pt at large

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.

Martha Mitchell Calling

Martha Mitchell went out of her way to scandalize the staid Washington social scene with her iconoclastic behavior during the Nixon years. Her sobriety and her credibility were both in doubt when she began making late night phone calls to reporters revealing secrets she'd learned about Watergate by eavesdropping on phone calls to her husband John, then Richard Nixon's reelection campaign manager. Her sobriety was indeed questionable. Her credibility was not.

“Martha Mitchell Calling” a play by Jodi Rothe
Central Square Theater (photo of entrance shown below)
450 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139
617-576-9278
Wed -Sun October 16 - November 9
One act, approximately 90 minutes

Whether this play rings the bell for you or not, one of the best reasons to take in “Martha Mitchell Calling” is to see the spanking new Central Square Theater. The new home of the Nora Theater Company and Underground Theater Company is at 450 Massachusetts Avenue, a five-minute walk from the middle of Central Square. The steep seating arrangement created by opening up the first and second levels of the building offers good sight lines with comfy seats. There is one literal downside: the view from the top row is a bit like sitting on a step ladder at your dinner table, but heck, the prices are right and there’s inexpensive parking at the nearby Green Street Garage.

Martha Mitchell was the southern belle wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General during his first administration (1968-1972). The superbly organized Mitchell resigned in 1972 to manage Nixon’s successful reelection campaign. Mitchell was implicated in the bungled break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in 1972.

The ‘belle’ part of Martha’s persona applies best to the way she had phone lines jangling as she defended her husband or excoriated President Nixon for lying to the public in late night phone calls to Washington reporters. Put a temperamentally loose cannon and a quart of Tanqueray together and you have a pretty good idea of Martha Mitchell. She may have flunked a sobriety test before she began declaiming but she was also one of the only people who saw that the king was wearing no clothes - and said so in public. Very public.

The play is set in December, 1974, with Martha recounting her formative years into a tape recorder for the memoirs she’s about to publish. The set, in which Martha wanders around as if a prisoner on an island, is a king sized bed with matching pink everything.

Hair coifed, looking regal in her flowing pink nightgown, Martha is never far from her pink Princess telephone and a tinkling tumbler full of something that animates her to make late night calls to Helen Thomas, then the influential queen bee of the presidential press corps.

Eavesdropping on phone calls to her husband, Martha becomes privy to the perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice that would be revealed to the nation two years later.

This photo courtesy of Nora Theater

The play cycles between Martha in her recording mode, her direct monologues to the audience, and cleverly staged conversations with her husband John. For the entirety of the 90-minute play, John sits behind a large picture frame in the rear corner of Martha’s pink bedroom set and strides out when Martha calls on him to relive portions of their lives.

Timothy Sawyer as John is impressive in his resemblance and manner to the original. His transition from playful, amorous husband to a bitter and divorced man is painful to watch. Love simply couldn’t overcome his loyalty to his president and his wife’s escalating notoriety and alcoholism.

“Martha Mitchell Calling” is part history lesson part cautionary tale. Playwright Jodi Rothe’s invention of having Martha comparing herself to Shakespeare’s Calpurnia and the prophet Cassandra may be far fetched but resonates with similarities. The two classic women were both truth-tellers and bad things happened to their country and their men when they were disregarded. We’ll never know whether Martha’s message would have been taken seriously is she’d been less of a whacko.

The play works best when Martha and George perform together. For all the cute Southernisms that Annette Miller deploys, she doesn’t get to the quick of her misunderstood and often ridiculed character. Miller’s characterization of Martha rarely exceeds that of eccentric southern belle, who enjoyed tweaking Pat Nixon and behaving outrageously at Washington social soirees.

After a while we hunger to witness a nuanced portrayal of the anguish Mitchell must have felt when her husband John stood behind Nixon in spite of what he knew. The show drags from time to time during Martha’s solo stretches. Her occasional impressions of mimicking the voices and facial expressions of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are exquisite brief detours.

One suspects there was much more emotional pain that went along with her deliberate off-the-wall behavior in Washington social circles and the late night calls to Helen Thomas, then the influential queen bee of the presidential press corps.

Viewers under a certain age don’t know who Martha Mitchell was. But they do know that from time to time, voices of truth still come out of unsuspected places in Washington. Now, as then, it’s our job to know which is which.

"Let Me Down Easy" Anna Deavere Smith

 One person telling a story to a group of people is one  of the  oldest forms of entertainment. When presented by a gifted actor, we see reflections of ourselves in the full  range of our complex humanity.

"Let Me Down Easy, a play in evolution"
Anna Deavere Smith
American Repertory Theater
Cambridge, MA
Running time 2 hrs 15 min with one 15 min intermission

Anna Deavere Smith’s solo performance of “Let Me Down Easy” doesn’t do that. Questions about the human condition gnaw at her. She scours the world like a modern day Socrates seeking answers. The answers are not pretty.

Smith, a film and TV actress, writer, and professor, has written two other monologues, “docu-dramas.” that she based on interviews she taped.  She performed “Fires in the Mirror,” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” at the A.R.T.

In a prologue, Smith casually walks to center stage. She explains she’s exploring the theme of ‘grace’ and its course is still evolving. She says that during several years of interviewing people on three continents she’s found common denominators of how resilient and how vulnerable we human beings are. She interviewed clergy of different denominations to ask them how they think about mortality.

At the end of the evening, we haven’t witnessed a cohesive and threaded narrative but we’re certain we’ve been moved by what we’ve seen. With the cadence of her voice, physical posture, facial expressions, and casual changes of shirt or coat or shoes Smith totally channels the people to whom she’s listened. Smith’s characters relive experiences of genocide, war, the American health care system, and death, and theologians attempt to explain the ways we cope with it.

She shifts seamlessly from a six year old Rwandan girl Ingrid Inema who’s witnessed slaughter of her family; to Kirsta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor in a hospital whose patients are mostly poor and black, waiting in vain to be rescued during Katrina; to the director of a South African orphanage who sits with her terminal child patients so they won’t die alone; to an assortment of clergy, pompous or humane, that most of us have witnessed no matter our religion.

Smith’s vignettes, thirty of them that represent about 10% of her interviews, are like a giant mirror illuminating what she finds: human beings at their best and worst. There is grace, there is resilience, there is blood lust that repels, there is occasional humor to leaven the suffering from which grace and resilience have been born.

We gratefully release laughter during vignettes about performance actress Elizabeth Steb accidentally setting herself ablaze during a dance and irrepressible former Texas governor Ann Richards taunting her throat cancer with an irreverent twang.

We know we’ve been moved by what we saw even if it’s hard to explain. We’ve been reminded that we’re a complicated lot, that we’re capable of unspeakable hatred and uncompromising love. The realization that we inhabit the space in between these dichotomies doesn’t let us down easy. Maybe that’s the point.

Photo courtesy of www.amrep.org

Excellent background interview with Anna Deavere Smith

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/232/index.html

The History Boys

The History Boys
Play by Alan Bennett
Directed by: Scott Edmiston
Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Music and sound, Dewey Dellay.
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts, Roberts Studio Theatre, through June 22.
Tickets, $51-54, 617-933-8600, bostontheatrescene.com

We’re living in a roiling sea of interests competing for our time and allegiance. What will help us get on in life, a deep understanding of our cultural history or the ability to reduce it to superficial sound bytes?

The question is posed, and not necessarily answered, by a rambunctious and touching SpeakEasy Stage production of ‘The History Boys,’ recently extended till June 22, at the Roberts Studio Theater in the Calderwood Pavilion.

The story unfolds in a working class boys’ school in 1984 Sheffield England. An eccentric professor, Hector, played by Bob Colonna, is a gray-bearded Socrates in a tweed jacket. "All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use," he says. The scenes of him careening between poetry, popular song, and exuberant skits to tease out lessons in history and culture to his class of eight students are filled with intelligence and a jaunty Python-esque imagination.

Tom Irwin, a young professor, is hired by the fatuous headmaster to improve the boys’ chances of being accepted at famed Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Irwin, played by Chris Thorn, encourages the boys to build their college entrance exams with froth and the reason of a sophist. They’ve been taught to write with a stone mason’s skill, laying foundation and layering point after point, “Booooring”, says Irwin.

"History nowadays is not a matter of conviction," he says. "It’s a performance." He encourages them to find the Fox News versions of their essays and abandon their training to search for historical perspective.

The eight boys are the stuff of the melting pot that is working class England. The dialogue between them underscores their wavering loyalties as they decide which of their teachers represents their best way to succeed. Dan Whelton as alpha male Dakin and Karl Baker Olson as sensitive gay student Posner are standouts. Olson’s singing of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and recitation of Thomas Hardy’s "Drummer Hodge” are unabashed expressions of unrequited love for another student.

Bennett’s main characters are complex and flawed. Hector’s habit of groping the boys he takes on motorcycle rides is certainly inappropriate. To his students, his behavior is a joke but there are consequences. Irwin misrepresents his credentials. Let’s just say the ending is not tidy.

Director Scott Edmiston and sound designer Dewey Dellay pull out the stops and use music, singing and lively dance routines that look choreographed for jolly soccer players as transitions between scenes.

History has not been crowded out of prime time in the British public education system, at least not in the 1984 England we see here. When is the last time your play program included two pages filled with over two dozen literary, historical, and pop culture references that will appear in the play? When is the last time you heard the names of Gracie Fields and Piero della Francesca (via T.S. Eliot) bandied about in any kind of play? No matter which way these boys write their exams, Hector’s made sure they know their history.

And I’ll bet my laptop that several references to the Dissolution of Monasteries, the destruction of 800 monastic libraries in the mid-1500s that represented a cultural and educational loss, is an echo of what playwright Alan Bennett wonders about in today’s era in which ‘history’ seems to mean last week.

We’re living in a sea of change. So many of our traditions, ways of thinking and living are becoming artifacts of history, replaced by fresh ideas, concepts, and market forces. But is newer better? The History Boys aren’t the only ones who have to decide. We have to do it every day.

Eddie Izzard

Eddie Izzard began his American tour, “Stripped”, at Boston's Orpheum Theater, April 28 - 30, 2008
Orpheum Theater
1 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108

Intelligent, rakish humor that doesn’t rely on bodily functions, bathroom activities, or saturated sexual innuendo is hard to come by in America. Which is exactly why an Eddie Izzard show is so refreshing. When he walks onto the stage and gets around to saying. “Tonight, we’re going to talk about… EVERYTHING!” he means it. All 4 billion years of the earth's history.

The next two hours were spent with Izzard cobbling together an oddball pastiche of comedy, history, and general clowning around. Wrap culture, language, and religion in tinfoil, set it in the microwave, and you have an Eddie Izzard show.

Watch Izzard mime about God using a crème brulee torch to create the earth or boil down the Ten Commandments to its essentials. Marvel at his downright courage to say. “Y’know, all we need is one commandment: Be kind to one another.” There is slight pause while he makes sure you registered that. Then a sharp left turn in which he acts out Moses trying to hold back the sea, or dinosaurs with little hands singing from hymnals in church, or Darwin's theory of evolution - "Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, you!"

Eddie Izzard is an updated Monty Python, crossed with Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. The English actor has a general idea of what he’s driving at but is so busy looking out the window that he gets gloriously lost amongst the trees along the way. A conversation about the existence of God might be interrupted by whipping out his iPhone to look up the definition of soup - which might been on the menu of the Jesus's Last Supper, “It’s all here on Wikipedia, you know.” And we do.

Using part of that detour as a running joke for the rest of the night, he gets a nearly Pavlovian response of laughter when he’ll pause and utter, “Soup!”

This is the first stop of his three-month American tour of  “Stripped”. By the end of the tour he’ll have shaped and somewhat tamed the show into what will become his second HBO special. The first, “Dress to Kill” (in which the cross-dressing comedian sports lipstick and black pumps), put his name on the map in 1999 and won him two Emmy Awards.

Izzard plays dodge ball with the ideas that streak into his brain. His stream of consciousness delivery is a three ring circus in which he is the daring young man on the flying trapeze, the tightrope walker, and one of the clowns squeezing out of the tiny car all at the same time. That’s a nearly death defying trick for a comedian working without a net on new material.

He took dozens of detours on his 4 billion year history tour about Everything. Aside from a few well-timed F words, the show was muscled along on brain cells, not testosterone. You just don’t realize how starved you are for stimulating comedy until you’ve heard this man in concert.

Youtube has bunches of Izzard's stuff from "Dress to Kill"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFq_nk8pE0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k

Whizzin’, a pissa of a show

Whizzin’
Musical by Ryan Landry and Billy Hough
Directed by Ryan Landry and Rick Park
Set, Windsor Newton, Costumes, Scott Martino
Presented by the Gold Dust Ophans
At Machine, through May 24, Tickets $28, 866-811-4111 or theatermania.com
Running time 2 hrs 15 min including fifteen minute intermission

It’s not that often you can see a true-blue campy drag show in Beantown. OK, the black walled basement of Machine on way upper Boylston Street is not exactly the Theater District. And Whizzin’, with book and lyrics by Ryan Landry and Billy Hough, is not a family musical. It’s the raunchy, over the top, un-self-conscious fun that a gay-themed production should be.

When the 6’2” black-clad, tattooed bouncer greeted me at the entrance to Machine last night with a “Hi, Honey,” I knew I wasn’t in Kansas any more.

The plot strays from the original Wizard of Oz but only purists, who are not likely to have this venue bookmarked in their Blackberries, might object. Social satire is often embedded in gay theater productions and Whizzin’ aims its share at cell phone users, Internet pornsters, and botox and plastic surgery addicts. Whizzin’ also refers to Dorothy’s bed-wetting problem.

Several inspired theater effects had the audience roaring with laughter. The imaginative props that cost no more than a collection of tin foil, coat hangers, bits of muslin, and foam rubber were gems. The gray fabric tornado might have cost ten bucks and had the audience in a grand stitch. The costumes were hilariously outlandish.

The theater is nothing more than about a hundred folding metal chairs spread out on a black cement dance floor facing a makeshift stage at one end of the sprawling Machine’s basement. The posters on the bathroom walls leave no doubt as to the proclivities of the patrons.

With impeccable timing, stage presence, and facial expressions, Olive Another’s Glinda delightfully dominated every scene in which she (he?…cripes what’s a reviewer to do about personal pronouns here?) appeared. Most of the other actors had their lines gobbled up when they ran them over audience laughter.

Megan Ludlow’s Dorothy had a fine show girl (and she is a girl) singing voice. Her re-imagined version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow was heartfelt and moving. Ryan Landry as the Wicked Witch squeezed every syllable from his rakish delivery.

As a matter of fact the whole production was full of heart and, dare I say it, gaiety.

