Dreams Plus Action

A unicorn made of glass catches the light. Laura is holding it, but this is not The Glass Menagerie . Gone are Laura’s limp, Tom’s struggle with his identity, and several of the other tragic details that color Tennessee Williams’ touching dream play. In its place is The Pretty Trap . The streamlined one-act, penned prior to its better known cousin, replaces the melancholy with the comedic. Cause Célèbre’s production does a nice job of bringing this piece to life. We quickly locate ourselves in the Wingfield’s household through Ray Klausen’s realistic set. Tennessee Williams spends a great deal of time intricately explaining the physical locations of his plays, and though I value the creativity of scenic designers, I am always happy to see that someone has taken the time to respect the playwright’s wishes. David Toser’s costume design and Bernie Dove’s lighting and sound are also well tuned to the realistic and naturalistic demands of the script. The design supports this world, and the characters seem to belong to a pre-war New Orleans.

However, there is one obvious choice that Director Antony Marsellis has made that gives me pause. Though Katharine Houghton has the charm and the vivacity to play Amanda, she is unfortunately a bit too advanced in age to be undertaking this part. Amanda is an aging southern belle, but in order for us to understand how overbearing Amanda is, we need to be bowled over by her energy. Though Houghton does a fine job, I wish I had been able to see her play this role ten or fifteen years ago.

Whereas The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s play, told from his memory, The Pretty Trap is certainly Amanda’s play. She is the ultimate manipulator, the “witch,” which is something that Houghton cannot quite pull off, as her presence is too gentle. This is more a fault of casting than of anything else, and her performance is still strong.

But it is the scene between The Gentleman Caller (Robert Eli) and Laura (Nisi Sturgis) that stands out in this production. As Sturgis overcomes her shy ways, drawn out of her shell by Eli’s friendly optimism, we watch as Laura has the first real emotionally intimate encounter of her life. But unlike the bittersweet conclusion that normally follows this scene, The Pretty Trap allows us to imagine a happier version of events.

Yet this aspect of The Pretty Trap is also, in my opinion, why the play has not had the lasting impact on audiences that The Glass Menagerie has. The happy version of events is nice to watch, but it does not have the emotional impact of the dramatic version. The arc of The Glass Menagerie tells the story of a family full of people who have convinced themselves that getting a suitor for Laura will solve all of their problems. By the time The Gentleman Caller comes, we are invested in this dream right along with the Wingfields. In The Pretty Trap we do not have time to get attached to Laura or Amanda, to know their hopes and dreams, to understand the stakes; not to mention the fact that Tom (Loren Dunn) is barely given a role in this family event.

We are happy at the end of this Williams play, something that cannot often be said. Perhaps this is because we like to see ending full of potentiality, or perhaps because we like to think of what it could have been like if things had been different from the Wingfield story in our heads. The play looks very much like dreams plus actions, just as The Gentleman Caller and then Amanda herself say. Whichever it is, this is a great chance to see a rarely seen Tennessee Williams work in a good production.

What a Piece of Work is Hamlet

In the Drilling Company’s Hamlet, staged as their Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot offering this summer, there is great drama being presented. Not only are there the conflicts between Hamlet and the rest of the Danish court, but there is also the real world drama of the conflict between an actor’s voice and a car rushing by or a helicopter overhead. Watching this play from the comfort of a lawn chair in a municipal parking lot on the Lower East Side is a unique experience, to be sure. For those looking for a definitive production of the Bard’s text, this is probably not the production to see. It is at times difficult to understand (both to hear and to follow) and there are many odd choices made here. If, however, what you are after is an opportunity to experience the play and to enjoy the New York City summer night, then this production is well worth your time. It is very pleasurable to be confronted with Shakespeare as you watch the city move by around you. The classic revenge drama is staged in such a manner as to cleverly incorporate its parking lot surroundings. A street lamp is placed in the center of the action, both to illuminate the stage action once the sun has set and as a platform on which the actors may climb. The brief moment in which an actor takes advantage of this lamppost is one of the highlights of the production. In a piece with such a special setting, it is hard not to wish that director Hamilton Clancy had incorporated the surrounding environment more. What would it mean if Hamlet were taking place in a literal parking lot? What might that setting do to the meaning of the plot(s) unfolding?

