pt at large

Lungs: A Relationship, A Baby, and Global Warming

Lungs, a play by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary
The Black Box Theater
The New Repertory Theatre in residence at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Watertown, MA
February 17-March 10, 2013
March 5, 2013

No matter what the New Rep Theatre attempts in their Black Box Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, it’s likely to be entertaining, challenging, off -the-wall, unfocused, non main-stream, creative, meandering – often all within the same play. Lungs, a play by British playwright Duncan Macmillan is a case in point.

Within a long stretch of 90 minutes, Macmillan takes on global warming, overpopulation fueled by both irresponsible and planned parenthood, the burden of bringing a child into a world teeming with social and ecological ills, the toll on a relationship of raising a child, and the entire cycle of one specific relationship.

Advertised as a comedy, it feels more like a psychodrama with some really funny lines. The play blasts out of the gate with M (Nael Nacer) floating the idea of making a baby with W his live in girlfriend (Liz Hayes).

W, who happens to be writing a PhD about global warming, is wired like a human pinball machine. Wildly conflicted about the prospect, she goes into hyperdrive, rattling off non-sequiturs, one-liners citing alarming ecological statistics and mugs ferociously.

Nacer as M, offers gravity, calm reassurance, reasoned arguments while managing to check his own ambiguity about becoming a father. (Note: if couples went through this kind of dialogue before deciding to have a child, there would be about one billion fewer people on the planet.)

Hayes is really good as a stream of consciousness woman who scatters facts and figures like a blunderbuss about the fragile state of the planet  and piles her ambivalent feelings about motherhood on top like so many jimmies.

Nacer, as M, can’t say much without setting W off on a tear about small scale personal responsibility of bringing a child into the world and the larger picture of a planet teetering on the brink with diminishing resources and an uncertain future for the generation about to be born.

The scenario is not far-fetched but the random way Macmillan throws in statistics about carbon footprints, a world awash in waste, in the midst of whether the couple should bring a baby into the world feels like driving a square peg into a round hole, more of an erudite filler than an axis upon which to build a hefty element of the play’s theme, which resonates with the angst and conflicting beliefs a man and woman bring to a modern relationship.

Their riffs about the kinds of people popping out platoons of children before they’re of voting age are delightfully non-PC thoughts that liberals might harbor but these two say then feel guilty about. Interspersed with these riffs are their ideas on whether smart people procreate or whether good people create babies knowing they’re adding stress to the planet’s fragile reserves.

The tiny Black Box Theater’s 12’x12’ square stage, surrounded with audience on both sides and center, with its honey oak finish becomes their world. Subtle changes in lighting and illumination of a design suggesting tree roots behind translucent drapery behind the set is all the actors need to portray work, home, a park, a nightclub, even a taxi on the way to the hospital when W’s contractions increase.

Through dialogue and subtle gestures, Nacer and Hayes follow playwright Macmillan’s story line to perfection as the playwright cleverly charts this couple’s relationship from its inception to its demise and beyond.

We hear about the divide between M and W’s parents, the ups and downs of M’s career, W’s commitment to the planet, the breathing exercises used in childbirth, the fading romance, M's infidelity, their separate paths, children (“They grow up, start buying their own clothes, leave home and hate you,” W says.) and a touching scene from their final years. Nacer and Hayes are at their best as they portray, in a matter of seconds, the changing intersections of their lives.

Nacer’s M is steady, gutty and layered. Hayes is great at acting as a very smart neurotic time bomb in nearly every scene but during ninety minutes the role gets stuck in the same mold. A judicious trimming of dialogue would help. Perhaps director Bridget Kathleen O’Leary could have suggested some throttling back or signs of growth that would have given W more dimension.

"Lungs" breathes life into two very complicated, very modern characters.

Photos by Andrew Brilliant/ Brilliant Pictures

Ch’ing-lish, A Smart Comedy by David Henry Hwang

Ch’ing-lish,  A Play by David Henry Hwang

The Lyric  Stage Company
140 Clarendon Street
Boston, MA
Through December 23, 2012

Barlow Adamson* as Daniel Cavanaugh; Alexander Platt* as Peter Timms;
Tiffany Chen as Miss Qian/Prosecutor Li; Michael Tow as Cai Guoliang
;Celeste Oliva* as Xi Yan; Chen Tang* as Bing/Judge Xu; Geming
Liz Eng as Zhao
*Denotes member of Actor's Equity Association.

Directed by Larry Coen; Scenic Design, Dahlia Al-Habieli; Costume Design, Emily Woods Hogue;
 Lighting Design, Matt Whiton;
 Sound Design, Arshan Gailus; 
Projection Design, Garrett Herzig; 
Production Stage Manager, Nerys Powell;
 Assistant Stage Manager, Sarah Morrison; 
Properties, Dahlia Al-Habieli; 
Language Coach, Gail Wang



Globalization has taken root in Boston with the Lyric Stage Company's production of Ch’ing-lish written by David Henry Hwang. “This is the best-selling play in the Lyric Stage’s history,” the house manager announced to a full house in her pre-play remarks.

Tell me a time half the play you’ve watched was in Chinese. And that the captions for the actors’ Chinese lines were translated in an electronic crawl on a screen across the top of the stage. And that four of the seven actors were Chinese. And the playwright was Asian-American. And that you enjoyed the heck out of it.

You want sociology, moral dilemmas, geo-politics, cultural collisions, history, a love story, juicy humor, fine acting? Ch’ing-lish had it all… a comedy of manners that made you laugh and think at the same time.

David Cavanaugh, an American businessman (Barlow Adamson) from Cleveland, visits the city of Guiyang, China in search of a contract for his sign company. He hires Alexander Platt, a wily ex-pat British professor (Peter Timms) with impeccable Chinese and a score to settle to act as his translator. 

Minister Xi Yan and businessman Daniel Cavanaugh/Photo by Mark S. Howard

Midwesterner Cavanaugh has no clue about his host's culture. His social skills are earnest but sophomoric. While trying to make deals with Minister Cai Guoliang (Michael Tow), and his wife, Vice Minister Xi Yan (Celeste Oliva), he steps on one cultural landmine after another. His attempts at learning Chinese phrases are wonderfully and unintentionally comic. Cavanaugh is embarrassingly American.

Cavanaugh’s stereotypes of the Chinese are matched by revelatory ones (spoken in Chinese, which Cavanaugh doesn’t understand but we read as captions on the screen over the stage) by the Minister, his wife; and Translator/Prosecutor Li (Tiffany Chen) have of Americans - evil, rude, without culture. The results are often hilarious and refreshingly non-PC. They represent obstacles both sides have to perceive before any business, or friendship, can be forged.

There are few cultural chasms as deep as that between America and China. The character of Cavanaugh as a sign maker eager to improve the signage in this Chinese city is a perfect vehicle for playwright Hwang to use humorous language to illustrate mutual distrust and insular ignorance, each culture believing it is superior to the other. A sign for a bathroom for the handicapped in the Beijing Airport reads “Deformed Man’s Toilet.”

Cavanaugh will have his work cut out for him if he can persuade the Minister to award him the contract for signage for the new Arts Center. In the meantime, the Minister is looking to further his own career with his choice.

The love story that unexpectedly blooms in the second act demonstrates the gulf between how the cultures view and value love and marriage. The conflict between Cavanaugh and Xi Yan gives us a chance to contemplate which culture more effectively manages the moral terrain when marriage falters.

The play is a sandbox for its set, lighting, and sound designers. The set, exquisitely evocative of a Chinese office/restaurant/hotel, is cleverly rearranged between scenes. The sophisticated light design directs your eyes and sets mood. It takes a few minutes to get accustomed to multi tasking: watch the captions floating across a screen above the stage, the facial expressions of the actors, register whether you’re listening to English or Chinese, and try to figure out the plot, which is a story inside a story inside a story. It can get confusing, and that’s the point.

Peter Timms as Alexander Platt and Michael Tow as Minister Cai Guoliang  deliver solid performances as men who have their own interests in mind. Barlow Anderson is a wonderful study - a slap-on-the-back, glad-handing businessman trying to recover his dignity after being involved in a spectacular scandal in the USA that he tries to hide. When he desperately reveals it because he believes the deal has collapsed, it ends up elevating his status with the Chinese officials. (Go figure.)

Celeste Oliva as Xi Yan is a joy to watch. Using expressive hand gestures, comic timing, body language, shrewd business acumen, and a deep understanding of China’s moral code, she’s the lynchpin of the story. Her moral compass is what ultimately helps Barlow’s Cavanaugh to find his true north.

Director Larry Coen has a firm grip on what playwright Hwang is up to. His actors have worked with language coaches to master dialogue.  The play’s conclusion is a little too tidy but so be it. Chinese-American relations can use a little  optimism.

Asians represent the fastest growing population in Boston. There were more Asians in the audience tonight than I’ve seen in ten years of attending plays in Boston. For years, theater companies have met with limited success at reaching out to minorities. Whether Ch’ing-lish is a one hit wonder or a trend remains to be seen. Either way, the Lyric Stage Company has taken a bold step forward.

"Holiday Memories": Capote's Reminiscences Warm The Heart

"Holiday Memories" by Truman Capote
Staged version of two of Capote’s short stories by Russell Vendenbroucke: told in two parts
Directed by Michael Hammond
New Repertory Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Charles and Mosessian Theater
December 10, 2012, runs through December 23, 2012

Jon Savage, scenic designer, Molly Trainer, costume designer,Chris Brusberg, lighting designer,
Edward Young, sound designer, Amelia Gossett, properties designer,Christine Lomaka, production stage manager

Sentimentally rendered stories and the name Truman Capote aren’t usually associated with each other but in the New Rep Theatre’s production of “Holiday Memories” they fuse together like incense and myrrh. The entire production, from set to costume to music to lighting is a gem of anecdotal story telling and theatrical execution.

Capote’s two short stories, A Thanksgiving Visitor 1967 and Christmas Memories 1956 are set in the Depression era rural Alabama household of distant relatives into which Buddy’s (young Truman’s) wayward mother has deposited him like a summer hat that’s gone out of fashion.

Truman Capote’s evocative prose can describe the depths of torment caused by a schoolyard bully, the redemptive power of friendship, and the ability of imagination to sustain life in impoverished circumstances. It’s a warm reminiscence of his two years in a mildly dysfunctional household in rural Alabama before Capote became everything you can read about in Wikipedia.

Whether you have your own softly burnished memories of the holidays that you’d like to have rekindled or you’d like to borrow these two gently told tales, you’re in for a treat.

You don’t have to dive into the theater program to grasp what is transpiring in the two acts. Plain and simple, it’s the story of a loving intergenerational friendship that transforms the lives of Buddy, Michael John Ciszewski playing the role of a 7 year old Truman Capote, and Miss Sook, his sixty year old distant cousin, played by Adrianne Krstansky.

Marc Carver, as the 35 year-old Capote, and young Buddy take turns telling bits of the Capote’s short stories directly to the audience. Woven between are scenes enacted by Buddy, Miss Sook and three other members of the cast who play minor roles of the bully, a local moonshiner and the other relatives who share living in this household.

Buddy, dressed in knickers, and Sook, in her sack of a brown housedress keep their southern accents steady throughout the show. Truman, impeccably dressed in a tailored navy suit, shows how much distance he put between himself and his southern heritage with his polished urban English.

The Thanksgiving Visitor (Act 1) is based on Capote’s experience of being bullied at school by a larger and older boy. Sook has the indomitable ability to strain their hardscrabble life through a sieve that allows only the good parts to pass through and willfully ignores the hurtful parts that remain. Her solution is to create a friendship between the boys by inviting the bully and his family to Thanksgiving dinner. The results are powerful and unexpected.  Sook’s declaration to Buddy at the end of A Thanksgiving Visitor is holiday lesson number one: "You know what the one unforgivable sin is, Buddy? Deliberate cruelty."

The second act, Christmas Memories, is a worth the price of admission all by itself. It’s centered on what Sook calls “Fruitcake Season” in which she enthusiastically enrolls Buddy to help her make 31 fruitcakes. "Fruitcake fuels the heart, it's fruitcake weather!" she shouts.

They don’t have two pennies to rub together. Through narration, we learn that they spent months organizing little events for which they can charge a penny a ticket. Their late night meetings to count their coins show that uneducated Sook has trouble with her figures but no trouble persisting until she’s accumulated enough money to purchase ingredients for her cakes.

Director Michael Hammond pulls out all the stops when he stages Sook and Buddy’s excursions to the local moonshiner Mr. Ha Ha to buy liquor for her fruitcakes and a foray into the woods to chop down, drag home and decorate an enormous Christmas tree with home made ornaments. The two endearing scenes come across as tenderly acted tone poems choreographed and performed with joyous simplicity, augmented with music and wonderful hand colored pen and ink drawings projected on the screen deep behind the stage.

Whether or not Sook’s kindness and generosity became models for Capote’s future behavior is doubtful but they certainly touch us as she describes her list of recipients.  Besides the obvious donations to friends and relatives, she is way ahead of the curve in her random acts of kindness. One goes to a couple from out of state who got lost and showed up at the house earlier in the year, one goes to a neighbor who’s fallen on hard times, one goes to a shopkeeper who is lenient with credit, and one is wrapped up in brown paper and sent to President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt (who reportedly send her a thank you letter).

Throughout the play, the director and the actors do so much with so little, just the way Capote remembers himself and Sook in this gauzily recollected holiday season.
Marc Carver and Michael John Ciszewski as the older and younger Truman Capote give solid performances but the heart of the cast is Adrianne Krstansky as Sook. With words and gestures, she strikes a delicate balance between her eternally childlike outlook and the homespun practicality and wisdom of a self-sufficient country woman.

The warmly lit set features two tall honey-colored hewn wood panels on each side of the stage that serve as beds, cupboards, windows, coatracks, even a piano.  A screen centered behind the set is used to project hand-colored pen and ink sketches or to cast characters in silhouette. Rarely do the elements of a set add so significantly to the arc of a play.

Sook’s dream of buying Buddy a bicycle for Christmas remains just that. The final scene of the two of them flying the kites (projected on the screen) they made for each other is wistfully brilliant.

“It’s hard enough not to get what you want for Christmas, Buddy. Even harder than that is not being able to give someone what they really want,” Sook says to Buddy in final scene.

Sook is a simple woman who never lost a childlike ability to squeeze joy from the corners of everyday life. Without her influence, it’s hard to see how Buddy, a ‘sissy’ and an odd loner, would have survived anywhere, let alone rural Alabama.

Photo: Andrew Brilliant Photography

Chesapeake - Art? Arf!

Chesapeake
A Play by Lee Blessing
New Rep Theatre
Arsenal Center For The Arts, Black Box Theater
November 29, 2012

Runs through December 16, 2012
Performance schedule: Wednesday and Thursday evenings at 7:30; Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:-00; Saturday afternoons at 3:00; Sundays at 2:00. There will also be a Tuesday evening performance on Dec. 11 at 7:30 p.m. 

Tickets cost $36, general admission. Students, seniors, and groups of 10 or more receive discounts. Tickets and more information available online at www.newrep.org or via the box office phone at 617-923-8487.

Chesapeake. Art. Arfff.

There are enough ideas in this two- hour one actress play to make your brain feel like it's living on a treadmill.  The main conceit is so off-the-wall – and delightful – that it would be a sin to tell you about it right now. Suffice it to say, the play is about a man and his dog, politics, the nature of relationships, sex, artistic drive, dogs, religion, performance art, private versus public lives of politicians, dogs, personal fulfillment, dogs, and redemption.

Originally written by Lee Blessing in 1999, the year in which a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a yellow liquid (urine) ignited a firestorm in the Christian right, it is also a stark raving manifesto for public support of the arts by the National Endowment For the Arts, which had awarded a grant to the artist who created this photograph.

To be candid, you need to have patience and stamina to stay with the opening hour. The first long act is a set up for Act Two, with Kerr the artist dishing out several story lines that sail around like Frisbees. The humor is cerebral and we keep wondering where it's going and when it's going to get there.

Kerr is a deliciously right-brained and driven artist whose destiny is to perform.She’s the kind of actress who says, " Performances that don't run the risk of jail time are a failure." She’s a possessed performance artist whose artistic sensibility is based on the scholarly readings she recites to us with the fervor of Angela Davis dressed as a kooky Harvard Square hippie in the 60s. With seductive and seditious glee, Kerr describes her earthy habit of inviting the audience to remove her clothing during her performances whilst she reads The Song of Solomon, 117 specifically lusty verses in the Old Testament.

Enter Throm Pooley (sounds a lot like Strom You-Know-Who) a South Carolina Congressman running for Senate, who condemns Kerr’s performance art as pornography, and stirs up enough conservative righteousness to be elected. Kerr’s revenge is a cockamamie scheme to kidnap Pooley's beloved dog, which was prominently used in his anti-pornography political ads.

When the playwright hollers "fetch" at the weird beginning of act two, we dive right in with the vitality of a Chesapeake retriever with a duck in sight, an allusion you’ll understand once you wrap your head around what Lee Blessing s up to.

Aside from its astute political and philosophical ruminations, the real reason to see this play is to watch Georgia Lyman at work. Big boned and tall, with a luxurious mane of thick auburn hair tumbling over her broad shoulders, she inhabits her several roles with the determination and single mindedness of Rover racing after the bone you’ve just chucked.

Lyman uses the 12' x 12' raised wooden platform in the midst of U shaped theater configuration as her playground – a stage, a lush sprawling lawn, the Chesapeake Bay, a senator’s study, the scene of a car chase, among other bits. Her easy physicality in one of her key roles has the immediacy of a big, galumphing, resilient, love-me–right-now dog. One difference that barks to differ is that dogs aren’t usually involved in deliberations about the value of art, the nature of politics, and the nature of love and loyalty.

You wouldn't believe me if I told you the trajectory of Lee blessings second act, you'll just have to see it to believe it. The result is a satisfying night at the theater, a  night when your imagination and your intellect have been exercised and your belief in the goodness of human – and canine – nature has been vindicated.

Photo by Christopher McKenzie Photography

 

"Race" - A play by David Mamet

"Race" A play by David Mamet
New Rep Theatre Company
The Arsenal Center for the Arts
Mosesian Theater
321 Arsenal Street
Watertown, MA 02472

October 14-November 4, 2012

This David Mamet play might make your head explode. Billed as a comedy, it’s more like a forced march into territory not directly addressed in polite conversation.  A white man accused of raping a black woman hires a law firm of two lawyers, one black, one white, and one black female associate, to defend him.  Race and sex: Mamet’s got all the ingredients for a provocative story in his pot – then he lights up the fire.

“Race is the most incendiary topic in our history,” the white lawyer says. No headline there but what happens over the play’s 80 minutes is some of the bluntest talk about race that you’re likely to hear on a mainstream stage.
 
“Do black people hate white people?”

Lines like that - and the black lawyer’s answer to the white lawyer’s question - are hammers that nail down Mamet’s belief that shame, guilt and lies shape any communication between white people talking to black people about race. 

The cast is up to the task of delivering Mamet’s rapid-fire lines with the range of emotions required to make them feel authentic. The lines often have the subtlety of an anvil with a point to make but Ken Cheeseman as white lawyer Jack Lawson; Miranda Craigswell as newly hired associate Susan (no last name); Cliff Odle as the black lawyer Henry Brown; and Patrick Shea as the white defendant Charles Strickland play well off each other.

The dialogue Mamet puts in his character’s mouths makes us think about our own deeply held beliefs about race, the ones that lurk under our public pronouncements. Mamet’s use of silence adds to the squirm quotient.

When one of the lawyers asks the client a question about a sensitive subject, say, why a white man would want to have sex with a black woman, it’s not only the client he’s asking. It’s every man in the audience. The flustered client clams up, then tries to offer a scrubbed version of his truth but the two lawyers get him to admit the stereotyped belief he’s too self-conscious to acknowledge.

Mamet’s heavy hand is at work when Lawson says, “It’s not beliefs were talking about, it’s the perception of beliefs.”  It’s no surprise when Lawson and Brown think of ways to exploit those perceptions in their arguments in front of a jury. Near the play’s final minutes, a scene between Lawson and Susan twists the plot to show Mamet's construct of perceived beliefs blacks have of whites.

Required reading, whether you see the play or not, is David Mamet’s 2009 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/theater/13mame.html?_r=0

One excerpt:

I have never spent much time thinking about the themes of my plays, as, I have noticed, when an audience begins to talk about the play’s theme, it means the plot was no good. But my current play does have a theme, and that theme is race and the lies we tell each other on the subject.

Chris Rock, in his last tour, addressed the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and asked, rhetorically and on behalf of the whites in the audience: Is it possible that a 70-year-old black man hates the whites? Let me enlighten you. You cannot find a 70-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.

 There has always been, at the very least, a little bit of hate between blacks and whites in this country, with each side, in its turn, taking advantage of its political strength (as who does not?). But that relationship is also perhaps like a marriage. Both sides at different times are bitching, and both at different times are bailing, but we’re all in the same boat.

We are bound to each other, as are all Americans. Bound though subdivided, not only by race, but by religion, politics, age, region and culture. And we not only seem to be but are working it out.

The play’s most powerful moment is its quietest. “I’ve done great harm to a friend and never knew it,” defendant Charles Strickland says of a male black friend in a moment of self-revelation. Whether he is convicted or not, Strickland's worldview has been transformed. He is, as Mamet writes,  “working it out.”

Final observation: I saw half dozen black people in the near capacity audience of the 340-seat Charles Mosesian Theater. Why weren’t there more? Perhaps they don’t have to attend a theater performance to be told what they already know about race.

Photo courtesy of Boston Globe, Andrew Brilliant - left to right, Cheeseman, Craigswell, Odle, Shea

Satchmo At The Waldorf: Louis Armstrong Revisited

Satchmo At The Waldorf
August 29, 2012
Tina Packer Playhouse
70 Kemble St.
Lenox, Massachusetts
http://www.shakespeare.org

The chances a kid like Louis Armstrong could succeed in life were one in a million. Satchmo at the Waldorf, Terry Teachout’s one man play at the Tina Packer Playhouse in Lenox, MA, packs Armstrong’s story into a theater experience as layered as one of Louis Armstrong’s blazing trumpet solos.

Following the trajectory of Armstrong’s life is like watching a shorthand version of the history of jazz and race relations in the twentieth century. It’s the story of a man with indomitable spirit, an incandescent talent for connecting with people through his music, and a man with an ego robust enough to shed the criticism and humiliation he endured on his way to becoming a man known around the world by one name: Satchmo.

The fact that Terry Teachout manages to compress Armstrong’s story into a one-act play is a feat as dazzling as one of Satchmo’s famous solos. Steeped in research including Armstrong’s letters, interviews with people close to him, news stories, and especially a trove of tape recordings Armstrong made, Teachout paints a narrative with a broad brush to illustrate the pivotal events in Armstrong’s life and a fine line pilot pen to sketch insights that reveal the heart of the man. Teachout transforms an icon into a man who rose to fame using his talent, good luck, and a forgiving nature.

How in the hell did Louis Armstrong end up in the Waldorf Astoria in March 1971, not only playing his last gig there but staying in a luxury suite with his wife Lucille to boot? Just like Joe “King” Oliver made a good choice by asking young Louis Armstrong to leave New Orleans and join him to play in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago, Teachout and director Gordon Edelstein made a good choice by casting John Douglas Thompson to tell Armstrong’s story.

The first moments of the play are jarring. There is Louis Armstrong standing in a tuxedo with a red bow tie and holding an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

“I shit myself tonight,” he says in his first line. “Something stinks here, (his wife) Lucille said in the elevator tonight. Here I am a 70-year-old man messing myself at the Waldorf.

Not many plays have the gumption to explode an icon in the first line of the performance.

“Here I am playing for the rich white folk and I shit myself. Had to give up dope, no salt in my food, troubles with my heart, kidneys, back….” he trails on.

The stooped man moves slowly, with effort, to a tape recorder, plays a cut from the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band in which he first gained notice, begins to muse about how his manager Joe Glaser has died, how he used to drink fancy wines and travel all over the world living the life...and that now people say he's lost his chops.

“Everybody knew me. I've had 4 wives - one whore, one piano player, and two chorus girls. I’ve played with Bing Crosby, been on Ed Sullivan, been around the world. I loved folks and they loved me. Where did it all go?”

John Douglas Thompson plays Armstrong from the inside out. From the first scene, Thompson’s tall and muscular frame assumes the persona of the smaller, portly Armstrong. And when Thompson flashes the iconic Satchmo smile, all straight white teeth and klieg light intensity, there is Louis right in front of us.

Through Armstrong’s reminiscences and tape recordings, we learn of his growing up fatherless and in extreme poverty in New Orleans, his two years in reform school where he got his first cornet, his persistence in playing trumpet, being hired to play with bands in New Orleans, then Chicago, his marriages along the way, his troubles with the mob, his association with manager Joe Glaser, his encounters with racism ("What you got for Pops?" he’d say as he went into a hotel’s back door to find food for him and his band, the same hotel he’d been hired to play at but not stay at), his anger at Governor Orville Faubus in the 1957 desegregation crisis and President Eisenhower’s slow response to it.

