pt at large

Man In The Ring: Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life

"Man In The Ring", Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Tremont Street, 
Boston, MA
December 16, 2018

"Man In The Ring" is a poignantly sad, strangely sweet story of a man whose hands could make a beautiful hat for a show room and deliver thunderous haymakers in the boxing ring. It will stay riveted in your memory long after you've left the theater.

It’s the story of two Emile Griffiths told in parallel, opening with scenes of the 70 year old mentally demolished (pugilistic dementia) older Emile searching for a shoe then ping ponging back and forth to the younger Emile, the kid filled with dreams who immigrated to New York from St. Thomas, V.I.

It’s painful to watch young off-the-boat Griffith enter the world of boxing when his employer in the hat making district discovers how strong and muscular he is and brings him to the gym to become a fighter. He had fast hands and could box - a natural.

We know where the play is heading and can’t close our eyes as we know how those dreams of fame on the baseball diamond or as a designer on the floor of a hat making business give way to a life of boxing that will give him the fame then crush him for being open about the kind of man he is. This is the 1950s and 60s. Homosexuality was taboo. Bisexuality was unthinkable. Combine that with the fact we're talking about a world champion boxer and it strains credulity. And it's true.

The characterizations of Griffith (1938-2013) lean on liltingly accented island English, poetic and filled with colorful local colloquialisms that eerily underscore what happens in Griffith’s life. The recurring rhymes of childhood songs that Griffith faintly remembers, songs that teach them how to behave in male/female relationships, hold the both the play and the older Griffith together as his brain struggles to focus on where he put his shoes, and wracks him with nightmares about a 1962 prize fight for the welterweight championship in which he killed Benny Paret with a brutal onslaught of punches. Paret had made fun of Griffith's sexuality at the public weigh in before the title fight. We are left to decide whether or not Griffith intentionally savagely beat the man senseless.

The six time world champion made and lost a fortune. A scene as he sells the belts he won as a world champion in the welterweight and middleweight classes to make ends meet breaks your heart. The champion is an emotional wreck, relentlessly remorseful for the fatal night in the boxing ring and deeply yearning for forgiveness and understanding for the life he chose to live.

'I killed a man, and the world forgave me, yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me," Griffith says uncomprehendingly.

He never tried to hide his sexuality and hardly seemed to understand his bisexual nature himself. Considering the era in which he lived, his openness, naive or intentional, was as brave as his valor in the ring. The result tormented him.

From the very first moments on stage, John Douglas Thompson and Kyle Vincent Terry inhabit the roles of the elder and younger Griffith with the magnetism of the man’s personality and the irreconcilable contradictions of his lifestyle. Luis (Victor Almanzar) as the elder Griffith’s lover and caretaker is tender, gentle, and the only link Griffith has with the real world. The portrayal of Griffith''s mother, who emigrated to the United States years before Griffith and prostituted herself to make a living is two dimensional.  She clearly has no idea how to nurture her son but is happy take his money as he rises to fame. The cruel aunt in St. Thomas she asked to care for him was cruel and devoid of any love. For nurturing and any kind of parental love (his father was long gone after he was born), Griffith began life with a mandatory eight count. Luis is the only constant source of love Griffith may have known his whole life.

How is it possible to make the life of an immigrant bisexual boxer a compelling piece of theater? Director Michael Grief, playwright Michael Cristofer, and music director Michael McElroy know exactly how they want the play to unfold - using imaginatively staged and illuminated vignettes that gradually fit together the people and the pieces of the puzzle that was Griffith's life.

The boxing scenes, strobe lights popping to show in freeze frame scenes of his knockout punches in his fights are starkly effective as are scenes of the champion patronizing gay bars. Even in 2018, the bar scenes contradict every notion we have of men in the prize fighting business, let alone world champions prize fighters.

The clever two-tier stage setting features a place for musicians to play the melodies of children’s songs as the boxer brings them into focus and a huge screen backdrop that shows crawls of headlines from Griffith's career and brief black and white video clips of Griffith during arc of his brilliant ring career from 1958 to 1977 (85 Wins [23 Knockouts], 24 Defeats [2 Knockouts, 2 Draws).

The man was either way ahead of his time or recklessly self-destructive. In his boxing career, he was willing to take punches to wait for an opening to knock out an opponent. In the ring of life, he absorbed the pain of being battered for who he was. Years after his death, this powerful, deeply realized portrayal of the most complex world champion boxer the world has ever known awards him a TKO over the misery he suffered in life.

Griffith's bisexuality may have been an open secret to the closely knit world of boxing but was never a story newspapers would run at the time. A meeting with Benny Paret's son when Griffith struggles for the words to ask for forgiveness at the closing moments of the play puts the entire audience into a sob mode. This is not a theatrical device. It happened.

The single bed on the set is a metaphor for the island on which Griffith finds himself stranded with only memories to keep him company.

 

“Miracles and Other Deceptions”: Sleightly Wonder-ful Show at the Omni Parker House

“Miracles and Other Deceptions"

Omni Parker House, 60 School Street, Boston, MA, 02106
Fridays, 7 PM and 9PM
November 16, 2018

I’m rolling up my sleeves to show I have nothing to hide as I tell you this is one of the best evening’s entertainments in Boston right now.

“Miracles and Other Deceptions,” a 75-minute program of theatrical sleight of hand magic is all of that. Paul Gertner was smitten with the idea of magic when he was a kid. He’s so good at it, he presents all over the world. He’s fooled Penn and Teller. Three times. Fooling me was a lot easier and I loved every minute.

No grand stage illusions by levitating a woman, or having her climb into a small box, driving swords into the closed box, and then opening it up to discover only air inside. This is the best kind of magic. Small scale, a few props, and big surprises with playing cards, coins, and cups and balls.

The set up is perfect. A small room on the Omni Parker House mezzanine level, a large round table covered in black velvet seating 12 people, plus one for Paul Gertner. Risers accommodating a dozen others are set behind the table close enough to see the goings on. I was two seats away from Gertner; my pal Myke who invited me to join him for the show sat right next to him.

"The closer you look, the less you'll see!" Gertner says in the first few minutes. Giving into glee is much easier.

Telling you what happened would spoil the fun. I can tell you that with playing cards, coins and a few cups and balls he will bedazzle you with magic and patter that makes the show feel like a musical that hums along just fine without the music. Back stories, anecdotes about his father, children, Johnny Carson, and wife seamlessly connect with the sleight of hand he performs. It is utterly mesmerizing for the ears as well as the eyes.

“Does anyone have a $20 bill?” he asks. I quickly reach into my pocket. What happened next had something to do with a lemon and was stupefying.

I haven’t had so much fun since my mother, her mother, and all her sisters were playing Peekaboo with me when I was an infant. OK, that’s an assumption. A fact is I haven’t done as much oooo-ing and ahhhh-ing in a long time.

“The sense of wide-eyed wonder you had as a kid still lurks in your psyche,” he tells you upfront. No small part of his show is that he makes that re-appear too.

SIDEBAR
Pricing; VIP “At The Table” $60, 12 people; General Admission: $45 in second and third row and close to the magic, 12 people, seats not assigned. Definitely recommend VIP seating.

Seating: Arrive 30 minutes early, wait in the hallway on the mezzanine level till Gertner’s wife Kathy opens the door 15 minutes before showtime. The 12 seats around the VIP table are first come, first served, as are second and third row. Myke was the first ticket holder for the table who entered the room and got those fabulous seats right next to Paul Gertner.

A Happy Thanksgiving message that magically turns into a personal timeline/mini biography from Paul

“Miracles and Other Deceptions" program covers.

 
Myke, Paul Gertner, PT

The residual memories of the joy of seeing magic being performed a few feet from my chair at the table in synch with an evening of personal anecdotes that scaffold the illusions has kept me beaming days and days after witnessing it.

https://gertner.com/developing-new-magic-trick/

https://gertner.com/upside-down-thinking/

"Ripcord": A Zany Un-PC Comedy with Heart

"Ripcord"

Written by David Lindsay-Abaire

Directed by Jessica Stone

Scenic design: Tobin Ost; Costume design, Gabriel Barry; Lighting design, David Weiner; Sound design and original music, Mark Bennett; Projection design, Lucy Mackinnon; Casting, Alaine Alldaffer; Production stage manager, Emily F. Mc Mullen; Stage manager, Kevin Schlagle; Scenic design, Tobin Ost; Costume design, Gabriel Barry; Lighting design, David Weiner; Sound design and original music, Mark Bennett; Projection design, Lucy Mackinnon; Casting, Alaine Alldaffer; Production stage manager, Emily F. Mc Mullen; Stage manager, Kevin Schlagle

At Calderwood Pavilion, Viginia Wimberly Theater, Boston Center for the Arts, May 26-July 2, 2017 Tickets start at $25, 617-266-0800; www.huntingtontheatre.org

 

Most people don’t need to be thrown out of an airplane to get the message to wake up and smell the roses. That’s one of the messages of the aptly named play called “Ripcord” playing at the Calderwood Pavilion.

It’s a froth of a play, an insanely comic piece occasionally leavened with a tug at the heart, and is a superb tonic for escaping the lousy news that abounds these days. 

In 90 minutes, the president might have tweeted, the Russians may have intruded, and someone in public office might have done something inexcusably stupid.

Watching Nancy E. Carroll as cranky Abby and Annie Golden as ditzy Marilyn take galomping chomps out of their roles as water and oil roommates in an assisted living facility will have rendered those things null and void while you’re totally engrossed with the antics of those two and the supporting roles of the cast.

Delivering dark humor, sarcastic, even abrasive humor and having it come off as laugh-out-loud funny is not easy. For this, Nancy E. Carroll is the queen of local actors. 

Carroll plays the role up to the hilt in her dealings with her roommate Marilyn, another damaged soul, whose armor is a bulletproof sense of goofy sunshine, oodles of thoughtfulness, and kindness as deep as the Grand Canyon. 

The whole play revolves around a bet, cleverly devised by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, to determine who gets the bed by the window that has a view of the outside world and sunshine, both of which are devoid in their lives. 

The subplots are fabulously abetted by the performances of a supporting cast who earn their stripes by holding their own with the two heavyweights. Ugo Chukwu as the room attendant, Scotty, is a standout.

The scenes showing the ploys each woman thinks up to win the bet are outlandishly creative. Director Jessica Stone, along with the scenic, costume, lighting, sound, and music design directors, must have had a field day fleshing out schemes in which the imaginative Marilyn tries to win the bet.

Not wanting to spoil the fun, I will only say that this is where the ripcord comes in. One brief moment of pathos in another vignette is a key to the final scenes. 

You know there has to be a back-story that led these two women to become the characters they are and end up in an assisted living facility. David Lindsay-Abaire’s strategy of unpacking their stories ever so slowly is ever so satisfying.

Oh, one last thing. The devices that director Stone uses to segue from one scene to the next in this two-act play are the most surprising and hilarious I’ve ever seen. There’s choreography and music involved and is so good that I don’t want to spoil it for you.

"Ripcord" is a satisfying night at the theater. I guarantee you’ll have a soft and safe landing.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater

"Arrabal" - Argentine History, Tango Style

“Arrabal”
Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge,MA
through June 18, 2017
Tickets: $25-$85, 617-547-8300
www.americanrepertorytheater.org

“Arrabal” is a theatrical Rubik’s cube in which music, movement, emotion, and story line are inseparably connected in order to portray a horrible stretch of Argentine history. If you like ballet, modern dance, and Cirque de Soleil, chances are you’ll love "Arrabal". Each form tells a story, more or less linear, that we kinda/sorta figure out. We’re ok filling in the blanks. When the language is Tango, the most dramatic dance form on the planet, who cares about the blanks. 

In 1976, Argentina became paralyzed by fear and governed with brutality after the violent overthrow of President Isabel Peron by a right-wing junta in 1976.  More than 30,000 objectors to the coup - activists, students, workers, teachers, amongst others - were seized, some with reason, others on whims known only to the police who carried out the dictator’s authoritarian policies. Many were tortured. Most were never seen again. They became known as the Desaparecidos, the Disappeared. An infant at the time, Arrabal never knew that her father became one of them.

The first act, “1976”, depicts Arrabal’s father’s transition from playful to active resistance. A popular member of a tango club in Buenos Aires, Rodolpho, the father Arrabal never knew, joins the resistance in the streets, much to the anguish of his mother, who knows in her heart that he is doomed. From scenes of ardent, tormented tango in several sequences, we see him brazenly wearing his opposition T-shirt, then arrested, beaten, and eventually killed. 

The second act, “18 Years Later”, is the saga of the tango club owner who summons Arrabal, the naïf from the outskirts of Buenos Aires who has been raised by Rodolpho’s mother, to the club so he can tell her how and why her father died. The scenes in which women congregate with black and white images of their loved ones hanging around their necks are haunting, the eyes of the mother’s beseeching us… “Have you seen him?” “Have you seen her?”

Dramas before and after Shakespeare use a comic character to give us a chance to laugh to relieve tension. Mario Rizzo as El Duende, the messenger who connects Arrabal with the owner of the tango club, does a seriously quirky version of street dancing and tango that got generous applause every time he entered. Julio Zurita, spectacularly emotive as Rodolpho, choreographed the show brilliantly. Soledad Buss in the role of Nicole, jilted lover of the man who becomes Arrabal’s protector, is fire and ice to Arrabal’s ingénue innocence as she encounters urban tango culture.

Tango is a dance of maximums and minimums. Dominant, often acrobatic displays of breath-taking fluid sensuality one moment, then the arch of an eyebrow, the nearly imperceptible shift of a shoulder the next.  Every solo, pairing, or ensemble routine, whether or not it fills in the blanks of the sometimes elusive story line clearly, was met with cheers from the audience.

Sub plots abound - between flirtatious couples, men competing to seduce Arrabal, the man who protects her, and women competing for the attention of their men (and vice versa). All present a chance to stage a heady fusion of tango, ballet, modern dance, and earthy street dance that set the play squarely in Buenos Aires and light it on fire with the same Argentine passion that fueled the insurrection. 

This is the kinetic version of the bleak period in Argentine history that director Sergio Trujillo wanted to make as an homage to the resilience of his countrymen and women during the repressive regime. For the trio of Trujillo, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, and writer John Weidman, tango became the language of revolution. 

The A.R.T. is a world-class theater.  Like a chameleon, it changes size and configuration to suit each play it presents. For this production, you can choose to sit in one of the two dozen round top cocktail tables in what is called ‘The Sunken Cabaret Tables” section just below the footlights or in the regular orchestra seats.

The American Repertory Theater has it all going on. The sound system has the power of cannon fire. The five piece band Orquesta Bajofonderos acts as a muse, predicting or underscoring the drama unfolding on stage. Cleverly situated on an upper level on the left side of the stage it pounds out the most robust and searing rock infused tango music you’ll ever hear. The backlit set suggests the working class barrios of Buenos Aires. 

The stage is big enough to hold spectacular scenes of ensemble dancing that left me in awe of the athletic strength of the men and the silky grace of the women. Tall, short, thin, muscular, a bit zaftig, with a range of faces you’d see on a bus in Buenos Aires, they are perfectly cast to represent the people who rose up after 1976.

The cast of dancers and musicians is from Argentina. Many of them appear to be too young to have experienced the repression first hand but all of them must know someone whose family or friends were affected. The intensity with which they dance is a visceral expression to purge the pain of history and an exhilarating statement to declare “Mo Mas...Never again.” 