Instead of attempting to answer these questions, the company seems to be using their locale as a forum for presenting Shakespeare at no cost to whoever wishes to stop by and hear it, which in and of itself is a very noble cause. Hamlet is one of the greatest plays in the English language and for those who may have no other chance to hear it performed live, this production is entirely worth taking advantage of. There is real heart in what the performers do here; it is clear that much effort has been put into this production and the actors perform the lengthy play with much zeal and zest.

There are many alterations to the text that are hard to justify. For instance, instead of opening the play with guards on watch, the play opens with a famous speech by Hamlet. By having the play start with Hamlet, the director is entirely reframing the context of the action. Although this is an acceptable choice–and similar to what many other contemporary directors have done with the play–these cuts and rearrangements detract from the overall impact of the play’s meaning. Rather than being a larger rumination on certain human issues, this production seemed much more concerned with the unfolding of the basic revenge plot.

In addition, many production choices are distracting. It is hard to place whether this production is meant to be a contemporary rendering of the play or a period piece; some actors wear what appears to be mid-twentieth century apparel while others are more casually attired in modern dress. There are also many unnecessary props on stage. Yet, at moments in which a prop would be useful, an actor would mime an object.

That being said, the stage design is fine overall, and the configuration of benches and sheet that create the grave is ingenious. The actors utilize the space well, making an effort to be seen on all sides of the audience. Unfortunately, I found the performers were often quite difficult to hear over the ambient noise of the city surrounding them. Some actors chose to shout over the sounds; this often took away from the larger impact of their performances. Hamlet, for example, played by Alessandro Colla, often seemed angry, as there was extensive effort put into projecting the voice above the din of city life. That being said, the Hamlet that he created was overall interesting to watch and sympathetic. The supporting cast, too, gave a laudable presentation of these oft-performed lines.

All in all, the joy of watching Shakespeare come to life in the unlikely location of a pay-to-park lot off of Delancey Street outweighs any possible flaws with this production. Witnessing this performance in this unlikely locale is a special occurrence and one worth taking advantage of before the transformative magic of the theater vanishes and the city goes back to its regularly scheduled business.

The Weather Is Nice Here

The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions… Or the road to heaven is littered with landmines… Certainly, for the Weather Underground, the truth lies somewhere in between the fuzzy, yellow lines. home/sick by The Assembly, now playing at The Collapsable Hole in Williamsburg, examines that rugged terrain through their thought-provoking production. The audience walks into a converted industrial space greeted by a man in a black suit and sunglasses. He politely offers us a beer and a button that reads, “My brain is a bomb.” As we take our seats- on chairs or benches or pillows- the lights shift, whirling us deep into a subversive world of young American idealists fighting for what they believe is the equality of all mankind. They are angry. They are fearless. They are brilliant. And they believe pacifism is a dead-end road.

Jess Chayes’s direction is daring and engrossing. The lines between actor and audience, play and reality, right and wrong, become so blurred it is hard not to get caught up in the fervor and passion of these romantics- even if you whole-heartedly disagree with their actions. Chayes intricately blends movement, dance, lighting and sound to capture not only the counterculture of the 70s but also the complex struggles and political questions these very real people were grappling with.

The talented ensemble delivers their performances with such empathy and honesty it is hard not to feel moments of compassion for a group of people who just blew up a building or robbed a truck. One of the most powerful moments for me was watching Edward Bauer fight back this child-like vulnerability when called out in front of the collective for confiding secrets and intimacy in one member over the others. And the rest of the cast is equally terrific! Their connection with one another, both as actors and characters, is palpable and powerful.

