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and
workshops-the show I went to was its
last, after spending a full week in Amman.
"Why
wasn't there any publicity for this?" my friend asked.
"I only found out from an anonymous text message on my
phone last night. It's typical. They'll spend millions to
import some group or some star, fly them out here, but then
they can't bother to spend a few thousand JD to publicize
it."
I
couldn't argue. I found out about the show from Issa, who
saw the dancers the previous night, playing in a 400-seat
theater to an audience of 38. It was even free.
People
who are trying to make art in Amman can testify that funding
for local projects has become harder and harder to come by
in recent years. No one wants to pay for art anymore; perhaps
they don't see enough return on it. And maybe that's the thing
that's missing: in America, there is a deep-seated cultural
idea that art is good for something. General Motors, Ford,
and GE all fund some kind of art as part of their public relations
endeavors. Archer Daniels Midland is one of the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting's biggest sponsors. No one gets rich
in America without tossing a few bucks to some favorite theater,
museum, or cultural organization.
As
much as Jordanians try to imitate America by putting up skyscrapers,
there are still details they miss. Like the fact that, although
Americans seem crass and cultureless about many things, when
it comes to art, many put their money where their mouth is.
The
Mission of Cultural Diplomacy was funded by Bank Audi, the
Municipality of Amman, and, of course, the American Embassy.
The best collection of Jordanian art available to the public
is in the lobbies of the Sheraton Hotel.
And
the Battery Dance Company was terrific. The show began with
its "solo project," which gave each of the dancers
a moment alone in the spotlight. Some of the solos were good,
others great. When dancer Stevan Novankovich performed a routine
that mixed Russian, European, and Middle Eastern sounds and
influences, the audience burst out in appreciative gasps and
applause, as if they never expected to see their own culture
reflected back at them except through spy movie villains.
For me, watching Novankovich's modern moves and flawless technique,
with his wild, Gypsy energy, felt like waking up.
Jean
Sato performed a short but haunting solo to accompaniment
from vocalist Christine Correa. The song she sang was about
death. Perfect movement matched with lyrics about decay and
dissolution. At one moment, Sato seemed like a puppet, hanging
from strings tied to some invisible hand, while the next she
surged like a live wire. For a moment, human skin was just
a wrapping around something bright and powerful and longing
to escape.
In
between the solos, the company's musical group performed pieces
both vocal and instrumental. One of the most interesting was
the simplest: a slow, chanted lyric about the life of an artist,
living in the Land of Art, who works on the Art Farm and sells
Art for money to deposit in the Art Bank, or to spend at Art
Restaurants and Art Nightclubs. Somewhere else, perhaps, this
song was written to be ironic. In Jordan, the Land of No Art,
it became a hymn, a paean to a world where the spiritual can
somehow intersect the temporal through an act of making.
Of
course, you can say, that's the world we all live in, the
only difference is whether we have eyes to see it. And this
is where the pain comes from, because if I had seen this show
in downtown New York instead of in a manufactured city set
on the side of a mountain in the middle of an uninhabitable
desert, how much of what I saw in that theater would I have
appreciated? Isn't that the irony of a world of abundance?
Even from an overflowing cup we can only drink so deep before
we choke.
For more information about
the Battery Dance Company, visit their website at:
http://www.batterydanceco.com
Nicholas
Seeley, a former staff writer for offoffonline, currently
lives in Amman, Jordan, where he works as a teacher and freelance
journalist. Recent theatrical work includes directing fellow
New Yorker-in-exile Jibril Hambel in a production of Wallace
Shawn's "The Fever," at Amman's Blue Fig Cafe, and
organizing an amateur theatrical salon.
Out of context, Machinal is an astonishing and unique portrayal of one woman's battle with the crippling forces of poverty and social expectations and an unwilling dependence on a loveless marriage. Yet even more remarkable is the story of this play's growing popularity and the emergence of its protagonist, a nondescript, middle-class young woman, as a universal figure.
Written by Sophie Treadwell, a reporter, in 1928, Machinal was unlike anything American theatergoers had experienced before. Treadwell loosely based the story on the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of Ruth Snyder, who was convicted, with her lover Judd Gray, of murdering her husband. Produced on Broadway in 1928, the play was immensely successful with its shocking subject matter, abstract and robotically lyrical language, and popular leading man, Clark Gable.
