Cultural Wasteland

Anne Washburn's ambitious but labored Mr. Burns is subtitled A Post-Electric Play. The central conceit is that in the future an undefined catastrophe has occurred (there are references to a quarantine, a “bug,” and empty and burned cities). All electricity has stopped, and worse, nuclear power plants are melting down. Around a campfire (niftily envisioned by designer Neil Patel as a smoking TV set), a group of survivors share stories about episodes of The Simpsons to keep their minds off their plight.

The title refers, of course, to Homer Simpson's villainous boss at the nuclear plant in the cartoon series. Meanwhile, the principals (all carrying the same first names as the actors who play them) try to piece together TV episodes from jumbled memories as if each were another Homer — the blind Greek one — assembling The Iliad; they falter and trail off and balk and interrupt one another. Although the play was partly developed by the actors' own reconstruction of an episode, which may account for some self-indulgence, it's a plodding start to a demanding play. One wishes director Steve Cosson had sped things up a bit.

Among the most proficient of the reconstructors is Matthew (Matthew Maher), whose most helpful colleagues are Susannah (Susannah Flood) and Jenny (Jennifer R. Morris). Their reconstruction, however, is suddenly interrupted by a stranger, Gibson (Gibson Frazier), who arrives from Framingham, Mass. In one of Washburn’s best ideas, the campfire group asks his story, and then each, following a custom that has apparently arisen among the refugees and survivors, reads 10 names from a personal log in hopes that Gibson will have information on the survival of someone in the log that he carries; Gibson, in kind, reads 10 names as well. Although it's time consuming, one senses the isolation and disappointment as name after name brings no response.

Beset by fears of radioactive fallout from disabled plants, they trade rumors of heroic last-ditch efforts, underground seepage and no-go zones, and then they return to The Simpsons. Other bits of pop culture, from the film Cape Fear, with Robert Mitchum, and the remake with Robert De Niro, to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, also bubble up.

In the second scene, seven years have passed. The principals have been joined by Quincy (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), and they are preparing to put on a Simpsons episode, albeit on a shoestring. During the intervening years, rival troupes have popped up (as well as theater circuits), all laying claim to various episodes of The Simpsons. It may be amusing or disheartening that what these performers want to preserve seems so trivial next to Shakespeare or Moliere or Chekhov, whose works, one must assume, cannot be remembered so well.

Nonetheless, there are suggestions that civilization is making a comeback; there are haves and have-nots, and Gibson offers the opinion that Chablis will come back into fashion because “people are ready for status again.” In this world, though, wealthier troupes pay for lines to Simpsons episodes that are remembered by various people, and shysters try to sell bogus lines or claim credit for lines that they had nothing to do with. And the actors find solace in the high quality of their commercials. (Washburn doesn't clarify whether they are presented during the play.) The cast rehearses their episode, but the scene ends with a twist drawn from other kinds of TV series, such as 24 and Strike Back.

A leap forward of 75 years brings a well-appointed troupe —with nicely painted backdrops and excellent lighting (Justin Townsend’s work is exemplary in all three segments), performing an episode of The Simpsons in costumes and striking half-masks. There is music (by Michael Friedman). The result is a pastiche of The Simpsons that incorporates bits of G&S, a Greek chorus, rap, and the catch phrase from the 1940 Bob Hope vehicle The Ghost Breakers: “Feets, don’t fail me now!” A reference to Chablis suggests that the original script of the shoestring company has served as the template for the production.

In its own way, Washburn’s apocalyptic drama echoes the history of theater, as culture forms and re-forms itself, passing through natural disasters and war and accruing .classic bits over time. The idea is full of promise, but the work is too often taxing rather than compelling, and feels ramshackle at times. Even so, the actors work hard, and they are all good. Sam Breslin Wright has the title role, but the plays-within-the-play are too cumbersome, and the whole enterprise, calculated to spark one’s intellect, ends up numbing the mind.

Miss Lonely Hearts

Closing out Theater for the New City (TNC)’s imaginative Dream Up Festival is an unusual offering from Hungarian-American troupe Pilvax Players, titled Liselotte in May. If you’re the type who has ever wondered what it was really like as Miss Lonelyhearts in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, then look no further. The play, written by Zsolt Pozsgai, centers around the eponymous character as she becomes desperate in her search for a soulmate. Just as she turns 30, Liselotte realizes, living all alone in her New York City apartment, that she has no one to share her life with. In a pathetic attempt to find her special someone, she posts a personal ad for a husband.

Sounds like the makings of your average romantic comedy — until you take into account the fact that each one of Liselotte’s suitors end up dead on the first date! In this vein, the play is more like a romantic comedy gone haywire, with the comedy part definitely amped up in the first half. Much of the funny bits are due to Chris Kardos’ scene-stealing performances as each of the lonely heart’s various suitors. 

Kardos is the ultimate character actor, effortlessly shape-shifting from one persona to the next. In one scene, he is an awkward and very nervous German butcher named Ludwig; in another, he’s a butt-crack-baring plumber with a New York accent. Each character has their own set of idiosyncrasies, and with this comes a whole lot of physical quirks, which Kardos takes on with much gusto as he falls over chairs and even gamely walks around with his coveralls dragging precariously to his knees, inciting much laughter from the audience. It is this sharp knowledge of physicality — coupled with his impeccable timing — that makes Kardos one talent to watch. 

As the play’s Liselotte herself, Kata Ruzsik is a vibrant actress and quite believable as a young woman frantic in her pursuit of happiness. Despite a few rushed line readings at the beginning, Ruzsik starts to hit her stride by the second scene. She takes in just as much as Kardos gives in terms of performance, playing against his suitors well and creating an energetic exchange between them that keeps us all enthralled. 

While the two actors’ comedic banter is certainly entertaining, it’s not all fun and games for Liselotte — after all, there is still the consequences of all those dead suitors to contend with. As each male character dies with each scene, the play’s tone takes a serious turn in its latter half. Maddened by the trauma of watching all of her paramours die so suddenly and tragically, the play culminates in the last of the deaths, as she meets Roland, an escaped psych ward patient whose poems Liselotte somehow seems to have memorized. It is here where her character takes a turn for the worse,

Presented by TNC artistic director Crystal Field, the whole premise behind the Dream Up Festival is for new works to push the boundaries of the form so that the play is presented in an untraditional way, and Liselotte definitely pulls this off. Much of the play — due to its inventive storytelling — felt very much like an independent film, both tonally and visually. Edina Tokodi’s set design reflects the femininity we see in Liselotte at the beginning of the play, with a simple set built around hanging canvases as the backdrop of her Bleecker Street-based apartment. As the play slowly takes its dark turn, Roland Udvari’s lighting design becomes noticeable in the form of second-long blackouts, with the actors sometimes repeating their lines — much like quick cuts in suspense films. 