The Assembly does an impeccable job of presenting a fair, honest, and unapologetic look at who these people really were. I never once felt like I was watching a political play, but rather an honest depiction of real lives asking big questions about the nature of humanity. This is a group of brilliant artists who will, without question, make their mark in the world of theater for a long time to come.

It is hard to really understand the nature of a revolution when one has never suffered from oppression. Sure, there are plenty of battles worth fighting in this country. There is an abundance of greed and destruction and corruption worth questioning every waking moment of our lives.

But how does one really ignite a revolution when drugs, sex, food, and entertainment are so plentiful? When one has never watched his family starve or had his house burned to ash by ruthless armies? When one’s freedom of expression- the very freedom that allows us to put on theater in such abundance- has never been censored? Not that these are the only roots for a revolution, per se, but it has often been the case throughout history that society as a whole must hit rock bottom, people must truly have nothing left to lose, before they are willing to sacrifice their existence and beliefs to rise up against their own country.

The Weather Underground, in their haze of drugs, sex, and egos, seems to lose sight of this reality. Fortunately, The Assembly has retained the insight to question their actions… and ours.

Memories from Hurricane Katrinia

The Play About My Dad at 59E59 is a rare gem masterfully guided by an incredible new voice in theater. Boo Killebrew’s beautiful play depicts several heartbreaking stories about the lives of people she knew and loved that were forever altered by Hurricane Katrina. The glue of the play is Boo Killebrew herself and her father Larry Hammond Killebrew, an emergency room doctor who was on duty in Pass Christian, Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. The stories the play tells are recollections of Larry and Boo’s memories woven together by their own turmoil. The play opens on a spare stage sprinkled with a few milk crates, old chairs and plywood boards. Larry (Jay Potter) and Boo (Anna Greenfield) enter with scripts in hand. Boo announces to the audience, “ We are going to play with magical realism and time travel and side stories and make the whole thing sort of like a tapestry.” After an awkward introduction from Larry, who reminds us he is not an actor, he and Boo introduce the other characters in the play. Kenny Tyson (Jordan Mahome) and Neil Plitt (TJ Witham) are two childhood friends of Boo’s who happen to be EMT workers on duty the day Hurricane Katrina hit. The scene opens with the two caught up in heated banter about whether or not Kenny, as he claims, can actually travel to other dimensions. Neil does not believe him, but his tone quietly changes when Kenny reveals a piece of news that sends a wave of fear through Neil.

Jay Thomas (Juan Francisco Villa), his wife Rena Thomas (Annie Henk) and their five-year-old son Michael (David Rosenblatt) are locals from Pass Christian. They are in the process of boarding up their windows before the storm hits. Michael is frightened by the loud thunder, but is quickly calmed by his parents who tell him they are going to have a hurricane party. Essie Watson (Geany Masai) is an elderly woman who helped raise Larry as a child. Larry stops by on his way to the hospital to check in on Essie. He tries to get her to go with him, but she refuses to leave her home. “You think I can’t take care of myself?” Essie remarks. “I taught you how to wipe your own backside.”

From there we watch the events of that all-too-familiar day unfold onstage. We watch as families and lives, just like memories and ghosts, are swirled up by nature. We watch as Boo and Larry, through the chaos of nature, gain the courage to finally confront their own memories and ghosts.

The entire cast is absolutely wonderful. Especially noteworthy are Anna Greenfield and Jay Potter. Both give nuanced and heartfelt performances, intimately capturing the complicated and universal relationship between a father and a daughter. During one of Greenfield’s monologues, the play was interrupted by a cellphone buzz. Without batting an eye, Greenfield paused the story and asked that the phone be shut off. It took me a moment to realize that this was not part of the play.

Lee Sunday Evans’s direction is subtle and effective. She creatively uses a somewhat awkward space to the play’s advantage through minimalistic choices. There are no sound effects or dramatic lighting or theatrical movements. She strips the play to its bare bones, allowing the audience to be swept up by the stories onstage mixed with our own memories of that event. Killebrew skillfully navigates a terrain that is full of very big landmines. How do you objectively write a play about yourself and your father? But she manages to do so while avoiding traps- such as sentimentality or self-indulgence or superficial dialogue- that a lesser writer could easily succumb to.

