hidden candy and Dodgson's trousers. But the potential of this psychologically fascinating and sordid relationship is quickly squandered in favor of creepy suggestions and awkward flirtation.
There are no transitions in this play. Dodgson quickly disappears and then some lights change and then Alice sniffs something and before you can say "through the looking glass," Alice is in Wonderland. She soon meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, etc. With each character she meets, Alice learns new and fun facts about her body, her sexuality, and the dark side of desire. Yet for all its early promise and speculation, Phelan's imagination comes up with little more than an amateurish, pseudo-sexual Freudian acid trip.
The cast of four enthusiastically make the best of what they have been given, collectively taking on 15 roles. Under Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's capable direction, the actors are let loose to play. Jessi Gotta perfectly captures the innocence and impudence of 14-year-old Alice. She takes a flat character and gives it dimension while maintaining Alice's precocious na
If you don't deal with the past, some say, it will sneak up and deal with you. For Aggie, the past appears on a stormy March evening in the form of her younger sister Bella, who abruptly forces Aggie and her lover, Madeline, to sort through their lives in order to press on toward their future.
Writer Robin Rice Lichtig's ambitious play, Embracing the Undertoad, wrestles with issues of trust, redemption, family, love, betrayal, and forgiveness, all within the confines of a small apartment bedroom in Wilmington, N.C. The award-winning script was presented as a one-act at the Bailiwick Rep in Chicago, where it won the Lesbian Theatre Initiative. With an occasional affecting metaphor or timely turn of phrase, the full-length production brings interesting relationships and issues to light. But the lack of any satisfying resolution for the characters gives the lengthy spans of dialogue the feeling of being diluted from what was most likely a sharper, more pungent original version.
When Aggie returns home from her waitressing job, her younger girlfriend Madeline immediately recognizes that something is wrong. She questions Aggie until she divulges that her boss's son has been sexually harassing her. As the women plot their revenge, their dialogue reveals the cracks in their five-month-old relationship. Madeline, a young writer, is hard at work on her book, a tome about spelunking and self-discovery. A heavy drinker, she writes all day while Aggie works. Aggie is desperate for her to finish her book so they can reap the monetary rewards and live the life of their dreams, while Madeline maintains that she will not be fully inspired until Aggie tells her the details of her life before they met. Aggie is tight-lipped about her past, and much of the action concerns Madeline's attempts to learn about Aggie's history.
When the telephone rings, Aggie's feeling of foreboding is confirmed when Madeline reports that Bella is on her way to visit. Aggie wants to flee, but Madeline, recognizing a possibility to finally unravel Aggie's past, insists that they stay. When Bella arrives, wind chimes sound, snow falls, and the curtains blow open. As sisters who have lived through tragedy, Bella and Aggie share a mystical, extrasensory bond. Throughout the course of the evening, Bella manages to expose the secrets of both Madeline's and Aggie's versions of truth, and she leaves the two to decide on the future of their relationship.
Lichtig certainly had strong elements with which to work. Madeline is an expert spelunker, which invites intriguing comparisons between venturing into caves and venturing into relationships, both of which bring us through darkness in pursuit of light. Aggie is also a fascinating character, a woman with low self-esteem who pushes aside her own life to live vicariously and feed off of Madeline's talent. The ethereal Bella operates as sage, muse, and prophet, a figure who arrives and departs surrounded by mystery. She leaves us with questions that are never fully answered, but perhaps for Lichtig's purposes, they are questions better left unresolved.
Much of the problem lies in the relationship between Aggie and Madeline. Although both Kate Cox and Deshja Driggs Hall give strong individual performances, there is a lack of chemistry between them that makes it difficult to support and believe in their fight for their relationship. Their dialogue often feels forced and clich
"You can expect this to be the last war, and then we'll absolutely have peace ever after...how can you reject such a monumental responsibility?"
That's a rallying cry not so different from slogans tossed around in America today. In fact, it's just one of many promises offered by the fictional society in Kettle Dreams, a surrealistic new drama by Gerald Zipper now playing at the Impact Theatre in Brooklyn. The psychological effects of these promises, and of fighting a war to end all wars, are the theme of the play, which takes on this dark side of the industrialized world with somewhat cloudy results.
Kettle Dreams depicts a world where new wars are beginning all the time, resulting in continuing success for a small factory that makes chemicals used in bomb construction. Arthur (Chris Sorensen) begins work as a young man in the factory, where he quickly befriends its amiable and pragmatic owner, Charley (Ron Leir). When times are hard during his life, Arthur returns to work for Charley just as his father had before him, and eventually he gets drawn far deeper into the industry than he ever intended. Torn between his love for his wife and baby son and his compulsive desire to provide a better life for them, he works harder and harder from one war to the next, until the factory and its kettle of toxic chemicals come to define his existence.
From a political standpoint, this is a play determined to make a statement, but it is seemingly unsure how to go about it. Chronicling the many repercussions of an endless war that is aiming for an increasingly ephemeral peace, Zipper's script raises some major political and moral questions. In dealing with them, he alternately lays out answers with heavy-handed authority or allows them to dissolve away like another gas bubble in the menacing, ever-present chemical vat that dominates the stage. Kettle Dreams swings wildly between styles and moods to make its points but never settles on a single one long enough to reach a satisfying form of expression. With one minute hopelessly sentimental and the next almost Brechtian in its didacticism, the audience is left uncertain where to go with each new turn in conversation.
Faced with a sweeping vision but a text plagued with inconsistencies, director Nonso Christian Ugbode and his cast have a tough time connecting all the dots. There are times when they find the right mixture and produce powerful, surreal moments, such as a fevered meeting between Arthur and representatives of the government he has contracted with to deliver explosives (including a general played with vicious determination by Michael Flood). Then there are moments when the play swings into a new mood, and the actors grope around trying to get ahold of the material again. Clarity and confusion come in about equal amounts, leaving the play tipping up and down between peaks of intense expression and valleys where the action stumbles to a crawl.
Kettle Dreams has its greatest successes when the actors grapple with the unpleasant truths of their roles in the monstrous military-industrial complex depicted onstage. Leir is particularly effective as Charley, the sadly practical factory owner who can't help growing close to his employees, even as they slowly kill themselves stirring kettles of his toxic chemicals.
Beside him, Sorensen has a huge burden to carry as he takes Arthur from the idealistic youth with big dreams to the battered industrialist of his later years, who declares at one point, "This war is fantastic! There's never been another one like it." His performance is particularly plagued by the script's many changes in tone, but the constant humanity and earnestness he brings to the part are commendable. As Arthur's wife Cherise, Erin Cunningham winds up in the middle of many of the play's more saccharin moments, which she handles with sensitivity, though she rarely has a chance to do more than plead.
When all is said and done, this is a dark play of weighty thoughts and weightier conclusions that never quite pulls off what it sets out to do. It offers a whole lot to think about, including some downright sobering political contemplations ("Our customers were the losers in this war
When you think of Shakespeare, many things come to mind: lofty language, intricate plot lines, doo-wop. Well, maybe not the latter, but after you see Millennium Talent Group's production of Fools in Love
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