Outlook Hazy

Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing ridiculous headgear? Probing and humorous philosophical questions like these are supposedly at the heart of Bob Jude Ferrante’s comedy A New Theory of Vision, but you might be hard pressed to find them under the crude technical effects and bizarre story swerves. As the late Douglas Adams – something of a comedic philosopher himself, paraphrased above – might say, laboring through A New Theory of Vision’s cross-eyed gook of ghosts and computer graphics is “unpleasantly like being drunk.” Doesn’t seem so bad? Just ask a glass of water.

Vision follows Berkeley philosophy chair Lee Krebs (a committed Eric Percival), as he wrestles with his department, who wants him to write another best-seller, and visions of his dead girlfriend. When an uneasy student with Aspergers Syndrome, Erich (Matt Steiner) proposes Lee use virtual reality to develop a fresh perspective on philosophy, Lee agrees. Despite concerns from the student’s counselor (Maeve Yore), Lee and Erich embark on a poetic and surreal journey of discovery.

Never mind that technical stuff feels ten years old – choppy virtual reality hardly seems relevant in an era of iPhones and World of Warcraft. Ferrante’s play (and this production in particular) has many faults, but it certainly doesn’t want for ambition. Hanging a whole narrative on the quest to write a philosophy book about cyberspace is a tall enough order; factoring in Lee’s dead girlfriend and a handicapped sidekick suggests that the playwright had a very, very big story to tell. Or rather, several stories to tell. Vision’s script suffers most from a case of mistaken identity – first it thinks it’s Good Will Hunting, where a downtrodden professor reaches out to troubled student; then it thinks it’s The Omen, about a conniving, but brilliant devil-child (Steiner comes off a little too robotic) who sabotages those closest to him; and finally the script settles on The Cell, in which the counselor, Cara, helps Lee confront his psychological problems through special effects. Did I mention this is a comedy?

Also strange – a lot of talk about Lee’s work “hurting” Erich dominates the earlier scenes of the play, and indeed Erich is eventually hospitalized… but from what? Long hours at the computer? Then, from his hospital bed, Erich deviously orchestrates the downfall of Cara’s husband and, to some extent, Lee by posing as other people online. Cara is devastated by this, but not so devastated that a suddenly repentant Erich can’t convince her to help “rescue” Lee from continually reliving the death of his former girlfriend. There are interesting characters (Yore works wonders as Cara) and interesting ideas (like online ethics or V.R. philosophy) in Vision, but Ferrante’s short attention span keeps them from fully developing.

Also troubling, the play takes its title from Lee’s first widely popular book, a book that Lee wrote years ago and is desperately trying to escape. The specter of the book and Lee’s inability to live up to its success seems like a metaphor for his need to emotionally get past the death of his girlfriend, Jane. In both cases, he refuses to deal with the past. By titling the play A New Theory of Vision, , Ferrante sends a subconscious message that it was ultimately the more important of Lee’s books and that, metaphorically, he will NEVER really outrun his past. This problem is unnecessary because we have NO IDEA what either of Lee’s books is really about, so there’s no reason the virtual reality book he writes over the course of the play with Erich couldn’t be called “A New Theory of Vision.” (Some quick research reveals an even deeper level to this frustration – “A New Theory of Vision” is actually the title of a REAL book by Lee’s philosopher idol, George Berkeley!)

But there are things to like too. Throughout the earlier parts of the show, various characters interacting with Ted “become” his dead girlfriend Jane, by suddenly adopting her British accent and mannerisms. Ferrante and Parker showed surprising restraint here and the buildup leads nicely to the later part of the play where Lee confronts his demons, even if he does so in a laughable V.R. helmet made from a pilot’s jiffy hood.

The biggest highlight of this clumsy staging by Cat Parker is George Allison’s inventive, but inconsistent production design. Using the entire set as a projection surface, Allison creates a wide range of environments with video: the Berkeley campus, the Bay Bridge, and an abstract swirl of colors to represent cyberspace. In one neat sequence, as Lee tries to translate a bit of Latin, the words scroll above him when he figures it out. Or when he remembers his dead girlfriend, Allison punctuates it nicely with flashes of her body and the newspaper headline about her death. Cool stuff, but very distracting if the video fails to sync with the action on stage or cuts out altogether, as it did many times during the performance I attended. Like Adams said, “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”

Though buried under unsuccessful video effects, baffling plot turns and insubstantial philosophy, A New Theory of Vision brims with good ideas. Maybe after a tune-up, it can cure its astigmatism.

Keeping It in the Family

The basic premise of Christina Anderson’s Inked Baby faces the danger of falling into sensational, soapy water: When husband and wife Gloria (LaChanze) and Greer (Damon Gupton) cannot conceive a child, they decide to have Greer instead conceive with her younger sister Lena (Angela Lewis). Only despite modern fertility innovations, the three opt for conception the old-fashioned way, with Gloria’s husband and sister in bed together for the most strictly scientific of reasons. Some writers might make the journey leading to this decision the crux of their show. Not so for Anderson, an emerging voice with plenty of promise. The intimate encounter between Greer and Lena kicks off her Baby, which just opened at Playwrights Horizons. She takes what could have been merely an odd love triangle and fashions a story that is about much more – and also, at times both refreshingly and disappointingly, about even less.

Anderson has more on her mind than domestic drama. Baby also packs a whopping amount of social commentary, though director Kate Whoriskey (Ruined) keeps the show moving at such a fluid, involving pace that one never tastes the medicine on its way down.

Baby takes place in an unknown American city, but one that represents Chicago or Detroit. Gloria, Greer and Lena have lived under one roof ever since Lena was laid off from a New York job in the finance sector. It is the childhood home of the two girls, built and tended by their father, who passed away when the girls were young. Lena, roughly a decade Gloria’s junior, was sent off to school and so has spent the better part of her life away from home while Gloria took care of their ailing father.

Between their differences in age, education, and fortunes in love and genetics, there are ample reasons for tension between the two sisters, but Anderson doesn’t really mine any of them. Instead, Greer and Gloria become disengaged from one another in ways that seem less than organic, with Gloria morphing into an unpleasant nag and an unfaithful drag.

At this point, Baby shifts away from the home front and into more metaphysical – and perhaps, even, metaphorical – terrain. It seems that perhaps the reason for Gloria’s past miscarriages has little to do with her own biology and more to do with the family’s lifelong exposure to an industrial waste dump. Greer, Lena’s childhood friend Ky (Nikkole Salter), and Odlum (Che Ayende), Gloria’s secret man, all manifest frightening symptoms of a new kind of virus, one that has them spewing soil from various parts of their body. Though clearly not HIV, Anderson clearly recalls both the dismissal and panic that arose during the disease’s early days.

Baby then becomes about something very different from what it initially suggests. Rather than debating the bioethical issues of what happens when a surrogate mother is a close relative, the show tackles the issue of environmental racism. The low-income area where these characters have lived may literally be hazardous to their health. Anderson’s play is undeniably steeped in the current state of the African-American experience. The playwright pays literal homage to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun both in her dialogue and, presumably, in the naming of Lena’s character.

This is heavy stuff, doled out in quite a palatable manner, but while Baby transfers its subject matter, it never quite reaches any transcendent level. Instead of cresting, the problems of the individual characters in the play give way to the politics of their creator. Anderson is to be applauded for her ambition, but in switching from a realistic predicament to one less so, she loosens the grip she has on her audience.

This is not the fault of Whoriskey’s excellent cast, who all tap into their characters’ (often) unspoken emotions of fear, grief and shame. Gupton is impressive, and it is nice to see Tony-winner LaChanze (The Color Purple) shine in a non-musical role. The real discovery is the incandescent Lewis, who never hits a false note. All actors, though, are to be commended for finding the poetry in Anderson’s dialogue and for making their characters’ emotions identifiable for audiences of any race.

Unconventional as it may be, Baby is certainly a work worthy of much attention and discussion. Anderson has given birth to a child of which she can be proud.

Powers That Be

The congressional controversy over arts funding in the recent stimulus bill has a historic precedent: The Federal Theatre Project. Created as part of the WPA, the project employed out-of-work theater artists during the Great Depression. If the recent funding debate revolved around the legitimacy of art's claim to stimulus dollars, the controversy in the 1930’s more directly questioned artists' patriotism; the Federal Theatre Project was dogged by complaints of un-Americanism throughout its four-year history. Before its demise in 1939, the nationally funded program produced a number of experimental works, among them a series of Living Newspapers, episodic scripts that presented in-depth examinations of contemporary issues. Power, a living newspaper written by Arthur Arent in 1937, tackled the development of electrical power and the ensuing national debate over whether it should be privately or publicly controlled. Though still nontraditional in structure, techniques pioneered by Living Newspapers enjoy prominence today. A source of employment for out-of-work journalists who researched each project’s theme as though it were a news article, the writers' findings ultimately formed the script of each production. That playwriting technique now exists in the form of investigative theater, a term popularized by The Civilians, whose interview-based scripts address complicated cultural issues. As a theatrical genre that combines journalism and performance, living newspapers also anticipated the split screen debates of television news programs and the back-and-forth critiques of opposing political blogs; living newspapers featured scenes designed to serve as counterpoints to one another (a meeting of a farming community followed by an electric company meeting) as a means of challenging audiences and keeping them engaged. That begs the question: in an era overfilled with rapid-fire point-counterpoint arguments, can the structure of a living newspaper still prove effective? As revived by the Metropolitan Playhouse, the answer is yes.

