Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
Many periods of history have become associated in the popular imagination with a single genre of theater. For example, the medieval mystery plays, Jacobean revenge tragedy, the closet verse-drama of the Romantic era, the great naturalistic classics of the late 19th century, and the experimental plays of early Modernism. Perhaps no era, though, has been as pigeonholed as the Restoration
Theater experiences shifts and trends. During the 1940's and 50's, it seemed every musical had either a cruise ship or a wagon in it. The 1980's brought some brilliant but mostly clich
Marriage, at least as it is presented in Soul Searching, a new rock opera running in workshop at Theater for a New City, is a mixed bag. In "Married," one of the opening numbers, Brenda, the show's single protagonist, asks her friends, "What's it like to be married?" The responses? "All my dreams have come true / I wouldn't wish it on you." It's not exactly a ringing endorsement, but in Soul Searching it is what being married is all about. Marriage isn't necessarily happy, but happiness lies in marriage. Soul Searching, running through Oct. 2, tells the story of Brenda, a contemporary Jewish woman in New York searching for a man of faith and substance. She's looking for someone, she sings, "charming and sweet and spiritually deep." As the program notes put it, "Although she wants to share her life with someone, she also wants to share her life with an accepting community of people."
Brenda's trials unfold Friends-style as she and her girlfriends sit and gab over coffee. Her married friends Rachel, Becky, and Sara want her to find someone, and set her up with three versions of their husbands
Ever laughed at an eggplant? Prepare to start. Back from a sold-out engagement at last year's Fringe Festival, Negin Farsad presents her smart comic riff on Islamic culture in her one-woman show Bootleg Islam at the Tank. There are only two performances remaining, so make a date to get there and see this boldly engaging show. And trust me, she can and will make you laugh at that eggplant. Farsad has been compared to Janeane Garofalo for the sharpness of her humor, and while she is similarly blunt and incendiary, Farsad creates a style all her own. Part standup comedy, part "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" presentation (complete with PowerPoint projections), Bootleg Islam is Farsad's triumphant account of her experience straddling a cultural divide.
Farsad was raised in Palm Springs, Calif., and her experience with Iranian relatives first consisted of only brief, sporadic visits to Iran, in which she smuggled illegal American pop CDs to her cousins. In 1999, however, as a 23-year-old, more-experienced American woman, Farsad visited Iran for one month for her cousin Mahsa's wedding. It is this visit that she recounts here, complete with vibrant characters and events as well as Farsad's expanding consciousness of cultural dissonance and its ramifications.
Bootleg Islam is at its most poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny, in the parallels Farsad draws between her life and Mahsa's. They are the same age, but have been raised in completely different cultures. Farsad compares their life paths in "30-second well-crafted montages," complete with a "V-Loss Chart" (the "V" is for virginity) for each woman. Within these montages, Farsad notes the cultural differences in such areas as mobility (Farsad has lived in three countries, while Mahsa has moved around the same small part of town all her life) and sexual proclivity (Farsad engages in a vibrant sex life, while Mahsa must save herself until marriage).
As much as Farsad works to criticize Iranian culture, she is self-critical and a bit defensive as well: "If she knew the truth about me, she would consider me a total Iranian-slut-whore-hooker-prostitute. In New York, they call that a Friendster."
Farsad also adroitly juggles cultural references, embodying characters ranging from her "closeted-yet-overtly-gay-wedding-planner cousin" Amir to her Clark Gable-look-alike uncle. Particularly hilarious is an account of three old women talking at the wedding in the manner of The Golden Girls.
The eggplant
Much has already been said about the fast pace and short attention spans that define our modern culture. Gone are the days of Greek dramatic festivals and Noh theater, when a captivated audience would watch plays for hours on end. Even the works of Shakespeare are being edited for time, not out of sympathy for actors who would have to memorize large amounts of dialogue but out of consideration for the modern theatergoer. Against this trend, the Orphanage is presenting Anathemaville, the three-act love child of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and the best-selling Sam Walton: Made in America. With a running time of four hours (including two intermissions), Scott Venters's drama is bigger, nastier, and more politically charged than Wilder's play, but nowhere near as relevant.
