Lost on the Levee

The title may be the most engaging thing about Mark Sam Rosenthal’s exploration of Tennessee Williams’s greatest creation negotiating the aftermath of the 2005 storm. Blanche DuBois finds herself disheveled and in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. But her experience seems refracted through that of author Rosenthal, as the play begins with him wandering through the debris, putting on yellow gloves and a filter mask to start cleaning up. Amid the muddy debris of the hurricane (Kevin Tighe’s willy-nilly piles of artifacts include an ornate portrait frame, a child’s bicycle, a blue rubber dildo, and Carnival beads), he discovers a pale green, pristine valise. When he opens it, a bright red, surreal light shines out. Inside he finds a blond wig and tiara; when he dons the wig, he becomes Blanche, riffing on her adventures with Stanley and Stella before the hurricane, in the Superdome, and with a FEMA roommate named Chandria d’Africa who is separated from her boyfriend Tyrece. The solo show becomes a dramatic stream-of-consciousness effort that not everyone may follow as Blanche encounters an assortment of characters and experiments with crack (and indulges in alcohol).

Blanche Survives Katrina… isn’t a drag show, though it reeks of camp. Rosenthal doesn’t trying to disguise his masculinity (at one point, his bare, hairy chest is covered only by a ragged shawl). The script is merely a meditation on the character in different circumstances, and one may surmise that Blanche embodies poor New Orleans itself.

Although Rosenthal's Blanche borrows phrases from Williams's heroine ("It just buzzes right through me," she says of the booze), the language here is determinedly high-falutin’. In an imaginary encounter with Jean Lafitte, for instance, she remonstrates, “No! Unhand me, you rascal pirate! I warn you, my sisters will track you down—and you shall have the wrath of the archdiocese upon you if so much as one blonde hair upon my head is harmed! Yes, you will steer your masted schooner through the murky waters of the bay at Barataria, you will secret me to your lair where you and your merry band of brigands intend to perpetrate all manner of mischief on me! And you think that I’ll enjoy these degradations because you’ve heard stories but I won’t because they are not true.”

A little of that goes a long way, but there’s no crude, brawny Stanley Kowalski to offset the feyness and flightiness—and his impatience with her in A Streetcar Named Desire very quickly becomes understandable. Anyone who attends Rosenthal's sequel may well decide that Stanley had every right to put Blanche away.

In Rosenthal’s script, Blanche has been released from the asylum, to which Stanley committed her, in order to seek shelter from the storm. She returned to their home to ride it out, and while she clung to the top of the stove, “They died. Drowned ... there in that house on Elysian Fields,” she says. After Katrina, Blanche has encounters with various characters, as well as drugs and alcohol. Surrounded by black refugees in the Superdome, she muses, “In a pot full of café, I seem to be one of the few drops of au lait!”

Later she acquires Chandria d’Africa as her FEMA roommate. The scenes with Chandria are played in a strange, dreadlocked blond wig that Blanche finds in a second green valise—the how and why of these spotless valises are points left unanswered—and puts on. The wig suggests the look of Chandria d’Africa, but Rosenthal isn’t Chandria. He’s always Blanche, and yet it's not a wig Blanche would ever wear. Director Todd Parmley hasn't helped clarify such confusing moments. Later, Blanche is transported to a new life in Phoenix, where she is aided by Christ the Avenger Church (one of the few really funny gags) and serves fried chicken at a fast-food restaurant.

If Rosenthal has a point to all this, other than an extended riff on the character, it’s not clear. It may be that Blanche embodies New Orleans, the elegant lady brought low, struggling against the ravages of the storm, scrambling just to survive and doing things no one should have to do. But Parmley invests no tension in the piece, no urgency about what happens next to her. It just plays out as a rambling streetcar heading nowhere.

Someone Give Me Some Rotten Fruit to Throw

Is theater dead? Stolen Chair's latest production, Theatre is Dead and So Are You thinks so. And if it is not, then the show does its best to give the knife one final twist. Designed to be an “irreverent funeral for the stage,” the play is a eulogy for the deceased emcee, Leonard J. Sharpe, of a vaudeville troupe. The troupe performs monologues, sketches, and songs, all focused on death. The point of the show seems to be clear—it's about death—but what never becomes clear is why the performance feels the need to exist in the first place. The introduction to Theatre is Dead is long and slow. The stage is littered with theatrical debris—a drill, a curtain, a sawhorse. One performer enters and slowly removes the articles from the stage, one by one, while the audience watches, some laughing nervously, some impatiently awaiting the start of some action. Then a coffin is wheeled onstage and a woman, Hazel, enters, and opening the lid, wails. She closes the lid. Then opens it again and once again, wails. And then repeats the actions, until she finally takes flowers out from her skirt and begins littering the stage and coffin with them. Finally, other performers begin climbing out of the coffin, which is a neat trick, and it looks like the actual show is ready to begin.