Power’s nine-member ensemble plays a whopping total of 150 roles. Some characters exist in single vignettes, others reappear throughout the production, lending a warm familiarity to the play’s continually changing landscape, which stretches from Hoboken, NJ to the farms of Tennessee. Rafael Jordan leads the cast as an everyman frustrated by the monopoly of private electrical companies and each of the actors demonstrates cool agility as they switch from role to role. Dressed in Sidney Fortner’s period costumes, the actors take on a variety of exaggerated mannerisms and approximated accents. Their portrayals stop short of farce. Look elsewhere for goofily reductive characterizations; Power is an energetic presentation of multiple, contradictory perspectives.

As if to further emphasize the importance of electricity, lighting designer Maryvel Bergen keeps the intensity bright for most of the production and audiences can see one another across the stage. Under the direction of Mark Harborth, rather than feeling invasive, that creates a communal environment appropriate to the play’s spirit of audience engagement. Harborth, also the set designer, has newspapers plastered across the floor and splashed across the back wall, a simple but powerful reminder that the play imagines itself as a newspaper come to life.

Despite its inclusion of a wide swath of American voices, Power is as much an editorial as a news report. It’s an appropriate production both for the Metropolitan Playhouse’s seasonal focus on Work in America and also, of course, because of our country’s renewed debate over the role of government in the private sector. Moments of Power are eerily reminiscent not just of our economic crisis but of our heated conversations about how to deal with it. The parallels are powerful.

Something Asunder Down Under

Characters on the fringe of society have often made for riveting works of art, from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe to Our Country’s Good to Separate Tables. The Production Company’s current staging of Patricia Cornelius’ 2003 play Love, directed by Mark Armstrong and playing at Center Stage, focuses on a trio of such characters and, as her simple title suggests, asks just what these three would do for love. Do not be mistaken, however. While Cornelius’ title is simple, her play is anything but. Winner of the Wal Cherry Award, a prestigious Australian honor bestowed upon new plays, Love is a challenging work, for both the audience and the trio of resourceful actors bringing the show to life. The play wonders who deserves love. Does everyone? What is love? Can it really exist in different forms with different people at the same time?

Love portrays people who use that term when what they really mean is want or need. Full of vim and vitriol, Cornelius connects the dots between three very intense characters, all constantly in need. Annie (Erin Maya Darke) is a prostitute and drug addict who falls for Tanya (Bronwen Coleman). Their passionate affair comes to an end when Tanya is imprisoned (one of the play’s few details that might benefit from further embellishment).

Enter Lorenzo (Ken Matthews), a fellow junkie and manipulator. Annie easily falls for him, or at least she thinks so – perhaps she has just fallen into his web, thinking she is starkly in need of someone to take care of her as Tanya had. However, Lorenzo doesn’t quite fill the void left by Tanya. When her incarceration is over, Tanya returns to Annie and Lorenzo remains in the picture. They form the oddest threesome, at times repellent and at other times oddly beguiling in their symbiosis. All of them, it seems, serve a need for one another.

Cornelius’ bizarre love triangle is an astute portrayal of desperate living, mainly because she does a superlative job shading in the details of these characters’ sordid lives. But it is the three actors who take her sturdy foundation and run with it. Witness Matthews’ work, in which humor, libido and drug-infused mania collide in a perfect storm. Watch Coleman balance her tough persona with touches of maternal instinct, with attention to both the nurturing instinct and sense of ownership that goes along with that.

And pay close attention to Darke’s complicated character development. As Love progresses, Annie’s ping-ponging begins to take a devastating toll on the character. Darke clues the audience in with subtle cues, embracing realism and subtlety over more obvious tricks. It is to the entire cast’s credit, though, that all three elicit equal amounts of empathy. Annie is not the protagonist of the show; rather, all three characters share that honor.

Cornelius is a co-founder of the Melbourne Workers Theatre, which seeks to elucidate the flaws in mainstream perception of Australian culture and identity. She has succeeded with a play that is both stark and soulful. Every moment is layered with texture. Like Armstrong’s last Production Company work, The Most Damaging Wound, Love is a deeply rich project. One can look into the face of any of the show’s characters and read into them a different motivation for just how and why events have escalated. Sarah Bader’s dead-on sound cues and Dan Henry’s expert lighting further strengthen the mood of the play.

A variety of reasons drive Cornelius’ characters to make poor decisions, but in Armstrong’s production, nary a one can be found.

State of Fear

The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) has a knack for resurrection, unearthing worthy revivals of long-ignored theatrical gems. Last spring, TACT presented Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a play that had not been seen in New York for more than 30 years. Now TACT reaches back even further into the past, bringing us, for the first time since its 1964 premiere, a New York City production of Arthur Miller’s riveting Incident at Vichy. Incident at Vichy opens quickly, spotlighting a lone man — a prisoner — anxiously sitting on a bench outside an office. Lights go out and then come up again. This time there are two men. We see additional men, and eventually their captors, each time the lights go up. Here, director Scott Alan Evans departs uncharacteristically from the script’s production notes, where lights go up at once and all characters wear fixed expressions. Evans’ technique works terrifically and underscores the continuous accumulation of prisoners, a theme which the play revisits at its conclusion.

The French town of Vichy was occupied by the Germans from 1940-1944, and the play takes place in 1942. Men are being rounded up by local authorities collaborating with the Nazis. Ostensibly brought to the compound for a “paper check,” some of the men have heard nebulous rumors of sinister plots against Jews, and of railroad cars and concentration camps. All except one of the men are Jewish. Some believe these rumors are preposterous and that if they just do what they are told, they will be released. Others feel that escape is impossible and that they must try to overpower their captors. As they wait to be summoned, their arguments about their captors’ intentions form the basis of the play’s action. Though we learn that the rumors are true, some remain incredulous.

Scott Bradley’s set design is powerfully faithful to Miller’s description of “a warehouse, perhaps an armory or part of a railroad station not used by the public.” The office where interrogations take place, with pipes emanating from its roof, itself suggests a furnace-like structure. Sound designer Jill BC Du Boff deftly injects a dull and ominous mechanical hum to the action. The spaces between the prisoners on the bench, however, are tight and sometimes appear to impede the actors’ fullness of language. Evans, attempting to illustrate confinement, keeps the prisoners close together and forgoes much of the stage’s available space, but perhaps he should have again broken slightly from the script and permitted them to stalk the stage more often. When the actors do this their exchanges are more expansive for it.

In a cast of 16, some actors are naturally stronger than others. Though they come close at times, none, though, entirely convey the sheer and obvious terror Miller’s script describes. Prisoner foils — the psychiatrist Leduc (Christopher Burns) and the actor Monceau — are slightly mismatched here; Gregory Salata as Monceau is more proficient, with greater range. Todd Gearhart, a TACT mainstay, plays an excellent Von Berg, a sympathetic non-Jewish Austrian nobleman who has been caught in the dragnet. Mr. Gearhart, perhaps wisely dispensing with the accent, deftly straddles his character’s tendency toward finding “shreds of hope” where they don’t exist and his absolute first-hand knowledge of the ruthlessness of Nazism.

That savagery is apparent in the conflicted Major (played with convincing and edgy menace by Jack Koenig, and with great costuming by David Toser) and the Nazi loyalist Professor Hoffman (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), a servant of something called the “Race Institute.” His job is to examine the noses and penises of the prisoners to find out if they are Jewish. The arguments between Leduc and Monceau are mirrored by angry exchanges between the Major and the Professor over why they must perform their duties.

TACT’s program explains that Incident at Vichy received mixed reviews from critics and defensive letters from theater goers when it premiered at Lincoln Center. The program suggests that some of these may have represented thinly veiled reactions to the play’s implicit accusations of societal guilt for the rise of Nazism, and for the Holocaust. The gist of these reactions was that Miller effectively insulated himself from criticism by surrounding his play with events and sentiments that were politically incorrect to attack. Unfortunately, these self-serving comments distracted from an honest evaluation of the work and its meaning.