Enthusiasm often trumped talent but the acting is so exuberant that it doesn’t seem matter. Like the Lion’s derriere, the production sagged with its own weight from time to time and could use a little kitch-o-suction. But if you want to sit amongst a very mixed crowd and listen to a collection of ballads and bodacious rocker song and dance routines, call the Gold Dust Orphans Company. Their “machine’ is running until May 24th.

Photo courtesy of golddustophans.com

Spin

Spin
A play by Robert J. Sherwood
Directed by David J. Miller
April 18- May 10, 2008
Thursdays, Fridays 8:00 PM
Saturdays 4:00 and 8:00 PM
Sundays 3:00 PM

At the Plaza Black Box Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts
Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont St in Boston’s South End
Tickets: $35
Seniors & Students $30

The first act of Spin feels like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel. Profane dialogue whooshes by at a dizzying rate, most of it uttered by a gonzo campaign manager who would sell his mother if it would help his candidate win the presidency.

The play opens with Samuel Champlain’s campaign manager gloating over a fifteen-point lead in the polls before the final debate that will occur in two hours. Two minutes later, the adversary’s campaign manager breezes into his office and lights a fuse to a scandal she’s ready to use to derail Champlain’s aspirations.

Boy, do we need a zany play like this. We are numbed by 24/7 politics. He says, she says, she spins, he spins. How much distortion is tacked on to a kernel of truth? Is anything off limits? Does it have anything to do with the candidate’s ability to do a good job?

We get to ponder this as the coyote campaign manager hints that Samuel Champlain’s wife is compromised by something, described as “having to do with three letters, S E X”, that will blow her husband’s candidacy out of the water. The threat: Champlain must accept the VP slot or his wife’s secret is aired and his candidacy is toast. The decision must be made before the debate that occurs two hours later, conveniently the length of the play we’re watching.

While this is teased out, we get to see the kind of wild, numbers driven, information spinning, anything goes politicking that we suspect goes on behind closed doors. Steven Barkhimer plays campaign manager Jerry as a political operative of gleeful crackhead proportions. He speeds along on vats of coffee and has a mind that can reconfigure any fact into a coin of the realm for his boss - a coin that on one side buffs him up and on the other denigrates his opponent. He occasionally overacts but he’s got lines that will make you hoot. (“No promises! Give the impression of promises!” Jerry tells the candidate as he’s practicing for his debate.)

Packaged in this cocktail of a play are a Saturday Night Live spoof and a drama with topical relevance. It’s shaken and stirring. Jerry’s pollster (Melissa Baroni) is a numbers whiz for hire. She can mold a statistic into a roadside bomb or a comforter. The opposing campaign manager (Elisa McDonald) has graduated from the Machiavelli School of Political Warfare. She gives Jerry a sniff of the scandal she’s uncovered and baits him into confronting the candidate’s wife to determine if the ambiguous sex story is true - and how much spin he’ll have to contrive to offset the damage.

The candidate’s wife Alexandra (Christine Power) is as good at spinning her truth as the two campaign managers in the room. These four are playing for all the marbles. Loser is not a word found in any of their lexicons.

Peter Brown inexplicably underplays his role as Henry, the candidate on the cusp of victory. He’s a forty-watt bulb set amongst klieg lights. It would be a serious distraction if the others weren't so busy chomping the daylights out of their roles.

One doesn’t have to be a cynic to see where the production is driving us. In contemporary politics, the notion of truth, decency, character, and moral courage comes home in a flag draped box. We all want to achieve our destinies, our dreams. How much will we sacrifice to realize them?

There are probably some pretty heavy-duty rapscallions who serve us in congress or our communities. Did we elect them because they proved they can do a good job of running the show, or that (short of pedophilia) they are paragons of virtue in their private lives?

It’s two hours of scary fun watching the five characters try to get a grip on shreds of their humanity as the tornado of a political campaign rages around them. It’s even better that the fuse set at the outset of the play is still burning at the end.

Photo courtesy http://www.zeitgeiststage.com/

Three Tall Women: Edward Albee

Edward Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. His fictional treatment of his early life is the play's undergirding. Questions raised about how we use or revise our memories to fit our identities will resonate with you long after you leave the theater.

Three Tall Women
A Play by Edward Albee
Directed by Spiro Veloudos, Set by Christina Todesco, Costumes by Molly Trainor, Lights by Karen Perlow, Music by Peter Bayne
Lyric Stage  Company through April 26
Tickets, $25-50,617-585-5678
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including one 15 minute intermission

Here are three good reasons to see Three Tall Women: Anne Scurria, Paula Plum, Liz Hayes.

Another reason to see the play is that Edward Albee wrote it. Forget what you’ve heard about the playwright being inaccessible. He poured his heart out (Albee-style) in writing this 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning play in which he fictionalized his upbringing.

The result is a touching, witty charmer that seesaws between broad humor and dark reality. The combination is odd but Albee is a master of making great stuff from unlikely premises.

Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. By the time he packed his bag, never to return, he left behind a trail of schools he’d been kicked out of and a painful broken relationship with his mother.

To reveal the play’s structure would take the wallop out of seeing it for the first time. One thing that must be revealed is that you don’t have a chance to see three high-velocity actresses play off one another that often.  The women, whom Albee named A, B, and C are played by three powerhouses: Anne Scurria of the Trinity Repertory Theater, Paula Plum, a fixture in Boston drama circles, and up-and-comer Liz Hayes.

Scurria and Plum are fully vested in their roles from the opening scene. The 92 year-old A (Scurria) shoots from the hip, not one PC bone in her aged body. Eighty one year-old Albee writes with the same rifle-bore directness.

As the shadow of death nears, do we re-imagine life’s losses and pleasures as they occurred or as we wished they had occurred?  On occasion, A’s attempts to remember accurately are like watching the proverbial camel fit through the eye of a needle. One wonders how much Albee struggled with the same question as he wrote this loosely autobiographical play.

Paula Plum’s Fifty something B, a cool breeze of mortality just beginning to chill her shoulders, uses her droll wit and deadpan black humor to ready herself for the trials of A, who might represent her own future. Liz Hays as twenty-six year old C is infused with the limitless possibilities of a life unfolding. Hayes, to her credit, inhabits her role more and more deeply as the play develops.

Albee’s preoccupation with the roiling themes of age, memory, relationships, and meaning are packed inside this freight train of a play. From the ABC of it to the XYZ of it, this is the best  production you’re likely to see in Boston this season.

The Shining City

The Shining City
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
BU Theatre - Mainstage, Huntington Avenue, Boston,MA
March 7 - April 6, 2008
Running time 1 hr 30 min, no intermission

Even if a play isn’t totally convincing, a good reason go is to see an outstanding performance by one of its actors.

The chief reason to see The Shining City at the Huntington Theater is John Judd’s performance as the patient of a first year Dublin therapist. Judd’s character John comes to therapist Ian because he’s beset by seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife.

John’s transformation from bumbling middle class widower into a man who’s faced down his demons is beautifully organic and credible. The downside of this is that there isn’t enough going on elsewhere in the play.

Three of the play’s five scenes show John coming to grips with his complicity in his failed marriage and inhabiting a new and improved psyche in the process. John uses gestures, facial expressions and terrific comic and dramatic timing to tell his story. He’d be an ideal candidate to bend your ear all night long over several jars of Guinness.

The scenes contrast therapist Ian’s slow unraveling as patient John gains traction in reality. Ian, played by Jay Whittaker, is as conflicted a therapist as you’ll find. An ex-priest, he’s just jilted the girlfriend who has borne him a child and is painfully attempting to get a grip on his sexual preference. His struggle is inferred, internal, and nowhere as clearly delineated as that of his patient. Many of his lines are “mmm” and “yes”.  We see him appear distracted as he listens to his patient verbalize. Ian knows he’s bedeviled but hasn’t the nerve to put himself on the couch.

John’s story is the stuff of sitcom entertainment. The more interesting but untold story is about Ian, his renunciation of his vows as a priest, and his struggle with sexual identity.

Judd is comfortable keeping his Irish brogue throughout the play; Jay Whittaker, Nicole Wiesner as his girlfriend, and Keith Gallagher as a hustler waltz in and out of brogue.

Banish a ghost from one person’s life and it re-appears in another’s. The Alfred Hitchcock ending is jarring and not a little “deus ex machina” but without it the play would be dead in the water.

What Ian does with his own ghost is the next chapter in his life. Maybe he needs a good shrink. It’s a shame it isn’t addressed in this play.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater

The Scene

The Scene
Play by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by: Scott Edmiston. Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Sound, Dewey C. Dellay.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through March 15. Tickets: $25-54. 617-585-5678
Running time 2 hrs plus one 15 min intermission

The Scene is a neo-classic themed play dressed in black high heels. It’s a no holds barred drama, loaded with smart dialogue, plot twists, quick turns, and sharp acting all around. MIddle-aged writer making the scene at high visibility Manhattan party meets younger woman from Ohio. Writer’s career has peaked and he rages with contempt at the vapid NY artsy suck-up scene. Woman is attracted to his volcanic anti-establishment scorn and the fact that he knows people sunning themselves higher on the glitzy entertainment pyramid.

The play is lit up by Georgia Lyman whose portrayal of Clea from Ohio is riveting. Clea is a bimbo savant, mixing her faux Ohio naivety with calculating detachment and an uncanny sense of what makes people around her tick. If they can be useful to her, she will find the chinks in their armor and climb over them.

The brains inside the body that is her portfolio seduce Jeremiah Kissel’s Charlie, the washed up writer. Everyone in the theater knows Charlie is heading for a cliff. Charlie seems to have one last chance at the play’s end. His choice will decide whether he remains a has-been or can swallow enough of his pride to become a somebody again.

Barlow Adamson as Charlie’s best friend and Julie Jirousek as Charlie’s wife Stella are serviceable foils for Charlie and Clea, and fill out themes of friendship and how much bending a marriage can take before it breaks.

Charlie’s affair is used as a catapult to launch stones at the wasteland that is the entertainment industry. No one can succeed without selling off chucks of integrity. Big fish eat little fish. Little fish gulp down enough to become big fish and eat little fish.

The fact that the dialogue has an HBO flair is because writer Theresa Rebeck has written extensively for Law and Order, NYPD Blue and LA Law. She’s also written powerful plays such as Mauritius and View of the Dome.

The set and music are spare and edgy, perfect for the mano a mano dueling going on between characters. The play doesn’t offer new insights on the human condition but does make a helluva scene.

The Clean House

This play showcases one of the best comic scenes you'll ever see . Although the play becomes more reflective in the second act, the incandescent performances of Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will tickle you long after you leave the theater.

The Clean House
A play in two acts by Sarah Ruhl
Running time 2 hrs, 15 min including one 15 min intermission
New Rep Theater, Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
617-923-8487
February 27 - March 23, 2008

The Clean House ends up in shambles with its inhabitants all the better for it.

The play opens with Lane and her husband Charles (whom we don’t meet until Act 2) hiring a 27 year-old Brazilian to clean their home. Mathilde has a congenital funny bone, hates to clean, and spends her time thinking up the world’s funniest joke. Lane’s sister Virginia appears, wound up tighter than a two-dollar watch, and offers to clean her sister’s house and let Mathilde cogitate comic stories. All on the QT.

The play takes off in the first act with brilliant pairings of Lane the doctor, her sister Virginia, and Lane’s house cleaner Mathilde. Paula Plum overplays Lane with shameless gusto, Nancy E. Carroll underplays Virginia with deadpan wit, and Cristi Miles plays Mathide the Brazilian housekeeper with sunny South American zest. Plum and Carroll cavort with exquisite comic timing, facial expressions, and voice tone. Ten minutes in and you can see that they’ve got it all going on. They know it, you know it and it feeds on itself beautifully. The audience erupted in applause after several interchanges between the two.

Obsessive-compulsive Virginia talks about traveling with her husband to see the ruins in Egypt and can only think, “Why doesn’t someone just sweep those up?” Virginia fills her life by cleaning her apartment religiously.  Her riff about dust is a hoot and you wait for her to feed you more. Mathilde is preoccupied trying to think of the world’s best joke and has no appetite for cleaning. So Virginia offers to clean house for Mathide. The deal Virginia offers the Brazilian maid fits both their needs - Virginia will clean the home of her sister Lane and her doctor husband and Mathilde can try to create the joke that keeps  eluding her.

As Virginia comes to visit in the first act, it is hilariously apparent that Lane and her sister have a  landfill of sibling rivalry. Toward the end of Act 1,Virginia and Mathilde discover a pair of women’s underwear among Charles’ laundry, an item that implodes the solid appearance of Lane and Charles’ marriage.

The second part of the play seems to leave the station on a different train. It’s not so much a question of improbability as tone. Charles, who has fallen in love with one of his cancer patients, comes to the apartment to introduce Ana to his wife (and Virginia and Mathilde who are present). Ana is dying, and Charles has found his soul mate. The humor and more sober aspects of mature love, mortality, along with Charles’s Pollyanna-ish “Cant we all get along together?” attitude can make good theater but the segue was hard to swallow after such a totally comic beginning.

Will Lyman as Charles nails the doctor-as-smitten-lover role. He portrays enough of the remote and practical surgeon in his man who has found his soul-mate role to give us an idea of who he was with Lane and of his struggle to embrace his newfound exuberance. Bobbi Steinbach as Ana is an earthy Mediterranean sunflower beginning to wilt and bend with the weight of her disease. She will not allow herself to drop to the ground before dying and concocts a plan to die on her own terms.

The second half veers close to soap opera from time to time, trying to balance the tears and the laughs and is saved by the terrific ensemble acting and the unorthodox imagination of playwright Sarah Ruhl.

The elegant set designed by Cristina Todesco is as white as an operating room and a terrific foil for the order to chaos back to order arc of the play. Jamie Whoolery’s projections against a backdrop of gridded windows at the apartment’s rear wall ingeniously fill in sights and sounds that connect the scenes.

The first act of this play is as much a tour de force of two actors as you’ll see anytime, anywhere. If there are awards to be given at the end of the year, Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will clean house.

Photo, caption, courtesy of Boston Globe: Cancer-patient Ana (Bobbie Steinbach, left) is involved with a doctor who is married to Lane (Paula Plum, right) in Sarah Ruhl's play. (Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures)

The Little Dog Laughed, Black Box Theater Boston

The Little Dog Laughed
Play by Douglas Carter Beane
Directed by: Paul Melone. Set, Eric Levenson. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Sound, Benjamin Emerson
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Wimberly Theatre, through Feb. 16.

Boston has a thriving theater scene, filled with sizzle, substance, and everything in between. The Little Dog Laughed, currently running at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theatre, has the feel of an HBO sizzler. How to achieve happiness and not sell out what’s important to you - or sell it out with minimal collateral damage - is the theme and its actors spend two hours wheedling and diddling to flesh it out.