Except that it doesn't. What instead occurs is more introduction—who the performers are, who is in the coffin, and the all important question: how did theater die? Instead of answering the question, the performer decides to question why the audience is at the show. After all, don't we have something better and cheaper to be doing? At this point, the audience most likely is wondering why they sacrificed their evening to see the show, but since not much had happened yet, it is still eager to see some action.

The preliminaries take so long that once the actual acts start, it is hard to get into them. And like the intro, the acts have a lot of air in them and could move much more quickly. Certain choices made the show physically difficult and painful to watch. A number of acts took place on the catwalks behind the balcony, so that the audience had to turn and crane their necks to see them. Making full use of the space is an interesting choice, but it is wise to reconsider such choices when it makes the show a pain to watch. Also, a source 4 positioned upstage center was swiveled around on occasion and shone directly into the audience's eyes.

The strongest skit in the show, a re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet's death scene, using the corpse of the emcee as Romeo, was truly funny and made good use of physical comedy and gesture. But it came too late in the performance to save the production from its own death.

Despite the large number of recent show closings and this shaky economic time, theater is not dead. We should be celebrating the fact that people are still drawn to theater, not attempting to “suck the pleasure” out of the remaining days of life as Theatre is Dead intends to do (according to the director's note). Anyone with any vested interest in the form is advised to stay away from Theatre is Dead and So Are You.

Deadly Serious?

At a funeral for actress Stacy Mayer, her eulogizer might say she was a charismatic comedian with great confidence and energy—almost enough to carry a clichéd show about funeral traditions. Though her performance in The Funeralogues is, at times, an admirable struggle, she perishes in the effort. I hope, for her sake, this is not what she will be remembered for. In the giddily irreverent hour-long Funeralogues, Mayer, as performer, and Robert Charles Gompers, as writer, cover the familiar, yet bizarre territory of public mourning, charting the progression of Mayer’s morbid obsession throughout her life. As in the brief eulogy above, Mayer dwells on the way she will be remembered. She also spends some time commenting upon the grief of strangers, but these parts lack the breezy, self-deprecating humor that Mayer excels at.

Adding to the irreverence, The Funeralogues is staged in the All Souls Unitarian Church. The church is outfitted with a “Quiet: service in session” sign, a guest book, hymnals, and its own piano player (Manny Simone, filling in for Jim Lahti) who provides plaintive renditions of songs like "Forever Young" and "Runaway Train."

The show gets off to a somewhat rocky start. Mayer takes some time to get comfortable, as does the audience, which tries to grapple with the awkward comedy of a highly polished monologue. By nature the monologue is self-obsessed, but in this show it can come across as woefully indulgent. Some of Mayer’s preoccupations are dull; in particular, her flashback to a Barbie funeral over which she presided as a girl is uninteresting and cloying. However, when Mayer’s humor takes a turn for the catty or self-effacing, she garners more laughs from the audience. For instance, when she considers the reckless possibility of saying what we really feel at funerals: “Let’s face it; you don’t get struck by lightning because God loves you.”

The show isn’t without charm, but Mayer and Gompers try to take on more than they can collectively chew. When the show tries to tackle the complex emotion of grief, it falls back on clichéd characters and perspectives. Mayer is capable of providing convincing turns of character—an elderly woman, the lone survivor in a large family; a crankily sad old man; a military officer and “death specialist” are given vivid life by Mayer, but they don’t really have a place in this show.

In the program, The Funeralogues is described as “a drop dead comedy,” and, at its best, it can be funny. The overall tone of the show is in keeping with this description, which makes the notes of melodrama ring all the more false. It is especially strange when Mayer recites an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s eulogy for two girls who died in an Alabama church bombing. Mayer frequently refers to funerals as “downers,” with the apparent intention of mocking the sometimes silly gravity we attach to our traditions. The MLK speech, as well as another one dealing with the death of two soldiers in Iraq, asks the audience to care in a way that the rest of the show does not.

