REVIEW: Henry IV, Pt 1

Sorry no blogging this past weekend. But I did write a mini-review of the Pearl's Henry IV for Time Out. (Warning: contains spoilers from 1597!)

REVIEW: The Good Person of Szechwan

Brecht's Epic He/She: Taylor Mac as Shin Te and Shui Ta.

Taylor Mac is giving the performance of the year down at La MaMa in The Good Person of Szechwan. And unfortunately most of you will not get to see it. This low-budget revival of the Brecht classic (co-produced by La MaMa and the Foundry Theatre) has sold out its one-month run in its 199-seat house and will probably have difficulty extending or "moving" any time soon due to Showcase Code restrictions. (Which I assume was how this was produced* [*update: see comments section for more].) Oh well. Maybe with enough resources and flexibility from Equity, Foundry and La MaMa will some day be able to share with the public this rare American Brecht staging that will not leave you wondering why anyone ever made a fuss about Brecht in the first place.

Until then, I'll do my best to describe what's so special here, starting with Lear deBessonet--a barely-30 director who has been consistently working around the edges of the downtown and nonprofit scenes for at least five years now. I first became aware of her in her first Brecht outing, Saint Joan of the Stockyards at PS122 in 2007. There, too, on a shoestring budget and Showcase Code cast, deBessonet forged ahead with her eccentric but crystal clear vision of a difficult play. What delighted me was not only that someone had successfully resurrected this totally forgotten (and admittedly odd) early Brecht gem, but had also infused it with a totally genuine contemporary American pop sensibility without flinching from the play's politics at all. The key was Kristen Sieh's winning performance of Joan as an honest-to-God happy Christian, an interpretation amplified by a live bluegrass score which situated that religiosity in a recognizable and playable down-home context.

DeBessonet--who has spoken about the challenges of bringing good-faith spirituality into our atheistic theatre culture--may have miffed some Brecht purists for not treating Joan's preaching with snyde sarcasm. But her concept worked because Brecht--while no believer--was himself clearly fascinated with religion, which is why he wrote so much about it in his plays. Even a Marxist must admit and contend with the power of that "opiate of the masses." In Brecht's work--and especially in Szechwan--religion is often the countervailing force to capitalism, just an ultimately ineffectual one. In Sieh's performance, Joan's likability and infectious optimism made her tragic failure at the end all the more heartbreaking.

Szechwan may be a more well known and frequently produced play than Joan. But that doesn't mean it's any easier to pull off. At least in most performances I've seen. This relatively late Brecht drama (as well as the similar, almost interchangeably produced Caucasian Chalk Circle) always comes off in performance as stiff, grey, and interminable "epic theatre" that occasionally tries (with great labor) to be fun. Despite the lively elements in its story, the sheer length and wordiness of most translations--combined with a prevailing tendency to play such a "classic" with the solemnity of Shakespeare--often weighs down what is, at heart, a simple fable, a folk take. What this production does that I haven't seen anyone else do, is strip away a lot of the dead weight (even efficiently cutting many walk-on characters) and restore the folk tale element--even down to childrens-theatre tiny cardboard houses that populate Matt Saunders' outwardly makeshift set. The show plays here with the energy of a commedia farce--further enabled by an almost bare stage of planks, quick-change costumes, and lots of direct audience address (and solicitation). I knew this production had a chance when the play's quasi-narrator, the often-annoying water-boy, Wang, delivered his opening monologue entering down the aisle...and was funny!  Actor David Turner--one of the many eccentric players DeBessonet has populated the cast with--deserves much credit for setting and sustaining the joyous yet caustic tone of the evening.

Speaking of tone, much of it is also supplied by yet another contemporary on-stage band DeBessonet has recruited, The Lisps. Their eclectic score ranges from rockabilly to Motown to garage-rock, constantly bringing the story into the now, even while DeBessonet and her designers always pay winking homage to the story's early-industrial Chinese setting. (Much fun is had throughout with scattered red petals.) As in her Saint Joan, DeBessonet's use of local dive-bar bands reconnects with the cabaret impulse in Brecht's use of music. It helps here that the Lisps' specialty seems to be percussion, used to consistently jarring, stirring, dare I say even "alienating" effect.

But let's get back to Taylor Mac. In case you didn't know, casting a man in the starring role of Shen Tei is not the norm. Shin Tei is a young prostitute who begins almost as a deliberately "hooker with a heart of gold" cliche. She is also one of the great female roles in modern European theatre. But since she spends a good third of the play in the guise of her invented alter-ego, "Mr. Shui Ta," one can see the temptation to cast such a gender-bending male performer as Mac (who has made a career downtown and in cabaret exploring gender and sexual identities in his own devised pieces.) The choice brings up some of the same issues faced when dealing with how all those Shakespearean "breeches parts" (Rosalind, Viola) were all written for boys playing women playing boys! Recent all-male Shakespeare productions (especially by English troupes Cheek by Jowl, Propeller, and The Globe) have reminded us of some of the lost dynamics built into those plays' original casting. (For instance, the men who interact with Rosalind as "Ganymede" or Viola as "Cesario" don't seem like gullible idiots any more.)

Brecht of course did not write Shen Tei for a man or boy, or a queer/trans icon like Mac. But without taking anything away from the fine actresses who have played the role (I still remember Cherry Jones at A.R.T. in 1987!), something special here happens when Mr. Shui Ta appears on the scene. "He" becomes very convincing!  Bursting onto the stage with an almost goosestep authority to a martial drumbeat, dressed as a classic Weimar-era pinstriped and bowler-hat capitalist, Mac makes quite a chilling entrance.

Or should I say, Shen Tei does. Because one thing this casting "trick" reveals is how good an actress Shen Tei has to be to pull this "act" off. (She has to invent Shui Ta to be the ruthless "bad cop" businessman to her more charitable "good cop" storekeeper when she can no longer do good works without going broke.) Obviously it doesn't take only a male actor to play a male convincingly. But rarely have I seen an actress cast in the role who can. (As a female "lead," Shin Te is often lazily cast with either a classic ingenue or a Shavian/Ibsenite "strong woman" who can get one side of the character but not the other.)

Then again, the issue isn't really being "convincing" in any naturalistic sense. Because Brecht deliberately set up this built-in "play acting" in his story in order to model his acting ideals--which called for the performer to both credibly inhabit and comment upon the character simultaneously. (Brecht wants us to see Shin Tei  "performing" her idea of "The Businessman.") Taylor Mac does this brilliantly not because he is a man, but because he is a powerful and (in the best sense of the word) self-aware performer. We see the soul-crushing effort it takes Shen Tei to become this monster. (She doesn't do it as just a lark.) So not only is Taylor Mac good enough to convince us he's Shin Tei; this Shin Tei turns out to be so good an actress that she can convince us she's...well, Taylor Mac!