We’re all familiar with the compromises we make to get by in life, love, and business. Few might have to make more than the closeted film actor, his female lesbian agent, a choirboy male hooker, and his neurotic girlfriend. Seldom do we meet such screwed up people who happen to make us laugh, in spite of their lack of backbone, self-awareness, and personal principles.

Diane, the theater agent, is about to break into the big leagues by pitching a film starring her client Mitchell, the closeted movie star. When Mitchell falls in love with Alex, a young, naïve hooker, and worse, decides to make his homosexuality public, Diane brings in the heavy artillery and takes aim at her client Mitchell, Alex, Alex’s girlfriend Ellen, and the entire Hollywood establishment.

Maureen Keiller grabs the role of the supremely cynical, conniving Diane and wrings it out to dry. With facial expressions, comic timing, and a surgical eye for the soft spots in any human armor in her vicinity, she is formidable, and all the more fierce because she’s acutely aware that she sold her soul to expediency years ago. The wonder of it is that the other three actors aren’t blown away by her phosphorescent turns on the stage.

This is an exquisitely paired quartet of actors who play to and off each other. Robert Serrell’s Mitchell is a disarmingly ingenuous movie star who’s begun to acknowledge the ways he’s allowed his delusions of heterosexuality to suffocate his true inclinations.

Jonathan Orsini’s Alex is damaged goods looking for a soft landing anywhere his heart and trust won’t be battered again.
Angie Jepson plays Ellen, Alex’s comically self-absorbed girlfriend with blithe façade that barely hides the pain of a loveless upbringing.

The play doesn’t brood. It’s a fast-paced satire brimming with one-liners and scalding turns aimed at Hollywood’s shakers and movers, who, in Ellen’s experience, will not acknowledge your existence unless you have a product or a power they need.

Ellen, who has sold out more times than Wal-Mart, proposes a solution to the three lovers. Her shrewd business tactic, asking  “Is everyone happy?” before leaving the negotiation table, results in a denouement that will give you a good reason to reread gaudy Hollywood features in the tabloid press.

Post script: How in the world does the play’s title fit in here, you might be wondering. As the stage lights dim, Ellen recites a nursery rhyme that seems synchronous with her final victory. And playwright Douglas Carter Beane just winked at us and said, “Open your eyes, folks.”

Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

PHOTOS (by Mike Lovett): Robert Serrell as Mitch and Maureen Keiller as Diane; Jonathan Orsini as Alex, Maureen Keiller and Robert Serrell; Angie Jepson as Ellen and Jonathan Orsini

This Wonderful Life: A Christmas-in-a-box one man play

This Wonderful Life
“A delightful solo re-imagining of the Frank Capra classic film”

Lyric Stage
140 Clarendon St.
(YMCA Building, Copley Sq. )
Boston, MA 2117

November 23 - December 22, 2007
Box Office: (617) 585-5678 or  www.lyricstage.com

One reason to see this holiday treat is to watch an actor have such a damn good time on stage. After Frank Capra pitched the “It’s a Wonderful Life” movie role of George Bailey to Jimmy Stewart in 1946, Stewart replied, “Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel named Clarence, I’m your boy!”

Substitute  ‘Spiro’ for “Frank” and that’s what Neal A. Casey must have said when Lyric Stage Producing Artistic Director Spiro Veloudis proposed the idea to Casey.

First things first. While you might enjoy Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” without having first read the story, it would be a tougher slog if you are one of the few who hasn’t seen the Frank Capra film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Playwright Steve Murray had to cut an hour from the 130-minute movie. The play hurtles along with the speed of a rambunctious one horse open sleigh and if you’re not familiar with the original movie, you could fall off when the thoroughbred gallops from one scene to the next.

The program summary:
“Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls, a small New England town, near the end of World War II. George Bailey, one of the town’s good citizens, fears he’s failed his family, his friends, and his town. In despair, he considers suicide, until Clarence, a dotty angel-in-waiting, shows him how bleak the world would have been had he not lived.”

Or even more succinctly as Casey says in his introduction, “A story of a man on a bridge, how he got there, and how he found his way home.”

Neal A, Casey plays all the characters in Murray’s New England Premier of “This Wonderful Life.” George Bailey, his wife Mary Hatch Bailey, Old Man Potter, Uncle Billy, old pal Sam Wainwright are the mainstays. Add up his children, an apprentice angel and everyone else he plays and you’re north of two dozen.

The movie has taken on iconic status during Christmas time. Changing the story line or sentiments will not do. "People have such expectations," Mr. Casey says, "and I have to respect that. I have to connect with their familiarity, and have some fun with it."

One of the endearing aspects of this production is that he does have fun. Using a few props, body language, twitching eyebrows or furrowed brow, and dozens of voice changes to suit each character, Casey is clearly enjoying himself. A moment he drops a prop, garbles a line, or a robust sneeze from an audience member leads to a playful ad lib. And Casey delivers a dead on imitation of Jimmy Stewart in several scenes.

Despite the gooey Hollywood storyline, the movie and the play have an edge to them. The bad breaks dealt to kind-hearted, visionary George Bailey drive him to a bridge from which he can hurl himself. His banking business has just about folded. The good works of his life haven’t brought him success. He knows the insurance policy in his pocket makes him worth more dead than alive. The Christmas Eve scene as George completely unravels in front of his family stings the audience as well as his family. The guy who can always find a silver lining has lost his prospector’s touch. Into the snowy night, he heads for the bridge, wishing he'd never been born.

Sweet ironies abound as Clarence the apprentice angel figures out a way to intercede with George's suicidal intentions. Clarence hits his stride when he shows George how different Bedford Falls would have been without his ever being born. Mr. Casey rat-a-tat-tats a handful of quick roles that show the rough and tumble underbelly of a town bereft of hope, bereft of George Bailey's stamp. George recognizes his worth and dear Clarence earns his wings as an angel.

George heads home and receives the news that his fortunes have changed, his bank saved by an infusion from a boyhood pal. Redemption is at hand and the audience, with more than a few tears, cheers the boisterous outcome of goodness over grinchiness.

Director Jack Neary’s tight 75-minute production is staged tidily enough for Casey to set up each scene. Jenna McFarland Lord’s spare two-tier set of a banker’s desk, porch doorway. bar, stairs and bannister to his home’s second floor and the bridge ominously looming at rear center stage is all Casey needs. Dewey Dellay's taped sound effects work beautifully to capture a breaking window, other end of a phone conversation, crowd noise, or Bailey's famous splash into a pool that takes place early in the play and film.

Like George, we’ve all gripped the rails of our bridges. peered into the deep, and experienced existential moments of uncertainty and self-doubt. We know the forces that can drive any of us to the precipice.

This seasonal little play reinforces the notion that there’s a “Clarence effect” present in our lives. Our good works do not go unnoticed. Somebody, somewhere, is paying attention.

Photos courtesy of www.lyricstage.com

Brendan: Irish-born playwright Ronan Noone comes to terms with America

“Brendan”
A play written by Ronan Noone
Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston
October 12–November 17 | $15-$50 | 617.266.0800

This little play feints and jabs for the first few rounds but about halfway through an uninterrupted ninety minutes it begins to land tender blows to the viewer’s heart. Any play that features the doppelganger of the main character’s recently deceased mother on stage with him for the full length of the play had better have some powerful hooks to go the distance.

“Brendan”, Ronan Noone’s new play that began a run at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater Friday night, is a sweet, imaginatively drawn coming-of-age story.

Dashiell Eaves plays Brendan, a self-doubting, terminally shy 25 year-old Irish immigrant who fled Ireland and his mother five years ago. He learns the date of his citizenship hearing the same day a letter informs him that his mother has died. After a shaky start, the pas de deux in which Brendan works out his karma with his salt o’ the earth, compulsively intrusive mother is a quiet wonder to behold.

Parallel to this narrative is Brendan’s tentative entry into Boston-ish American mainstream culture, conveniently populated by fellow Irish immigrants and a female neighbor as much in need of emotional salvation as our Brendan.

Watching scenes in which Brendan and his unmarried downstairs neighbor can’t connect verbally even though they feel strong emotional tugs might resonate with playgoers who’ve experienced similar timid moments. We want to shout “Yes!” when his mother, sitting in a chair in the corner, says, “Ask her if she’d like stay and have a cup of tea!”

The supporting cast, all of whom have dual roles, play their broadly drawn characters with gusto. Ciaran Crawford as Steve O,  Natalie Gold as Rose, Tommy Schrider as the brother of the female neighbor in the apartment downstairs, and Kelly McAndrew as the classic heart o’ gold hooker all make the most of their turns on the stage.

The play’s anchor is Nancy E. Carroll in the role of Brendan’s long-suffering mother. Invisible to all but Brendan, she’s as powerful a force beyond the pale as she was in her lifetime. She plays her role with wallops of dry humor and an Irish accent as thick and natural as the peat beneath the sod of the Emerald Isle.

Her wish to see her son succeed was coupled with enough smothering motherly advice to send him packing to America. Even from the first row of the mezzanine, you can see her eyebrows rise in disdain for some of her son’s new world choices in buddies, girl friends, and clothing. 

Alexander Dodge’s sets, pulled onto and off stage on tracks or rollers by the cast, are imaginatively designed. The Irish bar opened and closed from one side of the stage, Brendan’s one room apartment on the other, and the car Brendan learns to drive, make exquisite use of the technology of the Wimberly Theater stage.

Suffice it to say, we’ve all had ‘issues’ with our parents. Ditto for trying to find our niche in society and figuring out how to initiate a relationship, Somewhere between the lines of this play may lurk Noone’s own transition from Irish immigrant to American. Is it coincidence that Ronan Noone cast Brendan as a house painter, a job he held before finding his métier as a writer? Or that one of the pivotal moments is a scene Noone actually witnessed outside his Boston apartment?

In one entertaining riff directed straight at the audience, Brendan lists all the Irish-isms he’s dropped for American slang (“Brilliant!” not “Cool!”). The play is billed as a comedy but anyone familiar with Irish humor understands that a good laugh is often wrapped around disappointment and loss.

With its affecting light touch, “Brendan” helps us reflect on the need to find our voices so we can connect with the people who are important to us and grow into the human beings we (with or without the encouragement of our mothers) yearn to become.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams
New Repertory Theater in residence at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Watertown, MA
September 11 - October 7, 2007
Running time 3 hours 15 minutes with two 10 minute intermissions

A streetcar named Desire rumbled through the rowdy streets of 1947 New Orleans delivering Blanche DuBois to her sister Stella’s cramped one bedroom apartment where she lived with her husband Stanley Kowalski. The streetcar couldn’t have caused any more of a tragic mess had it plowed right through the tiny apartment in their blue-collar neighborhood.

One spectacular reason to find your way to the New Repertory Theater Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire” in Watertown is Rachel Harker in the role of Blanche DuBois. Harker’s incandescent performance nails Blanche’s incremental decline from quiet desperation to madness.

It’s a bear of a play to stage - thousands of words of dialogue, sustained emotional range required from the four principal actors, and running time of over three hours. It can wear down all but the most involved actors, let alone an audience. And of course there’s the 1951 Elia Kazan film adaptation that hurtled Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh to fame.

Todd Alan Johnson as Stanley, Marianna Bassham as Stella, Rachel Harker as Blanche in the New Repertory Theater Company production. Photo Boston Globe.

Under Harker’s command, Blanche’s coquetry, rage, desire to be loved, dysfunctional sexuality, deluded sense of gentility, and a stubborn incapacity to acknowledge the smallest of self-truths, flash like facets of a Cartier diamond.

In a first week performance, the nearly packed house broke into spontaneous applause after Blanche’s gut stoked tirade about Stanley that begins, “"He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's something even sub-human-something not quite to the stage of humanity yet!…”

Blanche mismanaged and lost the family’s large home, Belle Reve, in Mississippi. She was fired from her teaching job for seducing a high school student. Before journeying to New Orleans, she “had depended on the kindness of strangers,” men whom she solicited in a flea bitten hotel in Mississippi. Harker’s deconstruction of Blanche comes from some visceral place that most of us don’t dare to plumb.

Todd Alan Johnson seems miscast as Stanley. The sexual tension that underlies the antagonism between him and Blanche is not present. Nor is chemistry obvious between him and his wife Stella.

His rages and the alpha dog mentality that fuel relationships with his wife and friends are loud but disconnected. The high-pitched voice he affects in his fits of temper is brittle and monochromatic. I never saw the 1951 film but bet that no matter what the pitch, Brando’s voice had to be laced with wily or transparent testosterone. The final bedroom scene between Stanley and Blanche is disappointingly flat and anti-climactic.

Marianna Bassham as Stella refracts more convincingly against Blanche than with her husband Stanley. There’s nitro but not enough glycerine to make us buy into her lust for Stanley and her acceptance of her life style of men’s night out bowling leagues and revolving card games. Stella’s guilt and relief when she agrees to institutionalize Stella will cost her.

Compared to the hefty dialogue time for Blanche, Stella, and Stanley, Bates Wilder’s Mitch seems more of a sketch than a bored-in character. Blanche’s flirting with him is desperate and doomed. Perhaps Wilder underplays Mitch’s own desperation and yearning for connection.

John R. Malinowski’s setting is especially gritty, close quartered, and utilitarian. He fashioned  the Kowalski's apartment upon a dais with an alley that crescents around it in a semi-circle, and a semi-opaque  second floor apartment where the neighbors argue. Neon signs from nearby stores and bars beckon from the perimeter. For the observant, he adds subtle changes in the apartment’s décor that underscore Blanche’s presence from act to act.

Frances Nelson Mc Sherry’s costume design is very 1950s. John Malinowski’s lighting is straightforward on/off to accommodate brief scene changes.

Tennessee Williams grew up in a dysfunctional southern family and was no stranger to sexual tension, violence and loneliness - the themes that vein his plays.

To some incalculable degree, whether expressed overtly or experienced internally, these themes inhabit our own emotional fabric. We may loathe Blanche’s deficiencies but we understand something about the demons that throttle her.

Mike Daisey's "Monopoly..." at the American Repertory Theater:Zero Arrow Theater

“Monopoly! - Tesla, Edison, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the War for Tomorrow.”
Created and performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
May 1-May 5, 2007
Zero Arrow Theater, Cambridge, MA
617-547-8300
www.amrep.org

Two minutes into portly Mike Daisey’s monologue and he’s got it all going on. His pudgy round face is a theater all by itself. Eyebrows rise, fall, twitch. Eyes squint, roll, stare. Mouth and lips contort to give charge to the words coming from them. Voice thunders, wheedles, quietly slows to gently massage each syllable.                                                                                     Photo from amrep web site

Occasionally all of that plus whatever else of him is visible from behind the table he’s sitting at, his only prop other than a glass of water he seldom sips from, go into herky -jerky or balletic pantomime to buttress the words of the story. He’s a one-man band of a storyteller.