Yet the play was largely forgotten until the 1990's, when it had a number of revivals. It was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, starring Fiona Shaw; Off-Broadway by Naked Angels in 1999; and in a number of Off-Off Broadway productions in 2001 and 2003, not to mention countless national and college productions.
One reason it has enjoyed such popularity is that it has lost little of its original resonance. The story of the Young Woman, who is forced by fear of poverty and loneliness to marry and start a family with a man she doesn't love, is a familiar one. As she struggles with a different kind of loneliness, that of being married to a stranger, she finally explodes with sadness, anger, desperation, and self-destruction. She is a powerful character, perhaps as notable a down-and-out Every(wo)man as Willy Loman, and with her frequently lengthy monologues about terrifyingly mundane subject matter, she draws you into her head and leaves you struggling not to empathize with her.
At least, that is the play's potential. Mishandled, it becomes at first a cartoonish take on the burdens of industry and domestic life, and at last an absurdist spin on a Chicago-like trial drama. Unfortunately, albeit with some notable exceptions, the Dreamscape Theatre's new production is a little too much of the latter.
The play starts off with a bang. With director Morgan Anne Zipf's decisive, traditional interpretation, complete with Mara Canlas's period costumes and music and Carlton Ward's fluid, imaginative lighting design, the first "episodes" of the Young Woman's journey are engrossing. Yet as these episodes progress, and set pieces from each scene are piled in a corner of the stage, the production loses steam and begins to feel sloppy. It also loses its edge and self-awareness, and finally settles for a cringe-worthy misuse of the Law & Order theme before the dramatic trial scene at the end.
The play's backbone, undoubtedly, is the Young Woman, and Molly Pope does a formidable job with this difficult role. She makes sense of the character's long streams of nonsequential dialogue, and endows the Young Woman with a tragic combination of frailty and strength-imbuing frustration. But this strange world is constructed out of a dramatic irony. The audience is the only listener privy to the Young Woman's reflections on how her world is treating her. In the context of her existence onstage as an isolated character, it is understandable that she is alone and relates only to the audience. However, in the context of her life onstage, she must relate to the other characters; otherwise, her point about loneliness in even a social setting is flawed.
Pope, though compelling to watch, often seems as if she is onstage by herself. She vehemently decries her boss-turned-husband's "fat hands" and overbearing demeanor, yet in actuality her husband, played by Richard Lovejoy with childlike bounce and insecurity, doesn't seem nearly as intimidating as her many cringes and sidelong glances would imply.
Pope's engrossment with her own character, however, is not singular. Most of the ensemble members, though bringing a number of colorful characters to life, often lose sight of the play's tone. The most notable example is the shouting match of a trial scene that seems completely out of sync with the rest of the play. Zipf's staging might have been more successful had she reigned in the ensemble to create a more consistent world.
Machinal is a great play that presents a tremendous amount of challenges both in production and performance. Zipf and the Dreamscape Theatre, though not entirely successful in confronting these challenges, deserve credit for such an ambitious production.
"So overdone, you know what I mean? The photographic image. As memory thread, 'window into the past'
Tennessee Williams is quite the popular playwright this season. Five by Tenn opened off Broadway in the fall, and The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire are currently enjoying runs on Broadway. Now at 59E59 Theaters, Linda Marlowe is starring in Mortal Ladies Possessed, a new work based on Williams's short stories. Perhaps the show's creators should have left those books on the shelf.
The night begins with a door frame and a woman's personal effects strewn about a black box stage, and disembodied voices talking loudly and impatiently. Some character names and facts are thrown around, but it's tough to absorb this information out of context. Then Marlowe enters as the Widow Holly, patiently listening to the cacophony. There is silence, which the Widow Holly breaks with the sort of absurd personal statement that authors use to start their plays/books off with a laugh. (In this scenario, it does not have the desired effect.)
It turns out that she rents out rooms, and we see bits of the lives of the boarders at her New Orleans residence. Blackouts and the addition or subtraction of scarves and eyeglasses indicate changes of stories and characters. Since all of the tales are reminiscences, time is not linear, and in moments the characters jump from the near past to the faraway past to the present. But what makes perfect sense on the page, accompanied by character names and narrative directions, does not translate here to the stage.