There is a spellbinding moment towards the end of the first act where this whole Brechtian "genderfuck" comes together and fuels the argument of the play. It's during one of Shin Tei's songs. (Yes, these late Brecht plays are musicals, too. As if they weren't hard enough!) The song is the one that's sometimes translated as "The Song of Defenselessness" (I couldn't catch in this show's version) and in it she rails against the gods for leaving her to shoulder the burden of tending to the poor. But theatrically, Brecht undermines her self-pity by showing her donning Shui Ta's "mask" all the same, even while she claims she doesn't want to. What DeBessonet and Mac (and The Lisps in one of their most aggressively rocking selections) do with these few instructions takes the idea to the hilt. Mac, beginning as Shen Tei, strips off her feminine garments and--all the while singing at full voice at breathtaking speed--begins to don the black pinstriped suit and mustachioed visage of her alter-ego and self-inflicted nemesis. When the song climaxes, the transformation is complete--Shen Tei has become Shui Ta right before our eyes, and not just in clothes. Mac lands immediately in the next scene--in full Shui Ta mode--without even a pause for applause.

Such transformation of character before our eyes was a favorite device of Brecht's. In Galileo we watch the sensible priest who once supported the scientist turn against him in the course of one scene--a scene in which he is enrobed as the new Pope. ("The clothes make the man" must have been a favorite expression of Bert's.) One of Brecht's many challenges to "Aristotelian" conventions was his rejection of "character" as a stable entity. While most playwrights have striven to "develop" characters who are "consistent," even when they are challenged by a cruel world, Brecht saw mankind as utterly mutable given the circumstances. (Marxism, after all, is premised on the primacy of material circumstances in shaping all aspects of our lives.) Hence, in this story, we can't just easily excuse Shen Tei for doing the cruel things she does as Shui Ta. She is changed by the process. Struggle though she does, she has learned to accept "the lesser evil." Her tragedy is not that of a John Proctor, going to the gallows with his "dignity" intact, the way so few of us do in real life. No, like most of us poor souls, she does what she needs to do to survive, no matter how shitty she feels about it.

I'll stop there. Suffice it to say that DeBessonet and Mac's work here did much to clarify this conflict in the play. And "clarify" is the apt word here. Rarely have I seen such a lucid, uncluttered, streamlined staging of one of the Brecht epic tragedies. Think how hard it is to pull off Mother Courage, too. I look forward to DeBessonet scaling that mountain in the near future--perhaps starring the indomitable Lisa Kron, who also appears here, hilariously, in two supporting roles. (Shen Tei's mother-in-law, let's just say, arrives in Sezchwan by way of the L.I.E.) After the sententious "Mother Meryl" in the Park a while back, I would welcome this director's eclectic, irreverent, yet thoroughly text-grounded "Brecht 2.0" remix.

(PS. You can see Mac give an in-studio approximation of his moving closing speech as Shin Tei in the Times' "In Performance" video series.)

REVIEW: Clive

If I told you that Ethan Hawke was enlisting playwright friend Jonathan Marc Sherman to adapt Brecht's Baal for him to star in (and direct) so he could sport a Billy Idol 'do, wheeze away at the guitar, and surround himself with scantily clad babes for an intermissionless hour and forty minutes in front of a paying audience... you'd probably say: gee, that sounds pretty indulgent.

And guess what? You'd be right!

"Clive" chewed out by the mighty bear D'Onofrio.
Photo: Sara Krulwiich, New York Times

Not much more can be said about Clive (the re-titled adaptation) that already hasn't been by the first round of scathing reviews.  But I'll just add that mere self-indulgence isn't even the biggest problem with the show. The problem is Baal. Now I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read Baal--Brecht's first play that is rarely if ever produced and/or studied today. But I do know enough to know that it's not the kind of work we now expect from Brecht. This is Brecht the angry teenager--channeling German late-romantic decadence and nihilism. (The deliberately schematic expressionistic narrative charts the slow decline and assorted crimes of a hedonistic rebel poet.) So all it would have going for it is really the poetry. Poetry, of course, is hard enough to fulfill in translation. But am I right to be extra dubious about the ability of Mr. Sherman (still known chiefly as the author of that acting school staple Women and Wallace) to match the poetry of a young Bertolt Brecht?  (Especially when Sherman admits in the program to adapting the original German text via Google Translate!)

Updating Baal, as Clive does, to the Rent-era1990s might have seemed to Hawke and Sherman (and New Group A.D. Scott Elliott who has produced it) the most sensible thing to do, this choice may be the project's fatal flaw, even if its only reason for being. This muddled and pretty generic picture of punk/grunge Alphabet City ennui ends up not nearly as interesting or arresting as Baal would be in its original period of Weimar Germany--which I imagine unfolding in a series of Egon Schiele images brought to life.

The only reason, I assumed, to do this kind of "update" of Baal would be as an excuse to stage a decadent rock-concert mash-up of Brecht's basic idea. I'd be ok with that. But while Clive is billed as only being "inspired" by Baal, the adaptation isn't nearly free enough to make the concept work. Plus, worst of all: the music stinks!  What there is of it, at least. Hawke does bear a properly debauched Tom Waits-style voice (or is that just Hawke's usual untrained, strained raspiness? the flu?), but he can barely get a chord out of his ever-present guitar. If "Clive" is supposed to be some magnetic rocker who packs them in at Bowery Ballroom...well let's just say you're not going to want his CD.

To end on a higher note, though, I will say I was most looking forward to Clive for the chance to see a rare stage appearance by the mighty Vincent D'Onofrio. My only disappointment he wasn't in it more. Playing the sidekick character, he seems miscast, being some 15 years older than Hawke and sporting some odd redneck accent+mustache. But when he actually does get to plant his big, big presence center stage--even for something as ridiculous as dog-whoofing--I wanted more.  Come back, Vincent, come back! Forget Ethan and even Bertolt and go back to Sam Shepard where you belong!

REVIEW: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

If only the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featured something as jarring and surprising as a "Ghost Skipper" floating in and out of the background. Despite the understandable ridicule of that eventually discarded idea (which was cut by the time I saw a press performance), I might not have minded such a choice were it part of a bold, expressionistic dream-like reinvention of the play. But director Rob Ashford ends up serving up something much duller--a rudderless stumble-through of a long and flawed play where souped-up visuals try to substitute for drama.

Sara Krulwich, for The New York Times

I suppose I should start with the element that has made this production happen at all--the misguided star casting of Scarlett Johansson as "Maggie The Cat." I say misguided not because Johansson lacks talent or even stage chops. As she proved in her debut in A View from the Bridge, unlike other movie star Broadway novices, Johansson has a natural presence and energy on stage. (Only her voice--no doubt exhausted from delivering her long opening monologue eight times a week--gives away a lack of training. When little Scarlett starts sounding like Kathleen Turner with laryngitis, you know something ain't right.) Scarlett Johansson is not what's wrong with this Cat. If anything, it works against the show that this "star" character is basically only prominent on stage at the very beginning and very end! (That's certainly going to backfire with fans buying tix only to see her...)


No, what's wrong is that you have talented, able actors who are at sea in a script that certainly does not "direct itself." Ashford has put a lot of care into the setting and ambiance. (More on the many dubious "atmospherics" later.) But one doesn't get the sense of much insightful scene coaching in rehearsal.