Tonight’s roller coaster is “Monopoly! Tesla, Edison, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the War for Tomorrow.”   Whatever happens tonight may be different from yesterday’s or tomorrow’s monologue. Daisey has no fixed script. He glances at a one-page outline of each of the dozen or so vignettes in his show, takes a deep breath, and re-imagines the story.

And, if we believe Daisey’s intent in the second of three monologues presented by the American Repertory Theater, we in the audience bear some of the responsibility for how it turns out. Daisey’s Director’s Notes, printed prominently in the theater foyer, proclaim he “tells the tale fresh for each and every audience using whatever energy you bring with you to make new discoveries along the way.”

Ahhh, the audience as enablers. Right away I’m hoping that the other 149 people who’ve purchased tickets have read this and are prepared to lean into their oars for his ninety-minute monologue.

Thirty minutes into the show and I’m wondering what I would have to smoke to connect these stories in such brilliant ways. He’s made a quilt of stranger than fiction accounts of the Edison-Tesla AC/DC electricity saga; the history of Parker Brother’s most famous board game - Monopoly; growing up in rural Maine; experiences when he fled to Seattle (including being cast in an industrial video with Bill Gates and Daisey’s gonzo attempt to use a lightning bolt spewing Tesla Coil in a theater monologue); and the impact of Wal-Mart on small town America,

Using stories about his small town sister or big time inventors Edison and Tesla, Daisey gives us fascinating microcosmic lessons about history, economics, and capitalism on a very human scale.

Occasionally, Daisey gets mired too deeply in his self-admitted obsessions with capitalism or history and that’s where we can't help him out. If he senses the audience’s eyes glazing over from too much information, he pulls the pin on a hand grenade of humor, outrage, or mimicry to remind us we’re in a theater. If he doesn’t feel us fading (as in last Thursday’s performance for a couple of stretches), we feel like we’re in a lecture hall at Harvard.

With beautiful timing, Daisey creates hauntingly silent pauses in which you feel the audience holding its collective breath. What makes this a theater experience instead of an alpha male storyteller dominating a living room or bar room is Daisey’s notion that it’s not all about him exclusively. “We’re navigating the space together,” he said at a recent “Talk back” session with an audience.

Extending the metaphors he’s created with Edison and Tesla, Daisey ends his show saying, “Tonight you are charged and you will not dissipate.” And it dawns on us that if we could think as globally and non-linearly about our own lives, obsessions, and preoccupations as Daisey, we might generate enough electrons to illuminate our kitchens for an hour or so.

By then, the final statement in Daisey’s Director’s Note, “The alchemy of live performance makes our hearts larger, and our imaginations brighter than any of us can achieve alone” rings true.

Tickets still available
TONGUES WILL WAG – a special workshop performance of Mike Daisey's newest monologue!
One performance only! Tuesday, May 8 at 7:30 pm at Zero Arrow Theatre. Tickets: $20 - buy online or call 617.547.8300

Mike Daisey's "Invincible Summer"

INVINCIBLE SUMMER

Created and performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
April 4-29, 2007 at Zero Arrow Theatre
Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA 617.547.8300
http://www.amrep.org/invincible/

Mike Daisey’s stories seem to spin straw into gold. He riffs on the weather in Seattle, wedding toasts, parental divorce, his move to New York City in an oppressive August heat wave, the New York City subway system, and the morning of September 11, 2001 which found him in lower Manhattan drinking coffee and preparing to deliver an overdue book manuscript to his publisher. This is what became his “Invincible Summer.”

Photos from amrep web site
For his show at Zero Arrow Theater, Daisey sits on a chair at a wooden table a few feet from the first row. His only props - a glass of water and a lamp. At the beginning of each vignette of his monologue, he glances for a few seconds at what appears to be an outline, then spins the story. This is steeplechase theater. The careening highs and lows of Daisey’s emoting opens us up to our own experiences with grief, anger, loss, hate, and love. His use of humor, irony, and a face and voice of enormous elasticity, act as foils for the denser parts of his stories.

Aside from his experience of 9/11, Daisey’s stuff is much the same as our own, but retold a million times better. If you’ve ever been in the spotlight as you spun a story at a dinner table, you get a sense of how hard it is to keep an extended story alive. Daisey has a natural way of caroming off audience response and using it to gather intensity as the story resolves. With no smoke and mirrors in sight, he connects every strand at the end of ninety minutes.

Daisey spends months refining the vignettes and delivers them extemporaneously. ”We’re navigating the space together. I’m aiming for the truth without boundaries between me and the audience," Daisey said in a “Talk Back” session after a show last week. This is the 19th time he’s performed “Invincible Summer.” He has nine monologues in various stages of development.

Daisey started performing in an unheated garage in Seattle ten years ago. He’s been a guest on The Late Show with Dave Letterman and been heard on NPR.

“Moments happen that shift your life. All that happened before that becomes nostalgia. 9/11 and my parents’ divorce are two examples,” he said. Mike Daisey’s gift to the audience: On the way out of the theater, you find yourself wondering where those shifts took place in your own life.

Daisey’s upcoming productions at Zero Arrow Theater
Tongues Will Wag - Mike Daisey's newest monologue is about dog culture, baby culture, and the essential choices we all face. Special workshop performance May 8 only - tickets $20 - call 617.547.8300.

MONOPOLY!
May 1-5, 2007

"Fat Pig":Neil LaBute serves up theatrical mixed grill

“Fat Pig”, a play in one act by Neil LaBute
Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company
Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through April 7, 2007.
Running time 100 minutes, no intermission
For tickets and information, go to www.speakeasystage.com

If your view is that the world is a pretty cruel place, watching a Neil LaBute play is not likely to change your mind. His plays have a way of cracking the codes of dysfunctional or damaged people and inflicting them upon the hapless within their range. In “Fat Pig”, playing at the Calderwood Pavilion he lobs another one into our midst.

“Fat Pig” has a couple of powerful actors, grossly funny humor, and moments of poignancy. It illuminates the brutal effects of peer pressure then leaves us with the message that love is not enough to overcome it. This has the potential to be a theatrically rewarding experience if the two main characters infuse their struggles with nuance and complexity.

Photo from Boston Globe
The play’s first scene, a chance meeting in a cafeteria of tall lean twentysomething Tom with a plus sized -let’s get it out of the way, fat - young librarian is delightfully awkward and tentative. Some self-deprecation on Helen’s part, gauche foot -in-mouth remarks by Tom, lead to an unexpectedly good-natured conversation and a date to meet for dinner.

Both of them have relationship issues. Tom  (James Ryen) wouldn’t be able to identify his feelings in a police line-up. Helen (Liliane Klein) has endured marginalization as a plus-sized woman for her whole life.

You want to root for them to manage to swim against the current. With the right partner, Helen just might have the strength to stay the course. “I’m ok with it (her size), the trick is to get other people to feel the same way,” she says. With someone who loves him unconditionally, Tom might find the courage to withstand the onslaught of derision heaped upon him at the office or the ridicule of others he imagines as they see the couple in public.

The play’s scenes switch between ones in which Tom and Helen fumble around toward intimacy and Tom’s cubicle, which represents the cold, cruel world. Tom’s colleague Carter (Michael Daniel Anderson), preoccupied with Victoria’s Secret body shapes, his need to play seek-and-destroy with his own women, and his (family) connection with obesity, mercilessly belittles Tom’s friendship with Helen.

Tom’s former girlfriend, colleague Jeannie (Laura Latreille) in accounting, represents another kind of woman, one who’s had to put up with her share of loser guys, and can't believe her former beau has dumped her for a “fattie”.

The strident performances of these two supporting actors give the play its edge.

Carter is the play’s venomous Oracle. Time and again, he uses searing humor to expose ugly realities of people’s aversion toward the overweight or otherwise different. The audience’s laugher is spontaneous and often followed by a collective reflex of ‘How could I have laughed at that?’

Jeannie is a complex brew of hurt, rage, and self-loathing for having put up with so many “spineless shits” of men who disappoint and reject her. Her emotional meltdown late in the play is breathtakingly visceral and brought spontaneous applause from a stunned audience. Would that we hear or see such plumbing of depths by Tom or Helen.

“Maybe they don’t deserve it but that’s what they get, gay, fat, old, all of it. We’re all one step away from what we despise,” says Carter. Is he right?

Powerful theater gels complexity and ambiguity with humor, pathos, and humanity. Carter and Jeannie each show us a slice of the vulnerability and hurt that drive them. Helen speaks the words but doesn’t evince the daily ache she must bear at being judged by her appearance. Tom, unable to take a stand on anything but his accounting sheets, plays the same spineless character from beginning to end.

If it were to end badly, as it does, it would have been far more satisfactory to see him go down with a bang, not a whimper.

Sacred Hearts: a provocatively layered play - parishioners consumed by miracles and media

Sacred Hearts, a play in two acts by Colleen Curran
Zeitgeist Stage Company
Black Box Theater
Boston Center for the Arts
Tremont Street, Boston, MA

This play has it all. Relationships, popular culture, religion, miracles, the odd skeleton that’s buried within everyone’s closet, and the piranhas known as the media.

A woman witnesses what is construed as a miracle. The overwhelmed woman’s reluctant and confidential disclosure to her priest is overheard by a church busybody. Within five minutes of the play’s opening scene, the secret is out. For the next two hours, the story deepens, widens, and is resolved - perhaps.

Through an alternating series of deliciously well-acted flashbacks and real time drama, the play gains momentum by the minute. Everyone angles for a way to profit from the “miracle.”

Busloads of the faithful arrive in the small town. Secrets are divulged or divined or speculated. Reputations are maligned. Religion becomes a commodity. Reporters trample over private property and personal rights to privacy. The woman’s veracity is questioned. Speculation becomes news. Talk shows natter.

A sensational event. An all-consuming media response. People on the margins of the story craning their necks or raising their voices to be seen or heard on TV or radio. Does the parade of events sound familiar?

Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist web site

The power of the play stems from the way each character poaches on the personal boundaries of the miracle’s solitary witness, Bridget (Eliza Lay), a dropout law student turned shepherd in rural Canada.

Small town newspaper owner, editor, and married man Evan (Curt Klump) sees a chance to boost circulation. He threatens to use confidences he learned from Bridget as he thought about straying from his marriage when he befriended her.

The parish priest Father Phil (Ed Peed), apparently shuttled off to this Canadian outpost because of his radical activities on behalf of the poor in El Salvador, sees a chance to reinvigorate his advocacy for Third World causes.

Bridget’s brother Tim (Greg Maraio) visits with an agenda to persuade her to complete her degree and return to the lawyerly destiny he sees as hers.

If you’re lucky, you witness one over-the-top performance in a play. “Sacred Hearts” has two and several excellent ones. They drive the plot with the force of a pile driver. Gretchen and Violet sparkle. The audience in the tiny Black Box Theater spontaneously applauded after scenes in which these actors shined.

Gretchen (Melissa Baroni) dreams of becoming the next Geraldo. Disarmingly ditzy and possessed with exquisite comic timing, she nonchalantly invades Bridget’s home with a video camera and an agenda to manufacture an “investigatory feature” on why the miracle occurred to Bridget. Her mimicking of a Fox News-type reporter is farcical and a terrific send up of how networks sensationalize news.

Violet (Renee Miller) is consumed with the fact that a miracle has occurred in the midst of this small town. The fact that she’s learned of it by eavesdropping on a confidential conversation does not deter her from wanting to trumpet it to the public. The fact that Bridget doesn’t want anyone but her parish priest to know sets Violet off on a “public’s right to know” crusade. Violet’s belief that she’s acting on behalf of the “faithful” is unshakable. That we begin to wonder whether she’s got a point is a credit to Miller’s simple fervor and conviction.

Lay’s Bridget anchors the drama. Bridget’s life is complicated and messy but on a scale we can relate to. She’s smart, vulnerable, and has faith in her religion. The miracle she may have experienced ironically threatens to unearth a secret that propelled her to migrate to this tiny village and abandon a promising career.  In the back of our minds, mightn’t we all wonder whether a secret in our lives could surface to embarrass us if our lives were put under a microscope, as Bridget’s is?

Playwright Curran and Director David J. Miller provide us with complex, very human characters, not stereotypes. By the play’s final scene, we have enough knowledge to think that their basic humanity may insulate them from the brittle ending that might befall them if Geraldo Riviera were to come to town.

For more about the Zeitgeist Stage Company see  

How I Learned To Drive

How I Learned To Drive
A play in two acts by Paula Vogel
Devanaughn Theatre at the Piano Factory
791 Tremont Street, Boston, MA  02118 (617.247.9777)
February 1 - February 18

How I Learned To Find The Devanaughn Theatre could be the prelude to witnessing your first play there. Just locating the entrance at the edge of a parking lot behind Bob’s Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston’s South End is an adventure.

The term ‘theater’ might be a stretch in the case of the Piano Factory, the home of the Devanaughn Theatre. Inside, you can fly a paper airplane from one end of the room to the other. The two rows of audience chairs are practically on top of the spare but effective set. Romanesque arch patterns in the two exposed brick walls rise twenty feet to the ceiling and once could indeed have surrounded an industrial piano enterprise in the early twentieth century.

Watching a play in a space not much larger than a living room can be an intimate experience. Add a generous helping of good acting and a tightly constructed play and the result is powerful. Throw in a theme of sexual abuse and the space becomes downright uncomfortable.

The Devanaughn Theatre’s production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is a twisted love story. The play centers around a relationship between a young girl and her uncle, who teaches her to drive. He’s patient, compassionate, and the only one who will listen to this conflicted adolescent. He’s also a predator. He teaches her how to drink and how to make love.

The story repels us as it draws us in. Li’l Bit, insecure, fatherless, growing up in rural Maryland, is vulnerable. She’s growing up in a dysfunctional family, has no friends in school, and becomes fascinated with what she perceives as the calm worldliness of the man who married her aunt. Of this play, Paula Vogel has said, “We receive great love from the people who harm us."

Li’l Bit was eleven years old when she took her first driving lesson with her Uncle Peck. The reenactment of that drive is one of several disturbing scenes in the play. Telling the story at that point as a woman in her late thirties, Li’l Bit said of that day, “It’s the last time I lived in my body.”

The play is set between 1971 and 1978 but jumps around in chronology. It’s sometimes hard to figure out the sequence of events because Li’l Bit tells stories from various points in her adult life and in the next breath the play returns to reenactments of disturbing experiences in her childhood relationship with her uncle.

Photo credit to Devanaughn web site (see below).

The relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle is as complex as it is wrong. He’s the anchor who grounded her during seven years of a painful adolescence. He’s the man who dragged her into a miserable adulthood, which she may just survive, not only in spite of but possibly because of him.