Marlowe is a fine actress who speaks in a delightful girly rasp and commits fully to the physical and emotional presence of her characters. Her accent, though, does not play as effectively. The honey-coated drawl of Tennessee Williams's heroines is almost as iconic as the characters themselves, and certain expectations are inevitably formed. As Widow Holly, Marlowe spoke like an Australian who lived in New York for several years and then recently relocated to the South. There was no consistency, as if she was struggling to find the character's voice during her performance.
The only role in her repertoire here that needed no dialect coaching was Flora Goforth, the imperious owner of a Mediterranean villa. Marlowe was able to use an accent close to her own as she played up this deliciously vicious woman. This piece, in the middle of the set, was very funny, had an understandable story progression, and did not overstay its welcome. The same could not be said for its companion pieces.
A theatergoing audience appreciates it when the crafters of a show do not underestimate their intelligence, or their ability to interpret text and subtext. But when a production makes its audience work too hard to figure out who's who and what's what, oftentimes the audience stops trying. At the conclusion of Mortal Ladies Possessed, there was a hesitancy on the audience's part to clap, as they were not sure if they had, indeed, arrived at the end. All they, and this show, needed was a little more structure.
The packed audience at La MaMa bubbled with excitement on opening night for Split Britches' Dress Suits to Hire. New York's most renowned lesbians
Couplets, Mike Bencivenga's highly original new play about the rights and wrongs of love, proves that the Bard's sonnets are as malleable as his plays. Spinning a narrative thread out of the raw emotional material contained in several poems by Shakespeare, Bencivenga's text respects the wholeness of each sonnet's basic component
You can run, but you can't hide. Religion seems to be everywhere these days, infusing everything from mainstream films (Kingdom of Heaven) to the Broadway stage (Doubt) to our national government's rhetoric. Joshua Feldman's play How Light is Spent examines the effects of religion and belief on the lives of four seemingly disparate characters. This cleverly wrought character study is a virtual human crockpot. But instead of boiling these characters down to their essentials, Feldman adds too much to the mix, leaving us with a puzzling array of actions, motivations, and outcomes.
The play begins and ends with Judith and her boyfriend, Peter, who lies in a hospital bed receiving treatment for cancer. Judith, a stubborn atheist, cannot understand his new affiliation as a born again Christian, so she decides to break up with him. She moves back home to live with her widowed father, Ezra, a rabbi.
Ezra has befriended Amanda, a young girl who wanders into his synagogue one day. A recovering religious fanatic to the extreme (she recites religious texts by heart and once nailed her hand to a board), Amanda is being treated for schizophrenia. She adopts Ezra as a father figure of sorts and discovers that a traumatic event in her past somewhat fatefully links her to Peter, Ezra, and Judith. As Amanda reveals her secret, their lives are changed and they must reposition themselves both in their ideas of faith and their relationships with one another.
What does it cost to believe? How do we define and create faith? Why do we move toward (or away from) religion and notions of faith? How Light is Spent, with its captivating title, asks us to examine how faith works and reworks the lives of its characters. Faith cannot exist in a vacuum, and here we find characters who influence, challenge, bolster, shake and deny each other's faith.
It is also a critique of the believer. Each character accepts or rejects faith for unique reasons, often for what it can bring him or her. As Peter puts it, "If I have cancer, I'll have my reward. If I believe in the cancer, I can believe in God."
Paul Gelinas's set works brilliantly in design but fails in execution. He has framed the stage with a three-sided box of wooden boards, which cover the floor, ceiling, and back wall of the stage. As the show progresses, the upstage planks individually move forward and backward to create different configurations. The design seems to suggest the changing landscape of the characters' beliefs and relationships, but unfortunately the scene changes take so long that they distract from the show's flow.
Alison Cherry's lighting shines beautifully and hauntingly through the cracks between the boards, and an uncredited sound designer provides underscoring throughout the play that creates a cohesive mood
When Berlin fell to the Allied forces in 1945, Heiner Muller's service in the German army ended. He returned to his home, then occupied by the Soviet Army. One war had ended. Another was beginning. Muller was 16 at the time.
Mentored by Bertolt Brecht, Muller eventually established himself as Germany's premier playwright. The success of his translations of classic works as well as his controversial original plays allowed him to travel through Western Europe and even to America during the peak of the Cold War. His love of socialism, fear of capitalism, and hatred for dictatorships led him to write HAMLETmachine in 1986.