That opening monologue of Maggie's, for instance, is quite a challenging aria and puts a lot of pressure on the actress to ground everyone in the play. But poor Scarlett seems to have gotten little advice other than "louder, faster, funnier." Even the more seasoned actors suffer from a clear unease and lack of direction. While everyone else in the audience that night seemed there either for our young starlet or seeing "Bloody, Bloody" Benjamin Walker in a towel, I was most looking forward to veteran Irish thesp Ciarán Hinds as Big Daddy. Anyone familiar with Hinds' stage and screen roles as gangsters and even the Devil himself (in MacPherson's The Seafarer) would expect the ultimate menacing patriarch. Instead, with that wan, weather-beaten face buried under bushy grandaddy whiskers and a Yosemite Sam accent, he's completely de-fanged. And just as Johansson seems completely on her own through her long Act One, Hinds and Walker spend their big Act Two confrontation dully sitting around and talking with occasional random bouts of wrestling.

As for Walker, the very fact I find little to say about him is revealing enough. True, Brick is an awfully hard part--more reactive than active, forced to listen more than talk. But whatever punk rock presence he brought to Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is sorely missing. Like his lean, tall, but frankly unimposing and somewhat delicate bare physique on constant display, Walker conveys little energy, strength or purpose on stage. But again--he doesn't seem to have received much direction other than "keep your shirt off." (And, perhaps conversely: "keep your towel from dropping.")

Ashford--formerly known for direction and choreography of hit musicals--began making a more dramatic name for himself in London, where his "Streetcar" (with Rachel Weisz) was a recent hit at the Donmar. But while the British rightly celebrate Williams, I've noticed they seem to like their Tennessee with a heavy dollop of "Southern Gothic" exoticism. So based on this Cat, I can see why they may have liked about Ashford's style. Here, Brick's little upstairs bedroom becomes a veritable grand ballroom--with a chandelier and several balcony windows encircling his regal bed. The airiness of it all (gossamer walls and high ceilings) is certainly pretty. But it makes it awfully hard to feel sorry for the guy. Or to believe this is a real house, for that matter.

And far more questionable, to my mind, than any visions of Brick's dead admirer is the added presence Ashford gives to the scripted characters of the African American household servants. I'm referring to their singing of black spirituals (!) during the Act Three climax. Now, even though the play is set nearly a hundred years after the Civil War, if one wants to paint Big Daddy as a plantation owner and his estate as some throwback to Dixie and Tara, I'm game if it's meant to add to the feeling of corruption and moral decay in the family. But these slaves servants sure are one happy bunch of Singing Negroes! The elder female maid is seen genuinely caring as she eavesdrops on one of Big Mama's concerned phone calls. And the men smile when they are ordered about by Big Daddy. Perhaps this is Ashford's way of trying to justify these characters and flesh them out.  But wouldn't it be more humanizing to show the truth of their situation--that they are there merely because it is their job?

Now that the (mostly negative) reviews are in (StageGrade average: C-!), it will be interesting to see how the show fares at the box office.  (The production is, after all, a purely commercial enterprise.) Playbill shows the house last week was at 83.5% capacity--not bad for a nonmusical play (oh wait, this is a musical!), but not the 99% I'm sure the producers expected Scarlett Johannson to draw. If what they wanted was a vehicle for her, maybe they should have avoided a three-act, two-intermission(!), talky script, where she's not even on stage half the time.

And I left really thinking the play is not even among Williams' top works. Nothing much happens, Brick is a cypher, and who outside of the family would care about Big Daddy's inheritance anyway? The play lives or dies, therefore, on the dynamism of the acting. And the acting in a meandering, plotless script like this depends more than usual on the directing.

Here's a directorial suggestion, by the way: Cat is basically one long continuous one-act, isn't it, unfolding more or less in real time in that one bedroom. So how about a site-specific, intermissionless staging in an actual upstairs room of a mansion, where the audience is stuck in that room with bedridden Brick, with the cast of eccentric characters popping in and out.

Such speculation, at least, diverted me for much of the performance at the Richard Rodgers Theatre...

Review: The Morini Strad

My latest for Time Out: Willy Holtzman's The Morini Strad at Primary Stages.

The takeaway: "Tuesdays with Morrie for the WQXR crowd."

By the way, forgot to mention in the review that this is "based on a true story."  But I must say I found myself wondering: where's the "story" here???

Review: Beyond the Horizon

For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Rep revival.

By the way, I wrote this last week, so that "slut" line was pre-Limbaugh, I promise.

Review: "The Man Who Came to Dinner"

My latest for Time Out: Peccadillo's revival of Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner. (Online only.)

Photo: Carol Rosegg

The current lead, Jim Brochu, is fine. But as you'll see I suggest Alan Rickman as the ideal Sheridan Whiteside. Any others in today's theatre?

Review: "Pangs of the Messiah"

Straight outta Israel! "Pangs of the Messiah" is a play Motti Lerner wrote about the Jewish West Bank settlements...back in the 80s, believe it or not.  He's now revised/updated it and Edward Einhorn's Untitled Theatre Company #61 is giving it a long overdue NYC premiere. My review in Time Out (online only) is, alas, not a thumbs-up. But if you follow such issues, this is a play (and writer) you should know about.

Review: Dancing at Lughnasa

My Time Out review of the Irish Rep's Dancing at Lughnasa is now available as an exclusive online bonus feature!

Ok, exclusive to anyone with a computer...

Havel's "The Memorandum"

In this week's Time Out, my review of Vaclav Havel's 1960s Czech comedy The Memorandum, in a rare revival by the TACT company.

My reaction to the production is, as you'll see, mixed.  But for the Havel-curious, it's pretty much a must-see. Just not a guaranteed night of entertainment.  And I wish I had space in print to single out some very fine performances by Joel Leffert (pictured) as the stern indoctrinator, Mark Alhadeff as the icy antagonist, and Jeffrey C. Hawkins' mime-like corporate tool.

Review: The Sneeze

I'm back on the Time Out beat this week with a review of The Pearl's staging of The Sneeze--Michael Frayn's 1988 Chehov-comedy compilation.

Did not quite make me wanna say "God Bless You"...

Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"

One of the least constructive forms of criticisms is to hold forth on what you think a playwright should have written rather than what they did write.  Reviews that essentially rewrite a play reveal only the personal quirks of the critics instead of helping the reader grapple with the play at hand.

So that said...let me get out of the way all the things I wish Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play" were and how disappointed I was that it wasn't.

The play's basic concept is irresistible to a theatre history geek like myself.  It is a trilogy of one-acts, each about people performing the Passion Play in a different time and place: in Elizabethan England, where such performances are about to be banned by the monarch as a vestige of Popery; in 1930s Germany, where the otherwise secular Nazis exploited the anti-Semitism of the Passion's crucifixion narrative; and in post-Vietnam South Dakota, USA, where a cheesier theme-park style derivative of the play helps usher in the age of the "Moral Majority."

Such a scenario raises my expectations that I will see something about the meaning of theatre to different communities across time.  As well as the meaning of religion.  Also--the relation between theatre and The State; the specifics of the gospels themselves and how their meaning changes for different eras and audiences; and, well, just the good old magic of theatre.