+++++++

Addendum: This link helped me understand the play even better - the musicians explaining the cultural stew that created tango and what they call ‘milonga’, a vibrant music/dance environment still evolving today. Give it a read before you go~
https://americanrepertorytheater.org/inside/blog/%5Btitle-raw%5D/25524

Photos courtesy of http://americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/arrabal

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Beckett In Brief: Three Short Plays by Samuel Beckett

Beckett In Brief: Three Short Plays by Samuel Beckett
Sorenson Center for the Arts
Babson College
Babson Park, MA
Presented by The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
Directed by James Seymour
James Fenton, Scenic Designer; Chelsea Kent, Costume Designer; Alexander Fetchko, Lighting Designer; Elizabeth Callas, Sound Designer; Lisa Berg, Properties Master; Greg Nash, Stage Manager; Rachel Coming, Assistant Stage Manager

Ken Baltin, Will Lyman, Ashley Risteen
April 27–30 and May 3–7,2017

If you’re brave enough to go to a Samuel Beckett play, you’re in for a display of 15 rounds of intellectual and emotional turmoil. It’s a good idea to bone up on the playwright’s history and some kind of Cliff’s Notes summary about the plays.

If I heeded that advice, I wouldn’t have been trying to play catch up for the production of “Beckett In Brief,” a bundle of three Beckett plays last night. Beckett is the kind of playwright whose work I feel more than I understand. Even after reading discourses about "Rough for Radio II," I still could not fathom its twists and turns.

Irishmen Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are about as far apart in their style as Laurel and Hardy. Joyce expended pages to create his fictions, Becket created syllables…including un-nerving (for an audience not used to it), hold-your-breath passages of silence onstage. The bleak and fatalistic Irishman in him is in high gear in “Beckett in Brief,” a collection of three plays told in one 90-minute chunk at the Sorenson Center for the Arts at Babson College.

The Sorenson Center for the Arts is perfect for Beckett. The compact 60-seat black box theater is just the right size, intimate enough so the actors are close enough to the audience so we get powder burns as they deliver their pungent lines.

Beckett can be opaque one minute and punch-you-in-the-gut-observant the next, reminding us that our existence has a shelf life and chances are that, like his characters, we’ve let a good deal of it slip like sand between our fingers.

Beckett wrote “Radio Rough II” as a radio play in 1961. Played with the two actors who we see in silhouette, it recreates the auditory nature of a radio broadcast.

The radio play recreates the interchange between an aging character called The Animator, a young stenographer who appears to partially disrobe during the session, (ok the play was originally written in French during Beckett’s stay in France. Maybe he was drinking Absinthe at the time) and an unseen character called Fox. Honestly, I could barely figure out the allusions even after reading the Wikipedia notes. Beckett’s tortured characters, however, like the smoke from cigarettes that permeates your clothing, stay with you long after you’ve left their company.

“The Old Tune” is more familiar territory, the most straightforward Beckett you’re ever going to get.

Two old friends, 69 and 73, meet by chance after years of separation. The thirty-minute play is a morbidly humorous reflection on the unreliability of memory  and glimmerings of mortality on the horizon. The two argue over what happened to whom and when and the associations they have with their marriages and children as they reminisce.

Will Lyman as Mr. Gorman and Ken Baltin as Mr. Cream play the forgetful, arthritic old man roles a bit over the top, but since we’re talking about Beckett any injection of humor is appreciated. To modern audiences, the theme of that life has passed by those in their seventies is all too familiar. Or, with the advent of such dramedies as "Grace and Frankie," maybe he was way ahead of his time.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” is Beckett  (and Lyman) in full. It is Krapp’s 69th birthday. He’s made a new recording of his life in review for years and this night he finds a recording he made on his 39th birthday. The recording reminds him of the opportunities he’s lost or not had the courage to make. He gets into his cups. It’s not pretty. If you have the usual collection of the ‘road not taken’ moments in your life, his doubts and regrets are likely to set some of yours off as well.

Beckett’s persistent themes regarding memory, aging, sex, the cost of dreams deferred, and the cold shadow of death echo throughout the three short plays.  

The brooding Irishman went through patches of intense retrospection himself. Undoubtedly the musings are biographical, their expression meant to express in words what he’s felt and withheld for years. His work, from the enigmatic to the cautionary, has been doing that for over fifty years. Make a tape recording of your year in review at your own risk.

Eve Ensler: In the Body of the World

In the Body of the World, a World Premier Play
Written and performed by Eve Ensler
Based on Ensler’s memoir of the same title
Directed by Diane Paulus
American Repertory Theater
May 10 – May 29, 2016


Eve Ensler has a way of making her experiences translate the personal to the universal. The tempo and rhythms of her delivery often scale the walls of poetry.

Based on the quotes in the advertisements, I expected the connection between her struggle with her own cancer to be more directly political and connected to the horrors of the sexual atrocities committed on women by militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo than it was, but she did graphically connect the wanton rape of the women to the economic rape of the country by its leaders and the uncaring conglomerates that plundered the country’s natural resources.

Ensler’s accounts of stories of the African women who were brutalized were incomprehensively ghastly. To balance the weight of the heinously inhuman rape of hundreds of thousands of women with the suffering and pain born by one woman, Ensler, enduring uterine cancer, requires an enormously strong bridge.

Ensler’s genius is that she uses the way her own body was beaten up in order to ‘save’ her - out with her uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, cervix, part of colon, and anus, her body becoming a fountain sprouting an assortment of piss, poop, and pus-filled tubes looking like a subway map of Manhattan, as a way to connect with the brutalization of African women in the Congo. (Sidebar below)

As one part of her treatment concludes, she’s informed that her doctors want to radiate her vagina. ”My vagina! Do you know who I am!” she shrieks. Only a woman with Ensler’s history and sense of irony could make that funny. And her musing that the scourge of how we get cured is so great that dying occasionally felt like a comfy option.

She has the gift expressing her emotions with from-her-gut powerful words that somehow make the rest of us feel better, liberates us, as if she spoke the words for us that we couldn’t have mustered the courage to say, like what she said about her sister who she hated and her mother who was emotionally distant, and makes us laugh about it. No one does dark humor better.

The staging of the 90-minute play resembled choreography as Ensler moved props to represent different scenes. The way she rearranged the objects on the set to replicate medical settings, with the crisp white sheets, were so strong I could almost smell ‘hospital’, that vaguely antiseptic odor that always makes me feel like taking a shower when I leave, and yearn to get the fuck out of there so I can take a breath of clean fresh air and expel the funky heavy air that reminds me of mortality, fragility of life, sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-god go-I surreality of all of it.  

It’s a long way from “I hated my sister,” to having that sister become an ally in healing. And it’s a long way from being emotionally starved for a mother’s touch to an act of bonding and forgiveness with the frail pale woman as she spends her last days in hospice care. Ensler drives home the irony that cancer has the power to heal.

As a cancer survivor I loved what Ensler called the “Sue” moment when her friend the therapist turns Ensler’s fears on their heads with a whole series of mantras. “If you feel shitty while the chemotherapy courses through your body, think of what these cocktails are doing to the cancer, kicking the shit out of the cancer cells as it flows through your arteries and veins, seeking it out and killing it with a vengeance. Chemo as the Empathetic Warrior.”

I’ve been in that room. I’ve felt the chemo heating up my whole body, making me mildly nauseous then sliding me into a long flushy nap. I woozily visualized it seek and destroy every creepy little carcinoma cell trying to evade the hot cocktail pumping through my body. And I’ve felt radiation so strong that it blistered my skin. Like Ensler, I’ve read the reports and heard my oncologists keep talking about stages of cancer, even when I thought my treatment was finished and I was clear of cancer. The Onco YoYo.

Forget courage. It takes someone with imagination, perception, searing honesty, and the elusive ability to make us laugh about the road to recovery, let alone survival, that can suck away every little milligram of dignity you’ve ever had.

Ensler is deeply embarrassed when a very handsome doctor comes in to examine her anus. She is taken aback when, after examining her, “Dr. Handsome” walks around the table as she’s lying on her side with her ass exposed, looks her in the eye, and says,“Ms. Ensler, I know who you are and what you’ve done for women. I will do everything I can to make this succeed.” He has connected with her as a human being, not just another body to work on. Gratitude replaces shame. She is reduced to tears.

Fear of dying makes you remember all the stuff in your life that you haven’t done, or have done badly. And all the love you didn’t get or got and didn’t acknowledge. And the hurts you got along the way. It’s easy to connect with her, we’ve been there.  And with luck, like with Ensler, you will yourself to cope while feeling pain, fear, and uncertainty. You do it alone. You do it with people who love you. You do it sometimes with complete strangers.

This nearly bald, fifty-nine year old zaftig woman standing on stage chronicles it all. As she said in one of tons of laugh-out-loud observations, no amount of tofu or yoga or meditation or good sex is going to prevent you from getting cancer. Learning to become an Empathetic Warrior may not cure you but will put you in the arena.

SIDEBAR
In 2007, before her cancer was diagnosed, the founder of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Denis Mukwege, invited Eve Ensler to the Congo. As good as he was at stitching up cruelly sexually violated women, he knew that the power of these women’s stories could shock the world into caring and that Ensler was the person who could do it.

Over weeks, she listened. “What help do you need?” she asked. The dream? To build a safe place where sexually shamed women who had lost everything could recover their sense of self and dignity then return to their communities and be a force for change. That place would be called The City of Joy. By 2011, it was completely built. Against all odds, today it flourishes, spreading hope and empowerment by women who return to their homes to become leaders in their communities. http://drc.vday.org

Photos courtesy of American Repertory Theater

 

Back The Night: Melinda Lopez's Drama Timely, Skirts Challenging Questions

Back The Night by Melinda Lopez
Boston Playwrights' Theatre
949 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215
February 4- February 28, 2016
Reviewed after February 26 performance

Back The Night by playwright Melinda Lopez seemed like a good bet. As I listened to the play develop, it felt like playwright Melinda Lopez wanted to make a statement about sexual violence on college campuses and created characters to explore it. Not a bad idea, except when she crams so many themes into one 90-minute play.

The production values are simple and solid, as they usually are in the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. Rob Eastman-Mullins’ set with Misaki Nishimiya’s props suggest a college campus with cut out backgrounds of clock tower and dorms and multi purpose props to suggest everything from college admin offices to rally platforms and a dorm room. David Wilson’s lighting and music fit mood and action appropriately.

With a thoughtful refocusing of exposition, this could become a much more compelling production. As it stands, the play seems more like a treatise.

In the play’s opening scene, Cassie (Amanda Collins) shows up at Em’s dorm room, her face bloody, accompanied by a friend. She tells Em (Melissa Jesser) her best friend on campus, that she was attacked. The next 80 minutes explore what happened, how Em’s boyfriend, campus police, college administrators, and politicians react. It also tests the two women’s friendship.

College officials respond in ways similar to those we’ve seen on the 7 o’clock News…promise investigations, more security, and no tolerance for violence. It is far too convenient that Em’s mother happens to be a senator running for re-election and not above leveraging the event for political points when she shows up at a huge rally. And that Cassie has been blogging exposés about a fraternity with a reputation for degrading women. And that Em’s boyfriend happens to be a member of that fraternity.

Evan Horwitz adds a light touch as Sean, a very out iPhone wielding gay friend to both Em and Cassie. Socially tuned in and amusingly self-absorbed, it’s a hoot watching him make a pitch for the LGBT community when the TV crews show up. I couldn’t help thinking that this was Lopez’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to cram another constituency into the drama.

Stephanie Clayman hits the mark in her stereotype roles as the campus doctor, the college dean, and the senator. Michael Underhill is solid as Em’s frat boy boyfriend who wants to do the right thing for his fraternity and his girlfriend. James Kooi ably fills minor roles as Officer Sam, a reporter, and the college president.

Things get cloudy when Lopez tries to tie up loose ends in the plays final minutes. Em has doubted Cassie’s version of events. Cassie’s denial is not categorical. Em acknowledges having had some kind of sexual encounter at an alcohol infused party at the fraternity house that Cassie has critically blogged about.

If I understood the dialogue clearly, Em acknowledges she was in the moment, letting loose a fraternity party, having fun with a good looking guy, may have been a little drunk, and things got out of hand and other young men may have been involved…the dialogue, spoken softly, was hard for me to decipher.

Placing this revelation earlier would have been a braver, and more difficult, way for Lopez to explore the often-discordant accounts of sexual assault or rape on college campuses. Perhaps play director Daniela Varon could have helped by having Em’s critical dialogue audible to the back row (third) of the small theater.

Some sexual assaults are clearly intentional, inexcusable, and demand condemnation and punishment. Others, like the one Em appeared to experience, call for a playwright to render a drama in which an audience has to grapple with situations in which consent was or was not violated. In that regard, Back The Night falls short.

Photograph credit: Kalman Zabarsky.

Milk Like Sugar: Served Up With Theatrical Aplomb

Milk Like Sugar
Roberts Theater
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
February 23, 2016
January 29-February 27, 2016

Wow. This is the kind of play I’ve been hoping would surface in Boston and should have long before this. Several young African-American actors, up to the minute culturally relevant themes, music, and staging. 

Kirsten Greenridge’s Milk Like Sugar aims a blunderbuss at the teenage experience. Identity, values, self esteem, individuality vs. groupthink, finding love, family dynamics dysfunctional and otherwise, relationships, teen pregnancy…I mean, we’re all over the place.  

The fact that the characters are often sketches or stereotyped doesn’t matter a jot. They’re so well acted, feel so authentic, that I was caught up from scene to scene, rooting for Annie, the lead, to find a way to moor herself to her own reality and plan a future that she chooses, not the dead end kind that her friends or her mother try to influence her to take. Having the straight thinking Annie follow their path would legitimize the shallow choices and compromises they’ve made themselves.

The multicultural cast hits it out of the ballpark. 

Annie Desmond (Jasmine Carmichael) balancing her loyalty to her friends with the nascent belief that life is about more than babies and boyfriends that her high school pals revolve around; Margie (Carolina Sanchez) whose goal in life is to have someone of her own to love, a child of her own to give the love she's never experienced; Talisha (Shazi Raja), who will suffer any indignity to be Number One on “Her boy’s" list and flames anyone whose values differ from hers; Myra (Ramona Lisa Alexander) Annie’s single mother who long ago extinguished ambition or hope that she could amount to anything just like she snuffs out the cigarettes she incessantly smokes; Malik (Marc Pierre), possible choice to become the father of Annie’s child but focused on getting into college as a way out of the cycle of poverty and addiction; Antwoine (Matthew J. Harris) the young tattoo artist employed to give the three girls the same tattoo to bind them together in a pregnancy pact and a man with his own failed dream that haunts him; and Keera (Shanae Burch) the nerdy classmate whose connection with the steadiness of church life seems to represent salvation, love and a sense of belonging to the love starved Annie.

The play’s pace often feels frenetic, nearly off the rails with rapid fire incisive and provocative teen speak. The slower paced moments between Annie and Malik and Annie and her mother represent what Greenridge sees as the social and emotional gulf between parent and child and young men and women in the black experience.

The final scenes are touching. I’m not so sure that even Greenridge finds a satisfying resolution in the play’s last scene but when everything before it is so powerfully wrought, she gets a pass from me for alluding to a sense of hope that somehow this girl Annie has the inner core to withstand whatever obstacles life has in store for her.

What else? The play’s set - bright aluminum fencing, with sliding gates ingeniously incorporated into it, lines the back, offers characters entry and exit, and cantilevers over the stage - fits the sense of social imprisonment the characters live in. The hip-hop music, short vibrant dance routines, and social interplay seem like a page right out of a high school hallway…a chameleon corridor that can be carefree hilarious or as mean and snarky as the ones you remember but way more devastating. There is only one way to be cool. Woe to the kid like Keera who bucks the tide.

The production is one solid piece of work. Costumes/attire by Junghyn Georgia Lee fit the characters’ personalities as well as it fits their bodies. M.L. Dogg’s sound design is what you hear blaring from a teenage driver’s radio. M. Bevin O’Gara finds the right touch with staging, casting, and tone.

Greenridge has a broad appeal. The audience tonight was the most diverse in terms of race and age I’ve ever seen in Boston. Boston producers, please pay attention.