Brief though the text may be (12 pages or so, depending on the version), it is nonetheless epic. It has inspired productions that last days at a time. Directors tackling HAMLETmachine have employed the use of towering LCD screens, dozens of actors, and lavish sets in attempts to bring all of the nuances of Muller's dense script to life.
In the face of all the history and the high expectations accompanying HAMLETmachine, director Taibi Ann Magar has attempted something truly ambitious: she has cut away the pomp and pretension that surrounds the play, shifting the focus from the complex political mayhem to the emotional conflict between Hamlet and Ophelia.
The stage design is minimalist in the truest sense of the word. There are no sets, no backdrops, and no props, save for two chairs. Thus it becomes the actors' responsibility to create their own world and bring the audience in with them.
Jessica Pohly does just that as Ophelia. Not only does she deliver her difficult lines clearly but she also devotes herself wholly to the words and the subtext beneath them. This is most notably evident as she seemingly dies onstage during her monologue that begins "I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep." Critic Gordon Rogoff once wrote that the play might be better called OPHELIAmachine. Pohly does all that she can to support Rogoff's thesis, giving Off-Off Broadway a performance to remember.
Evan Lubeck looks the part of the brooding Danish prince, but finds himself overpowered by Pohly. That he occasionally struggles with his lines is forgivable in a piece such as this, but Lubeck's real flaw is a failure to grasp Hamlet's emotional landscape. His Hamlet is a perpetually angry one, with occasional but brief bouts of sadness and confusion (always evoked with the same furrowed brow).
To be sure, Lubeck is not at all a bad actor, nor is his performance intolerable. Though not physically imposing, he uses his tall stature effectively to command attention. His abilities are best used toward the end of the famous "Get thee to a nunnery" scene, as he allows Hamlet's self-disgust and contempt for his mother to come out in his attacks on Ophelia.
The success of good acting, as well as the fault of inconsistent acting, lies with the director. With her lead actor, Magar seems to have made the common mistake of interpreting Hamlet as indecisive; he is far from it. As a result, her Hamlet is unfocused and fails to reach his full potential.
Magar creates very beautiful and tense visual scenes using nothing but two actors, two chairs, and lighting design. Her actors' movements are carefully choreographed, and the mere twitch of a wrist or widening of eyes grabs the audience's attention. However, the actors shift back and forth between naturalistic behavior and Grotowski-esque calculation. They are ultimately limited by Magar's direction, often remaining stoic for aesthetic reasons when the text calls for actions more explosive.
But if Magar fails to understand certain sections of the text, she certainly does not fail to grasp the larger themes that the author expressed. Muller describes his purpose for writing as such:
"What I try to do in my writing is to strengthen the sense of conflicts, to strengthen confrontations and contradictions. There is no other way. I'm not interested in answers and solutions. I don't have any to offer. I'm interested in problems and conflicts."
HAMLETmachine is certainly no exception to this rule, and Magar sets Hamlet and Ophelia onstage to explore all of their conflicts without distraction. No solutions are presented, and none are necessary. The nature of the text is such that it could easily have been misinterpreted and misused (as it sometimes is) as a soapbox for narrow-minded, anti-consumerist propaganda. But Magar refuses to trivialize the world's complex problems by offering answers, making this interpretation of Muller's classic one worth watching.
"I find 'the joy of life' in life's cruel and mighty conflicts," wrote August Strindberg in his preface to Miss Julie. Although published in 1888, the play was banned in many countries for its rejection of melodrama and its adoption of realism, and the frank discussion of sex and servitude broke class and gender-role taboos.
In the play, the title character is the playful and manipulative mistress of the house, who corners one of her father's servants, Jean. What begins as simple flirtation soon unravels into a chaotic mess that explores the dynamics of their relationship to each other and to their families.
Lord Cromer, who banned the play from performance in England, wrote, "There is a sordid and disgusting atmosphere, which makes the immorality of the play glaring and crude." Of course, Miss Julie went on to become an essential part of the modern theatrical canon, the bridge between the mystical, romantic Symbolists of the late 19th century and the kitchen-sink realism that emerged at the beginning of the 20th.
With its production of Julie, the Theatre-Arts Connection has adapted the play for its art installation-cum-performance. The group has taken the realistic dialogue and abstracted it, using a surrealistic tone and design with a text freely adapted from the original. Spliced in are excerpts from works by Sophocles and Shakespeare, along with a tip of the hat to Charles Mee, the master of intertextual weaving. Alongside physical and vocal manifestations of the characters' subconscious drives, the play becomes overwrought, and what could have been an insightful and inventive production gets dragged down by its own overzealousness.
