Highway to the Anger Zone

In Kim Rosenstock’s new play, Tigers Be Still, it’s not just the big cat of the title that’s on the run – at one point a dog gets loose too. But while these animals run wild, their human counterparts are in varied cases of stasis in this introspective work from a very promising emerging playwright. Sherry (Halley Feiffer), a 24-year-old art therapist, is the connective tissue between these cocooned lives. These include her older sister Grace (Natasha Lyonne), who has retreated home after breaking up with her adulterous fiancé and brought half of his belongings – including his pet dogs – with her. Grace now spends her days in a fugue state, nursing Jack Daniel’s and re-watching Top Gun ad nauseum. The two sisters live with their mother, who has put on so much weight that she hides in her bedroom offstage and refuses to emerge, Gilbert Grape-style.

There are also several men attached to Sherry, including Joseph (Reed Birney), the principal of the high school where Sherry teaches but also the erstwhile prom date of Sherry’s mother, and his teen son, Zack (John Magaro), who becomes Sherry’s teaching assistant but is also in need of some therapy himself in the wake of his mother’s death in a car accident.

Rosenstock’s look at frozen lives is sharp but also painless; there is a plot, of sorts, that includes a tiger on the loose, but Tigers is really a character study. In this way the play calls to mind one of last year’s great triumphs, Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, in which characters’ seeming immobility actually had tons to tell and propelled the story along. Both shows have something else in common in the form of director Sam Gold, a genius at exacting nuance and depth from even the slightest situation.

And Gold does just that in Tigers. Grace, for example, could be a really self-indulgent showboating piece, but Lyonne does the work of dealing with the character’s pain beneath the humor to inject her with true pathos. Magaro, too, navigates the fine line between typical surly youth and emotionally crippled survivor with impressive skill: Zack engenders humor and sympathy as his complicated relationship with Sherry develops. Feiffer, too, is generous throughout the play, taking what could have been an annoyingly quirky leading role – Sherry has never had a job or a boyfriend, but comes armed with human insight – and instead weaving herself into the tapestry of an ensemble.

It’s Birney, though – himself a Circle Mirror grad – who runs away with his too few scenes in Tigers as the show’s most believable character. Rosenstock has made Joseph a character full of secrets, some of which he keeps from us (including a high school inside joke that remains between him and Sherry’s mother only) and some of which he keeps from other characters. A solo scene in which Joseph attempts to cancel his late wife’s yoga magazine subscription is a case study in grief and a textbook example of rich performance.

Tigers isn’t yet a perfect play. It would benefit from a little economy; if Rosenstock could cut down on the number of quick two-hander scenes, the play might feel less meandering as this quartet’s emotional journey continues.

And while it is a great compliment for the play to be a part of the Roundabout Underground series, the black box theater there is dreadful. With Gold’s actors often sitting or laying down, much of the action is quite literally impossible to see if one is not in the front row; a Cirque du Soleil member couldn’t do all of the craning and contorting necessary to see everything on that stage. (Still, what one can see of Dane Laffrey’s costumes and sets are worth it.)

Rosenstock’s play is proof-positive that many things in life are possible. Tigers can be tamed. People can get through grief. And it’s possible to write a smart, sensitive play that is pure joy to sit through.

Next-Door Haters

Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris's new drama, loosely based on the Lorraine Hansberry classic A Raisin in the Sun , is a searing and blisteringly funny look at race relations and the power of property. Enjoying its premiere at Playwrights Horizons, the play is presented by a talented cast of actors -- a few of whom (Christina Kirk, Frank Wood and Chrystal A. Dickenson) raise the bar exponentially on already-excellent writing. It is finely directed by Pam McKinnon.

Clybourne Park , (also the name of the all-white Chicago neighborhood depicted in Raisin , begins Act One in 1959, with neighbors up-in-arms over the sale (in the wake of a tragedy) of a home at 406 Clybourne Street to the community's first African-American family.

Russ and Bev (Kirk/Wood) play a traditional 1950's couple, who - while packing up the house with the help of their maid, Francine (Dickenson) - are confronted by angry neighbors (Jeremy Shamos/Annie Parisse) concerned about the effect of the sale upon local property values.

