pt at large

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of Lyric Stage website

9 Circles: Gripping War Drama, Classic and Contemporary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Publick Theater 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company web site

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blithe Spirit: Heavenly Noel Coward at the Lyric Stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Lyric web site

Boston Theater Marathon 2010: Laurels All Around

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

From Orchids to Octopi: Coming To Grips With Charles Darwin

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline: Velvet Thunder

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opus: Brilliant Work at the New Repertory Theater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from wickedlocal

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Numbers performed by Jacqui Parker

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

Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage Company

Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Perfect Concoction for Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick Fly: Gem at the Calderwood Pavilion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Scott Suchman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of American Repertory Theater website

New Rep's "boom" a bust

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUD, Directed By Louisa Richards, Former pt Student

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

MUD, written by Maria Irene Fornes

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Groundswell" unearths dark questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy Boston Globe

 

Aurélia’s Oratorio: A Contemporary Cirque Dazzles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos by Richard Haugton from the amrep web site.

David Mamet: Ducks and Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romance: Mamet's Politically Incorrect Courtroom Farce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fool For Love: Sam Shepard at the New Rep Theater

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

FOOL FOR LOVE
Play by Sam Shepard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Christopher Mckenzie

Blackbird: SpeakEasy Stage Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Stratton McCrady

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy Lyric Stage: Mark S. Howard
 

Exits and Entrances, New Rep Theater

EXITS AND ENTRANCES Play by Athol Fugard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Photo: Andrew Brilliant. Boston Globe

Jimmy Tingle's Laugh Stimulus Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy Regent Theater

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

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

The Year of Magical Thinking

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Lyric Stage Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aurelia’s Oratorio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of Boston Globe and American Repertory Theater

The Seafarer: SpeakEasy's Holiday Production

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

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

Photo by Mike Lovett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary's Wedding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Meg Taintor

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

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

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

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

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

Martha Mitchell Calling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This photo courtesy of Nora Theater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let Me Down Easy" Anna Deavere Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of www.amrep.org

Excellent background interview with Anna Deavere Smith

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

The History Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eddie Izzard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whizzin’, a pissa of a show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of golddustophans.com

Spin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Tall Women: Edward Albee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shining City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater

The Scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clean House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Little Dog Laughed, Black Box Theater Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of www.lyricstage.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chita Rivera: A Dancer's Life

Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Written by Terrence McNally, with original songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
The Colonial Theater, Boston, MA
May 1 - May 6, 2007

She’s 74 years old, for god’s sake. Seventy-four. And when her name is Chita Rivera, she can fill up a theater on the recognition of her name alone. Standing at five feet four inches on great gams, she’s one of the rare legends who knows how to trade on her fame without losing her dignity. Her feet don’t move like Latin lightning any more but she has stage presence, enormous poise, a surprisingly rich alto singing voice, and a terrific storyteller’s sense of timing.

Photo: http://www.thedancerslife.com/downloads.php#

 All of which she puts together in this national tour show, “Chita Rivera: the Dancer’s Life” - the story of her life, a history that practically defines musical theater in the last half of the twentieth century. She’s had her feet bandaged by George Balanchine, been taught to sing by Leonard Bernstein, and danced with the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century - Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. You don’t have to be a dance junkie to have heard of musicals like West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Rivera starred in twenty-five musicals in over fifty years.

The 2002 “Kennedy Honors” award to Rivera is the springboard writer Terence McNally used to propel the show and allow Rivera to look back on her career. Her stage arc may be in eclipse but her spark, well, that’s another matter. Sitting on a chair stage center, Rivera opens the show reminiscing about being raised in Washington, D.C. as a first generation Puerto Rican American. It’s not long before she’s dancing on a table on the set behind her (her mother sent Rivera to ballet school not long after she broke the family table while dancing on it).

Rivera and her company of eight top tier dancers stunningly executed two dozen song and dance routines that reprised her roles on Broadway. Rivera has lived musical theater from the TV Ed Sullivan Show to the post AIDS world.

Photo from http://www.chitarivera.com/productions/dancerslife.htm

The secret is that Chita has learned to do more with less. A sideways glance, a lowering of the voice, a well timed swivel of the hips, an sporadic burst of fancy footwork, and an occasional high kick to the rafters, remind us she’s still on fire. What keeps the show balanced is Rivera’s willingness to complement, not compete with, the extraordinary dancers in her troupe. They clearly adore her.

“Looking back doesn’t have to be painful,” she says at the top of the show. Rivera certainly had her share of pain - shattered leg in an auto accident, denied movie roles for dance roles she created on Broadway - but she always soldiered on in a Darwinian environment in which talent, luck, and grit were her constant dance partners. 

Here, she’s content to remind us of her greatness not to prove it. She never forgot the advice given to her by her first dance instructor before her first big audition, “Conchita, stay in your lane,” dance language for ‘Don’t worry about the dancers around you, just be who you are.’ Rivera is still stoked with stamina, talent, and attitude but, simply put, she hasn’t forgotten that she’s seventy-four.

Great singers and dancers like Rivera instinctively embrace their audience. One isn’t surprised to hear her say softly near the end of her show, ”When you drag yourself to the theater on a rainy afternoon and the matinée is less than half full, you are there for that one person whose life might be changed by what you do.” When she looked into the audience, I felt she was looking right at me and I’ll bet someone thirty rows away felt the same thing.

“Passing The Torch”, the last section on the program, features Rivera and her dancers in an exuberant, full throttle rendition of “All That Jazz” (Chicago). Under the combustion, one feels Father Time tapping his feet to the music, a poignant reminder that all shows, Rivera’s and ours, have a finale.

Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero knows what she’s got left in the tank and drives accordingly. What an instructive lesson to those of us not too far behind her in the parade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Daisey's "Invincible Summer"

INVINCIBLE SUMMER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONOPOLY!
May 1-5, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist web site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more about the Zeitgeist Stage Company see