The Play About My Dad is about Boo and her father, sure, but it is also about much more. We waste so much time holding grudges against the people we love, but we never know when that devastating storm will hit in our own lives and never give us the chance to forgive. Luckily for Boo and Larry Killebrew, nature gave them a second chance that they tenderly share with the rest of us.

Putting the Man in Manipulate

The beautiful but creepy opening tableau of Cherry Lane Theatre’s production of Manipulation sets the tone for this cerebral production. A woman is lying down. A slowly spreading spotlight on her face gradually reveals several marionettes invading her space. This artistic representation of the greater metaphors of the show is a perfect example of this production’s brave interpretation of Victoria E. Calderon’s American debut. If you are looking for a high-flying (or crashing) action epic, this is not your show. Calderon and Cherry Lane bring you an aesthetically pleasing production of a complex play, making it an exciting prospect for those of you who enjoy the rare delicacies of thought-provoking theater. Set in a place designated only as “Latin America,” Manipulation does an excellent job of literally setting the stage for a story specifically not set in the United States. I am far from an expert on the “Latin American” play, a term that is complicated by the lack of discrete boundaries for Latin America. Yet there are certain aesthetic sensibilities that stand out in all of the Latin American plays that I have read, and it is of vast importance that these themes are being exposed to US audiences in such a well organized production. The most notable of these themes is the palpable violence. Both physical and emotional violence are inflicted on characters in the show, while shadowy camouflaged figures are occasionally seen around the periphery of the action.

This leads me to the overall wonderful design of the show, which does a great deal to facilitate Director Will Pomerantz’s clear stage pictures. Bill Stabile’s towering wooden structure is comprised of sticks, making it seem both permanent and permeable. With the addition of Kirk Bookman’s delicate lighting design and Jeremy Lee’s operatic sound design, the scenic elements are able to play many roles. Sometimes they are as ambiguous as the plot itself.

I can’t pretend that this is an action packed show, so if you are looking for high flying stunts, you should go elsewhere. But if you are ready to be intellectually stimulated, then this is the show for you. Calderon’s protagonist Cristina, well played by Marina Squerciati, is constantly abused by the men around her. The misogynistic power order of this world is clearly established, yet things are not so simple. Despite Cristina’s complaining about her philandering, king-like husband Mauricio (Robert Bogue), Cristina herself has affairs and is free to take extravagant trips to Paris for two months. Nothing in Manipulation is how it seems at first. In the end we must ask ourselves who is being manipulated by whom. Is Cristina the victim?

These questions are posed more often than they are answered. Adding to the mystery are a series of choreographed moments throughout the show that hearken back to the puppets who opened the show. In the midst of realistic dialogue, the highly stylized moments lead us to question what we are seeing. At one time or another each and every actor channels the marionettes. At one point Mauricio is Cristina’s puppet-master, yet again we see that things are not that cut and dry. In a scene towards the end, all of the other people in Cristina’s life are puppets, and Cristina watches them. Is this meant to suggest that everyone else is a puppet, but Cristina is separate? In this instance, Cristina is the only one who can see that she is being manipulated. Or are we to infer that Cristina is actually controlling these people who she sees to have abused her? Characters are constantly telling Cristina that she is the only one who can save herself.

The uncertainty is not disconcerting. In fact, the twists and turns keep the audience engaged, as does some of the eloquent prose. The performance that I saw was peppered with murmurs of appreciation after particularly powerful lines. Every person who goes to the theater secretly hopes for a moment of illumination in the show, a line or a moment that reveals some fundamental truth articulated in a new way. This play delivers. Indeed, this play delivers overall. Combining a solid production with the kind of play too rarely offered to US audiences, Cherry Lane Theatre’s Manipulation is a great night at the theater.