Kirk and Wood are outstanding in this simmer-to-boil act. Kirk infuses Bev with such energy that she wrings out every drop of the hostility-behind-the-gentility of a 50's-era woman, both in her condescending interactions with Francine, and in the way she summons the community priest (Brendan Griffin) to aid her preoccupied husband and comfort herself. As a deeply depressed father, Wood is achingly funny - and uses some of Norris's shorter lines like lethal tennis volleys.

Racial misconceptions and fears are dredged up as arguments by the intruding neighbors -- ranging from vapid concerns over ethnic food to obscene sociological observations ("So what I have to conclude is that the pasttime of skiing just doesn't appeal to the Negro community.")

The act is washed down with Bev's ostensibly well-meaning but nauseating platitudes thrown in for good measure ("Maybe we should learn what the other person eats...maybe that would be the solution, if someday we could sit down at one big table.")

A Raisin in the Sun was to become the first play written by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. It draws its inspiration from the Langston Hughes poem, Harlem, taking its title from the line, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" For The Youngers, the play's central family, home ownership - in spite of objections from Clybourne Park's Improvement Committee - is held up as a Holy Grail of sorts.

In Act Two of Clybourne Park , set in 2009, we find a young white couple (Parissse/Shamos) thumbing through a contract that would allow them to bulldoze their freshly-purchased house at 406 Clybourne Street to reconstruct it, plus an addition (of the upwardly-mobile variety). As their home would then dwarf other nearby homes, they face objections from the Historical Society of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, in the form of another couple (Dickinson and Damon Gupton).

The second act starts out civilly, but soon emerges into raw conflict and the artful but brutal use of (racially-inspired) jokes. The second act really belongs to Dickenson (as Lena), as she evolves from benign impatience to increasing frustration with not being heard, to finally showing her teeth. The space in the room that Lena claims once she explodes personifies all the underlying metaphors in question. Kirk also shines as the narcisstic lawyer for the young white couple, langorously sipping iced-coffee Weeds style, and delivering well-placed comic lines.

The racism in this act hurts, it's meant to, but it's also raw and funny. It touches close enough to the nerve to be both unsettling and hilarious. The intra-couple tension that is also present only adds to the building rancor.

The only disappointing thing about Act Two (once it gets revved up) is the tail end of it, which harkens back to events in the house, as it existed in 1959. This attempt to tie the two stories (1959 & 2009) together - joined already by virtue of place - feels manufactured and gratuitous.

The set, engineered by Damiel Ostling and rich in detail, undergoes a stunnning transformation in-between acts. The pale greens and rose purples that contrasted with well-chosen costumes like Bev's dress in Act One, become grafitti-stained walls with off-stage glimpses of overturned paint buckets in Act Two.

There is an acute sense that no easy resolution is possible for still-festering racial tensions over territory and community. ("You can't live in a principle. You live in a home." )

Still, an evening of smart writing and terrific acting where risks like these are taken makes every startling moment completely worth the price of admission. Hurry to Playwright's Horizons to catch Clybourne Park while you can.

Cruel to Be Kind

In plays such as Fat Pig and Reasons to be Pretty and similarly dyspeptic films like In the Company of Men, playwright Neil LaBute has spared no mercy in displaying just how cruel man can be, invading the dark corners of the mind people keep hidden from strangers and shining a bright light upon them. bash, one of LaBute’s earlier works of note (it debuted Off-Broadway a decade ago featuring a searing cast that included Ron Eldard and Calista Flockhart), is perhaps one of his most searing. Director Robert Knopf certainly holds nothing back in Chris Chaberski's and Eastcheap Rep’s current production, running at Tom Noonan’s Paradise Factory.

The show is essentially a triptych of three extended monologues. Though the order has changed in various productions, the first of the three scenes I saw was “Medea Redux.” It features a lone woman, matter-of-factly addressing the audience about a sexual relationship she had with her teacher when she was thirteen years old. The unnamed woman ultimately becomes pregnant from this relationship, but keeps the child and defends this teacher, even though the two eventually become estranged.

Chelsea Lagos plays the woman in a performance that’s part endurance test and part act of deception: her character tells us a lot, and does so in very carefully measured amounts, but what is most important is what she doesn’t tell us. LaBute’s most important character attributes lie in what remains unsaid. It isn’t that his narrators in bash are unreliable, but that what we see is not totally what we get. The playwright wants us to dig in between the lines and come up with our own conclusions, forcing us to turn a mirror on our own dark impulses.