This particular technique was intriguing; while at first confusing, it gradually became effective as the play went on, especially by the time Liselotte met troubled Roland. It called to mind the film Swimfan, which utilizes the same method, and in the end, it created the desired effect. In fact, a lot of these moments happened throughout the latter half, sometimes repeating certain scenes after another scene had passed, giving the impression that perhaps it was all a part of Liselotte’s imagination.      

Agota Hodi’s costumes are also worth mentioning, as they also echo the transition the title character goes through. At the beginning of the play, we find the still hopeful Liselotte in sophisticated heels and a demure but colorful sundress, cinched at the waist with a wide belt. She is like any other young, fashion-conscious city girl about to go on a date. As the scene-after-scene passes and bodies of her potential husbands drop like flies, Liselotte’s wardrobe is pared down to more organic, natural silhouettes and materials. For example, when we meet British radicalist Henrik, Liselotte’s costumes take on an artsy flair, as she is dressed in a white jersey dress. Then, by the time Roland comes around, she is in a loose shirt and black leggings, her hair up in a tousled bun and mascara running down her face. It is as if she morphs into the person she thinks each man wants her to be instead of them conforming to her needs.

Liselotte in May is certainly a play that explores the boundaries of imaginative storytelling and takes it to new heights. While it hit some snags rhythmically at the start, it eventually gains momentum and dares to challenge the way a play is performed. Supported by an outstanding cast and creative team, every element of the play — from the set to the lighting to the costumes — helped to achieve their vision cohesively and to great effect. Liselotte in May teases, delights and shocks to the core and makes for a memorable visit to the theater.

Becoming the Black Man

The title of Will Power’s new play, Fetch Clay, Make Man, has fascinating echoes. It refers directly to its two protagonists, boxer Cassius Clay and Stepin Fetchit, the Hollywood film actor of the 1930s and ’40s whose portrayal of shiftless, lazy Negroes earned him widespread contempt. But the syntax of the title also brings to mind the creation story of the golem. The words themselves might be a mantra for its creator, and it's linked to Power’s theme: the American obsession with reinventing oneself, and the impossibility of escaping the past.

Set in 1965 in the week of a crucial boxing match with Sonny Liston, the play begins with Ali's summoning Fetchit to his Maine training camp. Reinvention is everywhere: Negroes are calling themselves blacks. Clay had just rechristened himself Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam. His intimates include Brother Rashid (John Earl Jelks), a security chief with a past, and Sonji, his young wife, who rebels against Islamic strictures. In flashbacks we also meet William Fox (Richard Masur), the Eastern European Jew who founded Fox Pictures, which put Fetchit under contract for movies such as John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend, with Will Rogers, and Dimples, with Shirley Temple.

Power lets Fetchit make the case (as he did late in life) that his shiftless, whining character was actually subversive: he was being paid to work and by wiggling out of it, he actually forced white people to do the labor instead. But even through that lens it’s hard to discern a positive spin in the role, and it's likely director Des McAnuff avoids using any clips of Fetchit on film because viewers would find him less sympathetic with firsthand experience of his embarrassing portrayals.

Designer Riccardo Hernandez has set the action on a large, sterile, raised square, with the audience on three sides — a training room in Lewiston, Maine. Fetchit (his real name was Lincoln Perry) enters this arena with just a hint of subservience, and he even does a brief shuck-and-jive movement to persuade Ali that it’s really him. Gradually, though, as Fetchit realizes Ali may be his ticket to redemption, he hatches big plans for himself and the boxer. Throughout, one senses that bitterness and ambition propel him, even when he outfoxes Fox to become the first black man with a screen credit and one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers. Ali, meanwhile, knows Fetchit was friends with Jack Johnson (the boxer played by James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope), and he suspects the character actor knows the secret of Johnson's rumored "anchor punch."

Fisher fills the bill physically and emotionally as Ali. Tall and strapping, the actor presents a rising legend who is immature, prankish, apprehensive and morally doctrinaire. He is determined to have a pure, Islam-respecting wife, and he’s deeply in love with Nikki M. James’s more easy-going Sonji, who has shrewdly hidden her past as a good-time girl. The Nation of Islam's world of black, white and gray is emphasized by Paul Tazewell’s costumes for the Muslims, but Sonji sheds her clerical robes and dons vivid purple and later orange outfits. Her dresses and a cobalt sports jacket for Fetchit are nifty visual signals that they don’t belong.

Masur shines in his few scenes as the blustering Fox, particularly an early monologue when he describes to Fetchit the way he surmounted his ancestry to become a “white man”: “Do I miss being me sometimes? Sure. Would I trade the new me for the old me? Not on your life. Trust me, it’s better on this side.”

As the fifth chameleon, Jelks mostly yells and glowers, enraged at what Fetchit represents yet bowing to Ali’s orders. Though, in the main, McAnuff's direction is helpful and propulsive, the antagonistic characters bellow often, and some of it becomes tiresome. And whether you take all the doubling of personae as evidence of Power’s single-mindedness about his theme or feel it has a sledgehammer effect may depend on your tolerance for the shouting.

However, the playwright adeptly backgrounds his story, from the amusing doggerel Ali loved to spout to the danger he faced from followers of Malcolm X, who had recently been assassinated. Ali chose rural Maine for the Liston fight to keep a closer eye on outsiders arriving in town. There is rich material in Fetch Clay, Make Man: Power has fashioned an intelligent drama from two iconic figures struggling with race and identity amid the social ferment of the 1960s.

A Lesson of Love and Loss

From the moment the lights dimmed and music started, I knew that 23 Year Old Myth was not going to be your average jukebox musical. With a genre-bending soundtrack (ranging from the indie hits of Florence and the Machine and MGMT, to original material by members of the company such as Emma Barash and playwright Leslie Gauthier), the play – which is part of Theater for the New City’s Dream Up Festival — is a musical about one girl’s journey of love and loss in the city, all told through the plucking strings of the ukulele. 

Loosely based on Gauthier’s own personal experiences, the play finds Girl 1 (played by Gauthier herself) falling in love with Girl 2 (Lindsay Cook), just as she is diagnosed with cancer. Narrated by a lone figure dressed as a subway busker, known as Ukulele Man (Brendan McDonough), 23 Year Old Myth is presented in a series of scenes that act as “snippets” of the journey. The transitions from scene to scene are clever, with the company not only doubling as stagehands but also as props — and even part of the set themselves — with some pushing and pulling the bed into place while one poses as a standing lampshade. Daniel Geggatt and Michael Steiner’s set is meant to reflect this youthful, metropolitan feel of the play: a single bed facing the audience lengthwise; and later on, a couple of chairs, hospital curtains, a metal food tray, as well the aforementioned handheld lampshades; and two blue subway pillars stand at opposite ends of the stage, with a single yellow line demarcating where the platform ends and where the tracks begin, a sign of the journey to come.