The play does not in any way justify the Uncle’s pathetic behavior. Alex Zielke as Li’l Bit and Kevin Ashworth as Uncle Peck bring the right quantities of obsession and self-loathing to their characters.

It’s a tribute to Vogel’s writing and the Devanaughn Company’s acting that we feel anything but antipathy for Uncle Peck. She examines the tricky terrain between Li’l Bit’s vulnerability and her complicity in their relationship. Questions about the roles of denial and forgiveness linger long after Li’l Bit has taken her last drive.

Wayne Fritsche, Molly Kimmerling, and Jacquelyn Therieau Stachel serve as Grandpa, Grandma, Auntie and a host of other small parts throughout the play. Under the thoughtfully balanced direction of Dani Duggan, they work seamlessly as characters and a sort of Greek Chorus.

The play mercifully has moments of levity but it rolls to its downhill conclusion with the power of an eighteen-wheeler. We know it’s out of control. We know it’s going to crash. We just don’t know who will survive.

The small venues in Boston continue to offer some of the best values and theater experiences. No matter where you live, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is worth the trip to the Boston’s South End.

For more about the Devanaughn Theatre http://www.devtheatre.com/  

Wings of Desire, brilliant or baffling?

Wings of Desire
Directed by Ola Mafaalani
American Repertory Theater
64 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
November 25-December 17, 2006
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

The American Repertory Theater always produces sound and fury. Sometimes it signifies nothing, sometimes it baffles and sometimes it produces brilliance. Often it occurs within the same production.

Case in point: Wings of Desire, a stage adaptation of a Wim Wenders 1987 film of the same name.

The screenplay is heavenly. Two angels, Damien and Cassiel, are assigned for eternity to observe and catalogue human behavior. Damien begins to question his lot to live a spiritual existence and begins to long for human contact, physical sensation of biting into an apple, and for love. He observes Marion, a lonely trapeze artist, falls in love with her, and over time decides to shed his wings and descend to earth to join her in the mortal world.

Most of us eye heaven as a place in which our worldly burdens melt away - the ultimate oasis where we bathe in pools of harmony and respite. We’ve experienced the crests and troughs of love and might envy Damien’s benign existence. But we understand the power of a yearning heart. Even though we know the costs and the disequilibrium that often attend love, we root for Damien make the leap.

What could be better? An angel willing to sacrifice heaven for an earthly love falls for a trapeze artist, of all people, a beauty who nightly soars toward heaven and earthly fulfillment. Beautiful irony. The handsome angel and the gorgeous trapeze artist in a cosmic collision that promises heat and light.

It never happens.

The set over which the aerial artistry takes place is spare and effective. The stage, stripped to its black rear wall and up to its forty-foot ceiling, suggests heaven and earth. The rooftop of a white canteen wagon parked at center stage acts as a perch for the two angels to view Earth. A pair of musicians play and relax to stage left, various characters, and local news personality Robin Young, take turns occupying stage right.

Suspended over all is the trapeze harness in which Smith frequently glides in stunningly sensual arcs. She seems most herself as she defies gravity. Longing for her from above is Damien, who has never felt its pull.

Between the philosophical conversations between Damien and Cassiel, other things happen. Music, loud and often inaudible, blares occasionally from the musicians. Robin Young reads the news. Other characters come forward to comment on the human condition. As a former angel who came to earth for his own reasons, Stephen Payne leavens the proceedings with panache. His gravel voiced cowboy philosopher in a rumpled hat comes across somewhere between a jaded hippie and a wise Zen monk. By the play’s conclusion, it isn’t at all clear that Damien will have integrated life and love as well as this free spirit.

Sand drifting silently down pools of light gives beautiful texture to the metaphor of the passing of time and suggests a channel through which mortals pass into heaven. Alas, the disparate elements and characters don’t add up to a coherent narrative.

Damien’s first steps on earth are acted out in an inexplicably madcap and manic rushing about the stage. It’s unsatisfying and out of synch with the romantically poetic nature he's demonstrated from his perch in heaven. The final scene with Damien flying sensuously with Marion would be a stunning act for the Big Apple Circus but it gives us no idea what Damien thinks of his choice to subject himself to the laws of gravity and vagaries of love. His ‘voice over’ during this flight suggests his ecstasy at being joined to Marion but seems awkward since there’s been so little exposition between them since his descent to earth.

So here we are again with the ART’s sound and fury, signifying something, I’m just not sure what.

"A Night in November", a candle in the darkness

“A Night In November"
A play written by Marie Jones, directed by Tim Byron Owen
Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater
www.jtoffbroadway.com
255 Elm Street, Somerville, MA 02144  (617-591-1616)
2 acts, one 15-minute intermission, running time approx two hours

The play’s final performances are Friday, Saturday, and a Sunday matinee, December 8-10

We are putty in the hands of a gifted storyteller. With gestures, timing, and imagination, he can whiplash us from of tears of laughter to tears of grief within one deft scene. He can transport us to faraway places but the most powerful trips march to the interior.

In the Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater in Somerville production of “A Night in November,” the storyteller’s journey becomes a mirror to any who have the nerve to acknowledge patches of hard wired ugliness that reside in the dark corners of our psyches.

Irish actor Marty Maguire portrays the transformation of Kenneth McAllister from a go along to get along Protestant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to a man of conscience, compassion, and action. His actions are not of the heroic stature that change the course of history but those of a man who comes to realize the life-sucking costs that hate and bigotry bring to himself and his country. And does something about it.

Photo: Avanti Studios
The lilting Irish inflection has an uncanny ability to plumb the range of human emotion. Maguire milks the nuances of Irish class dialects to portray a whopping twenty-six characters that make up the two-act play written by Marie Jones. Using a few props and a mannerisms which can register an attitude with a beautifully timed arch of an eyebrow or a full body mime displaying several feelings in slow motion, he constructs powerful characterizations which give the play emotional context and clout.

The play opens with Maguire portraying the scene in which his wife dragoons him into taking his father in law to the world cup soccer match in Dublin 1993. The match was a game actually played between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a game that determined who would play Italy in NYC for the world cup championship. 

Playing the roles of McAllister, other spectators, and the crowd itself, Maguire paints the disturbing, unfettered hatred of the Protestant fans toward their “papist” rivals. McAllister had grown up with and been part of the routine bigotry the Protestant majority had over the minority Catholics who live in a nearly apartheid section of Belfast but is repelled by the hateful ferocity of thousands of his Protestant countrymen, including his mercilessly racist, bigoted father. He registers revulsion then shame as he hears thousands of Protestant fans chorus “Trick or Treat,” a reference to a recent October 31 incident in which Ulster gunmen shouted “Trick or Treat” as they entered a pub filled with Catholic patrons and sprayed machine gun fire killing seven men. He’s appalled to realize that he’s too afraid of the mob to do anything but play along.

A seismic emotional shift has begun rumbling in his conscience as he struggles to find his center of moral gravity. The power of the play is watching this ordinary man question then defy the forces that he’s never questioned and have shaped his entire life. It is every bit the gut wrenching, soul searching struggle of a King Lear except with huge wallops of black humor that keep exploding the tension, and giving McAllister the stones to keep driving at full speed without headlights down his dark night of the soul.

The genius of the play is how Maguire uses everyday vignettes to deconstruct then reconstruct his unexamined life. The chit-chat of office politics and a marriage in which keeping up appearances is paramount demonstrate the power of everyday prejudice and the fear of straying outside the class norms. The last of several scenes in which Maguire acts out bureaucrat McAllister lording it over a Catholic man applying for work is the most quietly moving scene you will see anywhere this theater season.

McAllister’s struggle resonates with us in the audience. Safe to say, we’ve all been silent parties to casual prejudice or worse. And safe to say, we’re all carrying innate or learned prejudices that burrow into our psyches. Establishing dominion over them is one of the most relentless battles we face every day.

His stand against the eternal night of prejudice is not going to make the headlines but it’s going to make a difference in the one piece of Ireland that he can control - his own.

To any who read or watch the news, there’s no respite from seemingly intractable intolerance and hatred in every corner of the world. If there was ever a time we needed a Norman McAllister in our midst, it is today.

The play is a perfect embodiment of the proverb, “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.”

 

The Ice Breaker- this play satisfies

The Ice Breaker, written by Davie Rambo, directed by David Zoffoli
The New Repertory Theater
Arsenal Center for the Arts, Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
October 25 - November 19
A play in two acts, one 15-minute intermission, running time approximately 2 hours

Maybe this production is flying under the radar because it’s playing in the suburbs but ptatlarge recommends you make a reservation to land in Watertown before it closes on November 19.

This is one of the few plays you’re likely to see that successfully combines a heady mix of science and sex, content and context. That a play whose axis rotates around the subject of global warming can become riveting personal narrative is quite a feat. Without the compelling performances from the play’s two actors, it wouldn’t have happened.

The Ice Breaker, a play written by David Rambo and presented by the New Repertory Theater, satisfies. From the time that a brash young graduate student Sonia (Amy Russ) bursts into the quietude of the discredited former top-notch researcher Lawrence’s (Will Lyman) desert hideaway, these two seem poles apart.

Sonia is one complicated piece of work; her sense of urgency to debunk current scientific theory about the ice melt in the Antarctic is counter balanced by Lawrence’s long ago surrender to the forces that toppled his professional and personal life. In a whirlwind entrance, she demands that he read her thesis and uses every tool in her considerable arsenal to persuade him to do it. Is she a crackpot or the real deal on speed? It’s a joy to watch Russ’s Sonia show her precocious intelligence behind her funny, slightly manic, scientist-as-seducer persona.

Lyman’s Will isn’t impervious to her charms but he has his own reasons for refusing her request and advances. He’s chosen solitude and anonymity to salve the hurts of a train-wrecked promising career and painful divorce. Sonia’s uninvited presence reminds him of all he wants to forget.

As the two passionately discuss the dire scientific implications of core samples from deep inside Antarctica’s ice sheet, they’re boring into each other’s fragile emotional cores. With glacial momentum, their intellectual combat begins to create sexual heat between them.

Every time the play veers toward the didactic, it’s rescued by dialogue that penetrates the armor that has frozen the two scientists emotionally. Lyman is especially gifted at showing Lawrence’s inner conflict through his body language. And Russ often discharges tension with a mannerism or her perfectly timed twentysomething sense of humor.

The play revels in contrasts, The shoot from the hip young woman vs. the reserved older professor; the woman who isn’t above using her body as a bartering tool vs. the man who’s been burned in love and harbors a fearful secret about his marriage; a scientist who’s hanging her reputation on forecasting events vs. a scientist who’s devoted his life to explaining them. And then there’s the age-old mystery of why opposites attract.

Credit Director David Zoffoli for reining in the actors enough so they remain characters, not caricatures. The narrative arc of this play is satisfyingly organic. The casting of Lyman and Russ is brilliant. They’re allowed to evolve slowly and convincingly.

The play’s finale was open ended enough for us to draw our own conclusions about their futures. By then, we know enough and care enough about these two very human scientific seekers to believe that breaking through the ice has saved them from being locked in it forever.

Post Script;
News this week that 100 icebergs, broken off from the Antarctic, have been spotted floating north toward the shipping lanes off New Zealand, casts an eerie sense of reality to the play’s underlying theme.
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2006/11/03/story283744.html

The Waiting Room, by Lisa Loomer, disappoints

The Waiting Room, written by Lisa Loomer, directed by Janet Morrison
Brandeis Theater Company, Spingold Theater Center, Waltham, MA
October 12-22, 2006

‘The Waiting Room,’ written by Lisa Loomer, had potential. The themes - how standards of beauty dig into women’s psyches, how a largely male medical field lacks sensitivity toward women in crisis, and how profit and politics corrupt big time research hospitals - are a worthy trio of subjects that could be shaken into a powerful cocktail. Alas, what we’re served here is a cherry coke, a flat one at that.

Loomer’s attempt to cobble the themes together just doesn’t work. The play feels more like several sketches lifted from a playwright’s workshop. The setting, described in the playbill as “the past, the present, and often both at once” is awkward and often confusing. The three main characters meet in the waiting room of a hospital. Each woman appears to be from a different country - America (Wanda), China (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and England (Victoria) - and from different centuries.

What they have in common is medical men and husbands who don’t understand them or their medical plights. The subjects of breast cancer (Wanda), foot binding (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and hysterectomies caused by vise-like corsets (Victoria) are easy targets and have been mined thoroughly by other writers. ‘The Waiting Room’ doesn’t add any new insights to the subjects.

This production, recently mounted by the Brandeis Theater Company at the Spingold Theater in Waltham, MA, had a serious identity crisis. Its use of farce just didn’t gel with the play’s more dramatic aspirations. Dramatic impact was frequently diluted, if not entirely dissipated, by the attempt to inject sight gags into emotionally charged scenes. The second act, a shot at how "the bottom line" puts profits before patients in some research hospitals, seemed to be lifted from another play altogether.

Photo of the Waltham production
To add to the woes, the characters, with one or two exceptions, just didn’t have the acting chops to carry off either the dramatic or the farcical demands of the play. The four male actors lacked any sort of nuance; even comic sketches seemed out of their reach.

One thankful exception to the overall tepid acting was from Sara Oliva, as the American woman whose breast implants, all three sets of them, have probably brought about her breast cancer. When she swaggers in to the waiting room’, her “new tits” plowing ahead of her like the bow wake of a luxury liner, the play takes on life. The play sags every time it focuses on other actors.

Oliva’s characterization of Wanda, a working class Jersey girl, masks a life of ugly-duckling hurt behind outrageously vulgar humor. The pathos she invokes as she loses her breasts to cancer as the play grinds on through nearly two hours is a convincing tour de force of acting. Even her bravura performance doesn’t make the play worth the two hours spent witnessing ‘The Waiting Room’.

The Women, a play by Clare Boothe Luce

The Women, a social satire written by Clare Boothe Luce in 1936, runs for five weeks, thru October 21, 2006, in the Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston’s South End.

Guys, I’m warning you, this is not an equal opportunity play. It is of the women, for the women, and by the women. And by George, they make the most of it. All 20 of them. There ain’t a Y chromosome in the cast. But pay attention, it’s good fun and is instructive, especially if you think you’re the one in your relationship’s driver’s seat.

The core of the play revolves around several women, from recently married to long and unhappily married. Thanks to their husband’s wealth and power, they’re thrown together in a cement mixer called Manhattan high society.  The 1930s were before Eleanor Roosevelt made charitable work fashionable. One of the highest callings for these women is gossiping about infidelities and aesthetic tastes. “Yes, darling, that dress cuts your waist in half, (pause…) and makes your hips look twice as wide,” uttered by one woman of whom it is said, “If you’ve got Sylvia for a friend, you don’t need enemies.”