Take, for example, the next monologue, “Iphigenia in Orem,” starring Luke Rosen as Young Man. Rosen, in a wonderfully polished performance, recounts to an unseen party (and really to us) how a practical joke between himself and a work colleague escalated severely. As with Lagos’ Young Woman, circumstances eventually escalate to the point where the Young Man makes a shocking decision. This is shocking not just because of the weight of the decision, but also jarring because his assured delivery doesn’t fit that weight appropriately.

More than most of LaBute’s plays, including his later Wrecks, bash reflects the playwright’s dexterous ear for language and imagery. He knows how to make these long scenes more palatable for his less auditory audience members. Throughout the play, he subverts the major events of each monologue. His characters gloss over heavy subjects effortlessly – sometimes Lagos and Rosen display sweetness or fondness when describing difficult certain choices they have made – and speak in a lilting, lyrical way.

Knopf also demonstrates real style for each monologue. Each scene feels perfectly paced, and make the seemingly impossible possible: he finds a way into each character that not only hooks us in, but makes us care regardless of the information we get from them. We feel the pain, shame, foolishness and regret that these characters have experienced at some point in the stories they share.

And it really does feel like sharing. Throughout the performance, we feel as though we are right there witnessing the acts discussed in the play, rather than simply hearing accounts of past incidents. Nowhere is this more paramount than the second act monologue, “A Gaggle of Saints,” in which Lagos and Rosen play Sue and John, a New England couple who recount a disturbing trip to New York in ways that contradict each other while filling in missing blanks.

Lagos and Rosen are perfectly cast in each of their two roles. They both feel completely honest and lend an enormous amount of credibility to their respective pieces of the show. Additionally, Jessica Fialko’s design deserves mention, particularly the lighting, which becomes a character of its own during the performance.

Perhaps the most alarming about bash may be the same thing that makes it the most successful. Knopf’s production shows that, while cruelty can take many different forms and occur in a variety of different situations, it is something that lives in all of us.

U.S. on the March

George Santayana declared, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That may explain why the revival of this 1973 piece of documentary theater, originally written in response to the Vietnam War, comes as a shock. Although most people may know that the United States took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, almost no one remembers that after the treaty with Spain, from 1899 to 1902, the United States put down a Filipino independence movement with tactics that were as brutal as anything the Taliban thought up. Among the many astonishing parallels with more recent U.S. interventions is the use of “the water cure” to get information from suspected insurgents. Playwrights Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler took their title from an editorial in The Nation in 1900, a year after United States annexed the former territories of Spain and an election year in which imperialism was hotly debated. In the article, the periodical catalogued the U.S. depredations: “Liberty crushed to earth by the land of liberty...broken promises...trenches full of Filipino dead...smoking heaps where once were happy villages...desolate fields, ruined industries...starving women and children.” Year One covers the run-up to the Spanish-American War and its grisly aftermath, and the characters include some of the most famous Americans of the time.

Drawn from correspondence, speeches, debates, and official documents, the play features a vast array of characters, including generals, political bosses, party leaders, observers, and two Irish stereotypes, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Hennessey, who bring a bit of comic relief while also representing the attitudes of the common man. Among the Imperialists were President William McKinley, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, and patrician Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of the Massachusetts dynasty (“Hooray for dear old Boston/The home of the bean and the cod./Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/And the Cabots speak only to God”), who was at loggerheads with his senior senator, George Frisbie Hoar, leader of the Anti-Imperialists.

The Anti-Imperialists included ex-Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, who offered President McKinley $20 million to buy the Philippines so he could free the citizens. (Only Twain and Carnegie appear in the play.) Unusually, it was the older generation of former abolitionists who battled to keep the country true to its ideals, while the younger generation, epitomized by Roosevelt, were itching for expansion.

The debate touched on all aspects of American life in unexpected ways, as when eye-patched "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a Senator from South Carolina, admonishes Lodge and his cohorts: “We inherited our race problem. But you are going out in search of yours. ... Let me ask you then, if the Filipinos are not fit for self-government, how dared you put the southern states into the hands of Negroes, as being fit not only to govern themselves, but also to govern white men?”

The production by Alex Roe employs 11 actors in 43 named roles, including three women, although none of the decision-makers of the period were female. But at two and a half hours, and even with two intermissions and a fascinating subject, the production is taxing. Part of it is the amount of information presented, but some of the actors also spoke haltingly, as if still mastering their characters. Perhaps as they become more comfortable with the huge parts the pace will pick up.