I'm sure Sarah Ruhl had many of these themes in mind while writing the play.  But for me, they don't really show much, either in the dialogue or the action.  Instead what we get is three very different stories ("backstage dramas" if you will) for which the Passion is often just a backdrop to more internal conflicts of the particular characters.  In Act I (the Elizabethan episode), the woman playing Mary is caught between the man playing Jesus, who is respectfully devoted to her, and the man playing Pilate, who lusts after her and knocks her up.  In Act II (the Nazi episode) the Pilate and Jesus actors are secretly gay lovers (one flees, one stays and joins the party) and the company's one Jew is taken to nearby Dachau.  Act III's "Morning in America" shows one actor (Pilate, again) shipped off to Vietnam, returning with severe PTSD, only to find his fellow actor (Jesus, again) carrying on with his wife and selling out to TV.

In themselves, these are not bad little one-acts.  But so often, their historical settings (and the presence of the Passion) seemed incidental to what they were really about.  Surprisingly the most successful of the three acts at this is the last, where Ruhl poignantly juxtaposes the soldier's decline with the country's emerging Reaganite whitewashing optimism.  And in probably the best use of the actual Passion Play, we see him return to his role as Pilate, only to freak out Lady Macbeth-style during the "I wash my hands of this" scene, imagining blood instead of water in the basin.

But moments like that which fully exploit the details of the Passion narrative are surprisingly rare.  And I could just as easily imagine these three stories dramatized without the presence of Passion Play.  Again, not to rewrite Ruhl, but how fascinating it would have been to see, say, the same scene from Passion reenacted in each act in a vastly different way.  And while we do get the gospel-like themes of betrayal and martyrdom in each of the stories, the direct parallels with the Passion are always left for us to figure out.  Maybe that's sublime subtlety on Ruhl's part--but I prefer my theatre not to pull its punches.

Passion Play's other tease is political.  This is the most outwardly political play Ruhl has written.  But while her introductory program notes are full of requisite Bush-bashing, her play constantly sidesteps the nitty gritty of her stories' political implications.  Nowhere is this more evident than in what should be the play's biggest coup de theatre--the recurring appearance of the autocratic leader at the center of each era.  While the grand surprise entrances of Elizabeth I, Adolf Hitler, and Ronald Reagan (all played by the same actor--in this production the superbly creepy T. Ryder Smith) should all climax their respective acts, the writing in each case is notably anticlimactic.  By Reagan's turn, the idea becomes a gimmick, a winking joke, rather than a dramaturgically galvanizing device.  Each of the three monologues drifts in and out of historical trivia related to the figure's performative aspects--Elizabeth's obsession with white facepaint; Hitler's hammy showmanship; Reagan's showbiz background--which makes sense, sure.  And Ruhl certainly illustrates their political ruthlessness and/or cluelessness (Elizabeth's police state; Hitler's genocidal dreams; Reagan's confusion of war with war movies).  But these moments still came off to me as unfocused and, frankly, wasted opportunities.

The truth is, as much as she may try here, Ruhl does not seem to be an innately political playwright.  Most writers taking on the subject of 19th century doctors inducing orgasm in their female patients with electrical devices would capitalize on the situation's inherent narrative of misogynist exploitation.  Not Ruhl, whose In the Next Room: or, The Vibrator Play--as likeable as it is--plays as a coy sex comedy where men are just silly asses out of touch with their feelings.  Perhaps the belittling of the oppressor is a more secure feminist (or postfeminist) statement.  But again, a missed opportunity, I felt.

In Passion Play we get snapshots of politics and art colliding.  In a speech taken mostly verbatim from history, Hitler addresses the Oberammergau about the need for the Passion's demonizing of the Jews.  But why does a similar sense of danger not pervade the Elizabethan episode, where performing the Passion Play is about to become a banned, religiously heretical and politically subversive act?  In Act III our tortured Vietnam Vet experiences conflict mostly in his head, not with the state; yes, there is an interesting scene at a VA hospital, but even there he is treated rather civilly, rather than encountering the indifferent bureaucracy many real life vets did suffer.

The very subject and form of Passion Play also cries out for a playwright intensely concerned with religion itself.  But Ruhl seems neither especially political or religious.  I don't know anything about her personal spiritual beliefs or practices.  All I know is that the Passion narrative raises so many theological and deeply communal questions that are only addressed here in the most abstract terms.  (Betrayal, Martyrdom, Spirit vs Flesh, etc.)  When acted out on stage, the scenes from the Passion Plays rarely resonate and touch us the way these plays were meant to.  They rarely transcend Ruhl's use of them for simply a framing concept.  They are not allowed to work their timeless stage magic on us and turn an audience of hip 21st century secularists (like me) into believers just for a minute.  That's because the script itself seems written with an air of too much hip secularism.  Ruhl's tendency to waver between ironic shrug and unabashed sentimentality leaves little room for the tragic poetry of the Bible.

Finally, there's another dramaturgical device that ultimately stymies the play: Ruhl's insistence that the same actors play basically the same roles from act to act, and that they keep being identified with the Passion roles of Jesus, Pilate, and Mary.  When it works, we get a nice long story-arc of basically a 400-year love triangle between the three.  But the unintended effect is of a numbing sameness to all three playlets--when jarring shaking up is sometimes badly needed.  I would have been much more interested in seeing the casting overturned in each act to make the play-within-the-play seem as different as possible.  Instead, over three and a half hours I got quite frankly bored watching the same three actors play out similar scenarios.  Adding to the similarity are the bare-bones design and production values--tastefully minimalist and perhaps budgetarily required, but still barely changing from one act to the next.  In retrospect, it is the Elizabethan Act I--played in the same flat American accents as the rest and speckled with inconsistently anachronistic props and costumes--that suffers most from this approach.  If each setting were more aggressively made strange from each other and highly specific to its era (i.e. alienated in the truly Brechtian sense) the overall effect would have been much richer and thought-provoking.

I will say, though, that in the production Dominic Fumusa's brooding intensity as the "Pilates" nearly justifies the concept--especially in Act III, when his frightening delivery of the character's shell-shocked rages do more to puncture the "Morning in America" myth than any of Ruhl's prose.

Fumusa and Ryder are the standouts of the otherwise able cast.  Mark Wing Davey's sparsely beautiful  staging employs much rough magic and dreamy atmosphere.  And for the little Epic Theatre Ensemble that mounted this huge project--at the splendid Irondale Center in a Brooklyn church--this NYC premiere of a major play (and a majorly difficult play) by a major new writer is a triumph, after a decade of tireless work and rising from nowhere.  I say the play is a "major" one quite sincerely.  Our playwrights unfortunately are not often allowed to be as ambitious as this.  I'm sure many others found these ambitions fulfilled and, as I said above, this ultimately boils down to what we each want out of the play's concept.  And for myself, it was a play that did not live up to its premise.

"Paradise" Regained

I have an article in this month's American Theatre magazine (March 2010) about new directorial approaches to the work of Clifford Odets.  No link, unfortunately, but the issue is on newsstands now, and available online via various academic databases, like Proquest.  Meanwhile, here's the opening:

Can Clifford Odets be cool again? He certainly was in the 1930s. Odets was only 28 years old when his Waiting for Lefty became an overnight sensation, and his most ardent followers at the time were in the same age bracket. For fellow scribe William Gibson, he was "the playwright most of my generation wanted to be." And director Harold Clurman considered Lefty's opening night "the birth cry of the '30s," when "our youth had found its voice."