Plays like this are seldom performed any more. No gimmicks, no snazzy sets, no extravagant costumes, just clever dialogue that resembles machine gun fire. The socialites’ verbal bullets are uttered with their white gloves on but are a blood sport for the Manhattan socialites created by Clare Boothe Luce in her 1936 play, The Women.

The story hinges around a discovery that the husband of one of the happiest married women has strayed from the marriage bed and is carrying on with a, sniff, common salesgirl from Saks.

The Speakeasy Stage production’s actresses dig their ‘jungle red’ nails into their roles with gusto. Nancy E. Carroll, Aimee Doherty, Ellen Colton, Kerry Dowling, Alice Duffy, Anne Gottlieb, Amanda Good Hennessey, Maureen Keiller, Mary Klug and Sonya Raye aren’t into playing with nuance here.

It was hard to tell whether the play’s lead character, Mrs. Haines, was underplaying her role or was overshadowed by the unadulterated camp of her peers but that was a minor distraction. There are deliciously, sublimely catty, over the top performances up and down the line.

Photo: Clare Boothe Luce in 1935 (www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0010.htm)

Luce introduces social commentary in several scenes from the women who toil for these rich self-absorbed prima donnas. “Lady, you ain’t felt pain till you had your baby on a cold kitchen floor, make supper for your husband, then go to work the next day with your insides hanging out” says the nurse to one socialite matron who whines about her hard delivery while lounging in her comfortable hospital bed and nibbling on bon-bons.

Other commentary comes from unexpected sources. When the heretofore happily married Mrs. Haines asks her mother what to do about her husband’s infidelities, mother, who's been through it all, replies, “Nothing.”

“Stephen’s not tired of you, he’s tired of himself. When we get tired of ourselves, we go shopping. We redecorate the house. Men never think of something so simple. They want to see themselves differently in the mirror of another woman’s eyes. There’s nothing like a dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his own wife.”

In between these commentaries on class and caste, there are more catty one-liners than sequins on an evening gown. “Keep your chin up…both of them,” says one friend to another who’s complaining about her husband’s peccadilloes.

The two-hour play loses some steam in the second act. A certain fatigue develops after so many clever one-liners and over the top acting in the same style, no matter how outrageous. An exception to this is the play’s chief scene-stealer Mary Klug, whose larceny is worth the price of admission as she camps up her role as the Countess de Lage. To accomplish that in a company of such terrific actresses is quite a feat.

The play withstands the test of time fairly well. Today’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ is ‘The Women’ with the y chromosomes added. Our hunger for portrayals of gossip, infidelity, and bratty behavior seems insatiable. We need such guilty pleasure when the news on the front pages is so damn bleak.

These women dealt with the ethos of their time the only way they could. They may have savaged one another in the gossip trade but they never felt more comfortable in any other company but their own.

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh

This Pillowman is not related to The Sandman. The Sandman sends us off temporarily to the land of nod. The Pillowman sends people to the land of eternal rest. In one man’s opinion, both have our best interests in mind.

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh is the kind of theater that plumbs the macabre corners of our psyches, and manages to make us laugh as we cringe. The play finished its run at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown on Sunday. An epic 2 1/2 hours long, it loses its way from time to time but contains bursts of acting that are riveting.

A writer of stories that portray gruesome deaths that have a morbidly moral rationale is questioned about recent deaths in town that resemble the murders in his stories. During the course of the interrogation, we are left guessing about what is fact and what is fiction, both in the writer’s stories and in his life. Be prepared to feel whiplash as truth is interpreted differently by the play’s four actors.

Billy Crudup, Zeljko Ivanek, and Jeff Goldblum in a Chicago production of "The Pillowman"
Photo by Joan Marcus

Playwright McDonagh injects enough themes for several plays: artistic freedom, the power of love given and withheld, the real or imagined emotional scars we bear from our childhoods, the question of who is responsible when a fan acts out perversions written by a writer, and the need for the state to punish crime - no matter how guilty the accused may be.

We’re all complicated human beings, and the actors are up to showing just how we’re shaped by the accumulation of our experiences. The Pillowman, a mythic character invented in one of the writer’s stories, gently warns children whom he knows will meet with deep emotional or physical abuse in their future lives, and offers them a chance to avoid it by arranging their deaths in what appear to be random accidents.

Both the writer and his retarded brother have been abused by their parents; the police suspect one brother or the other committed the unsolved grisly murders in town. Like the daily headlines, conclusions often jump way ahead of facts; we’re continually off balance as we wonder whether what we’re hearing is true or is the public mask of each of the four characters.

“There are no happy endings in real life,” the writer says during his interrogation. The exception to his mantra comes from an unlikely source at the play’s conclusion and is satisfying, if not happy.

Steven Barkimer and Philip Patrone are terrific in their roles of two interrogating policemen. John Kuntz as the writer and Bradley Thoennes as his retarded brother often overact but when all four are firing on all cylinders the play packs a terrific emotional wallop.

The Maternal Instinct

The Maternal Instinct
Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA
March 30-April 16, 2006, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m.
Box Office: 866-811-4111 or online at www.ootbtc.com
$20 Adults $15 Students/Seniors (requested donation)
Running time approximately one hour 45 minutes

Having a mother is an experience we all share so there’s something for everyone to relate to in “The Maternal Instinct”, currently playing at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater. Making a choice to have a baby seems contemporary enough. All the more interesting if the choice is being made by two lesbians on very different career paths and who were influenced by two very different mothers. Add to this an unlikely love triangle, serio-comic debates about the method of insemination, plus a chance encounter with a homeless person on a park bench and you have the ingredients for the play’s subtitle: A glimpse of the American psyche as defined by the 21st century.

The acting is spirited, the set simple, and the pacing swift. The dialogue is distractingly articulate, often sounding like the things you wish you had said during a conflict with someone you love rather than the incoherent shards of emoting you actually produced. It sacrifices depth for speed but it’s fun to listen in as lines referring to the mystery of why we choose our mates, how we identify ourselves with our work, and the hereditary grip of addictions go hurtling by.

Boston actors Rena Baskin, Stephen Cooper, Alisha Jansky, Elise Manning, and Karen Woodward Massey squeeze all the juice they can from their roles. The triangle of the two women (Jansky as Sarah and Woodward Massey as Lillian) and Fred (Stephan Cooper) seems credible. Fred, engaging and earnest, is an unwitting anchor keeping both Sarah and Lillian from being unmoored by their dissimilar needs. It’s harder to fathom the relationship between Sarah and Lillian but how much less complicated are they from many of the couples we know, let alone our own relationships? The lines that emotionally wounded Lillian rains down on Sarah are the shock and awe version of lovers in conflict.

Photo: Sarah and Fred debate methods of insemination over glasses of warm champagne

Director Melissa J. Wentworth builds the story through a series of short vignettes in which the individual actors address the audience directly or play off each other as an ensemble. It’s a bit of dramatic shorthand but it does the job of introducing the maternal instinct that unexpectedly seizes fortyish Sarah with a back-story that reveals Lillian’s experience with her own mother that has both scarred and scared her. Lorann West’s set and P.J. Strachman’s lighting designs are spare and efficient.

The play’s program notes offer an amazing look at the way a writing exercise might evolve into a drama. In a playwrighting class at Boston University, 2005 graduate Monica Bauer was asked to “go out and write down an exchange between two people you overhear in a public place.” Bauer made her way to Copley Square in Boston and witnessed a homeless man who would only say “ouch, ” and a well-dressed man who walked by and asked, “What’s the matter?”

Bauer, encouraged by her mentors, shaped the exercise into a ten-minute play, then a one-act play and to the present ninety-minute play in two acts. By the time the homeless person appears on stage, the audience is wondering how this little vignette will fit into the grand scheme of things. It turns out a little far-fetched but strangely touching. The ending that ensues is abrupt but one is left with a glimmer of hope for what appeared to be a relationship that had gone over the cliff. The play may be a work in progress but the three principal actors make the trip as interesting as the destination.

The Boston Playwrights Theater is another of the small theaters bubbling in the crucible of the Boston theater scene. It is the home of The Boston University Graduate Playwriting Program that was founded in 1981 by Derek Walcott. It’s a fitting venue for plays like the Maternal Instinct to be delivered to the public (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun).

Production notes:
Maternal Instinct is an Actors’ Equity Association Presentation, in collaboration with Out of the Blue Theater Company (www.ootbtc.com), The Boston Playwrights’ Theater (www.bu.edu), and Pulse Media (www.pulse-media.com).

Broad Comedy: I've known this broad since...

Broad Comedy: An all female sketch comedy show with music, song, and dance
Created and written by Katie Goodman
Written and directed by Katie Goodman and Soren Kisiel
Stuart Street Playhouse, 200 Stuart Street, Boston, MA
Saturdays, 8 PM

Every so often, the leggy actress singing and dancing on stage morphed into a little kid in overalls practicing a skit she’d half imagined and half written with her fourth grade friends. A nine year old girl in thirty seven year old body or a thirty seven year old woman in the body of a nine year old? It’s not often a spectator has those dueling visions in his head as he watches a talented, sexy actress strut her stuff onstage. But OshKosh B’gosh to spandex, there was my former student Katie Goodman singing, dancing, and acting in front of a packed house at the Stuart Street Theater in Boston last Saturday.

I sat the fourth row as Katie wowed the house with her smart writing and directing talent. Katie’s been doing plays since grade school. Made’em up herself, took part in school plays, and wasn’t above creating drama in her social life just to keep things interesting. Were the comic sketches between married women on the park bench extensions of the pre-adolescent dialogues she had with her friends or antagonists on the playground?

Broad Comedy is a good old-fashioned cabaret style revue featuring five other talented actresses who were some other fourth grade teacher’s former students. Parts of our lives, sides of ourselves we may not even be in touch with, live in the minds and memories of others. George W. Bush (the target of some of Katie’s pointed political broadsides), 50 Cent, and Yo Yo Ma all have places in the memory banks of their former teachers. We remember them as children, see who they’ve become, and wonder about the maze of roads taken that propelled them to the present.

For that matter, how have the rest of us arrived at our current stations in life? Unless you’re a strict adherent of predestination, pt at large guesses it was forced marches through college, graduate or trade schools, or the universally famous School of Hard Knocks. Robert Frost would have a field day with our map of Roads Not Taken. Choices made by action or default. Opportunities taken or rejected. And the kick of it is that most of us are still works in progress.

We make choices every day - and I’m not talking about cabernet vs. pinot noir. Say something to the parent of the kid who’s using a Fenway Park voice in the coffee shop you’re sitting at for your afternoon “cuppa”, tell a business associate that a racist joke makes you uncomfortable, acknowledge a sticky problem with a significant other?

We’ve all grown up but I wonder how much we’ve changed since we’ve been in fourth grade. Katie harnessed her talent with the desire to entertain and make a point, and a difference. There’s a part of Katie the girl that’s still emerging as Katie the writer. When the Bard said, “All the world’s a stage,” he didn’t specify the size or capacity of the venue. Our own kitchens will suffice. If we’re lucky, our lives are extended engagements. And it’s probably helpful to keep in touch with the kid inside all of us.

I had all I could do to restrain myself from proudly shouting, “Hey, Katie’s my former student!” and wishing for some of her stardust to rub off on my gray tweed sport coat.

I know that when Katie said, “I’m so honored that you came to see the show,” the words were right from her heart. As I talk with her after the performance, I wonder if in her eyes I morph into an enthusiastic young man with burnished brown hair who liked to take his class to the museum, show them how to make clay float, and write cinquaines.

Nearly thirty years ago, I created some of my own stardust by being a knowledgeable, supportive, and occasionally entertaining teacher for Katie. Neither of us is done with dispensing or gathering stardust.
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To read what the critics have to say

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/03/03/all_female_show_satirizes_with_a_broad_point_of_view/

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/03/22/with_song_and_satire_the_fun_is_infectious/

http://www.boston.com/ae/events/articles/2006/03/08/broad_comedy/

The Fox, a one act play

The Fox
A one-act play adapted by Allan Miller from a novella by D.H. Lawrence
Boston Center for the Arts - Hall “A” at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion, Tremont St, Boston, MA
March 2 - March 18
Running time approximately 90 minutes

Little theater companies swim furiously in the primordial soup of Boston’s thriving theater scene. Aspiring actors, directors. and production teams are awash in the turbulent and fertile backwaters of rehearsal halls, church vestibules, gymnasiums, and any other place where folding chairs can be assembled. If they swim hard enough they might land on the beach and crawl onto the solid floorboards of larger and larger stages where their talents will become more evident to the public.

The tiny Basement on the Hill Theater Company gains visibility with its recent production of The Fox, just concluding a run in Hall “A” at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion. Adapted by Allan Miller and first produced in 1981, the play is based on a novella set in WW I by D.H. Lawrence.

With novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover to his credit, Lawrence’s predilection for exploring the charged erotic moments in which characters must decide to follow their minds or their loins is dramatically explored. Nellie and Jill, two young women who are romantically attached, have found a small country farm on which they can live on their terms. Opening scenes make clear that the chores of farm life and perhaps the burden of attempting to nourish a relationship in their rural and isolated life style is taking a toll on them. The chickens don’t lay eggs, firewood is always in need of chopping, bread and cheese is scarce, and the townspeople’s tongues wag at the slightest hints of unconventional behavior. And there’s a fox pillaging the henhouse.

A strapping young soldier on leave arrives during a one week leave in search of his grandfather who formerly owned the farm. Jill lobbies to take him in for a few days hoping his help will help with the volume of demanding work. Within days, the soldier Henry insinuates himself into the household. At first slyly, then menacingly, he uses his physical and sexual power to drive a wedge between Jill and Nellie. Does he want to possess Nellie or is he angling a way to become owner of the farm then, as Jill warns Nellie, “Treat us like farm stock and have his way with us.”

Henry slays the marauding fox late one night. The scene sizzles with sexual overtones as he calls Nellie out of the cabin to witness his victory. “Have you ever felt a fox before?” he says as he stands over Nellie and guides her hand to slowly stroke the fur of the fox that he’s slung in front of himself. The way he describes his guile at killing the fox mirrors the guile with which he’s trying to tame the resistant Nellie, who has remained torn between loyalty to Jill and her attraction to Henry.

One fox has been slain but a far more dangerous predator has infiltrated the women’s household. The play culminates in a visceral struggle between Jill and Henry for Nellie’s love.

In the play’s program notes, Greg Raposa thanks the company for “getting him in touch with his inner animal.” Indeed, Raposa plays the soldier’s role with a powerful combination of testosterone and guile. Dialogue about his boyhood reveals that Henry was controlled by a demanding and unloving grandfather. Strong willed Henry uses his sexuality to snare Nellie and repeat a cycle of dominance to which his grandfather subjected him. Raposa is a convincing ‘fox’.