The evening begins with narrator Leo Jones talking about some of the troubled denizens of this town, who all work at (and are controlled by) a fearsome one-stop-shopping mecca called UberMart. Bernard White models his conduct after the strict UberMart manual, in hopes of advancing through the ranks. David Thompson has abandoned his classics studies at college for a dead-end retail job and a twisted sexual relationship with his half-sister, the alcoholic and vitriolic Kathleen Thompson.
Warren Steuss is a suicidal closet case who secretly pines for David when not being repulsed by the affections of Verda Williams, who speaks in an unintelligible rasp due to a tongue of circus-freak proportions. Verda is so enraptured by Warren that she doesn't realize the enemy she has in Sir Galahad (aka BJ), a devotee of role-playing games who's completely surrendered to the reality of his gaming character and who sees Verda as a fierce beast in dire need of slaying. Overseeing the crew is Bob Robertson, the morbidly obese manager who loves Hostess Sno Balls and his truck Maggie.
These characters are joined in Act 2 by Carol Kennicott, the daughter of one of the chain store's founders and a revolutionary-in-training. Through her misguided manipulations, she awakens the emotionally dormant David and turns him, too, against UberMart. Their dreams of a coup, like their lives and those of their co-workers, soon unravel, and we follow the deceased David as he travels back from the afterlife to Anathemaville, trying to figure out the meaning of it all.
So why does this play come across as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Perhaps Venters should have looked more closely to his original source. Though Grovers Corners is full of characters, there is a focus on the immediate families of Our Town's two young lovers, George and Emily. That focus then tightens on the couple in Act 2 and on Emily in Act 3. In the town of Anathemaville, however, all ten main characters are given their own elaborate story arcs, and the duo that we're supposed to care about (David and Carol) do not actually meet until the middle of the second act.
Still, kudos must be given to the actors in this production, who have thrown themselves into their roles and admirably tackled hundreds of pages of dialogue. John Ivy, in particular, is immensely enjoyable as the scene-stealing Sir Galahad, investing equal measures of goofiness and gravity into his portrayal of what could have been an irritating one-joke character.
In a world where the Bard's plays are often restricted to 120 minutes, writing a show that clocks in at twice that length smacks of self-indulgence. And if Venters's main intention is to be heard, he makes it tough when the message is this long and unclear.
Welcome to reality theater
Oscar Wilde's plays crackle with witty prose, delightful double entendres, and insightful observations about society and its classes. With his trademark pithy abandon, Wilde elevated satire to new levels, proving himself a formidable talent. His plays are an embarrassment of riches full of robust characters and delicious situations. Yet Jambalaya Productions' leaden rendition of An Ideal Husband, despite its sumptuous plot of blackmail, political corruption, and romantic intrigue, never gets off the ground. The play follows the romantic and political entanglements of the esteemed Sir Robert Chiltern (Christian Kohn); his beloved wife, Lady Chiltern (Christina Apathy); their trusted friend, Lord Goring (Trevor St. John); and the woman who stands to bring them all down, the conniving Mrs. Cheveley (Carolyn Demerice).
Mrs. Cheveley, Lady Chiltern's former rival and Lord Goring's ex-lover, arrives intent on blackmailing Sir Chiltern into using his political clout to make her a rich woman. As Mrs. Cheveley threatens to divulge information about Sir Chiltern's unethical past dealings, his secrets come to light, jeopardizing his political aspirations and social standing. Worse still is the threat to his marriage as Lady Chiltern soon realizes her "ideal" husband is flawed. When Lord Goring and Lady Chiltern team up to bring Mrs. Cheveley down, misunderstandings and a classic comedy of manners ensue.
Wilde's biting script is rendered toothless under Robert Francis Perillo's pedestrian direction. Long stretches pass where nothing happens as characters talk while confined to their seats. Wilde's words beg for more, but to no avail, as possibilities for richness and humor are squandered. Perillo flounders, mistaking satire for drama and failing his actors as they struggle to grasp Wilde's sharp repartee.