There is no doubt that Incident at Vichy is a thorough and broad condemnation of inaction in the face of evil. Miller was unapologetic about making the audience uncomfortable. And, even with Leduc psychoanalyzing the rationales of the survival strategies of his fellow prisoners, Miller’s writing mostly avoids overt didacticism. TACT’s production is a potent and fitting return of this overlooked classic.

Tracing a Rumor

A chronic mistrust between the sexes takes center stage in WorkShop Theater Company’s She Said, She Said, an ensemble story that appears to have been designed to initiate discussion about issues beyond its scope. Its six characters float in and out of its framework, each conveying a finely drawn archetype and serving a very deliberate purpose. There’s a twenty-something whose sexuality teeters between objectification and empowerment, a victim of domestic violence who is hesitant to label herself as such, and an impassioned old-school feminist. As its title indicates, She Said, She Said focuses on the consequences of telling the truth and relying on word-of mouth accounts of a past event. We learn early on that a rape may have taken place inside a crumpling marriage, but never have the opportunity to witness the incident in question. As in watching John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, we begin to study its characters’ mannerisms, words and reactions to discover who is lying and why. Although Jamie’s (Shelley McPherson) account of her husband’s violent actions feels convincing, the offstage nature of the play’s central event prompts us to view it with an investigative eye.

Men are the perpetrators in She Said, She Said, but the moral ambiguity of its two male characters also serves to their advantage. While its women feel at times excessively familiar, we cannot help but want to learn more about the men who complicate their lives.

Writer Kathryn Chetkovich, whose background is in authoring short stories, allows characters Dan (Tom Berdik) and Ross (Mark Hofmaier) ample time to show the range of their frustration, and strong performances only add to the simultaneously sympathetic and frightening nature of their characters. As Ross, Jamie’s husband with an ominous angry side, Mark Hofmaier is a particular standout. Projecting an unexpected sadness into his posture and glare, he manages to avoid turning Ross into a villain, and instead deepens our curiosity about the play’s most divisive character.

The play’s four women, meanwhile, offer a convincing portrayal of female friendship. Dee Dee Friedman’s fiery Nina sometimes tips the balance of an otherwise delicate scene, but many of us are likely to recognize this personality type in our own circles of friends. Ashley Anderson, meanwhile, injects a sense of pride and ownership into CoCo, a young waitress whose tendency to attract men’s attentions turns out to be more of a personal crutch than a source of power.

Mark Symczak’s elegant stage design provides an added level of artistry and symbolism into the production. Layered white curtains punctuate scene changes, serve as a canvas for projected family photographs, and allow the stage to morph from a living room into a neighborhood bar. This approach results in quick, smooth transitions from one scene to the next, as it eliminates the need to lug furniture around the stage.

As an example of a neatly edited play, She Said, She Said is a success. The play was polished into its final form over several years at WorkShop Theater Company’s development seminars, and the final product includes almost nothing extraneous or distracting. Because every turning point in the plot takes place offstage, its characters come across as talky and passive at points, but by the time it reaches its ambiguous final scene, their brooding desperation just might feel eerily familiar.

Forget about Letting the Sun Shine in, the Catchphrase this Year Should Be “Rain On!”

Every once in a while a musical comes along that captures the spirit of its time flawlessly. The New Hopeville Comics, A New Rock Opera from Commander Squish Productions, is one of these shows. Don’t be misled by the four-color poster featuring the heroic Perfect Man and his gal pal Molly. This is not your typical kid-friendly comic adventure. Owing more to the mature themes of shows like Rent and the macabre sensibilities of Little Shop of Horrors than it does to any of the Sunday funnies or the caped crusaders that ostensibly inspired it (and I should know, I have boxes and boxes of Batman and Justice League taking up space in my closets), The New Hopeville Comics begins as a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek flight through crazy comic land, and ends up landing very much in the world we live in today, with a message so powerful (and delivered so powerfully) it brought tears to this reviewer’s eyes. For a storyline featuring Man of Steel-like Perfect Man and his trio of supervillains with the heavy-handed yet appropriate monikers Sex, Drugs, and Rockenroll, this three-act little super-hero song and dance piece turns out to be thrillingly deep. Featuring bravura acting performances, show-stopping dance numbers (choreographed by Ashley Adamek), and an ensemble that blends so well I think my heart actually skipped a beat several times, New Hopeville Comics is one of those rare pieces that can truly be called a theatrical gem.

Among the many fine performances were Chris Crittelli as the golly-gee-willikers goody-two-shoed Perfect Man, whose song-and-dance delivery of certain lines brought the house to tears of laughter; Aaron Phillips as Felix, the nerdy dare-I-say sidekick who quickly comes into his own after a hilarious sequence of events; and the amazing trio of Terren Wooten Clarke (Sex), Carl Conway Maguire (Drugs), and John Bennett (Rockenroll), who very nearly steal the show with their antics. There were more than a few Forbidden Broadway-like moments, such as Perfect Man trying to convince his gal Molly (played by Sarah Hayes Donnell) to stay with him while performing Chorus Line choreography, or when Felix leads the revolution in the second act marching in step and singing “One Day More”, but the villainous trio of Sex, Drugs, & Rockenroll manage to top everything with a vibrant number ending in a calypso (“a Calypso!?!”). Later, the villains lead the entire town’s populace in a raucous revelry that is so wrong it can only be right. Christine Dwyer as April, Molly’s later love interest, has a beautiful and powerful voice, which she gets to show off towards the end.

The production values were fantastic, with bright, colorful costumes (designed by Denise Schumaker) that stood out against the darker but still colorful set (designed by Steve Royal). The band (under the direction of Tim Matson) was rocking, and delivered Nate Weida’s score with aplomb. In fact, the only major criticism I have with the show is that the leads were not supported with microphones, so they were sometimes lost in the music and vocal power of the ensemble.

Quite possibly the best thing about The New Hopeville Comics is the message. What begins as a sinister refrain delivered by the villains early on in the show, “Rain On!” becomes a powerful message of hope. With a nod to everything from Rent’s “No Day But Today” to Eric Draven’s “It Can’t Rain All The Time” (from the film The Crow), from 110 Degrees in the Shade to Broadway's Hair, “Rain On!” empowers the disenfranchised to realize that times are hard right now for everyone, and that we need to do the best we can with our circumstances right now. For that we don’t need a super-hero, we just need ourselves. And maybe a little help from our friends.

Speaking of help from our friends, all proceeds from this production will be donated to Fountain House and the SJM Pediatric Transplant Foundation.

Theater as Devotion

The Tidings Brought to Mary is 20th-century French dramatist Paul Claudel’s take on medieval mystery plays, which were based on Biblical readings, and originally performed by clergy until a papal writ in 1210 forbade them and guilds took their place, earning these plays the name “misterium,” Latin for occupation. Within the limitations of this form, Claudel’s poetic language and the cast’s energetic and heartfelt performances make what could be a dull recitation of religious maxims an affecting drama. If The Tidings Brought to Mary sometimes feels like a relic, perhaps its message will appeal to an audience living in a world of turmoil. For Claudel, the solution for a society in which the center does not hold is simple: the center is the cross—redemption and eternal glory through devotion and suffering. Set in 15th-century France on a farm in the Champagne region, the play opens with a moment of tension: Pierre De Craon, the town’s master builder, who is erecting a cathedral, suffers incredible desire for a young peasant girl, Violaine, which impels him to try to rape the girl. She foils his attempt, and it’s after this encounter that we enter the story. De Craon is shaken to the core, unhappy about both his desires and his inability to fulfill them, saying, “What man who loves does not want all he loves?” He believes his impure thoughts have marked him with leprosy (a commonly held conception in medieval Europe), which he conceals by wearing a robe.

Rather than criticize and spurn De Craon, Violaine feels deep compassion for him. She wants to share in his joy and grief, but he is overwhelmed by her empathy and happiness. After they circle each other with increasing tension, Violaine gives herself to Pierre, and kisses the leper, thereby sealing her terrible (here, a good thing) fate. Further complicating the narrative, this forbidden kiss is witnessed by Mara, Violaine’s jealous sister.

As De Craon, Douglas Taurel paces with apt gravity, and in the role of Violaine Erin Beirnard blinks with the innocence of a sacrificial lamb, but it would be nice to see the two actors feed off of each other more. The audience could perhaps then understand the depth of the “cup of sorrow” passed between them. As it is, their relationship seems a bit superficial, a recitation of their roles in society and in the drama. Perhaps with more performances the two actors will achieve a rhythm that will give this first scene the power it requires.

The nocturnal meeting between De Craon and Violaine, and most of the play’s action, take place in a space made to look like a stable. The biblical implications of every arrangement and set piece are thoughtfully executed in the Storm Theatre’s production. In particular, the lighting design stunningly renders the day’s changing light. We are made to feel that the farm’s humble spaces are as filled with God’s presence as a church. At times, the soft lighting can even make certain scenes look like works of religious art. But like a religious painting or icon, there is something stagnant about the play. With Claudel’s archetypal characters and obvious intentions, it’s as though one can only watch this story to satisfy preexisting mores.