In the first few of these scenes, Gauthier memorably captures life as a twenty-something living in New York City: young, vital and alive. The show opens with the cast all dressed by Jenny Kessler in variations of blue jeans and white shirts, standing in various positions onstage and yelling out typical “New York-isms” in alternating spurts (“I lost my MetroCard!” “Wallet in Cab!”), as Girl 1 makes her way across the stage. She stands on a subway platform, singing along to Florence and the Machine’s “Between Two Lungs” at the top of her lungs – in all appearances, just a regular 22-year-old starting her life. In the middle of her private concert, Girl 1’s train arrives, and she runs for it, only to trip just as the doors close. Her journey has started, if with a little fumble. 

It is here we first take notice of Ukulele Man, who softly provides musical accompaniment throughout the play. He is not quite Stew of Passing Strange, though not quite Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, either. McDonough’s character seems more in the vein of Evita’s Che, a sort of hipster bearing witness to the struggles of Girl 1 with her illness and how it affects her relationships. Midway through he disappears, perhaps signifying how people in your life will come and go, depending on your need for them. He helps tell Girl 1's story with as much wit and pathos as needed, as do the rest of the vibrant cast. 

In fact, it is the company’s energy that truly makes this show, providing each scene with the right balance of both humor and humility, especially during the middle portion of the show, the bulk of which takes place during Girl 1’s time at the hospital. Together, they breathe life into Gauthier’s wonderfully natural dialogue and make certain moments seem as if we’re witnessing our own friends interact. 

In one scene, Girl 1 visits an old friend (the delightful Barash), who stumbles through the painfully realistic discomfort of greeting someone whom you know is dying. Girl 2 struggles with how to take every reaction to her situation. How does one go back to being young again when every question or proposal comes underscored with the possibility that you may die? This scene (and every scene before and after, for that matter) in the latter half of the show treads this line with beautiful execution, veering back and forth from laughter to tears, and back to laughter once again.

According to the show’s program, the show is based on “the parallels between falling in love and being diagnosed with a disease,” an idea which is represented through Girl 1 and Girl 2’s relationship. Cook’s Girl 2 is like any lover confronted with a disease; her portrayal is one of selfless strength and love at the beginning, yet filled with regretful inadequacy towards the end. Just as with the disease, their relationship goes through stages of positivity, denial, anger and finally acceptance. That is, after all, the journey of life.

23 Year-Old Myth is a story of mythical proportions, taking you on a journey where the littlest things can have the biggest impact. This unusual musical play takes you by surprise, bringing moments filled with laughter and tears, plucking at your heartstrings.    

Portrait of an Angry Young Man

“Welcome. Welcome to Vienna, the city of joy and gaiety. Of love and romance. The city of dreams. The year is 1910. On the eve of the Great War. On the eve of the end of the world.” And so begins Final Analysis, Otho Eskin’s award-winning play, now in repertory with Breakfast With Mugabe at The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre. 

Final Analysis, which takes place in the course of a single day in a Viennese coffee shop, focuses on the lives of some of Vienna’s most well-known residents: Sigmund Freud (Gannon McHale), the man who created a new science of the mind; Gustav Mahler (Ezra Barnes), one of the greatest composers and orchestral conductors of his era; Alma Mahler (Elizabeth Jasicki), his wife who would have love affairs with the leading artists of Vienna; and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Michael Satow), who dominated philosophical thought for half a century.

One of the most compelling scenes from director Ludovica Villar-Hauser features a conversation between the young Wittgenstein, and the elder Freud. Wittgenstein, contemptuous of the decaying society that surrounds him and disgusted by his own homosexual desire, has arrived at the point of hopelessness. And he sees no way out, no salvation.

Ludwig: "Our world is infected by a plague. That is the source of her hysteria, as you call it. Not some distasteful event in her childhood."

Freud: "Plague? What are you talking about? I’ve seen no reports of plague."

Ludwig: "Because it is silent. Invisible. Your science will not prevent annihilation — for her, for you, for all of us."

Freud: "That’s only coffee-house talk."

Ludwig: "Vienna is dying. The Empire is dying. Europe is dying. If you listen carefully, you can hear the death rattle of a dying world."

What I most enjoyed about this play were the deep philosophical questions which it asks about love, art, ethnic identity, and perhaps most interesting of all, hate.

Is hate love’s dark companion?

Eskin explores this question through the character of the Young Man played excellently by Ryan Garbayo. This Young Man would go onto to be one of the twentieth century’s most reviled figures: Adolf Hitler (who lived in Vienna from 1909-1913).

The Young Man begins the play as a starving, but determined artist who tries to ingratiate himself to Vienna’s cultural elite. He attempts to sell his painting of Vienna’s cityscape to Alma Mahler; he tries to persuade Wittgenstein to invite him to one of his famous soirees; and he forces a disinterested Gustav Mahler to read the opening pages of his opera.

So what happens to this ambitious artist?

Alma laughs at him, refuses to buy, and declares that it may be his destiny to starve. Wittgenstein scoffs and treats the anti-Semitic Young Man with contempt. And the most crushing blow of all is delivered by Gustav Mahler, one of the Young Man’s artist heroes. What does Mahler think of his opera?

“This is worthless trash!” he says.

Soon after this rejection, the Young Man abandons his love of art and his grandiose artistic ambitions. “I wanted to be an artist, to create beauty — to do something that would make people remember me. But the world denies me my canvas and paints.”

Instead he chooses to embrace the hate that simmers inside him. “My hatred keeps me warm at night, feeds me when I’m hungry, keeps me company when I’m alone, gives my life purpose. So long as I can hold onto that rage, I can survive. I have something to live for. I can triumph.”

Theoretical Physics for Dummies

“Do you feel like you’re in science class?” an audience member asked me as I stood in line for the restroom during the intermission of And It Spins Twice, playing as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Shockingly, for a show set in parallel universes where three fourths of the characters are theoretical physicists discussing concepts like gravity, membranes and string theory, I did not feel like I was in science class. 

It says a lot of playwright Alexis Roblan’s script, which uses clever metaphors like guitar strings and the Titanic to make these complex ideas a little easier to swallow. Instead of groaning at the mention of protons, neutrons and electrons, audience members will find themselves drawn into the two stories being told.