It’s too bad The Funeralogues lacks focus and consistency; Mayer is likable as an actress and comedian, however, when she introduces serious outsiders into her warped world, it’s hard not to wish it would come to a quick end. Of course there is comedy in tragedy and tragedy in comedy, but here they make terribly strange bedfellows. Mayer, a leader of MC², or Manhattan Comedy Collective, has the enviable skill of making people laugh, but she squanders that all too readily here. Perhaps, for everyone’s sake, it would be best if this show went gently into the good night, while Mayer continues to rage.

BFF

The Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, widely believed to be among the world’s oldest surviving pieces of written literature, tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his wild friend Enkidu (NK). To adequately stage the Gilgamesh saga, which includes god-kings and bestial creatures, opulent palaces and apocalyptic floods, lush wilderness and foreboding underworlds, a production would need either a Broadway-level budget or the solidly minimalist production aesthetic of the Rabbit Hole Ensemble. The Brooklyn-based group, which describes its work as “strong stories, told simply and theatrically, without much technology,” is well suited to the task of depicting the ancient story onstage. Under the direction of Rabbit Hole Artistic Director Edward Elefterion, Shadow of Himself, playwright Neal Bell’s Gilgamesh adaptation becomes a sharply poignant meditation on masculinity and friendship.

As per Rabbit Hole’s signature style, the five-person cast creates much of the production’s effects, from reciting chants and beating a small drum to forming scenic structures with their bodies, which enhances Shadow of Himself’s mythic nature. Whenever they are not central to the action, the actors’ presence along the sides of the bare black stage further supports the production’s spirit of collective storytelling.

Each of the male actors portrays a single primary character, while Emily Hartford, the sole actress of the cast, plays a smattering of female roles. Adhering to gendered casting in a production that emphasizes the versatility of its ensemble focuses the story’s epic scope to issues of gender, specifically of male power and the impact it has on companionship. The main characters include Gil (Matt W. Cody) the powerful king, and NK (Mark Cajigao), the only individual who matches Gil’s strength and beauty. Prior to the arrival of NK, in keeping with the Gilgamesh story, Gil is an unrepentant rapist who terrorizes his subjects until he finds his match in NK, at which point the two become best friends who travel the world on epic quests. It’s literally the stuff of legends.

Shadow of Himself echoes the relationship between Gil and NK with a pair of soldiers (Daniel Ajl Kitrosser and Adam Swiderski), a fun and effective means of examining friendship in different forms. Though neither relationship becomes explicitly sexual, both are alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) violent and tender. According to the mythology, Gil is part god and NK is part beast; in Shadow of Himself, their otherworldliness manifests itself in elevated language. This sets up a contrast between them and the more mundane soldiers, who call each other dude like Bill and Ted, and throw around the f-word like Rod Blagojevich. Similarly, the soldiers are more cognizant of sex than are Gil and NK. Once the business of raping brides comes to an end, Gil and NK are too focused on their love for one another to become embroiled with women.

Yet if the relationship between Gil and NK isn’t consummated, it’s not exactly platonic either. They may be too gallant or too naïve to consciously sexualize each other, yet they fall asleep in each others’ arms and cannot imagine a life apart. When their inevitable separation occurs, the play’s focus on coping with loss emphasizes the depths of their friendship.

The actors bring a disciplined sense of commitment to embodying specific characters while creating the effects that bring the world of the play to life. Still, at just an hour and a half, the production feels overlong. It’s easy to see where the story is headed, a common challenge of staging archetypal legends, and though the actors do their best to keep the energy up, the unchanging austerity so central to the production eventually grows repetitious. Though occasional prop pieces, designed by Michael Tester, add welcome flourishes, audiences who prefer lavish productions may want to wait for the upscale production value version of the Gilgamesh story before they see its depiction onstage; fans of epic legends and energized experimental theater should see Shadow of Himself.

Putting a Spin on Drug Education

When one attempts to produce theatrical works for teenage audiences, it doesn’t get much more difficult than the anti-drug play. Most of us may have put the traumas of high school behind us, but few still have a clue about how to win the approval of the cool kids—especially when it comes to telling them that they shouldn’t do something. When staging a production for teenagers, the most effective rule of thumb is also the most paradoxical: The moment you attempt to please, you’ve lost your audience. As an anti-drug work, Cranked is about as good as they get. A one-man show about the life-threatening crystal meth addiction of talented freestyle rapper Stan (Kyle Cameron), the one-act work inserts a cautionary tale into a hip-hop formula. On paper, this pairing comes across as too eager to please, but the result is effective to the point of shocking. Stewarded by Cameron’s remarkable performance, Cranked lacks all pretention, and as a result is truly frightening.