From the soldier’s first entrance, Grace Sumner’s Nellie displays a prey’s natural wariness in the presence of a threat to survival. The burden of caring for Jill, performing the farm’s heavy work, and now the interloping soldier, are weighing on her. Her physical agitation often seems overwrought and would be more credible if we could sense more of the inner turmoil from which it stems.

Robin Rapoport is perfect as a chattery fussbudget Jill. She appears frail and dependent upon Nellie’s caretaking but is the stronger willed and more determined of the two. In the final showdown, she sheds her façade of neediness and becomes a formidable challenger to the soldier competing with her for Nellie’s love.

Balances of power are established and occasionally shift within every relationship. How do relationships withstand the predatory forces of the outside world? Director Lilia Levitina delivers a hefty dramatic punch while exploring the question. Minimal props and lighting were used to tell the story effectively. The music arrangements by Emily Romm were seamlessly integrated into the action and powerfully underscored the play’s emotional tensions. The Basement on the Hill Stage Company closes in on the shore with this well rendered production.

To read the text of Lawrence’s original novella, go to
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41f/
A literary essay about Lawrence and The Fox
http://www.viewsunplugged.com/VU/20030410/arts_litEssay_lawrence.shtml

Charlotte the Destroyer

Charlotte the Destroyer
A Dark Comedy by Megan O'Leary
Directed by Janet Bobcean
My Fair Heathen Productions
Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, 536 Tremont St, Boston 617.933.8600
January 11-21 | Curtain 8 pm Wed-Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat
$20; $15 students
Running time approx 80 minutes with no intermission

The Boston theater scene occasionally appears to be one big psychiatrist's couch, a place where writers come to grips with their inner demons. The results can be uneven, unfocused, and occasionally cathartic, but I suppose the same is true of a session on "the couch".

My Fair Heathen Productions touts this play as "a dark comedy about a washed-up children's-book author whose drinking problem and death anxiety sabotage her ability to be a writer." It's not clear in the play that this author (played by the playwright O'Leary) ever had enough of a career to be called 'washed up' but her drinking and anxieties are both pervasive and self-destructive. The effects of being abused as a child contaminate relationships as the adult attempts intimacy. It's hard to find humor, however dark, as she alienates her lover and sends him packing, and attempts to grapple with her demons alone.

The set, a squalid, one room apartment festers with filth and failure. The crumpled papers, beer cans and whiskey bottles littering the floor mirror the litter in the woman's emotional life. As the author attempts to write her next book, she creates the character of Charlotte the Great who lives in an ideal nuclear family world. In a clever flashback, her childhood is played out at as her alcoholic father, her emotionally disconnected mother, and an actress playing the writer as a budding teenager enter from backstage to reprise the sordid events that have scarred her.

The book author's fictional child hero Charlotte the Great morphs into Charlotte the Destroyer, with dire results for the overwhelmed author. The acting ensemble is earnest but we can see where this play is heading.

An emotionally charred past has the power to kill spiritually, perhaps even physically. There are parts of our pasts that I'm certain we'd like to rewrite. Do most of us live our lives somewhere between the spiritedness of Charlotte the Great and the negation of Charlotte the Destroyer? The mystery is how some of us can rise from the ashes of early hurts, cope with life and stay within the bounds of emotional health. Perhaps in her next play O'Leary will probe that mystery.

The Firebugs (12/19/05)

The Firebugs, a play in one act by Max Frisch (1911-1991)
Running time 95 minutes
Presented by TheatreZone, the Chelsea Theater Works, 617-887-2336
189 Winnisimmet Street, Chelsea, MA 02150
December 8-23, Thurs.-Sat. 8:00, Sun. 3:00

Boston’s equivalent of “Off, Off Broadway” is probably Chelsea, where TheatreZone established a beachhead in 1999 by purchasing the historic Post Office/Oddfellows Hall in Chelsea Square. Located on the second floor, the theater space is another of the small gems of space devoted to the burgeoning local theater scene. Five rows of 15 comfortable seats are tiered to ensure no bad view in this modestly sized venue.

Navigating to the theater is a performance piece all by itself as it takes the playgoer from Boston through the ever-changing lane configurations to the Tobin Bridge. One lapse in concentration can easily put the driver on the road to New Hampshire, so pay attention. Once over the bridge, homing in on the theater is a piece of cake and on-street parking easy to find. At $12 -$18 a ticket, the price is right even if you do get lost or the show isn’t up to snuff.

Swiss playwright Max Frisch was consumed by the question of the passive complicity many Europeans showed as they turned a blind eye to the horrors of WW II. In his 1950s play “The Firebugs", Frisch explores the consequences of a failure to act when two seemingly homeless men ingratiate themselves into the home of a successful middle class hair tonic salesman and his wife.

Seeing and hearing what should serve as hair raising signals that the pair are the arsonists that have been plaguing the town, the salesman, who can connive to sell a phony product to gullible buyers, ironically refuses to acknowledge the truth when the pyromaniacal twosome talk openly about their plan to incinerate his home next in their fiery spree. The salesman is in the same self-delusional boat as his hair tonic customers: they’re all hoping for a miracle to trump reality.

Frisch uses a morality play format in which yellow-jacketed firemen standing around the edges of the set act as a “chorus” and sound warnings that the middle class blowhard salesman cannot bring himself to believe. He’d rather protect himself by trying to make friends with the evil doers (collusion?) than report them to the police; his foolish strategy has deadly consequences. Frisch undoubtedly remembered the “appeasement” used to tolerate Germany’s bellicose intentions in the late 1930s.

The two “firebugs” are played with just the right amount of gleeful camp to keep them credible but pathologically dangerous. The play’s scenes of comic relief between the salesman and his maid unmask the pompous salesman’s elitist behavior and represent another axe Frisch grinds during the play.

The “chorus” of firemen is a distraction. It seems too dated and states what we can already infer from the characters. The three-level see-through set cleverly shows the salesman’s parlor and attic where most of the action occurs. The lighting is effective. The sound effects are imaginatively done by a man in full view in the far corner of the set.

The play doesn’t break new ground but does put a hot poker to our consciences. How do we respond to the realities of our times? What consequences do we pay if we remain passive in the face of social inequities, intolerance, or even the vexing tangle of emotions and laws as we respond to threats of terrorism?

In playwright Frisch’s mind, action won’t necessarily result in success but inaction will certainly be doomed to failure. In today’s climate of social and political flux, we have chances every day to take a position on whatever side of the divide on which we stand. To remain silent is to play with fire.

For information about TheatreZone, and a set of directions that should prevent you from heading to New Hampshire, visit http://www.theatrezone.org/

Red Elm, Boston Playwright's Theater

Red Elm
A play in one act written by Dan Hunter, running time 1 hour, 20 minutes
Setting: Jack and Margaret Butler’s living room, flanked with sofa and easy chair covered in clear protective plastic, a card table and folding chairs in center, and doors leading to front hall and kitchen
Boston Playwrights’ Theater, 949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
Playing 12/1-12/18, call for times 617-358-7529

If you’re looking for a feel-good play for the holiday season, “Red Elm” should probably be removed from your shopping list. On the other hand, if you might enjoy watching a small Midwestern family implode under the weight of misunderstandings, self-deceits, and pretensions, this production at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater would be a good ticket to stuff into your Christmas stocking.

The play opens with a loud thud as Big Jack pushes through a door and dumps a heavy cardboard file box on the living room floor. Big Jack thinks he’s dying and tells his wife Margaret that he’s decided to change his will, which he says he cannot find and thinks is in the box. During the next hour and twenty minutes, the contents of the box will reveal a past that Jack rejects but is killing him spiritually if not physically.

As the couple settle into a game of not so friendly gin rummy around Margaret’s meticulously maintained folding card table, years of unresolved tensions begin to erupt as they verbally spar, which one suspects is the way they habitually communicate. It’s clear that pretense has a major role in their coexistence.

“If you fool yourself long enough, it becomes real,” Margaret says. Jack responds, “Fooling yourself is an honorable way to get along.” Corrosive is the more accurate term and the play begins its descent into a world of emotional damage done to a marriage built on denial and pretension.

Layer by layer, the play’s dialogue strips away the pretense that Big Jack Butler, his wife Margaret, and his son Ezra have been living with for years. The memory of the Butler’s dead son Bobby, immortalized in twice the number of photographs on the living room wall as photos of Ezra, casts a controlling shadow over Big Jack, Margaret, and Ezra. Big Jack bullies wife Margaret, Margaret is a study in self-delusion as she copes with her overbearing husband, and son Ezra tries to badger Big Jack into modernizing his business. Ezra is fearful Big Jack is not going to bequeath the farm to him, and is bitter about never measuring up to his father’s memories of son Bobby, who either died the death of a war hero or, according to Ezra, a drug overdose. Not pretty.

Photo: Linda, Ezra

The play is a tangle of relationships and secrets worthy of a good soap opera. The plot thickens when Big Jack asks his secretary Linda to come to the home to read him the contents of the boxes. Linda, a divorcee who grew up as a neighbor, is being courted by Ezra. Linda is on a tightrope act balancing between faithful employee who can keep a secret for her employer Jack and a woman with compassion for the bitter and conniving old man. When she says, “Every secret finds the light of day,” Jack squirms. Linda sees through Jack and says, “You’re a padlock looking for a key,” and he realizes he needs to unburden. Jack insists she read the contents of the box aloud to him. For each piece of the past revealed through Linda’s reluctant reading, another puzzling piece emerges.

In an angry confrontation with Ezra, Jack brandishes his red elm walking stick and talks about the wood’s ability to bend and not break. Ezra replies that the red elms that used to surround the farm have all died. It is clear that stubbornness and delusion have replaced resilience in Jack. Whatever has withered away in his soul is not about to be revived.

The ultimate failure of the play is not with the actors. William Young (Big Jack Butler), Ann Marie Shea (Margaret Butler), Mark Peckham (Ezra Butler), and Julie Jirousek (Linda) convincingly get inside the skins of their characters. Their mannerisms and dialogue move us alternately to be repelled by them or pity them. Too much of the family tangle is left to the last minutes of the play to resolve and seems rushed. A final twist comes out of left field and is not clear enough to help us connect the dots. In the final minutes of the play, Jack mutters, “You don’t get what you want in life.” True enough if you're unwilling to confront reality and find a place for love in your heart.

After the play’s climactic last scene, we see Big Jack staring alone into the darkness outside the front door of the set. The truths that have been unearthed have not set anyone free. We’re left with an empty feeling that we’ve seen the sound and the fury and it’s signified nothing.

Collected Stories by Donald Margulies

Collected Stories, a play in two acts, approx 110 min including intermission
Written by Donald Margulies, 1997
Setting: Ruth Steiner's Greenwich Village apartment, 1990-1996
Playing at The Theater Coop, 277 Broadway, Somerville, MA

Consider this play a warning if you happen to be friendly with an ambitious writer. Think twice before you let your hair down and wax confessional. Your most private tete a tetes might end up on the pages of a best seller and what you thought was a deepening friendship will go up in flames. Consumed in the conflagration will be loyalty, trust, and your personal vision of who you think are. The sparks will throw off alot of heat and both of you will be singed.

Lynn Redgrave and Karina Mackenzie as mentor and writing student in the Wilmington (Philadelphia) production.

All come to pass in "Collected Stories", a play written by Donald Margulies in 1997 and staged at the Theater Coop on Broadway in Somerville. The compact production is a series of six vignettes covering a span of six years. A talented, star-struck grad student begins an apprenticeship with an established, published professor. Over six years the graduate student goes from awestruck blabbermouth to author on the cusp of fame. In an arc that descends inversely with the rise of her student's, the staid and somewhat arrogant professor becomes unglued and questions her life choices.

Both women are self centered, one driven by repression, the other driven by ambition. At some point in their six year relationship, we must assume they found equilibrium when their mutual needs were fulfilled. We don't see those moments. We see the awkward beginning and the messy ending. Margulies’ dialogue gives us enough to fathom what happens in between.

Margulies explores the consequences of the two women’s use and misuse of the truth as they construct their personal and professional lives. The result is surprisingly topical. In today’s culture, truth struggles to survive in an often harsh environment. Think about Truman Capote's betrayal of his subject when he wrote "In Cold Blood", think about weapons of mass destruction, or the fragments of truth that political parties use to justify their positions.

Truth is relative for both of these women. Early on, Lisa is startled to learn that Ruth lied when she was interviewed on CSPAN. Ruth says, "I didn't lie. Using some elements of the truth, I spun a tale." When Ruth analyzes Lisa's forthcoming collection of stories, she compliments a descriptive passage. Lisa says, "It wasn't a pickle jar that broke, it was ketchup, but ketchup wasn't too interesting to describe." Clearly both women take liberties with the truth.

Lisa plunders her journals for the material for her first well received collection then fears she’s run out of ideas. "I need something bigger and outside myself to write about," she wails. Lisa's entreats Ruth to divulge her long repressed memories of an affair with acclaimed writer Delmore Schwartz. Ruth reminisces, Lisa calculates. The audience sees the eighteen wheeler that's begun to barrel down the highway in Ruth's direction. When Ruth discovers that Lisa's first novel uses 'elements of the truth' to thinly fictionalize a relationship that Ruth had with Schwartz. Ruth howls, "All my life is to you is material, have you no moral conscience? "

"Your stories stopped being your stories when you told them to me," replies Lisa. The finale, in which pride and status overcome love and acceptance, is bitter for both women.

Caryn Andrea Lindsay's performance subtly transforms Lisa from gushing acolyte to author who has outdone her mentor. She also nails the soap opera conniver that Lisa becomes as she mines Ruth's life for material. Lesley Chapman finds the brittleness and loneliness in Ruth, although her internal conflicts seems more intellectual than emotional.

The simple set, Ruth's spartan apartment in Greenwich Village in the early 1990's, is evocative of the circumscribed life Ruth lives. The lighting fades to an eerie blue during each change of scene in which we see the two characters shift around to prepare for the next scene.

The play doesn't come down squarely on the side of either character. It's complicated for the audience, too. How many times have we taken elements of the truth and woven them to suit own set of collected stories? The play's questions about integrity and betrayal linger long after the final curtain.

Carol Mulroney, a world premiere play

Carol Mulroney, a world premiere written by Stephen Belber, Hollywood screen writer and Broadway playwright
Directed by Lisa Peterson
Huntington Theatre Production
Staged at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
October 14 - November 20, 2005

"Carol Mulroney" has all the ingredients of a fine play. It is cleverly staged, well acted, and skillfully lit. Alas, the sum of these parts just don't add up to a satisfying dramatic whole. The central character, thirty two year old Carol Mulroney, is a terminally sad woman. She delivers her opening monologue from her rooftop high above the noise and bustle of the metropolis far below. The monologue is one of a series which begins to reveal details of her childhood, her dead mother, her failing marriage, and her decidedly dysfunctional relationship with her father Hutton. Perhaps Ana Reeder intentionally underplays Carol, but it's hard to feel her pain, even as she refers to the rooftop’s edge in a way that gives it an ominous presence.