In one universe, Lucia Grillo plays Beth, a theoretical physicist and physics professor whose husband Ryan, played by Thom Christensen, has just left her. Grillo’s Beth is either angry or weepy throughout the show, which is understandable given her circumstances. But despite all her crying, it never really made me care.

In the other universe, a more compelling story unfolds, thanks in part to the wonderful chemistry between Marlena Kalm’s Liz (a theoretical physics graduate student) and Thom Christensen’s parallel universe version of Ryan (a singer/songwriter obsessed with the idea that somewhere out there in the vast expanse of space, another version of himself could be Bono.) The two are just starting out their relationship, which is dotted with humor. When Liz tells Ryan she’s addicted to his eyes, he retorts, “Not my hot 40-year-old-man body?” But their relationship gains a depth to it as the piece progresses and the two take on much more meaningful conversations.

In both universes, Liz and Beth are approached by June (Julia Campanelli), a “cosmologist, astrologer, author, healer and inspiration” to Beth and a world-renowned physicist to Liz. She’s convinced that Liz and Beth’s equation for predicting the collision of two universes’ membranes is correct, and that the time is now.

Director Michael Padden does a great job staging the show, seamlessly flowing between the two parallel universes with the help of lighting designer and stage manager Joe Cabrera. Though the set is not elaborate, consisting of only two tables and three chairs, it is more than adequate. The minimal set helps the audience to focus and contemplate on the questions being raised throughout the show.

Questions like, would you want to know if the world were about to end? And if you did know, how would you want to spend your last day? (Ryan suggests he would, “drink absinthe, and eat chocolate, make love to my girlfriend and get my favorite pizza from the West Village.”) Another probing question is do you believe in supersymmetry? The theory that “every subatomic particle in existence has a superpartner, an exact complement, a mirror image which completes it?”

And perhaps the most moving question is whether or not there is a rhyme or reason for anything. Both Liz and Beth at one point during the play wonder, “I never thought there was a plan, but there are supposed to be rules, aren’t there?”

The Haunted Dictator

Breakfast with Mugabe, a troubling, Macbeth-like play, which won the prestigious John Whiting Award in 2006, has finally arrived in New York (The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre). The play, written by Fraser Grace and directed by David Shookhoff, centers around the malevolent spirit or ngozi which haunts Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

A departed spirit may become an ngozi either through dying violently or not receiving the proper burial rites. The ngozi appears to Mugabe in the guise of one of his former freedom fighting comrades, General Josiah Tongogara. Tongogara was expected by many to become the first president of independent Zimbabwe. And as such, he was a threat to Mugabe’s own political ambitions, much in the same way that Banquo was a threat to Macbeth’s ruthless desire to be king. Tongogara’s death, which occurred just before the 1980 elections that brought Mugabe to power, was officially ruled an accident. Yet rumors have always swirled regarding Mugabe’s involvement in his former comrade’s untimely end.

Che Ayende, who plays Gabriel, the President's bodyguard, nearly steals the show. His good looks and deadpan humor instantly won over the audience. Ezra Barnes plays Dr. Andrew Peric, the white psychiatrist who is hired to cure the President of the ngozi. In addition to being a psychiatrist, he is also a farmer involved in a court battle to stay on his land, as embittered war veterans encroach on his property. Michael Rogers brings intensity, vulnerability and well-placed humor to his portrayal of Mugabe. And Rosalyn Coleman, who looks gorgeous in traditional African garb (thanks to costume designer Teresa Snider-Stein), is Mugabe’s younger wife — 40 years younger! She is desperate to see the President cured, so that he will finally let her go and allow her to start a new life. 

A testament to this play’s power is that it will likely upset at least two different factions. Firstly, those who would like to see Mugabe portrayed two-dimensionally as a psychopathic dictator; and secondly, those who would like to see Mugabe championed (however few) as an unjustly treated African freedom fighter whom Western powers have conspired to destroy. 

Over the last decade, highly touted documentaries including Mugabe and the White African directed by Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson, and memoirs such as The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin have documented the turmoil, strife and chaos which have engulfed Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The narrative presented in such works has been rather simple: Mugabe is a racist dictator, hell bent on expelling all white farmers from Zimbabwe and redistributing their land amongst his cronies; and it is Mugabe’s land distribution policy and refusal to relinquish power which has plunged the country into a crisis.

Thankfully, Breakfast with Mugabe does not take us down this well-trodden path. A fact that speaks to Fraser Grace’s talent as the writer, but which may doom the play at the box office. The simple narrative of bad man Mugabe against heroic white farmers would have been a much easier sell. It would have demanded less of the audience: less imagination, thought or sophistication. But instead Grace has created an imaginative and complex piece of theater which plunges the audience into one man’s sick and guilty conscience. 

I hope that Grace and the strong cast of Breakfast with Mugabe are rewarded for their efforts. 

Sliding Down the Pole

If you're wondering what to see at this year's Fringe Festival, you won’t go wrong if you head to Valerie Hager’s autobiographical, solo show, Naked in Alaska. It chronicles the joys, frustrations and heart break Hager experienced in her 10-year career as a stripper which took her from Tijuana all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska.

So it’s just another stripper confession story, chock full of cliches and stereotypes?

Hardly!

Over the last few years, the stripper memoir has become an American cultural phenomenon. Booty-shaking, pole-climbing, tell-alls, such as Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl, Ruth Fowler’s Girl, Undressed and Lacy Lane’s Confessions of a Stripper were runaway best-sellers which spawned numerous imitations. It’s a genre ridden with cliches and one of the most persistent (and annoying) is the female protagonist who comes from a educated, middle-class background and is the “last person you would ever expect to be stripping." (Cody says, “I had spent my entire life choking on normalcy, decency and Jif sandwiches…for me stripping was an unusual kind of escape.”)

Stripping may have been an escape for Hager, but it was hardly an escape from normalcy, decency or peanut butter sandwiches. Rather, hers was an escape from a harrowing adolescence. Describing her young, troubled self, Hager says “I was this young girl who was a secret bulimic for over a decade, who became a crystal meth addict and was expelled from high school.”

It’s that kind of unadorned honesty and humility that makes the show so compelling.

Early in the show, Hager and her impressive director Scott Wesley Slavin demolish the “Last Girl in the World" cliche and use the show’s multimedia format to great effect. The play opens with Hager shooting up crystal meth, while a montage of childhood photos rapidly flashes on a projection screen. It was an exciting and promising opening to a show which didn’t fail to deliver. 