For all his technical brilliance, Armstrong had no talent for business or self-promotion. After the first boost from wife number two, who convinced him to leave King Oliver and hired him to be in her band in New York, advertising him to be the world’s greatest trumpet player, and dressing to look the part, his connection with a Chicago lawyer with shady connections to the mob became his ticket to success.

This may be heretical to say but Louis Armstrong would not have become a household name without his manager Joe Glaser. The idea for Thompson to play a dual role as Glaser is brilliant – the play wouldn’t work without that touch.

We’re caught off guard the first time the house lights dim and shine a solitary spot on Thompson’s face. He utterly transforms himself into Joe Glaser, a shrewd, fast talking, tight lipped, calculating business man whose primary concern is the bottom line. Glaser understood how the race factor works in the music business. Thompson nails him right down to his cigar chomping Chicago accent.

Playwright Terry Teachout handles race head on. “My friend Black Benny gave me advice way back. ‘White men like you, find one to take care of your business, he can say, this is my nigger.’” Armstrong says. That’s exactly what happened.

“Joe Glaser saved my ass,” Louis says, then tells us how he arranged the tours, paid the band, paid Armstrong’s bills, and bailed him out of jail a few times. He also had Satchmo on the road as many as 300 times a year.

For all his fame, or maybe because of it, Armstrong no longer played for a black audience. “I go on stage to make people happy, but I see no spades. The audience looks like a carton of eggs out there,” he says. But he knew he had a style unmatched and unrivaled by any other trumpet player.

In the performance I attended, Teachout added a section in which Armstrong plays a haughty Miles Davis who calls Satchmo an Uncle Tom, and worse, says he’s an untutored musician. “I study,” Davis sniffs.

“When I play there are no wrong notes. My solos tell a story, like a moving picture, things I feel come right out of me, maybe I remember some sad man I saw the corner when I’m leaving a gig, it all comes out,” Armstrong says, then turns on the tape recorder to play a solo that smokes with  fierce, passionate improvisatory skill.

“Study that!” Armstrong shouts at the top of his lungs.The audience roars with gusto.

“No one has a heart like Louis Armstrong. People love you, they want to be you,” Glaser tells Armstrong. And through Armstrong and Glazer’s narratives it’s clear that there was a bond of love, often tested, between the two men. A revelation about a part of their business partnership that crushed Armstrong is revealed in the final scenes of the play.

Despite the bitter taste of race relations for most of Armstrong’s life, he never became stuck in the past, always looked forward to the next day with a forgiving heart. And played his heart out every time he set foot on stage.

Photo: Cavanaugh for Boston Globe

"Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom": Powerful Drama Set in 1927 Resonates Today

"Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom"
A play by August Wilson
Director Liesl Tommy; Scenic and Costume Designer Clint Ramos; Lighting Designer Marcus Doshi; Original Music, Sound Design, and Music Direction Broken Chord; Production Stage Manager Leslie Sears; Stage Manager Kevin Robert Fitzpatrick

Boston University Huntington Theater
264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA
Running time 2 hr, 45 minutes with one 15 minute intermission
Play runs through Sunday April 8 at 2 PM.

The scourge of racism might be America’s original sin. Playwright August Wilson (1945 - 2005) spent a lifetime writing plays about the African American experience. It’s as complex a story as you’ll find in American history.

After writing "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom," Wilson realized he’d written plays set in three different decades. In the 1980s he decided to write a play for the rest of the decades of the twentieth century. The plays are known as The Pittsburgh Cycle. Having a white father but raised by his black mother, he grew up in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood in which nine of the ten plays in the cycle take place. When he writes about threats and hostility it’s not academic, he’s lived it.

"Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" boils over with the themes that become the hallmarks of August Wilson’s dramas: hopes and aspirations of black Americans set within a social and racial framework that stack the odds against them.

By 1927, the Great Migration is well underway. Millions of black Americans have moved north to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence. It’s clear after the first few minutes of "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" that Chicago doesn’t hold out the welcome mat for them.

Unless they could sing or dance or play music.  The music industry is the lens Wilson uses to drill down to racial disparity of the 1920s.  "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" takes place in a dingy recording studio in Chicago. It’s clear from the start that Ma's agent Irvin and record producer Sturdyvant are parasites. Ma Rainey and her musicians are their cash cows, useful for as long as they can milk them.

Slow Drag (Glenn Turner),Levee
(Jason Bowen),Toledo (Charles Weldon),Cutler (G. Valmont Thomas) Photo T. Charles Erickson

Irvin and Sturdyvant realize that black musicians in South Chicago are creating the most innovative music in town. The big band music in North Chicago is pure white. In segregated Chicago, they won't share a stage with Ma Rainey or her black musicians but have no trouble copying (polite word for steal) arrangements they hear when they flock to after-hours joints on the South side.

The three-tier set at the Huntington Theater is a perfect metaphor for the times. At the left of the stage, a steep stairway leads to the office in which recordings are controlled. Half the left side of the stage is set as the recording studio, a tier below that on the right side is the rehearsal room in which the musicians practice. Top to bottom, that pretty much explains how power is distributed in the 1920s.

Ma Rainey’s band has shown up at 1 PM to record a new song. Ma, the famous Blues singer and diva of the first order, is late. Most of the play’s action takes place in the rehearsal room. While waiting for Ma to show up, the four musicians in Rainey’s band tell stories, argue, and engage in one-up-man-ship.  

Wilson sets up a brilliant dialectic between young and ambitious trumpeter Levee and piano player Toledo, a generation older. It sounds like a conversation Wilson is having with himself to illuminate the nascent sense of possibilities in which blacks can make their own way in a white society and the reasons why that’s not going to happen.

Wilson’s ear for dialogue is unrelentingly authentic. He wants to capture a moment in time. There is not one whiff of PC language here and plenty of candid talk about the cruelties the characters have experienced at the hands of white people. Toledo's philosophizing about the nature of race and the place of blacks in a white society is eccentrically incisive and at odds with Levee's confidence that his new jazz-oriented arrangements will get him fame and fortune.  

Their experience of discrimination and the means the characters devise to survive it act as a bond to link them together no matter what their politics. The exchanges between Levee and Toledo will echo in your mind long after the play ends.

The casting of Levee (Jason Bowen), Toledo (Charles Weldon), and Ma Rainey (Yvette Freeman) is especially strong.  Everyone else – Ma Rainey’s white agent Irvin (Will Lebow), record company owner Sturdyvant (Thomas Derrah), Ma’s musicians Cutler (G. Valmont Thomas), Slow Drag (Glenn Turner), Ma’s nephew Sylvester (Corey Allen), Ma’s girlfriend Dussie Mae (Joniece Abbott-Pratt), and white Policeman (Timothy John Smith) pulls his or her weight with vigor.

The play barrels with the momentum of freight train into its unexpected final scene. The white people in the audience get a version of history not captured in school books as Wilson starts working out how race relations got to the 1980s from the 1920s.

Bakersfield Mist: A Collision of Class and Values

Bakersfield Mist
A National New Play Network 
Rolling World Premiere
A comedy-drama by Stephen Sachs, directed by Jeff Zinn
A co-production with 
Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater

New Repertory Theatre
Black Box Theater
Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal St.
Watertown, MA 02472
(617) 923-0100
Feb. 26- extended run to March 25

Jiyoun Chang (set Design), Anne Miggins (costume Design), John Malinowski (lighting design), Nathan Leigh (sound design), and Nick Dorr and Mary Fritz (prop design) Phill Madore (stage manager)


Jackson Pollock was one of the most gifted, or crazy, artists to have emerged in the 1950s. He’s the artist who laid his huge canvases on the ground and dripped paint over them, or scrawled paint around with sticks, dry brushes, trowels, or his bare hands. Many viewers think his non-representational, abstract art is junk. His canvases hang in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are worth millions.

Bakersfield Mist, beginning its run at the New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, tackles the theme of the value of art and the stature of people who judge it with the same vigor as Pollock created his paintings.For 75 minutes, the play hurtles, pauses, lurches, then settles into a satisfyingly ambiguous finale.

Maude Gutman (Paula Langton) learns that a painting she picked up at a thrift store might be an undiscovered work by Jackson Pollock.  Through fierce determination, the unemployed bartender convinces a foundation to send Lionel Percy (Ken Cheeseman), a distinguished expert from Manhattan, to come to her woebegone trailer park in Bakersfield, California, to authenticate the painting. What’s really cool is that the play is based on a true story. What’s also cool is that Langton and Cheeseman play their roles to the hilt.

With gestures, mannerisms, and facial expressions, Langton and Cheeseman are perfect foils. Tall and lean in his dark, tailored suit, Percy’s hauteur exudes New York entitlement. Gutman, in jeans she nervously hikes up during exchanges with Percy, appears mildly disheveled in her loud faux leopard skin top, likely from a thrift store, and in need of a nip of Jack Daniels.

Photo Andrew Brilliant

Gutman, whose trailer is filled with oddball items she’s collected over the years, throws F-bombs around like a trucker with attitude. Percy’s soaring rhetoric, on display as he cites his credentials to Gutman, makes it clear he’s not accustomed to being chauffeured to a shabby trailer park in the boonies to assess a painting he’s probably written off as a fake long before he enters her trailer.

Watching Percy try to find a clean place to sit for the first few minutes is hilarious. The gap in social class between these two characters is as wide as the Grand Canyon. Champagne vs. Jack Daniels.  Brie vs. Velveeta. Country vs. Bach, it’s a cultural steeplechase.

Gutman is not the crackpot that Percy first believes her to be.  As uneducated as she is, she has used her resources to learn details about Percy that he omitted in the comically self-aggrandizing resume he recites to her.

The dialogue crackles. About halfway through the 75 minute one act play, it becomes clear that the power of money is not the only driving force that motivates these two. Being “right” about the provenance of the painting is important. But so is determining the value of something you love, whether it hangs in the Met or on the dingy wall of a trailer in Bakersfield.

Percy has made one big mistake in his career as an authenticator. He doesn’t want to make another.  The stakes are higher in a trailer park. With a right call, he could become a hero. With the wrong call, he could become a laughingstock. No matter what call he makes, there will be controversy.

Gutman, all to aware of her trailer trash status, needs the painting to be authentic not so much to become rich as to ‘be somebody.’

The set design acts as a third character. Jammed with items that look like cast off yard sale stuff to outsiders, it is an extension of Maude Gutman’s personality and her value system. It isn’t a loft in SoHo but Maude can tell you where every item came from. She collects on the basis of her intuition and she trusts it. Can Percy say the same thing?

In judging whether this painting is a Pollock or a fake, Percy has to make a leap of faith, knowledge guided by intuition, that Gutman’s painting is the real deal. Can he make the leap?

There are a couple of times the jousting between the two characters lags but it’s more than compensated for by the nagging questions that still beg to be answered. What makes a piece of art valuable, and who determines that? What does ownership of a valuable piece of art say about the social class of the owner?

The uncertainties aren’t neatly resolved by the play’s end but there’s no question that Langton and Cheeseman have done a bang up job showing us a collision of class and culture.

Superior Donuts: Not Perfect, But Satisfying Production at Lyric Stage

SUPERIOR DONUTS
Play by Tracy Letts
Directed by: Spiro Veloudos. Set, Matthew Whiton. Lights, Shawn Boyle. Costumes, Mallory Frers.
At: Lyric Stage Company of Boston, through Feb. 4. Tickets: $27-$60.
617-585-5678


"Superior Donuts" is a drama that connects an older man’s secret sense of shame with a younger man’s salvation from the path of crime and poverty that plagues inner city youth.

Chicago is a tough, turf-oriented, multi-racial, multi-cultural city, raw with racism, conscious and unconscious, and huge cultural divides. All of it shows up during business hours in Superior Donuts.

With nine characters sharing the stage, there are several stories spooling out at the same time but the central one is of that Arthur Przybyszewski (Will Lebow), owner of Superior Donuts, a store he’s worked in since his father collapsed and died behind its counter years ago.

Art is divorced, lonely, and burdened with the shame of the cowardice that was at the root of his resistance to the draft in the Vietnam War. He has closed himself off from the world.  After a slow start, Act One gets off the ground like a Roman candle when 21 year-old Franco Wicks (Omar Robinson) shows up in the family donut shop.

It takes time to see that the brash, creative ways Franco tells Art to improve his business are real, not a way to hustle or con him. Omar’s rapid-fire monologues about white people are Richard Pryor Lite, delivered with observation, not malice, and disarmingly funny. It’s his way of connecting with Art and testing him. It also offers a counterpoint to the racism of Max Tarasov (Steven Barkhimer), the Russian entrepreneur who owns the shop next door. Max wants to expand. Art won't sell.

The play establishes its first beachhead when Franco tells Art he’s written a novel. “America Will Be,” the “next great American novel.” When Art wins a bet by naming ten black America poets, Franco has to let him read it. A voracious reader, Art is impressed.

Will Lebow (left), as store owner Arthur, and Omar Robinson, as young assistant Franco, in Lyric Stage Company’s “Superior Donuts.’’ (Mark S. Howard)

It’s not clear where the play is going until the last minutes of Act One in which a loan shark shows up in Art’s store. Franco is in serious arrears with a debt from a bad betting habit. It is clear his safety is going to be at risk.

The play lags from time to time. The introduction of Officer James Bailey (De’Lon Grant) and Officer Randy Osteen (Karen McDonald) in the play’s opening moments permits playwright Letts to pursue the topic of racism and present a possible love interest to Art, whose lame social skills are tutored by Franco.

Letts telegraphs where the action in the second act is heading but the resolution is touching nevertheless. The interaction between Art and Osteen is sometimes distracting. Karen McDonald's (Officer Osteen) effort to introduce humor in her character comes across more as caricature than character. De’Lon Grant as Officer James Bailey is plausible as a caring young black cop and Max Tarasov’s (Steven Barkhimer) racism is more comical than corrosive. Will Lebow, a riveting force on any stage, allows himself to disappear in the role of Art, which makes the interplay and the rest of the cast more grounded. Robinson's strong performance is the thread that holds the play together.

Art, introverted by his sense of shame, has long given up on feeling connected to others. Franco’s persistence in showing up at work, trying to learn how to make a tasty donut, and the questions he asks Art about his past, give Art a reason to face his demons once and for all. The last touching scene shows that Art's choice to stand up for Franco might be the catalyst to motivate Franco to overcome the odds and rise above his environment.

++++
Afterword
I don’t profess to have broad knowledge of the Boston theater scene but I’ve seen more African-American actors perform at The Lyric Stage than any other theater in the past two years (Superior Donuts, Lady Day Sings The Blues, Broke-Ology, for example). Applause to Producing Artistic Director Spiro Veloudos for offering more roles to black actors.  Boston’s next challenge is to draw more African-Americans into the theaters. A production like Superior Donuts is a start.

God of Carnage: Civilized Adults Acting Very Badly

GOD OF CARNAGE
Play by Yasmina Reza.
Translated from French by Christopher Hampton.
Directed by Daniel Goldstein.
Sets, Dane Laffrey. Lights, Tyler Micoleau. Costumes, Charles Schoonmaker. Sound, Brett R. Jarvis.
Presented by Huntington Theatre Company at Boston University Theatre, through Feb. 5. Tickets start at $25.

God of Carnage indeed.

The verbal carnage waged at this play at the Huntington Theater leaves the battlefield on stage littered with walking wounded, smashed roses, art books, and one soggy cell phone that is a veritable fifth character.  

Two couples meet to discuss a fracas between their two pre-teen sons. Their “civil conversation” devolves into a shoot out that is funny, sad, and raw. If their parenting skills are anything like their social skills, we wonder how their kids will reach voting age without requiring therapy for the rest of their lives.

As in French playwright Yasmina Reza’s other play running at the New Repertory Theatre, both "God of Carnage" and "ART" dissect the underpinnings of the relationships of the characters involved. Watching both plays is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know there will be wreckage. The only question is will there be any survivors and how will the the experience change their lives.

The Vesuvial emotional outpourings are rip roaringly over the top. They feel like a textbook rendering of the unspoken tensions, withholdings, uneasy truces, compromises, or downright antipathies that underlie outwardly healthy relationships. Think about every petty, snarky, or possibly hurtful thing you’ve ever felt like saying to a significant other and add about 50 decibels.

We are used to watching movies and sitcoms where characters rip each other to the sound of a laugh track. The difference here is that underlying much of the humor is dark stuff, the repressed thoughts that sooner or later will strangle a relationship. In “God of Carnage”, it all comes up unexpectedly, like vomit.  Be forewarned.

Michael Novak (Stephen Bogardus),Alan Raleigh (Brooks Ashmanskas),Annette Raleigh (Christy Pusz),Veronica Novak (Johanna Day) T. Charles Erickson photo

This is the kind of explosive theater that could make the disturbances in our own relationships feel less draining. If not, "God of Carnage" would be an excellent jump-start for a couples weekend intended to clear the air.

Veronica Novak (Johanna Day), Michael Novak (Stephen Bogardus), Alan Raleigh (Brooks Ashmanskas), and Annette Raleigh (Christy Pusz) play their roles with gusto. Day and Bogardus are standouts. Reza has said that she writes with her body. Body language, subtle and farcical, is a tool of communication that often rings truer than words in these two plays and the actors are up to the task.

God of Carnage has moments where it runs out of steam, all the more noticeable since so much has been bubbling along for 100 minutes of non stop action. Aside from the cathartic moments, it’s not clear how much this evening’s upheavals will change the essence of the relationships of the two couples.

In both plays, Reza is presenting, not judging. She leaves that up to us.

ART: A Painting and Friendship Deconstructed by The New Repertory Theatre

ART
A Play by Yasmina Reza
Translated from French by Christopher Hampton
Directed by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman
Sets and lights, Justin Townsend, Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound, David Remedios

New Repertory Theatre, Arsenal Center for the Arts, Charles Mosesian Theater.
Through Feb. 5. Tickets $28-$58, 617-923-8487, www.newrep.org


“Does this dress make me look fat?”
“How do you like my new hairdo/cut?”
“What do you think of this artwork I just bought?”

Potential landmines. All of them. And in the case of “ART”, playing at the New Repertoy Theatre, that last query leads to questions about three character’s sense of artistic sensibility and their entire value systems. The question becomes that patch of black ice that turns a routine drive around the block into an out of control spiraling spin that changes their lives.

On the surface the premise is great for any of us who’ve ever walked into a pricey gallery, seen a universally acclaimed work of art and thought, “That’s art?” or “What the hell is that?” or “That’s worth $200,000?”

“ART” would probably stand up as an entertaining play with just this concept on its palette. But wow, within ten minutes, the purchase of a piece of art starts plumbing the nature and complexity of friendship between the three men in the cast.

Serge (Robert Walsh) invites his friend Marc (Robert Pemberton) to see his newly purchased painting, what appears to be a 3’ by 4’ canvas of pure white. And it’s the work of an artist highly regarded in the rarified atmosphere of the art world, an artist Marc hasn’t heard of.

Serge paid 200,000 francs for it, he loves it. It’s not clear whether he loves it because of it’s been painted by a famous artist, or that it cost a ton of money and he could afford it, or that his status as a discerning aesthete has been upped a notch.

Marc’s assessment? “It’s a piece of shit.” Game on.  Their mutual friend Yvan (Doug Lockwood) is drawn into the drama and the 90 minutes of the play become a funny and touching intellectual and emotional free for all between the three men who’ve been friends for 15 years.

If you enjoy theater with smart, edgy, dialogue and watching actors totally inhabit their roles, this is a play for you. There’s a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” scorched earth quality to the way the three long time friends go deep into past resentments, withholds, and petty judgments to bolster their arguments. It’s hard to fathom that a night of infighting like this would not incinerate normal friendships.

Humor helps. Aside from one-liner zingers, the three actors use every device in the book to ham up and diffuse their fusillades aimed at their friend’s soft spots. Their snarky asides, eye rolling, facial contortions that convey sarcasm, scorn, disbelief (mock or real), and body language had the audience guffawing often.

While each man described the painting, I couldn’t help recalling the reviews of wines, the ones hailing the notes of plum, apricot, whatever, in the taste or “nose” of the wine. Where do they come up with these comparisons? One of the arguments of art appreciation is how a piece of art makes you feel, which is as entirely unpredictable as that hint of plum or apricot that might show up in your next glass of Shiraz. But I digress.

Serge (Robert Walsh), Yvan (Doug Lockwood), Marc (Robert Pemberton), and the White on White painting.Photo by Andrew Brilliant

The question remains, whether considering ART or Shiraz: is it good? The average Joe, like Yvan in the play, is satisfied to go with a thumbs up or thumbs down. He has enough drama going on in his life to be bothered with the intellectual strain of deep aesthetic analysis. Serge and Marc, nearly come to blows. For them, and others like them, “understanding” and “appreciating” the art for the right reasons is paramount, a badge of honor and intellectual superiority.

Who are the gatekeepers of what is “ART”? What does it mean about us if we think a work of art is a ‘piece of shit’, not a masterpiece.  Are we stupid, uniformed, uneducated?  Any of us who’ve trotted through an art gallery or museum has had these questions.

The play was inspired when its author, a Parisian named Yasmina Resa, witnessed two friends feud because of their diametrically opposed views of a monochromatic piece of art one had purchased.  Originally written in French and translated for the stage, it’s a wonderful observation on the  complex nature of social relationships, the factors that determine self worth,  and the mystery of the value of a piece of art

There are moments in the play that come across as a PBS show about modern art but they're in service of the characters who have a stake in the arguments. There are no definitive answers but solidly opposing points of view. Ms. Reza leaves it up to us to decide where we stand. The final scene left me feeling that the author was not content with a soft landing and wanted to keep some edge showing. She succeeded.

 

Three Pianos: A Contemporary Take on Franz Schubert

THREE PIANOS
Loeb Drama Center (American Repertory Theatre)
64 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA, 02138 (617-547-8300)
Writers: Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, Dave Malloy
Director: Rachel Chavkin
Sets, Andrea Mincic; Lights, Austin R. Smith; Costumes, Jessica Pabst; Sound, Matt Hubbs; Video, Dave Malloy.
Tickets $25-$55 with discounts for WGBH and Mass Teacher Association membership
Through Jan. 8

There are some delightfully goofy scenes in the current American Repertory Theater production of "Three Pianos". I’m not saying it’s enough to make an evening of rewarding theater but it has its moments.

The play is based on a gathering of Franz Schubert's Viennese friends in which he presents them with his final work, “ Winterreise”   (Winter Journey), a cycle of 24 songs Schubert composed to the poems of Wilhelm Muller.

Franz Schubert led the charge of the Romantic Movement in early 1800s. He was at ease writing opera, symphonies, and sonatas but it was with lieders, songs he composed to contemporary poetry, that he outdistanced his peers. He is credited with elevating the idiom of song into a much more subjective and emotional genre and breaking traditional rules of form with abrupt changes in tempo and poignant melodies.

The Winterreise songs are about as bleak as one could expect from a young man dying of syphilis and a broken heart to boot. During this evening’s “ Schubertiade,” as the gatherings were called, history and fiction collide.

At this point, it’s hard to tell exactly what kind of play writers and arrangers Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy (who also happen to play all the roles of Schubert and his loyal band of friends) want to create.

If the Marx Brothers were to write a play about Franz Schubert, this is sort of how it would turn out. Plenty of puns, running jokes (“Is there anything left to drink?”), a few sight gags and lots of non-sequiturs. 

It’s deliciously goofy when the actors refer to texting and youtube while giving us the picture of 1827 Vienna, with its strange combination of censorship from the King and serious partying by the intelligentsia. It’s hard to keep track of fact vs. fiction especially when the dialogue speeds up and has to be understood over the Schubert’s music in the surround sound theater system.

Then there’s the matter of the three pianos. During the one act 120-minute play, the three actors simulate playing Schubert’s lieders on the pianos that they keep do-si-do-ing around the stage. The dynamic is an effective counterpoint to the rapid fire dialogue.

Schubert, “The Wanderer” in the songs, is truly a bereft soul and embodies the despair in Muller’s poems.  The three actors sing a handful of Schubert’s Winterreise lieders. A huge LCD screen hanging over the set displays the song’s number in the cycle and translates the lyrics from German to English. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but if you close your eyes, the impact of their voices and Schubert’s music still packs a punch.

After a while, the strategy of trying to lighten up the proceedings with broad humor describing the personalities of Schubert’s increasingly inebriated friends and a few minutes of straight biographical narrative feels like Sesame Street has gone high-brow and is trying its hand at music education.

For the life of me, I couldn’t find the core to the play. The joking around, imaginative set, and clever staging trumped an experience of Schubert’s struggle to survive and his compulsion to create. I could read the gloomy words of his songs on the LCD screen but by evening’s end, had no idea what drove him to write them.

Music and lyrics about love lost have never gone out of style but this play needs more than a score sheet to keep us interested for an evening in the theater.