Demerice gives an energetic but off the mark performance as Mrs. Cheveley, one of the great female antagonists in the theatrical canon. Demerice settles for superficial choices (a seductive glance, a raised eyebrow), making her Mrs. Cheveley nothing more than a one-note villain.
Kohn gives an unsteady performance as Sir Robert Chiltern. His uneven take on the character alternates between bland respectability and hysterical buffoonery. As his wife, the steadfast Lady Chiltern, Apathy never settles into her role, opting for false emotion and dry tears.
There are exceptions. Lian Marie-Holmes is charmingly irreverent as Sir Chiltern's younger sister, Mabel Chiltern. She clearly understands the subtle humor of Wilde's text, scoring many laughs and even creating a believable chemistry with St. John's boorish Lord Goring.
The saving grace of An Ideal Husband is the blithe Lynne McCollough. She is an absolute joy as eccentric society doyenne Lady Markby, breathing desperately needed energy into this lifeless production. The stage comes to life each time McCollough's Lady Markby graces it; she forces the other actors to meet her head-on, raising the bar of accepted mediocrity.
Despite her performance, a great play is lost in Jambalaya Productions' clumsy rendering. With its limp direction and anemic acting, this Ideal Husband deserves a speedy annulment.
The characters who populate Saturday Players' new comedy, Finding Pedro, are pulled from the various strata of society with what seems like a deliberately egalitarian eye. In a single play, indeed at a single party
The Eisteddfod accomplishes a rare feat: it leaves the audience with something to talk about long after they have left the theater. A tightly directed, two-person character study, the play combines psychological drama with dark humor, and in the process it serves up a fascinating, hourlong head trip where everything is as it seems, yet nothing is as it appears. Set within a suffocating room somewhere in Australia, The Eisteddfod tells the story of two emotionally splintered siblings, Abalone and Gerture, as they prepare to compete in the local eisteddfod (a Welsh word, which somehow found its way into the Australian lexicon, meaning "talent show"). Rehearsing scenes from Macbeth, they create and recreate scenes from their own lives. As the eisteddfod draws nearer, Abalone and Gerture confront their murky past, narrow present, and inescapable future, ever mindful of their absent parents and former lovers.
Playwright Lally Katz has created a hall of mirrors: her characters and their story reflect on themselves, distorting both reality and imagination. She also has devised an intriguing puzzle. Her play juxtaposes scenes of infectious comedy with those of disturbing depravity, then blurs the line between reality and fantasy. She makes Abalone and Gerture's rendering of Macbeth a truly awful spectacle, complete with bad Scottish accents. Yet within these very funny scenes Katz injects moments of dark reality as Gerture's insecurities manifest themselves in a past relationship with a sadistic beau, played by her brother.
Luke Mullins and Jessamy Dyer, who have been with this project since its inception in Australia, create finely detailed portraits as they bring Abalone and Gerture to vivid life. Mullins gives a measured and controlled performance as the manipulative Abalone. The more desperate he becomes for his sister's attentions, the more compelling Mullins becomes in his choices. He inhabits his character with a beguiling charm that is eccentric and, within the confines of the story, disturbing.
Jessamy Dyer gives a raw performance of overwhelming spontaneity as Gerture. She imbues her character with a haunting fragility that evokes empathy but never pity. Desperate for love, Gerture clings to scraps of it like a drowning woman caught in a whirlpool.
Director Chris Kohn confines the action to an 8-by-10-foot platform, forcing both characters to remain trapped physically, much the same way they are emotionally. It's a bold choice, one that keeps the action focused while creating an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension. Richard Varbe's claustrophobic light design produces an unsettling atmosphere of anxiety and dread, helping Kohn and Katz to realize their vision.
The Eisteddfod triumphs in its own ambiguity. As reality and fantasy converge, Abalone and Gerture are left to navigate the inevitable uncertainty of their future, while the audience must piece together the clues they have left behind.
Written primarily as a rebuttal to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House but also as a critique of the flaws in feminist thought, August Strindberg's Miss Julie is a radical piece of drama that plays out the war of the sexes between an upper-class mistress and her valet while also managing to deride religion and high society. Despite its deep-rooted and highly controversial social commentary, the play is, at heart, about the ill-fated midsummer's night affair between the two lovers. Regarding Julie and Jean, Strindberg wrote: "Because they are modern characters living in a period of transition more feverishly hysterical...I have drawn my figures vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of old and new. My souls [characters] are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul."