Still, there was confident and sharp work from J.M. McDonough in all his roles, including Carnegie and Tillman; Michael Hardart as the young, irascible, determined Roosevelt; and David Patrick Ford as minor characters and as an impressive singer of the national anthem. Roe utilized the small black box space well. A balcony served as platform for the politicians as well as a ship’s deck for Commodore Dewey (the master of gunboat diplomacy, who had already opened Japan and who sank the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila), and flags and music added visual interest.

A host of moments links the play to our own time, from the descriptions of the burnings and starvation inflicted on the Philippines, to the startling debates between the self-righteous imperialists led by a bull-headed Republican President, to the official reassurances that “The boys will be home by Christmas.” If it sometimes plays more as history lesson than drama, it still has a lot of juice.

It Can Be a War All the Time

Simply put, International WOW Company

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' on the Bus

There is a groove going on uptown at the Harlem School of the Arts; there is rhythm and there is blues, there is soul and there is funk, heck, a couple of times there is even some good old-fashioned musical theater. Buy a ticket and get your booty on the D train. Nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in its original 1971 Broadway production, Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, the Classical Theater of Harlem tells us, paved the way for the choreopoem, spoken word, and rap music. Legendary impresario Melvin Van Peebles has concocted a great bluesy, jazzy, and above all, poetic paean to a specific time and a specific place�most specifically black urban neighborhoods of the early 1970s.

Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death is about the comings-and-goings of this neighborhood, a pointillist portrait of a community using no drama save its residents� daily lives, no antagonist save a general malaise called "the man." In a series of musical monologues, the residents sing their fears, frustrations, criminations, recriminations, and regrets�all blending together into a unified cry of pain.

(l to r) Carmen Barika and Ty Jones in Ain't Supposed to Die A Natural Death Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg
Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg

But that is not to say it is not any fun.

In the opening scene of the show, Sunshine (the ebullient D. Rubin Green) walks onstage appearing mighty annoyed as he watches something go by, looks toward the audience, and cries "It just don�t make no sense how these corns are hurtin� me!" Sunshine gets on the bus and is joined in rapid succession by his neighbors, running and winding across the stage in a snaky conga line; an exciting beginning, and also the best impersonation of careening public transport this reviewer has ever seen.

That is only one of several songs, of course, and one of several characters; there is a pimp and his prostitutes, a country boy-turned Nation of Islam proponent, a drag queen and an angry lesbian, a convict on Death Row, a sad, fat man, and more. Each character has a song, each character has a moment, and almost all of it is arresting.

	(l-r) Rashaad Ernesto Green and J. Kyle Manzay in Ain't Supposed to Die A Natural Death
	Photo Credit:Carol Rosegg

There are highlights�the aforementioned Sunshine; the lesbian, Dyke (Tracy Jack) who sings a plaintive song to her unseen lover, pleading that she go to a dance with her; The Con (J. Kyle Manzay), singing to lover, Lilli, the girl he murdered; the crooked Black Cop, gleefully abusing a prostitute on his beat. Perhaps the loudest accolades should go to set designer Troy Hourie, whose urban sprawl of a set is as bleak as the characters' lives.

Some may be put off by the show; as a poem, like Ntozake Shange's Obie award-winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf, much of what is spoken is often incomprehensible, but as a poem, its chief concern is not content, but tone; to put it more plainly (and to paraphrase Roger Ebert), it is not what it is about, but how it is about it. Like Ain�t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Mr. Van Peebles� landmark Sweet Sweetback�s Badasss Song (famously "rated X by an all-white jury") is another endeavor remembered more for its attitude than the intricacies of its plot.

The complaints are few, but the biggest is that in the relatively small theater space of the Harlem School of the Arts, director Alfred Preisser chose to have his actors wear microphones. This amounts to gross overamplification, giving the performances a tinny, pre-recorded quality, jarring at 20 feet away. When Wino�s (Ralph Carter) microphone cut out during his performance, the natural sound of his voice energized his song�until the microphone came back on.

Perhaps that is quibbling. Even with the microphones, the alchemy is still there, the music (under the direction of William "Spaceman" Patterson) still jives, and the actors just do their thing.

Oh, yeah.