Ryan Jensen photo courtesy of Boston Globe

"Divine Sister" - Devilishly Funny Romp From SpeakEasy Stage Company

THE DIVINE SISTER
Play by Charles Busch
Directed: by Larry Coen
Sets, Cristina Todesco. Lights, Daniel H. Jentzen. Costumes, Charles Schoonmaker. Original music/sound, Arshan Gailus.
Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston.
Through Nov. 19. Tickets $30-$55, 617-933-8600,
www.speakeasystage.com
140 Minutes, no intermission

Here’s the first clue that “Divine Sister” will not remind you of an Audrey Hepburn movie. Writer Charles Busch’s other creations include “Die, Mommy, Die!,” “Psycho Beach Party,” and “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”  And the Divine Sister, Mother Superior, is played by Jeffery Roberson, better known from audiences from Provincetown to Broadway as Varla Jean Merman.

Now that we have that straight, or shall I say understood, we may begin. The show is an absolute romp.  

The actors, Jeffery Roberson (Mother Superior/Susan), Paula Plum (Sister Acacius/Lil), Kathy St. George (Sister Walburga/Mrs. MacDuffie), Sasha Castroverde (Agnes), Ellen Colton (Mrs. Levinson/Timmy), and Christopher Michael Brophy (Jeremy/Brother Venerius), chew up their scenes with sheer gluttony. If overacting were a sin, they’d all spend eternity in hell.

Remember those seven bad words that got George Carlin in trouble? Well, they are lingua franca here.  So are dastardly slang words for Catholics, Jews, and numerous ethnic and cultural groups. I stopped counting gasps from the audience because laughter, at first nervous, then hearty, followed the raunchy lines that began exploding like over-heated kernels of popcorn.

Mother Superior's first entrance: unconventional from the first scene.

1966: Sister Superior hatches a plan to rebuild the crumbling edifice of St. Veronica’s Convent School in Pittsburgh. A visit to possible benefactress and Jewish atheist Mrs. Levinson uncovers the byzantine, hilarious history they share. Other plots include the mystery of a drama-queen young postulant, Sister Agnes, who sees holy visions in undergarments, and the arrival of Sister Walburga from Germany, who is intent on overthrowing Mother Superior and sanctifying the remains of Jesus’ long lost sister that are interred under St. Veronica's Convent.

The element of camp humor is elevated to that of a holy sacrament. Mugging and eye-rolling asides to the audience reach vaudevillian heights. If you’re a movie buff, you’ll understand writer Busch’s references to nearly every movie about Nuns ever produced.

The staging and sets are delightful, imaginative and low-budget. Each plot twist, and there are many, becomes more absurd. I felt like we reached the saturation point well before the uber-outlandish final scene. But what the heck, the point was to have a good time spoofing sacred cows and Busch has spoofed of herd them.

If you want to see a bunch of really good actors having a helluva good time, “Divine Sister” is for you.

Photo courtesy Craig Bailey, Speakeasy Stage Company

"In The Red and Brown Water," Part 1 of "The Brother/Sister Plays" in Boston

IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER
Play by: Tarell Alvin McCraney
Directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian
Sets, Erik Diaz. Lights, David Roy. Costumes, Sarah Nelson. Sound, Aaron Mack.
Presented by Company One. At: Plaza Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston. Through Dec. 3.
Tickets $33-$38, 617-933-8600
www.companyone.org


Every so often a play with smashing reviews comes to town, I witness the show and walk away scratching my head. Such was the case with “In The Red and Brown Water,” the Company One production now at Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre.
 
Perhaps the entire fabric of the story is knitted together tighter in “The Brothers Size” and “Marcus; Or The Secret of Sweet,” the two plays that complete Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays,” now playing in repertory at the theater.
 
McCraney draws on the culture of the Yoruban people of West Africa for inspiration. The play’s characters are named after Yoruban gods and goddesses and, like Greek and Roman deities, represent particular powers.
 
The theater program contains an unprecedented 16 pages of interviews, artwork, and back-stories about the playwright, Yoruba culture, and a Family Tree diagramming the characters in “The Brother/Sister Plays”.
 
Do your homework: read this before you see the play. I suppose if this were an Anglo play, we wouldn’t need the back stories and family tree diagrams because the playwright would assume the audience already knew that Zeus was the King of the Gods, Diana the Goddess of the Hunt and so forth. Not so here.
 
“In The Red and Brown Water” characters Oya, Aunt Elegua, Mama Moja and Nia, Shun, Elegba, Egungun, Shango and brothers Oshhoozi and Ogun Size are also the names of West African spirits. The West African deities, like these characters, are the same mix of nobility, fractiousness, connivance, conviviality, and loyalty as any bunch of Greek or Roman gods and goddesses.

Hampton Fluker, Miranda Craigwell, Michelle Dowd - as Marcus, Shaunta, Shun

The setting is San Pere, a small community deep in a steamy Louisiana bayou, where Creole culture mixes with McCraney’s infusion of Yoruban and Vodon (including belief in Voodoo) cultures in which ancient West African beliefs became woven into the Roman Catholicism introduced by white missionaries.
 
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s dialogue and characters refract this stew of history with the intensity of a mirrored disco ball - often with the same disorienting result. Several story lines run on parallel tracks.
 
The acting is fierce. Characters often recite their cues or tell back-story along with their lines…”Ogun enters with a pained look on his face…” Ogun says as he enters a scene. This was a useful storytelling device, perhaps similar to that of an African storyteller dramatizing a tale for his audience and McCraney didnt overdo it.
 
Family life in San Pere is light years away from The Huxtables. Characters swear, lie, gossip, cheat on their vows, and follow their urges. Morality is shifty territory. Fidelity might be taken for strength or foolishness. Forgiveness may or may not be granted but second, third, or fourth chances usually are.
 
Interpreting dreams and premonitions is serious business in San Pere. Early on in the play, Elegba tells Mama Moja his dream about seeing her daughter Oya standing in the water, her blood turning the water brown. Whether it has to do with death, infertility, or something to happen in the next two parts of the trilogy, I have no idea.

I could see the characters’ emotional pains and pleasures but didn’t have enough cultural context to feel them. Themes of fidelity/infidelity, loyalty/betrayal, community/self-interest, obligation/opportunity, didn’t reach the level of universality.
 
For me, one of the best reasons to see this play is to witness a company of black actors work at high levels of dramatic excellence. McCraney’s “In The Red and Brown Water” may have been difficult for me to interpret but the young playwright is an authentic voice unafraid to dig deep into disparate roots of African American culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cast photo

Back: Miranda Craigwell, Johnnie McQuarley, Hampton Fluker, James Milord. 
Front: Natalia Naman, Juanita Rodrigues, Michelle Dowd, Jerry Goodwin. 
Not pictured: Chris Leon.

Before I Leave You: A Boomer Pens A Bittersweet Boomer Comedy

BEFORE I LEAVE YOU

Written by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Director: Jonathan Silverstein

Credits:
Sets, Allen Moyer, Lights, David Lander, Costumes, Michael Krass, Original music and sound, David Remedios

Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company
At the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater
Through Nov. 13

Ticket price: Starting at $25

Whether you think this play is a boom or a bust may depend on your age. For the boomers in the audience, the shadow of advancing age and the certainty of tomorrows, once taken for granted, take on an eerie edge. What is the latest medical scare? How have friendships endured? What is the cost of roads not taken?  If you’re a boomer, you are familiar with this kind of terrain.

The play crackles with a sense of urgency.  Playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro wanted to write a play “about four friends on the cusp of old age,” she knows what makes them tick, what consumes them, and the secrets they keep from one another and from themselves. The play is funny, dark, mordant, and sweet. Yamagiwa has lived this stuff.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro has resided within walking distance of Harvard Square for forty years. She graduated from Radcliffe around the time JFK was elected and has been writing short stories and poems since then. Harvard Square is as good a place you’ll find to witness human condition and the playwright has been paying attention.

The play opens with four friends – Emily (Kippy Goldfarb), a 61 year-old painter, Koji (Glenn Kubota), her 62 year-old writer/professor Japanese husband of forty years, Jeremy (Ross Bicknell), a 64 year old professor and novelist, and Trish (Karen MacDonald), his 58 year-old out-of-work sister who’s moved in with Jeremy - sharing dinner in the Chinese restaurant they’ve met at for decades. Their conversation centers on a medical problem Jeremy has just experienced.  

“This is the first time anything like this has happened,” Jeremy says. “It’s funny – when you’re young, ‘the first time’ means something great, but when you’re our age ‘the first time’ means a heart attack or a stroke.”

Thus begins a series of life-changing events that test the bonds this quartet of friends have with one another. Some pass the test, some don’t.

Within minutes, two things become abundantly clear. Their levity as they consider Jeremy’s episode is a bridge to deal with the fact that they are now officially “old,” and that Trish is going to be the lightning rod that will charge the temper and tenor of the play.

Kippy Goldfarb, Glen Kubota, Karen MacDonald, and Ross Bickell in Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro’s “Before I Leave You’’

Trish obliviously keeps the plot careening along as she hilariously gives voice the truths about vulnerability, marriage, careers, and friendships that lurk beneath the affable veneer at dinner this night.  She may not have the academic or artistic credentials the others have but she has a Ph.D. in analyzing character and there’s no filter from her thoughts to her lips. She's the Greek chorus in a short skirt and low cut blouse.

"Before You Leave Me"’s stew of ideas- race, class, love, fidelity, and mortality - can bounce around like ping pong balls but it’s riveting nonetheless. The introduction of Koji and Emily’s 22 year-old son Peter (Alexis Camins) and his relationship with a Vietnamese woman he's met as he works as a bagger in a local market adds the issue of green cards to the mix. Oy.

The play is a series of vignettes that flesh out back stories - Emily’s artwork being dominated by Koji’s ego fueled sense of self, Jeremy’s honorable nature and loyalty while grappling with an ominous white spot an MRI has found in his brain, Koji’s infatuation with a young intern, Trish’s triangulated relationship with Emily and her brother Jeremy, and why son Peter is so estranged from his emotionally distant father, Koji.

Koji’s frequent pronouncements - egotistical, harsh, and judgmental - during the two-act play make you wonder what the glue is that has held the four together for decades. The series of surprises in the last act reveal the answer.

The challenges that Emily, Koji, Jeremy, and Trish navigate are not age specific but definitely time stamped. These characters realize it’s time to face them or forever keep their peace. And forever is not an abstraction anymore. Before I leave you, indeed.

Somewhere in the middle of Act 2, Emily, Koji, Jeremy, and Trish spontaneously sing “September Song” (Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill). The lyrics poignantly fit the scene. It has the impact of a freight train. By the play’s last heart-warming scene, we discover who will be aboard.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater: T. Charles Erickson 

Next Fall: SpeakEasy Stage Company's Season Opener Shines

NEXT FALL
Play by Geoffrey Nauffts
Directed by: Scott Edmiston
Sets, Janie E. Howland. Lights, Karen Perlow. Costumes, Carlos Aguilar. Sound and original music, Dewey Dellay.
At: SpeakEasy Stage Company, Roberts Studio Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts. Through Oct. 15.
Tickets $50-$55, 617-933-8600


The SpeakEasy Theater Company’s first play of the season comes close to connecting all the dots in a layered production of Geoffrey Naufft’s "Next Fall".

It’s a sign of the evolution of cultural mores that a play featuring a homosexual relationship opens a major theater company’s season. The fact that Massachusetts was the first state in the country to legalize gay marriage has something to do with it. So does the increasing focus on same-sex relationships in mainstream television ("Modern Family" had five Emmy wins this year).

Luke (Dan Roach) is in a coma after being struck by a taxicab in New York City. In the hospital waiting room are Luke’s friends Holly (Deb Martin), Brandon (Kevin Kaine) and Luke’s divorced parents Butch (Robert Walsh) and Arlene (Amelia Broome).  

Adam (Will McGarrahan), Luke’s lover and partner for the past four years, arrives and quietly seethes because “family only” are allowed in Luke’s room. Tension builds between Adam and Butch. Butch and Arlene are great examples of dysfunctional parents. Between Butch’s intensity and barely hidden rage and Arlene’s ditziness, there are no idle moments when they hit their marks onstage.

The scenes in which Adam and Luke (still painfully closeted to his parents) work out their differences give us insight into how love seems to be able to mix Adam’s oil to Luke’s water. McGarrahan's Adam is a marvelous mix of anxiety and intellectual curiosity. Watching him fidget and squirm while dealing with his manufactured mid-life crises is balanced by his relentless questioning of Luke’s religious faith and doctrine.

Photo: Luke (Dan Roach) and Adam (Will McGarrahan)

 There’s no scarcity of themes. Let’s see: same-sex unions, the clash of religious beliefs in interfaith relationships (think of a conversation between a Christian believer and an atheist on the subject of "The Rapture"), monumental family dysfunction, and the power of love that keeps a relationship going in spite of complications.

Writer Geoffrey Naufft injects just enough humor to balance the heavy drama. He puts lines into Adam’s dialogue that would once be heard only in theaters in Provincetown and now give the straightest of spectators a good laugh. The crisp dialogue doesn’t have the fits and starts of everyday people trying to work out religious divides and it sometimes hammers didactically but it keeps us thinking.  

The characters may be stereotyped portrayals but the ensemble cast plays them full out. By the end of the two-hour production, one spectator behind me is weeping softly.

Nauffts concept of rolling the play out in non-linear order is brilliant. The main set, center stage, is a waiting room in a hospital. The revolving sets to the left and right, unveiled to accommodate scenes then hidden with a curtain that reminds you of the ones used between beds in a hospital, are inventively constructed and fit the narrative structure that spans four years. It is fun piecing the story together bit by bit from the kaleidoscopic way Nauffts sequences it.

By the play's finale, there are more questions raised than answers given. And that’s a good thing. The last scene is a dandy that leaves us speculating, in effect making our own ending – or beginning.  Between the powerful acting and the hot button issues, this is a play worth seeing.

Photo courtesy SpeakEasy Stage Company

The Boston Theater Marathon - 50 Plays in 10 Hours...The Review

13th Annual Boston Theater Marathon
Produced by The Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
May 22, 2011
12 Noon  – 10 PM Sunday
Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

Noon. They’re off and running. Fifty theater- companies, fifty directors, fifty writers, fifty ten-minute plays – five plays an hour for ten hours. Wowza!

The thirteenth running of the Boston Theater Marathon is out of the gate.  The seats are predominantly filled with a Whitman sampler of veteran play goers and first timers who’ve come to cheer a friend, family member, neighbor, lover, teacher, student and lord knows what other configuration of association.

Each play has a writer, director, actors, technical staff, and represents a Boston theater company…you do the math. That’s enough to keep the 360 seat Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion filled for ten hours. Every ten minutes is punctuated with anything from polite applause to whoops of delight, the former for a WTF was that all play all about to a spontaneous ignition of cheering for ten minutes that touched your heart, made you laugh out loud, or made you marvel at the ingenuity of what a playwright can achieve in one sixth of an hour.

In the world class Boston Marathon from which the afternoon takes its title, runners go by in a blur. Some of the competitors lodge in your memory with their outfits, outlandish or aerodynamic, an irrational smile that belies the challenge of 26.2 miles of non stop running, the sign that they’re focused on the dream of a lifetime, or a cause that motivates them to push themselves to the limit.

The same thing happens when I watch twenty plays speed past me from noon to 4 PM. Twenty plays in four hours is a personal best for me today. Every so often, just when I' m beginning to loose focus, a play grabs me by the collar and recharges my attention.

Remember how you used to play act when you were a kid? Your father’s overcoat could be a magic carpet, a teepee, or cape to make you invisible. And the cardboard carton could be a desk, a treasure chest, a brick wall?  That’s how the props are here. A pair of cushiony seats that look like they were lifted from a Greyhound Bus, a tall wooden frame that is a doorway, a cart on rollers that could be a desk, an ice cream cart, a filing cabinet, or a bar and a few dinky folding chairs are about 80% of the props today. It so gloriously reminds me that all you really need to stir an audience is a good story and good acting.

The key is how the ten minutes grabs you. “When the actors are in the moment, reaching inside to breathe their characters, we in the audience go from voyeurs to participants who have affinity for the actor’s experience,” Ann Baker says. Today, Ann, with her pal Jack Welsh, are in their customary seats, last two seats in the last row of the theater. Ann’s taking notes that help her cast actors for future Boston plays. Jack, a veteran reader who’s one of many who’s helped Kate Snodgrass winnow around 400 entries to the fifty that we see today is right next to her. I don’t know how they do it but they’re here for the duration.

It’s refreshing to me that agreement on a play’s actors or story is still a subjective art form, that their assessments are not uniformly similar. Yep, As Shakespeare says, “The play’s the thing,” and it’s impossible to separate the viewer from his/her own interpretation.

The Marathon’s first hour is a terrific sampler of what’s to come: “Share This World,” (Libretto, music, Lyrics by Ronan Noon, sponsored by Emerson Stage, Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw) as much of a sweeping play as you can fit in ten minutes, all the elements of a musical with seven ensemble characters filling the back story for the two principal actors. Four plays later, a mini morality play, “One More To Go in Beantown” (by Debbie Weiss, Sponsored by New Repertory Theatre, Directed by Kate Warner) finishes the hour. We're off to a great start.

During the quick break between hour one and two, I’m horrified to see that my notes look more like a Picasso sketch on a napkin that anything useful to transcribe. Now I know why Jack sits at the end of the row. The light fixture illuminating the stairway emits just enough to permit legible note taking.  

All five of the next hour’s plays are “World Premiers.” Twenty-three other world premiers follow, terrific exposure for new writers in particular. The cast members run from heavy hitters who headline local productions to first timers who might be the writer’s lawyer or plumber. I’ll tell you, if they’ve got a running chance with good writing they can make a big enough splash to be noted by people like Ann Baker and other scouts in the audience.

“A good hour,” Jack Welsh observes as he passes us his homemade ginger cookies after hour three.  The three play titles beside which I draw a star (by now I’m reduced to inscribing symbols rather than writing in the margin of the program) are for “The Resurrection” (by Catherine O’Neil, sponsored by Actor’s Shakespeare Project, directed by Michael Forden Walker, acted by Steven Barkheimer and Sarah Newhouse) and “Birdbaths, Twilight” and other Sundry Items” (by March Shrader, sponsored by The Village Theater Project, directed by Barlow Anderson, acted by Jeff Mahoney and Victor Shopay) and “Uncommon Ground,” (by John Zarouf, sponsored by Hovey Players, directed by Mike Haddad, acted by Robin Gabrielli and Tracy Nygard).

“Good acting, good writing, good beats,” Jack says as “Uncommon Ground” actors take their bow.

“Their sense of timing is right on the mark,” Ann says. It occurs to me that when a play sucks me in, I hold my breath without realizing it, and experience joy, grief, hilarity, uncertainty, delight, whatever the actors are intending, and completely forget that this is play acting. For those moments I'm living in their shoes. Miraculously, this happens once, twice, sometimes three times an hour.

The sets show in spades that you don’t have to have a zillion dollar period set to tell the story. “Waiting for Godot” demonstrated that decades ago. Boston veteran actors Barkheimer and Newhouse, perched on two of those Greyhound Bus seats, a couple with a complicated past, manage in half sentences and oblique references to tell us they’re going to repair their relationship.

Jeff Mahoney and Victor Shopay as Mick and Dec, two life-long townies sitting on a park bench, delight us with an over the top play that shows the bond of friendship can overcome stereotypes even in hard nosed South Boston. “Just because we’re talking about guys who are gay doesn’t mean we’re gay, does it?” Dec says. A zigzag conversation later, a dream sequence ensues, the lighting bathes him in pink and he performs an endearing, life altering, joyous, dance to the pounding sound track of “Dancing Queen” that makes me – and the rest of the audience - want to cry and cheer at the same time with his spirited bolt from his “closet.” When the lighting reverts from a pinkish hue to daylight, Mick’s “What the hell was THAT?” is followed by, “I know, Dec, I know,” with an arm around his pal, an act of indelible friendship.

Hour four for me is like what runners call hitting the wall on the rolling hills of the Boston Marathon. My effort to categorize plays and sketches is fuzzy. 

“Park and Ride,” (World premier by Michael Ennis, sponsored The Publick Theatre Boston, directed by Megan Gleeson, with Maureen Keillor, Barlow Adamson, and Marie Pollizano) is a bravura performance by Keillor and Pollizano that jump-starts me for the rest of the hour.

Imagine a scene in which a married couple (not to each other) drives to a secluded spot, and begins to wrestle off clothing for a passionate afternoon tryst. And that one of them accidentally pushes the OnStar Assist button in the process. “Mrs. Everson, is everything alright? Do you need assistance?” booms a concerned voice through the car’s speaker system. The twists and turns in the story that follows are full of speed bumps and surprises. The staging, with the couple in the car (those same bus seats) and twenty-something OnStar phone rep Becky Sharp (Pollizano) on a spotlighted raised dais in the left corner of the stage, is perfect.

Great writing, fabulous acting, a very satisfying play. This happens two or three times an hour. It reminds me I'm living in a darn good town for theater and that lots of it flies under the radar.

The Theater Marathon has the feel of a Mardi Gras parade. Like Mardi Gras, it doesn’t matter that every float dazzles. What matters is that you’re in the moment with the creators and the crowd. The energy sparkles like a handful of Mardi Gras beads arcing through the air from a float and into the eager hands of people who love and respect the tradition – and are having a hell of a good time.

Plays and Playwrights of BTM XIII (alphabetical order by playwright)
All net proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund which provides financial support to theatres and theatre artists in times of need.

Doll Hospital by Jeanne Beckwith
Pentagon Mashed Potatoes by Cliff Blake
Rox-N, Miss Thang by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich
Sarah in Blunderland by Robert Brustein
Mirror Touch by Michael Burgan
Late, Lamented by Lynne Cullen
The Curator by Jennifer Diamond
Boy-Man by Diane Di Ianni
The Fudgicle Thief by Bill Doncaster
Procession by William Donnelly
Wasted Kisses by Thomas G. Dunn
Park ‘N' Ride by Michael Ennis
A Ballad for Peggy by Stephen Faria
Oops by James C. Ferguson
Escape to Wonderland by Patrick Gabridge
Game On by Gary Garrison
Our Part to Change by Susan Goodell
Big Squirrel Lick by Gregory Hischak
10 Years After Paradise by Israel Horovitz
The Mouse by Colleen Hughes
Every Seven Seconds by Dan Hunter
Beep...Doot by Aaron Kagan & Seth Soulstein
Slugger by Terrence Kidd
M. Riverside by John J King
Little Boys by Margaret Lagerstedt
Crickets by Emily Kaye Lazzaro
Trust Fall by Steve Lewis
Stuck by Christopher Lockheardt
Downward Facing Dog by Melinda Lopez
Squirrelly by James McLindon
Teddy Ballgame by Caitlin Mitchell
Casting Amanda by Jack Neary
Share This World by Ronan Noone
Cat in a Box by Julian Olf
The Resurrections by Catherine M. O'Neill
Birdbaths, "Twilight", and Other Sundry Topics by Rick Park
Backfire by Leslie Powell
Those Still Living by April Ranger
Open House by Theresa Rebeck
Camberwell House by Amelia Roper
Uncommon Ground by John R. Sarrouf
Bible Study by Daniel Sauermilch
There's an App for That! by Richard Schotter
A Handy Man by March Schrader
Rogue River, Oregon by Phil Schroeder
Perfect Strangers by Peter Snoad
Welcome to the Hate Store by Jan Velco Soolman
Ms. Connections by Erin Striff
One More to Go in Beantown by Debbie Wiess
A Tall Order by Sheri Wilner

The Boston Theater Marathon - 50 Plays in 10 Hours! - Sunday, May 22, 2011

13th Annual Boston Theater Marathon
Produced by The Boston Playwrights’ Theater
May 22, 2011
12 Noon  – 10 PM Sunday
Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
TICKETS: $25 in advance / $35 at the door. To purchase tickets please visit www.bostonplaywrights.org or call 617-933-8600.


Fifty different 10 minute plays written by fifty different New England playwrights, performed by fifty New England theater companies…how do you spell lalapalooza!

If you want to have your play-loving brain scrambled by the wildest assortment of themes, actors, directors, and playwrights, this is the ticket for you. Stay an hour, stay two! Stay until you get hungry, find a nearby place to eat or drink, and head back to the theater and find a general admission seat. You’ve got all day, baby!

The fifty ten-minute plays have been chosen from about 400 entries according to straightforward submission guidelines.There are no restrictions on subject matter. This is as wild and wooly a batch of little plays as you’ll ever see. I’ve been to several “marathons.” Trust me, I mean that.

Boston Theater Marathon Artistic Director Kate Snodgrass writes a fabulous letter explaining the decision-making process that begins after the November 15th submission deadline.  The plays are read and scored by an extraordinary range of readers. The cream usually rises to the top.