In Th
"Uh, Breaker One-Nine, this here's the Rubber Duck. You got a copy on me, Pig-Pen? C'mon." With those words began C.W. McCall's "Convoy," one of the more successful novelty songs by a one-hit wonder to top the charts. McCall was actually a pseudonym for William Dale Fries, a Midwestern ad man who faked a conversation about traffic peril at the height of the citizens band (CB) radio craze. The song gave birth to the 1978 Sam Peckinpah film and now is reincarnated in the form of Lady Convoy, BRATPAK Productions' entry into this year's New York International Fringe Festival.
Given that the song itself is only about two minutes long, the plot of both the film and the play is rather slight. A tough-talkin' lady trucker (Kelly Rauch) known by her CB handle, Rubber Duck, picks up a hitchhiker (Gene Gallerano). It doesn't take long before she and her trucker friend Love Machine (Lucy Smith) find themselves fleeing the law, embodied by a corrupt sheriff and a governor with a secret. Soon enough, Rubber Duck becomes a renegade folk hero on the CB circuit.
Admittedly, the joy of this Lady is not what it's about; it's how it goes about it. BRATPAK mined theatrical gold earlier this season with its adaptation of the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, and it now manages to find humor from an even more obscure source. Robert Ross Parker's direction keeps the ball rolling, which is also a testament to the lack of filler in Ken Gallo's script. The show pulls the audience in and does not let go for 75 minutes.
The amazing thing is what great characters Parker's ensemble manages to create from such a thin blueprint. Smith is an absolute hoot as Love Machine, a volcano of energy waiting to erupt, but also a character full of love. Brad Thomason, as Sheriff Lyle McGee, Rubber Duck's main nemesis, delivers a devilish turn, abetted nicely by Sam Schamberg as his deputy, who steals every scene in which he appears with his subtle facial tics and tongue-in-cheek responses to Thomason. And Sean Doran proves highly amusing playing several different characters, including a reporter and one example of the many men whom Rubber Duck loves and leaves.
But Lady rests on the impressively buff shoulders of its star, and it begs a question: Is there anything Rauch can't do? Her cocky, earthy Rubber Duck is a stark contrast to her performance as Claire in The Breakfast Club, a proper, popular girl in high school who's a wholly insecure mess. In both shows, Rauch emerges as a master of physical comedy and broadly expressive facial gestures (her slow burn is so dead-on it rivals Kelsey Grammer's on Frasier).
And while Rauch effortlessly commands the stage, she seems unafraid to share it with co-stars Gallerano and Smith and is quite generous in her scenes with them. She suggests this generation's answer to the similarly versatile Julianne Moore, though if Rauch were to pursue a film career, she would leave a large void in the downtown theater scene.
Lady faced quite a few hurdles in finding its way to the stage. Based on a film that relied largely on desert location shoots and inspired by an old country-western song that few remember, it lacks the built-in audience base that so many other shows at the Fringe rely on. Instead, it earns its audience the old-fashioned way, through solid writing and performances. In other words, the kind of traditional values that would make Rubber Duck proud.
Guess what? If you fill an audience with middle-aged New York International Fringe Festival theatergoers and perform a vaudeville show that openly lambastes the state of American politics under the Bush administration, you'll get quite a few sympathetic laughs. Uncle Sam's Satiric Spectacular: On Democracy and Other Fictions Featuring Patriotism Acts and Blue Songs From a Red State is a grab bag of skits and songs as grossly obvious as its name. What's more, the promise of satire is unevenly delivered: the acts range from the formulaically feminist ("Quick Change") to the ridiculously emotional ("Ballad of Johnny Cuba") to the downright absurd ("X, a Cute Knife Throwing Sensation"). True to form, the production is rife with sight gags and witticisms, but as a whole it lacks a coherent perspective that would make its mere societal complaints seem like social protest.