Though he's seldom been out of production, Odets's critical and popular fortunes have varied wildly since that bright beginning. His plays' complex leftist politics - always intertwined with the personal and the sexual - fell out of favor in the conservative 1950s. And when he reluctantly cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee to avoid being blacklisted - Odets depended on his screenwriting to raise two children as a single parent - he was shunned by many who once worshipped him.

Then, as fate would have it, when his politics at last came back into favor, after his death in 1963, it was his realist dramaturgy - and the association of his work with so-called Method acting, a legacy of the Group Theatre for whom he wrote - that made him seem passé. Reviewing a 1984 revival of Odets's Awake and Sing! in the New York Times, Frank Rich faulted the characters for lack of "psychological depth" and concluded that while the play "endures as a social document, its status as a stageworthy play has declined." A decade later Peter Marks, in the same paper, said of Waiting for Lefty. "Lacking the economic disaster and political context that once validated it.. .the play now is oddly airless."

In the eyes of many resident theatres around the country today, though, that economic disaster, and its attendant context, may now have arrived again. The 2009-10 season boasts no fewer than nine Odets revivals at TCG member theatres. And the new century has produced a new generation of directors who came of age post-cold war and post-Actors Studio, and who accordingly might be equipped to approach Odets without the cultural baggage that has weighted his work in years past. In their hands the archetypical playwright of the Great Depression may still have something to teach us about our own Great Recession.

In addition to emphasizing the timeliness of Odets's work I wanted to focus on how a new generation of directors are embracing this writer, normally considered an uber-naturalist, in more experimental ways.

My starting point is Bartlett Sher's Awake and Sing, produced by Lincoln Center on Broadway to mark the playwright's centennial in 2006, which won new accolades for the play including a Tony for Best Revival.  But aside from a landmark tribute, Sher's expressive use of scenery and insistence on this as a poetic play dared us to completely reconsider Odets's legacy and significance for a new audience--one not mired in either Group Theatre/Actors Studio nostalgia or 1950s communist witchhunt politics (during which he compromised himself by cooperating as a "friendly witness").

I also noticed another director taking on Odets in 2006--Daniel Fish, whose Rocket to the Moon I saw at Long Wharf.  Like Sher's production, it combined rigorous naturalistic acting and expressive stagecraft to force us to see the play in a new way.  As I describe in the article, it involved a revolving set that let us peer into the proceedings of this notably claustrophobic and intimate play (set in a Depression-era dentist's office) through windows and walls.  Kind of an expressionist naturalism, if you can imagine such a thing.

So when I heard Fish was taking on perhaps the biggest challenge of the Odets canon, the rarely revived Paradise Lost (a box office failure originally), I knew that, a) I had to see it, and b) I wanted to write about it.

The article went to press long before the production went up, so I was writing based on Fish's plans for it without having seen it.  But now that I've been up to Boston to see it at ART, I can gladly report that it is quite a momentous event in this writer's tormented afterlife, and something well worth seeing before it closes this Saturday (March 16).

Paradise Lost resembles Awake and Sing in some obvious ways--a three-act "living room" family drama about struggling to survive in the Depression.  Except here, the family loses everything.  And, Paradise's Gordons, being more upper-bourgeoisie than the lumpen Bergers of Awake, fall from a greater height, as we watch their fortunes wither away over a few years as they and the country sink deeper and deeper into an economic wasteland.

So this is quite a "depressing" play in more ways than one, unlike Awake, which at least features an uplifting and optimistic ending.  When I asked Fish why he thinks this play gets produced much less, he said, "Look at the two titles!"  Indeed this painful meditation on loss--both spiritual and material--would be a tough sell on Broadway.  (It was even back in 1935, with the Group Theatre actors no less.)

In fact Fish could barely get any nonprofit theatres to bite either.  So ART and its new AD Diane Paulus deserve a lot of credit for investing confidence and real resources into a tough--really tough--but important and wonderful play.  Part of what is thrilling about watching Fish's Paradise is how BIG a production it is.  Our only chance of ever seeing this in New York I imagine would be in a scaled down Off-Off/ Mint Theatre-style version.  So to see it playing out on that big ART stage with all the tools at a modern director's disposal really fulfills what the play is capable of today.

Now as you can see from the photos, this is indeed a modern production.  An updating? Yes, but not in the text.  Fish and his team have simply placed Odets's characters in a tangibly contemporary environment--the better to remind us that "The Great Depression" was not some distinctly historical time, some sepia-toned snapshot from the annals of the "Greatest Generation."  It is what we are living through now.  Right now.  So rather than the suit-and-tie world of 1930s nostalgia, we get a recognizably middle class world of middle-America, 2010.

One shocking thing about this to Odets purists might be how "white" the world of the play becomes.  The Gordon family has always been considered by Odets scholars a barely deracinated Jewish family, one coming from a culture that talked in the writer's Yiddish-influenced cadences and whose story reflected specifically the legacy of "the immigrant experience."  Fish makes no gesture to this being a "Jewish play" at all, and as a result it plays out on a broader canvas. With Andrew Lieberman's expansive set of fragmented pre-fab suburban housing materials, the image recalls Sam Shepard more than Clifford Odets; and the play becomes more obviously about America (as in the suburban middle-class image we usually see in the media) and its deeply embedded capitalist framework, rather than just another period piece about our Jewish grandparents in New York.  You'll feel the shock of this approach right away when you walk into the theatre and a loud and overblown Western shootout is playing on the huge upstage projection screen, as the "new" Gordons sit around the dinner table watching in numbed silence.

The extensive use of video projection is another startlingly contemporary aspect of the production.  And one apparently the Boston Globe critic couldn't abide--complaining she didn't know where to look as if she'd never seen this before on stage.  Most often this was used to enlarge the action already happening on stage (close-ups of actors talking in corners, e.g.)  and so I also don't understand her complaint that the video didn't have anything to do with the play.  I also don't understand how one can review this play and not discuss the parallels between 1930s America and today; she treats the modern touches as simply random and unexplainable, thus declining to spell out the underlying concept, good or bad.  But there you go.  The Boston Phoenix's Carolyn Clay at least seemed more attuned to the production's sensibility.

Anyway, as the opening mythical Western clip announces, what unfolds on stage is a ruthless dismantling of The American Dream, piece by piece.  The play will end on a practically bare stage, the Gordons dispossessed and cast out into a strange world.  Their business and their house is gone, and their children (in whom all families stake their future) have in various ways been picked off--Mother Courage-like--one by one.

The clash of visual anachronisms and the 1935 text certainly does raise eyebrows throughout.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  Having the play open with the daughter Pearl talking to her boyfriend not alone on the hallway telephone, but at the dinner table on her cell phone makes her an instantly recognizable teenager from today, immediately demystifying the play's period trappings.  On the other hand, the intermittent lines about Hitler and the future prospects of "television" just don't yield dividends to offset their jarringness (and probably would have been better off being cut, so rarely do they occur).  But overall, the risk pays off by how surprisingly easily this plays as a contemporary play.  It is, after all, about people living through financial freefall and the prospect of neverending war.  The anachronisms just remind us Fish is not trying to "fool" us into believing it wasn't written in 1935 and the dialogue we end up having with it across time is fascinating. 