Milk Like Sugar proves that Greenridge, a Waltham, MA, resident, has her fingers on the pulse of her generation...and an alluring possibility of things to come from her pen. 

L Ramona Lisa Alexander and Jasmine Carmichael in Milk Like Sugar

R Carolina Sanchez, Jasmine Carmichael, and Shazi Raja in Milk Like Sugar

Photos courtesy of Huntington Theater

Boston Theater Marathon XVII: 50 Plays in 10 Hours...Start Carbo Loading!

Boston Theater Marathon XVII
The Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Sunday, May 10, 2015.
12:00 PM – 10 PM

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

This is the best bang for your buck that you’ll get all year… 50 ten-minute plays, by 50 New England playwrights, produced by 50 New England theater companies…in ten hours…for the measly cost of $25 in advance; $35 the day of the event.

An imaginative Mother’s Day treat! Take your mother for an hour or two then walk out for lunch or dinner at a bunch of nearby cafés and restaurants in the South End. If she really digs the plays, bring her back after dessert.

The 50 plays are chosen from over 400 submissions so you’re getting the cream of the crop. Theater companies are matched with plays. The casts usually have two or three characters and are paired with a New England theater company. The settings are bare bones, perhaps a park bench or a table and chairs, an airline seat, a coat rack, so the burden of making it real to you is on the actors, directors, and the writers.

Actors love this stuff. They’ve got 6000 seconds to make the play work. You’ll recognize many of their names and make it your business to follow the careers of newcomers. Comedy, drama, send ups, high or low camp, on a range of subjects as varied as the styles of the runners in our famous Boston Marathon.

The BTMs (Boston Theater Marathons) I’ve have witnessed have been eye opening. Some plays are more to my taste than others, but in some cases it’s helped me expand my horizons. You can count on being surprised a few times every hour.  It’s tricky but a skillful writer and talented actors can make you laugh or cry by connecting to universal truths in ten short minutes. Marathon co-founder Bill Lattanzi’s essay “How Not To Write a Ten Page Play” is a must read for playgoers of every stripe. Read between the lines and you’ll get better in assessing the next play you take in.
http://www.bu.edu/bpt/files/2013/06/How_Not_To_Write_A_Ten-Page_Play.pdf

Lattanzi and Kate Snodgrass, Artistic Director of The Boston Playwright’s Theatre, founded the Marathon in 1999. http://www.bu.edu/bpt/

Every hour, five ten-minute plays with a no fooling around one minute break between each and a precise five minute break to stretch at the end of each hour.

My casting director friend Ann brings her own bag lunch every year. I know exactly where to find her since she and her theater pal Jack camp out in the same seats every marathon. They are a couple of the loyalists who are there for the whole shebang.

 I’ve never made it that long. Heck, I could watch 20 or 30 plays, go home and mow the lawn, and come back for the party at 10 PM. In the time it takes to watch a ball game or a couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, you could see over 20 plays.

By the time you leave, you’ll have no doubt that the New England theater scene is as rich as clam chowder and exciting as a Red Sox come-from-behind victory.

The net proceeds from ticket sales to the BTM benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund that provides financial relief for theater artists and organizations that face dire need and require financial assistance. http://www.tcbf.org



For the second year in a row, I’ll be in San Diego at the Gator By The Bay Music Festival on marathon day. I’m counting on you to check out the BTM and tell me what you think.

FLASH! And in case your calendar is full on Sunday, The Boston Theater Marathon will conduct Warm-Up Laps on Saturday, May 9, featuring three staged readings. These readings are free and open to the public. http://www.bu.edu/bpt/2015/04/29/boston-theater-marathon-xviis-warm-up-laps/

BIGGER FLASH! Here is the running order, hour by hour, of plays in next Sunday’s (May 10) Boston Theater Marathon XVII. http://www.bu.edu/bpt/category/boston-theater-marathon-xvii/

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WORTH KNOWING http://www.bu.edu/bpt/our-programs/boston-theatre-marathon/submissions/

Scripts submitted to the Boston Playwright’s Theatre have specific guidelines. A few examples:
• Ten pages maximum. IF YOUR PLAY IS MORE THAN 10 PAGES LONG, IT WILL BE INELIGIBLE FOR THE FESTIVAL.
• No more than two submissions per author. This includes co-authored pieces.
• Minimal sets and props suggested.
• Submissions will be accepted from New England-area playwrights only. The states of New England are: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
• There are no restrictions on subject matter.
• Only permanent residents in New England and/or those who have a New England mailing address are eligible.
• NO NAMES PLEASE on the three copies. Only indicate the title of the play on the first page of the text—nowhere acknowledge the author’s identity (this includes headers and footers). (pt note: this is to ensure the readers who collectively judge the plays will not know the identity of the playwright.)
• Please include a brief synopsis (100 words) with a character breakdown, and the age and the ethnicity of characters, if applicable. This synopsis is for internal use only and may be edited for content.

FINISH LINE: Kate Snodgrass on the tricky process of judging plays submitted for the Boston Theater Marathon every year. http://www.bu.edu/bpt/our-programs/boston-theatre-marathon/judging/

The God Box: Revelation and Closure

The God Box
Written and performed by Antonia Lassar
Directed by Christine Hamel
The Second Annual Next Rep Festival Celebrating Women Theatremakers
Black Box Theater at The Arsenal Center for the Arts
Watertown, MA
April 9-19, 2015

One aspect of being a fervent believer in any religion is thinking that your path has an edge on all the others. The God Box explores what happens when that aspect is challenged.

To become captivated by a story, especially one rich with imagery, imagination, humor and a dollop of heartbreak, is in our DNA. The God Box, presented by the New Rep’s Black Box Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, has all of that and then some.

This is theater at its most compelling. Ingredients: a small stage, simple lighting, audience close to the action, and a spare set in which every element in the narrative is eventually connected.  Oh, and one actor telling a story with relish as if you were the only person sitting at her kitchen table.

Any story that makes you think about religion without taking sides or getting into a shouting match is so welcome…and so rare. Playwright and actor Antonia Lassar mines her experience of growing up then questions her own Jewish identity. The result is a one-hour piece of theater that provokes and satisfies.

Gloria Andelman (Antonia Lassar) is in her young daughter Rebecca’s apartment going through her possessions, now her effects, since she was just killed in an auto accident. Gloria is singularly and proudly Jewish. As she makes abundantly clear, Judaism may not be the only religion but it’s certainly a notch above all the others. It feels like catechism with a hint of condescension when Gloria explains what it means to sit shiva to all the goyim (non-Jews) in the audience.

Gloria has just discovered a box that her daughter labeled The God Box.

One of the first items in the box is a book - a traditional folktale about Schlemiel from Chelm, which Gloria pronounces with a phlegm inducing “Chhh” and asks us to try saying it. The story about a mythical village populated, according to Jewish folklore, by fools, It was one of Rebecca’s favorite stories, Gloria tells it with gusto by heart. The lesson of the story is a clever scaffold that holds the rest of the play in place

The rest of the contents of the God Box shake Gloria’s self-satisfied attitude that her chicken-soup nurturing had prepared Rebecca for a life that embraced Judaism. Who knows,  maybe she would have even married a doctor.

Lassar’s Gloria starts as a stereotype and grows into a prototype. Gloria Andelman has it all going on – the Jewish mother thing, the mannerisms, inflections, roll of the eyes, knowing nods, timing, a Brooklyn-ese accent, intuitive sense of where to lean in and where to step back. She mesmerizes us with her warmth and storytelling bravura.

The items in the God Box show that Rebecca became a seeker who investigated every imaginable path from wacky cults to mainstream religions as a path to God. As she pulls books, letters, and icons from the box, Gloria considers each with humorous objectivity, as if dismissing items in Ripley’s Believe It or Not exhibit.

To get insight into what her daughter was seeking, she decides to meet some of the people from the groups that Rebecca temporarily joined as she explored other paths to God.  These include a priest, a Buddhist monk, and several cult leaders (including a couple of doozies). The cults are unconventional to say the least (they involve reptiles or the worship of a certain part of a woman’s anatomy). Nevertheless, the outlier cults believe in a divine spirit, and welcome new converts without proselytizing or demanding oaths of allegiance. Judgmental but curious,  Gloria brings her signature cheesecakes when she visits as an offering. In her mind, food is a universal bridge to reach common ground.

The religion and background of the man to whom Rebecca had become engaged are as antithetic to Judaism as one can envision. Gloria's conversation with him is a revelation and harks back to the lesson in the "Schlemiel from Chelm" story.

Embracing an investigative spirit that her daughter would have loved, Gloria Andelman realizes the common bonds between religious beliefs and aspirations. Antonia Lassar’s God Box gives us the gift of a marvelously told story layered with the satisfying density and flavors of an heirloom recipe cheesecake.

Grounded: A One Act Play With Firepower

"Grounded"
Written by George Brant
Directed by Lee Mikasa Gardener
Set, Steven Royal. Lights, Wen-Ling Liao. Sound, Dewey C. Dellay. Production design, Kathryn Lieber.
A Nora Theatre Company Production
Central Square Theater
450 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139
Date closing: March 22
Ticket price: $15-$56

“Nooooooo!” I silently screamed to myself in the last minutes of the play “Grounded.” That’s when I realized how deeply Celeste Oliva had dragged me into her role as a Pilot unraveling in the performance of her duty.

Ninety minutes, one actor, one prop, one helluva an explosion of drama. That pretty much describes the play "Grounded" at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

That’s precisely the reaction that playwright George Brant wanted to create in this modern day morality play.

By the time you begin to breathe normally when the stage lights fade to black, you think differently about the use of drones (umanned aerial vehicles/UAVs) to conduct warfare. No boots on the ground? Great, it’s not as dirty or bloody so we don’t suffer casualties.

As soon as Celeste Oliva walks on to theater-in-the-round stage, she fills the space with a charge of Alpha electricity.  Wearing an olive green flight suit and dark aviator glasses, she exudes warrior mentality. Competitive, confident, cocky, she’s as much a bad-ass as any of the flyboys.

Our hot-shot pilot has just been grounded. The pilot formerly luxuriated in the endless blue sky over her cockpit, a mighty warrior, free and fierce, strapped into a million dollar war machine flying at Mach2, dispensing righteousness upon enemy convoys, housing, and fortifications. By the time her missiles have rained hell on the targets, she can see the dust rising from miles away as her jet screams for home. And she screams with satisfaction from the gleaming aluminum tube.

Now? Grounded because she got pregnant. No more a member of the high and mighty fraternity of top dogs.  Pissed off. And ordered to report to duty in the Nevada desert an hour’s drive from her home to take 8 hour shifts piloting a drone circling like a lethal predator five miles over war torn Iraq. All she has to do is focus, concentrate, concentrate, concentrate to locate terrorists, pull the trigger and then go home and have dinner with her husband and daughter.

Drones have the astonishing optical ability to zero in close enough to a suspected enemy to determine whether he shaved or not that morning. Our pilot gets good at finding and firing. She exults at watching earth, truck carriages and wheels, rocks and rubble tossed into the air. She is so far removed from the battlefield. So safe from being wounded or killed.

Physical distance makes the killing process easier. Cultural differences and moral differences psychologically insulate the warrior. Our enemies have weird practices and customs and religions. Killing by pulling the trigger on a remote controlled drone helps keep the enemy as just that, an abstract concept rather than a warm blooded human being with a family, friends, and community.

One day turns into the next. Pack lunches for her daughter’s preschool day, kiss her husband goodbye, head for the office, tap the pilot she’s replacing on the shoulder and focus on the gray and white screen in front of her.

“What’s that?” she wonders after gleefully inspecting the debris flying from a missile strike one day. Body parts.

Grounded really takes off after that revelation. We watch our Pilot’s descent into psychological paralysis. Can operating one of those unmanned killing machines have the same effect on a pilot as thrusting a bayonet into a man’s stomach?

Celeste Oliva’s monologue builds slowly, reaches emotional altitude and delivers a devastating payload. Her performance on the small circle of lighted stage packs as much power as a sidewinder missile in its chamber on a drone’s wing.

Photo A.R. Sinclair Photography

Grounded was named a Top 10 Play of 2013 by The Guardian and the London Evening Standard, Grounded was nominated for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award.

Intimate Apparel: Satsfying Fit at the Lyric Stage Company

Intimate Apparel
A Play by Lynn Nottage
The Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Directed by Summer L. Williams. Other credits: Anne Sherer (set design), Amanda Mujica (costume design), Chris Judacs (lighting design), Kelsey Jarboe (sound design), Stephanie LeBolt (assistant director), and Bryn Austin (dialect coach).

Running  time 2 hours, 15 minutes with one intermission
February 13- March 14, 2015

Just because all the pieces of the play Intimate Apparel look terrific, it doesn’t mean they fit perfectly. But this is a lovely play, actually a series of vignettes deconstructing the life of Esther (Lindsey McWhorter), an African American seamstress with uncanny ability to match fabric and craftsmanship to the lingerie needs of her clientele. The range of her Manhattan clients allows playwright Lynn Nottage to explore themes of race, sexuality, loyalty, self worth, and social status.

Nottage’s attempt to marry all the themes taxes credibility but the individual pieces are achingly touching. Esther, at 35, is high on talent, humility, and core values and low on self-esteem and, according to her own assessment, plain and unattractive. Living in an all female boarding house, she foresees a life as a spinster.

When a letter from a laborer digging the Panama Canal arrives, Esther, who can’t read, depends on other characters to read it to her. This device connects her with her white Fifth Avenue client Mrs. Van Buren (Amanda Ruggiero), her red light district client Mayme (Kris Sidberry), and Mrs. Singleton (Cheryl Singleton), both African American, who each bring their class’s perspective to Esther’s situation.

Esther’s shopping forays take her to fabric merchant Mr. Marks, an unmarried orthodox Romanian Jew. The scenes between these two characters, marginal in social class and status, take on dual meanings as lonely Mr. Marks delicately strokes the rich textures of the silks he saves for her, his only customer with equal appreciation for the fine materials. One of the most breathtakingly tender scenes in the play takes place during one such meeting.

Esther agrees to marry George, the Barbadian laborer, sight unseen, who, we are not surprised to learn, is not the thoughtful, romantic man she expected him to be.

The triangle that develops between Esther and Mayme and George is telegraphed early on but crushes Esther and depletes her of savings and her dream of opening her own beauty shop.

“Don’t give a man a piece of your heart unless he gives you a piece of his,” Esther’s land lady, the sage widow Mrs. Singleton, tells her. Naïve Esther ignores the signs and pays the price.

The scenes between Esther and Mrs. Van Buren underline the gulf between the black and white societies of the early 1900s (and, we wonder, of contemporary society).

The Lyric Stage Company consistently makes the most of its performance space. The production values - set, costumes, lighting, music - were thought out imaginatively and cleverly delivered by Director Summer L. Williams.

No matter that the story is stitched together in a bit of a patchwork, the ensemble makes for a moving night at the theater.

Photo by Glenn Perry for the Lyric Stage Company

SpeakEasy Stage Company's "A Future Perfect": GenXers Cross Into Adulthood

A Future Perfect
Roberts Studio Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston
Playwright: Ken Urban
Director: M. Bevin O’Gara
Set, Cristina Todesco; Costumes, Elisabetta Polito; Lights, Jen Rock; Sound, Nathan Leigh.

SpeakEasy Stage Company
Date closing: Feb. 7, 2015

Subtlety is not playwright Ken Urban’s style. His play “A Future Perfect” has an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink inclination to wrestle with a bunch of themes, all of them nailed down with a directness that leaves little to the imagination.

The first scene sets up comfy enough. Two couples who’ve known each other for years, meet at Max and Claire’s apartment in Brooklyn for dinner. Tranquility lasts two minutes. When Elena asks for water instead of her usual wine, Max joshes, “What, are you pregnant?” An awkward pause. Alex, trying to come to grips with becoming a father, fumbles around for a direct answer. Elena finally says "Yes.”