Uncle Sam's begins well enough with a promising ensemble song, "American Way," that giddily bemoans the exportation of "democracy" in the form of reality-TV shows and grande chai lattes. Uncle Sam (Ian Frank), the show's uncharismatic master of ceremonies, ushers us from one skit to the next with jokes that fail to hit their mark. He's confusingly unaware that the show is being performed in the present day and has to be told that the stars he is introducing are all dead.
As a conceit, having a time-warped Uncle Sam as an M.C. is all well and good, until the show itself begins to unravel because the "management" is unhappy with the acts' liberal-minded tone. Uncle Sam is fired midshow, and yet the acts, including one against vegan hypocrisy and another for gay marriage, continue. One trait that separates vaudeville actors from traditional theater actors is their acknowledgment of the form in which they're performing. In vaudeville, which gave rise to the variety show and arguably to stand-up and improv comedy, there is almost never a fourth wall.
And yet during the course of this show the demarcation between vaudeville-style acting and traditional acting becomes increasingly unclear. Uncle Sam, for instance, never drops character, but many of the performers
"If life ended tomorrow, I'd still have my memories and dreams," says Alex Law, a flashy Puerto Rican poet who has resided on Avenue B since the 70's. He is the guest speaker for a series of plays at the Metropolitan Playhouse known as Alphabet City, a unique and ambitious endeavor by the theater's artistic director, Michael Bloom. Bloom sent his actors out to Avenues A, B, and C in the East Village on a mission to find the characters that define this quirky section of Manhattan. The actors were then instructed to observe and take notes on their chosen character's story and transform it into a monologue. Alphabet City III focuses solely on those who reside on Avenue B.
The setting is sparse: wooden crates and planks make up the stage, while a noise resembling that of a dripping water pipe provides the only sound effect. The theater is small for intimacy purposes, and the actors take advantage of this by frequently jumping into the audience and speaking to them directly.
At times this approach brings you closer to the story by creating the illusion that you are chatting with the character over coffee. Other times it is uncomfortable to have someone leap off the stage, lock eyes, and speak directly to you in a forceful tone. The balance is a precarious one. English Photographer (Tod Mason) affably converses with the audience, whereas a tightly wound Care Provider (Mario Quesada) comes too close for comfort, screaming questions in your face with such intensity, you uneasily wonder if you should answer.
Deborah Johnstone gives an absorbing performance as a Parisian man named Billy Lyles, who notes the erosion of camaraderie on the avenue. He speaks of a time when residents talked on the streets, picked up tabs at diners, and enjoyed the thriving art scene as a group. Over the years he has watched hip jazz clubs descend into moneymaking machines that want you to buy a drink or get out. He sits on the street trying to connect with his neighbors, sadly resigning himself to accept that times have changed and people don't talk anymore.
Regardless of whether a particular character is worthy of focus, most of the actors are talented enough to carry their stories with wit and charm. There are problems, however, with the clarity of Quesada's monologue that his energetic and impassioned performance cannot overcome. It is never entirely clear which, and how many, characters he is playing at a given time. This is disappointing, because Quesada has several great lines and touching points to make. The problem is that you do not know which person he is playing when he makes them.
Though this production has some wrinkles that need to be ironed out, the Alphabet City series on a whole should be commended for the bold steps it takes in trying something different. The East Village has a rich history, and this play proves how easy it is to pull someone off one of its street corners and find a story fit for a theatrical monologue.
Since these actors have nothing to work with other than a blank stage and a spotlight, they are forced to capture the intricacies of the person they are portraying, down to every twitch, cough, and stutter. It's a difficult feat to accomplish, and during the play's run the actors, themes, and monologues regularly change, so there may be times when the actors fall short of delivering pitch-perfect performances. But even then it's worth the price of admission to watch someone try to fully inhabit the mind, body, and spirit of a stranger he just met on the streets of Alphabet City.