And as a contemporary play, Paradise Lost is a burst of fresh air, since so few plays today (especially "family plays") are so infused at every turn with the effect of the economy on our daily lives.  (It makes  new plays today that claim to be about class--like Becky Shaw--seem so tame by comparison.)  As the Gordons' home and dreams are gradually, painfully dismantled bit by bit in front of our eyes, we don't see them as mere passive victims of greater forces--they are victims of their own obliviousness to them.  One son, a former Olympic athlete, now can't get a job to support his wife and so turns to petty crime; the father's business partner invites an arsonist over to seriously consider burning the store down to collect on the insurance.  Both drastic measures result in part from an earlier baseless optimism in the American Dream, in the system working, always working.

While Odets calls for the last act to be played Cherry Orchard-style in the house's now-empty living room, Fish offers another equally haunting tableau all too common today: the family cast out to its own front lawn, with everything they own in a U-Haul.  In a nicely sardonic touch, costume designer Kaye Voyce dresses various characters in leftover T-shirts bearing logos from recent political/financial disasters: AIG, Enron, and the Kerry/Edwards campaign. (They're good liberals, these Gordons.  And all the more clueless for it.)

The nearly three-hours of Fish's Paradise Lost is not a walk in the park.  But its tough-goingness is appropriate in making us feel the Gordons' dreadful progress from one economic disaster to the next.  Employing much in the way of alienation effects and long painful silence, it reminded me of another epic deconstruction of capitalism I saw at ART years ago: Robert Woodruff's chilling staging of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities.  But here we have Odets's more emotionally expressive language and characters to counterbalance the coldness; Odets thus plays very well in such epic staging.

This is helped by a wonderful cast that pours its collective heart into every impulse.  I particularly liked Michael Rudko as the odd character Pike--a rabble-rousing handyman who forms part of the eccentric extended family of neighbors and hangers-on in the Gordon household.  Outfitted in a old baseball cap, down vest, with a big white Grizzly Adams beard, Rudko's Pike may look nothing like what Odets had in mind--but he certainly looks like the kind of heartland radical you see today on Democracy Now.  His impassioned arias denouncing "the war to end all wars" that killed his son requires no "translation" to apply today; Rudko's at times direct address to the audience shames us, as he says, "Who are we if we remain silent while they make the next war--who then are we with our silence? Accomplices, Citizen!"

Also affecting were longtime ART actor Thomas Derrah as the ineffectual neighbor Gus--who I always considered a kind of boring spineless distraction until I saw Derrah walk out in old biker-leather gear and play him as just a good ol' boy with a heart.  (Gus is after all a motorcycle enthusiast in the text.)  Fish's expansive staging--where characters continually wander on and off stage or otherwise lurk in corners--also actually enhances certain roles that normally would get short shrift in performance.  Therese Plaehn's unsentimental Pearl gets to play away at her piano not offstage but visibly up on the set's higher levels, buried in her headphones and her teenage angst.  (No ingenue, she.)  And by allowing Adrianne Krstansky's Mrs. Katz to actually make an impression on the audience by letting us see her for more than the few walk-on's Odets specifies, pays off in her big Act II explosion, revealing the lies and desperation behind her marriage, the family business, and for that matter all middle class families when the bountiful riches run out.

Again, Paradise Lost closes this Saturday and I strongly recommend it.  To the adventurous, that is.  I would even acknowledge that not knowing the play (and most don't) could be a hindrance.  Fish's staging and the actors' delineations strike me as clear enough for a newcomer to the text, but there are some experimental "doublings" and other effects that might obscure certain plot points and character identities.  (Partly to scale back on the immense casting requirements of the play--24 characters in all--in one scene three shopworker characters are represented by "real" people onscreen, dubbbed over, the results of which are admittedly mixed.)  That said, even merely reading a synopsis of the play--if not the whole script--can only enhance one's appreciation here.  I consider myself very much an Odets fan and could not have liked this staging as much as I did if I didn't feel it stayed true to both the spirit and the letter of the text.

In the American Theatre article I hope not to draw some facile binary distinction between realism and expressionism, naturalist and experimental theatre.  Odets saw himself, in fact, as a kind of hybrid dramatist--striving, particularly in this play, for a poetic realism and struggling against the confines of the literal realism more common on the Broadway of his day in favor of a more expressive emotional truth.  (He thus embodies and anticipates the spirits of both Miller and Williams at once.)  So I have a hunch Clifford would like how Fish and his actors have let their imaginations work on his disenchanted "paradise" and let it awake and sing again for Americans in 2010.

(PS. One more note about the article.  Contrary to what it states, I personally do NOT deem Odets's last play The Flowering Peach a "slight biblical comedy" at all.  That was an editorial insertion, one I do not agree with.  I'm not saying it's a great play--but definitely a serious and a moving one.  So, caveat lector, as they say.)

"Do Not Go Gentle"

In this week's Time Out, my review of the one-man Dylan Thomas show, Do Not Go Gentle.

Do not go.

"Misalliance" at the Pearl

My latest Time Out review.

Don't get me wrong, I do like Shaw. But this kind of play is the reason why most today don't.

"The Late Christopher Bean"

In this week's Time Out I review the seldom revived 1932 Sidney Howard comedy The Late Christopher Bean. Not bad.

Happy to discover the play. Should be done more, especially by schools (i.e. a play from the 30s with roles for women!). I'm surprised other reviews haven't pointed out the clear Van Gogh parallel, which must have been the whole point of the original French farce Howard adapted. Any René Fauchois experts out there...?

Sayonara Oleanna

The Broadway Oleanna has posted a January 3 closing notice. Despite a movie-star cast of its own (Julia Styles and Bill Pullman), it has not lived up to Steady Rain standards for star-driven, two-character 90 minute plays. Last week, it did only 65% capacity, barely more than Brighton Beach when that closed. According to Playbill: "As of the January close date, Oleanna will have played 15 previews and 97 performances."

Maybe the closing notice is a ploy to boost sales. Personally I blame the ad campaign's tag line for being too prophetic: "Whatever Side You Take, You're Wrong!"

Riedel offers his take today, focusing on the backstage bickering over those "Take A Side" talkbacks:

I don't think the talk-backs sold many tickets. But since the show ran just 80 minutes, they were a way of making the evening seem less chintzy. "They definitely added value," says a production source.
Alas, Mamet hated them. He never attended one, but he's against them on principle, believing that his play should stand on its own and not be picked apart by "experts" on the law, feminism and campus sexual harassment policies."The talk-backs added a lot to the show," an investor says, "but we were told by David's agent right after we opened that he didn't like them."
Mamet couldn't stop them. Writers control only the script, not what happens onstage after the final bow. But he had a trump card to play. When the show opened to mixed reviews, the producers had to cut expenses and asked Mamet to waive his royalties. His price? No more talk-backs. Production members are bitter that Mamet nixed something they believed was helping the show.
"This is a play that's supposed to generate controversy, and the audience wanted to talk about it," a source says. "Mamet was basically saying 'F - - - you' to his own audience. We'll never know if the talk-backs could have become a selling point because he shut them down so quickly." (They ended right after the show opened.)