Fortunately Mara is there to spice things up, incorporating shame, guilt, and the deviousness of a wicked sister. As Mara, Laura Bozzone flies into the play with exciting fury, and the huffiness and whine of a modern teenager. Such modern touches make the play feel more relevant and vibrant. Jenny D. Green’s performance as Elizabeth Vercors achieves a similar feat: she draws on familiar caricatures of shrewish wives, but also incorporates the self-aware nagging of modern comediennes.

Though Mara’s feistiness is enjoyable, Bozzone’s performance can come across as a one-note song. In particular, her tone in the final scenes calls for more nuance; is Mara truly unchanged?

Still, Mara’s fire makes her more relatable than Violaine, who’s all black and white. In considering Violaine, there’s little to do but marvel that all’s right in the world of the devout. The sinners are more interesting. It would be nice if the production looked more deeply at Mara, who must reconcile conflicting emotions and a confounding miracle. Unfortunately, Claudel avoids complexity, and the character lacks the depth of emotion that makes the complicated women of other plays electric and thought provoking (as in Macbeth).

Yet there is beauty in simplicity. As in many religious stories, good triumphs over evil: Violaine dies happily, her sister realizes the error of her ways, and the prodigal father is restored to his family. This production honors the play’s uncomplicated beauty with an earnest rendering, but one cannot help but hope for gray, like the complicated shade of the silver flower of leprosy, to cast doubt, and give us something to ponder.

With Friends Like These...

Once you’ve earned the right to drive, vote, and drink, the thrill of milestone birthdays is pretty much gone. What’s left, except to bemoan having gotten on in years and to wax nostalgic for the past? As a result, birthday parties tend to be breeding grounds for disaster. Perhaps Anthony, the title character of On the Night of Anthony’s 30th Birthday Party…Again, should have remembered that before lying that he was a year younger than his true age of 31. Anthony may be the title character of the L. Pontius play currently being seen at Manhattan Theatre Source, but he isn’t the most prominent one. In fact, the rest of the ensemble share more stage time than does Andrew Glaszek, who plays the birthday boy.

Pontius’ play follows the farce framework made popular by such playwrights as Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular) and Michael Frayn (Noises Off), albeit with slightly flimsier results. Charlie (Tom Everett Russell) is throwing a surprise birthday fete for his partner, Anthony, in the couple’s new condominium. He has invited their close-knit circle of friends to the event, all of whom have shown up. But while only some have arrived bearing gifts, all have brought along some baggage.

The main plot revolves around Ben (Tyler Hollinger) a free spirit who has decided to run off with his friend Kate (Synge Maher) despite having dated Jenny (Kate Grande) for the last year and a half. Meanwhile, Otis (Carsey Walker Jr.) uses the occasion to nurse his own love jones for Kate as well as a hankering for marijuana. Kate has invited her boss, Max (Brandon Potter), to set her up with single friend Beth (Stephanie Lovell), though he really also harbors a secret crush on his employee. Due to a misunderstanding on Max’s part, he thought that this dress-up event required a costume, and has arrived in full bunny rabbit regalia.

As Anthony devolves into a one-track play that might as well be called Everybody Loves Kate, director Megan Demarest does her best to distract with the usual door-slamming and eavesdropping that befits such works of farce. Unfortunately, Jason Bolen’s set consists solely of the guest bedroom, so instead of one door opening right when another closes, characters have to enter and exit the same bedroom door. The pacing is currently not fluid enough to keep the show running at the appropriate level. There are too many stops and starts, and Anthony’s rhythms are far too choppy.

Aside from Jenny and Max, all of these characters are supposed to be best friends since college. However, Pontius’ determination to have various characters explain aspects of their shared history and personality that other would have already known makes them feel like they know each other far less than they should. Occasionally, it even forces the characters to appear dumbed-down. The skilled Hollinger makes for a charismatic ladies' man, but not even he can sell Ben’s forgetting his engagement to Jenny. How could something like that completely slip one’s mind?

Pontius also fails to mine the characters’ history with one another. If they know secrets about one another, the occasion of Anthony’s party would be an ideal time to unleash them, but this opportunity for drama is lost. Is there a reason, for instance, that Beth hasn’t dated in three years? Or for Otis’ sudden crush on Kate? Or why Ben and Kate were never an official couple? Saying that everyone’s long friendship made Jenny feel excluded lacks a true payoff.

Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of Anthony is the tonal shift between its two acts. Just when one thinks Anthony will remain an off-stage device, the character emerges. Glaszek does an impressive job in the second act, balancing an extended monologue with continued costume and prop bits, but it forces Pontius’ action to come to a halt when it should continue rising to a logical climax. He literally forces the majority of his characters to stand still for the better part of the act. And it is hard to grasp why Anthony is so upset. Did he have a bad day? Is he apprehensive about aging? Does he harbor a secret of his own? Or is he really just irked by the various characters running into the guest bedroom? That reason doesn’t seem weighty enough for the tirade that ensues.

Only some of Demarest’s actors are able to hold their own. Russell is always a hoot as the anal party host. He should have had more to do; Charlie is merely a caricature. If he had been less reactive, he could have been a more bodied character. Lovell is terrific. Her sense of timing and delivery remain spot-on, even when Beth’s scenes begin to feel a tad repetitive. Grande shows a lot of promise, though Pontius doesn’t seem to have much respect for the put-upon character. I wasn’t even sure who to root for in the Ben-Jenny-Kate triangle. Jenny seems too good for both of them. So, in fact, does Max. Hopefully Anthony will opt to go out of town for his next birthday.

Night, Brother

The Love of Brothers plays host to a slew of harrowing subjects in its depiction of complicated fraternity: AIDS, abuse, incest. But perhaps the most jarring thing about this important show is just how many people seem to be missing out on it. Brothers, directed by Andreas Robertz and written by Mario Golden, plays the downstairs theatre of the Theater for the New City, a venue known for championing challenging original works. In that respect, this two-character piece is well-suited for TNC. So why were there only four people at the performance I attended?

I imagine one major reason is the show’s dark subject matter. Rogelio (Mauricio Leyton) and Sergio (Golden) are brothers bonded by the obstacles which they have overcome. Both brothers are gay and share an apartment in San Francisco, but they were born in Mexico City to privileged parents who have since passed away. All was not well, however. Sergio, an aspiring writer, suffered abuse as a child.

Rogelio, meanwhile, suffers both emotionally and physically. Not only has he achieved greater success as an artist (he is a well-received painter), but he also feels guilt for not having prevented his younger brother’s abuse. More immediately, though, is Rogelio’s health. He has AIDS and his body is breaking down as a result of cryptococcal meningitis. He wants to make amends to Sergio for failing to protect him in their youth before he dies.

And so Rogelio announces to Sergio that the end is near. He vows to both stop painting and stop taking his medication, thereby opting to begin the end of his life. This is a devastating declaration, and Leyton delivers it with the appropriate amount of surrender, lacking in self-pity or despair. Golden’s viewpoint is that Rogelio is making an important decision, rather than merely giving up.

Sergio’s reaction is likely to polarize audience members, though. He goes to great lengths in his desperate attempt to convince his brother to choose life. As Brothers continues, Rogelio and Sergio use both art and conversation as a means to excavate the demons of their shared childhood – demons that both pull them together and threaten to tear them apart. To Golden’s credit, Sergio’s choices seem firmly rooted in character, keeping his plot from feeling merely sensational.

This is not unfamiliar terrain. While the motivating factors are different, Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-winning ’night, Mother addresses similar themes. Golden’s play does not quite hit the same grace notes. Brothers is a more protracted play. Some of the dialogue makes scenes feel both redundant and padded. However, Robertz compensates for what the play lacks in poetry with a staging that packs plenty of power.

Both actors deliver fierce, committed performances. Leyton’s work is one of carefully measured dignity and gravitas, while Golden’s work is more effusive; he's a little boy lost. As the characters retreat increasingly from society into each other, the play requires both actors to bare their hearts and souls, which they do to impressive effect. I imagine by show’s end, the two are exhausted. There is a third, nonhuman character to the show. Yanko Bakulic's set is effective as well. The brothers' nicely decorated apartment ultimately serves as a prison for the two of them, hermetically sealing the two of them from the rest of the world.

Robertz’ production is bold and, yes, geared for adult audiences. It isn’t a show for everybody. But four seats filled in the audience? These Brothers deserve more love than that.