Despite Axis Company's insistence that each of the four installments of its serial play Hospital 2005 is self-contained, the three short plays that make up the third episode are manifestly uneasy bedfellows. The umbrella conceit of the evening is flexible enough to be intriguing: having fallen victim to an avian flu pandemic sweeping in from the Far East, one lonely, anonymous man (roles are not attributed) slips into a terminal coma and spends the last few days of his existence wandering the troubled back alleys of his own mind. The problem is that, as the play wears on, these back alleys start to feel ever more disturbingly like little more than run-of-the mill tangents. The piece begins promisingly enough: a slickly professional short film projected onto a large screen at the rear of a blank stage chronicles the man's last day or so before his collapse. We begin with his morning ablutions, then follow him to his day job, where a persistent and worsening cough irks his co-workers, and then back to his home, where his rapidly deteriorating condition forces a repairman to call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Finally, as he slides into the coma, we watch his ghostly form step out of his body and see the hospital gown-clad actor physically enter the stage. What the man steps into, however, is the issue.
Of the three sections, the first is the most relevant to the man's recently changed circumstances. As he takes stock of his strange, new surroundings, a small gaggle of barefoot people dressed all in white enter from stage right
What do you get when you mix crooked cops and sequin-gowned transvestites with conservative politicians and an upcoming presidential election? The answer is Go-Go Kitty, GO!, a delightfully wacky gender-bender musical playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. When a beloved drag queen named Po-Po is involved in a suspiciously timed car crash minutes after fleeing from the stage of the Club Fuzzy Gimbal's Twist-o-Rama, her two friends Wanda (Kim Ders) and Sugar (Erin Quinn Purcell) vow to avenge her death. Wanda and Sugar are not your usual heroines. Dressed in leather shorts, high-heeled go-go boots, and beaded bra tops, they call themselves the Go-Go Kitties. They ride motorcycles, swagger into bars, dance at the club, and break more than a few hearts and bones while doing so.
But beneath their tough leather exteriors are two loyal friends who will stop at nothing to find out what happened to Po-Po, even if it means risking their own lives. They know that the conservative senator of Washingtonville who hopes to run for president, Thomas Patrick McDonald (Vin Knight), is somehow involved in the murder, especially since he mysteriously faints at the mention of Po-Po's name. Unfortunately for the Kitties, McDonald's top presidential aide, shifty-eyed Dick (Marc Aden Gray), will go to great lengths to protect his boss's reputation.
The story is told through a series of playfully loony scenes leading up to a moment of truth where McDonald must come to terms with his role in Po-Po's accident. In the meantime, the Kitties save the life of an old man at a gas station after a flirtatious glance from Sugar gives him a heart attack. They also expand the horizons of McDonald's preppie teenage daughter, Peggy (Nicole Fonarow), at Busty Bronco's Roadhouse, where she has her first encounter with casual sex and hallucinatory drugs.
Each set is elaborately constructed with clever cardboard props that inspire fresh rounds of laughter when presented. To add to the set's uniqueness, Go-Go Kitty, Go! provides authentic smashing noises every time a cardboard wine bottle or a bottle of Jack Daniel's is thrown to the floor. Sound effects punctuate much of the play's comic scenes, such as when the Kitties fight the bad guys kung-fu style and drums emphasize the force of their kicks and punches.
Yet there are some deep truths and touching lines beneath the layers of satire. At Busty Bronco's Roadhouse, Peggy McDonald discovers she has a desire for self-expression that her restrictive environment has shamed her from indulging in. Her father the senator also looks deep within himself to find out who he is, as opposed to what his political advisers want him to be. What he finds is a surprise too precious to reveal.
Purcell and Ders have a wonderful chemistry as Sugar and Wanda, respectively. You sense that they share a history, having had other adventures before, and there will be many more to come. Gray gives a fine performance as Dick, who is intent on upholding morals though he scarcely hides the fact that he has none himself.
He plays well off Knight, who is instantly likable as the puny presidential nominee pulled in every direction by his family and political team. When McDonald's aides attempt to toughen his public image by sending him to the podium in a camouflage coat and boxing gloves, his expression is so riddled with terror that you don't blame his opponent, President Schwartzenberger, for calling him a "girlie man."