“More years than not, over half of the chosen marathoners are new to the BTM–and this is a good thing!” Ms. Snodgrass writes.

If you’re like my friend Ann Baker (formerly known as  “The Queen of Casting” in Boston), you get the most brilliant bang for your buck. She packs a lunch, arrives before noon to secure her annual perch in the back row, in a seat near her pal Jack (who is one of the "readers" in the BTM play selection process), and stays for the whole shooting match. Cost? Fifty cents a play.

Ann knows theater. I asked her for a little ‘guide’ to help me get a handle on what feels like a Niagara Falls of plays spilling out one after the other.

“The Marathon is a mix of sketches and plays,” Ann said. “A sketch/skit is situational.  A play is character driven.”

“In a sketch/ skit, it is the action, the situation, and little or nothing to do with the actors involved. There is no change, growth, development of any kind that takes place with the actors in a sketch/ skit.  The actors simply react to the action taking place. After the action ends, they go right back to who they are. They are the same character at the end of the action as they were in the beginning.”

“In a play, there is a beginning a middle, and an end… exposition, climax, resolution. There should be a change in the development of the character or a change in the degree of the character's being. For example - the shy character may come out of his/her shell, or become more shy, or become a raving lunatic. Something happens to the characters that alters their being by some degree. The thing that happens might be as little as a tone of voice of another character  - which changes everything.”

The Boston Theater Marathon program lists the entire day’s timetable (five ten minute plays each hour), play titles, playwrights, actors, directors, technicians, and theater companies. Most plays have two or three actors and two or three props – essential because while we’re applauding the ten-minute piece, those actors take a brisk bow and remove the props while the stage crew and next actors arrange the next play’s set in one minute flat. There’s a very brief breather at the end of each hour and the show rattles on.

Audience members can change seats or enter/exit between plays. I’ve never managed to stay longer than three hours (thirty plays!).

“If you come to BTM next year, plan to stay for the WHOLE ten hours,” Ann exhorts me.  Last year was one of the best I've seen in the last 5-7 years. The writing was better and they used more of the best actors. It is sometimes hard for me to see, while the play is being performed, if I'm seeing a good piece of writing, or a very good performance of an average piece of writing. So I need time to mull over what I've seen.”

I’m packing a lunch for The Boston Theater Marathon this Sunday. I know I could never finish the fabled 26.2 mile Boston Marathon even if I walked from Hopkinton to Copley Square…but, with any luck at all, I’ll be able to break my own personal best record and sit through more than three hours of this entertainment marathon.

Come on down and join me, I’ll be in the back of the pack, somewhere around Ann and Jack.
+++++++++++++
Plays and Playwrights of BTM XIII (alphabetical order by playwright)
All net proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund which provides financial support to theatres and theatre artists in times of need.

Doll Hospital by Jeanne Beckwith
Pentagon Mashed Potatoes by Cliff Blake
Rox-N, Miss Thang by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich
Sarah in Blunderland by Robert Brustein
Mirror Touch by Michael Burgan
Late, Lamented by Lynne Cullen
The Curator by Jennifer Diamond
Boy-Man by Diane Di Ianni
The Fudgicle Thief by Bill Doncaster
Procession by William Donnelly
Wasted Kisses by Thomas G. Dunn
Park ‘N' Ride by Michael Ennis
A Ballad for Peggy by Stephen Faria
Oops by James C. Ferguson
Escape to Wonderland by Patrick Gabridge
Game On by Gary Garrison
Our Part to Change by Susan Goodell
Big Squirrel Lick by Gregory Hischak
10 Years After Paradise by Israel Horovitz
The Mouse by Colleen Hughes
Every Seven Seconds by Dan Hunter
Beep...Doot by Aaron Kagan & Seth Soulstein
Slugger by Terrence Kidd
M. Riverside by John J King
Little Boys by Margaret Lagerstedt
Crickets by Emily Kaye Lazzaro
Trust Fall by Steve Lewis
Stuck by Christopher Lockheardt
Downward Facing Dog by Melinda Lopez
Squirrelly by James McLindon
Teddy Ballgame by Caitlin Mitchell
Casting Amanda by Jack Neary
Share This World by Ronan Noone
Cat in a Box by Julian Olf
The Resurrections by Catherine M. O'Neill
Birdbaths, "Twilight", and Other Sundry Topics by Rick Park
Backfire by Leslie Powell
Those Still Living by April Ranger
Open House by Theresa Rebeck
Camberwell House by Amelia Roper
Uncommon Ground by John R. Sarrouf
Bible Study by Daniel Sauermilch
There's an App for That! by Richard Schotter
A Handy Man by March Schrader
Rogue River, Oregon by Phil Schroeder
Perfect Strangers by Peter Snoad
Welcome to the Hate Store by Jan Velco Soolman
Ms. Connections by Erin Striff
One More to Go in Beantown by Debbie Wiess
A Tall Order by Sheri Wilner

The Book Of Grace: Powerful Acting, Problematic Resolution

THE BOOK OF GRACE
A Play by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by: David D. Wheeler
Assistant director, Lewis Wheeler. Sets, Eric D. Diaz. Lights, Kenneth Helvig. Costumes, Tristan Scott Barton Raines. Sound, David Wilson. Projection, Jason Weber. Presented by Company One.
Through May 7, 2011

Wild Wednesdays All tickets $18 

Thursday and Sunday Full — $30 (side); $35 (center) Students (w/ ID) —$15 (all tickets) Seniors — $30 (all tickets)
Friday & Saturday Full — $33 (side); $38 (center) Students (w/ ID) — $15 (all tickets) Seniors — $30 (all tickets)
Pay What You Can Performances (min $6) – Sundays, April 17 & 24, 2p.m.

All the pieces are there. Talented actors, world class director, award winning playwright, creative theater company, great set, intimate theater space to contain the action. Alas, all these elements float along on the surface together for a bit over two hours like pieces of a puzzle, touching, rebounding off one another but never locking together in a way that satisfies.

From the play’s program, we know that a young man will appear at the south Texas border town home of his estranged father and the father’s young second wife. And we know that secrets will be revealed and apparent tranquility will be shattered.

The theater darkens for the opening act. Each of the three characters is spotlighted for a brief monologue that sets the scene and gives us a big chunk of information about their emotional states.

The young man, Buddy (Jesse Tolbert) is black. His father and stepmother, awaiting their turn for their initial monologue, are white. Buddy has been honorably discharged from the Army.  After years of little communication between them, he’s sought out his father in this Texas border town to confront him for an act he may have committed when Buddy was a boy. Buddy wants an apology for we’re led to believe was sexual abuse, maybe even wants a declaration of love from a man who may not be capable of that emotion.

The brittle character of Buddy’s white father, Vet (Steven Barkhimer), describes his job of keeping the US border safe from intrusion by aliens. “Aliens. That’s what we’re up against… . They’re not like us. That’s why we’ve got to keep them out,’’ says Vet, adding pointedly, “Sometimes the alien is right in your own home. Sometimes right in your own blood. And you’ve got to build a wall around it.’’

It’s clear that Vet’s ideas of containment aren’t confined to illegal immigrants. “My shrink says I have boundary issues,” he says. He also has a mean streak.

We see Grace (Frances Idlebrook), Vet’s wife, in her waitress outfit, giving Vet sunny advice on how to manage his first conversation with the estranged son he hasn’t seen in years.  With her body language, wringing of hands and forced smile, there is something manic about Grace’s  there’s-goodness-to-be-found-all-around-us attitude.

What happens in the first encounter between Grace and Buddy is unexpected to the point of stretching credulity. They’re both living in the grip of Vet’s demeaning, almost clinical behavior but there’s enough tension building in the play to make their behavior out of place, perhaps the playwright’s strategy to make the arc of the play more fraught than it already is.

Frances Idlebrook is terrific as Grace, the tightly wound wife contained under Vet’s thumb. Grace has discovered that the only safe way to channel her fear of Vet is to secretly write a book, The Book of Grace, in which she inserts stories and anecdotes of evidence that good does exist outside the boundaries of her own house.

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks uses Grace as a narrator to help unfold the story. Grace’s reading of her book, and her frequent brief appearances to deliver “footnotes” during the action, is the window through which Parks gives us the back-story.

Buddy’s references to an act Vet may have committed on him is powerful stuff. Vet’s obsessive need to keep his trousers neatly creased, and comparing the creases to the borders he protects, “Everything on this side is ours. Everything on that side is yours. You stay where you belong, we stay where we belong,” reveals his struggle to keep his inner life as contained as possible.  This is a man with serious trust issues.

The tension that builds during the first act and a half seems to hit its own border in the last two scenes. Immediately preceding these scenes, Grace’s searing meltdown at Vet’s cruelty, her white hot rage at Vet for controlling her life as assiduously as he patrols the US border, is that of a woman unspooling from years of oppression. It’s an awe-inspiring piece of acting.

The action becomes unnaturally forced after that. Buddy’s behavior in the final scene between Grace and Vet is unfathomable, given his experience with Vet and his plan to seek revenge. The final scene, which would be spoiler material to divulge, is just not credible, way too forced – too much the playwright’s need to tidy up what hasn’t been resolved already.

We’re left with three damaged souls in limbo. If any play needed moments of catharsis to relieve the emotional pain suffered all around, it would be The Book of Grace.  I exited the theater thinking that I witnessed three powerful performances that left me thinking, “What’s the point?”


Photos by Lisa Voll courtesy of Company One website.

 

"Broke-ology" at the Lyric Stage: Rich With Characters, Family Drama

Broke-ology
By Nathan Louis Jackson
Directed by: Benny Sato Ambush.
Sets, Skip Curtiss. Lights, Margo Caddell. Costumes, Mallory Frers. Sound, Chris Bocchario.
At: The Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Tickets: $25-$52. 617-585-5678
Running time 2 hours with one ten minute intermission

There are a bunch of reasons to catch this play before it leaves town April 23. Let’s set aside for the moment that it has a great mixture of pathos and tension, solid acting from each character, contemporary themes, and good technical stuff: direction, set, lighting, and use of music.

This is one of the rare plays to hit Boston that is written by a black playwright, helmed by a black director, and features an entirely black cast. The audience for Broke-ology at last Sunday’s matinee was more salt and pepper than I’ve seen since Stick Fly played at the Wimberly Theater last year. To me, the racial mix in the audience makes the play seem more authentic. We’re not talking comedy clubs here, where black entertainers can hit the right notes that embody the black experience in rambunctious  ways to full houses of spectators who relate completely to all of it. With Broke-ology, we’re talking downtown theater, the province of a generally white audience, accustomed to themes that relate to their own lives, loves, trials, and triumphs.

Well, this play has all of that. It also has the specificity that is at once African American and universal. Being broke, having to scrape by with little money, and the dream of how to break the cycle of low income survival is not race specific, but in this beautifully wrought family drama, it has the weight of a social tract with an overlay of tenderness, love, loss, and aspiration as rich as in any production you’ll see in a season.

Playwright Nathan Louis Jackson has loaded “Broke-ology,” his second play, with enough themes for at least three productions. Let’s see. Family obligation vs. personal aspiration, the effect of being perpetually broke on life choices and marital and sibling relationships, the way social environment shapes your future, the way education offers a path to upward mobility and the price it extracts for what you must leave behind, the sacrifices partners make in the marriage compact, the transcendent power of parents’ love of their children that can neutralize the lack of money in the bank, the pain of being unemployed, and finally, the effect a parent’s life-altering affliction has on siblings who have to find a way to care for that parent.

At times, Jackson’s kitchen sink approach makes me think he’s trying too hard. He occasionally veers into melodrama. His sense of exposition is heavy handed but when his characters lay it out I can feel Jackson’s heart beating with the fierce desire to tell this largely autobiographical story. His choice to tell the back story in scenes in which William, the boys' father, interacts with his late wife Sonia in exquisitely played dream sequences, is a bit contrived but manages to bridge the past to the present.

Set in the early 1980s in a once thriving and community-minded Kansas City neighborhood now in the thrall of gangs and deteriorating infrastructure, two grown brothers come to grips with choices they must make to care for their ailing father suffering from MS. Jackson’s dialogue reveals what’s at stake for the older brother Ennis, married with a new baby, a demanding wife and a menial job at a BBQ joint and his younger brother Malcolm, just returning for the summer from UConn, a master’s degree in Environmental Science in hand and a deeply felt desire to return to UConn to study with a beloved mentor.

While tension about how to care for their father William pushes them farther apart, Jackson never lets us forget the two young men were raised in a loving family. Even though their mother has been dead for 15 years, the nurture they felt from loving parents is clear and all the more poignant since whatever they decide for William will drive a stake between them. The awful set of choices of how to care for a sick parent are all too real for any of us in the ‘sandwich’ generation, no matter what color we are.

Monty Cole as younger brother Malcolm King and David Curtis as Ennis King, play off one another with sibling intensity that feels natural even as they are clearly on different life paths.

Patrice Jean-Baptiste as Sonia King gives us the nurturing and optimistic force that held the family together. One the dream scenes with her husband William reveals the deep personal cost of that choice - lack of money extinguished her own aspirations for the family to move to a better neighborhood and took away her ambition to become an artist.

The beating heart of the show is Johnny Lee Davenport as William King. Scenes in which he pantomimes The Persuasions choreography and his riff about what would happen to fat old Santa had he landed his sleigh in the Bloods or Crips neighborhood are hilarious and reveal his playfulness and gentle nature.

Davenport might lack consistency in the way he shows his character’s physical deterioration but there’s no denying the emotional toll the debilitating MS takes on a proud man. His love for his sons and his pride in who he was in his prime are clear.  In one brief scene in Act 2, Davenport’s portrayal of a man's longing for his deceased wife and humiliation over his physical deterioration results in the most overwhelmingly raw emotional moment of anguish I’ve ever seen portrayed on stage. I could literally feel the air sucked out of the room by the implosion.

The fact that Jackson telegraphs the way the play will end doesn’t affect its emotional punch. This is a unique theater experience created by a playwright who will have lots more to say in the future.

Photos courtesy of Lyric Stage website

9 Circles: Gripping War Drama, Classic and Contemporary

“9 Circles”
Written by Bill Cain - based on a true story
Presented by The Publick Theater of Boston
BCA Plaza Theater, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
April 6, 2011
 
By the time this play ends, you’ll have had a visceral experience of what has been called “the fog of war.” In a fog, nothing has a defined shape. Shapes that appear as one thing are indeed another. Unimaginably atrocious acts are committed in the fog of war.

In this fog, it’s hard to distinguish who is right, who is wrong, who is friend, who is foe, what is bravery, what is cowardice, what is true, what is false, who you’re fighting for, who you’re fighting against….and who, exactly, are you, and why are you here.

When it isn’t punching you in the solar plexus, Bill Cain’s play “9 Circles” hits you right between the eyes. Two minutes into the first scene, Circle 1, I become aware I’m already trying to catch up to a mind-bending dialogue between Private Daniel Reeves (played by Jimi Stanton) and the Army officer telling him he’s being honorably discharged from soldiering in Iraq.

Through the next 8 circles (scenes), information about who Reeves is and the crime he’s  later accused of committing is turned upside down and inside out by the lawyers, psychiatrists, public defenders, army doctors, and preachers (played by Will McGarrahan and Amanda Collins) who, for their own reasons, are trying to save him or have him convicted for allegedly murdering an Iraqi man, his wife and one child and then raping and killing a 14 year old girl who was in another room – and worse things after he allegedly did that.

Reeves is an apparently amoral 19 year old from rural Texas. He has a criminal record, is emotionally damaged, painfully conflicted, and has a personal code of conduct, perhaps warped, to survive the bloody violence that’s part of his everyday world. 

Reeves is deceptively intelligent for a country teenager and an extraordinarily perceptive foil for the characters who, over the course of the months, try to help him, use him, or condemn him for what he allegedly did in Iraq.

The play’s dialogue has the recoil effect of an Army issued M4A1 carbine. Sharp, incisive, often conflicting, and paradoxical, it is punctuated with ironic laugh out loud humor in the most unexpected places. Playwright Bill Cain’s script employs Reeves countering his accusers with a startlingly convincing dialectic that keeps him from becoming a scapegoat, a simple-minded immoral hick from the heartland.

Reeves applies logic and reason to explain his actions. It may not be a civilian’s logic but the true north of the play hinges on it. Listening to him verbally duel his advocates or accusers is a totally invigorating theatrical experience. The person he most needs to convince that his actions are defensible is himself. The inexorable march toward the truth of what he did in combat hurtles through the 9 scenes, each identified as  “circles,” a clear reference to the Nine Circles of Hell in Dante’s “Inferno.”

The spare set, lighting, and music underpin the drama tightly and Director Eric Engel’s pace keeps the play steadily grinding to a startling finale.

Jimi Stanton’s performance is electrifying. After the 100 minutes in this one act play, you may feel like you’ve just been on patrol in Iraq. “People get careful when they’re around me,” Reeves says.  If the tightly-wired Private Reeves was on patrol with you, you might be as afraid of him as of the insurgents in the streets. In their several roles as psychiatrists, lawyers, preachers, public defenders, Amanda Collins and especially Will McGarrahan provide a polarity to Stanton's character that produces voltage in every scene.

Playwright Bill Cain superimposes and connects layer upon layer of complexity in dialogue leading to the 9th circle: the shifty nature of heroism, the human cost of violence, the power of the demons that can possess soldiers, the influence of imagery to change the course of war, the military industrial complex, to name a few. This is a meaty piece of theater.

After witnessing 9 Circles, I need to reevaluate the stories of atrocities that happen on both sides of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly not to condone them, but to have some sense of the warped rationale from which heinous acts can be perpetrated. 

This play may dissipate some of the fog of war for those of us observing it through the skewed lens of what passes for information in our newspapers and visual media. For those who fight it, the fog may be the only way the lucky ones might retain a shred of the humanity they were born with.

Photo courtesy of Publick Theater 

The Aliens: Annie Baker's Shirley, Vermont plays land at the Boston Center for the Arts

THE ALIENS
Play by Annie Baker
Directed by: Shawn LaCount
Set, Cristina Todesco. Lights, Benjamin Williams. Costumes, Bobby Frederick Tilley II. Sound, Aaron Mack.
Presented by Company One at Calderwood Pavilion, Hall A, Boston Center for the Arts.
Through Nov. 20.
November 18 performance

Close the window, shut the door. Shut off the computer and everything else that’s connected to the power grid. Spend the next five minutes in complete silence.

Now you’ve been prepared for the first scene of “The Aliens,” in which KJ (Alex Pollock) stares blissfully into the sky, his face aglow as he ponders the beatific beauty of clouds coupling and separating in the July afternoon.

This is a weird play. It’s characters are weird, the setting next to a dumpster in back of a coffee shop is weird, the plot, such as it is, is weird. If you’re not weirded out by all this, you’re ready to enjoy a quirky, non-traditional coming-of-age play.

Two raggedy, unkempt, thirty-something losers, sorry there isn’t a more polite way to describe them, occupy the small, fenced-off area as their clubhouse. KJ is a University of Vermont dropout, derailed by a nervous breakdown. Jasper (Nael Nacer) is a high school dropout, sitting on a righteous anger he can hardly control. They see themselves as social outcasts and, to tell the truth, this solitary piece of turf, tucked away from civilization, is where they fit best and are safe from the company of the rest of us.

“The Aliens” is loaded with silences. It is non linear. It is steadfastly non-theatrical. During one of the eternally extended silences Baker has written into the play, I went through my to do list, remembered I had to get my parking ticket validated at intermission, watched the audience watching the silence, wondered whether I could ever maintain such a silence when sitting with a dear friend, and wondered why, if we were really in the back lot of the coffee shop, the silence was so pure.

No crows cawing, no chatter from inside, no trucks rattling down the road outside, no sound of breeze rustling the leaves. I found myself trying to breathe quieter. I became aware of all the chatter in my head. I felt like I could breathe naturally when dialogue restarted. And I wondered why Baker was screwing around with my head like this.

The appearance of Evan (Jacob Brandt) in scene two sets the play in motion. The nerdy, socially awkward, painfully self-conscious 17 year-old is a doppelganger of what KJ and Jasper must have been when they were teenagers. Here he is hauling out the trash and trying to tell the two vagabonds that his boss says they have to leave.

“Ham on Rye” author Charles Bukowski is KJ and Jasper’s patron saint. These guys imagine themselves carrying Bukowski’s flag of intense alienation as they travel bravely down a path the rest of us are too acculturated to find.

With Evan as the lone spectator, they pass the time rehashing their history, perhaps imagined, as punk rockers and general screw-ups. Their spontaneous enactment of their band incarnations, with its in-jokes, shared history, and zany lyrics, unshackles them briefly from their present circumstances and unleashes a childlike glee they may never experience again.

Jasper, in an emotional nose-dive, is writing a first-rate Henry Miller-esque manuscript detailing his relationship with a woman who has rejected him. KJ, is given to long stretches of staring in serenely into space, transported there by infusions of mushroom tea, which, like Linus’s blanket, is never far from his side. The casting for each role is excellent. The three actors breathe life into these  three fragile characters on the fringe of society.

KJ and Jasper invite Evan to Fourth of July party to be held in their grotto behind the coffee shop. Evan, the only guest, brings brownies, sparklers, and peppermint schnapps - a perfect metaphorical offering from this boy on the uncertain road to manhood.

At times the whole thing feels like Seinfeld on acid. Much of the dialogue between KJ and Jasper is self-referential. These two guys have seen their share of losses, failures, and disappointments, which we hear about in the two-act, two hour and ten minute production. The back of the coffee shop in rural Shirley, Vermont is their foxhole - a refuge.

Over the course of two acts, in a series of small moments, one life is extinguished and one life is transformed.
 
Both Annie Baker’s plays I’ve seen this week, Body Awareness and The Aliens, dwell on the nature of how we connect with each other, perhaps how we need each other, and, dare I say it, how we express our love for each other.

Baker’s world of characters in Shirley, Vermont, as misfit or dysfunctional as they may be, have at their core a decency that transcends their own social status, draws them together and sees an inner beauty the rest of us cannot.

Note about the Shirley, VT plays by Annie Baker at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA:

Three Boston theater companies collaborated to produce the The Shirley, Vermont Plays: A  Festival of 3 Plays By Annie Baker. The Huntington Theater Company (“Circle Mirror Transformation” ended November 14); Company One (“Aliens” through November 20); The SpeakEasy Stage Company (“Body Awareness” through November 20)

Body Awareness: Annie Baker at the Boston Center for the Arts

"Body Awareness"
Play by Annie Baker
Directed by: Paul Daigneault
Sets, Cristina Todesco. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Costumes, Bobby Frederick Tilley II. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at Roberts Studio Theatre
Boston Center for the Arts. Through Nov. 20. Tickets $30-$55, 617-933-8600 www.bostontheatrescene.com
November 17, 2010

If you haven’t begun your theater season yet, "Body Awareness" written by Annie Baker is a perfect place to dive in. Everything in this tight production at the Roberts Auditorium -the acting, setting, lighting - fits together seamlessly.
 
The play is set in the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont, from what we can tell, a crunchy granola citadel of political correctness. Phyllis, a  psychology professor at Shirley State College, has organized Body Awareness Week, a five-day symposium to celebrate human connection in the most gender-neutral, non-judgmental manner possible. It doesn’t occur to her that the mere title of the program brings up knee jerk cultural and gender-specific ideas buried deeply in the collective psyche (hers included).
 
Phyllis (Adrianne Krstansky), a lesbian, lives with her partner, high school teacher Joyce (Paula Plum), and Joyce’s 21 year-old son Jared (Gregory Pember), a self-described “auto-didact.” Jared displays all the symptoms of Asberger’s syndrome. “I don’t have it!” is his refrain to his mother who’s trying to steer him into treatment.
 
Joyce and Phyllis have agreed to host one of the week's presenters. The arrival on day two of Body Awareness Week of Frank Bonitatibus (Richard Snee), a photographer whose fame rests on his photographs of nude women - old, young, and very young - has a tectonic effect on the lives of Phyllis, Joyce, and Jared.
 
The dynamics between the four finely drawn characters are exquisitely played out. There’s an earthy quality about the dialogue that feels real and unpolished. The fact that the playwright specifically wrote the duration of the pauses and silences into the margins of the script doesn’t alter the power of the dialogue.  It settles into your head and your heart as you listen raptly.

The direction of conversation can turn on a dime. The reason it feels so damn real is that we’ve all had conversations like it.
 
The whole Asberger’s thing with Jared is brilliantly conceived and is central to the story. Joyce’s frequent remarks to Jared that a person’s inability to feel empathy is a hallmark of the syndrome magnify the moments when a small gesture, a question, a piece of conversation, show that Jared, in spite of his denials, is struggling with self-awareness.

Frank’s arrival exposes the cracks in Joyce and Phyllis’s relationship. It also sets up a life ring for Jared, deeply in need of a dose simple, unrestrained alpha-male groundedness. What makes the play so effective is the way playwright Baker finds humor in the way her characters relate to one another. Many of Joyce and Jared’s conversations are hilarious. Frank’s ribald "birds and the bees" talk with Jared had the audience laughing out loud.