Brian Hastert, Marianna Bassham, Chelsea Diehl, Nael Nacer in world premier of "A Future Perfect"

A cheer, a toast, and general merriment usually ensue after such an announcement. Claire is clearly agitated. She manages to ask, “What about your job?" a seemingly insensitive response rather than the expected hugs and euphoria.

Max is clearly surprised but manages to offer a toast after what seems like an eternity of uncomfortable attempts. The party ends prematurely. Claire and Max’s muted response has clearly generated a rift between the couples. The decision to have a child?  Max and 38 year-old Claire have let that slide for years, holding on to a sense of youth for which they no longer qualify and career paths, especially for Claire, ascending the ladder in a high-powered advertising firm and the major bread winner.

The next 90 minutes are loaded with dialogue that fills in backstories, probes the stability and foundation of both marriages, and how two couples can be so close to each other and communicate so little. The play doesn’t offer any new insights into classic relationship impasses. The candor from each character, familiar to us from TV sitcoms, is often brutal and funny.

The dialogue treads its way through questions like how do you define yourself, what do you value, how do you make decisions (job, family, having a baby) that will change your life forever, what/who do you leave behind as you become older are considered head on. For Max and Claire, how do you nurture a relationship as you mature into your late thirties.

The play’s central questions are not new but are presented with enough dramatic force to have repercussions for us in the audoience. Decisions about career vs. family, maintaining friendships as we get older, and acknowledging that we're getting older, are familiar to any who’ve navigated the same shoals.That would be just about all of us.

Writer Ken Urban actually popped the “What…are you pregnant?” question as a joke to the wife of a friend a few years ago when she refused a glass of wine at a party. When she surprised everyone with a "Yes," the group celebrated. And another woman said, "I'm pregnant, too!"

Urban realized that their lives were changing. “A Future Perfect” was his way of turning over the questions that surfaced as he felt himself and his friends in transition, growing older.

It’s fun watching Marianna Bassham plumb the conflicting aspects of Claire’s character. Smart, commanding, and competitive, Claire defines herself (and even her friends and husband) by job title. She  values prestige and hides her need for love under an emotional core wrapped in chain mail.

Brian Hastert as her husband Max is Claire’s opposite and soul mate. An idealist, he has a job that appeals to his sensibilities but realizes his career path has hit a plateau. He’s willing to risk his tenuous position as a poorly paid writer for PBS when he pushes to have an anti-war message included in a puppet show he’s created. Developing a partner who meshes with Claire’s strong personality and seems credible is no easy job. Hastert is up to the task.

Nael Nacer and Chelsea Diehl as Alex and Elena are largely foils against which Claire and Max can work out their marriage and ideals. They seem a less likely couple than Max and Claire but hey, who knows what chemistry or circumstance makes a relationship work. And they each bring intensity to their roles.

The play’s final scenes reminded me of the O’Henry tale the Gift of The Magi.  Both Claire and Max give up something they prize - and become more committed adults. They just might make it for the long haul.

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Photo: Craig Bailey

Red Hot Patriot: The Kick–Ass Wit of Molly Ivins at the Lyric Stage Company, Boston

Red Hot Patriot: The Kick–Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.
by Margaret Engel & Allison Engel
Directed by Courtney O’Connor
Set, Katharine Burkhart; Costumes, Sarie Gessner; Lights, Chris Brusberg; Sound, Chris Kurtz.
Staged by the Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA,
Through January 31.

The kick-ass surprise of the night was to hear that star actress Karen McDonald is in the hospital. “She is fine, she wants you to know, and will be out of the hospital next week,” said a member of the Lyric Stage Board of Directors. The house lights had just dimmed. We were expecting the usual remarks (“If you love the play tell everyone, if you don’t, don’t say a word…” “Turn off your phones and that includes texting please” “The exits are…”) and were greeted with this bombshell.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the next thing he said was, “Paula Plum will be reading the part. She has agreed to do this on little notice (last Tuesday). Give her all the support you can.” I admire Paula Plum. But geez. I thought McDonald would fit in to the role of Molly Ivins like a well-worn glove. Just about every critic in New England had gone gaga over her performance.

House goes dark. Stage lights come up. There’s Molly Ivins, leaning back on a task chair, big red hair, blue denim shirt over a red jersey, jeans with a pair of well worn brown cowboy boots draped over a grey metal desk. The audience applauds. Ivins/Plum acknowledges with a conspiratorial grin and a slight wave… then picks up the script.

The play opens with Ivins trying for the umpteenth time to write a column about her authoritarian father who is dying. His presence as a motivating force in Ivins’ life resurfaces often.

I’ll tell you, not many actors in town could have done what Plum pulls off. She homes in on Ivins thick-as-grease on chicken-fried steak Texas accent and begins to chomp into the script.

Molly Ivins was born into privilege. Daughter of a powerful Houston oil man, cold, conservative, demanding, authoritarian, she traded in the silver spoon for a silver spur that sat like a burr under her saddle for the rest of her life.  Tall, big boned, a shock of red hair, and a big mouth, she always stuck out in a crowd, not always for the reasons another woman might want.

A key to the fact that Paula Plum can pull off the role as she pauses often to glance at the script is that Ivins was so damn funny. (So is Plum when she says, “Why don’t we try that one again…” when she messes up a line of dialogue.) Her wit was dry as tumbleweed and could bite like a rattlesnake. “God gave me all this material!” she gushed after getting a job covering the Texas legislature.

One fabulous example referring to U.S. Representative James Collins: “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” Several advertisers and subscribers canceled their support for the Dallas Times Herald after that one. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

When Ivins describes a “community chicken killing festival” in New Mexico as a  “gang pluck” you get the idea that she could not help tweaking authority, in this case the New York Times, which was paying her salary (“I was miserable, at five times my previous salary…”).

She may have been able to trade in her Texas drawl for one more suited to her Smith College education but her sensibilities were pure Texas…rough and tumble, irreverent and often fueled with alcohol.  She fearlessly and rambunctiously skewered Iraq war President George W. Bush, with whom she’d been in school in Houston as a kid.

Molly was a populist much like Mark Twain, with whom her humor and dry observations about America and its citizens is often compared. Both manage to sandwich contempt and ridicule with a sense of humor that softened repugnance for their targets. Of the six newspapers for whom she wrote for from 1970 to 2006, four were in Texas. Whether she wrote in Minneapolis or New York, her sensibilities were always deep in the heart of Texas.

Ivins would be an anachronism these days. The well-rendered set, with its file cabinets, bundles of newspapers, gray metal desk and humongous bulletin board with curled pages of newspaper columns pinned to it, won’t resemble today’s newsroom, even in remote regions of Texas. It’s hard to imagine a commentator with her populist, opinionated voice commanding an audience again. It’s also hard not to wish someone would rise to the occasion.

The play is written with fond purpose by twin sisters Allison and Margaret Engel, both journalists. The images projected over the bulletin board behind Ivins’ desk of her father, family and friends, and targets during her career give her narrative a feel for the people person Ivins was and a welcome visual context to go with the torrent of Ivins' words.

Her opinions course through the dialogue like waves continually lapping onto a beach. Her feelings though… “I’m one of those people out of touch with my emotions. I treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives — a long-distance call once or twice a year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.’’ As is clear from what the dialogue insinuates, Ivins certainly heard them knocking.

In 2006, she reported that her breast cancer diagnosed in 1999 had recurred. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.” Pure Ivins. Born in 1945, she died a year later at 62.

The play closes as Ivins pounds on the keys of her manual typewriter to finish that piece from the opening scene after learning of her father “The General”’s death.

After 75 minutes, whether channeled by Karen McDonald who knew the script inside out or Paula Plum who reads it, I realize we need Molly Ivins kick-ass words, attitude, and admonishment more than ever.

As usual, she has the last word. It’s not “What would Molly do?” It’s “What would YOU do?” Ivins tells us as the lights dim and she walks off stage.

"The Trip To Bountiful": Stellar Production from Footlights to Finale

"The Trip To Bountiful"
Writer: Horton Foote
Director: Michael Wilson
Set, Jeff Cowie; Costumes, Van Broughton Ramsey; Lights, Rui Rita; Original music and sound design, John Gromada.
ArtsEmerson and Jonathan Reinis Productions in association with Center Theatre Group
November 20 - December 7, 2014

“The Trip To Bountiful” is as richly satisfying a theater experience as you’re likely to find in a long time. Everything works. The cast is loaded with talent from headliners to bit players. The sets, lighting, and music integrate seamlessly, each reflecting a facet of the drama unfolding in front of us. And the Cutler Majestic Theater, with its old time opulent arches, columns, frescoed ceilings and rich ruby color accents, is itself an unselfconscious setting for this warmly wrought drama.

The three main characters play off each other with the sense of familiarity that living together in a cramped two-room apartment can produce over a period of years. Mrs. Carrie Watts, “Mama Watts” (Cicely Tyson), is frail in body but with indomitable spirit forged from living her eighty some-odd years in the Deep South. She has the powerful desire to return before she dies to her childhood home in Bountiful, a fictitious Gulf Coast Texas town about a three hour drive from Houston, where she lives with her son Ludie (Blair Underwood) and his wife Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams). Her son and especially his high-strung wife rebuff her wishes, knowing that tiny, rural Bountiful has slipped into desolation after the Depression. They feel Mama Watts will be crushed to see the town’s demise and her now dilapidated home.

From left: Cicely Tyson, Blair Underwood, and Vanessa Williams, pictured in “The Trip to Bountiful” earlier this year in Los Angeles.Photo courtesy Craig Schwartz

Delicious sub plots abound.  High-strung Jessie Mae balancing her need to use her mother in laws' monthly pension check to underwrite her weekly visits to the beauty parlor with Mama Watt’s habit of irritating her by singing hymns all day long. Ludie’s tentative plan to ask for a raise to better their living accommodations after eight years of being a loyal employee. Jessie Mae and Mama Watts are two pieces of work. Their jousts are epic and hilarious. Both stubborn, they know how to get on the other’s nerves - with Ludie, husband and son, trying gamely to occupy a neutral ground during their skirmishes.

The chemistry between actors is deeply convincing. After a few minutes, I began to feel more like a fly on the wall in the apartment than a theatergoer spectating from seat L3 in the orchestra section.

Cicely Tyson disappears here. What we see, from the play’s first minute in her rocking chair, is Mrs. Carrie Watts, Mama Watts. We can almost smell the sachet that probably scents her dresses and the aroma of the biscuits she invariably made this morning.

One thing is clear. Mama Watts is going to find a way to get to Bountiful. What’s not clear is how the hell can she pull it off. She’s too old to drive and hasn’t been out on her own for years. What transpires in the second act is the reason we go to the theater. We connect. We laugh. We cry. We cheer.

When the coast is clear one day, she makes a break for the bus station. Mama Watts’ chance meeting on a bus heading out of Houston (one of several beautiful sets by Jeff Cowie) with young newly-wed Thelma gives us Mama’s back story - her childhood memories of Bountiful, her parents relationship, the smell of the trees and songs of the birds, getting her hands dirty working the land, the closeness of family ties. 

A scene when octogenarian Mama Watts creakily gets up from the bench in the “Colored” section of the bus station (a sharp reminder of America in the mid 1950s) 12 miles from Bountiful and has Thelma join her in a rowdy dance she remembers doing when she was a teenager ignited a spontaneous ovation. If they hadn’t already, everyone in the sold-out theater fell in love with this woman living her dream.

Against pretty steep odds, Mama Watts gets to visit her home in Bountiful before her son and daughter in law can catch up to her and thwart her plan. What happens there will break your heart, make you weep, and shout for joy, pretty much at the same time.

Written by Horton Foote, The Trip To Bountiful was first produced as a television play in 1953.  Dated? Yes, but in a good way. The set features rotary phones, and wooden AM radios. Women wear 1950s dresses and hairstyles and men wear fedoras to work.  But the human drama, the need for a sense of home and belonging, filled with love and hope no matter the financial status, is universal and drives the narrative.

Proof? Horton Foote’s original Watts family was white. Here, it works brilliantly with a black cast and holds the same wallop.

In its broadest sense, Bountiful is a parable. We all have a Bountiful, whether real or imagined, a place that centers us, represents home in whatever manifestation that’s important to us. At some point in our lives we’re all going to need our Trip To Bountiful. If we’re lucky, it will give us a sense of completion and resolution. And if we’re very, very lucky, it will transform the people closest to us, as it did Mama Watts' son and daughter-in-law.

 
Photos of Cutler Theater by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Closer Than Ever: A Sneak Preview at the New Rep Theatre

Message on my inbox…

You are invited to A Sneak Peek of CLOSER THAN EVER
Attend a working rehearsal with director, Leigh Barrett and cast members from CLOSER THAN EVER.  Get an exclusive look at the production and engage with the cast and director in a brief Q&A session.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27 AT 6:30PM  
ARSENAL CENTER FOR THE ARTS
3RD FLOOR REHEARSAL HALL

 This sounds like a cool idea.  The email invitation says:

About CLOSER THAN EVER  
Each song is a story in Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire's CLOSER THAN EVER, winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical. Twenty-four wise and witty "songs of experience," based largely on true stories, intertwine insightful tales about love, security, happiness, and self-definition in an ever-changing world. Universal experiences and truths are uncovered through charming melodies and smartly-crafted lyrics. Called "one of the half-dozen finest American theater scores of the last decade" by The New York Times.

I’m not a fan of musicals but this looks like a good deal.

About INSIDER EXPERIENCES
New Rep invites our audience members to go behind the scenes as we develop our productions. Our INSIDER EXPERIENCES allow unique glimpses into the rehearsal, design, and technical processes. Attendees become familiar with the New Rep staff, each production's company of actors, director, and designers, and learn about the theatrical process with fellow theatre enthusiasts. All are welcome.

So this is how they make the sausage. By the time I climb to the third floor at 6:30 PM, it feels like I’m in the factory. No AC and the space at the top of the building is stuffy and overheated. We’re sitting in three long rows of chairs behind 8-foot floor to ceiling glass panels opening into a long rectangular rehearsal room. The only way to hear what’s going on inside is through the two doors at each end of the room, maybe 30 feet apart. The upside is that if you’re sitting near one of the doors at each end of the room, an invisible wave of air-conditioned air cools a small area next to it. Most of us are too far away to get relief. But we’re interested.

We literally have a backstage view of the production. The four actors are sitting at a table together with their backs to us are facing in the direction of what will be an audience in two weeks.

Bridget O’Leary, Associate Artistic Director of the New Rep Theatre, welcomes us warmly.

“People are hungry for this kind of experience.” She says. “When we first offered, about ten people responded. As we continued, we’ve had as many as 45 people at these sneak peeks.” Theaters are pro-actively wooing their audiences. Post show talks with actors and directors are becoming common. Now The New Rep is offering “sneak peeks” at pre-production activities.

A few feet away in the rehearsal room, the cast, attired in shorts, T-shirts, jeans, is rehearsing a few of the 24 songs in the production. This is the second of what will be three weeks of rehearsal.

Leigh Barrett, one of the four actors and the show’s director steps out of the rehearsal room. “We’ve been rehearsing a week. We’re working on 13 songs, how to stage them, what the actor’s movements are going to be, and practicing delivering the lyrics.”

As the actors sing their songs, Leigh, back inside, watches while wearing her Director’s hat. During one of the show’s big songs, “Dating Again,” Leigh asks the other three actors to try different ways to present their songs (“Can you try singing that note a little higher at the end?”) The piano player, who will be on stage, is a few feet from us on his side of the partition, replays the song, Leigh and actors go back and forth as the song gets shaped.