Cranked originated at Vancouver-based Green Thumb Theatre more than two years ago, and since then has toured at high schools and theaters around North America. The script has a heavily autobiographical flair (at points, it brings to mind a hybrid of 8 Mile and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), but Stan is, in fact, a fictionalized character assembled from the experiences of several real-life addicts.

In preparing for the role, Cameron had to learn to manifest many of the clinical effects of crystal meth, including the characteristic fidgeting, sweating and paranoia. It’s a physically taxing role, and Cameron succeeds admirably; he is an equally charismatic and frightening presence on stage, and it’s difficult to take one’s eyes off him. Cameron shows remarkable control of his voice and movements, from his twitchy reflexes to the play’s several freestyle rap segments, and his pale complexion and skinny frame lend themselves effectively to the image of physical exhaustion.

Stan’s story is framed by a performance that the rapper gives after checking out of a rehab clinic. Stating that he is not yet ready to go onstage, he throws himself into a series of flashbacks that narrate his early teenage years, his short-lived success in hip-hop, and his decision to check himself into rehab. Most vividly, however, Stan describes what it feels like to crave the drug, comparing himself to a zombie. “I’m rotting from the core,” he says in one segment. “I’m gutless, I’m soulless, I’m dead,” he later describes.

The impact of Cranked is strengthened by its thoughtfully executed stage design. In order to believably channel an underground hip-hop show, a microphone stand is the only prop on the otherwise empty stage, and a backdrop of graffiti art provides a canvas for both gritty realism and drug-induced fantasy. The background depicts several ghoulish figures standing underneath rows of speakers and a white, skull-like face. On occasion, this face serves as a video screen that alternately shows close-ups of Stan and stylized images recalling a meth trip. Combined with flashing, red lights and a bass-heavy music track, the overall effect is appropriately surreal.

Because Cranked has an obviously educational goal, it doesn’t offer a traditional theater experience. It’s more likely to attract school groups or families wishing to learn about drug addiction than casual theatergoers, but within its notably limited framework, the show is at the top of its class.

A Pledge of Allegiance

‘Silent’ is the description collectively assigned to the cast of characters in Linda Escalera Baggs’ play about military wives, but throughout its seventy-five minute running time, it was the word ‘trapped’ that most frequently snuck its way onto my notepad. The play’s cast of women, each of whom reveal their own unsettling secrets as they wait for their husbands’ fighter jets to return home, appear to be confined to the point of hopelessness—inside their marriages, inside lives that lack grounding and agency, and inside the paradigms of the small, unchanging set. The premise of Silent Heroes is rich with tension: one of six fighter planes has crashed just moments before the play opens, but it’s not yet clear whose husband has perished in the accident. Bracing for heartbreak, the group collects into an underground room at the base to wait. A sense of dutiful camaraderie is obvious between the six women, but each of their attempts to remain calm in the face of death causes underlying conflicts within the group to burst onto the surface. In a situation such as this, is it possible to not secretly wish for the death of a friend’s husband?

Silent Heroes is a success, thanks largely to its affecting premise, its bouncy, entertaining dialogue and its strong performances. Baggs’ attempt to give all six women a moment to share their individual traumas feels too calculated at times, but outstanding performances across the board allow the narrative to maintain its momentum.

Set in the 1970s, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, Silent Heroes brings a notably diverse group of individuals onto the stage, highlighting the circumstantial quality of their bond. Be it not for the fact that their husbands are pilots, these women, different in backgrounds, ages and worldviews, would have been unlikely to have established such an intimate rapport with one another.

The most obvious standout from the group is young Miranda (Sarah Saunders), whose politically rebellious background is a topic of debate and discomfort within the group. Patsy (Julie Jesneck), meanwhile, is quickly established as the wife with the most outward and immediate struggles—she’s the only wife not looking forward to her husband’s return. Jesneck’s performance is difficult to watch, but for all the right reasons; her instinct to make excuses for her aggression-prone husband and avoid eye contact as she explains her choices is likely to ring authentic to anyone who has ever confronted a friend in an abusive relationship.

Rosalie Tenseth as Eleanor, the most outspoken member of the group, is also a joy to watch and delivers the funniest lines of the production, but it’s Kelly Ann Moore as her best friend June who is most likely to inspire chills in her audience. Because she is the most nurturing and least confrontational member of this collective, her eventual burst of anger is genuinely shocking, and Moore delivers this punch with a fearless sense of emotional wisdom. It’s a controlled performance that’s difficult to shake.