There is something contagious about this play's energy, which had the audience consistently clapping and howling at the songs, jokes, and political jabs. The story has a great climax, with a twist ending you will not see coming. Go-Go Kitty, GO! provides a much-needed release from today's grim headlines. The play allows us to transcend reality for just a little while, with the promise that in its world you are guaranteed a happy ending.
Toby makes the prospect of being a stereotypical out-of-work New York actor kind of O.K. It's an ingenious play about two old friends, both named Toby, who find themselves in a never-ending production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot that is being financed by a wealthy and conspicuously absent producer. "You'd think the backwoods of Vermont would have gotten its fill of Waiting for Godot after four months," complains the short, round, angry Toby Donally. "But no. We're still ticking." To which the taller, lankier, mellower Toby McDonell replies, "Maybe they just appreciate good theater up here."
McDonell's optimism could hardly be farther from the truth. The audience, never robust and fewer than 10 a night, has begun to trickle in, and both Tobys wonder when this gig will end its run.
Though not strictly existentialist, the premise is a comically bleak one that seems to have no end in sight. When seven Alzheimer's patients attend a matinee, two of them fall asleep, and one has the gall to die during Donally's monologue. "Seven audience members come in," he gripes. "Six leave. That's got to be some kind of record or something."
Playwright Anthony P. Pennino has a knack for dialogue that does not seem forced, even though the situation borders on the absurd. We believe that the Tobys, who have been friends since they met during "orientation week [their] freshman year at college," find women to sleep with by systematically making their way through the town's small phone book.
Timothy J. Cox and Phillip Bettencourt play off each other with ease and grace, and at their best moments they remind us of the tag-team duos
Everyone knows vampires are sexy. From Byron to Buffy, vampires have been the glamorous provocateurs of our imaginations' underbellies: lithe and wan and languorous after their catnap with mortality, they always strike a cool, devil-may-care attitude amidst their bloodthirsty lusts. Dance With Me, Harker proves that the undead know how to get down and dance, too. While remaining faithful to Bram Stoker's classic, writer and director Eileen Connolly has entirely revamped Dracula into a multimedia extravaganza that emphasizes the sultry "vamp" in "vampires." The show proceeds by way of a sampler platter of camp theatrical forms: it is by turns fashion show, ballet, striptease, opera, drug-induced fantasia, puppet theater, school lesson, mockumentary, ballroom dancing, oversized chess game, booming discotheque, hypnosis-by-swirling-umbrella, and poetry both high and low.
As if all of this weren't enough, there is also plenty of the requisite necking and sucking. In fact, the opening sequence begins with an entirely naked woman writhing sensually, her back to the audience. She is loosely wrapped from the waist down in translucent plastic. Off to the side, a senile nun sits crocheting a long, red scarf while she mumbles the rosary.
A video projection of a scientist comes on to remind us of the facts we must remember when dealing with nosferatu
First off, let's get one thing straight: If you're going to tell the story of your life, you better remember your lines. Unfortunately, Kimberlee Auerbach had to call for her lines not once but three times during the performance of her one-woman show, Tarot Reading: Love, Sex, and Mommy, that I attended, where next to me sat a prompter wielding a flashlight and a script. Tarot Reading is ostensibly the tale of a 32-year-old woman's struggles to find an empowered sense of self- and sexual enlightenment in the face of her family's eccentric and often excessive demands. There is even a "lesson" at the end: After recounting the myriad tribulations of junior high, three failed relationships, and two near-death experiences, Auerbach concludes, "I know myself, and everything's going to be OK."
In reality, however, the show only convinces us that its protagonist has a painful lack of self-awareness. When the tarot card reader, projected onto a video screen behind her, tells Auerbach that she will not be playing with a full deck, there seems to be little recognition of what this may imply.
At another moment in the piece, Auerbach replays her 15 seconds of fame as a teen model in a commercial for Le Clic, an instant camera produced by a company her father ran. In another segment, her mother, projected onto the screen in all her botoxed glory, hisses that she turned down a scholarship from the Yale School of Drama. The privileged Auerbach appears entirely consumed in a culture that consumes, locked in schlock, unable to gain any critical distance between her self and the insecurities she might have parodied.