Jefferson Migraine

Robert Lyons’ wacky Red-Haired Thomas, currently in production at the Ohio Theatre, is a dark comedy, the script for which specifies that the production should indicate at every opportunity that it occurs in a “dream scape.” Its main character, the superstitious Cliff (Peter Sprague), plays cards for a living and is in the midst of a bad losing streak. Abby (Nicole Raphael), his whip-smart and precocious 12 year-old daughter, tries to root her dad in reality but he keeps slipping away into crises of his own invention. Red-Haired Thomas offers plenty of amusing plot threads, with varying success, and it’s tough keeping up with them all; some will undoubtedly resonate with New Yorkers. In one, Abby is believed by her school to live less than 1.5 miles away, so she only receives a half-fare Metrocard. Cliff tries to instill “principles” in his daughter about fighting for a full-fare card, not just for herself but for all the other unfortunate boys and girls who live 1.49 miles away from their schools. In the midst of their conversation Abby realizes that she and her family live in an illegal sublet. Cliff dismisses her naïveté and his own hypocrisy with one of the script's sharp comic lines: “When you’re a little older I’ll explain New York real estate. Okay?” Later, Cliff, trying to collect quarters for Abby’s bus ride, gets into several heated arguments with Ishtikar (Danny Beiruti), the hardworking owner of the local newspaper shop, who refuses to make change at Cliff’s request.

Cliff also squabbles with Ishtikar over a decorated twenty-dollar bill that Cliff found on the street in a moment symbolically important to him. Inadvertently, he hands the bill over to Ishtikar, who refuses to return it when he discovers its gravity. Ishtikar, an immigrant, wants what the American Cliff has, whatever that entails, and this mildly curious bank note soon takes on tremendous imaginary significance.

And then there’s Thomas Jefferson, or his ghost, who, battling chronic headaches, observes everything and emerges throughout the play to instill principles of his own into the characters and the audience. Here, we find that the play may also be a multi-layered allegory, suddenly laden with symbolism, taking on the relationship of the United States with the Muslim world, America’s economic decline and its exploitation of other cultures. Cliff’s wife, Marissa (Danielle Skraastad) is an executive who tries to persuade corporations to invest in the region that includes Iftikharstan, reducing her pitch to a corporate jingle and a cheesy PowerPoint presentation. No wonder Jefferson has migraines.

Cliff, according to Marissa, has become a bore. Passionless, he’s lost his game, his swagger, his zest for life. He needs to become that American cowboy again, a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, shoot-from-the-hip winner. Deep down, though, Cliff also knows he needs to regain his principles. Cliff, in a way, is America, gambling with his future, suddenly under-confident, grasping, having uncharacteristically fallen on hard times. He’s physically exhausted, spiritually diminished, angry and seeking his moral center.

It turns out that both Cliff and Ishtikar are, at least symbolically, sons of Jefferson, and, yes, brothers. Ishtikar is dismayed that the world, and particularly America, know or care nothing of his country, Iftikharstan, currently being overrun by radical Muslim invaders, similar to the Taliban. Ishtikar is trying to live the American dream, saving money so that his wife and daughter immigrate to the United States. Cliff and Ishtikar represent former and present freedom fighters, persecuted resisters of tyranny. Jefferson alludes to the fact that some American Revolutionary War soldiers committed atrocities in the pursuit of freedom. Later Ishtikar mentions that he has committed similar deeds, of necessity.

I’m not entirely sure that all of the actors are on board with the absurdity and multi-faceted nature of the premise; they should adopt more of the script’s silliness into their roles. Though technically proficient, Mr. Sprague never truly inhabits the swaggering but insecure Cliff (is that name symbolic?), teetering on the brink of financial and emotional destruction.

Yet, Alan Benditt as Thomas Jefferson is terrific, with a natural understanding of his role. Jefferson doesn’t come out smelling like a rose, however; he shows flashes of racism (calling the Irish immigrants of his own time “micks”) and seethes contempt for Hamilton. It's a treat to hear Benditt humanize this mighty mythic icon, lacing his defense of the Bill of Rights and his principles with comedic jabs at his old foe, Hamilton. Oliver Butler’s direction is solid, utilizing the abundantly spacious theater in imaginative ways.

Red-Haired Thomas is a frequently pleasant but sometimes slight topical romp through the mind of Mr. Lyons. You may alternate, like I did, between thinking you understand it all and thinking it’s all a clever red herring. In the end, though, you can’t help but think that you have been uniquely entertained.

Nightmare Scenarios

Two men in grim, adjacent cells talk to each other through prison walls. They have been incarcerated for years and are repeatedly tortured for information—or rather, initially for information, but now pointlessly, as a distraction to their tormentors. The men in this Kafkaesque nightmare are named Valdez and Wallace. Wallace calls Valdez “Mr. Valdez,” but Valdez is more casual and uses “Wallace.” To pass the time, they speculate on what they don’t know—The Unseen of the title. Dramatist Craig Wright’s Kafkaesque situation invites some comparison with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, whose characters also wait in uncertainty and near despair for some resolution to their fate. The Unseen is bleak but not depressing, and it feels especially timely and universal in Lisa Denman's taut, riveting production. The men might be in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or any number of hellholes around the world. Their names, too, suggest a breadth of places the action might be occurring. "Valdez" calls to mind a banana republic; "Wallace" might be American or British, of which neither nationality has escaped accusations of torture in the struggles with Iraq and the IRA, respectively; and their guard, Smeija, has a distinctly Slavic name that summons up the brutality in the Balkans in the 1990s.

To pass the time, Wallace and Valdez exchange words in shorthand about their torture: “Trips to the sink, making knots … twice, the whole drooling gang…” Wright leaves it to the listener to surmise the specifics of the horrors they endure. The men play an old game that starts “I went to the ocean and took…,” and they list various objects whose names must be in alphabetical order. They speculate on whether the prison layout is irregular or not. “We don’t know the structures or rules,” says a worried Valdez. “We don’t know the grand design.” (His point is skillfully demonstrated by Sarah Brown in her asymmetrical set.)

Wallace moves objects on the floor of his cell—saucers and a piece of chalk and other objects—in a pattern that only he understands. Suddenly he announces that they must escape that day, that all the signs point to its being their only chance. But a visit from the hulking, black-masked thug Smeija, nicknamed “Smash,” reveals that Wallace’s sanity hangs on a thin thread.

Smash is not only a guard but one of their torturers, and Wright indulges in pitch-black humor as Smash (played with frustration and intensity by Thomas Ward) complains that he’s been too nice to them and is being punished with double duty on his birthday. Wallace tries to butter him up—“We’re here for you”—but it doesn’t work. “All you people think about are yourselves,” fumes their anguished inquisitor. “No one with a heart is safe around you people.”

Steven Pounders as Wallace captures his character's suspicion and confidence, with a streak of arrogance; he’s not sure that Valdez isn’t a spy. Valdez (Stan Denman) has opposite qualities: he is more upbeat and hopeful, certain that someone is in the adjoining cell and aching to make contact. He’s open enough to admit that his captors don’t trust him because they think he lies—even though his admission jeopardizes Wallace’s trust in him.

As time passes, Valdez exhibits his own delusions with a theory of a vast array of tunnels under the earth with the entry points in graveyards that is just as chilling as the moment that Wallace accidentally learns that his hope of escape is built on an illusion.

Both actors, superb in their roles, seem to have done their own makeup just as superbly. They look like victims of brutal beatings, with scars, welts and bruises disfiguring their bodies; costumer Carl Booker’s torn and shredding clothing matches their skill.

Although the physical action is limited, Wright’s dialogue takes up the slack with unexpected lyricism, from the story of a button that Valdez’s mother has taught him, to Smash’s gruesome descriptions of what he has done to a prisoner. And his ending suggests, hopefully, that somehow humanity can never be extinguished, that an unseen spark survives even in the most inhumane circumstances. The play may be short, but it packs a wallop.

Poet to Poet

“This is a world of books gone flat./ This is a Jew in a newspaper hat” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in 1950. Based on her visits to Ezra Pound during his institutionalization in a mental hospital, Visits to St. Elizabeth’s provided inspiration to contemporary writer Hayley Heaton, whose new play The Man in the Newspaper Hat serves as the inaugural production of theater company ManyTracks. The Man in the Newspaper Hat imagines the exchanges between the two great poets that served as the inspiration for Bishop’s poem. Found unfit to stand trial on charges of treason for a series of pro-Axis radio broadcasts he’d completed in Italy during World War II, Pound spent fifteen years at St. Elizabeth’s (dubbed “The House of Bedlam” in Bishop’s poem) in Washington D.C. During her tenure as poetry consultant for the Library of Congress (a position akin to today's Poet Laureate), Bishop visited Pound on a number of occasions and penned Visits to St. Elizabeth’s in response. What might the celebrated poets have talked about? In Heaton’s dramatic realization, they discuss Shakespeare, how various objects (cologne, a watch, an artichoke) are and are not like poems, and Pound’s culpability.