The set, designed by Nick Francone, adds to the necessary sense of claustrophobia. Furnished with a worn couch, a modest coffee station and photos of soldiers on the back wall, the room is appropriately void of spirit. During the second half of the play, when the six characters take turns stepping onto a chair and peering through a small, rectangular window near the ceiling, their sense of entrapment becomes all the more pronounced. The fate of their invisible husbands will define their destinies, and one gets the sense that ‘Silent Heroes’ is, quite literally, their only moment in the spotlight.

Beyond the Sea

In the same way Herman Melville experimented with language in Moby-Dick, Carlo Adinolfi, in his one-man stage adaptation of the novel, manipulates his voice and body. With similar playfulness, The Whale, presented by Concrete Temple Theatre, addresses the ways and means of storytelling, producing an elaborate dance that pays homage to the awesome, but graceful power of the sea and to Melville’s original text. Adinolfi’s interpretation of Moby-Dick’s themes is a physical take on Melville’s tale which weaves the mysteries of the deep and the mysteries of man into a complicated linguistic and psychological web. But what it lacks linguistically, The Whale makes up for with stunning staging that draws parallels between the shapes fashioned by man and by God. However, like Melville’s maniacal Captain Ahab, Adinolfi takes on an impossible task. In excerpting from an intricate novel, Adinolfi cuts key details and the plot points that make a coherent story. For those unfamiliar with the text, the play can be confusing, jumping from monologue to action scene without narrative exposition. For audience members who have read Melville, The Whale, while bursting with energy and imagination, pales by comparison. Still, this exciting journey is worth embarking on—just as men are drawn to the ocean, they are drawn to good storytelling.

To the sound of ominous groans, the opening scene introduces a minor and forgettable character from Moby-Dick, the Sub-Sub Librarian. Melville makes this “poor devil” a meaningless creature by necessity, claiming: “Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong… Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!” (Moby-Dick, xxxix). Whereas Ishmael narrates the novel, Adinolfi uses the Sub-Sub as his narrator, giving greater emphasis to the structural frame of a story within a story, but losing Melville’s characterization.

As in Melville, the Sub-Sub is there to contextualize the mythical significance of the Whale in social and literary history; the creature has captured man’s imagination for centuries, but is still mysterious. For this reason, he is the ideal subject for a story. Adinolfi’s Sub-Sub fantasizes about whaling voyages, bringing the drama of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a giant and valuable sperm whale to vivid light with enthusiastic recreations. While the distinctions between the various characters in this drama are unclear, the rough transitions are smoothed over by Adinolfi’s child-like energy.

With equal fervor, Adinolfi stages the battles between predator and prey, in ever-changing relationship to each other, by morphing into both sailor and whale. To evoke the shape of the beast, he turns his back to the audience, flexing his broad back and twisting his legs into a fluke. His transformation demonstrates that storytelling is about more than words. All of his characters are bathed in ominous lighting (by Tyler Micoleau), and their speech is echoed with a portentous score (by David Pinkard). The set and sounds demonstrate the intoxicating but terrifying beauty of the sea.

The most stunning aspect of The Whale is its staging. Adinolfi, his crew and director Renee Philippi transform the stage into the limitless sea, showing scale through the use of model boats. As Adinolfi morphs into various characters, blocks of wood onstage take on different meaning: they are boat prows, library shelves, a pulpit and pews, and perhaps coffins. Adinofli also creates a boat skeleton from strips of wood, which is later shrouded in a white sheet to become the elusive Leviathan. The effect is lovely and eerie. The Whale is ghost-like, but the sheet ripples with the natural beauty of fins underwater. Compared to the other props, the white whale is enormous, and the projections of Adinolfi’s shadow onto a screen behind seem ridiculous.

The climactic meeting of Ahab and Moby-Dick shows Adinolfi at his feverish best. The story line is at its clearest, the metaphors too. Bathed in a red light, wrapped in the tangled ropes from his own ship, Ahab goes down spectacularly. Yet, as life rises from the Pequod’s wreck, the Sub-Sub Librarian re-emerges. The Whale has won the epic struggle, but the narrator retains control of the tale.

Adinolfi’s interpretation is powerful due to the performer's ability to go beyond words and to experiment with physical formations that demonstrate the profound shared relationships between all beasts. When the Sub-Sub Librarian sketches a whale skeleton on his arm, he is playing with this connection, just as Melville, in his introductory material, uses quotations to emphasize the whale’s influence. Though maybe not the letter, the spirit of Melville is very much alive in this staging, which likewise pays respect to its subject with a vibrant telling.