As it should have been, Venue #5 at the Lower East Side’s Theater of Whimsy was tightly packed with exuberant and slightly tipsy theater lovers. Throughout the evening, Hager’s energy, honesty and humor kept the crowd rollicking with laughter and applauding her seductive pole dancing. She has talent, guts, charisma, a taut petite frame and a treasure trove of distinct mannerisms, voices and impersonations. Over the course of the show, she plays a dozen characters, and plays them well. (Charlie, a stooped-back, foul-mouthed, African-American stripper, was a particular crowd favorite.)

“It’s a show dedicated to the outcast, the forgotten,” Hager says. “I wrote Naked in Alaska for any of us who have ever felt different and or on the fringe.” While the show may be dedicated to outcasts and other marginal figures, Hager’s search for something to belong to, her own “tribe,” is something that many, if not all us, can relate to. 

So get down to the Theatre of Whimsy (aka the C.O.W.), grab a few drinks at the lobby bar, and catch Naked in Alaska before it moves on to Chicago’s Fringe Festival at the end of the month. Because as one audience member said after the show, “I am so glad I came. So glad.”

A Widower's Sexual Salvation

“I’m standing in the street feeling murderous toward this prostitute, thinking about stabbing and stabbing and stabbing her and I know she doesn’t deserve it.”

This expression of raw emotion is uttered in the compelling Second Act of Toni Press-Coffman’s Touch. Directed by Deborah Mathieu-Byers, these powerful words are spoken by the play’s protagonist Kyle Kalke (Jonathan Berenson), a heart-broken astronomer, struggling to come to terms with the murder of his wife Zoe (Rachel Spencer). He tries explaining to his best friend Bennie Locasto (Mike Petrie, Jr.) how he began seeing a prostitute in the wake of his wife’s murder.

The moment Kyle, full of rage and desire, first encounters the prostitute is the point of attack when the play should begin because something vital is at stake where a conflict will lead up to a crisis and the protagonist has reached a turning point in his life. Yet inexplicably, Press-Coffman, an experienced and award-winning playwright has made the near fatal error of filling the first act with tedious exposition and characterization.

How could someone so accomplished make such a miscalculation? I have no idea. But it’s as if she didn’t realize how good the writing and acting are in the second act — at times electrifying and chilling. As Lajos Egri said in his 1946 classic treatise on playwriting The Art of Dramatic Writing: “A play should start with the first line uttered. The characters involved will expose their natures in the course of conflict. It is bad playwriting first to marshal your evidences, drawing in the background, creating an atmosphere, before you begin the conflict.”

Yet in the opening monologue, which seems to drag on interminably, Press-Coffman seems determined to disregard Egri’s wise counsel. She marshals her evidences, draws in the background, and creates an atmosphere, before beginning the conflict. We learn that Kyle was an introverted nerd who became fascinated with astronomy and star gazing, and how he fell in love with and eventually married the Annie Hall-like Zoe. Mercifully, the opening monologue ends and so does the first act as Kyle recalls the night his wife was murdered.

It is in Act II where the play really begins.

The energy in the theater changed when the prostitute Kathleen (Dorothy McMillan) strode onto the stage in daisy dukes over fishnet stockings, and a red bra under a lace top (kudos to costume designer Miodrag Guberinic). Kathleen filled the theater with the sweet stank of sex. As she strutted to the front of the stage and began soliciting audience members, she supplied the edge, sexual energy, and spunk the play so desperately needed. But why did we have to wait so long to see her?

Interestingly, Kyle is a much more compelling character when talking about his raw, strictly sexual relationship with the prostitute, than when he is reminiscing about his love for his murdered wife. While explaining to his best friend the erotic charge and rejuvenating force which Kathleen has brought into his life, he comes alive. In these moments, the writing and the acting sparkle. In one passage Kyle says, “Because I can feel myself making and expending energy again. Because when I’m lost inside this woman’s body, I don’t think about who killed Zoe. I don’t think about how much pain she might have been in before she died.” If only there had been more moments like these!

As advertised, this staging of Touch by Avalon Studios NYC was a multimedia affair — Jarrel Lynch (production design), Nicholas Ortiz (photography) and Max Ridgeway (media design). Unfortunately, the use of the jumbo screen which hovered above Marija Plavsic Kostic’s stage — two opposing chairs and a raised platform with a pile of rocks — could hardly have been less imaginative. Throughout Act I, this potentially powerful media serves merely to echo the protracted backstory: Kyle mentions first seeing Zoe in a science class. An image of Zoe leaving a classroom flashes on the screen. Kyle recalls their winter vacation in New York. Pictures of a snow-covered New York flash on the screen.

What a waste.

These images would have been much more compelling if woven seamlessly throughout the play, rather than dumped at the beginning. If images of Kyle’s murdered wife had flashed on the screen during his tense and initially guilt-ridden encounters with the prostitute, they would have added layers of meaning and heightened the dramatic intensity.

One only hopes that this play is restructured and restaged. There is too much good, serious and compelling work here not to be put together more thoughtfully.

In a Dark Place

Rebecca Gilman’s 1999 play, The Glory of Living, ambitiously revived in a shoestring production by Revolve Productions at The Access Theater, feels very timely indeed. With the horrific revelations of the torture and rape of three young women in Cleveland still fresh in the news, Gilman’s examination of two lethal losers resonates powerfully.

Gilman, whose play won an Evening Standard Award in London and set her on course to her better-known works, Spinning into Butter and Boy Gets Girl, splits the two acts of her play by letting us first get to know Lisa (Hannah Sloat), a reticent young woman whose rough-and-tumble home life is deftly outlined, and Clint (Hardy Pinnell), the roistering man who takes her away from it all and into a life of crime and sexual depravity.

Almost all the scenes in Act I progress over months and years. They take place around a bed in a motel room, where Clint, whose high spirits conceal a small, suspicious mind, gradually seeks more sexual fulfillment than Lisa (they have quickly married) can provide. It’s a good sign the marriage is in trouble when the pillow talk turns to “Your mother’s a drunk whore.”

Eventually the pair progress to kidnapping young women, and the compliant Lisa acts out Clint’s sexual fantasies. They involve luring young women into a vehicle and kidnapping them, drugging them and having sex. After that, the young women disappear. It’s a mark of Sloat’s affectless, sullen performance that she comes across as ambivalent about what she does; it’s not until Act II that one realizes something is fundamentally wrong inside her. Still, Lisa has a hang-up about leaving the women’s bodies in the wild for animals to find. She surreptitiously telephones police and guides them to the corpses. But that apparent kindness backfires once she is traced and she and Clint are arrested.