That's right, without a stupid contrived talkback panel of random "experts" the audience will never talk about the play.

I say, good for Mamet. The whole tone of the talkbacks, as advertised, demeaned the play as not just a civics lesson (which it clearly, uh, isn't) but a cheap tabloid style civics lesson at that.

Maybe the talkbacks turned people off--people who care about serious theatre that is. Maybe some who would be interested in seeing a decent production of an interesting Mamet play were not interested in going to a Montel (actual panelist) Williams show with dramatic prologue.

Anyway...What did I think of the show?

Like Brantley I too had trouble getting the terrific 1992 William Macy Off-Broadway premiere out of my head. And Mamet's original minimalist staging--on a bare-bones, almost black-box set in the pre-Stomp Orpheum Theatre downtown--enhanced the play's intensity much more than the bloated version that had to be expanded onto the John Golden stage. (Neil Patel's a good designer, but too bad he was required to build a cavernous faculty office for this struggling, not- yet-tenured professor that was fit for a Provost!)

But putting those memories aside, I still appreciated, even if I didn't prefer, Bill Pullman's far more genial protrayal. Pullman can't not be likeable, I've decided. A fine stage actor who's made a specialty of sexually-beleaguered Albee men lately, he gave the character layers of almost nebbishy self-doubt that the script otherwise would not suggest. Which unfortunately has a deleterious effect on the play, especially when the other character, the troubled female student, is played by an actress less talented and even less likeable: Julia Styles. I won't deny that Oleanna may be a sexist play. But at least with the original cast, the professor came off as a tragically arrogant pedant and the student a perhaps misguided yet justifiably motivated complainant. In this production, I get the feeling most of the audience is wondering what that cold little fembot could possibly have against such a charming mensch as Bill Pullman!

Maybe that's what kept people away.

Best American Play on Broadway to Close After One Week

I thought nothing could shock me about the state of Broadway anymore.

We all know the Rialto is not a safe space for dramatic plays--at least those lacking celebrities.

But not only did the current Brighton Beach Memoirs revival get very strong reviews...but I can attest personally that the production is also a wonderful, wonderful thing to behold. A beautifully acted and masterly directed (by David Cromer) mounting of, yes, what would normally be a so-so play but here is delivered as a very satisfying confection of tasteful and tearful family drama. (Notice I'm not saying "laugh riot." The laughs are there, but they're not the selling point. And it says a lot that the role of the wisecracking teenage narrator, Eugene--made so central by Matthew Broderick's original performance--now fades into the sepia-toned woodwork, giving way to much more satisfying characters.)

So, no masterpiece. But I left feeling there will always be a market on Broadway for a really well done middlebrow bourgeois family drama. In short, I thought it would be a hit.

Not so, apparently. The producing team just announced it's closing tomorrow. Just one week after opening.

Yesterday, Playbill was reporting the notice was "provisional," leaving open the possibility that the move was an attempt to suddenly boost sales. According to the initial release:"The notice can be taken down at any time and no final decision on closing will be made until Monday, Nov. 2, when a statement will be issued."

But this morning, NY Times' ArtsBeat reports it as a done deal.

Ok, ok, you're saying. Don't get so worked up about the closing of an old Neil Simon play.

I wish I could have gotten together some kind of review sooner to make my case for the show in more detail. However, with it closing tomorrow, I say if you had any interest in seeing this--or any interest in seeing Cromer's work--definitely go.

Meanwhile, if nothing else, this certainly provides a tantalizing case, from a producing standpoint, of what went wrong? And it forces the question: is the state of serious drama on Broadway much, much worse on Broadway than we even thought?

That there were problems behind the scenes was clear back on October 20, when lead veteran producer (and Neil Simon's perennial producer) Manny Azenberg was frank with the Times, in an article about how much indeed the Broadway biz is relying on marquee names this season:

Ticket sales have been so slow for “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” a Neil Simon play that originally ran for more than three years on Broadway, that some theater insiders are skeptical that its producers will have the financial means to open its companion piece — Mr. Simon’s follow-up play “Broadway Bound” — as scheduled in December, unless grosses improve for “Brighton Beach.” Emanuel Azenberg, the lead producer of both “Brighton Beach” and “Broadway Bound,” said on Tuesday that since the two revivals lack major stars to help sell tickets, “honestly, we need a blessing from the critics.” He added, “With a blessing from the critics, we can go forward full steam.”

Despite this obvious wink/plea to the Times' Ben Brantley--the one critic whose "blessing" seems to matter--Brantley only like it, not loved it (Critic-O-Meter sums up his notice as a "B+") but most of the other major dailies gave it outright A's.

But of course it's ticket sales that matter, not reviews in newspapers that no one reads anymore. And after slogging through a preview period averaging only 60% capacity (in a 1200-seat house), Azenberg & co. staked everything on a huge jump in advance sales the moment the reviews came out. Apparently that did not happen. (Box Office figures since October 26 not yet publicly available.)

The advance was, literally, doubly important in this case because Brighton Beach was only one of the plays in Azenberg's project. His whole idea was to pair it with Simon's later sequel, Broadway Bound. I guess he figured--same set, most of the same characters, why not. Two for one! And after all, folks just couldn't get enough of those three Tom Stoppard plays about frickin' Russia, for crying out loud. So a Neil Simon play about Brooklyn should be a synch. (Maybe he thought it would attract Brighton Beach's more recent Russian immigrants?) The fact that the also-British Norman Conquests trilogy struggled to lure three-peat ticket buyers this summer seemed not to deter him.

Fatal flaw number one--both Coast of Utopia and Norman were not only British (and hence front-loaded with snob appeal for the affluent, i.e. those who can afford tickets) but were also produced by nonprofits: respectively, Lincoln Center Theatre and London's Old Vic, who created Norman before its commercial tour to NYC.

So here's Manny Azenberg thinking he can create a rep-production from scratch in a commercial venue in 2009, and actually make money. The last time such a thing was tried I believe was the Broadway Angels in America back in 1993 But I'm not sure how that did overall, and the second part, Perestroika opened six months (and one Tony Award sweep) after Millenium Approaches. Plenty of time to build an advance. Plus, it benefited from the buzz (in the still-influential print media of the time) of being the hottest new American play in a long while.

Broadway Bound, on the other hand, was set to begin previews in just three weeks, November 18. (I assume they were already in rehearsal?)

So Azenberg was looking at a massive, massive bill, huge weekly operating expenses, and very little income. And he was surprised???

Of course, the whole plan was premised on the belief that Neil Simon's name alone would attract the sales. But even that hasn't been true in a long time.

The postmortems on this one will be interesting, to say the least. Many will undoubtedly ask if Brighton Beach would have survived ok if it had not been yoked to this crazy rep idea. It seems that the financial burden of Broadway Bound is what really sunk the first play.

I must say, leaving the Nederlander Theatre that night, I was so satisfied with what I had seen that, rather than whetting my appetite for more, I really didn't need to see a sequel. I had seen just enough of those characters and it was perfect for what it was. Simon's convoluted plotting was not the highlight, and that's all that would change in the next play.