What's Up

Fefu and her Friends, Maria Irene Fornes' 1977 play that examines the fraught nature of female friendship in 1935, was perhaps most notable for its roving staging. Originally produced in a SoHo loft, the second act of the three-act production required audiences to split up and move throughout the performance spaces, watching simultaneous scenes play out between pairs of characters. Although Fornes later revised the script to permit staging in more traditional venues, Fefu and her Friends has long served as a source of inspiration for innovative productions. Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers of Trick Saddle have recently adapted the play into their own quasi-environmental Wickets. With the time period transposed from the mid 1930's to the early 1970's, the characters from society ladies to stewardesses, and the locale from a country home to a passenger airplane, Wickets combines Fornes' original text with additional source material to create a performance piece that is at once retro and contemporary. In the spirit of Fornes, much of the pleasure of Wickets comes from the care taken with its scenic design. High quality production values that include curved white walls, narrow aisles, and partitioned sections of chairs make sitting inside set designer Rogers' cleanly constructed craft about as close to a commercial airplane as you can get without first going through security checkpoints. Beyond the plane's porthole windows, light designer Burke Brown effectively creates the hues of a changing skyscape. Yet for all the delight derived from the quirky realism of Wickets' set, the aircraft contains elements of the surreal; how many passenger planes have floors lined with AstroTurf? Its consciously idiosyncratic aesthetic is indicative of the entire production, which balances a kitschy celebration of sisterhood with an examination of the turmoil that incited feminism's second wave.

The characters of Fefu and her Friends belong to the ladies who lunch set; converting the characters into working class women in a feminized service profession adds interesting friction to their relationships with other women while making the audience implicitly responsible for their servitude. It also works toward undoing the notion of feminism as belonging to the providence of upper middle class white ladies, a smart choice that would be further enhanced by a more diverse cast.

The fun that Wickets has with its stewardess ensemble makes itself apparent before the opening lines of the play: upon arriving at the 3LD Art and Technology center, audience members are asked to form a line, "boarding passes" in hand, so that the stewardesses can check them off clip-boarded passenger lists. The strong cast, led by the superb Lee Eddy as a dignified yet gruff Fefu, forms a seamlessly supportive ensemble, including standouts Jessica Jolly, Elizabeth Wakehouse, and Christianna Nelson.

Over the course of the play, the stewardesses confide in one another their deep-seated fears as they engage in both cattiness and comradery. Curiously, a number of cast members employ inconsistent accents that are as distracting as they are unneeded. Like a long airline flight, Wickets isn’t always smooth. When it soars, it’s a thrill to be part of it.

Keeping It (Un)Real

Only two years ago, Joseph Biden, our Vice President-elect, made this questionable comment about Barack Obama, America’s soon-to-be first African-American president: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Mr. Obama obviously forgave this comment, although you can bet it stung.

While this exchange does not appear in her new play, The Shipment, it’s the type of racism that Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee sees just about everywhere in our society. The fact that it raises its ugly head even in high-level American politics, where every word is—or at least should be—carefully weighed, would seem to be confirmation of its ubiquity.

Though a book of Lee’s collected plays will soon be published, they must be seen to be fully experienced. As she tells us on her web site, “Every word I write is written to be performed.” She collaborates with her actors throughout the development process. Her satiric plays benefit from generous dollops of the absurd and her willingness to involve her company in most aspects of their creation.

Lee’s aesthetic is to create powerful theater that makes herself and the audience uncomfortable—she’s at her best as an irritant. She likes to get under your skin (after cutting her way in) and poke around in there. “Does that hurt? How about that?” she asks, before rubbing in a whole lot of salt and then fleeing mischievously. The results are only sometimes healing, but they are always provocative.

Lee calls The Shipment, an “African-American identity politics play.” The Shipment might strike viewers as a kinder, gentler Young Jean Lee. The blows are still there and the audience still squirms, yet the punches are softened by recognition of shared humanity. And comedy. Yes, this is a very funny show, even side-splitting in parts, and the laughs only increase as it goes along.

The actors in the all-black cast are multi-talented—each play multiple characters, and sing and dance with formidable skill. Standouts are Prentice Onayemi as Desmond and Mikeah Ernest Jennings as a variety of characters. Most of the actors were part of the cast that premiered this work last year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. They command their roles and imbue the characters—with a gesture here, a wave of the hand or a self-conscious glance there—with a compassion that’s often not apparent from stripped down dialogue on the written page. That’s why Lee’s plays must be seen rather than simply read.