The second act examines Lisa during her incarceration for murder, and here set designer Alexandra Regazzoni provides stunning visual counterpoint. The first act is awash in bright colors and contrast. For the second, Regazzoni places a clear plexiglas wall between the audience and the action, with chain link fences on the other three sides, and a gray-and-black color scheme. It’s a nice touch, subtly emphasizing the danger the young woman poses. Tuce Yasak's lighting complements the concept: warm amber in Act I; harsh white fluorescents and pockets of darkness in the second. The inspiration carries over to Regazzoni’s apropos costumes — there’s a peach of a blouse for Lisa’s slutty mom in Act I that has a plunging neckline and weird pieces of cloth hanging from it; the blouse screams “trailer trash.” (The action is set in Alabama, though it might take place anywhere in rural America.) 

As Act II unfolds, The Glory of Living (an ironic title, since almost nobody in the story has an smidgen of glory in their lives) assumes the routine of a Law & Order episode. Lisa meets with her court-appointed lawyer Carl, who tries to get her to help with her defense. Her descriptions of events suggest that Clint’s hold on her wasn’t absolute. Why didn't she flee? Why didn't she turn him in? Even after one has seen Clint’s brutality toward Lisa and his sexual hang-ups, Gilman relays enough ambiguity that one has to ask, “Is it possible Lisa is more dangerous than Clint?” Investing the production with unsettling silences and claustrophobia, director Ashley Kelly Tata maintains the uncertainty to the end; between what the authorities allege and what is shown to the audience, there is a gulf large enough to make one doubt that truth is ever discoverable in actual legal proceedings.

Tata has also gotten mostly good performances from the supporting team, especially Richard Hutzler as Lisa’s lawyer and Stephen James Anthony (the only Broadway veteran, from War Horse) as Steve, the boyfriend of one of the slain women; he survived Lisa’s attempt to kill him. They share a scene, and Anthony’s compelling performance melds regret, loneliness, bewilderment and anger into a memorable portrait of a victim/survivor, while Hutzler as the attorney treads a fine line to get information to help his client without alienating the witness.

The Glory of Living isn't an easy piece. For August entertainment, there is nothing frivolous or summery about it, but this ambitious production affirms Revolve as a troupe that's willing to tackle serious topics without regard to the temperament of the season.

An All-Around Messy Situation

Hoarding is a jumping-off point for Jay Stull’s interesting but unfocused drama, The Capables. The dire medical phenomenon has been the subject of reality television, but it has rarely been used dramatically: its most notable appearance was in Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play The Dazzle, about the real-life Collyer brothers in 1947.

Now that the disorder is widely known, however, it is bound to crop up more often, and Stull’s first play employs it primarily for comic effect. The disease, though given astonishing visual presence by George Hoffmann and Greg Kozatek’s extraordinary set, which appears to be the result of mating a toy drive with a flea market, is ultimately just window dressing — and inevitably more orderly than the real thing — for the personal conflicts of the family of the title.

Those conflicts spill over to encompass the crew of the reality TV show that is invited into the home of Anna Capable (Dale Soules) by her daughter, Jessy. To help Anna clear out the family home, Jessy has persuaded her reticent, fundamentalist Christian mother to unburden herself on a broadcast. Part of Jessy’s worry is the near-blindness of her father, Jonah, a fan of classical solo piano music. Inexplicably, director Stefanie Abel Horowitz has him waving his arms as if directing the music in his imagination, apparently unaware that solo piano recitals do not involve conductors.

It’s surely Stull’s bad luck that a razor-sharp satire on reality TV, Good Television, premiered at the Atlantic just a few weeks ago, with several striking similarities to The Capables, including a ruthless producer and an obsession with entertainment over human needs. Here the TV producer is David (Charles Browning), a hard-driving team leader who wants “authentic and spontaneous displays of emotion” to fuel his ratings. Among his assistants is a cameraman, Tommy, a dryly humorous, easygoing participant played by Micah Stock with a slight goofiness and reassuring demeanor. Those qualities help him in a budding romance with Jessy (inhabited with deceptive verisimilitude by cross-dressing performer Katie, aka Jay, Eisenberg).

Stull has a gift for writing sarcasm and arguments: disputes over the use of the word “retarded” and riffs on McDonald’s food choices produce some good comic moments. But the horrors of hoarding are sidelined in favor of the unscrupulous behavior of reality TV; a family mystery the Capables are hiding; and the liaison between Jessy and Tommy.

Fresh off her performance in Hands on a Hardbody on Broadway, Soules displays another expert Southern accent (the setting is Virginia). She is by turns blustering and proud, overbearing and condescending, and when the therapist from the show (Jessie Barr) tries and fails to persuade her to discard items, it’s one of the comic high points of the evening. But she also reveals a cruel streak.

Amid the strands of his plot, Stull has also stuck a peculiar flashback, in which young Anna and Jonah meet. Young Anna is portrayed by an effective Dana Berger, crying and cursing from some he-done-her-wrong interaction. Approached by a concerned young Jonah, her hard-edged, scowling Anna insults and baits him, and the scene drags on past the turning point when Anna, finally playing nice, could have earned some sympathy. But Max Woertendyke’s Jonah — confident, easygoing and sympathetic — is a gem. He conveys an innate kindness in the character that puts over an unlikely plot twist, and Stull’s ear for dialogue helps, as in Max’s description of Anna: “You got a serious hatred for the innocent and what most would call devotion or love you describe it like the plague, like it something shameful.” Still, the bit of back story doesn’t have a payoff sufficient for the time it takes up.

Also too lengthy by far is the opening scene of Act II, when Tommy and Jessy take a trip out to the woods, and Tommy begins to reassure Jessy that although she hardly knows him, he won’t rape her. It’s the comedy of discomfort that’s fashionable today, and although Stock plays it deftly, the pace dwindles to a standstill; the play needs pruning by Stull and/or Horowitz.

Ultimately, the playwright ties up the knots of his plot with a finale that Mark Twain would call a “stretcher.” There is a good deal of talent here, obviously attracted by the promise of the script. But Stull's nascent talent needs stronger directorial focus and more discipline to help it grow. 

Sea Dogs on Shore

The Boat Factory, a two-hander from Northern Ireland currently playing as part of the Brits Off-Broadway festival, has a bit of a split personality. Its first half details the early life of the main character, Davy Gordon, and the way he becomes a worker in Belfast’s boatyards, along with their rich background. The boatyards date back to ancient times, and the two actors, Dan Gordon (who is also the playwright) and Michael Condron, embody a variety of characters to catalogue the major steps in Belfast’s glorious maritime history—it was at Harland and Wolff, the boat factory of the title, that the Titanic was built. Happenstance Theatre Company, from Belfast, even provides an impressive souvenir booklet about the factory.