A few minutes later, a couple rehearses an intense song about the trials of marriage, one that anyone who’s been in a relationship can relate to. “May I suggest something about your timing with this song, can we have more of this note,” Leigh asks one of the two and scribbles notes to herself.

The actors, including Leigh, work the Dating Again scene several times to refine the choreography, standing, sitting, singing to each other in pairs. Some have memorized their songs, others glance at their songbooks. I can feel a camaraderie beginning to gel as they concentrate on tiny details of pitch, harmony, and timing and talk between themselves. I notice I’m tapping my feet now.

At one end of the rehearsal room, the stage manager and assistant stage manager sit at a table crammed with markers, coffee, snacks, Kleenex, and crackers. They’re are typing notes on laptops and taking videos.

The cast will rehearse on stage next week. They’ll take about ten hours of “tech” time to set up lights and microphones, costumes, shoes (they begin wearing them right away, break them in before the show, Bridget tells us). Photos for press will be taken at that point.

Our allotted thirty minutes flies by. Bridget escorts us down to the Mosessian Theater to finish the experience with a brief Q and A. By coincidence, the two men in charge of building the set have just begun to build it. I’ll bet a “sneak peek” at the set building process would be a draw to many theater-goers.

By 7:30 PM, Bridget, who’s answered questions ranging from production budgets to artistic vision, thanks us for being theater advocates and wishes us good night.

Interesting factoid from this session: once the show has begun, the director can no longer change an actor’s lines. If a director wants to do that, he/she must write a note to stage manager,  who gives it to the actor, who can follow or decline. (Facts like this are terrific insights, just the kind of information I hoped to learn tonight.)

Notes to Bridget: The sneak peak concept is great. Here are a few suggestions for the first 30 minutes outside the rehearsal room from a grateful member of that audience of about 20 people.

Your comments are nuggets that give us a framework to understand what we’re witnessing. It was nearly impossible for me to hear you unless you were standing at my end of the rows.  Sound is muffled in that space and if you speak too loudly it will pass through one of those two doors at each end and interfere with the actors at work. It was frustrating to miss a bunch of what you or Leigh said when you spoke from the other end of the rows of chairs. Please find a better way for us to hear what you and directors/actors say to us as we sit outside the rehearsal room. And please figure out a way for us on the other side of the partition to hear what’s going on inside the rehearsal room.

This would make the sneak peak a smashing and informative theater experience.

Closer Than Ever
Presented by The New Rep Theatre
The Charles Mosesian Theater
Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
September 6 – September 28, 2014

Music by David Shire
Lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr.
Directed by Leigh Barrett
Musical Direction by Jim Rice

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. with permission of New Rep

Boston Theater Marathon 16: Fifty Ten-Minute Plays, Ten Hours - Such A Deal!

The Boston Theater Marathon XVI, Produced by The Boston Playwright's Theatre

The most unique theater experience of the year, and best bang for your buck, the 16th Annual Boston Theater Marathon…Sunday, May 11, 2014

WHAT
53 ten-minute plays, by 55 New England playwrights, produced by 54 New England theatres…in ten hours

WHERE

Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston

WHEN
Begins at noon and wrap up promptly at 10 p.m., with a party to follow.

WHO

Hundreds of New England actors; dozens of directors, technicians; volunteers; and you.

HOW

Several hundred plays have been submitted from writers from New England, fifty are chosen by a panel of readers.


BONUS

The Boston Theater Marathon will include The Warm-Up Laps on May 10 featuring three staged readings. These readings are free and open to the public.


COST

Your all-day pass ($25 in advance; $35 the day of the event) allows you to come and go as you please. The tickets are general admission.

BENEFICIARIES
As always, net proceeds from ticket sales to the BTM benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, which provides financial support to theaters and theater artists in times of need.

OTHER STUFF TO KNOW


• The Calderwood Pavilion Theater has the most comfy seats in town, clear sight lines, and stellar production capabilities.

• Range of play’s subject matter: love in its innumerable forms; friendship; history; personality disorders; guilt; coming of age; boomers coming to terms with mortality; and the occasional over the top politically incorrect sketch, among many other themes.


• Hilarious plays, poignant plays, absurd plays, plays with hardly any dialogue, plays full of dialogue, plays that give you a lump in your throat, plays that make you laugh out loud, plays that make you think, the occasional one that makes you cringe. Not every play will pull you in. Some will knock your socks off.

• This is bare bones theater. It is astonishing how two or three actors and two or three props, can engage our imaginations 


• Take a bag lunch, nothing that crinkles though, and a drink. I have two friends, dedicated theater goers, who’ve been to every BTM, arrive shortly before noon, sit in the same seats every year, sort of like season ticket holders at a Sox game, are there for the duration, bag lunches and all.


• The tickets allow you to leave and return to the theater all day long. Take a coffee break and you miss ten plays. So what, you can see forty more.


• Up and comers: chances are you’ll see a few actors whose names will light up the theater scene in the coming years.

ADVICE FROM A PRO (from my post http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2011/05/the-boston-theater-marathon-50-plays-in-10-hours-this-sunday-may-22-2011.html)

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



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

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



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



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



Let’s say you can only spend two hours at the theater on Sunday. You’ll see a dozen plays. Even at the day/of price of $35, that's $2.91 per play. You might end up calling the friends you were supposed to have dinner with to tell them to pack a sandwich and come down to the theater.

If I hadn't planned months ago to be in San Diego dancing at Gator By The Bay, I'd be there with a bag lunch. If you go, tell me what I missed. I can take it.

pt review from 2010

Boston Playwright Theatre's archives of BTM I-XV

The Whale: Plumbing Murky Depths

THE WHALE
Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion
Boston Center for the Arts. SpeakEasy Stage Company
Playwright: Samuel D. Hunter
Director: David R. Gammons
Set, Cristina Todesco; Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley; Lights, Jeff Adelberg; Sound, David Remedios.

SpeakEasy Stage Company, runs through April 12, 2014
Two acts 70 minutes, 60 minutes, one fifteen minute intermission

Sometimes a play touches all the bases but never reaches home plate for me. The SpeakEasy Stage Company production of "The Whale," playing until April 12 at Roberts Auditorium in the Calderwood Pavilion on Tremont Street is one of those.

I just saw yesterday’s matinee performance of “The Whale." The play featured good acting by some highly regarded Boston actors but the play just didn't move me. I couldn't get a grip on exactly what the playwright (Samuel D. Hunter) or director (David R. Gammons) intended to convey.

My takeaway was that I saw a well-acted play, two young actors who show promise, and a few well-timed funny scenes that lightened the heavy, dark mood of the play. The serious scenes, including ones intended to shed light onto why Charlie (The Whale), played by John Kuntz, got to be the way he was, weren't strung together cohesively enough for me to care deeply about him or the characters around him. I felt sorry for Charlie... but that’s not what I’m looking for in a theater experience.

The mechanics of the play do their part to add value to the show. The set (Cristina Todesco) is a powerful visual image of Charlie's out of control eating disorder and general out of control life...a basement apartment strewn with empty soft drink cans, wrappers from potato chips, candy, takeout containers, pizza cartons, so dense that they rattle around under the feet of Charlie's nurse (Georgia Lyman), the young Mormon missionary who visits for his own need for redemption, Charlie's 17 year-old daughter and finally his ex-wife (Maureen Keiller) who enter his cramped, smelly, trash pit of an apartment.

The soundscape (David Remedios) is a combination of amplified sounds of Charlie’s labored breathing, whale songs/communications, and ominous electronic storm sounding effects all highlighting the loose, “Moby Dick” imagery in a book report written by Charlie’s daughter Ellie when she was in 8th grade and read several times during the play’s two acts. If you're going to hit me over the head with a hammer, give me a good reason to sustain the blow.

The lighting (Jeff Adelberg) and sound effects punctuate each scene deftly. Costume designer Gail Astrid Buckley deserves credit for her outstanding setup for sizing up John Kuntz's Charlie (The Whale). Watching Kuntz's Charlie pull his 500-pound plus character up from his couch to walk to the bathroom is testament to the character's condition being trapped in his own voluminous body and Kuntz’s extraordinary ability to show it in wrenching, lurching movements.

Two of the most scarred characters are Charlie's teenage daughter Ellie played with snarky ferocity by Josephine Elwood and 19 year-old "Elder Thomas", a tormented Mormon with wounded ideals played by Ryan O'Connor. Elwood and O’Connor, remember those names.

Charlie, isolated in rural Idaho, has been making a living for the past 17 years as a college instructor for an online writing course (no cameras involved). I could not figure out how un-closeted Charlie's repeated beseeching to his students to write their essays with honesty fit into the grand scheme of things - obesity, religion, homosexuality - nor how the awkwardly explained, mysterious, slow death of his lover from malnutrition was connected to Charlie's apparent desire to eat himself to death.

The play got a boffo review from the Boston Globe so I’m wondering what I missed. If you see the show, I’d love to hear your take.

Photo by Craig Bailey

Rich Girl: Smart Money Says You'll Be Impressed

"Rich Girl"
Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Playwright Victoria Stewart
Directed by Courtney O'Connor
NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE
March 28 - April 26, 2014

Running time: Approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, including one intermission.
FULL REVIEW LATER THIS WEEK!

I just returned from a press opening for Rich Girl...really strong production, loved it. Good story, well told, powerfully acted and directed. I'll put together a review later this week that says so...

Playwright Victoria Stewart does a fine job of recasting this drama/comedy, based on "Washington Square" written by Henry James in 1880, made into "The Heiress," a film in 1949 with box office stars of the era...women, men, money, love... there's a volatile combination for you.

Stewart changed father/daughter relationship in the original to a mother/daughter relationship and this mother/daughter pulls it off with increasing layers of complexity. The other two roles are strong, one adding a wonderful element of farce, the other, the love interest, kept me guessing till the final moment and then some!… satisfyingly resists the notion of tying it all together in a neat bow.

 

Soul Mates: Original, Provocative, Fabulously Acted

I saw this play last night, wrote this review in 30 minutes. The play's last two nights are tonight and tomorrow night. Time is of the essence.

Soul Mates
Boston Center for the Arts
Black Box Theater next to the Calderwood Pavilion
March 21, 2014
Approximate Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes with no intermission
Cost: $30, $15 for Seniors


Look, I’ll write more about this by tomorrow but right now I want to tell you one thing. Get yourself down to the Boston Center for the Arts Black Box Theater next to the Calderwood Pavilion and see "Soul Mates". The last two shows are tonight and tomorrow.

This was the biggest bang for my buck I've had at the theater all season.

Funny, touching, poignant, provocative, the four actors, in pairs of two for each of the eight vignettes, are all in for every single minute. During the 90-minute play, I laughed, I winced, I had a lump in my throat, and I stood up to cheer at the end of the play. All four actors, no matter how they are paired, connect solidly with each other. The premise of the play, acted out in each scene, is that a soul mate is not that one solitary person on the planet who resonates with you in that deep, enduring, satisfying way.

Playwright Kirsten Knisely believes that and, by the end of the play, so do I.  We can feel completed by a friend, a lover, a family member. Love, loyalty, and friendship, even if it is for a brief but important period in your life, add up to be moments in time with a kindred spirit, a soul mate. It doesn't have to an epiphany with a spectacular 'Ah Hah!" halo surrounding it. Whether you acknowledge it in the moment or with the benefit of hindsight, you were loved and accepted by someone who saw you exactly as you are.

From the first of the eight vignettes to the last, the play is intensely acted, occasionally electrifying, often touching or wildly funny, and always feels right and true. Watching the actors, it was easy for me to recognize my own awkward moments of feeling embarrassed or shy,  or lacking the words to express my true self when trying to break through emotionally with a friend or lover… and the soaring sense of relief, joy, and satisfaction when I became myself rather than the person I thought I should be.

I’ll say more about the actors, directing, lighting, stage managing, and will probably edit this first draft in a post tomorrow.

Right now all I want to tell you is that this play is in the lead for my choice of "Hidden Gem of the Season."
++++++++++++++++++++++

POST SCRIPT written a week after seeing the play…

The Cast (playing multiple characters):
Angela Keefe, Laura Menzie, Joe Kidawski, Brett Milanowski

Playwright: Kirsten Knisely
Director: Caroline L. Price (www.carolinelprice.com)

Producing Artistic Director/Set Design: Danielle Lucas
Props Design: Paul Ezzy
Sound Design/Publicity Photos: Vincent  Morreale
Costume Design: Julia Dauber
Graphic Design: Matthew Scheumann
Program Design: Jeremy Goodman
Stage Manager: Samantha MacArthur

Playing roles from kids to adults, gay and straight, love struck and love struck down, is challenging for any actor. Some of the vignettes hit the mark more squarely than others but there are kernels of truth to be explored in each.  

Laura Menzie and Angela Keefe solidly set the play’s premise (the possibility of having more than one soul mate/pivotal character in life) with great chemistry as two pre-teen girls. The audience lit up with laughter when the two broke into a song and dance rendition of “How Will I Know?”

Angela Keefe managed to consistently inhabit every character she played, from grade school kid to adult. She choreographed the dancing in “An Awesome Dancer” to boot. Director Caroline L. Price does a fine job of holding together a play spanning years 1946 – 2011. Brett Milanowski’s mugging to portray emotional discomfort is just right in some scenes, overdone in a couple of others because he has the range to suggest it without the exaggerated facial expressions. Joe Kidawski and Milanowski are at the top of their game in the vignette “Boys Will Be Boys.” Kidawski and Angela Keefe shine in “The Arrangement.” Laura Menzie is affecting as she acknowledges her complicity in a relationship that came apart (The Beginning To An End.")

It’s amazing what a company on a shoestring budget can accomplish with sets. All this play needed was an 8x10 red rug, a few chairs, a blanket, anda few all-purpose wooden boxes. The actors and our imaginations do the rest. The audience spanned 20s to 70s, good to see several non-white spectators in the crowd (the Black Box Theater seated 70 for the show, was almost full).

This was the kind of production that reminds me that Boston is an evolving theater city with lots of small, unheralded companies daring to try new material or remix standards. It may be unevenly acted or produced and has its share of successes and failures but it is vital, undaunted by lack of attention from major outlets, and driven to create stimulating work.

Death Of A Salesman: Mighty Production at the Lyric Stage Company

Death Of A Salesman
Lyric Stage Company
March 15, 2014, ends March 16
Running time 2 hours 45 minutes with one 15 minute intermission
Director Spiro Veloudos
Janie E. Howland - Scenic Design; Gail Astrid Buckley - Costume Design; Karen Perlow - Lighting Design; Dewey Dellay - Original Music


You have to be brave and bold to mount a production of this play, thought to be one of the best of the 20th century. It would be easy to descend into sentimentality or veer into a political statement about the cold-hearted nature of the American enterprise system.

Director Spiro Velouldos does neither, thanks to a superb cast and careful adherence to playwright Henry Miller’s two pages that specify precisely what the play’s set should look like… a worn-down apartment in Brooklyn in 1949 in which much of the furniture and appliances are already old.

The Lyric Stage Company nails the set right down to the junky off-white Hastings refrigerator, shabby linoleum on the kitchen floor, and two other rooms in the apartment. It feels small and cramped, much like the lives of the Loman family.

The cast does the rest. It doesn't take long to realize that Willy Loman has transformed the American dream into an ongoing American nightmare. While it's painful to watch him descend into delusion and play out his final get rich scheme, it's even more disturbing to watch how Willy's dreams have stunted the lives of his wife Linda (Paula Plum) and his two sons Biff and Happy, solidly acted by Kelby T. Akin and Joseph Marrella.

Willy has never been able to connect the dots between his lofty dreams and what it takes to achieve them. He never really understood that a smile and a shoeshine were not enough to forge a successful career as a salesman. You had to make the numbers.