A variety show of sorts, with segments featuring stand-up comedy and dance, The Shipment is divided into three major parts. The first features a comic, Douglas Streater, who is a less funny and more vicious version of Chris Rock. He is fixated on the perverted and scatological, and, between rants about both white and black people, occasionally drops his “keeping it real” guard, even intimating occasional suicidal ideation. Streater gets in the audience’s face and makes them feel uncomfortable—Lee goads the unsure audience into laughing at intentionally bad jokes— frequently made at its own expense. I found myself hoping that Mr. Streater would inject a little bit more of the despair that his sometimes sagging façade belied.

The second part of the production is a sort of black face minstrel show. Framed almost as a teenage morality play—a cautionary tale about gang violence and drug use that you might see at a middle school—replete with a requisite drive-by shooting and imprisonment, it portrays black people in the hopelessly one-dimensional way whites often view them.

The third major segment of the show, a sometimes-surreal sitcom with an ending that might come as a surprise, is the funniest. This segment underscores what Lee seems to think are certain privileged, educated people’s capacities for meanness, even for psychological torture. Mr. Onayemi is hilarious and utterly shines as the wound-up but taciturn Desmond. Mr. Jennings is physically masterful. We feel his embarrassment with each awkward tic and facial expression.

A special treat comes after the second major segment, where cast members Amelia Workman, Okieriete Onodowan and Mr. Onayemi sing, beautifully and a capella, what I initially read to be an oblique and cleverly worded paean to equality. I was a little disappointed when I found out the lyrics are actually from a Modest Mouse song, and not Lee herself, but the subject matter seems oddly appropriate nonetheless.

Performed in a black-box setting, with black walls, floors and curtains, The Shipment is often visually stunning. The characters are dressed in formalwear, a device that lends an air of nobility, but simultaneous brings to mind the era of Mr. Bojangles. Mark Barton’s lighting focuses on the characters’ faces, fleshing out every painful or betrayed look.

The Shipment doesn’t cohere in the way that conventional plays do but, for Lee, that’s the point. It takes work and collaboration on the part of the audience to put its meanings together—any two people might come away with different interpretations. Lee has confessed on her blog that, during its development, sometimes even she didn't know where the play was going. Race relations are often thorny and jagged as well as subtle, and the content and structure of her work track that prickliness.

The Shipmentis another milestone in Lee’s still very young career. This is exciting work, liberating and vital to new American theater.

Such Sweet Sorrow

Filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh’s works are often exercises in endurance. His works cover the quotidian, the everyday lives of everyday people, with a healthy mix of social observation thrown in for good measure. He rarely adds even a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down. And yet his catalog of work is so rich, every minute is worth sitting through, which is why theater companies time and again excavate his shows to perform. This is also largely the reason why Horse Trade Theater Group and Black Door Theatre Company have chosen to revive Leigh’s 1979 play Ecstasy. While the blueprint with which the companies work is an excellent, insightful play, the individuals involved in this current production, directed by Sara Laudonia at the Red Room, deserve much of the credit for revisiting this work so successfully.

Jean (Mary Monahan) is the fulcrum upon which Ecstasy pivots. The show looks at only two nights in her life, but it clear that Jean wants more for her life and doubts that she will ever have the resolve to seek it out. In one sense, not much happens. She has an affair with Roy (Josh Marcantel), a volatile married man whose wife, Val (Lore Davis), later arrives to wreak havoc. She shares tea with her friend Dawn (Gina LeMoine) and discusses her humdrum life.

There is more talking later, as Jean takes Dawn, Dawn’s husband, Mick (Brandon McCluskey), and Len (Stephen Heskett), an old friend who has recently moved back to town, back to her small London flat following a night of drinking. They have arrived under the pretense of fixing Jean’s bed (Val broke it during her melee), but the unspoken motivation also seems to be to pair Len up with Jean. The drinking continues, as the characters smoke, sing, dance, and reminisce.

There is a lot of talking in Ecstasy, and Laudonia’s production achieves an incredibly intimate effect. Though its size and poor acoustics sometimes make The Red Room a difficult venue in which to perform, it is perfect for this show. The audience has the perfect fly-on-the-wall perspective to watch Jean and her friends. Additionally, the music that sometimes creeps through the theater walls only adds to the lack of privacy and need to escape that Jean must feel in her solitary existence. (Ecstasy would benefit, though, from an intermission before the play’s long, last scene).

Monahan is extraordinary as Jean, anchoring the show with the character’s combination of regret, indifference, and surrender. Pay attention to her in the character’s “in-between” moments, when Jean is quietly reacting to another character’s comment or thinking of what to say or do next. This is a performance in which the wheels are clearly always turning.