The play draws on a tradition of British dramatic works (not to mention those of Shaw) about public issues involving the working classes, politics, and industry, such as John Arden’s Vandaleur’s Folly (1978) or David Hare’s The Permanent Way (2003). But in this case, Gordon’s recounting of the vessel-making visionaries and the growth of the industry comes across initially as rather dry and parochial for an American audience. It’s not just the unfamiliar words and accents (only minimally an issue), but the lists of ships, Belfast landmarks, and people whizzing by that make it hard to connect.

Gordon does his best to alleviate the unfamiliarity. For instance, the headlong race through history is handled with stream-of-consciousness and word association, and such passages have rhythms that sound like poetry. Davy: “The boats—the trade—we must act—Act—in Parliament—Irish acts—”

Geordie: “Acts—Romans—Corinthians—Galatians—Ephesians—Ahhh—men.”

Davy: “Acts for cleansing the Ports of Galway, Sligo, Drogheda and Belfast—Clarendon Dock—Hugh Ritchie—John Ritchie—Alexander McLaine.” 

Still, the amount of information thrown at the listener may make you feel you've been dropped into a novel by James Joyce. The actors play a lot of parts, sometimes switching to the same character back and forth. There’s not a really strong focus except for the complex narrative itself, making it hard to connect to one person for very long—even Davy, who’s played by Gordon alone.

The second half of Philip Crawford’s production, however, is almost a different play. In it, Gordon develops Davy’s friendship with a young man named Geordie, introduced in the first part, and their relationship provides a way to engage with the play more easily than in the first half. Although Condron plays Geordie, he’s also assigned the bulk of the other roles, including the comic ones. He’s especially good as Clifford, a mentally challenged young worker with a cherished tool belt. Although Clifford's job is secure because of nepotism, he is the butt of practical jokes and abuse from others. His nemesis is the big boss, Mr. Marshall (Gordon, fitting easily into the role of a heavy). After Davy becomes Clifford’s protector, he learns a crucial secret that Clifford knows about the boatyard.

But it’s the friendship of Geordie and Davy that anchors the second half, and the actors shine. Although a key element—Geordie’s love of Moby-Dick—is introduced rather late in the play, most of the writing is sure-footed. One might wish that Gordon hadn’t written a shoe salesman who is gay in quite so hackneyed a manner, although Condron brings it off, or that the poetic litanies about hammers, nails, saws, and chisels didn’t become so predictable; at the same time, the accumulation of details echoes the passages about whales and harpoons and gams in Melville’s great novel. They give the story a texture.

The set of scaffolding on both sides of the stage and a map of the Belfast shipyards that covers the upstage wall are simple but effective. (Graphic design is attributed to Andrew Campbell). It’s clear that the production is a labor of love and civic pride, and its two performers make a success of it.

No More Business as Usual

In 1992, when Stephen Daldry revived J.B. Priestley’s warhorse An Inspector Calls, the British playwright was largely forgotten. Daldry’s inventive staging was a runaway triumph in London and New York, but only sporadically were Priestley's other plays revived here: Dangerous Corner at the Atlantic, The Glass Cage at the Mint. However, they added to the suspicion that Priestley’s obscurity was unfair. Now the Finborough Theatre, arriving from London with Cornelius for the Brits Off-Broadway festival, provides the most damning evidence yet.

Priestley’s play is about many things: a society in change, the callousness of the business world, and the way that work defines people. James Cornelius, a partner in Briggs & Murrison, an aluminum importer, is awaiting the return of Murrison, who has been scouring the country for orders. Meanwhile, the firm’s finances are shaky; creditors are beating at the door, and the staff is awkwardly trying to avoid them in the street or give them assurances of imminent payment that they know to be uncertain.

Over two turbulent weeks, as the firm totters and falls, Priestley examines the victims, their past hopes, and their probable futures. They include Miss Porrin (Pandora Colin), a middle-aged spinster whose commitment to the business hinges on her secret love for Cornelius; Biddle (Col Farrell), an elderly and kindly loyalist who doesn’t care to retire yet; and Lawrence (David Ellis), a frustrated office boy.

Beset by the creditors and flummoxed by various attitudes of the staff, Cornelius has a further problem when Judy Evison (Emily Barber), a lovely young woman, arrives to fill in for her sister, who is a secretary at the firm but has been called away to care for an ailing husband. The outspoken Judy, played by Emily Barber with pluck and confidence, is also a competent, unemployed secretary, and Cornelius reluctantly allows her to fill in.

Cornelius bears surprising parallels to current events, not just in the fallout of the company’s collapse, which is engendered by falling prices and export barriers that sound familiar to the modern ear, but in other ways. A former airman (Andrew Fallaize, in a poignant cameo of a man struggling to keep his honor in desperate straits) arrives to sell business supplies, but he almost faints. Trying to establish himself in the civilian world, the ex-officer is starving and falling through society’s cracks. Cornelius’s advice—“Think of some way to make money”—is absurdly futile. “I’m not allowed to earn a living in any of the old ways,” laments the flier. 

Priestley’s details create a mosaic of a world in flux. A stream of door-to-door salespeople arrive, but when a young woman enters, selling shaving products, the male workers are astonished. In one of many comical moments, Miss Porrin flies off the handle, labeling such saleswomen “vulgar, shameless sirens.” When Lawrence complains of being 19 and still at a boy’s job, Cornelius asks, “What do you want to do?” Lawrence answers, “Something to do with wireless and gramophones. I’m really interested in them.” And Cornelius responds, “So is everybody else of your age…. Wireless and gramophones and motor-cars and aeroplanes.… And how everybody’s going to make a living out of that beats me.” 

As Cornelius scorns those future staples of modern technology, you may find the words “smartphones,” “tablets” and “apps” leaping to mind. Everything, new and old, can be turned into a business transaction: the aged Biddle is collecting estimates for his eventual cremation. As the demise of Briggs & Murrison approaches, Cornelius begins to question whether he has any future. Clearly he has always taken his lead from Murrison, but the arrival of a changed Murrison undermines all their hopes.

Director Sam Yates has drawn sterling performances from 11 of the dozen cast members, and the bar is set high from the moment Beverley Klein’s hearty cockney charwoman enters. Klein reappears later as the landlord’s niece, unrecognizable in her change; she and others, like Fallaize, vividly take on multiple roles.

Unfortunately, Alan Cox in the title role is problematic. From moments after his first entrance, Cox plays to the audience in a noticeable way. If he turns, he lingers full front just long enough to acknowledge the viewers; late in the play, when he toasts Judy’s happiness with a flask, he turns from her to hold the flask up full front to the audience. It’s a habit that’s irritating and tiresome and distracts from the story; Yates should have curbed it, because Cox is just fine when he’s fully focused on his fellow actors.