Thrills, Chills and Interpretive Dance

After leaving the Mckittrick Hotel, I found myself with various souvenirs, including a creepy white mask, a saliva-covered ring, and a (fake) bloodstain on my shirt. I also had to contain the urge to run after interesting-looking individuals on the street - not an urge I usually have after an evening of theater-going. But there was nothing usual about this particular theater piece. Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More offers audiences full immersion into its heightened world of dark corridors and dastardly deeds, a night of escapism like no other. The night unfolds something like this: after "checking in" (getting your tickets), you head up a flight of stairs and through a series of disorienting dark hallways, emerging into a jazz-era bar complete with specialty cocktails and dimly lit little tables. You are called away from the bar in small groups, given masks, told not to speak, and herded into an elevator, which spits you out into a series of rooms: fully realized replicas of abandoned hospital wards, offices, bedrooms, eerie forests and graveyards, shops, banquet halls and bars, all dimly lit and constantly filled with moody music.

You are free to explore any way you choose: props are meant to be handled and picked through. The space is littered with texts, including books, clippings on the walls, ledgers, and letters, that invite you to open and read them and discover what you may. Entries are constantly being locked and un-locked and lighting and moveable set pieces change the look of a space so significantly that you could enter a floor three times and experience it in three completely unique ways.

After wandering around for a bit, you begin to run into actors, perhaps mid-action, or running from point A to point B. The latter was most exciting to me: after wandering around aimlessly, running into an actor felt like an important discovery. Something was going to happen, and if I kept up, I would see it happen, and others wouldn’t. I’ll admit I was often disappointed by the happening itself: scenes are primarily movement-based, and while interesting and well-executed, they never satisfied my expectations. When walking around, I could, from time to time, feel completely immersed in the world of Sleep No More , as though I had stepped into a noir film myself. But the dances took me out of the reality of the space, reminding me that I was watching a performance. The characters and plot are taken from Macbeth, and if you are familiar with the Scottish King’s tale, you can make meaning out of characters’ actions and interactions, but one’s experience is so fractured and incomplete that it is difficult to connect to these elements so as to care what happens to them.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have some sort of one-on-one experience with an actor. From time to time, actors will pull audience members into small rooms, locking the door behind them. I couldn’t tell you what goes on in these rooms, but I can tell you I ached to be pulled into one of them. I did, however, have an intriguing public interaction with a woman in a red dress. As she slowly, thoughtfully ate a chicken coated in a deep red blood-like sauce, she locked eyes with me, and continued to stare into my eyes for several minutes. Her gaze was penetrating, searching, intense. Eventually, she spit out a ring, motioned me over, and, without breaking her stare, put the ring on my finger. I am not sure if I could have participated in this interaction if it wasn’t for the mask I was wearing: it protected me, kept me anonymous, less vulnerable. Though it was thrilling to be brought into this woman’s world, it was a safe thrill, a comfortable thrill.

The designers, Felix Barret, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns, cannot be praised enough for the renovation of the McKittrick Hotel. Rooms are detailed and specific, sometimes realistic, sometimes terrifying strange or surprising, but never dull. Lighting, designed by Felix Barrett and Euan Maybank and sound, designed by Stephen Dobbie, adds a sense of magic and suspense, the constant feeling that ‘something is about to happen’ that is perhaps the most thrilling aspect of Sleep No More . And everything, everything is beautiful. Just stunningly gorgeous. It is a thrilling world to live in for a few hours.

In the end, the experience is what you make of it. It reminds me of a quintessential post-modern novel, most strikingly of House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, which presents multiple possible ways of reading, offers puzzles in the text and invites you to dig deeper to solve them, making it easy to explore but difficult to come away with a full, unified understanding of the experience. However, the novel is filled with questions and musings that one can chew on for ages.

Sleep No More gives one puzzles to solve and choices to make, the thrill of potentiality and the chance to escape into a world much more beautiful than one’s own. But I came away wanting more: more connection to the characters and the narrative, more discomfort, more challenge, more fear. Sleep No More comes close to offering audiences a transformative experience but stops just shy of delivering. It is excellently produced and absolutely worth seeing, but not the end-all and be-all of theater experiences. See it, and dream on.