When Joyce decides it would be "freeing" for her to pose for Frank, it rattles Phyllis, who uses the occasion to mount a defense for her stringent feminist beliefs and politically correct ideas. Phyllis’s terrifically acted meltdowns are slow motion train wrecks in which her doctrinaire views are tested in the crucible of her relationship with Joyce. When Joyce blurts out,  “There’s a difference between concepts and people,” during a tense moment between them, it resonates.

So does Frank’s response to Joyce when she asks him about prurient interest in photographs of naked women. “The intent of the artist and the effect of art on an audience might be two different things,” he says. Frank and Phyllis are on two different planets when it comes to art. Joyce feels the pull of gravity from both planets.

The three part, multi-tiered stage set of kitchen, dining room, and bedroom is the unsung fifth member of the cast.  Warmly lit, loaded with a collection of well-worn wooden tables, chairs, bookcases, and a platform bed, it feels pure Vermont. The honey colored wainscoting that surrounds the set on three sides from above embraces it with an aura of home, security, and safety.

The link holding the production together is Jared. In an exceptionally well-calibrated performance, Jared melts our hearts as he comes to grips with his reality. It’s easy to see how his mother loves him unconditionally, as trying as he is. By the play’s final scene, her love for him has rubbed off on us, too.

"Body Awareness" is a great evening of theater. Baker stakes out the battle grounds that the characters have to navigate but doesn’t take sides. The play unfolds naturally - full of zigs and zags of real life. On a small scale, Body Awareness takes on themes of love, acceptance, and sexual politics. Some of the play’s best moments are its quietest and smallest. The play’s final scene is locked into place by one click of the camera shutter, a very satisfying moment in time.

Note:
The Shirley, VT plays by Annie Baker at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA

Three Boston theater companies collaborated to produce the plays: The Huntington Theater Company (“Circle Mirror Transformation” ended November 14); Company One (“Aliens” through November 20); The SpeakEasy Stage Company (“Body Awareness” through November 20)

Photo courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company web site

In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) Alternates Current

IN THE NEXT ROOM (OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY)
Play by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by: Scott Edmiston. Sets, Susan Zeeman Rogers. Lights, Karen Perlow. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound design and original music, Dewey Dellay. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Roberts Studio Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, through Oct. 16. Tickets: $30-$55. 617-933-8600, www.speakeasystage.com


The buzz for this play has been positive. Its suggestive title explains part of it. When it comes to prurient interest, we Bostonians have our share.

The SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production of “In The Next Room” has some “insightful, fresh, and funny” moments, as promised by snippets excised from a New York Times review that promoted the Boston production, but it can’t seem to extend those moments into a satisfying 2 and 1/2 hour play. The idea for the play was conceived after Ruhl read Rachel Maines's 1999 book, "The Technology of the Orgasm," in which Maines documents physicians in the 1880s treated women in emotional distress (“hysteria”) with a vibrating device applied you know very well where in order to induce an orgasm (“paroxysm”) to relieve what they surmised was congestion of fluid in the womb.

Using Edison’s electrical inventions as a scaffold, Ruhl’s characters make perceptive observations on the fundamental way technology impacts their way of experiencing light… and life. The play then explores the emotional abyss that separates her male and female characters,  especially their pitiful inability to understand sex as an intimate, shared experience.

In his role as Dr. Givings, a detached “man of science,” Derry Woodhouse plays his role with stolid earnestness. In his office, separated on stage from their living room by a partition with a closed doorway, he dispassionately dispenses his treatments. He marvels not so much about the emotional release his patients experience as with the technology of the machine that makes it possible.

On the other side of the partition, his emotionally starved wife keeps house and tries to fathom the nature of the moans of his female patient as she climaxes at the end of her “three minute treatments.” With fierce, occasionally wacky intensity, Anne Gottlieb establishes Catherine’s increasing sense of desperation, physical longing, and sexual awareness.

Marianna Bassham plays Dr. Givings’ patient Mrs. Sabrina Daldry with ethereal charm and wry humor. Her straight laced husband (Dennis Trainor Jr.) is nearly a caricature of the domineering, uptight Victorian middle class male. His supreme lack of understanding of sex helps to underline the plight of his wife in particular, and, Ms. Ruhl seems to suggest, men in general in this era. I could hear women in the audience stifle gasps at some of his more egregious comments.

From left: Marianna Bassham, Lindsey McWhorter, and Anne Gottlieb in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production. (Stratton McCrady) Photo courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company web site.

The second act, in which Leo the Artist (jauntily played by Craig Wesley Divino) is introduced, seems a bit forced. His wild and hot-blooded nature ignites Mrs. Givings’ smoldering passions. His desire to paint a portrait of Elizabeth, the Givings’ African-American wet nurse, leads to unforeseen complications, one of which helps lead Catherine and Sabrina to test-drive the newfangled device in a giddy scene in Dr. Givings office. In the final scene, the good doctor and his wife have a moment that changes their chemistry. Thomas Edison has nothing to do with this one.

As Ruhl’s characters show at the beginning of act one, we've been in the thrall of technology for ages. They exude childlike delight in standing next to a lamp and marveling “on…off”, “on…off.” Like us, they speculate about what new advances the new technology will bring to their lives and how it might shape their perception of it.

Today we gape at each other’s latest 4G cell phone or iPad as we flick fingers and say. “Look at this app… and this one… and this one.”

With contemporary culture awash in sexually oriented entertainment and advertising, there is no mystery about the sex act as there was in 1880.  That said, one look at the feature stories in Cosmo and a rack of similar ones suggests there’s no overwhelming evidence that men and women are any better at communicating with sexual or emotional intimacy now than they were then. It still takes work, and, in the Givings’ case, trust, to allow it to bloom.

Despite its title, this story of a man and a woman who slowly learn from technology rather than becoming slaves to it unfurls with more of a cerebral than emotional thrust. Trimming the second act might add voltage to the play’s resolution and present us all with a more satisfying climax.

David Mamet's "Boston Marriage" at The New Rep Theater

BOSTON MARRIAGE
Play by David Mamet
Directed by: David Zoffoli
Sets, Janie E. Howland. Lights, Deb Sullivan. Costumes, Rafael Jaen. Sound, Joel Abbott.
New Repertory Theatre, Watertown, through Oct. 3.
Tickets: $28-$59. 617-923-8487
www.newrep.org

What on earth do we have here? Is David Mamet channeling his inner George Bernard Shaw? Mamet has concocted a story of two women of a certain age who are involved in a relationship of a certain lesbian nature at the turn of the twentieth century. The dialogue is rife with social commentary and intellectual gymnastics.
 
Anna fills the first five minutes with rapid fire dialogue revealing the details of her new found security while Claire’s been gallivanting about on an unexplained trip.
 
Anna’s found a paramour, a man who, for favors rendered, is furnishing her with a monthly stipend, enough for Anna and Claire to live on, and has bankrolled a makeover of Anna's apartment, which he'll visit for carnal delights. The benefactor has also gifted Anna with a magnificent emerald necklace, “in his family for five generations,” a token that will play a large part in the play’s denouement - and Anna and Claire’s lives.
 
Anna has a knack for declamatory speech with a suggestion of a wink. She enjoys verbal jousting but doesn't take herself all that seriously. Claire has fewer lines in the first act but delivers them with the speed and accuracy of a heat seeking missile.
 
Claire divulges that she’s fallen in love, or at least lust, with a shapely young girl and wants to arrange a tryst with her in Anna’s apartment. Eventually Anna consents, with the proviso she can watch, perhaps even participate.

Keeping up with Anna's galloping dialogue is tiring. Like an owner pops a biscuit into an attentive pet's mouth, Mamet keeps us in the game with a succession of terrific one-liners and scatological zingers.

“Do you believe in God?” Anna says after one of her cerebral speeches.

“I would if you’d shut up,” Claire reposts. That along with an occasional “Kiss my ass,” in the midst of proper Edwardian conversation. And the best riposte from Anna. “One must keep a civil tongue in one's mouth; it need not be one's own.”

Anna and Claire, now looking at their youth in a rear view mirror, and painfully aware of it, have fewer and fewer prospects for acquiring incomes to support their guilded "Boston Marriage." The transition into accepting the advance of age and its effect on their life style, let alone their psyches, underpins much of the play.
 
 The last line in the first act (no spoiler here) is the intriguing axis for the second act to pivot upon.  Let’s just say it has to do with the emerald necklace Anna is wearing and the arrival (unseen) of the object of Claire’s lust.
 
The second act has a “Waiting for Godot” feel to it. Plans are hatched, plans are jettisoned. Letters are sent. Letters are  received. Traction gets slippery.

The sexual chemistry between Anna and Claire doesn’t make sparks fly, but when they argue and fling scurrilous insults at each other, they’re a matched pair. They have long memories and have the capacity to use them to express their romantic history or fire dishy, no holds barred, broadsides at each other.

Debra Wise as Anna inhabits her role with relish, a mix by turns of the realist, the pragmatist, and the earthy philosopher. She’s a cockeyed optimist, who hasn’t met a problem, a man, or a woman, for that matter, that she can’t manage

Claire (left) and Anna (photo courtesy of Boston Globe)

Jenny Israel has a less satisfactory grip on the character of Claire. She’s smitten with a young woman and undone with the realization that her own youthful days are long behind her. While she gets that across clearly, her romantic connection with her partner Anna just doesn't fire on all cylinders.

Melissa Baroni’s character of Catherine the Scottish maid is the unlikely glue that holds the play together. Catherine’s entries and exits become a running joke. Every time she enters, something unexpected happens. Mamet deftly uses her to move the action along. Very smart, because if not for this zany character, the play would have descended into boredom long before its conclusion.
 
Scenes involving Anna and Catherine often hit your funny bone but “Boston Marriage” doesn’t contain a cohesive enough structure to satisfy. It runs out of gas long before it concludes with a resolution that is not entirely plausible.
 
Does David Mamet’s play not succeed because the humor is too underplayed for a full blown comedy of manners or because the plot is too thin to extend it into a two hour production? Either way, it doesn’t connect solidly with a universal theme. In the end, we may want to care about these women but can only observe from afar.

Blithe Spirit: Heavenly Noel Coward at the Lyric Stage

 "Blithe Spirit"
A play written by Noel Coward
The Lyric Stage Company
140 Clarendon Street
Boston, MA
May 7- June 6, 2010
Running time 2 hours 45 minutes with two brief intermissions

This play was a ton of fun. Let’s review. Here we have American actors streaking through dazzling British dialogue faster than thoroughbreds at Kensington and not dropping an indiscreet vowel anywhere on the page - how swell!  A cast with some serious Boston stage royalty sent this production of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" to its heavenly reward in the stretch limo of a production I witnessed in its final weekend of the run.

Charles and Ruth Condomine (Coward has such a flair for creating names) invite Dr. Bradman and his wife Edith for dinner and a funsie séance to be conducted by Mme. Arcati, the local kook. Mostly for entertainment, we’re to understand it’s also grist for content a book Charles is planning to write. Unexpected things happen, deliciously.

Charles’s late wife Elvira materializes, “ectoplasmically,” after Mme. Arcati’s séance, and is visible only by Charles, a terrific device Coward dreams up to make the play really work. Charles's sparring dialogue over unfinished business between him and Elvira is understood by his very alive wife Ruth to be directed toward her. It’s a tribute to Coward that he can wring so much humor from this simple ploy.

 The writing for many American sitcoms is full of zingy lines but the humor fired back and forth between Charles, Edith, and Elvira is as dry as Charle’s famous martinis. This is the kind of repartee you’d give your eye teeth to have the presence of mind to fire off spontaneously. When it gets rolling, Charles (Richard Snee), Ruth (Anne Gottlieb), Elvira (Paula Plum), and Mme. Arcati (Kathy St. George) play their roles sublimely over the top.

They mine the biggest bang out of small gestures, non-verbal interplay, and facial expressions. As brilliant as he is, Coward couldn’t write this stuff into the script. The actors have to be able to calibrate from subtle to farcical, and you can almost feel them hooting internally as they romp through some of the fabulous turns of action.

Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle Coward has been slyly assembling for the play's first two hours begin to coalesce at the end of Act 2. By the end of Act 3, Coward tidies up all the loose ends, taking aim at the British upper class drawing room fascination with crystal balls, psychics, and séances-as-party-games while he’s at it.

Thanks to the fun-loving actors who relish playing to the back of the house, Noel Coward gave us two hours and forty five minutes of sparkling dialogue and pitch perfect acting… a blithely spirited finale of Lyric Stage’s 2010 season.

Photo courtesy of Lyric web site

Boston Theater Marathon 2010: Laurels All Around

Boston Theater Marathon XII - Sunday, May 23
Produced by The Boston Playwrights' Theatre
Stanford Calderwood Pavilion
at the Boston Center for the Arts
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Presented in part by the Boston University Humanities Foundation
$25 tickets in advance - $30 tickets at the door


If you had any teensy doubts that Boston was not a theater town, they would have exited stage right if you took in the 12th Annual Boston Theater Marathon. If you went, I’m preaching to the choir. If you didn’t, lemme tell ya, you blew your chance.
 
Here’s what you missed. 50 ten-minute plays   by 50 New England playwrights presented by 50 New England theater companies in 10 hours. I arrived for the starting gun at high noon and witnessed the first three hours - 37 actors performing in fifteen plays written by fifteen different playwrights, staged by fifteen different directors collaborating with fifteen different theater companies. What a glorious spectacle.

Like its namesake the Boston Marathon, the lineup is filled with names familiar to the crowd and ones you never heard of. Some of these unknowns will emerge from the pack and become local legends or pack up for the Big Apple. Some are living out a fantasy, will take a brief turn on the boards, and not be heard from again. All of them radiate the kind of passion that makes it a pleasure to sit in the seats and watch the shows go on.

Photo: 11:58 AM Patrons await the starting gun. The stage lights go up in two minutes.

The quality of the plays and performers is for the most part quite even. The vetting process in which over 350 submitted plays are whittled down to 50 takes care of that. Nearly all the plays followed the sage advice of veteran play selection committee member Bill Latanzi.

From the starting gun at noon until I left at 3 pm, at least three of the five plays each hour had the audience whooping with pleasure or admiration. When a play didn’t quite hit the mark, it was hard to see whether the actor didn’t channel the character or the playwright’s lines didn’t ring true but one thing you did see was that the actor up there was giving it his/her best shot.
 
This is bare bones theater. Most plays set up with a couple of chairs or a bench. The biggest set of in my three hour stint was a love seat, a sofa, two coffee tables and a couple of lamps. In the fleeting 60 seconds after each play, the actors take a brief bow, the stage lights dim, efficient techies reset the stage with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, and the next play begins. The Paris Metro doesn’t run more efficiently.

As Will Shakespeare said, “The play’s the thing.” The content varies from sketches to compact playlets. Communications/Presentation Coach Ann Baker, who has 30 years of casting directorial experience, explained the difference to me.  "A sketch/skit is situational. A play is character driven."

“In a sketch/ skit, there is no change, growth, development, of any kind that takes place with the actors.  They simply react to the action taking place. After the action ends they go right back to who they are. They are the same character at the end of the action as they were in the beginning.”

“In a play, there is a beginning a middle and an end - exposition, climax, resolution. There should be a change in the development of the character or a change in the degree of the character's being. For example: The shy character, may come out of his/her shell, or become more shy, or become a raving lunatic. Something happens to the characters that alters their being by some  degree. The thing that happens might only be a tone of voice of another character which changes everything.”

Baker has packed a lunch and gone from start to finish for years. "This year was one of the best I've seen in the last 5-7 years," she said. "The writing was better and they used more of the best actors in town."

The net proceeds from this charity event are poured into the Theater Community Benevolent Fund, a fund for actors and theaters in need.

Artistic Director Kate Snodgrass tinkers with the lineup like Tito Francona manages the Red Sox batting order. Every hour has a mix of heavy, light, zany, zenny, ambiguous, or precisely pointed plays. Differentiating between sketches and plays is another way to keep score.

Timeless themes exploring romantic relationships of all possible permutations; friendship; history; personality disorders; guilt; coming of age; boomers coming to terms with mortality; and the occasional over the top politically incorrect sketch (Kosher Kop) kept me laughing, thinking, or holding back the occasional tear.
 
It’s a revelation to see how much drama can be packed into the time it takes to microwave your dinner. Whether you stay for one five-play hour or pack a lunch and go the distance, you will never be bored. Put this event on your calendar. You’ve got a year to clear your schedule.

BTM Play Lineup 2010 (All 50 plays)
pt at large's three hour stint
12-1 PM:
Kosher Kop by Robert Brustein/American Repertory Theater
Pseudoephedrine by Ken Urban/Pilgrim Theatre
Color Coordination by Benjamin Conrick/Emerson Stage
And Clouds Made of Bones by William Orem/Firehouse Center for the Arts
Hygiene by Gregory Hischak/SpeakEasy Stage Company



1-2 PM:
Rosie’s Things by Janet Kenney/Holland Productions
It’s the Jews by John Minigan/Actors’ Shakespeare Project
Girls Play by Masha Obolensky/Boston Center for American Performance
Pressing by March Schrader/Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
Go to Helen Hunt for It by Rick Park/Phoenix Theatre Artists

2-3 PM:
 The Driving Force by Jenny Lecce/Boston College Dept. of Theatre
Tricia and Tony by George Matry Masselam/Playwrights’ Platform
Open Position by Christyl Watters/Wellesley Summer Theatre Company
Quiet Killers by Kristin Palmer/Stoneham Theatre
In the Absence of Words by Skylar Fox/New Repertory Theatre

From Orchids to Octopi: Coming To Grips With Charles Darwin

FROM ORCHIDS TO OCTOPI: An Evolutionary Love Story
Written by Melinda Lopez
Directed by Diego Arciniegas
Presented by Catalyst Collaborative@MIT
Performed by The Underground Railway Theater
At: Central Square Theater, through May 2
450 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. 617-576-9278,
$35, $25 seniors, $20 students


When is a play a play and when is it an educational experience? Well, you’ll have to make up your own mind if you check out “From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story”, a play created by Boston playwright Melinda Lopez to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Evolution of the Species”.

Lopez gets a gold star for even attempting to create the play. No matter which way you slice it, the play is a challenge to present.

On a cerebral level, the play has the goods. Lopez devised a plot involving the original Emma and Charles Darwin, a modern couple named Emma and Charles, a carnival barker and several minor characters whose names you might recognize, Reverend Thomas Malthus, for example.

The strength of the play is one of its liabilities. The play’s dialogue is loaded with references to abstract ideas that have to do with how and why we humans evolved from one celled organisms to artists and restaurant chefs, the modern Emma and Charles, respectively.

Evolution from fins to hands, from quadrupeds to upright bipeds, the persistence of pestilences like tuberculosis to decimate the planet’s population from time to time, the extinction of creature that didn’t or couldn’t adapt, all sorts of lingo about the origin of the species from the ooze to the patio - all of it is crammed into quick paced dialogue between the two Charles’s and the two Emma’s and, in a terrific concept, a carnival barker.

In an ideal theater world, the play’s program would be required reading before witnessing the production. The program includes:
• Three pages of “Why Is Evolution So Hard To  Understand” by Roxanna Myhrum, excellent background material, lists and elaborates on five key ideas:
    Humans instinctually make sense of the world using non-evolutionary concepts.
    The scientific language of evolutionary theory often has other meanings that lead to confusion.
    Culture and technology drive change in the modern world.
    The exact mechanism of change and inheritance are complicated and carried out on an invisible scale.
    The implications of evolution for human society are sometimes controversial.

• A brief “Evolution of Life” from 4.6 billion years ago until November 1859 when Darwin publishes “On the Origin of the Species.”

• “The Life of Charles Darwin”, a three page biography by Michelle Hochberg
 A two page “Time Line of 20th Century (ish) Science”

• One page titled “On The Origin of From Orchids to Octopi” listing scientists consulted via in-depth interviews (including MIT Professor of Biology Hidde Ploegh, the father of one of my former fourth grade students), and other scientists and advisors consulted during the formation of the play.

• A two page reproduction of Charles Darwin’s “Marry - Not Marry, this is the question” that lists his reasons for marrying or not marrying.

That gives you an idea of what’s rattling around in playwright Melinda Lopez’s mind after the National Institutes of Health commissioned Catalyst Collaborative@MIT to create a play that explains the importance of Darwin’s work and how it manifests itself in our daily lives.

Lopez’s idea of inventing a 21st century Emma, an artist hired to paint a mural celebrating Darwin’s work is brilliant. The cast of Charles Darwin (Wesley Savick), Emma Darwin (Underground Railway Theater Director Debra Wise), modern Emma (Kortney Adams), modern Charles (Tom O’Keefe) stretches hard to keep the story together. Savick and Wise are especially grand with their roles and their other roles as a Carnival Barker with a mile a minute evolution science rap and a wise cracking obstetrician, respectively.

What isn’t a stretch is the sobering reminder that germs and viruses adapt to the drugs we’ve created to eradicate them. O’Keefe and Wise fill in some links in the evolutionary time line by wearing sandwich-board type puppets and comically expound upon the roles of early invertebrates, bacteria, and the like.

The puppet representing tuberculosis gleefully reminds us how it’s adapted quite well, thank you very much, is still one of the world’s deadliest diseases, and that a staggering on third of the world’s population is infected with TB.

Ultimately, the play can’t handle the burden of knowledge it tries to impart. The dialogue is often too fast to digest and many of the connections it tries to make between Darwin’s theory and our own everyday lives are a bit too square to fit into a round hole.

If you’re looking for an intellectually rousing night at the theater, this might be your cup of tea. But I advise you to adapt by arriving at the theater with your tea a half hour before curtain time and bring your reading glasses. The Orchid and the Octopi will make way more sense after you read the program thoroughly.

Photos of David Fichter's terrific murals courtesy of the NIH web site

A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline: Velvet Thunder

"A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline"
With Bridget Beirne and Tom Frey
April 7, 2010 - April 17, 2010
Fiddlehead Theater Company at Back Bay Events Center (John Hancock Hall)
200 Berkley Street
Boston, MA, 02116


Yes. You heard me right. Patsy Cline. Whaddya mean, you don’t like, “country”? I dare you to listen to “I Fall To Pieces” or “Crazy” and tell me you don’t like country. Let me straighten you out with a few facts, Hoss (a term of endearment Cline used to refer to her friends).

Patsy Cline is the Number One Juke-Box Play in the World. Her "Greatest Hits" album has been in first place for more than 200 weeks on Billboard’s Top Country Catalog Albums. Whether you like country music or not, you’d have to have had your radio turned off for sixty years or so not to have heard her sing something or someone cover a song she made famous.

Sing is a tepid word to describe what Patsy Cline did. She emoted. So does Bridget Beirne who sings the daylights out of her role as Patsy in the play, “A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline,” at the John Hancock Hall in Boston.

Cline’s uneven rise to fame and death in a plane crash as her career was peaking is cleverly told through the eyes of Mr. Little Big Man, a disc jockey at WINC, “The Music of the SouthLand with 10,000 watts of country power out of Winchester, Virginia.” The guy has loved Patsy Cline since Virginia Hensley (her original name) showed up at the station in 1948 at age sixteen and drilled a hole in the man’s heart with her raw talent and phenomenal pipes.

The play’s set features a bandstand at center stage and a tiny radio booth on the side of the stage. Mr. Little Big Man, on his stool in the booth at WINC, is spending the night of March 6, 1963 reminiscing about Cline’s climb through early rejection, personal injuries, and relationship problems to her breakout song, “Walkin’ After Midnight. ” Career launched, Cline blazed an unheard-of trail from the Arthur Godfrey Talent Show, to The Grand Ole Opry, to Carnegie Hall, the first country singer to ever be invited there.

Beirne, as Patsy fronting her very lively quintet of piano, guitar, bass, laptop/pedal steel and percussion, takes over each time the jockey plays one of her songs.

Cline’s patter with the band reveals her comfort in her own country skin and her unerring sense of showmanship. “I started out singing at parties in Virginia and they haven’t been able to stop me since,” she says before taking off on the show’s first song, “Come On In,” She had the goods. She believed in herself when acknowledgment was slim and didn’t crow about it when adulation came her way.

Although it has to distill Cline’s rich life into ninety minutes, “A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline” manages to weave in the small details that made this woman special. One night, Cline, just beginning to get name recognition, stepped out on stage and said, “We’d love to sing for you folks tonight but the promoter hasn’t paid us yet.” The promoters, who often skipped town with the proceeds and stiffied the singers, promptly paid the entertainers on the night’s billing. They didn’t mess with “The Cline” after that.

Through changes in her attire and the venues in which she played, Beirne show us Patsy at work on stage. Cline was a force but no prima donna. Virginia Hensley transforms from gingham dressed school girl in Winchester, Virginia to a woman in a fire engine red hat, fabulous fringed vest, skirt and boots in Las Vegas and finally to an icon wrapped in a gorgeous floor length gown in New York City - but her two feet stay firmly planted in the soil of working class Virginia. Patsy Cline was one of the first singers to have such enormous crossover appeal.