Hutton Mulroney is a force of nature, a high flying cosmetics mogul of exceeding self absorption. Hutton lives by the motto that every problem in life can be overcome by saying yes, specifically, yes to his demands or dreams. He attempts to steamroll one of his vice presidents, an African American man, to marry his (already married) daughter. He has no tolerance for his son in law, another vice president, whom he considers a dreamer and comically wishes would be struck down by a truck to clear the way for his meddling plans. In these scenes, it's easy to see how Hutton could have become a singularly successful businessman and an abject failure as a father and husband.

Carol's neighbor Joan is a zany, trash talking artist battling the bottle and her biological clock. Joan is desperate to have children. The rooftop is may be their confessional but it doesn’t help Carol Mulroney get a grip on why her sadness paralyzes her. Joan is extroverted and sexed up, a sharp contrast to Carol's uncertainty and passivity.

Ana Reeder and Larry Pine in Carol Mulroney
(Photo © T. Charles Erickson)

Carol's husband Leslie, a man whose idyllic dreams of moving to Vermont with Carol and escaping the rat race are at odds with his need to be "fiscal" and keep his comforts. The monologues that playwright Belber puts in his character's mouths are clever, but cluttered with too many ideas that remain unexplored by the characters. Each character’s monologues to the audience is meant to deepen character or reveal relevant information. They have a hollow ring and sound more like lines delivered in a speech contest than soul searching.

Hubbard and Joan seem to be the only ones who know what they want and go for it but their selfishness only hurts those around them. Both play their roles to the hilt, are wacky, funny, and pathetic simultaneously. Unlikely as it seems, they are the only two who face up to their own failures by the play’s conclusion. Their over-the-top turns are memorable performances.

The entire one act play is set on the roof of Carol and Leslie's apartment. Carol knows that she's perilously close to edges, in her emotional life and on top of her roof. They each beckon her and frighten her. By the play's end, the edge has the last word but the audience is left asking, "Why"?

Lord of the Flies, Wheelock Family Theater

Lord of the Flies
A play in three acts by Nigel Williams,
Based on the 1954 novel by William Golding
Performed at the Wheelock Family Theater, 200 The Riverway, Boston, MA
Friday~7:30pm / Saturday~3:00pm / Sunday~3:00pm until Nov. 20
Running Time: 2 hr. (includes 2 intermissions)
Info: 617-879-2300
Price $10.00-$17.00

Srebeniza, Darfur, Rwanda, Nazi Germany... if you ever had any doubts about the thinness of the veneer that separates social order from barbarity, the play Lord of the Flies will dispel them. When a plane load of English school boys crashes on an unnamed tropical island, it takes but a few days for the boarding school manners of one faction of them to devolve into savagery. The story is a tale of survival of the fittest, with an alpha male usurping power and crushing those who resist knuckling under. It’s not pretty.

Heavy with symbolism, the story pits democracy and order (in the characters of Ralph and Piggy) against anarchy and savagery (in the characters of Jack and Roger). Even though the plot is heavy handed, the characters are so stereotypically powerful that the message pierces us. When the mob mentality takes over, individual responsibility evaporates as many boys comply in order to avoid being ostracized. Ralph, Piggy and a few others try to maintain an orderly camp but are attacked by Jack and his forces. Jack, who sees rules of conduct and civility as interference to his freedom, represents the dark forces. His chant, “Kill the pig, drink its blood!”, as he leads his increasingly menacing gang to hunt wild boars, is chilling. Anarchy and violence run their course with deadly results. Piggy, the boy most representing the ideals of democracy, is killed in a sadistic group act. The concluding scene in which naval officers come ashore to rescue the boys does nothing to convince us that the boys have felt remorse as a consequence of their actions.

Part of the play’s power resides within our own experience. Can any of us not recall the first time when we had to choose between loyalty to a friend and submission to a group led by a bully. When the pecking order mentality takes over, we’re all capable of complicity either by commission or omission.

The play has contemporary political resonance. Identifying an enemy and keeping his band intent focusing on that enemy is how Jack consolidates his leadership. Any hesitation to hunt, any question of his authority is portrayed as cowardly and reason to be ridiculed or banished from the safety of the group. In the early days of the war in Iraq, those who questioned the war were called unpatriotic and subject to suspicion of thinking like traitors.

The acting ensemble is excellent, with Piggy, the slightly nasal voice of reason, being a standout. Jack is rippingly cunning and manipulative, and Ralph admirable in his losing battle with Jack. At slightly more than two hours, some of the second and third acts drag a bit and some of the dialogue The back story, that there is a war going on in the outside world and that the boys’ parents may have perished in it, is not sufficiently illuminated.

A clearer statement of that in a prologue might underscore that the boys feel not just shipwrecked but also unmoored from society as they knew it. The one set is ingenious. A series of slatted wooden ramps represent hills, the jungle, a volcano, and the beach. The lighting alternately suggest storms, blinding heat, fires, and pitch dark within the jungle. A video of the play would offer a gold mine of discussion for middle school and high school students.

"Theater District", written by Richard Kramer

"Theater District", written by Richard Kramer
Roberts Auditorium at the Calderwood Pavilion, Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Presented by the Speakeasy Theater Company, resident theater company at Boston Center for the Arts
Runs from September 30 - October 29

Watching this performance of “Theater District” at the Roberts Auditorium in the Calderwood Pavilion, I felt like a voyeur. The characters on stage didn’t seem to be acting roles, they seemed to be living their lives. Their physical presence, the unforced delivery of lines, their natural mannerisms, gave me the feeling of being an invisible witness to a pivotal day in their lives. It felt mildly embarrassing, like it might be impolite for me to be listening.

Forty something actor turned restaurant-owner George lives with his partner Kenny, a gay-rights lawyer, and Kenny’s fifteen year old son Wesley. While Kenny is emotionally impotent to dial into his son’s unfolding life, George connects with Wesley, and is the one who generally knows the answer to the question, “Do you know who your child’s friends are and where he is?”

The play’s underlying theme is ignited one morning when Wesley asks his dad Kenny, “Do you think it’s a choice? ... You know, your general gayness?” Wesley’s best friend has just come out at a tenth grade school assembly. Kenny fumbles his answer, George recovers enough to keep the door open between father and son.

Wesley’s teenage angst and search for identity ring alarm bells to his mother Lola, with whom he spends weekends. She insinuates, after Wesley is beaten up defending his gay best friend, that Wesley’s living with two gay men is problematic, and his bond with George is more than platonic. The echoes of what she says and what she implies tear at George and Kenny, threatening to destabilize their comfortable relationship.

Supporting roles of Wesley’s friend Theo, Lola’s second husband Ben, and restaurant headwaiter Mario fit together with the familiarity of an ensemble cast.

The play’s ending walks a tightrope between concrete resolution and a sense that these characters have endured a brutal awakening and no matter where they go from here, may just have the tools to deal with the next storm.

Imaginative use of a video camera, a versatile two level set with several points of entry and exit, and spot lighting add to the sense of intimacy and tensions that simmer. Written by Richard Kramer, who has a solid portfolio of TV credits including writing and producing “thirtysomething’, “My So-Called Life”, and “Now and Again”, it is his first play.

In synch with part of the play's setting in George’s restaurant in the Theater District, Kramer’s play is julienned with dialogue that shows us dark little corners of the character’s psyches and the currents of struggle that eddy below the surface. Several memorable one-liners that Kramer pens are both hilarious and revealing, but he knows when to slow down and let what’s unsaid echo through the theater. The audience laughs, winces, and wonders.

The play's strength lies in a balance between showing and telling and offers enough ambiguity to stir the emotional guts of the audience. It make us wonder where we take sides in the human drama before us.

The Boston Theater Marathon VII

The Boston Theater Marathon VII
The Calderwood Pavilion’s Virginia Wimberly Theater
May 22, 2005

Fifty plays in ten hours? Yep. And if anything in this world would qualify to be called an epic event, this was it. Sunday’s seventh annual Boston Theater Marathon ran all day long and went by in a blur of creative sweat. As in the running marathon, the event was loaded with shining talent, zany outfits, show offs, and the occasional plodder. The themes of the plays took on contemporary hot button subjects as well as personal and social issues that have been subjects of playwrights since Euripides.

A true diehard could have paid the admission charge of $30 at 12 noon, watched the show leap out of the starting blocks, and cheered entries as they rambled past until the finish at 10 pm. The Calderwood Pavilion’s Virginia Wimberly Theater is way more comfortable than even the best lawn chair and impervious to the still dismal New England spring, so sitting through the entire event wouldn’t have been difficult physically. But mentally, whew.

The marathon was run with Swiss watch precision. Five ten-minute plays started at the top of each hour. The two minutes between plays was like an efficient gathering of the Keystone Cops, with sets and actors rapidly changing places on the darkened stage. Like the other marathon, this one flashed by with such rapid pace that it was impossible to do anything but react in the moment and save the analysis for when you could catch your breath for a couple of minutes at end of each five-play hour.

The audience in the Wimberly Theater was more relaxed than for standard productions and that in itself was refreshing. They ran the gamut from seasoned to inquisitive, young and old, gay and straight. Their responses were robust. Laughter was frequent, spontaneous, and, in the case of some of the plays involving same-sex themes, occasionally a bit uncertain.

Sets and lighting were minimal: assorted spotlights, piped in music, beds, chairs, milk crates, wooden boxes and doorframes, and the occasional inflatable coconut tree. The minimalist approach gave the audience a chance to engage their own imaginations as two milk crates became a canoe (“October”), an inflatable coconut tree became an island (“Eralset or Scrabble in Babel”), or absolutely no props used at all (“Gus Penelope Syberson”)

What wasn’t minimal was talent. This observer sat through 20 plays between 2 pm and 6 pm. Nearly 300 entries were submitted from every corner of New England and, with few exceptions, the ones left standing were ready for their ten minutes of fame. For the most part, these sketches were brilliantly etched and filled with either comedy, pathos, or tragedy. Stereotypes were given shape, depth, and enough nuance to lift them off the page.

Plays like “October” highlighted that Mars/Venus incongruity is not the sole province of straight couples. “The Amazing Adventures of Captain Normal” was an antic send-up of a modern day Walter Mitty trying to break out of the mundane reality of his life. Imagine a man draped in a bedsheet and wearing his wife’s yoga tights under his polka dotted boxer shorts and you begin to get the picture. Lovers of wine and roses could laugh at the way “Blind Tasting” showed two dysfunctional lovers who used the vocabulary of wine snobs to connect with their co dependency. “Gus Penelope Syberson” was a charmingly choreographed set piece between a man, a woman, and technology, played by a sprightly woman in a frilly dress and elastic facial and body movements. Technology, after setting up bruising but hilarious battle, finally loses to the human instinct of wanting to connect with no computer chip acting as intermediary. Occasionally, plays surfaced that were more polemic than playful. The actors in “The Flood” sounded more like they were reading an essay than lines in a drama.

Humanity was the common denominator in these wildly disparate plays. The need to connect, to love and be loved, and to reach for the stars of our personal galaxies were telescoped into ten-minute lifetimes. Euripides would have been proud of these playwrights’ command of brevity.

The Sea Horse

The Sea Horse
A play by Edward J. Moore staged by the Nora Theater Company at the Boston Playwright’s Theater, 941 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA
March 13, 2005

The Sea Horse is a powerful two-act play in which a man and a woman try to navigate the treacherous waters between vulnerability and love. Harry has just returned to a northeast coastal town after weeks at sea on a bucket of a boat in the local fishing fleet. He’s taken all day to return to his girlfriend, the proprietor of the Sea Horse, a seedy bar near the piers, and she is steamed. She takes his tardiness as a lack of respect, a quality she’s in short supply of herself. As it turns out, Harry, a man of certifiable mechanical skill but lubberly emotional intelligence, has had an epiphany while at sea. He wants to begin life again, start a boat business, and has realized that what he feels for Gertrude is love. Gertrude is not a believer in men’s dreams and long ago gave hers up for auction. “You don’t have a head for business,” she says to him as he’s explaining his plans to her. When Harry has enough Jack Daniels to say it, he confesses his love for Gertrude and asks her to partner up with him in business and marriage. Gertrude, showing the armor associated with the aquatic sea horse, turns on him fiercely. She has no interest in intimacy, let alone love.

From here, both characters are in uncharted emotional waters. After hearing each declaration of Harry’s love, Gert digs in. Through her angry rejections, we become aware of the self-loathing she’s developed after an abusive first marriage and a traumatic experience with her father, from whom she inherited The Sea Horse. Every time she lashes out at his “sentimental crap”, Gertrude betrays her feelings for him with a gesture of conciliation. Both characters make the most of body language. When she can’t verbalize, Gertrude’s brown eyes can shout fear, vulnerability, or unassuming affection. Harry’s clumsy attempt at dancing is endearing and an exotic romp with his duffle bag is hilarious.

For the past year, Gert, for whom men have satisfied a physical but not an emotional need, has invited only Harry to her bedroom upstairs over the bar. And Harry’s reciprocated by using his mechanical skill to keep her worn down bar intact, and a way to express words he hasn’t been able to form. In her struggle to acknowledge her feelings for Harry, she admits that he’s the only man she invited to her room after meeting him for the first time. Even if they cant admit it, their dialogue shows that lust has only been part of the reason these two castaways have stuck it out for the past year. Their shaky grammar and plain clothing are right at home in the play’s setting, a small barroom with worn down stools and tables. You can almost smell the sour odor of spilled whiskey and beer on the floor.

Harry shows us the soul of an uncomplicated man, who can describe his appreciation for the beauty of the sea in one breath, and his ability to fix a greasy water pump in the next. We can see his character, a loser for most of his life, become ennobled by acknowledging his love. Thinking he can convince Gert with the same persistence he uses in repairing boat engines, Harry won’t give up on her or his dream, the only dream for which he’s willing to risk it all. The two come across as genuine people, rough around the edges but with a dignity that’s nearly buried beneath the armor they’ve adopted as a shield for the hard knocks they’ve absorbed. Gert is overweight and plain, but far from the fat and ugly self-portrait she’s adopted to shield her from rejection. And Harry’s a simple man, but full of sincerity and impish humor.

The resolution of their situation may not be resolved by the play’s ending, but they’ve managed to connect. If they can allow themselves to trust each other, they’ll be able to weigh anchor and find a new home port.