Shakespearean Echoes

Even the most ardent fans of Shakespeare may not have heard of Double Falsehood, which is getting a rare production by Classic Stage Company. It was only last year that the Arden Shakespeare decided to include the play among Shakespeare’s works, with an edition describing its shaky provenance. An 18th-century reworking of a collaboration reputedly by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Double Falsehood is presumed by some scholars to be based on Cardenio—the holy grail of lost Shakespeare plays and the first collaboration of the playwrights, whose Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen have survived intact. (Fletcher, no slouch as a playwright, was half of Beaumont and Fletcher, and became the house dramatist for Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, after Shakespeare retired.)

Some quick history. Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans closed theaters in 1642, and they weren’t reopened until after the English Civil War, in 1660, with the restoration of the monarchy. Many scripts from earlier in the 17th century ended up in the hands of playhouse owners or producers such as Lewis Theobald (pronounced TIB-alt). In 1727 Theobald’s repurposed version of the drama was staged. Though the play, which was based on an episode from Don Quixote, has been knocking around for more than three centuries, the Arden Shakespeare’s endorsement has given it unexpected attention. A production at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England is planned this year.

Passing through so many hands, the play retains surprising echoes of other Shakespeare works. Two brothers, the decent Roderick and the rakish Henriquez, are sons of a duke (As You Like It), who pretends to have died (Measure for Measure). Henriquez rapes the lovely Violante, then abandons her to pursue Leonora (Hayley Treider), whose father intends her to marry a suitor—Henriquez—against her will (Romeo and Juliet). Leonora’s true love, Clayton Apgar’s dashing Julio, exiles himself to a forest, where, dressed almost naked and smeared with dirt, he goes temporarily mad (King Lear).

The plot elements are common among Shakespeare, Fletcher, and their contemporaries, but the unfamiliarity of this text lends it freshness, and it moves swiftly (a Fletcher strength). The simplicity of Oana Botez-Ban’s design—a series of hanging Oriental rugs, with three on the floor, shifted back and forth—helps focus attention on the story, although in one case the budgeting of actors—Philip Goodwin as the magisterial Duke and distinguished Camillo—may confuse even attentive listeners. Director Brian Kulick has staged the play with a minimum of fuss and even eliminated CSC’s side seating.

The cast clearly relishes the opportunity to create characters from this neglected classical drama. Slate Holmgren as the slimy Henriquez manages to find layers in a stock villain. Even after Henriquez has “reformed,” there’s a lingering suspicion that he’s manipulating people, as he’s forced (the way Lucio is in Measure) to marry the woman he wronged.

Apgar, too, is a fine, heroic Julio. Playing the good guy isn’t usually as interesting as playing the bad one, but Apgar embodies charm and sincerity, strength and honor. And Jon DeVries as Don Bernardo, blessed with a rumbling voice and extraordinary command of verse, makes the most of Leonora’s alternately doting and scheming father, torn between love and greed. He’s a joy to watch whenever he’s on stage.

Only Hayley Treider’s Leonora, and to a lesser extent MacKenzie Meehan’s Violante, occasionally move with more gesturing than women of that period would, and Treider has a habit early on of falling into shrillness. (Botez-Ban has dressed the cast in clothes that mix peasants’ rags with evening dress but reflect no particular era, although they are of more recent vintage.)

Still, even with a Shakespeare name tag, the play never burns brightly. There are no speeches on the order of “To be or not to be” or “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” or “The quality of mercy is not strain’d.” Ardent fans who feel they’ll never have another chance to see a production of this historical curiosity are probably right.

Although Double Falsehood is close in temperament to Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale, two late romances, it can’t touch them. Still, it has charms, good performances, and value beyond scholarship. One hopes that Kulick will start looking at all the playwrights of the period who have been overshadowed by Shakespeare. He’s found a topaz; there are diamonds still out there.

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.