“I just sing how I hurt inside.” Patsy Cline

She never hid her country roots, could carry off an “aw shucks, what’s the fuss about” character, and bantered and mugged shamelessly with an adoring audience that sensed her authenticity.

Through the progression of songs, the show traces the arc of her career. You also get a glimpse into mid 20th century America through Tom Frey’s multiple roles as disk jockey Little Big Man delivering commercials for Mr. Clean, Ajax, and as a comic doing his shtick as the second banana introducing Patsy Cline to the audience in Las Vegas and at The Grand Ole Opry.

Most of all you get Beirne singing full throttle Patsy Cline. Cline had “pain in her voice that speaks to your heart” said Mr. Little Big Man. On ballads, Patsy Cline’s rich contralto voice is velvet thunder with a distant echo of unfathomable grief. Listen to “I Fall To Pieces” or “Crazy” or `Sweet Dreams.” The timbre in her voice resonates in your heartstrings. I get a lump in my throat every time I hear those songs - happened earlier this week when Beirne sang them, too.

Beirne doesn’t duplicate that dark mournful edge to Cline’s voice in ballads like “I Fall To Pieces” but honestly, I don’t know if anyone can. What she does is give us a sense of the joy Cline had in singing and her uncompromising way of giving everything she had on every song every night. You may call her country but you’ll certainly realize you've never heard anything quite like Patsy Cline's way with a song.

Even though you know it’s coming, the show’s last scene on that March night, in which Mr. Little Big Man gets a news flash about Cline’s death in a plane crash, is a heartbreaker.  The plays final two songs feature Cline, starkly lit in a stunning white gown, reprising "Crazy" and "A Closer Walk With Thee."

Barely 30 years old, Patsy Cline was gone. It took a few moments for the choked up audience to respond - a standing ovation for the musicians, Tom Frey, and Bridget Beirne, but mostly for the woman who made the memories possible.

PLAYLIST
“Come On In”
“Gotta Lotta Rhythm in My Soul”
“There He Goes”
“Seven Lonely Days”
“Faded Love”
“Turkey In The Straw”
Walkin’ After Midnight”
“Your Cheatin’ Heart”
“Stop, Look, and LIsten”
“Always”
“Lovesick Blues”

Act 2
“Blue Moon of Kentucky”
“I Don’t Wanna”
“Just A Closer Walk With Thee”
“She’s Got You”
“Back In Baby’s Arms”
“Sweet Dreams”
“I Fall To Pieces”
“Bill Bailey”
“Crazy”

Photo of Bridget Beirne courtesy Edge Boston
Photo of Patsy Cline web archive

Opus: Brilliant Work at the New Repertory Theater

Opus
A drama by Michael Hollinger
New Repertory Theater
Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA
March 29 - April 18
Directed by Jim Petosa
Cristina Todesco, scenic design, Eric Propp, costume design, Scott Pinkney, lighting design, Ben Emerson, sound design, Amy Weissenstein, production stage manager

Shelley Bolman -Alan
Benjamin Evett - Dorian
Michael Kaye - Elliot
Becky Webber - Grace
Bates Wilder - Carl

Who knew the dynamics within a chamber music ensemble could provide such arena-sized satisfaction. The New Repertory Theater ensemble actors in "Opus" at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown blow the hinges off your notions of the serene, elegant unity of a high powered group of talented musicians playing Beethoven, Mozart and the whole catalog of classical treasures we associate with the genre.

The world-renowned Lazara String Quartet is preparing to perform at the White House and a television audience of millions. Ho hum. How will this produce drama. By the time 90 minutes has flown by, we’ve witnessed several deliciously drawn subplots that rival “Lost” for complexity and shifts of power. The harmonics produced by the Lazara String Quartet are heavenly but the social dynamics between the principals morph into guilty pleasure soap opera, capable of casting a strong spell of "Desperate Housewives" upon you. And it works.

Writer and former violinist Michael Hollinger has created a play that alternately soars with passionate, informed dialogue and crashes fabulously at high speed into brick walls. His dialogue miraculously layers references to stops, rests, frets and music scores between passionate, sometimes comical, sometimes confrontational, interactions between high-strung musicians.

The characters, as different as the instruments in the quartet, own their parts with conviction. They offer highly charged and nuanced performances that mine the territory of personal identity and group cohesion.

A key member of the group, Dorian (Benjamin Evett), is cast out because of erratic behavior that surpasses his musical genius. Grace (Becky Webber) is hired to replace him. Lazara Quartet’s wonderfully over-the-top violinist Elliot (Michael Kaye) egotistically pushes his musical and personal agenda, disturbing the group’s inherent tendency toward unity. Quartet bassist Carl (Bates Wilder) and second violinist Alan (Shelley Bolman) navigate the turbulent territory between allegiance to the deposed player Dorian, the newest member Grace, and their desire to make world-class music with rigid, impervious-to-compromise, Elliot.

Alan (Shelley Bolman), Elliot (Michael Kaye) , Grace (Becky Webber), Dorian (Benjamin Evett) , Carl (Bates Wilder)

Hollinger consistently breaks the escalating tension with one-liners from the cast that had last night’s audience laughing out loud. The music sequences were recreated by having the quartet mimic bowing their instruments, letting us imagine their fingering over the instruments’ frets, over recorded music of whatever score they were playing. The synchronization was terrific, nothing was lost in translation.

Evett’s and Kaye’s use of body language and facial expression are particularly brilliant as they range through Elliot and Dorian’s complicated relationship.

This is a very rewarding night of theater. The final moments of "Opus" are a hold your breath piece of drama. A short epilogue intended to flash forward from the play’s last dramatic scene, falls inexplicably flat. It is the only missed note of a finely tuned piece of theater.

Photo from wickedlocal

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill: Billie's Last Dive

 LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL
Play by Lanie Robertson,
with musical arrangements
by Danny Holgate
Directed by: Spiro Veloudos. Music direction, Chauncey Moore. Set, Skip Curtiss.
Costumes, Mallory Frers. Lights, Karen Perlow.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through April 24.
Tickets: $29-$54. 617-585-5678

Billie Holiday’s life was a train wreck long before she stepped on to the fictional stage of Emerson’s Bar & Grill in South Philly a few months before she died in 1959 at the age of 44 of cirrhosis of the liver. By the time we’ve finished watching “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” currently playing at the Lyric Stage, we see what else killed her.
 
The setting, a small, exposed brick, bare bones seedy bar, a few cocktail tables, rickety piano and a stool for the singer, might be fine for an aspiring talent on the way up. For Holiday, who’d sung in Carnegie Hall, it was the pits, the last stop. The haze drifting through the spotlights on the stage deftly conveys the smoky atmosphere in a dive like Emerson’s but also the fog through which Holiday is struggling emotionally.
 
Between 14 songs, a worn out and insecure Holiday, played sensitively by Jacqui Parker, sings for an indifferent, unseen bar audience. She’s been ravaged by drugs and booze but can still, in a few infrequent glorious  moments, cop an attitude reminiscent of her glory days. She doesn’t have any energy left to hate the men who took advantage of her or blame herself for letting it happen.

What we get is Holiday tossing off stories of being raped as a young girl, the whorehouse she worked in, her wayward mother, the many musicians she met and sang with, and the men who messed with her in every way they could. She sang with the best bands of the twentieth century: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Her nickname, “Lady Day,” was bestowed by Lester Young, the great sax player of the 1930s and 40s.

Chauncey Moore, playing piano player Jimmy Powers, anchors Holiday on the stage during her attacks of petulance or need for a fix.  He’s way better than many who probably accompanied her in her last few years.
 
Given her temperament, Holiday may have self-destructed no matter when she lived. “Your best talent is you pick the worst apple in the barrel every time,” Holiday recalls her mother saying about her choice in men. Holiday might have been a world-class singer; she was also a world-class enabler.
 
Bandleader Artie Shaw hired her as one of the first black singers to work with a white orchestra. After listening to her stories of life on the road south of the Mason Dixon line, even with one of the best bands in the country, it’s clear that segregation battered a big part of her soul and whatever self-regard she could muster.
 
During the 90-minute one act show, she disintegrates while gulping bourbon and once disappears, leaving Jimmy to improvise a boogie woogie until she reappears after she’s apparently shot up with heroin.
 
Till now, we’ve been watching Parker perform a documentary of Holiday’s life interpreted through song. When she wanders back onstage, barefoot and glassy eyed, it’s almost embarrassing to see such great talent reduced to slurry, unkempt caricature. All that talent, that sass, that gritty will to survive, flickers faintly and will soon to be extinguished. These are the most indelible moments of the night.
 
The aggregated toll of segregation, selfish and addicted lovers, and a complete lack of love from anyone who mattered and would stand by her have crushed her. Parker doesn’t try to mimic Holiday’s iconic, thin, raspy voice. No problem. When she sings “God Bless The Child” and “Strange Fruit, ” they resonate for all the sad reasons Holiday wrote them.
 
There's no other way writer Lanie Robertson could pull this off other than having Holiday be in a safe setting where she can say whatever she wants. Emerson’s Bar & Grill is not too far a stretch from the whorehouse in which Holiday  first heard records of  Louis Armstrong and Besse Smith. She’s in a black milieu and is pouring out her life story to a few people at the bar who might be paying attention. Several stories describe incidents with the ‘ofay’ (derogatory term for white people), the small minded, holier than thou, very un-black promoters and parole officers who made her life miserable.
 
She tells the stories without rancor and occasionally gets a laugh out of some of white folks very un-cool ways. So when she says, “The only difference between us and white folks is we wear our black on the outside,” I look around at the audience and don’t see many “we”s but after listening to her stories for the past hour, I know who she’s talking about. Good theater puts you in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes the better the fit, the more uncomfortable it feels.
 
“Singing is the best part of living for me,” she says early in the play. Her voice endured long after her body and soul began to desert her. As in the Besse Smith song she sings, "All I ever wanted was to be somebody's baby doll..." She never found that somebody who really cared about her.
 
The play doesn’t reveal profound truths but does give us liner notes to a musical icon of the twentieth century.

Musical Numbers performed by Jacqui Parker

“ I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone” by Woodrow Johnson
“When a Woman Loves a Man” by Bernard Hanighen, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny Mercer
“What a Little Moonlight Can Do” by HarryWoods
“Crazy He Calls Me” by Bob Russell, Carl Sigman
“Gimme a Pig Foot” by Wesley Wilson
“Baby Doll” by Besse Smith
“God Bless The Child” by Arthur Herzog, Jr, Billie Holiday
“Foolin’ Myself” by Jack Lawrence, Peter Tinturin
“Somebody’s On My Mind” by Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog, Jr.
“Easy Livin’” by Robin and Rolinger
“Strange Fruit’ by Lewin  Allen
“Taint Nobody’s Business” by Porter Grainger, Everett Robbins
“Don’t Explain” by Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog, Jr.
“Deep Song” by Douglas Cross, George Cory

Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage Company

Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Perfect Concoction for Spring

Limonade Tous Les Jours by Charles L. Mee
Directed by Louisa Richards
Production Manager Adrienne Boris, Stage Manager Candace Mongellow, Scenic Design Kathryn Kawecki, Lighting Design Tamar Shavit
Black Box Theater at The Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
April 1-10, 2010
Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 8:00 pm
Saturday 2:00 & 8:00 pm

The “limonade” being served at the Black Box Theater at the Arsenal Center for The Arts is a perfect concoction for spring.  The formula: A young cabaret singer. A middle aged American man. Paris. Two people recently devastated by love lost, “damaged goods” as they call themselves, who end up hovering close to the flame of love again like two moths with no short term memory.

Andrew, a fifty-ish American smarting from divorce from a younger woman. Ya Ya, a twenty-something cabaret singer recently dumped by an older man. He thoughtful, cautious, reflective (“boring” she says). She, a personality brimming over with the effervescence of a just uncorked bottle of champagne. Sex happens. Then they try to figure out whether to say hello or goodbye. Both are clear that they don’t want each other. Or need each other. Or both. Or neither. But they do anyway. And that’s the fun of watching the play unfold.

Ya Ya (Marie Polizzano) lights up the play with her antic, stream of consciousness, wonderfully Gallic ideas about love, sex, relationships and what she wants. Listening to her get going on a zany roll foaming with fizzy French female logic is hilarious. Her French accent is spot on and miraculously stays on for the entire production. She gushes with her ideas about what makes a man and a woman connect, never mind that they’re all contradictory.

Andrew (Peter Haydu) is the ice to Ya Ya’s fire. His sense of romance is more grounded and mellowed with age. His reflective nature is a speed bump for Ya Ya. She’s never met a man she can trust. Never believing their lives will touch beyond these moments, they share their vulnerabilities and their dreams with easy candor. They are two pieces of a puzzle that when turned just so, fit together perfectly. Is it enough?

The spare set design, music, and lighting fit perfectly with the theater space and the feel of the play. Interludes of Ya Ya’s cabaret singing (Marie Polizzano can sing!), the photo montage shown by their café waiter that adds another dimension to what they’ve been up to on their day in Paris, and a stunning song by said waiter (counter tenor Doug Dodson), add pow to the production.

Beneath all the funny lines, this play has to do with human yearning for connection. Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows that dance of finding the right fit and the work it takes to smooth the inevitable burrs along the edges.

What will become of them? Who knows. There are scores of reasons they’re not suited for each other, most of which they tell each other with penetrating, often comical, honesty. But since when has that foreclosed a relationship?  By the play’s final moments, we know their chance meeting has changed their lives.

Of course, the fact I enjoyed this play written by Charles Mee has nothing to do with the fact my former fourth grade student Louisa Richards directed it. And nothing to do with how rewarding it is for me to see a kid I knew as a reserved, earnest ten-year-old go for broke and become a founding member of Exquisite Corps Theatre, Boston’s newest theater company.

Young theater companies and start-up internet enterprises might be two of the most fragile, high-risk, high-gain ventures to launch. In my thoroughly biased opinion , if anyone can make lemonade out of the sweet and sour ups and downs in the world of directing and producing plays, it’s Louisa Richards.

Stick Fly: Gem at the Calderwood Pavilion

STICK FLY
Play by Lydia R. Diamond
Directed by: Kenny Leon. Set, David Gallo. Costumes, Reggie Ray. Lights, Allen Lee Hughes. Sound, Timothy J. Thompson. Presented by: Huntington Theatre Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Wimberly Theatre, through March 28.
Tickets, $20-$60, 617-266-0800

If you’ve been waiting for a good reason head to Boston to see a really good play, Lydia R. Diamond’s “Stick Fly” is the one. This Huntington Theater Company production at Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater is the most fully realized production I’ve seen this year. You want to stand up and cheer when the footlights go up. I did.

Actors, set, themes, pacing, rich complex plot lines - they’re all in.

David Gallo's inventive, visually appealing, cutaway set that allows scenes to take place simultaneously and without the other actors onstage aware of them is the engine pulling the play down the tracks. The acting is the coal burning brightly in the engine’s firebox. 

The sons of a well to-do-African American family bring a fiancée and a girlfriend to their parents’ upscale Martha’s Vineyard summer home. The unexpected early arrival of the son’s father, a wealthy self made man and successful Boston neurosurgeon, starts the plot ticking like a time bomb and it doesn’t relent until the last scene.

The plot is has more layers than a wedding cake. Class divisions within the African American community, sibling rivalries, generational conflicts, the unearthing of secrets that shake a family to its roots -  could be the basis for an entire play unto themselves. They’re all here and a few more for good measure.

Every one of the characters is smart, accomplished, and fully developed. Diamond doesn’t hit us over the head with a sledgehammer of a sociological treatise. She lets the plot come to us through the characters’ back stories and dialogue. The interplay between them deftly highlights the biases and assumptions and perceptions about class, skin color, interracial dating, stereotyping, and gender biases. This isn’t about black issues or white issues. It’s about our issues

Taylor (Nickkole Salter) is the brainy insecure etymologist (scientist who places a fly to a pin and examines it from every possible angle); Kent (Jason Dirden), aspiring novelist, her fiancé, is trying to find approval from his father; Flip (Billy Eugene Jones) is cut out of his father’s cloth and tries to straddle black and white worlds; Kimber (Rosie Benton) his white girlfriend, is a liberal minded nonconformist who has an academic understanding of how the system fails her black students but a few cultural blind spots of her own; Cheryl (Amber Iman), the daughter of LeVay’s longtime maid, sent to fill in for her at LeVay summer home by her ailing mother, is making her way through high school; and Dr. Joe LeVay (Wendell W. Wright) is the father who has made the concessions he had to make to rise to wealth and status and browbeats his sons for not following his strategy of finding what they want and grabbing it by the neck. His ascendance has had its secrets.  Their struggle to “fit in” to a multi-racial society is the spine of the play’s narrative.

An aspect of the play for a white audience (at least for me) is the guilty pleasure of having the impression of listening to black people talking to each other as if we white folks weren’t there. Diamond’s brilliant stroke to have Kimber present while they’re doing so provides both comic and sharp edged moments.

Where do you compromise? Where do you make a stand? How to you get comfortable in your own skin? What do you do when you can’t find approval from the ones whom you love?

While wrestling with these universal issues, Diamond deftly serves up a  comedy of manners that has the ring of a richly observed sitcom, a really good one, where the funny bone is close to a nerve. And are we ever glad to laugh out loud with the zinging repartee.

These gifted human beings are trying to find acceptance within their families and in society at large. People of every color can relate to that.

Photo: Scott Suchman

Paradise Lost at the A.R.T. Loeb Drama Center

PARADISE LOST
Play by Clifford Odets
Directed by: Daniel Fish. Set, Andrew Lieberman. Costumes, Kaye Voyce. Lights, Scott Zielinski. Sound, Clive Goodwin. Video, Joshua Thorson.
Presented by: American Repertory Theatre.
At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through March 20.
Tickets, $25-75, 617-547-8300

Look, I really want to actually love a production by the A.R.T. at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. The theater architecture is fabulous: a proscenium that can stretch out into the audience if necessary, a stage deep enough to contain the four horsemen of Notre Dame, wide enough to hold a whole Chorus Line, and high enough to feature aerial acts. So much potential. 

I don’t mind that A.R.T. directors push the envelope. I do mind if they crumple it so it’s too much effort to make use of it.
 
The current production of Clifford Odets' Paradise Lost is a challenge for audiences in any form it’s delivered. Over 2 1/2 hours long with two intermissions and a large cast, it requires stamina to appreciate under the best of circumstances.
 
Odets (1903-1963) had Eastern European roots, lived through the Great Depression, and flirted with Communism. He had a bone to pick with America’s economic collapse. His anger seemed equally distributed between the people who accepted the Depression with equanimity and the government that seemed incapable of doing much about it.
 
In the play’s program, Clifford Odets is quoted as saying, “It is my hope that when people see Paradise Lost, they’re going to be glad they’re alive. And I hope that after they’ve seen it, they’ll turn to the strangers sitting next to them and say ‘hello’.”
 
I sat next to my theater companion and said, “What…?”
 
The play opened with nine members of three families sitting around a dining room table in an American city on Armistice Day in the early 1930s. One way or another, all of them are being ground down by the Great Depression.
 
We have handbag manufacturer Leo Gordon, his wife Clara, their two sons Ben and Julie, and their daughter Pearl. We have Leo’s business partner Sam Katz, and his wife Bertha. We have Gus Michaels, a family friend, and Libby Michaels, his daughter, who marries Ben. We have Kewpie, a friend of Ben’s. We have Mr. Pike, a furnace man, given to perorations. We have Mr. May, Phil Foley, Felix, and a few others who appear only on videotape. A couple of actors play dual roles.
 
We have patrons scanning their programs to figure out who is who and piece together how this web fits together.

Director Daniel Fish’s choice to video scenes taking place on the wide stage's perimeter and project them onto a huge screen directly over the stage adds punch to those scenes. It's distracting when he videotapes action at center stage and projects it right over the actors performing it. Our video savvy eyes gravitate to the projected imaging on the screen. Our theater eyes keep saying, whoa, watch the real live action right in front of you on stage.

Some of the most rousing soliloquies come from populist laborer Mr. Pike, who seems to fill the role of Greek chorus. Pike does a good job of standing on Odets' soapbox but the rest of the play rambles.

Leo and Sam’s business is going down.  Ben’s marriage to Libby is failing. Leo’s relationship with his family is loving but distant. Sam has secrets that emerge in the final scenes. The fact that none of this is pretty is beside the point. The problem is there doesn’t seem to be an emotional core to the play that we can relate to, or worse, care about.
 
Odets’ themes of inter-generational family clashes, middle class struggles to gain economic footing, and the effect of money and greed on relationships, are worthy. They just do not gel here.

I’m not asking director Daniel Fish to sugar-coat Odets' dramatic pessimism. I’d just like to see a play that delivers a clearer vision of what Odets was trying to say.

Photo courtesy of American Repertory Theater website

New Rep's "boom" a bust

boom
Play by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Sets and props, Jarrod Bray. Costumes, Jennifer Guadagno. Lights, Chris Brusberg. Sound, Matt Griffin.
Downstage @ New Rep
Arsenal Center for the Arts,321 Arsenal St. Watertown
through March 13. Tickets: $25. 617-923-8487

boom is a bust. The New Repertory Theater production currently running at the Arsenal Center for the Arts has a hellsapoppin’ pace that makes if feel like several TV sitcoms stitched together to make a 90 minute show. There’s the battle of the sexes part, the end of the world part, the science gone tone deaf-part, and the superimposed play within a play part.
 
In the play’s foreword, new artistic director Kate Warner says, “...the script deals with the determination of the scientific pursuit of the truth, and because what may seem impossible in terms of challenging scientific reason can hit faster than a comet. If we take these truths for granted, then we risk losing our ability to interpret our history and divine its hidden messages and all it represents in both arts and sciences.”
 

Well and good, Kate, but this theme gets highjacked by the frenzied pace of the dialogue and the frenetic style in which it’s delivered.

From left: Scott Sweatt, Zofia Gozynska, and Karen MacDonald in “boom.’’ (Rob Lorino, Boston Globe)

 A geek’s advertisement on Craigslist for a night of unbridled passion is the starting point for the play. The young scientist is convinced his data predicts the end of the world is imminent within hours. Jules desperately wants to attract a young female with whom he can cohabit in his underground apartment cum laboratory/bomb shelter, and make children to repopulate the planet once the comet he predicts devastates the world as we know it. 

Jo, the young woman he attracts is as problematic for him as the comet he fears is about to snuff the earth. Jules the scientist might be gay and can’t get out of his head. Jo the budding journalist is whip-smack smart and can’t find her inner Eros (“Have you invited me here so I can find a story that makes you think that a random act of sex will make you feel hope in a decaying society?”). Both of them view sex as radioactive.
 
Writer Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s intent is to make a screwball comedy aimed at stodgy academic scientists who are slow to accept a fellow scientist’s data predicting catastrophe subtexted with the question of whether a socially inept man and an emotionally damaged woman can connect when the stakes are so high they trump their individual needs. Fine in theory.
 
The snappy, clever dialogue between them is non-stop. After thirty minutes of this, I’m ready for shifts of pace, of mood, of combative intensity. They never come till near the ninety-minute mark. By this time, it looks like Mr. Nachtrieb’s ready for a comet ex machina device to end the show.
 
The fact that the play we’re witnessing is actually a carbon-dated interactive exhibit set in a museum eons after the earth-snuffing occurred seems forced.
 
Barbara is the ditsy curator of the exhibit, which, ironically, seems to be in its last day of operation for reasons never clearly stated. The sound effects are terrific for the space-ship like console she operates at the side of the set to stop and start the action in this diorama drama, but this is not meant to be a cartoon.
 
Karen Macdonald is grand as the off-the-wall curator, who appears to be here for comic relief. Like Jules, she’s is battling forces she cant overcome. As good as she is, Macdonald’s role as scene jockey detracts from any emotional momentum the play strains to achieve.
 
Scott Sweatt as Jules and Zophia Gozynska make the most of their roles but in this reviewer’s opinion could have been directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary to employ a less one-dimensional interaction with each other.
 
I left with the impression that boom's world ended not with a bang, but a yawn.

MUD, Directed By Louisa Richards, Former pt Student

Every so often, a review gets lost in the "in progress" folder. I finished this one while wating for a plane in the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport en route to Chile.

MUD, written by Maria Irene Fornes

Presented by The Factory Theater
Directed by Louisa Richards
Set designer Tim Baumgartener, Lighting designer and  Producer Greg Jurkiewicz
Stage Manager and Producer Sarah Simons
September 8, 2008


When the lighting technician rushes down from an unseen perch above the seats to give you a hug that’s rare enough. “Mr. Tamburello, I knew that was you,” she says with a big grin. There was Louisa Richards, all grown up, now in the thick of Boston’s thriving theater scene. “I’m directing a play here at the Piano Factory next month, I wish you would come!”