The lead actress is matched by each of her peers. LeMoine proves Dawn to be a loyal friend and nimbly talks a blue streak, while balancing the additional challenge of looking progressively more inebriated. Heskett makes Len, a bumbling man, warm and charming, and McCluskey continually breathes life into the show with his energized comical delivery. Davis’ and Marcantel’s work is also solid. Page Clements is credited as the dialect coach for Ecstasy, though I have no idea which actors required such training; the English and Irish accents employed in this show sounded universally authentic to me.

Laudonia’s attentive, crisp direction has breathed new life into Leigh’s play. She has found a way to make the bleak lives originally depicted three decades earlier just as relevant today as they were then. A production like this makes a life of dissatisfaction seem somehow quite satisfying.

Winter of 69

Breakups are a serious state of affairs, and usually both parties bear some responsibility for the end of the relationship. The couple that reaches a tipping point in <I<Stay Over, directed by Matt Morillo at the Theater for the New City, can blame their problems on a single source: a middling script that has no identity of its own. Though they’ve been together in the neighborhood of a decade, Mark (Tom Pilutik) and Michelle (Lori Faiella) can’t seem to move forward in their relationship, so the two have gone on a break for several months. During this time, Michelle has allowed Mark one opportunity to stray with one girl. Michelle returns to Mark’s apartment, #69, on a severe wintry night to reconcile.

First, though, she wants to hear the details of his dalliance, punishing him for something she had given him permission to do. It’s not much later that we learn Michelle, too, has strayed in her time apart from Mark, and the fact that he doesn’t put her through a similar line of questioning makes Michelle not only a hypocrite but also just plain cruel.

I have a feeling that audience sympathy in Stay Over will fall along gender lines. One reason for this is that both a male and a female pitched in on the writing. Morillo (of last year’s relationship comedy All Aboard the Marriage Hearse) and Maria Micheles adapted Micheles’ own Sleepover, a more dramatic version of a New York love triangle, and yet Stay Over still feels as though it is in draft form. It is hard to root for any single character, almost as though the writers were friends of the couple, too afraid to commit to taking a side.

Early on, Michelle comes off as the affronted party, having been betrayed after what may have just been a test of Mark, and Faiella goes a long way toward making the audience share her anguish, especially as the character appears more vindictive than wronged. Pilutik’s performance, meanwhile, is both age- and character-appropriate. He makes Mark, an actor, seem rational, moderately narcissistic, and possessive of a healthy sexual appetite, rather than merely a hedonistic cad. This makes it harder to hate him, and easier to care about the two of them.

Perhaps these hard-working actors would be helped if Micheles and Morillo gave at least a little background about the characters’ pasts. The script leaves many questions unanswered (what finally pushed Michelle to let Mark cheat? What had kept them together for all the years prior to that?), but watching the two actors at work, I found myself investing in what these two had and hoping to find out more about what made them work as a couple and what complicated the matter.

At least for a while. Then Lilly (JessAnn Smith) enters the play as the other woman, and Stay Over began taking crazy turns, some of which I even mean literally. Lilly, it turns out, not only had an affair with Mark, but also has a surprising connection to Michelle. The dynamics of the triangle that ensues is funny and unpredictable only to those who have never seen an episode of Three’s Company. Each character tries to outsmart the others as though this were some twisted episode of Survivor in which the winner gets to be in a relationship, but Lilly, Mark and Michelle increasingly appear to care only about themselves, making the audience care less and less about who might end up with whom.

Part of the reason for this is because Lilly doesn’t quite fit in. Faiella and Pilutik look and act like people in their early thirties, suggesting a believable balance of experience and confusion when it comes to relationships. Lilly, on the other hand, is supposed to be in her early twenties, but Smith’s vocal intonations suggest someone even younger, weakening this pivotal triangle. It is bad enough that she doesn’t seem to post a viable threat to Michelle, but she actually comes off as jailbait for Mark. A dance Lilly performs late in Stay Over (choreographed by the actress herself) comes off more clumsy than seductive.

Morillo’s staging also leaves something to be desired. The downstairs theater at TNC is a small space, but I spent roughly two-thirds of the show contorting myself in an attempt to see the action onstage around the people seated in the rows in front of me. Perhaps Morillo could have blocked more of the action upstage to allow his audience to see more given the confines of the venue.

As hard as Faiella and Pilutik may try, without further repairs, Stay Over is currently one affair not worth remembering.