The beauty of Henry Miller's play is how artfully, through dialogue, flashbacks, and voices imagined by Willy, that he leads us to understand how Willy’s dreams for his sons have unwittingly stunted them as young men yet kept alive his wife's love for him. She knows he’s a good man, does not know of his infidelties, a secret that has consequences.

Willy’s accounts of his prodigious days as a salesman are countered by small bits of reality that seep through every scene Henry Miller has written. It’s not pretty. Willy has been a mediocre salesman at best. Humans are dreamers by nature. Most of us know the difference between our dreams and our realities. Many of us have had moments like Willy in which we realize our lives and our dreams for our lives don’t match perfectly. We adjust.

The Willys of the world don’t adjust. They self -destruct. Watching Willy deconstruct is painful enough. Watching his sons run the same pattern is unbearably sad.

Ken Baltin carries the play on his shoulders from the first moment he shuffles into his dingy apartment after an awful trip on the road. His mixture of bravado, bonhomie and self-importance, is clearly tinged with desperation and the ominous realization that he has failed as a father, husband, and, worst of all for him, as a salesman. Willy has died on his feet long before he dies at the play’s dark final scenes.

For my money, Paula Plum is the Meryl Streep of Boston theater. I've never seen her been anything less than exceptional. Her portrayal of Linda Loman is extraordinarily shaded. Willy doesn’t give her the chance to interrupt him when he’s talking which is most of the time but Linda is Willy's chief cheerleader. She’s also firm and perceptive. Linda tries to broker peace between her sons and their father, seeing what she believes to be their lack of understanding of the man at best and their contempt for him at worst. “Attention must be paid!” she demands of her sons when Willy begins his final slide. And is willing to banish them from her home when they don’t.

Every little thing about this play works. The team of Janie E. Howland - Scenic Design; Gail Astrid Buckley - Costume Design; Karen Perlow - Lighting Design; Dewey Dellay - Original Music gives the play an authentic period feel.

The entire cast, especially Kelby T. Akin and Joseph Marrella as Loman's sons, Charley (Larry Coen) and Willy's brother Ben (Will McGarrahan) make the mark. Credit Veloudos with casting young African-American Omar Robinson as Howard Wagner, the son of Willie’s former boss who now runs the sales business. There was one black face in a full house audience of 240 tonight. Boston needs to expand its audience in terms of race and age. Unusual casting like this can help turn that around.

Photos courtesy of Lyric Stage Company website

Appendix:
The cast:
Ken Baltin -Willy Loman
Paula Plum - Linda Loman
Joseph Marrella - Happy Loman
Kelby T. Akin- Biff Loman
Victor L. Shopov - Bernard
Eve Passeltiner - The Woman
Larry Coen - Charley
Will McGahhahan - Uncle Ben
Omar Robinson - Harold Wagner
Margarita Martinez - Jenny
Jaime Carrillo - Stanley
Jordan Clark - Miss Forsythe
Amanda Spinella – Letta

Robin Hood: Lustrous Lollapalooza of a Play Part2

THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD
Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge 617-547-8300.
Playwright : David Farr
Director: Gisli Örn Gardarsson
Set, Börkur Jónsson, Costumes, Emma Ryott, Lights, Björn Helgason, Sound, Jonathan Deans
Performing company: American Repertory Theater
Date closing: Jan. 19
Ticket price:  Starting at $25

Arrive early so you can appreciate the transformation of the theater space. Two steps in the door and it feels like you're under the canopy of an old-growth forest, the air is moist and chilly, the cascading set a rich mixture of browns and greens that stretches into the midst of the theater, and strains of music coming from somewhere.

Five young men, tall, skinny, bearded indie rockers in boots, baggy pants and funky hats dressed like extras in the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" appear from a dimly lit grotto under a massive tree trunk at the way back corner of the set. They shuffle, ramble, and high step their way across the grassy set all the way up and down the theater aisles amongst bemused audience members trying to find their seats. "Poor Old Shine," (mandolin, guitar, standup bass, percussion, pump organ) sings a rollicking danceable ditty, "Don't Let Your Burden Touch the Ground" with fierce upbeat energy. For a while, I think the band must have taken a wrong turn on the way to Club Passim down the street. In the ten minutes before the play, they’ve got us jacked up considerably. The crowd is cheering even before the play begins. If this production doesn’t come out of the blocks strong, I’m thinking it could sink like a stone.

First scene: A simulated coach, servant acting as horse, a well-dressed couple on a daring ride through Sherwood Forest which we become aware is not the safest place for such travelers. Indeed they are stopped by Robin Hood and his Merry Men who leap from trees and bound with astonishing athletic tumbles, twists, and turns to surround the coach and relieve the frightened nobles of their pocketbooks then send them in their underwear to pull their own cart coach out of the woods. They are happy with their heist and add it to the riches they have already fleeced from travelers in their woods. And have no intention of desisting. Forget about that stone.

Robin Hood (Jordan Dean), tall, muscular, with six-pack abs, makes it clear that Sherwood Forest is a man's world. "Women cause cause tension in the heart of a man, they make us unreliable, we must make our heart a fortress." As the alpha dog in the ‘hood, what he says goes. No matter how much I rave about this, you will be astonished by the jaw dropping Olympic-style twisting turning tumbling gamboling the actors perform during their staged battles and thieveries.

Marion’s father, the Duke of York, is pressured by the villainous Prince John (Damian Young) for Marion’s hand in marriage. Marion loathes the lecherous prince. Marion (Christina Bennett Lind) learns of Robin Hood and his mercenary ways from her endearingly charming and effeminate attendant Pierre (Christopher Sieber), a scene-stealer of the first order. And thus sets up the story when Marion decides to disguise herself as Martin of Sherwood and rob and give to the poor as a proper Robin Hood should. Robin confronts and is impressed by the spirited Martin of Sherwood/Marion who persuades him to join forces to battle the rich and rescue two children kidnapped by the cruel Prince John.

Jeremy Crawford as Little John, Jordan Dean as Robin and Poor Old Shine. (Evgenia Eliseeva)

The first act loses traction from time to time but regains its footing, often thanks to Marion’s attendant Pierre, whose comic antics, double-entendres, and fey mannerisms never fail to tie together a plot element and draw guffaws from the audience. The casting, from the lowliest ruffian to the principals, is spot on. Robin Hood, Marion, Prince John and Pierre fill their roles with outsized energy.

Although you know the bad guys will receive their comeuppance, the lovers will be united and the kingdom will live happily ever after, there are one or two surprises that sweeten the foreknowledge. After witnessing “The Heart of Robin Hood,” it is clear that he’d never have found his heart were it not for the resourceful personality and strong willed nature of Marion, who brings enough civility to Robin so he retains his alpha status while adding a dimension of humanity and love.

Creative vision, writing, acting, set lighting, design, music, and start-to-finish entertainment, this is one of the most complete and satisfying productions I’ve seen in years.

++++++++++++++++

A Cheer to the Loeb Drama Center
The Loeb Drama Center was made for a production like this. In my humble opinion, the Loeb uses its arsenal of theatrical magic (apparatus to allow actors to fly, to descend from the sky using thick circus type rope and cables, to appear from portals under the stage, capacity to fabricate stunningly creative sets, to name a few) because it wants to keep them from gathering dust - they often upstage or overmatch the production on stage. In "The Heart of Robin Hood", they do it because it’s a perfect fit. 

Building the set...
No other theater in town could mount this production in such spectacular scale. The back of the set is a huge arc that looks like someone detached a wide forty foot high section of a grassy roller coaster and deposited it there. From it actors slide and tumble, drawbridges appear to allow scenes to take place in locales other than the forest, and several other things it would be shame to tell you and spoil surprises. The aerial ballet during the finale is ...oops, I'll let you find out for yourself.

The Heart of Robin Hood: Lustrous Lollapalooza of a Play

THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD
Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge 617-547-8300.
Playwright : David Farr
Director: Gisli Örn Gardarsson
Set, Börkur Jónsson, Costumes, Emma Ryott, Lights, Björn Helgason, Sound, Jonathan Deans
Performing company: American Repertory Theater
Date closing: Jan. 19
Ticket price:  Starting at $25

I’m going to write more about this soon but I need to shout this out right now. Stop reading and get a ticket to this lollapalooza of a production – pronto.

If Cirque de Soleil got a hankering to put on a first rate piece of theater that smacked of Shakespeare it would display the visual oomph and playful spirit of "The Heart of Robin Hood." This thing is bigger than life. Actors appear from holes in the ground, a pond in the middle of the stage, tumble down from the tree canopy that overspreads the playground of a set, and appear from hidey holes and platforms built into the cascading backdrop of the set. I’ve never seen a playhouse so imaginatively transformed into a magical forest, Sherwood Forest to be exact.

I’m getting ahead of myself. There are so many things to rave about. Playwright David Farr has turned the legend inside out. By the final scenes of the play he retains the spirit of the original but turns it upside down and shakes it. Robin Hood is a bit of a thug, steals from the rich and shares it with his Merry Men. Poor peasants oppressed by the overlord? What poor peasants?

Then appears Marion, daughter of the Duke of York, allied with Richard The Lionhearted presently off crusading in distant lands. Marion, with her irrepressible attendant Pierre, heads for the forest to escape marriage to the villainous lecher Prince John and to teach a thug a lesson in civility.

From left: Jordan Dean, Christina Bennett Lind, and Christopher Sieber in American Repertory Theater’s production of “The Heart of Robin Hood.”

What follows is a merry mix of comedy, drama, and high jinx. Great dialogue, sight gags, an ingeniously designed set, sensationally choreographed slow motion fight scenes, a few gory scenes to leaven the broad humor, mistaken identities and a couple of vile characters representing the forces of evil.... a wonderful amalgamation of alchemy and imagination
 
Every one of the actors gloms onto their roles with zest you can feel all the way to the back of the theater. (Note: The Loeb, with a capacity of around 590 reduced the house to 530 seats to accommodate the sprawling set. No matter where you sit, you won’t be far from the action.)

Oh. Get there early.  The Connecticut roots band  “Poor Old Shine” adds a smashingly appealing musical element. Dressed like a bunch of extras in “O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” they rollick through the theater for about ten minutes amongst patrons trying to find their seats. Their singing and playing is seamlessly integrated, the musicians of Poor Old Shine even get into the acting. Ever seen a bass fiddler imitate a wild boar?

With a rousing finale, all's well that ends well.
TO BE  CONTINUED...

 

The Cocktail Hour: Predictable But Carefully Shaken

"The Cocktail Hour"
A play by A.R. Gurney
Huntington Theatre Company
Boston University Theatre
Director: Maria Aitken
Set, Allen Moyer, Costumes, Candice Donnelly, Lights, Paul Palazzo
November 15- December 15, 2013:


This play is a real hoot. Using the apt vehicle of the social ritual called “the cocktail hour’ playwright A.R. Gurney captures then surgically dissects the 1970s upper middle class milieu in which it was still thriving. The man of the house returns from work and the family gathers to talk about the travails of the day. The conversation is lightweight, argument is off limits, and olives for martinis are in far greater supply than emotional content. Dinner is often delayed. The alcohol keeps the illusion of family cohesiveness intact. Cocktail hour is actually a way to be alone together.

The best reason to see this warmly wrought comedy is watching Richard Poe as Bradley, the sublimely over-the-top pater familias. Bradley epitomizes Gurney’s upper class WASP male whose sense of noblesse oblige is big on patronizing, weak on compassion. A stuffed shirt non-pareil, he gleefully chomps upon every scene he’s in. Plastered down gray hair, barrel-chested in his tweed sport coat and slightly-too-short burgundy slacks, he has the stentorian pipes of a news reader who would be lost without the teleprompter.

John (James Waterston) now in his thirties, visits home to announce he’s written a play about the family. The father talks about how he and wife used to go to plays all the time. “They were over promptly then you go to bed." The examined life is not his forte.

“Am I in it?” Bradley asks.
“It cuts pretty close to home,” John answers.
"Write it after I'm dead, not now," his father demands.

The Cocktail Hour by A. R. Gurney, Huntington Theatre Company
Richard Poe (clockwise from left), James Waterston, Pamela J. Gray, and Maureen Anderman portray a New England WASP family in the Huntington Theatre Company production of A. R. Gurney’s comedy of manners The Cocktail Hour. Photos by T. Charles Erickson.
The set, lighting, and costumes are subtle underpinnings that evoke the upper class milieu in which the play takes place.

The setup complete, you know that by curtain time, the foment caused by son John’s play will unearth revelations, truths long buried, behaviors explained, and hurts salved. Then we’ll go home.

Bradley has his own version of events, whether family or history. “I’ll look it up,” John says as his dad tells a tall one explaining the origin of the clipper ship on the label of the bottle of scotch. “No, it will destroy the rhythm of the conversation,” he objects. In scene after scene, we see that Bradley doesn’t allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.

The rest of the family soon appears. Wife Ann (Maureen Anderman, in an exquisitely turned role as wife who’s learned to live with her husband’s spectacularly egotistical foibles, sensing a decent man underneath all that self-aggrandizing behavior), dressed in a pale silk blouse and finely tailored floor length skirt, enters for “Just a splash,” (one of several). She’s followed by daughter Nina (Pamela J. Gray) who brings her own dysfunctional life to the party.

John, who trades his soda water for scotch at the opening of Act 2, says there is something missing in his play (titled "The Cocktail Hour"), a narrative arc, a plot, that he has yet to figure out, that part of the reason he has written the play is to understand his place in the family constellation. By the end of the play, he finds a solution that satisfies all parties. Even Bradley manages to see something in life besides his own image.

Yes, it’s predictable, but so well performed, with so much lively dialogue, that it’s a good night at the theater. It won’t change the way you think about life (unless you need to write a play and bring it home when you visit your parents for the holidays). The play’s ending is too tidily wrapped up but, because it’s acted so damn well, I felt like I’d slugged down a splash myself.

 

Mies Julie: Updated Strindberg Packs Power

Paramount Center Mainstage, Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Writers: Yaël Farber, adapted from “Miss Julie” by August Strindberg
Performing company: Baxter Theatre Centre of South Africa
Presenting organizations: ArtsEmerson Boston, MA
Nov. 30- Dec. 8, 2013

It’s a good thing smoking is not allowed in theaters. With the tiniest of sparks, the Paramount Theater would have gone up in a fireball midway through “Mies Julie” tonight. The heat between Mies Julie (Hilde Cronje) and John (Bongile Mantsai), a laborer on her father’s estate in the rural East Cape region, is incandescent. Mies Julie is acting recklessly while her father is away from the farm. Young, sexually capricious, an entitled Mies Julie exudes a sense of a woman in heat.

PlaywrightYael Farber updated August Strindberg’s  “Miss Julie”, first produced in 1888, to take place in her homeland South Africa. To Strindberg’s original themes dwelling on tensions between class and the sexes, add tension between the races and ownership of land in post Apartheid South Africa. Powderkeg.

Julie flirts provocatively with John, her father’s young black servant whom she’s known since they were both children. John, aroused but aware of his social standing, keeps his distance. With Julie’s persistence, you know he will be sorely tested.

A storm is on the way. With heavy atmospherics, thunderous rumbling bass tones so deep that you feel them vibrating through the theater floor, the mist blowing over the set, you know something of awful Shakespearian scale is going to transpire. And the play has hardly begun.

It is impossible to understate Hilde Cronje’s ability to portray Julie’s raw sexual desire and the way she uses her power as a white woman to manipulate John, at one point saying, “Master is away, you eat here,” ordering John to sit at the wood plank kitchen table.

Bare gleaming legs, short skirt, loose red tunic, she glides with the sultry body awareness of a ballerina intent on seduction, not sure how far to take her precocious behavior. “Kiss my foot,” she demands, then pulls her foot away when he kneels before her.