 
So here I am sitting in one of the tiny Piano Theater’s fifty seats watching a production of Mud, written by Maria Irene Fornes and directed by a young woman I knew as a nine-year-old kid with a big smile and outgoing personality.
 
At that point in our lives I was the director and she was one of the actors. My job was to be sure that by the time she left my class, she’d be better prepared for her immediate future in the fifth grade and her ultimate future, where she’d carry a bit of what she learned from me out into the wide, wide world.
 
Well, here she is, directing her own show and doing the same thing with her actors as I did with the kids in her class - challenge, nurture, cheer, give insights into themselves, and occasionally light a fire under them.
 
MUD takes place in a rural, perhaps Appalachian, town in the 1920s. The ensemble Louisa’s chosen to play Mae (Janelle Mills), her brother Lloyd (George Saulnier III), and townsman Henry (Bob Mussert) find the visceral cores of their roles.
 
Against all norms of the day Mae is trying to learn to read and perhaps set out from the village that seems to embed its populace in amber, insulating them from life outside the town line. Henry, with whom she gets involved romantically, and brother Lloyd, represents the uneducated narrow mindedness of townsfolk, fearful of moving away from the comfort of the small lives they lead. Threatened by her desire. They disparage Mae’s attempt to stretch out of her comfort zone.
 
Fornes’s raw dialogue deftly represents clashes of will and the nearly virulent sexual stereotypes prevalent at the time. Janelle Mills’s portrayal of Mae’s struggle against prevailing norms, from her body language to her character’s lines, is deeply realized and gripping.

Director Richards has leveraged her Bachelor’s Degree in Performing Arts at Goddard College, advanced training at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, including the Advanced Directing Program, to leap into Boston’s fertile theater scene. She’s been involved in acting, producing, and directing in the area since the early 2000s.

The best part of the play for me took place in the first row of seats to the left of the stage. There was Louisa Richards silently mouthing lines she’d rehearsed with the cast. She was radiant with excitement as she let go of the work and watched the actors do what she had helped them find in their roles. And there I was, a few rows away, watching Louisa fly on her own in the wide, wide world.

Note
Louisa Richards will direct Limonade Tous les Jours by Charles L. Mee at The Arsenal Center for the Arts Black Box Theater April 1- 4 and April 8-11, 2010.

"Groundswell" unearths dark questions

GROUNDSWELL
Play by: Ian Bruce
Directed by Daniel Gidron
Lights, Margo Caddell. Sets, Jenna McFarland Lord. Costumes, Seth Bodie.
At: Lyric Stage Company. Through Jan. 30. Tickets $25-$50, 617-585-5678
www.lyricstage.com

Groundswell is a political treatise masquerading as a theater piece. Like magma from a volcano, when enough pressure builds from below, something has to give. South African playwright Ian Bruce’s story line is slow to develop but when it blows, its heat reveals what’s been slowly boiling under the surface.

South Africa was welcomed into the world anew after it abandoned apartheid 15 years ago. Like the issue of slavery in the United States, the racist system left scars. Issues of entitlement. land rights, and business ownership became points of ugly contention.

Affirmative action? Reparations? Who gives? Who gets? How does anger, still smoldering between race and class, play out? South Africa’s social structure is in free fall. Who is an African? Very simply, can the races get along together in post apartheid South Africa, and by extension, anywhere?

Groundswell, playing at the Lyric Stage in Boston, takes on these questions in a one-act 90-minute production set on the wild and remote western coast of South Africa. Three men grapple with the fallout from a country in socio-politican flux: Thami, a black gardener who manages a guest house in the off season; Johan, a white handyman and former policeman in apartheid Africa; and Smith, a retired businessman who decides to flee the urban Capetown environment in which he no longer feels secure. 

Tension builds from the outset. Johan is haunted by his brutal past, and is driven to find redemption, even if twisted. Thami is desperately seeking to make something of himself in the new Africa and enters into a scheme Johan hatches to purchase part of a nearby diamond mine when the government auctions it off. When the affluent Smith comes along, Johan senses an opportunity to talk him into investing. The result is not pretty. Nor is the transition from institutional racism to post apartheid Africa.

Greed, the desire to dominate, lawlessness, and corruption are equal opportunity behaviors in the new South Africa. Groundswell shows that freedom and equality don’t necessarily result in a just society.

Jason Bowen as Thami, Timothy John Smith as Johan, and Richard McElvain as Smith breathe life into their characters. Smith’s Johan is a ticking time bomb. McElvain delivers one of the most gut wrenching performances I’ve seen this season.

Apartheid and its demise altered the lives of South Africans of all colors. It has been famously said that all politics is local. One exits the theater with the unsettling question of how each of us has addressed the question of race in our daily lives.

Photo courtesy Boston Globe

 

Aurélia’s Oratorio: A Contemporary Cirque Dazzles

This show is advertised for audiences from 8 to 100. The full house on July 22 hit the low range and a handful of patrons were within hailing distance of 100. If the volume of laughter and applause were any barometer of success, the sandaled, sundressed, straplessed, Bermuda shorted, business suited audience was tickled by the Oratorio’s illusions, dance, and acrobatics. This is no circus act. It is theater at its most imaginative, illusory, and sophisticated. A word for you… Go.

Aurélia’s Oratorio
Written and Directed by Victoria Thierée Chaplin
Starring Aurélia Thierrée, with Jaime Martinez
Loeb Drama Center, Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 617-547-8300
http://www.amrep.org/2009/
Exclusive Return Engagement July 22 - August 2, 2009

So what the heck is Aurélia’s Oratorio? It’s hard to answer that question as you walk out of the Loeb Drama Center at the American Repertory Theater after witnessing this… this… highly refined theater experience. You’ve witnessed a heady mix of ancient theater arts - acrobatics, dance, comedy, aerial arts, and a load of illusions that made you think “Whaaaat?”  It’s like trying to explain a dream.

Everything is slightly - or mightily - out of whack. Kites fly people. Ice cream burns your mouth. People dance on their hands. Coat racks dance a merengué. Just about everything is topsy turvy upside down inside out right side down up sideways. And glorious.

In the place of dialogue and a story line were sound effects and music - gypsy jazz, French cabaret songs and accordion, classical, electronica, - perfectly matched to the core of whatever in a seventy-minute series of vignettes was being acted out.

Performer Aurélia Chaplin Thierrée has the timing, the sense of silent kinetic amimation of her grandfather, the Little Tramp himself. She projects volumes with tiny gestures. And oh, those big-as-saucer eyes that ought to get credit somewhere in the program for their skill at projecting wistfulness, bewilderment, surprise, or fear all the way to the back row of the theater.

Performed is too shabby a verb. Aurélia charms and delights us with her fluidity of movement whether dancing or floating high above the stage, an aerodynamic nymph soaring on swaths of ruby red velvet.

Writer and Director Victoria Thierrée Chaplin displays the meticulous attention to every teeny aspect of performance that her famous Poppa Charlie Chaplin invested in film productions that made him an icon of film history. Even the ruby textured stage curtains have choreographed roles.

The show opens with a worn wooden bureau at stage center. All of a sudden, a drawer mysteriously pops open, a hand appears from one drawer, a foot from another, then all sorts of things happen involving telephones, candles, flying lingerie, from any one of the nine drawers.

How on earth can someone contort herself to stick her head or limbs out of those drawers, And when Aurélia finally emerges after a few minutes of sleight of body tricks, she hauls a fake leg out of the bureau explaining some of the mystery.

The audience responds with laughter and applause. We were fooled and we loved it. Showing us how we were fooled added to the experience. How grand. Aurélia, and later Jaime Martinez, often make no effort to hide the conceit of the illusion then go right ahead and we fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

This show is lovingly put together. Aurélia’s mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin was inspired when she found medieval illustrations of just such topsy turvyness and decided to incorporate them into a ‘cirque,’ a contemporary form of theater art with ancient sensibility. The choices of music, the degree of luminousity that bathes the curtains and the performers, are perfectly attuned to each vignette.

Some of the conceits are so subtle it takes your brain a moment to see how you’re being fooled. You never know which part of the audience will get the joke first. More than once I heard a pair behind me tell each other what they just missed.

The dance piece in which Aurélia and Jaime Martinez squeeze into the same coat and pair of pants is the most clever and joyous tango I’ve ever seen. My brain watched them get into the clothing but my eyes kept getting fooled by the illusion. I loved it.

Moments of darkness and mystery give the show depth and range. A vignette with a lace monster is an elegy of longing, unrequited love and implacable fate (that’s my interpretation and I am certain others may analyze the vignette differently). A vignette with little puppets starts with a comic Punch and Judy show and devolves into something more like The Lord of the Flies.

These are the exceptions to an evening of stunning visual comedy and graceful animated movement. At some point in the show I guarantee you will spontaneously clap your hands together in chlldlike wonder at what you’ve just seen…or think you’ve just seen. Aurélia’s Oratorio is a chance to see an updated version of the kind of entertainment that’s been making us laugh for centuries.

Photos by Richard Haugton from the amrep web site.

David Mamet: Ducks and Sex

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago
A Double Bill of two of David Mamet’s early comedies
Zero Arrow Theater
Cambridge, MA
June 11-28, 2009

It felt like David Mamet used both ends of a telescope to write these two short plays about friendship now playing at the Zero Arrow Theater in Cambridge. For Duck Variations he put the big end of the tube to his eye to look far into the distance of senior citizenship. For the other he used the spyglass to get a close up of two young men in all their callow, fragile, testosterone-addled, 1976 minds.

It’s one thing to grasp how completely Mamet nailed male insecurity in the night's second play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. After all, he authored it when he was 27 and living smack in the middle of the disco 1970s. The needle on the record album was stuck on SEX, at least as far as the two twenty-something men in the play are concerned. The two young women are less deeply etched in Mamet’s short play and seem to be foils for the men’s misogynistic feelings. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet plumbs the effect one alpha friend can have on a less dominant one. If you’re squeamish about coarse sexual language, rent a movie and stay home.

There isn’t a pair of knockers, excuse me, that Bernard doesn’t see without objectifying and sexualizing. His experience with them seems to be rooted in his imagination. And is the way he so aggressively berates homosexuals a sign of homophobia or of a self-loathing closeted young man? In any case, Bernard's effect on his pal Dan is toxic. How much of Dan's behavior with his love relationship with Deborah is influenced by a know-it-all (fear-it-all?) Bernard and how much of it is men’s genetic inability to relate intimately with women?

Bernard (Tim Eliot), Dan (Scott Lyman), Deborah (Susannah Hoffman), and Joan (Laura Parker) are members of the A.R.T. Institute For Advanced Theater Training.

It’s another thing to witness the evening’s first play, Duck Variations. How would a twenty five year old Mamet be able to convincingly grasp the worn-as-an-old-flannel-shirt interplay of two old timers sitting on a park bench within quacking distance of a pond.

This is Mamet the intellectual having fun with a witty conversation between two smart-alecky pals whose friendship can tolerate, even flourish in, disagreement. This feels like a sunny, funny, poetically dazzling version of Waiting For Godot.  Actors Thomas Derrah as Emil Varec and Wil Lebow as George S. Aronowitz have known each other for more than two decades. And (excuse me for saying so Tommy and Wil), they’re pretty close to the stage ages of the two characters. No need to artificially add gray to the hair or beard.

A conversation about the ducks - flying overhead, waddling on shore, paddling insouciantly on the pond - morphs into a conversation that alternates from bumper car aggressiveness to wing-men flying off into the wild blue yonder together.

The ideas boing around like the silver orb in a pinball machine. George’s observation of the duck formation overhead leads to a treatise on leadership, group energy, mortality, commitment and destiny. That's only the first scene. The two actors are a two-man formation. One takes the lead through the intellectual firmament and the other is right on his tail, ready to take the lead with a contradictory idea built on what the other has said.

From time immemorial, park benches have been launch pads of conversations from the ridiculous to the sublime. This little play oscillates between both and is it ever fun. The title of each segment, highlighted by giant cue cards illuminated stage left and right before each variation, is the first sentence either George or Emil iterates. Who knew a mallard could inspire contemplations about the order of the universe, the contents of the stratosphere, air pollution, life, death, human nature - and once in a while something gloriously bogus like Emil's theory about the flammability of the ocean, to which George asks, “Did you make that up?” -  they're not beyond embroidering on a toothpick of truth. Whether made up or not, you wonder what these guys are smoking and wouldn’t mind scoring some after the show.

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity In Chicago suggest Mamet is working out some Jekyll and Hyde feelings about the fibers that weave together male friendship. In Sexual Perversity the friendship is a straightjacket that squeezes the life out of it. In Duck Variations it’s the warm cardigans in which two gray haired men fit comfortably.

We’re left to ourselves to figure out what the trajectory is between young men and older men but one message is clear. Choose your friends wisely.

Mother G Rights A Wrong: A Robert Johnson, Jr. Play

"MOTHER G"
A play by Robert Johnson, Jr.
Directed by: Jacqui Parker. Set, Peter Colao. Lights, Jonathan Bonner.
Part of the 9th African-American Theatre Festival, presented by Our Place Theatre Project
At: Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, through Friday. Tickets $15-$35, 617-933-8600
May 27 - June 6
www.bostontheatrescene.com

The Ninth Annual African-American Theater Festival kicks off this week with "Mother G", a play penned by local playwright Robert Johnson, Jr.

The play documents a tumultuous week in a specific Dorchester, MA church community in 1963. All is not well in the New Beacon Baptist Church. An agitated young singer in the church’s choir comes to Mother G, the spiritual leader of the church, to disclose that she’s pregnant and that the father is none other than the charismatic pastor of their church.

A ‘he said/she said’ conflict ensues in which the male church council votes to retain the pastor. The fault lines aren’t exclusively along gender lines as people take sides and blame the girl or condemn the preacher. Incensed and having more than enough evidence of the pastor’s guilt, the women, led by Mother G, refuse to return to the flock and successfully petition to form their own church.

Eventually, they are joined by some of the men, who have sufficient doubt in the pastor and are stung, and perhaps shamed, by Mother G’s fearless conviction that a wrong must be righted.

The whole drama takes place at a time of political and cultural upheaval in the mid sixties. Fluent in the verses of the Bible, Mother G did more than work tirelessly to organize the women in the church to sing, provide food, and support the men in authority. When it became clear that a man trusted to shepherd them spiritually had breached trust and tarnished the church, she took action. Feminism was in its infancy but Mother G was way ahead of her time.

Singing the music of the gospel has been a source of comfort, conviction, and cohesion in many Christian denominations, perhaps no more emotionally important than in black churches, where song was one of the only sources of comfort since the years of slavery. Playwright Johnson uses the church’s choir, mostly women, to link the scenes of the play.

Jason Cross as Reverend James Mercy and Linda Starks-Walker as Mother G’s sister transformed the theater seats into pews. You didn't just listen to his words or her songs -  you felt them in your guts. You saw the sweat form on their brows and their bodies become animated by a religious conviction that bordered on ferocity. The divided world outside disappeared in the thunderclap of their visceral performances.

Linda Starks-Walker brought down the house with several full-bore body and soul gospel songs that resonate with you long after the two and a half hour play at The Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre. Singing didn’t change laws or right injustices but it certainly dissipated some of the sting and helped one to keep on keeping on in the face of it.

Jason Cross’s portrayal of the charismatic pastor hit the stage like a lightning bolt. With soaring rhetoric and theatrical mannerisms, Cross nailed the effect a preacher can have on a congregation. It's easy to see how he's increased the membership, which fills the church's coffers. That a man who was in charge of shepherding his flock took advantage of one of its most vulnerable made his fall from grace so much more unforgivable.

Latonya Gregg as Mother G, initially incredulous that her pastor could violate his position as moral leader, gathers evidence then plays her role with quiet determination. She stands up, alone at first, and won’t back down.

There are places where the pace drags and where important dialogue isn’t explored. When young Al Burgan (Garry Bates) complains that the women should be taking their message to the streets instead of sealing themselves up in the church, an audible affirmative response ripples through the audience. Perhaps that’s grist for Mr. Johnson’s next play.

As a fifteen-year-old boy, the playwright watched his mother organize opposition to the corrupt pastor of their own church. Her courage and persistence were a moral beacon to Mr. Johnson, who never forgot her willingness to take a stand in a time when it was nearly unthinkable to do so.

I’m used to being in the racial majority for the plays I write about. Not so tonight. Of the 200 people in attendance, you could have fit the number of white people in a freight elevator.  I wondered whether I’d laugh or be moved at the same things or whether I’d feel like an outsider.  It turned out the same way it does for most theater- sometimes I laughed or responded when others did and sometimes I didn’t.

Peering over the racial divide, I’ve wondered how much are we alike and how much are we different. As our president has said, there’s more that unites us than divides us. That rang true as I witnessed this play.

Photo by Robert Johnson: The choir - (from left) Garry Bates, Lakeisha Gilliard, David J. Curtis (back), Marvelyn McFarlane (front, as Hazel), Linda Starks-Walker, Alphonzo Moultrie, and Latonya Gregg, as Mother G.

Romance: Mamet's Politically Incorrect Courtroom Farce

"Romance"
A play by David Mamet
Directed by: Scott Zigler
Set, J. Michael Griggs.
Costumes, Miranda Hoffman. Lights, D.M. Wood. Sound, David Remidios
At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through June 7.
Tickets, $25-79, 617-547-8300, www.americanrepertorytheater.org

The only romance in “Romance,” David Mamet’s courtroom farce playing its last week at the American Repertory Theater, is Mamet’s love of language and the way he delights in making us squirm with his use of it. 

Prominently displayed in the theater lobby on a video screen crawl is “WARNING: this performance may offend lawyers, Arabs, judges, politicians, cats, Jews, historians, Arab-Americans, Catholics, rabbits, rabbit lovers, pedophiles, chiropractors, chiropodists, courtroom prosecutors, gays, liberals, Republicans, Episcopalians…” and that’s just the beginning.

 “If you’re here with your mom,” says an actor who introduces the play and touts the Mamet Festival in progress here, “good luck to you.” Yep. Two acts and two hours later you’ll have heard every kind of racist, homophobic, stereotypical, and ethnic slur in the book delivered in gleeful over the top performances by every man on the stage.

For the most part the play transpires in an urban courtroom presided over by an allergy stricken judge addled by enough antihistamines to kill a horse. He takes jurisprudence down lanes with absurd asides that become strangely relevant and show the all too human side of what we politely call human nature.

The first act contains three scenes. First, a courtroom in which a man is being interrogated by a prosecutor for an act we’re never quite sure of, officiated by a judge whose attention is hilariously drained by his gulping pills for his allergies, a bailiff who’s counting and supplying them, and a defense attorney who’s trying to keep his client out of jail.

The next two scenes, one in which the prosecutor and his gay lover engage in a lover’s quarrel and another in which the defense attorney meets with his client to advise him on a courtroom strategy, follow. This scene is as politically incorrect as anything you’ll ever witness. You will laugh - and wonder whether you should feel guilty about it - and squirm, even in the darkened theater, at the stereotypes and slurs that are being hurled around like cultural hand grenades.

Admit it, these are things that have run through your mind in some of your less than charitable moments. At least for me. And David Mamet knows it and aims at it with a sawed-off shotgun sense of humor.

Have you ever wondered whether Shakespeare was a Jew? Or gay? Or whether a chiropractor could hatch a plan for peace between the Arabs and the Jews? Thoughts like this ricochet off the second act and take off in a circus of non-sequitur absurdity. By the time the play is over, Mamet has reduced the reasons for conflict to absurdity and found a kinder gentler layer underneath it. The chiropractor’s plan for peace in the Mid-East, a theme that has been lofted into the play’s firmament since the opening minutes when a parade/demonstration noisily passes under the court’s window, is wacky but it acts as an undercurrent that fits right in with the contesting that’s going on in the courtroom.

At the center of all this is Will Lebow as the judge. Lebow might be the most gifted comic actor in town. His rich and malleable voice, impeccable timing, and zany characterization are at the play’s core and the foil for the other actors. Thomas Derrah (Prosecutor), Jim True-Frost (Defense Attorney), and Remo Airaldi (Defendant) are wonderfully realized but Lebow gobbles up the stage with his presence in a way that fuels his acting partners to push their own envelopes.

Mamet pens the churlishness with glee. Nearly lost in the hilarity is Mamet's deeper message. At one point, the judge muses, “How can you have world peace when you cant even have it in your own house?” 

The courtroom chaos is resolved in a way that would make Shakespeare grin, no matter what his religious affiliation. You’ve laughed, you've been touched, and you wonder whether we’ll ever get it right when it comes to live and let live.

Photo: Will LeBow (center) presides over his courtroom and (from left) Carl Foreman, Jim Senti, and Jim True-Frost. (Michael J. Lutch)

Note: “Romance” is part of  a Mamet celebration, "Sex, Satire, Romance, and Ducks," at the ART. Mamet’s "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and "Duck Variations", two of his early comedies, will play at the Zero Arrow Theater from June 11 to June 28.

Fool For Love: Sam Shepard at the New Rep Theater

“Fool For Love” was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco on February 8, 1983, with Sam Shepard directing and the two lead roles played by Kathy Baker and Ed Harris.  Shepard’s notes for the production state, “This play is to be performed relentlessly without a break.” The New Repertory Theatre follows the dictate to the letter.

FOOL FOR LOVE
Play by Sam Shepard

Directed by: Bridget Kathleen O'Leary. Set, Ada E. Smith. Costumes, Eric Propp. Lights, Christopher Brusberg. Sound, Matt Griffin. Fight direction, Meron Langsner. Presented by New Repertory Theatre.

At: Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, through April 5. Tickets: $25. 617-923-8487, www.newrep.org

Sam Shepard is alive and well in Watertown. He hasn’t been in these parts for quite a spell and The New Repertory Theatre production of "Fool For Love" gives him a pretty good homecoming. Nothing much gets resolved in Shepard’s plays and this is no exception.

Eddie has driven his rig 2480 miles to track down May in some run down motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Eddie has a commitment problem, a drinking problem, and has his own version of the truth. May loves/hates Eddie, has had a drinking problem and has her own interpretation of their tangled past. They’ve known each other since they were in high school. They may have the same father.

The Old Man, who sits at the edge of the stage and acts as an invisible Greek Chorus, is the play’s missing link. His revelations and denials are the taproot that explains Eddie and May’s history.  Martin is the hapless man who has come to take May on a first date. He seems to be the only emotionally intact person on the stage.

Stacy Fischer as May is a terrific wild-eyed, damaged, trailer trashy woman. May’s body language, provocative and self protective, practically shouts Shepard’s lines. She’s been abandoned by Eddie before and may be again. Timothy John Smith is a tightly wound Eddie, a cowboy stunt man who understands animals better than he understands women. He’s tied to her in ways he can’t rope down.

Andrew Dufresne as Martin is probably Shepard's way of showing us how far the others are from the norm. He fills that role well. As desperately as May would like a white picket fence life with Martin, she’s just not equipped for a settled life. Joseph Finneral as the Old Man has his own versions of how Eddie and May met and what role he’s played in how they’ve turned out.

Finding one’s identity amidst emotional debris is Shepard territory. When Martin asks Eddie if the stories he says he makes up aren’t lies, Eddie responds,  “No, no. Lying's when you believe it's true. If you already know it's a lie, then it's not lying.”

It’s hard to tell where the truth lies in the play. Like standing in the middle of the desert outside this seedy hotel room, it’s hard to find the path to salvation at its green edges when the wind constantly sweeps it away. That’s just the feeling Shepard wants to evoke.

Just as a rodeo might not be everyone’s idea of good entertainment, neither is a Sam Shepard play. But if you do like Shepard, this production will give you a good ride.

Photo: Christopher Mckenzie

Blackbird: SpeakEasy Stage Company

BLACKBIRD
Play by David Harrower
Directed by: David R. Gammons. Set, Eric Levenson.
Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Sound, Cameron Willard.
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Roberts Studio Theatre, through March 21. Tickets: $30-$50. 617-933-8600

Do any of us ever change? Underneath all the plot twists, controversial subject matter, and quirky acting style, that’s the central question SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production of Blackbird at the Calderwood Pavilion seems to ask us.

The sordid details of an illicit affair between an older man and a younger woman are revealed in a pitched battle between the two who meet years after their initial encounter.

Think of the play’s exposition being pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered over the floor and slowly assembled from the outside edges in towards the center. After one hundred minutes there are some pieces missing but a powerful image is constructed. What do we learn in the process?

My guess is that one reason the play won the 2007 Olivier Award for best new play is for its bold choice of subject matter, which the audience is asked not to disclose. (Stated on the program: "Tell your friends to come see Blackbird, just don’t tell them how it ends! Thanks for keeping the end a surprise.")  That could also go for a disclosure which drops like a bomb about ten minutes into the play.

Bates Wilder and Marianna Bassham’s performances are gut wrenching. One distraction is that both of them (as Ray and Una) often lapse into mannerisms that appear more like body tics than authentic agitation to show inner turmoil. Words would have been enough. Believe me, the subject matter might cause you to squirm in your seat.