Despite the play's renown for displaying the beginnings of theatrical realism, Strindberg gives the audience numerous clues that the action takes place in a mystical void, outside of time and space. Its setting on Midsummer's Eve, an all-night festival celebrating the summer solstice, involves Dionysian abandon in dancing and drinking.
The master of the house is nowhere to be found, although reminders of his presence, in the form of his newly shined boots and the bell that summons the servants, constantly hang over the characters. The installation design by Liat Hazan and David I.L. Poole and lighting by James Bedell do a marvelous job of setting the tone. White scrims separate the audience and the actors as a dreamlike filter. The house is made of the same scrim, framed with a delicate wood. The scrims indicate the evanescence of the evening and the ease with which the house
La MaMa e.t.c. is presenting the world premiere of Robert Montgomery's A Case of Murder, which is billed as "a singing detective story." A musical murder mystery inspired by Crime and Punishment, the play transplants Dostoyevsky's timeless story to modern-day New York City, to distracting effect. In the process, Montgomery also offers up little more than forgettable music, stock characters, and a story line that is more limp than literary.
A Case of Murder follows the plot of the novel, a meaty book ripe for interpretation. After committing a horrific double murder, a young man lurks in limbo, dreading punishment yet yearning for redemption. This "musical" sidesteps any psychological complexities in favor of stereotypical TV-cop-show protocol. Told from the point of view of the distant, hardboiled (and sometimes drunk) Detective Porfiry (Brian McCormick), the show plays like a lost episode of the short-lived TV series Cop Rock.
Truth be told, this show is all over the map. Everything about it is abrupt. It begins abruptly with each of the eight characters taking to the stage and bursting into song with nary an introduction as to who they are. The murders, so integral they reverberate throughout the story, creating the impetus for everything that happens, are never seen by the audience. The victims are mentioned briefly and are nearly incidental. It's all tell and no show. One character abruptly moves to L.A. because that's what she's always wanted. Other characters abruptly fall in love
Holding up a "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt, Deanna Pacelli, star of the one-woman show There Goes the Neighborhood, looks at it with embarrassment.
"O.K., I bought this in 1996 when it was ironic," she says. "I can't wear it now. I'd look like an [expletive]."
Pacelli is speaking as Peter, a white, thirtysomething architect living in Carroll Gardens. A resident of the neighborhood for more than a decade, the affable Peter is one of the early invaders of what not long ago was a close-knit, working-class Italian neighborhood. He is also one of the 10 characters of varying ages, races, and sexual orientations whom Pacelli inhabits to recount the story of Carroll Gardens's rapid gentrification.
Written by Mari Brown and based on interviews with neighborhood residents that she and Pacelli conducted over a two-year period, There Goes the Neighborhood, playing at P.S. 122 through May 29, weaves together the perspectives of nine residents and one outside observer to create a complex and insightful portrait of the neighborhood. At the same time, it offers 10 dead-on portraits of these people who live and work there. Smart, wickedly funny, compassionate, and insightful, There Goes the Neighborhood is a brilliantly written, brilliantly performed piece.
Pacelli, who carries the entire hour of the play on the strength of her characterizations, switches effortlessly, almost breezily, between characters like Peter; Vinny, a lifetime resident of Carroll Gardens and third-generation owner of Cositini's Pork Shop ("Bringing You the Best Pork in Brooklyn for Over a Hundred Years!"); and Mike, a nightclub owner from Hong Kong with an enthusiasm for the nouveau in culture, music, and art.
For example, moments after making her confession about the "Brooklyn Rocks!" shirt as Peter, Pacelli has pulled a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball cap on her head and is standing with shoulders back and chest puffed out while she booms in Vinny's classic Brooklyn Italian-American dialect, "Hello? Hello? What is this? What is this, 'Brooklyn Rocks'? Who rocks? I'm Brooklyn, do I rock?"
Inhabiting all of her characters with equal poise, Pacelli delineates each one with a few well-chosen mannerisms (adjusting her bra straps, putting on Chapstick, pushing her glasses up her nose), a prop or two, and a handful of linguistic tics.