Underneath the sexuality of this volatile relationship is the friction between white landowners and the black population on whom they depend for labor. The play takes place on the eve of the 18th anniversary of Freedom Day, the first in which citizens of all races were allowed to take part in 1994. Soon after, Nelson Mandela was named President. The right to vote and the assumption of political power by Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) did not immediately address the issue of land ownership. The problem of land ownership plagues South Africa to this day.

Hilda Cronje as Julie and Bongile Mantsai as John in Baxter Theatre Center of South Africa and ArtsEmerson’s production of “Mies Julie.”

The farmhouse kitchen takes up most of the stage. Its rustic worn wood planks, wooden table, chairs, cabinet give Julie, who stalks the stage like a cat, plenty of room to try to work out her demons. Her father is away but his presence is nearly spectral in the form of his black boots that John assiduously buffs while being tested by Julie.

The intermittent presence of John’s mother, who raised Julie after her mother committed suicide, seems to be the only person governing Julie’s behavior. Raised in the old tradition, John's mother knows that much has changed but much remains the same after universal right to vote became the law of the land.

She’s seen enough of her white masters’ behavior to know their faults and cruelty. As a church going servant, she tries to stifle her son’s fierce sense of entitlement to own some of the land on which he toils, land his family owned before their right to own it was abolished in the Bantu Land Act No. 27 of 1913 (described in the theater program). Land restitution was called for in the 1990s but it hasn’t gained much traction. John hasn’t been brave enough to openly defy his master but is becoming more militant in his views.

Sexual politics? Plenty here. Julie’s power as daughter of landowner gives her room to manipulate. The only thing she needs to fear is her own lust. Virile and robust, John knows he has what Julie wants, that it's a source of power for him. Carnal attraction pulls them together. A belief they are each entitled to the farmland pulls them apart. Three generations of Julie’s forebears are buried in the land. John’s relatives are buried under the floor of the kitchen built when the property changed hands.

Clearly, the playwright is a provocateur in her own right. Arguments over who has the right to the land isn’t usually involved in foreplay but here it makes sense. Both John and Julie know that land and who controls it shaped who they are and who they will become.

In a storm of intensity rarely portrayed on stage, John and Julie copulate violently on the kitchen table. John lays claim to Julie and the property she represents. Blood is spilled. Both lives have been destroyed. More bodies will be buried in the land. Who will own it? Farber lets us draw our own conclusions.

Windowmen: Morality Play in the Fulton Fishmarket

Windowmen
A play by Steven Barkhimer
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
Cast: Daniel Berger-Jones (Lester), Nael Nacer (Rocco), Alex Pollock (Kenny), Brandon Whitehead (Vic), and Will Lyman (Al)
Director: Brett Marks
Set, Anthony R. Phelps; Costumes, Rachel Padula Shufelt; Lights and sound, David Wilson.

Running time: two hours ten minutes with one ten minute intermission
November 24, 2013

This play is as much fun and layered complexity as you're going to get in a two-hour theater production. It has everything going for it. The right cast, the right theater, the right set.

A recent college graduate, Kenny (Alex Pollock), is hired as an office assistant at Turner Point Fish in the Fulton Fish Market in roustabout lower Manhattan in the early 1980s, long before it becomes gentrified. With a major in philosophy and a minor in math, he seems to be a weird fit. Vic (Brandon Whitehead), blue-collar and proud of it, is the “Windowman,” who runs the small office. Vic vows to take it easy on him on his first morning of work a little before 4 AM. The previous assistant lasted exactly one day.

Playwright Steven Barkhimer drops two plot bombs in the first minutes of the play. “We were $400 short yesterday. It’s not the first time,” business owner Al tells Vic, who dismisses it as a mistake that will be corrected. A minute later, Al follows with, “I’m getting a computer, that should solve the problem.” It’s hard to get a read on Vic – is he relieved or worried?

After the play’s first frenetic minutes, you sense something is awry. Orders are barked in from a PA system from the warehouse floor. They’re paid for through the noisy sliding metal window, which seems to be a sixth character by the play’s ending. The phone often rings with mysterious gravel-voiced Sal who wants to talk with Al, owner of the business. Kenny screws up some of what Vic calls “the codes”.

The furious pace of ordering, calculating, writing receipts, is tense. Exactly how tempting is the cash coming through that window?

Kenny (Alex Pollock) and Vic (Brandon Whitehead)

“I’ve never seen so much money in my life,” Kenny says surveying the mountain of greenbacks he tallies at the end of his first day. Cash indeed. We begin to wonder about the codes Vic tells Kenny to write on the invoices.

We have ideas how the computer might change business as usual. But what the hell is going on with the money? And why do some of the orders barked from the floor end with “Going south”?  Why is Vic so picky about how he wants Kenny to write up the invoices? Rarely does a play establish its footing so quickly and firmly.

The genius of the play is how these questions are answered. Using back-stories and revealing dialogue, Barkhimer paints a picture of Kenny, Vic, and Al undergoing transformations on a scale fitting the problems by which they are bound together. By the end of the play, you really care about what becomes of the three main characters.

Playwright Steven Barkhimer’s ear for the play’s dialogue was honed at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked after graduating from college in the 1980s. For the next three years, Barkhimer got a degree in the college of hard knocks. If you’re fussy about vulgar language, take a pass on this play.

The set is simple and brilliantly conceived. The messy, cramped office space set in the shoebox-sized Boston Playwright’s Theater with seating at the front of the stage magnifies the immediacy of the intense action going on in the office, the only place we see the action unfolding. The rest is brought to life as characters in the office allude to the action where the fish are sorted and sold on the warehouse floor.

Al comes into the office periodically to check on Kenny. Al inherited the family business. Erudite, inquisitive, and hard driving, if he weren’t running Turner Point Fish, he’d probably be a principal in his own law firm. He’s a hard-ass boss intrigued by this college kid with a knack for numbers, Socrates dialectics and no idea where he wants his life to go. He quickly sizes Kenny up. “The longer you don’t know what you want, the longer you do what someone else wants,” he tells the wishy-washy kid in a paternal but firm way.

None of this would amount to small change if we didn’t get invested in these three guys. First of all, they look and talk so damn right for their parts and have mannerisms to match them. Vic’s beer gut, disheveled appearance, flannel shirt hanging out, is the voice of the working man (“I was born in Brooklyn, live in Brooklyn, and will die in Brooklyn.”).  He takes a liking to Kenny, asks him about his love life (“Are you sending it in every night?” he asks, making a crude gesture) and makes us laugh with his witty, vulgar ripostes to customers at his “window.” Vic confides to Kenny that he has family troubles. His plan to manage them is the fulcrum on which the play turns.

With his diffident way of answering questions, lack of direction, it’s clear that Kenny is drifting. He has a grasp of business efficiencies and the ability to work under pressure cooker days beginning at 4 AM. Kenny can keep track of Vic’s orders coming and going through the sliding metal window box that Vic uses to rake in cash from customers and send receipts to customers at a frenetic pace. There are orders from the warehouse floor, from the phone, from the window. The crackle of business is intense, with the immediacy of a 911 call we can feel all the way to the back of the small theater.

Will Lyman’s Al is the play’s center of gravity. He commands respect or fear. He can quote Socrates, spot fault lines in the cash business, drives his employees hard when he works with them on the warehouse floor. He can read a man’s character as easily as he can gaff fish with the hook hanging over his shoulder. He’s developed his own moral code, a code that is brilliantly on display in “Windowmen”s final scene.

The play is rounded out with Rocco (Nael Naser), a shady small businessman who connives to get better prices and pay late. The other minor character, in cahoots with Vic, is Lester (Daniel Berger-Jones) who works on the warehouse floor with Al and the rest of the crew.

As the second act gets underway, I realize I’m watching a morality play in which men try to do the right thing, each by their own lights. Honesty becomes a relative commodity, a wandering North Star to Al, Vic and Kenny. They’re good men, decent men, doing the best they can.

Al’s plan to resolve business and personal matters is satisfying and laced with wisdom and unexpected humanity. As the lights dim to dark onstage, we see how their fates have changed for the better. And we cheer.

Photo courtesy Boston Playwrights' Theatre

Water By The Spoonful: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives

Lyric Stage Company, Boston
Written by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Director Scott Edmiston
Set, Richard Wadsworth Chambers; Costumes, Elisabetta Polito; Lights, Karen Perlow; Sound design/composer, Dewey Dellay; Video, Amelia Gossett.
November 15, 2013

This is not your average theater production.  The cast is Hispanic, black, Asian, and white.  The setting is split between an online chat room and real-time family drama. Until the second act unfolds it appears to be two plays, interesting but fragmented. Where the heck is playwright Queria Alegria Hudes headed and what’s the point, you wonder.

Like a street performer in Harvard Square, Hudes starts out juggling three balls, then four, then five, then adds a few plates, a bowling pin and a kitchen knife to the mix.  Can she pull it off, and will anyone get hurt are the two questions come to mind. After two hours and 15 minutes, you’re ready to dig into your pocket to give her, the cast and production team of  “Water by the Spoonful” a tip.

One chunk of the play revolves around two twenty something Hispanic American cousins Elliot Ortiz (Gabriel Roderiguez) and Yazmin Ortiz (Sasha Castroverde). The two cousins mothers are sisters. Sasha’s mother has just died, and their family is already fighting over her furniture. Elliot, a wounded Marine veteran, has a dead end job in a sub shop in Philadelphia and dreams of heading to Los Angeles to become a Latino movie star. The stage bond they forge feels authentic, forged in their own Puerto Rican family’s assimilation into American life.

The other chunk recreates an online chat room dedicated to helping its members steer clear of crack cocaine. These are broken people struggling to get through life a day at a time. Separated geographically and culturally, they are joined at the hip via computer.

The set deserves its own credit. Spare, a few plastic chairs, a plastic table, a desktop computer is all that’s necessary. During the online chats, a spotlight illuminates the participants who talk to each other’s online presence, no pretense of keypads or laptops, just people trying to get past the day without getting fired or high. These characters could not be more different. What they have in common is the will, often tested, to survive.

Theresa Nguyen, Johnny Lee Davenport* in Water by the Spoonful. Photo by Mark S. Howard.

Eight plasma screens hang over the simple set show who’s online or photographs or fuzzy videos representing an aspect of the play. We are so used to looking at IPads, iPhone and laptops that we don’t think twice about glancing at the video screens in our vision of the play. At its best, we can’t distinguish between what’s more powerful, the virtual or the real world, as both worlds tug at the characters.

Fountainhead (Gabriel Kutner) is a businessman whose crack habit cost him a job and perhaps a marriage. Orangutan (Therese Ngyuyen) is a young Japanese American searching for a mother in Japan who gave her away to an orphanage. Chutes&Ladders (Johnny Lee Davenport) is a fiftyish IRS bureaucrat trying to break out of self imposed isolation and guilt at losing his family when he got addicted to crack. You feel them.

They have become friends, virtual friends but with loyalties as thick as any real time friendship. They log on daily, know each other’s back story and aren’t shy about offering advice and tough love. The chat room moderator, Odessa (Mariela Lopez-Ponce), a recovering addict of seven years, keeps the chats civil. Her moniker of HaikuMom, the grounded one, is deserved. She’s the glue that holds it together. She also has the most disturbing secret, a secret that embroils and enables (in the best sense) all of them by the play’s conclusion.

Hudes brilliantly pulls the disparate threads together in Act Two. It’s not pretty but it is rewarding. This story of recovery and redemption couldn’t have been written by a playwright who didn’t love the Philadelpia environment in which Elliot, Yazmin and Odessa grew up and characters like those fragile members of HaikuMom’s chatroom.

By the play’s conclusion, you’re rooting for all of them. They may or may not make it but they’ve taken the first step toward a world where their lives transcend zeroes and ones.

"Tribes": Sound/No Sound at SpeakEasy Stage Production

"Tribes"
A Play by Nina Raine
SpeakEasy Stage Company
Directed by M. Bevin O’Gara; Scenic design by Cristina Todesco; Costume design by Mary Lauve; Lighting design by Annie Wiegand; Sound design by Arshan Gailus; Projection design by Garrett Herzig

Roberts Auditorium at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
October 18, 2013

Growing up in a family of five can be challenging enough. Add a father who has a Mensa chip on his shoulder and a son who is born deaf poses problems this play explores. Communication is as much about what is said (and heard) as how much is not.

The play begins at the family dinner table in a well to do upper middle class home. It’s a lively sarcastically amusing dinner conversation especially if you’re accustomed to four letter epithets being passed around like the broccoli. Although father, wife, son and daughter have equally foul mouths, the other son at the end of the table is not engaged in any of the conversation and left alone as the dishes are cleared away. That would be Billy, a young man we learn has been deaf by birth. Billy (james Caverly, who was born deaf) can read lips and has learned (we’re never clear how) to vocalize. He has not participated in any of the rip-roaring conversation, or even been glanced at by the other shouters. What is his place here, we wonder.

Twenty-something Daniel (Nael Nacer) and his sister Ruth (Kathryn Myles) are living at home. Neither has gained enough air speed to lift off into the world of commerce or relationships – a fact pointed out by their father Christopher (Patrick Shea) with what he considers tough love but we hear as demeaning belittling rants that clip whatever wings his children may be spreading. Christopher’s wife Beth (Adrianne Krstansky) seems immune to his rants, even when insultingly directed at her.

Growing up in this combustible family constellation ruled with gravitational force by the father, Christopher is challenging to say the least.  Christopher uses his sharp intellect to throw words around like bricks, denigrating ideas and people with gusto. By the end of Act 1, you suspect his high decibel rants are emanating from a failed academic who has no room for the company of successful wife, children, or anyone else in his galaxy.

Erica Spyres and James (Joey) Caverly in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s “Tribes.” Photo Craig Bailey

Billy’s family has never made an effort to enter his universe. This becomes clear when Billy falls for a young woman he meets at a social gathering of deaf people. Sylvia (Erica Spyres) is slowly going deaf, as has happened to her parents.

Billy brings Sylvia home to the family. Christopher baits Sylvia, takes issue with deaf ‘culture’, defends the choice not to enroll Billy in schools for the deaf (“out of principle, we didn’t want to make you part of a minority world”), maintaining he wanted Billy to feel ‘normal’, and dismisses deaf the deaf community as being inbred and exclusive… a ‘tribe’ he scorns. To him, their signing is a way that separates them rather than connects them to the speaking world.

When Billy learns sign language from Sylvia, worlds collide. Billy’s family stands by in confused silence as Billy and Sylvia “talk” to each other.  If you’ve ever been in the company of foreign language speakers, had no idea whether they were discussing the weather or the piece of spinach in your teeth, you get the point. Four digital screens set above the stage translate conversations as Billy and Sylvia ‘talk.’  Sylvia gets Billy a high-powered job as a lip reading expert in court cases.

His success, unexpected, unanticipated, upsets the family dynamic. Billy’s making it. They aren’t. Beth is an aspiring opera singer challenged with pitch problems, Daniel is attempting to write a thesis we suspect will never be completed, mother Ruth is working on a  “marriage/detective breakdown novel,” and Christopher, an academic with authorial ambitions. None of them have succeeded yet.

The second act begins with heavy-handed exposition. Billy confronts his father for not allowing him to be in the company of other deaf kids and for dismissing deaf culture. “This is the first time you’ve ever listened to me,” Billy shouts at his father, who belittles sign language. Billy and Sylvia struggle with their differences of being deaf at birth versus becoming deaf as an adult when you know what you’re in the process of losing.

Sylvia, Daniel, and Beth deal with their failures as Billy thrives. Billy is in jeopardy of losing his job as he fabricates parts of testimony he’s lip reading to fit his own circumstances. Sylvia decides to be with hearing people until she becomes completely deaf, even though she despises the tribal hierarchy within deaf culture: the highest level being deaf children born of deaf parents.