The set is a perfect metaphor for the lives of these two characters. What appears to be a worker’s lunch room is littered with wrappers and empty containers, painted industrial gray that’s peeling from the walls, has a couple of dilapidated gray metal lockers and two chairs. Its harsh fluorescent lighting casts a cold glow upon the audience. It is desolate, messy, and untended.

As Mickey and Sylvia sang long ago, “Love, love is strange, lot of people take it for a game, once you get it, you never wanna quit, after you’ve had it, you’re in an awful fix…” This is especially true for these two characters. Writer David Harrower gets heavy handed from time to time but the subject matter is riveting.

Ray and Una paid a heavy price for what happened between them years ago. In the charged moments of the play’s final scene, we wonder whether either has changed since they met. Has this encounter closed that chapter in their lives or poured salt into emotional wounds that will never heal?

Audiences and critics are divided about whether the play offers us a glimpse into our own psyches. I suppose that depends on how you feel when Ray asks Una, “Does anyone care about you at all?” and how open minded you are about who that ‘anyone’ might be.

Photo: Stratton McCrady

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Play by Tennessee Williams
Directed by: Scott Edmiston. Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Sound, Dewey Dellay.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through March 14. Tickets: $25-$50. 617-585-5678, www.lyricstage.com

Are you a fan of Tennessee Williams? Enjoy a bracing night of good theater? Let me make this easy. Get down to the Lyric Stage Company before March 16 and see “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.”

Georgia Lyman’s Maggie on the hot tin roof is as carnal and feline as Williams intended.  Watching her expressive eyes, small gestures, and smoldering desperation in the first and third acts is worth the price of admission.

Williams’ themes of hypocrisy, greed, and corrosive secrets emerge from the moment the first act opens. For reasons I don’t understand, these themes work best in Southern settings. Maybe it’s the southern accents and vernacular, which sound genteel, but are often stealth missiles meant to inflict pain.

The cast of Maggie (Georgia Lyman), her husband Brick (Kelby Akin), Big Daddy Pollit (Spiro Veloudos), Big Mama (Cheryl McMahon), Gooper (Owen Doyle)  Mae (Elisa McDonald), and minor supporting cast works well in ensemble. McDonald plays Mae with a little more broad humor than the viper Williams had in mind but she does it well.

The family has converged upon the family mansion to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Big Daddy is dying of cancer, a fact known to all except himself. One of his two sons will inherit his sprawling 28,000 acre Mississippi plantation. Second son Gooper wants it; he and his wife Mae connive to get it. Favorite first-born son Brick is indifferent toward the inheritance and to Maggie. His childless marriage with Maggie has raised eyebrows and spawned suspicions about Brick’s sexual preference.

The second act confrontation between Big Daddy and Brick gives Williams the chance to work his classic themes of ‘mendacity’ and failure to communicate. Brick - how marvelous a nickname for a young man so blocked from his emotional life - steadfastly hangs on to his bottle of bourbon, his security blanket.

Big Daddy pushes Brick to tell why he drinks and doesn’t let him off easy. Brick finally admits that his drinking began when his best friend died of alcohol and shame. “One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true! I had friendship with Skipper. You are namin' it dirty!” Brick says

Gruff Big Daddy came from nothing by bullying and braying his way to wealth. In his rise to power, he seems to have learned more about human nature than anyone else in his family can guess. Trying to cope with Brick’s secret, he says, "One thing you can grow on a big place more important than cotton!—is tolerance!—I grown it." Big Daddy took over the plantation from the original owners, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of bachelors who lived in the very bedroom in which the play is set. Big Daddy knew them to be good men. He has reserves of tenderness not many see.

The third act offers as much resolution as you’re going to find from Williams. Venality comes from expected places, deception comes from unexpected quarters. And everyone seems to be lying to everyone else. The play is rich with William’s aphorisms, mainly delivered by Maggie and Big Daddy.

Maggie, the cat on a hot tin roof, has come from poverty. She’s not going to give up her chance to escape it by losing Brick and her ticket to a monied life. "You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it," she says. This is a high-class American soap opera that will engage you from start to finish.

Photo courtesy Lyric Stage: Mark S. Howard
 

Exits and Entrances, New Rep Theater

EXITS AND ENTRANCES Play by Athol Fugard

Directed by: Chris Jorie. Set, Patrick Lynch. Costumes, Eric Propp. Lights, John Malinowski. Sound, David Wilson. Presented by: New Repertory Theatre.

At: Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, through March 15. Tickets: $35-$54, 617-923-8487, www.newrep.org

Athol Fugard’s play Exits and Entrances is at once intimate and existential. Youth and age, apartheid and political freedom, arrogance and innocence, self-loathing and self-acceptance form the contrasting arcs of this small poignant production at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown.

The play centers on an aspiring writer (the young Fugard) and a aging Afrikaner actor André Huguenot (born Gerhardus Petrus Boorstlap in Bloemfontein, S. A.) in rural South African theater dressing rooms in 1956 and 1961. The entrances and exits themes are set in motion.

Huguenet is a pompous actor and ardent proponent of Afrikaner theater. After thirty years, his fame diminished, he is still in the thrall of self-importance and identifies with the noble and flawed characters he’s specialized in during his career.

In their first scenes in 1956, the young man is in awe of Huguenet’s ability to recreate moments of high drama on the stage night after night. He looks upon Huguenet as a mentor. As his dressing room assistant and bit actor in Huguenet’s plays the young playwright listens - and corrects the actor when he omits words from his lines as he prepares for his nightly roles. He dreams of writing for the stage. Huguenet reminisces - and haughtily recreates some of his classic soliloquies for the writer’s benefit.

The writer’s dedication to the letter and spirit of the play contrast with the actor’s disregard for the occasional muffed line. Huguenet has become weary since being star-struck by the sight of his 1916 sight of Pavlova dance the role in Swan Lake. Huguenet’s star is retrograde, the playwright’s is ascending.

Huguenet has always used the theater for the safety to become someone else. “I know who I am in those roles,” he says as he thunders passages from Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, In the compact eighty minute performance we watch Hugeunet’s long held façade disintegrate as tragically as one of the flawed men he’s played all his life.

Five years later, the playwright witnesses Huguenet’s final performance as the persecuted Cardinal in “The Prisoner.” The Cardinal's struggles with his underlying self-loathing are Hugeunet's own. Pride has given way to humility. Nearing his final days, he summons the resolve he's played on the stage but never in life.

Ross MacDonald portrayal of Fugard's youthful idealism and earnest desire to use theater as a tool for social justice is a worthy foil for Will Lyman’s André Huguenet. Hugeunet, disdains his middle class public audiences, the writer sees them as his target.

Will Lyman’s rich baritone, aristocratic demeanor and physical presence make him an ideal choice for the role of Huguenet. Huguenet’s egotistical bluster is a shield for his self-loathing. Bit by bit, Lyman shows the man’s armor crumble under the weight of a failing career and the a life built on self-deception.

Huguenet’s recreation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy is his first true gaze into his life’s work and the maw of mortality. The quietly delivered lines might be the best "To be..." speech you've ever heard. It has more impact than the fiery oratory Hugeunet has ever played on stage.

The simple scene gains power as it comes from a stooped man seated on a chair backstage of a no name theater in a nowhere town. No declaiming, no bravura, just a man asking himself the hardest question any of us will ask ourselves at the end of our own time. What has it all been about? Is life worth living? If Edward Albee and Will Shakespeare quaffed a pint in a dimly lit tavern some night and decided to write a short play together, this is how it would come out.

“Fan the flames of your purpose, keep them bright,” Hugeunet implores his young friend. Hugeunet’s has been reduced to a flicker. His most courageous performance is played out in the dingy dressing room as he casts aside the yoke he's dragged behind him his whole life. We wonder about our own flame as we make our exit from the theater.


Photo: Andrew Brilliant. Boston Globe

Jimmy Tingle's Laugh Stimulus Program

Jimmy Tingle’s Laughter Stimulus Program
Regent Theater, Arlington, MA
February 28, 2009

Jimmy Tingle is a local UFO. Underappreciated Funny Observer of Life. He’s a descendant of the best and hardest kind of vaudeville acts - a stand up comedian. Remember Fred Allen and George Burns? Guys who could take the stage, read the headlines in the daily paper and wring wry and offbeat humor from them. That’s our Jimmy - a local boy from Cambridge, MA who’s appeared on The Tonight Show and 60 Minutes II.

When he gets on a roll, all he needs to do is pace around the stage, tap his red head mop and say, “Y’know folks, I was just thinking…” and we get ready to laugh at some oddball spin he’s about to lay on something.

The jury is still out on whether Barack Obama can deliver on his promise to bail us out of global misery with his Stimulus Plan. Our boy Jimmy, however, delivered on his promise to present a “Jimmy Tingle’s Laughter Stimulus Program” last Saturday. Several hundred people who watched Tingle present his show at Arlington’s venerable Regent Theater were treated to a wealth of laughter.

Tingle does this the hard way. No four letter words, no bathroom humor, no crude sex jokes.  You could bring your teenagers to this show. Several of them who sat in the row in front of me guffawed with the rest of us and even asked Tingle a question in the brief Q and A that preceded Tingle’s second act in the two-hour show.

Jimmy’s been parlaying his brand of thought-provoking comedy for twenty-five years. He ran Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theater in for five years, shuttering the doors in 2007. Tingle’s little box of a theater brought in some of the smartest political and social satire in town. Sadly, we didn’t know a good thing while it was in our midst. That’s another story.

Watching a stand up comedian work is part of the fun. You know he/she has some bits they planned in advance. Tingle had material so fresh about President Obama’s recent nationally televised speech about the economy that he read it from a podium. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s rebuttal speech gave Tingle at least a page of material.

Tingle made his own proposals to raise money, create jobs, and use green energy. He poked at easy targets like Bernard Madoff then did a hilarious bit about mortgage brokers. Sometimes Jimmy gets on a roll and riffs for five minutes about a topic. You can almost see him going through the mental gears from start to finish like a grand prix driver on laughing gas. His list of what airlines might begin charging passengers for was a lulu.

The wild thing about his off the wall humor is that much of it has a teensy thread of possibility to it. His ideas about cheap ways to find and use wind power - put wind turbines in the breakdown lane to make use of cars whizzing by, for example. I mean, we've all stood on the side of the road and felt that blast of air generated when a Ford goes by at 65 mph, haven't we? Then he gets rolling about the gas tax and gets going about methane from farm animals.

He can spin a trip with his wife on a cruise ship into a shtick that ends up with “If 9 Vikings can row to America why cant cruise ships save thousands of gallons of diesel fuel by requiring passengers to row to Jamaica?” Then somehow he ties this in with riffs about physical fitness and the endemic problem of obesity. Whew.

By the end of the evening, you’ve listened to Tingle put his offbeat spin on gays in the military, figure out how he would spend revenue from parking tickets, poke holes in immigration policy -beginning with the buckled up Pilgrims,

Around the middle of the show he pauses for a moment. “Look, I like to make people laugh because it’s part of the human spirit, right up there with empathy, compassion and love,” he says. He knows damn well we’re up to our eyeballs in scary headlines and financial worry and people behaving badly. He finds a way to turn them upside and make us laugh about them.

It makes the headlines we read the next morning a little more bearable when we wonder. “I wonder what Jimmy would say about that?”
 

Photo courtesy Regent Theater

Tingle appears at the Regent Theater again March 14, 8:00 PM

The Year Of Magical Thinking: Didion's Play at Lyric Stage Company

The Year of Magical Thinking

Play by Joan Didion
Directed by: Eric C. Engel. Set, Matthew Whiton. Costume, Mallory Frers. Lights, Shawn E. Boyle.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through Jan. 31. Tickets, $25-$50, 617-585-5678, www.lyricstage.com

Joan Didion is a celebrated author. The power of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking was through Didion’s dissection of her reaction to her husband’s death of a massive heart attack as they ate dinner together on December 30, 2003.

Didion’s a journalist, a cognitive internist. She hits the keyboard to deal with loss and grief she’s not ready to acknowledge. She writes The Year of Magical Thinking in a few months at the end of 2004, recreating the death scene, the aftermath, and her reaction to it as if gathering information for the kind of fact driven work for which she’s famous. For her, information has shamanistic powers. If she learns enough, she is convinced she can bring her husband back, make him un-dead.

Twenty months after her husband’s death, Didion’s 39-year-old daughter Quintana died of complications of pancreatitis, the last in a line of medical problems that began plaguing her a few months before her father died.

Didion was persuaded to write a play about these devastating losses.  A Broadway production starring Vanessa Redgrave ran in New York in early 2007. Entitled The Year Of Magical Thinking, it launched with chunks of text from her memoir and new work describing her daughter Quintana’s unsuccessful struggle to survive massive assaults to her system.

We should note here that Didion is an avowed control freak. She makes sense and order out of the world by observing it shrewdly, with a curious detachment that has a point of view. There’s righteousness, underlying anger, and glacial denial involved in her initial behavior after her husband’s death. Others notice. She does not.

The Lyric Stage Company’s production of the play began its run January 3, 2009.

Photo: Lyric Stage Company

Nancy E. Carroll is a craftswoman of an actress, as careful with her gesture and emotional dialing as Didion is with her written words. I looked forward to see her chomp into this role as Didion in the stage version of The Year Of Magical Thinking.

The transition from page to stage is rough passage. The production just doesn’t hum with an emotional core. Didion’s brain is a gatekeeper to her gut. Even when trying to be confessional, she is the detached observer. Didion’s surgical writing doesn’t give Carroll enough purchase to engage us with the experience of loss and grief.

The play’s opening lines, “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it wont when it happens to you. And it will happen. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you,” fling wide the door of dramatic possibilities. But the ensuing ninety minutes feel more like a treatise than a theatrical experience.

Carroll’s delivery, like Didion’s book, is detached. Didion/Carroll observes her emotional response at arm’s length, a safe distance for her but too great for us in the audience to empathize with the woman telling the story. We know it will happen to us. It has happened to us. A theatrical production on this subject begs to be told with emotional transparency. Although Didion says she wrote it while her feelings were still raw, it doesn’t feel that way.

One of the play’s refrains, her husband’s oft-used words, “Why must you always be right,” and “Why must you always have the last word,” reveal something about the writer’s disposition. Aside from that People Magazine tidbit, there is nothing revealed in the play we don’t already know. We know we will all need to cope with the death of people we love and let them go.

We will all go through our own versions of magical thinking. Death is a visceral experience. As fine a writer as Joan Didion is, and as solid a performer Nancy E. Carroll, this production of The Year Of Magical Thinking was too much sleight of heart to be rewarding.

Aurelia’s Oratorio

Two generations of the Chaplin family, steeped in the history of performing, have created Aurelia's Oratorio, now playing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. Like productions they've created in the past, Aurelia's Oratorio is a form of "cirque."

"Cirque Nouveau," new circus, is a performing arts movement that developed in the 1970s in France, Australia, and North America. It is influenced by circus history, although no animals are used, and medieval art forms.

The artist's body and face, together with elements of dance, music, theater, and acrobatics, create a mosaic that is imaginative and timeless. We've been performing for each other with narratives, dance, and music since we discovered fire. The joy from a well-imagined performance is as fascinating in the digital age as it was to us in the Stone Age.

AURELIA'S ORATORIO
Conceived and directed by Victoria Thierrée Chaplin
Lights, Laura de Bernadis and Philippe Lacombe.
Sound, Chaplin and Paolo Barcucchi.
Set, Chaplin.
Costumes, Chaplin, Jacques Perdiguez, Veronique Grand, and Monika Schwarzl.

Presented by
American Repertory Theater and ArKtype.
At: Loeb Drama Center,
Cambridge, through Jan. 3. Tickets, $25-$79.
617-547-8300, www.amrep.org

Aurelia’s Oratorio is a perfect and timely tonic for long-time patrons of Cambridge’s A.R.T. We leave the theater with a light-hearted sense of having been entertained. Unlike some of the edgy theater’s productions, one didn’t need a reviewer to explain what we were witnessing and why we should enjoy it.

In Auriela's Oratorio, the gymnastics we've often had to employ mentally to figure out the goings on are actually done physically onstage. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy the show, which as it happens, is a heady mix of mime, dance, aerial ballet, and enough sight gags to fill a Charlie Chaplin movie.

Aurelia Thierrée, the gifted artist who performs the show, is the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin. Those Chaplin big-as-saucer eyes can telegraph reactions of surprise, fear, ennui, and everything in between all the way to the back of the house.

Thierrée’s graceful and acrobatic limbs are balletic one moment, Raggedy Ann floppish the next. And she inherited that exquisite Chaplin sense of timing in which the pause, the glance, the gesture, are extended just long enough for us to hold our collective breath to enjoy what has just happened and speculate what’s next.

The play without a plot is a sequence of about ten sketches held together loosely by a series of running sight gags. The music for each sketch seems organically embedded in the action. Nothing is said but much is intimated and that’s where the fun comes in for the audience.

It’s like viewing a Salvador Dali painting. Beautiful and playful visually, it often includes dark or disturbing imagery that suggests that beauty doesn’t exist in the absence of malice. The balance of fanciful and surreal is the dialectic that keeps the show from becoming a circus act. It would be impossible to convey this without Thierrée’s consummate aerial ballet and acrobatic skills.

The show, complete with puppets, has the feel of the kind of theater that tickled the fancies of medieval audiences and grew up to become cabaret entertainment in Europe. The A.R.T.’s vaunted heavy artillery - staging capacity, lighting, and sound - get whipped up into a full lather by Aurelia’s mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the last child of Charlie and Oona O’Neil Chaplin and the show's creator and director.

The entire 75-minute show is a meticulously layered mosaic of music she chose, movement and lighting she directed, and costumes she designed. With the imaginative twists Chaplin brought to a career of creating “cirques” for over thirty years, she even has a role for the lush ruby colored theater curtains, which can move to precociously conceal something from our view one moment and dance a rumba across the stage the next.

This play, running till January 3, 2009, is a lovely palliative to our plight as players on the larger stage these days, in which our financial security is disappearing just as mysteriously as some of the props on the stage of Aurelia’s Oratorio.

Photos courtesy of Boston Globe and American Repertory Theater

The Seafarer: SpeakEasy's Holiday Production

THE SEAFARER
Play by Conor McPherson
Directed by: Carmel O'Reilly.

Set, J. Michael Griggs.
Costumes, Rafael Jaen. Lights, John R. Malinowski. Sound, Benjamin Emerson.
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts, Roberts Studio Theatre, through Dec. 13.
Tickets, $30-$50, 617-933-8600,
www.bostontheatrescene.com

Photo by Mike Lovett

The Seafarer, a new play by Conor McPherson, has been heralded as a bright ornament to decorate the pre-Christmas theater scene in Boston. Alas, the production seems like the Christmas dinner you’d eagerly anticipated but has gone awry.

There are some wonderful bits of acting but taken as a whole, it is disappointing. Set in a coastal settlement outside Dublin, the play’s themes, in time for the holidays, remind us that love and acceptance can flourish in the most inhospitable quarters. Granted, every Christmas season can use this message. Just not delivered with a sledgehammer.

The first 60-minute act takes place on Christmas Eve morning and afternoon. It is a humorously sodden sketch that introduces three of the main characters, Richard Harkin, his brother James “Sharky” Harkin, and their bumbling friend Ivan Curry. The tension between Richard, recently blinded in a drunken accident, and his younger brother, who has returned home to care for his brother, is omnipresent. The wonderfully bumbling Ivan is the buffer between Richard’s comical but edgy eccentricity and Sharky’s contained introversion.

There’s nothing new about the stereotype of boozy Irishmen with the gift of gab and an unbridled urge to hit the bottle. There are some funny scenes in Richard’s grimy living room, the house in which the brothers were raised, but it takes much too long to develop a sense of where the play is headed.

The story seems to be a morality play about redemption, good vs. evil, and self-loathing vs. self-acceptance, underscored by the entrance of Mr. Lockhart, who appears in the final minutes of the first act. It is here that the play goes off the rails with its heavy-handed portrayal of Lockhart, a devilish specter of a Christmas past for Sharky.

Playwright McPherson intends to conjure a Faustian atmosphere between Sharky and Mr. Lockhart, who appears in the Harkin’s living room some 25 years after a high stakes card game he played with Sharky. Lockhart seems to be recycling a Frank Langella impersonation of Dracula, complete with elocution and demeanor. Stage lights dim and a soundtrack emits a howl of wind and portentous music. Drama becomes melodrama.

The 75-minute second act exposition of Sharky’s past, the Harkin family’s dysfunctional nature, and the particulars of Sharky’s acquaintance with Lockhart all feel forced. The final resolution late Christmas Eve night is winsome but comes out of the woodwork.

Bill Meleady as Sharky, Bob Colonna as Richard, and Larry Coen as Ivan are high caliber talents, Ciaran Crawford as Nicky Gilbin (now living with Sharky’s former flame) and Derry Woodhouse as Mr. Lockhart complete the cast.

The most thoroughly realized performance is Larry Coen’s Ivan, who leavens the play with a brilliant running joke from one end of the play to the other.  Ivan seems to represent a certain Irish capacity to find melancholy humor in life often dominated by dysfunctional relationships and the drops of drink that keep them that way. Ivan’s cheerful nature, with its hangdog acceptance of his lot in life, will never be worn down.

Director Carmel O’Reilly’s touch with Irish themes and characters was terrific in her staging of several of Irish playwright Ronan Noone's work in the past few years. She assembled a fine cast for The Seafarer but the McPherson’s writing gives her too many shoals to navigate for us to enjoy a good theatrical voyage.

Mary's Wedding:

Mary’s Wedding
Play by Stephen Massicotte
Directed by: Meg Taintor. Lights, Erik Fox. Set, Emily Nichols.
Presented by Whistler in the Dark Theatre. At: Boston Center for the Arts

Rehearsal Hall A, through Nov. 29 www.bostontheatrescene.comPhoto courtesy of Meg Taintor

 “Mary’s Wedding” is a delight of a play. Mary’s well-to-do family from London has emigrated to the provinces in Canada in 1914. Impending war broods in Europe and young love is kindled in the countryside when Mary meets farm boy Charlie. The violent crashes of the thunderstorm outside the barn in which they meet in search of shelter foretell the explosions that will soon rock the European countryside.

The power of the play, aside from its ardent two actors, is the inventively non-linear way it unfolds. Playwright Stephen Massicotte arranges his play as carefully as one would a tea service on a tray, intentionally drops it to the floor, picks it up and rearranges it with no regard for chronology. The strategy works, Sometimes we’re not quite sure whether we’re watching real time or dream time. We are sure, however, that we’re watching love bloom in all its lurches and turns, exhilarations and doubts.

In a prelude, Charlie says, “It begins at the end and ends at the beginning, and there are some sad parts…” The play alternates between real time and Mary’s dreams recounting her meeting and courtship with Charlie. After a bit of a shaky start with Mary’s frenetic movements in the first storm sequence, the play hits its stride, both actors filling their roles with the awkward grace of youth and inexperience. The social divide between Mary and muddy Charlie washes away in successive meetings. Charlie’s behavior at the tea party to which Mary invites him is like watching a seal in its first encounter with a swimming pool - from uneasiness with the environment to comfort that it can survive in it.

Mary’s dream, on the eve of her wedding in July 1920, transports us from one side of the ocean to the other. War scenes with Mary reading Charlie’s letters are intertwined with Charlie’s acting out the scenes of men going ‘over the top’ and being mowed down like so many sheaves of wheat. Equally gut-wrenching is the naivety of boys going to war with no idea of the chaos into which they will be led. 

Photo by Meg Taintor

Charlie’s recounting of the first time he draws a bead on a German and kills him produces the same nausea in the audience as it does within Charlie. The later scene in 
which Charlie murderously rides through German lines and enjoys his kills is all you have to know about the demons war can unleash in the kindest and gentlest of men. And perhaps this is why, for so many years, veterans of the first two world wars never spoke of what they witnessed or did on those distant shores.

Mary and Charlie are on stage together for the production’s full ninety minutes. The shifts from bucolic Canada to muddy shell-shocked France are seamless. Massicotte’s writing deftly illustrates the permeability of the boundaries between of tenderness and barbarity in wartime - one minute a scene of reading a love letter while sitting in the mud, the next minute an order to fix bayonets.

Charlie’s increased conditioning toward mayhem and death growing in the same heart that dreams of marrying and fathering a family with Mary, and Mary’s devotion to the boy she senses turning into a man, are beautifully wrought and remain with you far into the night.

The whole is satisfyingly equal to the parts of this production. Samson Kohanski and Jennifer O’Connor play beautifully off one another. The hand of director Meg Tainor, lighting by Erik Fox, and spare set by Emily Nichols all contribute to writer Massicotte’s vision.

The senseless slaughter of war and the grief of love lost were real in 1920. They are no less real today. Somehow that news is easier to take in “Mary’s Dream” than in the headlines of today’s newspapers.