Meredith Neal’s thoughtful costume design dresses Pound in loose clothing, with a shirt that he undoes to appear at his most crazy and, ironically, free. In contrast, Bishop wears dress suits and tailored pants. It’s a nice reflection of their respective styles of writing; Pound privileged musical rhythms over strict metered phrasing, while Bishop compulsively edited her constrained verse. For the script to achieve its heights of dramatic power, we need the actors to move beyond the poets' smart surfaces to reveal traces of the brilliance that marks their work: the discipline girding Pound’s wild aesthetic and the fervor underscoring Bishop’s rigidity.

Under the light direction of ManyTracks founder Katrin Hilbe, the play never reaches its intended heights. Angus Hepburn's Pound rails against the state of the world, alternately playful and enraged, while Anne Fizzard’s Bishop functions mostly as an expository device with which to explore Pound’s flamboyant eccentricities, not as a complex character in her own right. As a result, what could have been a fraught interrogation of artistic and political ideologies between two of the most influential literary minds of the last century fails to fully develop.

Heaton doesn’t sugarcoat her material; expository voiceovers at the opening of the play contain grossly anti-Semitic excerpts from Pound’s broadcasts. Yet Hepburn picks up on the poet's warmth (Pound was a fiercely generous advocate of his peers' artistry) and resists reducing the character to ether inflammatory zealot or lovable lunatic. That's in keeping with the poem on which the play is based, which attributes a number of idiosyncratic adjectives to its complicated subject.

For her part, Fizzard’s Bishop is a patient, sensible woman who does her best to tolerate the senior poets’ cantankerousness. It’s plausible that Bishop, who eschewed confessional poetry, came across in person as reserved if blandly kind, but it makes a dull play. A more dynamic take would not be hard to imagine; like Pound, Bishop was not only a formidable poet but a fascinating person. Following her tenure with the Library of Congress, she would take a two-week trip to Brazil and stay fifteen years. Such surprising, determined behavior is wholly absent from the Bishop of the play, who equivocates in front of the elder, controversial poet without ever indicating her own quiet intensity. The result is scenework that feels at best static and at worst lopsided.

Production notes stress that the The Man in the Newspaper Hat is a dramatic imagination of real-life events rather than a historic account. That’s rendered most clear by Elisha Schaefer’s set design, which intertwines the real and the surreal to effect both the imagined world of the production and the uncertain psychic space of a mental hospital that sets both characters on edge.

For all of their dissimilarities, the historic figures of Pound and Bishop share more than great prominence in the American poetic landscape. Both writers would live in multiple foreign countries (she primarily in the Americas; he in Europe) and in unconventional romantic relationships (she with a woman; he with two). Yet unlike Bishop’s patent insistence on personal privacy, Pound lived loud and publicly, literally broadcasting his beliefs. With greater directorial awareness of dramatic tension, that disparity could have informed the play in ways that extend beyond Pound's pontifications and Bishop's reluctant criticism of him. As it stands, the richest suggestion of what transpired between the poets is Bishop's poem on which the play is based. Fizzard's recitation of it at the close of the play is the production's most revelatory moment.

The Unreal World

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t fully understand The Nerve Tank’s A Gathering. Even its director, Melanie S. Armer, didn’t understand Chance D. Muehleck’s text when she first read it: “Because I couldn’t make sense of this piece, I put it aside.” Many of us react similarly, sometimes in a knee-jerk fashion, to dense experimental texts, but we shouldn’t; they are often outstanding, thought-provoking pieces, and Mr. Muehleck’s A Gathering is among them. Forget about time, space and plot; they don’t exist — at least as we know them – in A Gathering, which is billed as a “metaphysical thriller,” and has been significantly expanded from an earlier 10-minute version. Not much can be said with absolute certainty, but it is safe to say that Bantam, Fuller and Alaska, the play’s characters (or “personas,” as Mr. Muehleck calls them) are anxiety-riddled, disembodied entities stuck, at least for the time being, with each other, recalling the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.

We first meet these personas in what may be the remnants of a house, largely destroyed by some unseen force which they fear may return. Together, they may be/have been involved in some petty criminal enterprise, but it’s unclear, as is whether Fuller may have committed a murder before the play begins. In A Gathering gender and ages are blurred. Bantam, a man over 50, is played by a woman less than 40 years of age. Alaska, a 16-year old female persona, who may or may not have died as an infant, is played by a man in his 30s.

When we meet them, Alaska is trying to recall the contents of the house’s rooms. Her success in this endeavor appears to be a matter crucial to the continued existence of these personas. The three personalities desperately attempt to reconstruct, from memory, the contents of the room, the house, their former reality. They are caught somewhere between time and space, disrupted by an unseen force, searching for some kind of salvation.

The text, relying on its audience to form a gestalt from the mosaic it presents, is not looking to be understood like a traditional narrative. The personas interact and separate, again and again, sometimes subjecting each other to supernatural abuse and ultimately spinning off, as whatever “reality” had been holding them together disintegrates, into tormented fountains of individual language.

At 3,600 square feet, The Brooklyn Lyceum may well be the most cavernous Off-Off Broadway venue in New York City. A former municipal bathhouse, the structure is a century old with an interior ideal for sound designer Stephan Moore’s far off echoes, water sounds and assorted rumblings. Its concrete, brick and twisted metal core offers the characters space to perform some very physical gyrations as expressions of distress. Brian Barefoot as Fuller is particularly athletic and nimble. He jogs up one staircase, plunges down another, and slides across the floor, all the while hiding from the unseen threat and confronting Alaska, whom he mistrusts but to whom he is also attracted.

Because these curious entities appear to retain human characteristics such as hunger and libido, the confusion builds. Are they people? Ghosts perhaps? Are they in something like hell? In the end, you stop wondering and try to focus on the language of the personas, individually and as they interact with each other, and even with the audience.

A Gathering is a bold, exciting work that pushes and frequently explodes the boundaries of conventional theater. It won’t be for everyone, but if you enjoy intrepid, brash new work, you’ll find this production to be greater than the sum of its parts.

This Figaro/Figaro Hits a Few Flat Notes

When the name Figaro is invoked, it usually conjures images of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s magnificent opera The Marriage of Figaro, with its plush sets, sumptuous costumes, and powerful voices raised in song. The (re:) Directions Theatre Company’s production of Eric Overmyer’s Figaro/Figaro keeps the costumes, the names, and a dash of Mozart's music, but there is little else to recommend it to the discriminating theater-goer's eye. Billed as “the New York premiere of Eric Overmeyer’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro and Odon von Horvath’s Figaro Gets a Divorce,” this more-than-a-mouthful is about as exciting as it sounds. When presenting adaptations of two different but connected plays as a single evening’s entertainment, a word of advice: make the second one shorter than the first. This can make the night more bearable. In the case of this production, there is not much else that could make it so. The actors did the best job they could on their shaky, very unsolid-seeming set, designed by Jack Blacketer. For the most part youthful and full of enthusiasm, they just could not overcome the inadequacies of Overmeyer's clunky, humorless script and Erin Smiley's stolid, unimaginative direction. The blocking was elementary and mechanical, with actors moving through their paces as if they had been told where to go, having no apparent objective other than that they had to keep moving. The set was symmetrically designed, but not in a good way; rather, it smacked of a lack of inspiration on the part of the designer, or a lack of resources on the part of the company. If it was indeed lack of resources, which is certainly believable in today’s economic climate, then the set was simply too ambitious, and could have used more of a minimalist touch. As it was, it featured four flimsy, evenly spaced arches that looked like they would topple over at the slightest touch, and a cut-out of majestic mountains in the background that did little or nothing to add to the ambience of the show, as well as a set of squeaky steps leading from the mainstage to a narrow upper level. There did not appear to be any rhyme or reason for where characters made entrances and exits, and having a split-level set seemed a sad waste when the upper level could not be worked into the show in a meaningful way, with the exception of a somewhat interesting tableau in the second half of the show.

Some of the performances were quite good, given the limitations imposed on the actors. Ralph Petrarca as the Count Almaviva was particularly interesting, having to rise above the shallow, womanizing stereotype of the first half of the play to become somewhat sympathetic in the second. Likewise, Gillian Wiggin as Figaro’s wife Susanna practically carried the first half of the show on her capable shoulders; unfortunately, as the play continued, she too succumbed to the onerousness of the direction (or lack of) and to the troublesome script. The rest of the company, while enthusiastic, for the most part just seemed to be making the best of a poor situation, happy to keep their heads above water when they could.

If there was any redeeming value to this production, it was in the costume design by David Withrow. The costumes were bright and colorful in the first act, giving way to more muted tones in the darker second act. They were well suited to both the actors and the characters, and were a welcome breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale production.

(re:) Directions means well. Unfamiliar with their earlier work, I hope this production is atypical and not an indication of the possibilities they may deliver in future works.