The play’s set, a sprawling living room/dining room/ kitchen, is ingeniously designed for theater in the round. The dining room table, living room chairs, at stage level, surrounded by kitchen sink, cabinets, bookshelves, and armoires in a low perimeter that surrounds the stage elicit the feel of well-worn comfort. The music - opera, rock, pop - played before the play begins and during scene changes reminds us of how our ears take in the world around us.

The play’s final scene feels like the only forced moment, although still touching, and seems to find a truce between the tribes of hearing and non-hearing. The ensemble acting is as good as it gets. Add it to the superb sound and set design and you have a rich night at the theater.

One Man, Two Guvnors: A Half Baked British Farce

One Man, Two Guvnors, a play by Richard Bean
Directed by Spiro Veloudos, Music Director Catherine Stornetta
Lyric Stage Company of Boston
140 Clarendon Street
Boston, MA 02116

Matthew Whiton - Scenic Design;Tyler Kinney - Costume Design; Scott Clyve - Lighting Design; Andrew Duncan Will - Sound Design; Nina Zendejas - Dialect Coach

Running time: Approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes
with one intermission

Box Office: 617-585-5678     Play runs through October 12, 2013

American writers make screwball comedies, just not as wacky and convoluted as the Brits (whose tastes in comedy you can trace back to Moliere and the Italian commedia dell'arte). This one goes a mile a minute and you need a road map to keep track of the play's route. Neal A, Casey as Francis Henshall, describes himself as "the role model for village idiots everywhere."  Francis is the play's pivotal nutcase -  by turns hapless and wily, makes the most of his slapstick role and fits right in with the blowhards, braggarts, and buffoons who populate the story.

"One Man, Two Guvnors" might also be titled "One Man, Two Plays". The first act of the 2 ½ hour show is pure British madcap comedy. If you enjoyed the Monty Python or the Fawlty Towers series this would be your cup of tea. Running sight gags, pratfalls, byzantine connections linking characters together, and hilarious one-liners delivered deadpan or with a wink to us in the audience, and nutty songs that add frosting to the zany layer cake of a play. Neal A. Casey as Francis Henshall, the fellow with two guvnors, is the chief reason to order a slice of this comedy. The trouble is the cake, which rose well enough in the first act, falls flat in the second act.

I confess that I couldn’t understand many of the rat-a-tat lines delivered by characters in the first act but I laughed along at the loopy comedy. Let’s see, there is Neal A. Casey as Francis Henshall, Tiffany Chen as Pauline Clench, Larry Coen as Harry Dangle (yes, there are obvious lines thrown about with that name), John Davin as Alfie, McCaela Donovan as Rachel Crabbe, Aimee Doherty as Dolly, Harry McEnerny as Gareth, Davron S. Monroe as Lloyd Boateng, Dale Place as Charlie “The Duck” Clench, Alexandro Simoes as Alan, and Dan Whelton as Stanley Stubbers. Their lives are all connected in some vague way. Each of them has a blast overacting, hyperventilating and playing outlandishly.

Francis, a bit of a flibbertigibbet with an apparent eating disorder, is the man with two bosses. He manages to concoct zany stories to cover up the mistakes that irritate each boss, gets into a love match with one of his bosses secretaries (Aimee Doherty as Dolly steals every small bit she has), cooks up several  moments of playful absurdity with members of the audience, and is an endearingly picaresque space shot trying to make a living by using his wits, which are deficient but swallowed by his gullible guvnors.

Neal A. Casey as Francis Henshall and Aimee Doherty as Dolly. Photo Mark S. Howard

Theren are song and dance numbers, sort of Gilbert and Sullivan style, played with a live band in the theater wings, that are meant to underpin parts of the plot, such as it is. The colorful set design is ingeniously devised, swiftly moved about by the actors between scenes, usually accompanied with zippy music.

Oh, and there’s mistaken identity, people who are alive that are supposed to be dead (or was it the other way around). Honestly, at some point it doesn’t make any difference. There’s a familiar ring to the plot. It is based on an 18th century Italian comedy, Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. It is sort of a Shakespearean Comedy of Errors – multiple plots, mistaken identity, young lovers trying to overcome difficulties, slapstick, tangled sub-plots, and earthy humor.

The second act just doesn’t take off. It almost doesn’t matter. You can see that the coincidences begin to congeal into an absurd but serviceable ending in which everyone is paired up or suitably stationed.

If you like Gilbert and Sullivan with a twist, this might be the tonic for you. If you’d like to see how one man, Neal A. Casey as Francis Henshall, can anchor an air headed (and I say this with love) comedy with a cast of ten characters depending on him to be the sun around which they orbit, this is musical comedy is for you.

Jimmy Titanic: An Imaginative Homage To The Unsinkable Titanic

Jimmy Titanic

Written by Bernard McMullen, Directed by Carmel O’Reilly; Lighting,
Tyler Lambert-Perkins
Produced by Tir Na Theatre; Presented by The New Rep Theatre
Arsenal Center for The Arts Black Box Theatre, Watertown, MA
Through June 30, 2013

The story of the sinking of the RMV Titanic has been told in film and TV scores of times. The first film about the disaster was produced 29 days after the disaster and starred one of the survivors. Twenty other films, including the one you probably saw, James Cameron’s Titanic, followed.

I don’t know a single one of them that’s been told as a one-man show by an angel in heaven. In the first scene, Jimmy Boylan (Colin Hamell), who recently passes through the pearly gates after perishing when the Titanic sinks on April 15, 1912, is getting a lesson on how to fly like a proper angel from Archangel Gabriel. When Boylan’s efforts to fly remind us of a drunken duck and Gabriel is seen to be a first class twit, we get the idea that whatever we’re about to witness is an imaginative approach to recounting history.

In the next ninety minutes, Jimmy, a born story teller – are there any Irishmen who are not born storytellers? - plays two dozen roles in what can best be described as a kaleidoscopic historic narrative with an Irish brogue.What propels this glorious retelling is the backstories that weave imagination and fact together in a tightly woven quilt of vignettes told by points of view from every quarter on the compass.

We get the mayor of Belfast worrying that the Titanic’s sinking could damage Belfast’s reputation as a ship building capital and employer of thousands of Irishmen. We get the editor of the New York Times desperately attempting to get the facts straight before trying to scoop the competition (sound familiar?). And of course we get Jimmy’s story, that of a twenty something country lad from outside Belfast, who, with his pal Tommy Mackay, helped build the ship and sign on to shovel coal into the ship’s hungry boilers on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

Mind you, this is all from one man with an immense presence on an unadorned rectangular stage. In a matter of seconds, Boylan’s playing John Jacob Astor, a desperate Italian immigrant shot because he wouldn’t stop trying to have his wife and children seated in a life boat, a coal-shoveling seaman, an entitled British gentleman, a girl in a bar somewhere in heaven, or a stevedore loading lifeboats with women and children.

The real focal point of the show remains the RMV Titanic and Jimmy doesn’t let us forget it. Alternating between stories such as the 700 immigrants in steerage who had to share two bathtubs, Jimmy mimes the way millions of rivets were cast from molten steel and banged into place by Irish laborers. He reels off facts and figures telling the Titanic’s length, width and tonnage, interspersing them with atmosphere of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and the herculean efforts of the 176 men who had to shovel six tons of coal a day into the ship’s furnaces in four hour shifts day and night. On her maiden voyage, she carried 2,224 passengers and crew. 1,502 perished.

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912

Then there’s Boylan’s fabulous caricature of God as a cigar chomping boss not above a bit of larceny as he shakes down Gabriel, the bully at the pearly gates, who’s been shaking down the newcomers he calls the JD (the “Just Dead”) the way they might have been shaken down when they managed to land in the new country. Both of them get a kick out of shaking down the rich and famous for sport. These fanciful caricatures, as only an Irishman like playwright McMullen could conceive, keep the play afloat.

No props. Light fades and music plays to show change of scene, mood, or character. Jimmy dressed in white collarless shirt, gray vest, light gray pants, black shoes has gained notoriety after letting it slip that he went down with the Titanic. Now known as Jimmy Titanic, he’s become quite the ladies man, who find him by using a pokey online dating service (hello, Match.com) “It’s got much better after a JD named Steve Jobs got up here,” Jimmy confides in us.

Forget your ideas of heaven being an egalitarian society.  A privileged British passenger demands that Jimmy deliver his luggage. On the other hand, there are charming scenes of John Jacob Astor, 47, one of the richest men in the world, and his pal author Jacques Futrelle, calmly smoking cigarettes and asking Jimmy and Tommy if they’d like a drink. Astor has already put his 19 year-old pregnant wife aboard a life boat.

Tommy, after years of being on the lowest social tier, thinks they want him to serve them. “No, they want us to sit down and have a drink WITH them!” says Jimmy.

“Tell us about the ship,” they ask. Tommy (says Jimmy), “can tell a story including every detail known to man,” reels off facts and figures we havent yet heard by the bushel.

 “There we were,” Jimmy says, “four men who have nothing in common minutes away from having everything in common.”

Here we have an actor with a gift of gab to weave the story together with the jolt of a Hollywood action movie in a theater space the size of one of the staterooms on the Titanic. Playwright Bernard McMullen and director Carmel O’Reilly set the course for Colin Hamell’s Jimmy Boylan and Hamell goes full steam ahead for ninety minutes.

Photo courtesy New Rep Theatre

Rapture, Blister, Burn: A Light Touch, Heavy Subject-Women's Choices

Rapture, Blister, Burn
A Play by Gina Gionfriddo
The Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
The Virginia Wimberly Theater
527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02116
Saturday, June 22, 2013 Matinee, show closes June 30
Running time 2 hr, 20 minutes with one ten minute intermission

Never mind there’s no new ground broken in this slick production. The cast on stage is having fun delivering the goods. The sets are clever and the scenes involving changes in location are seamlessly integrated during the two-act play.

Catherine Croll (Kate Shindle), published author ("The Politics of Pornography: The Rise Of Degradation As Entertainment") and a familiar face on Dr. Phil, has returned to her New England small college hometown to care for her mother, Alice Croll (Nancy E. Carroll). In the first scene, she’s having beers in the back yard of her former grad school-drinking buddy Gwen Harper (Annie McNamara) and her husband Don (Timothy John Smith), an administrative dean at the college. And oh, Don was Catherine’s boyfriend before she left town to pursue her career.Gwen has forsaken drinking to keep her family of one pre teen and one teenager (who are not part of the cast) together and to charge her smart but pot smoking, porn-addicted husband with enough momentum to keep his job

In short order, Gwen’s college age babysitter Avery Willard (Shannon Esper) shows up. When Catherine offers a summer school class on Feminism, the only two who sign up are, you guessed it, Gwen and Avery. Just about everything the well read and opinionated Avery says lights a fuse that unsettles Catherine and Gwen’s long held beliefs about the paths they’ve chosen.

Kate Shindle, Nancy E. Carroll, and Shannon Esper in “Rapture, Blister, Burn.” (Photo courtesy of Boston Globe, T Charles Erickson)

A lingering question that surfaces during the first three quarters of the two hour twenty minute two act play: Catherine recently made a drunken phone call to Gwen, can’t remember the details, but believes she exposed herself emotionally by questioning whether she’s made the right choice by putting professional achievement ahead of home and hearth. The offer she made while being blitzed finally comes to light midway through the second act. The result answers one of the central questions on playwright Gina Gionfriddo's mind.

This is no Saturday Night Live sketch. Heavy ideas spawned from the works of Betty Friedan, Phyllis Schlafly, and John-Jacques Rousseau are tossed around like a beach ball in the bleachers of a day game in Fenway Park. The repartee is smart, fast, and furious. People I know don’t rattle off references quoting seminal authors like this but that’s why I like to go to the theater. It’s stimulating to hear the ideas flung about in service of the story. Theater is storyville, after all.

Forty somethings Catherine and Gwen, and twenty-one year old Avery have vastly different ideas about marriage, love, sex, relationships, and careers. At times I wish I had an instant replay button to digest their spirited, scholarly dialogue. Then there’s Catherine’s widowed mother Alice. Luminously pithy, she’s outlived her husband and updated much of her old school upbringing about marriage. She delivers her insights into what makes Catherine and Gwen tick with droll one-liners as dry as the martinis she serves every day at 5 PM.

The hidden gem in the play and the fulcrum around which the play revolves is Avery. She knows nothing about the gender wars of the 1960s and 1970s. She’s by turns smart, intuitively counter cultural, invincible, vulnerable, and fearless. Her brutally candid observations about Gwen and Catherine are delivered with an analytic detachment that takes the sting out of their barbs. She’s sort of a one-woman, antic Greek chorus who exposes the fault lines in the choices Catherine and Gwen have made in their lives.

Witnessing the interchanges between Avery, Catherine, Gwen and Catherine’s mother Alice is like an intergenerational synopsis of women’s role in America’s white bread, middle-class society. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo dishes it all up to us with enough humor to keep vitriol at bay. There’s plenty of laughter from the audience, laughter I expect from many who’ve had to live through the same life-altering choices as Catherine, Gwen and Alice.

Relational kryptonite has no shelf life. Avery, despite her blasé attitude toward “hooking up,” is vulnerable to being rejected. She’s resilient and young enough to make changes on the fly. What might have been millstones for Catherine or Gwen are helium balloons for Avery, who finds a way to move on without feeling paralyzed by self-doubt.

Judging by the amount of gray-streaked hair, a good chunk of the crowd actually lived through much of the period in which the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 was passed, a victory for the feminism movement. Today’s matinee audience is largely eligible for the AARP membership but peppered with enough 20-40-ish spectators to balance the ages of the cast on stage. Several pods of grand-parents and parents with their teenage/college age kids in the audience match the generations on stage. Pretty cool since the dialogue on stage, especially from college kid Avery, is unabashedly laced with most of the seven words George Carlin gleefully claimed were taboo on TV.

The chemistry between actors is just right. Gwen’s facial mannerisms say volumes. Alice’s timing is perfect. The complex strands that motivate Catherine are peeled back scene by scene. John’s professional and personal inertia is well pitched. His addiction to pornography helps playwright Gionfriddo flesh out (sorry) it’s effect on the way men and women relate to one another.  Every character is flawed and very human. We can see both the unseemly aspects of ourselves we’d rather keep buried and our more noble selves up there on stage in all of them, particularly Catherine.

The arc of the play comes into focus as we learn what Catherine said to Gwen in the drunken conversation referred to in the first scenes. It is acted out with unanticipated results. It reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that life is messy and complicated with a great expanse of grey between the absolutes of black and white.

Let’s just say that the grass isn’t always greener in another woman’s pasture. Let’s also say that all’s well that ends well and that the conclusion, while wrapped up a little too tidily, is satisfying. We may not be able to change our pasts, but we can turn the page on it and transform a sense of regret into an opportunity for reformation.

Lungs: A Relationship, A Baby, and Global Warming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos by Andrew Brilliant/ Brilliant Pictures

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Andrew Brilliant Photography

Chesapeake - Art? Arf!

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

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

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

Chesapeake. Art. Arfff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Christopher McKenzie Photography

 

"Race" - A play by David Mamet

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

October 14-November 4, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satchmo At The Waldorf: Louis Armstrong Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Cavanaugh for Boston Globe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bakersfield Mist: A Collision of Class and Values

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Photo Andrew Brilliant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God of Carnage: Civilized Adults Acting Very Badly

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

God of Carnage indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three Pianos: A Contemporary Take on Franz Schubert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Jensen photo courtesy of Boston Globe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy Craig Bailey, Speakeasy Stage Company

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

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


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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cast photo

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

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

BEFORE I LEAVE YOU

Written by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Director: Jonathan Silverstein

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

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

Ticket price: Starting at $25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater: T. Charles Erickson 

Next Fall: SpeakEasy Stage Company's Season Opener Shines

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy SpeakEasy Stage Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book Of Grace: Powerful Acting, Problematic Resolution

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

Wild Wednesdays All tickets $18 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Photos by Lisa Voll courtesy of Company One website.