It helps, of course, that Brown's script gives her pitch-perfect lines to deliver. In an article published in The New York Times in 2003 (There Goes the Neighborhood was first performed in Carroll Gardens in 2003), Brown says that when she began waitressing in a local bar back in 2003, listening to her customers talk was like hearing lines of dialogue.
But even if she owes some of the natural richness of the script to a good ear for conversation, Brown has taken her raw material and arranged and polished it to perfection. The rough and smooth, the bad and good, the complaints and the paeans all fit together to make a deep and compelling portrait.
In fact, the "Brooklyn Rocks!" T-shirt is a fine metaphor for the show. Some of the characters hated it. Some loved it. A lot didn't understand all the fuss--Carroll Gardens, heart of Brooklyn, was their home, whether it rocked or not. There Goes the Neighborhood is a window into that world, and for the space of the play, it's easy to feel as if it's your home too.
Poor Madame Ranevskaya. She is in debt, and the dire state of her affairs leaves her with little option but to auction her estate and its splendid cherry orchard. When presented with alternatives by the wily yet earnest businessman Lopakhin, Ranevskaya is immobile: she simply cannot forsake what took generations to build. In her thinking, to do anything other than wait for a miracle is to comply with the seemingly inevitable change about to consume her family and bring about its demise.
And this is a comedy?
Well, that is debatable. Are we really meant to care much about Ranevskaya? In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov gives us a number of clues as to what he thinks of her. She's wanton. She's gullible. She abandons her daughters to go off and squander their inheritance on her extravagant whims. She has no spine and cannot bear to say no even to the most unreasonable requests. She thinks primarily of herself and her nearly delusional woes.
David Epstein, whose direction I loved in ICTC's recent production of Arcadia, has chosen to direct a show that is a wart revealer of a play. It takes guts. His cast is talented and full of an earnest zeal to feel and express their heady emotions. They are costumed marvelously (with the exception of a few unfortunate handbags) by Michael Bevins and have a lovely and appropriate set on which to play, thanks to Ed McNamee.
But something is off. I have a suspicion as to what it is: Ranevskaya. As played by Cindy Keiter, Ranevskaya's ceaseless crying jags are given a gravitas they do not deserve. And from that core all the other characters seem to crash like sentimental dominoes into each other. There is such pregnancy of thought, such precious period delicacy loose onstage, that the production often feels as if there is something very serious afoot. But with such a hollow heart as Ranevskaya at its core, who can't help feel cheated by emotions that are at best misguided?
Chekhov added two little words to the title of his play. The full title is The Cherry Orchard, A Comedy. What he knew, but very few people have ever listened to, is that Ranevskaya is a silly, obnoxious woman. Chekhov wrote a play about social change, asserting that the maudlin sentimentality of the landed class is nothing more than the childish antics of spoiled brats incapable of sharing, unwilling to cast off their faulty sense of entitlement for a new world order. Epstein occasionally has his cast nearly there, but not quite.
It is difficult to tell actors not to feel or that what they're feeling is wrong and inappropriate. Every modern acting class points to the legitimacy of emotions as the truth behind acting. It is difficult to cut what you love. But look at what Chekhov said about the play's first production, in 1904: "How awful it is! An act that ought to take 12 minutes at most lasts 40 minutes. There is only one thing I can say: Stanislavsky has ruined my play for me." You might recognize the director's name. And yes, some of Chekhov's criticism could be aptly applied to ICTC's production.
His play could be timely, if only the production took a step to make it so. Do we sympathize with the Enron executives who lost the millions they unlawfully gained at the expense of their employees? Do we think it is reprehensible when Kathie Lee Gifford is ridiculed for using child laborers from Third World countries while her son Cody tromps around redefining "spoiled"? Do we all nod our heads in assent when President Bush tells us how much he sympathizes with the poor single moms of America? Of course not. This is the same point behind The Cherry Orchard.
That said, I love this company. They have a voice, they have style, and they love what they do. The pitch-perfect near miss of a proposal scene between Varya (Beth White) and Lopakhin (Gerry Lehane) is both delightful and painful. It alone is worth admission. White's Varya is well calibrated, dancing the difficult line between absurdity and genuine emotion with grace and ease. Varya is arguably the only character punished with a fate she does not deserve, and White does her justice, then swiftly moves on. Lehane's Lopakhin is a worthy and conflicted counterpart.
Indeed, ICTC is a company worth getting to know, even if this production lacks clarity of purpose.
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