The Wonderfulness of Helplessness

A woman is buried to her waist in a pile of dirt. A bright blue painted sky stretches behind her and the sun constantly beats down upon her. She is awoken by piped in buzzing sounds. Though stuck in the mud and controlled by unseen forces, she seems quite okay with her situation and proceeds to go about her day to day routine. Reaching into a tote bag, she pulls out an unusually long toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Much time is spent attempting to read the writing etched into the handle of the toothbrush but to not much avail. The woman, Winnie, forgets what she has deciphered once she has deciphered it. Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days makes no attempt to explain why Winnie is buried the way she is. It is this lack of explanation, prevalent throughout his work, which makes Beckett a challenging figure and why his plays are tricky to produce. People want explanations, but like life itself, Beckett offers none. The play is often looked at as a comment on the human condition: a true expression of the absurd. We have no idea why we are here, might as well ramble on about it, might as well accept the circumstances as they are (even if that means sinking into a pile of earth). And yet, although the play comments on the human condition, Winnie’s experience is so far removed from what a typical person would experience that it is difficult to relate to her. Furthermore, Beckett’s stream of consciousness style occasionally goes in and out of one’s ears, with occasional phrases burrowing deep into the brain but with the majority leaking back out again.

Here would be where quality directorial choices and a strong performer would come into play. The goal is to make all the words stick, to engage the audience through the magic of theater. Intentional Theater’s production is almost completely able to make the play engaging and relatable. The show makes use of Beckett's production notebook from a 1979 performance in London. Winnie's mound is the same but the props are a real standout. They are surrealistic, elongated forms. Winnie’s mirror is about 2 inches wide yet has at least a foot-long handle. Her sun shade is a not very wide, crocheted parasol, a visual reminder of its uselessness against the constant sun. The deformed props highlight the futility of her condition. She can't read the toothbrush; she can barely use it to brush her teeth.

One occasionally feels sympathy for Winnie, as she tells stories from the past, as she calls out desperately to Willie, her husband, who lives in a hole behind the mound of earth. All that is seen of Willie, for the most part, is the back of his head and his papier mache boater hat. Asta Hansen brings a vulnerability to the role of Winnie that is quite appropriate, but occasionally the actor breaks character. There was a very audible line prompter hidden under the mound at the reviewed performance, and, suddenly, Winnie’s pauses were simply an actor forgetting her lines rather than an artistic choice.

Beckett is bleak. And yet, for that, each of his plays has some element of physical comedy, perhaps because comedy finds its base in sadness. Winnie digging through her props is one element of this. So is Willie's toying with his hankerchief and boater. Unlike Winnie, Willie is free to move about, and his flopping and climbing lighten the proceedings considerably. An accurate depiction of the frustrations and struggles of life, Happy Days is a must-see for anyone who has ever questioned their existence and then paused to smile about it.

On a Mountain, Gazing Upwards

There’s no lack of ambition in This Beautiful City, the latest work of documentary theater by The Civilians. Narrating the farcical downfall of evangelical preacher Ted Haggard and its impact on the Colorado Springs community, the work features thirteen musical numbers, a cast of six actors playing more than fifteen characters, and as many individual story arcs. The work certainly offers a rich palette of viewpoints, but by the time it reaches the frantic worship scenes of its second act, exhaustion sets in. This Beautiful City is based on a series of interviews conducted by writers Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, along with five of its cast members, in the Colorado Springs area. And despite being punctuated by energetic musical numbers, these true stories are mostly presented as monologues that place the audience in the role of the interviewer. The characters—ranging from evangelical pastors and liberal activists to a teenage girl, a transsexual woman, a local mother and the son of Ted Haggard—frequently make this relationship explicit. “Did you have trouble finding here?” one character asks. “Is there a particular slant you’d like to put?” another says, gazing at the audience.

The setup recalls other successful works of journalism-based theater (Culture Project’s Iraq-based monologue play, In Conflict, recently took a similar approach) and juxtaposes nicely with the show’s musical theater elements. On several occasions, two characters present contrasting monologues while sitting on their respective sides of the stage, thus creating a stylized variation of a political debate.

Because the show’s creators directly quote real-life individuals, This Beautiful City is notably ambiguous in its satirical moments—and in its moral message. Excerpts from Ted Haggard’s actual emails and the use of terms like "strategic prayer" generate laughs, but the work never slips into outward mockery. If anything, it appears to be too concerned with presenting each and every side of a community built on idealistic extremes. The lineup of character introductions feels endless at points, and despite the strong performances, makes it difficult for the audience to feel genuine attachment to any particular character.

If its script could benefit from a series of edits, the show’s visuals are nothing short of flawless. The backdrop of the stage is a small town viewed from above, in which clusters of rectangular rooftops are contrasted by small patches of green. Throughout the show, these roofs serve as canvases for projected images and bright neon lights. As we hear a cast member read an email from Haggard, for example, we simultaneously see photographs of him, slyly grinning, on these rectangles. As the scene progresses, the photos are replaced by white, lowercase words on blue screens. Recalling words from his letters, they display words like “God” and “trust.” A large, unmarked area above the town is also carefully utilized. At points, it depicts looming rain clouds; during others, it shows a range of snow-capped Colorado mountains. From the looks of it, set designer Neil Patel (who also crafted [title of show]), lighting designer David Weiner and projection designer Jason Thompson played well together.

The six actors, each of whom takes on multiple characters throughout the production, are talented enough to not let the visual spectacle dictate their performances. Their notable vocal skills not only allow them to achieve crisp, ringing harmonies in the show’s musical numbers, but lend themselves to intense, terrifying prayer scenes.

Stephen Plunkett, who channels the straight-laced magnetism of a guitar-toting youth minister and later the quiet disbelief of Haggard’s son Marcus, is a notable standout along with Emily Ackerman, who creates some of the show’s most gut-wrenching moments as both a transgendered woman and a local church member with a self-destructive past. Brad Heberlee makes an equally impressive transition from playing an associate pastor at New Life megachurch to portraying a gay rights activist. Watching their focused performances, one becomes particularly aware of the rambling feel of the script; had the writers featured a smaller cast of characters and slipped into fewer detours with park rangers and prayer groups, this alluring work could have delivered a more focused punch.

Deathbed Confessions

Frank McGuinness's new play about two gay men who founded an Irish theater company is rooted in fact: His models are Irish actor Micheál MacLiammóir and his partner, the director Hilton Edwards, who started Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1928 and lived together openly in a country where their relationship was considered criminal. Gates of Gold feels like a tribute to the two men from the openly gay playwright, but it’s a strange one. The characters are a group of dysfunctional eccentrics who indulge in emotional and verbal abuse, often confusingly. The theater is given scant attention in favor of a domestic drama that tries to rival much better plays about thorny love-hate relationships, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Indeed, McGuinness has changed the names, which suggests that he has taken artistic license either to exaggerate or subdue the personality of MacLiammóir (who played Iago in Orson Welles’s film of Othello and followed it with a noted memoir).

The play opens with an interview: Conrad, the partner of Gabriel, a dying, middle-aged actor, warns a new nurse, Alma (Kathleen McNenny), that the patient will be difficult—he has driven away numerous nurses. Gabriel (Martin Rayner), afflicted with bowel cancer and a heart aneurysm, may die of either, but he is dying painfully. Pumped full of morphine, Gabriel is waspish and vain; he puts on makeup that includes lipstick and powder. “He is not a fool,” Conrad warns Alma, “but he is a liar.”

Alma takes the job anyway. When she tries to learn about him, Gabriel feeds her stories of growing up in Salamanca, the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest and an Irish woman studying abroad. Within moments he has reconstituted the tale: his mother was an acrobat with a traveling circus in Buenos Aires when she met his father, an Argentine rancher, on whose farm he was raised. This sort of whimsicality is amusing for a bit, but the flood of blarney soon becomes irritating, and director Kent Paul's production never makes a case for why these characters are important.

Gabriel bickers with the unflappable Conrad (a ramrod-straight Charles Shaw Robinson, nattily dressed by Nanzi Adzima) and accuses him of infidelity with Gabriel’s handsome, troubled nephew, Ryan (Seth Numrich). “Why should he consent to sleep with you?” he muses to Conrad, voicing his suspicions about Ryan. “Is he into necrophilia?” Rayner doesn’t flinch from the nastiness in the character, and skillfully creates a monstre sacré. (He also possesses a voice just as plummy as that of MacLiammóir, who can be heard as the narrator of the bawdy 1963 Oscar-winner, Tom Jones.)

As Gabriel comes to terms with death and his family, Ryan and his mother, Kassie (Diane Ciesla), visit. Gabriel’s sister is herself a tale-spinner who claims to have been a world-class poker player known in Las Vegas as Sylvia. She shares the Argentina chimera, but also makes up her own superstitions: “That’s the kind of us as a family,” she tells Alma. “Always inventive. Always different.” This relentless flood of turbid reminiscences makes the truth hard to grasp, however, and when a crucial piece of the family history is uncovered it beggars belief. For his part, Conrad denies he has ever betrayed Gabriel, although the truth looks a good deal more complicated when he and Ryan kiss.