It's all a terrible shame, because the work on stage in Brighton Beach is so fine. Laurie Metcalf gives a brave, scary performance as the matriarch, Jessica Hecht is unrecognizable as the wallflower aunt (you can hear her talk about the role in a nice NYT "slideshow"). The two of them engage in some naked emotion and outright ugliness you're not used to seeing in a Neil Simon play. Young Noah Robbins as Eugene is actually the weak link in the cast; he's probably too young as an actor to carry the play. (Broderick was 21 at the time. Robbins is 19 but seems genuinely on the brink of puberty.) But I was happy to focus instead on Santino Fontana, who is very strong as the older brother (as he was as the older brother in Billy Elliot) and, most of all, Dennis Boutsikaris as the father. Boutsikaris gives such an understated and dignified portrayal he somehow moved me to tears constantly. (No, I don't normally cry at the theatre, and hardly at Neil Simon!) I don't know what it was, but he somehow endowed the character with that noble suffering that the immigrant generation went through to give their children a better life. A simple line like, "I never finished the eighth grade," in his delivery, floored me; a poignant reminder of when we didn't take education for granted and that is really wrong to judge someone for lack of one.

So that's just a snippet of what I found worthy. With this on top of Our Town, David Cromer claims the mantle of Master of American Naturalism (successor to Daniel Sullivan, one could say) and gives American (noncelebrity) actors a chance to do on stage the kind of thing they do best.
Too bad so few will get to see his work.

I guess you can thank Broadway and the increasingly clueless producers who still believe in it as a venue of quality.

What I've Been Seeeing

To confirm that Playgoer indeed still does go to plays, I've decided to discipline myself better about writing them up. When sitting down to write a whole "review" seems to daunting, though, I may resort to this new feature, "What I've Been Seeing"--a way to take the pressure off myself and simply unload what I most remember about notable productions.

And so, here's what I've been seeing lately. I'll get to Broadway another time, but here are two prominent Non-Broadway productions I saw last month that deserve some reflecting upon--even though they are, alas, now closed.


Aftermath (New York Theatre Workshop). Exonerated's Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interview Iraqi refugees and put their words on stage. (closed)

First, wonderful cast. The company of nine Arab and South Asian actors, most of whom I had never seen before, was very impressive. The stories they had to tell (taken from the words of the actual Iraqis interviewed) were powerful, especially in reminding us of yet another horrific blunder of our misadventure in that country: ruining the lives of so many of the people we were supposedly trying to save.

So that combination of gripping stories powerfully told and embodied was basically worth it. However, as with Exonerated, I find myself bothered by Blank and Jensen's approach. First, something about the staging (by Blank) and structure of Aftermath seemed really awkward and plodding. In interspersing the stories of two couples and four individuals, Blank made the actors keep moving into spotlights from upstage--resulting in a new "cutaway" and transition every ten minutes or so. Theatrically this just became inevitably tiresome and ended up sucking some of the power out of the fine material. Also, the creators' decision to have one actor behave as "translator" had a number of odd effects. One, for the first twenty minutes or so the storytellers began talking in Arabic, with the translator "translating," and then--magically!--letting these Iraqis morph suddenly into English-speakers. It's a convention well known from the movies and here seemed entirely unnecessary. Sure, I guess it foregrounded the very nature of translation and lent some "authenticity" to the proceedings. But problems of translation didn't really figure in the rest of the play, when this convention was soon dropped. Moreover, while the storytellers mostly addressed the audience directly, that "translator" was always there mediating, and often lessening our direct connection with the characters. This ended up actually softening the blow, I felt, when certain characters directly accused the U.S. (i.e. us) of ruining their lives.

All in all, this had the ingredients of good documentary political theatre, but suffered from a little too much meddling from its non-Iraqi creative team.


Othello directed by Peter Sellars, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (LABrynth & Public Theatres, at NYU)

You may have gathered many folks didn't much care for this production. Let's just say there was a lot to scratch your head about.

While I too questioned the costuming of Mr. Hoffman (an ill-fitting merino sweater of the ugliest green--to signified some green-bellied monster?), I actually liked his performance. Sure, this was not an Iago that would have made sense in any realistic staging of the play--playing his sadistic subtext for all to see, hulking around the stage like a crybaby about to go postal--but, hey, this was hardly a realistic production. As he did in Long Day's Journey and The Seagull Hoffman once again reminded us of his fine stage chops--he's one of our few major movie stars who can project the exact same quiet intensity on stage as he does on screen. His line readings were, well, weird sometimes--but never boring. He illuminated the knotty text powerfully and completely inhabited it. So whether or not it was a "proper" Iago...I was riveted whenever he was on stage.

Unfortunately, Iago isn't in every scene. And the rest of the LABrynth ensemble--while shown to good effect in other, more contemporary and naturalistic plays--just were not up to Hoffman's level natural skills and engagement with the text. And in the case of John Ortiz (who's shone in other LABrynth productions and in supporting roles for Michael Mann films), here was an actor who never would be cast as Othello were he not co-running the company. Whether it was Ortiz's relatively slight build, his thin voice, his unfortunate resemblance (from the balcony at least) to SNL's Fred Armisen...he was so overpowered by Hoffman from the get-go, and so unconvincing as the swashbuckling slayer of Turks, that the character dynamics of this monumental tragedy were thrown fatally off balance.

As for Sellars' vision, perhaps I'm one of the few who wishes he futzed more with the play, not less. I enjoyed his reimagining of the play's opening intrigues and backroom dealings as a series of furtive (sometimes simultaneous) cell phone conferences, manipulated by Iago. I was genuinely creeped out by the exaggerated horror-movie style of Iago and Othello's plotting against Cassio (played face out, into microphones, with campfire from-below lighting and spooky underscoring). Meanwhile, Sellars' stated intentions of creating an Othello for the Obama age never really materialized on stage. Dressing soldiers in formal navy blues and plopping a bed of tv screens center stage don't exactly do the directing for you. Deciding to go with pretty much the full four-hour(!) text in this context seemed senseless since Sellars' concept only came through in brief spurts, leaving lots of longueurs of unsteadily spoken blank verse in between.

So for me what was most wrong with this Othello was an odd schizoid quality that I've not seen anyone else point out. It was like two productions going on at once, and colliding. On the one hand you have Peter Sellars doing the full regietheater, using actors as symbols to make bold ironic intellectual statements on a big industrial stage (in this case NYU's Skirball Center). And then you have the LABrynth ensemble: a bunch of gritty naturalists who perform best in small blackboxes with contemporary material. Given the set's mostly bare stage (outside of the much-maligned "TV-bed") and contemporary clothing, what unfolded often looked, comically, like a group of very inward looking method actors who had broken into Wooster Group headquarters to do a four-hour runthrough on their stage.

Review: "A New Theory of Vision"

Once again, the Voice has relegated the quickie "Sightlines" reviews to online-only world. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come from parent company New Times Media (sorry--recently renamed Village Voice Media.)

So my web-exclusive for this week: an odd little piece called "A New Theory of Vision" at the Kraine downtown. If you're really into enlightenment philosophy and/or virtual reality...maybe. Otherwise, eh.

BTW, the William Gibson referred to in the review is not the Miracle Worker guy.