All of her problems have readymade solutions. When she gets crabs from a one-night stand, she simply goes to the pharmacist; when she catches a mysterious numbness from a flu shot, she visits the doctor and her ailment goes away. This, along with a few humdrum relationships, is what ignites Auerbach's epiphany about how she will overcome life's adversities. My friend quipped when we left the theater, "Worse things have happened to me
Offensive. Appalling. Dirty. Vulgar. Inappropriate. Obscene. The Banger's Flopera: A Musical Perversion embodies all those qualities and one more: brilliant. The brainchild of Inverse Theater Artistic Director Kirk Wood Bromley, with exhilarating music by John Gideon, The Banger's Flopera is playing at the Village Theatre as part of the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival. It is not to be missed. Flopera updates John Gay's 18th-century play The Beggar's Opera to perversely dizzying heights. The beggars, hookers, and crooks of the 18th century are replaced with modern-day pimps, gangsters, porn stars, and pop stars. The story revolves around the infamous Mac "Macky" the Knife, here a pornographer and gangster, and his band of degenerate, sexually ambiguous misfits. As Mac cheats, steals, and murders his way to death row, he falls in lust with the pure, pubescent Polly Peacock. Their twisted Romeo and Juliet story mirrors society's obsession with a corrupt culture and government.
Nothing is sacred as playwright and lyricist Kirk Wood Bromley pushes the envelope, lights it on fire, and then throws gasoline on it. Bromley is a master of language, stringing together his words into a poetic menagerie of double entendres, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. His world is so bizarre it defies reason, and it breaks all the rules of conventional musical theater. The story's heroine, Polly, sings a beautiful, yearning ballad while seated on a toilet, and the toilet later serves as a conduit for a love song between Polly and Mac.
The music is transcendent. John Gideon's exceptional, 16-song score includes rap, rock, torch songs, power ballads, and traditional Broadway fare with a demented twist. The obligatory group dance number is a lasciviously naughty anthem about the depraved joys of porn (as performed by a group of adult movie stars), while the finale climaxes (literally) against the backdrop of an execution. The music is brought to vivid life by Nate Brown, Taylor Price, Brad Gunyon, and Gideon himself.
The gifted cast of 17 operates as if they were a single unit. Everyone stands out and works with such conviction and passion, the audience quickly realizes it is witnessing the birth of something special. Joe Pindelski as Mac gives a star-making performance, and the two-hour-plus show lives and breathes off his every move. His voice is part leading man, part monster rock balladeer, and entirely inspiring. April Vidal as Polly transforms herself from precocious pop tart to naughty nymphet in the blink of an eye. Her precise comedic timing is matched only by her gorgeous, "my God can she sing" voice.
Dan Renkin and Anni Bruno tear up the stage as Polly's protective parents, Jonathan and Mimi. On a mission to save their virginal daughter from Macky's defiling deflowering, Renkin and Bruno play their stereotypical "Mom" and "Dad" roles with an over-the-top abandon that's a giddy delight.
Catherine McNelis as porn star Loosy Brown manages to make you laugh and breaks your heart even as she never loses her skanky core. John McConnel, Lydia Burns, and Randall Middleton generate countless laughs as Mac's band of malevolent misfits.
Ben Yalom directs this revelation with fiendish delight. He never loses sight of the story or its dark message, effectively directing the cast of 17 to intelligent, polished performances. The inspired set by Jane Stein captures Bromley's depraved world perfectly, proving itself to be versatile and efficient as each of the three weathered, metallic set pieces creates more than a dozen different settings. Karen Flood's costumes are a spark of creative genius, particularly her anatomically correct porn-star attire.
While the second act is slightly disjointed and perhaps a few minutes too long (particularly the 11th-hour political diatribe), The Banger's Flopera is a celebrated journey of epic proportions. It leaves one feeling exhausted, excited, and wanting even more.
Some critics do everything in their power to craft a review from which no one can pull a quote for marketing purposes. Others, though they may not admit it, yearn to see their name emblazoned under an exclamatory phrase on a city bus or in a theater company's season brochure. I have been neither of these thus far in my reviewing career, but be forewarned. The following review of Soir