For added kicks, Gabriel tosses digs at Kathleen McNenny’s anguished, bottled-up Alma, who labors under the guilt her parents placed on her after her twin brother was killed in a car accident and she survived.

McGuinness’s point may be that people forced to live a lie eventually can’t distinguish the truth. Their lives turn rancid. “It is sometimes best to be rid of people,” Gabriel tells Alma. “You can never been too ruthless.” But the perversity of Gabriel’s behavior diminishes one’s sympathy for him. “I have never done anything but lie to you,” he tells Robinson's long-suffering Conrad in one of their vaguely sadomasochistic games. “You believed me.” An audience will have quickly learned not to.

Puppets without Masters

When the curtain rises in the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s production of The Historye of Queen Esther, King Ahasverus and of the Haughty Haman, four magnificently tall and colorful puppets dominate the stage. The puppets, like their human actor counterparts, are large-scale representations of the play’s main characters, and throughout the show echo the stage action like extended shadows. Unfortunately, these puppets are the most exciting aspect of the show, an awkward and lackluster take on an incredibly dated piece of 18th-century folk theater. A hit on the traveling marionette show circuit in the 1700s, The Historye of Queen Esther is based on the Bible’s Book of Esther. In the biblical telling, King Ahasverus of Persia holds a contest to name a new queen after his wife, Vashti, refuses an order to display her beauty for the King’s guests. The winner of this contest is Esther, a gorgeous young Persian woman who happens to be of Jewish descent, a fact she hides from the king, as advised by her stepfather Mordechai. Sitting near the palace gate one day, Mordechai overhears two royal attendants plot to kill the King. He reports their treachery, and they are executed. Mordechai’s respect for the King, however, does not extend to his prime minister, the haughty Haman. When Mordechai refuses to bow before him, Haman vows to kill him and obliterate his people, the Jews. Fortunately, the King learns of Mordechai’s honorable deed and vows to reward him, foiling Haman’s efforts. This leads Esther to reveal her true heritage, and the King amends Haman’s decree against the Jews, allowing them to defend themselves against persecution. He also orders Haman’s execution.

Incorporating stock comical characters, goofy word play, and distractingly loud instrumental accompaniment, the Czech Marionette Theatre’s take on this story is only slightly more chipper, retaining much of the content and structure of the Biblical version. Though the play ends on a happy note, with comeuppances to its villains, it isn’t really a show for kids, as it’s promoted to be. In addition to the on-stage hangings and Jew-hating, some of the verbal jokes involve advanced vocabulary that kids won’t understand, and punning that will make adults cringe. This is a shame, as children are likely the only ones to get much out of such a farce.

With children in mind, the play attempts to demonstrate a moral involving the danger of haughtiness, but it’s clear that the bigger issue is bigotry. The overwrought attempt to harvest a moral is just one problem. Whereas the moralizing is an oversimplification, the dialogue is a complication of a simple story. Theresa Linniham’s performance as Kasparkek (the Punch of the Czech version of Punch and Judy) is a welcome relief from the plodding tone. Though clumsy wordplay sometimes overshadows her skills at accents and clowning, she uses every opportunity to showcase her talents as a vaudevillian. Unfortunately, some of the other actors do not share her fluidness and eagerness to entertain, which further weighs the play down.

Though the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre is known for its post-modern approach to puppetry, which involves the obvious presence of the puppet master, they do not use this style to their benefit here, and the actors are upstaged by marvelously clever-looking marionettes. Created by Jakub Krejci, Michelle Beshaw and Emily Wilson, the cast of puppets is widely varied and incorporates odd instruments to delightful, surprising effect. Some have chalkboards or violins for chests, plungers for legs, hammers for arms, dazzling beads for a bosom—all of which relate to the personalities of the characters in witty ways. It’s a pleasure to see a new puppet enter the spotlight, but, sadly, this satisfaction wears off once the puppet begins to speak.

Perhaps The Historye of Queen Esther is doomed by its dreary source material to be a heavy-handed attempt at dealing with the complicated historical attitude toward Jews, but one can’t help but wish that the Czech Marionette Theatre group applied the innovation that produced its puppets to the live performance. Whereas the plunger and hammer limbs of the marionettes move with grace, the human actors are stiff and dull. If a carpenter like Geppetto could work his magic on this show, maybe the wood and the flesh would work together in greater harmony, and the material wouldn’t seem so ancient.

The Old New Wave

The idea occurs to me, while sitting in Richard Foreman’s jam-packed Ontological-Hysteric Theater (OHT), that he invites his viewers to experience the feeling that we are temporarily visiting from another planet. Not that we are mere Earthlings viewing a bunch of aliens before us, but instead we are given the alien’s-eye view of what the human experience might be like, without any known symbols, narrative language, or familiar archetypes of character. It might all be quite specific, but it seems deliciously up for interpretation, or maybe even post-interpretation, since whatever remainders are left can be absorbed organically, without any sense of linear story at all. And yet, the human experience often is the story, of course, always as informed by one’s own personal experiences. In the case of Astronome: A Night at the Opera, now playing through April 5th, Foreman collaborates with composer John Zorn, whose noise-metal score only furthers this experience. Zorn, a fixture in the downtown NYC music scene since the mid-1970s, creates his music from his experience in a variety of genres, including jazz, rock, classical, and klezmer. With pre-recorded tracks of loud, hardcore music with a guttural kind of gibberish language (including many bodily function-type sounds), the accompaniment sounds exactly right supplementing Foreman’s work. It seems to naturally follow the same process of breaking down into smaller parts, recreating, and attempting to express those things that cannot be named, operating almost as its own interior monologue. In this practice, both non-traditionalists merge raucously here. And despite having earplugs given out with the programs (unnecessary in my case), the moments in between musical tracks did lend an even greater intensity to the silences.

If you are an OHT veteran, you will probably appreciate this new juxtaposition of sounds, along with a few of the more familiar voice-from-above-overs provided by the writer/director himself. But for those new to Foreman, you must experience his particular artistic vision, participate in the brilliant collaborative process being offered, and possibly test your own (innate or learned?) needs for a linear narrative. Or better yet, simply approach with an open mind.

For your viewing pleasure, you are rewarded with a black, red, and green multi-level set design and a layered light scheme, inhabited by a kind of giant totem embedded on one side, attended by six semi-veiled players: Deborah Wallace, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, Fulya Peker, Karl Allen, Eric Magnus, and Benjamin Forster. Decked out in black nose pieces, fezzes, and a kind of peasant-punk garb, they could emanate from any cultural origin or era, past, present or future. On the other side of the stage, a green-faced rock ’n rolla, played viscerally by Jamie Peterson, is separated into his own Plexiglas-protected chamber, complete with glory hole. This is a departure from the usual clear set piece separating the stage from the audience, and it’s interesting conceptually while also making the theater space feel more open. And maybe also more vulnerable. With lighting designed by Foreman and engineered by Miranda Hardy, the full house lights have never seemed quite so bright as they shine unexpectedly, or when a captivating green spotlight beckons.

The movements of the ensemble are carefully choreographed as they move through various configurations and behaviors, occasionally stopping to pose, according to some operating system of their own, sometimes robotically or otherwise involuntarily. The skilled performers often enact a kind of voraciousness, from filling up the hungry orifices of the overseeing face in the wall, but also sexually, toward a variety of inanimate objects or each other, especially when a strawberry headpiece is donned by one, and then devoured by another. The gold-chained ogre rages, while dummies and snake-like creatures with shrunken heads are alternatively abused and revered. From above, another figure resembling the Hanged Man tarot card is suspended upside-down, further suggesting ritualistic or magic themes.

The set is strewn with interrupted sequences of random Hebrew and English letters, a bejeweled Torah-shaped wooden panel is carried in and out, a blackboard is repeatedly erased, unintelligible signs and symbols are dropped from above, as the characters stomp on blank-paged books. Even the brief spoken lines express the inadequacy or futility of the written word, and maybe of all language itself, likely due to its intractable human component. One of the few spoken lines in the piece demonstrates this, garnering laughs: “Hiiii. I believe every thing that comes out of a human being’s mouth.”

All of the elements work tightly together, perhaps like the gears inside the grandfather clock we see paraded around, even though it’s stuck at straight-up 12:00. All the while a large pendulum swings almost threateningly back and forth, as a multitude of props and tools are utilized, including giant salt and pepper shakers, lacy hot pink bras, scissors large and small, bullhorns, and ping-pong paddles. Meghan Buchanan, the props engineer and costumer, must have been quite a busy lady indeed.