Still, Priestley’s astonishing play shines through, and the wide net Cornelius casts in its look at British society—there are romantic subplots as well—is a sad reminder that few dramatists nowadays, except Tony Kushner, offer such breadth in a single work.

Bull

Mike Bartlett’s Bull is subtitled The Bullfight Play, but the four characters in Clare Lizzimore’s production clash for 55 minutes in what appears to be a boxing ring, with a water cooler in one corner. Outside the ring, audience members stand (there are also seats around the room). As Bartlett’s characters confront each other, it gradually becomes clear that Sam Troughton’s bespectacled, apprehensive Thomas has been singled out for slaughter, and his office mates are the picadors in the process.

Unlike the colorful participants in a bullfight, the three men and one woman are all dressed in gray or charcoal (costumes and sets are by Soutra Gilmour), but what ensues in this businesslike atmosphere is nevertheless blood sport, as Thomas has his worst fears confirmed: his co-workers Tony (Adam James) and Isobel (Eleanor Matsuura)  are ganging up on him to have him removed from their “team”—Tony is team leader. They have located his weaknesses and exploited them; they have also sabotaged him by withholding information for an important meeting with their superior.

Isobel has a go at him first, softening him up by implying Thomas is unprepared: He has something on his face, his suit doesn’t look good, he’s unprepared to meet the boss, Carter, who is expected shortly. When James’s smooth, boisterous Tony joins her, he underlines her criticisms. To Thomas, though, it’s clear that they are in league against him. Their mind games are ruthless, careering from apparent camaraderie and beneficence to outright belittlement. “You’re like any physically odd man," says Isobel, "talking too much, strange gestures, yapping away, does get annoying, but essentially you're harmless." Or, "You know you can get stuff for hair loss?" She also suggests that his aversion to drinking will certainly hurt him with Carter (Neil Stuke). 

Indeed, Isobel is as ruthless and nasty as any Strindbergian female. When she claims to have been abused by her father, it’s never clear if she really was abused: she may have invented the story to exploit the moment or not. She radiates a certain cold-bloodedness. It's easy to believe that she would use actual sexual abuse to her competitive advantage to undermine Thomas’s confidence. The stakes are ratcheted higher as Tony and Isobel lure Thomas into touching Tony's bare chest—Isobel puts her head against it first—in a homoerotic moment that, in Troughton’s performance of ache and desperation, is obviously humiliating. James is equally superb as the bristlingly confident and ruthless Tony, smiling broadly as he enjoys the game.

Slowly but inexorably, Thomas loses control as the story moves straightforwardly to the arrival of Carter, when Isobel and Tony denounce their colleague as incompetent. The plot is not particularly original—the business world and its sharks have been portrayed before in plays like Other People’s Money and Glengarry Glen Ross, though perhaps not quite at this primal, Darwinian level. Still, Bartlett repeatedly refers to school and childishness, and his portrait of the business world suggests the players in it are no more than childish bullies in a playground. "Promise," Isobel and Tony say to reassure Thomas; it's a childish refrain, and and the astute Thomas even responds, "We're not at school."

Lizzimore paces the show adeptly, and the intensity builds as Thomas, like a wounded bull, thrashes around trying to escape his tormenters. Stuke's Carter is equally uncaring about Thomas's ordeals with his colleagues, spouting boilerplate as he's about to can one of them: "When it comes down to it we're people aren't we, all of us, every single one and we should be treated as human beings." But then he can't remember Thomas's name, and when he does address Thomas, obliviously calls him "Tom"—a point that offends Thomas's dignity.

In last season's Cock, also by Bartlett, a similar arena staging was used, and the title was understood to be a shortened form of a gutter term; it's clear as Bull progresses that it's less about a bullfight than about a dehumanizing business atmosphere where offensive matter is callously slung—more than that, where tooth and claw are used to cull the herd. It's not a terribly original social comment, but it's vividly brought to life in this production.

Love Therapy

In an age where every reality TV star thinks he or she is qualified to throw around Freudian terms, psychology and therapy hold a very mainstream place in our culture. Yet what has this inundation of pseudo-psychological information in our lives done to us? Have we lost track of what therapy is really meant to do? This is the central question in Wendy Beckett’s new play Love Therapy, currently playing at the DR2 Theatre near Union Square.

I was first introduced to Australian playwright Wendy Beckett through her play A Charity Case, and quickly realized that she has a lot of fresh ideas. Love Therapy displays a great deal of interesting characters and some nice scenes, though unfortunately the overall arc of the play is not fully satisfying.

Part of this has to do with problems that actually stem from Jo Winiarski’s set design. The stage is a substantial size, but the actors do not have dynamic spaces in which to work, and therefore their blocking often seems un-moored and distracting. This is coupled with the fact that because Jill Nagle’s lighting has taken on some of the work of creating discrete spaces, the actors often necessarily move into darkened spots because of the limited scope of the lights.

When they are lit, Patricia E. Doherty’s costume design has us wondering why a therapist would be wearing an outfit that looks a bit more risqué than one would expect. The shining example on the technical side of the show is Fight Director Brad Lemons, who does an excellent job with some very fantastic fight choreography.

Despite these design problems, the actors do a good job of holding our interest. The supporting actors give solid performances, especially David Bishins’s portrayal of Steven and Janet Zarish’s of Carol and Mary. Margot White plays marriage counselor Colleen Fitzgerald, who believes in a kind of radical love therapy in which genuine emotion takes the place of distant formality.

Unfortunately, though she exhibits the idealism of the character, White does not seem warm and genuine. She is engaging, but director Evan Bergman has not pushed her to exhibit the kind of strength this character needs to portray throughout her sessions. There are, however, a few shining moments for White where I did get a glimpse of how her character could have been with stronger direction.

Of course, the other stumbling block here is the uneven trajectory of the play itself. Beckett writes excellent and interesting individual scenes, but the overall effect is a bit too choppy. The ending was so abrupt that I did not actually believe the play had ended. Yet something about Beckett’s quirkiness kept me engaged and interested in these characters even when I was unsure where the story was going.

The play's questions are pertinent and complex: how can a therapist help if they are detached? Where is the line between emotional and physical intimacy? Has contemporary life inhibited our ability to connect with each other? The answers seem to hinge on Colleen Fitzgerald’s struggle between her powerful position and her weakened emotional state, yet Bergman has not created enough of a contrast between these two parts of the protagonist for this to be fully effective.

Love Therapy is an interesting but ultimately flawed attempt to look at the power dynamics that result in trying to work on romantic relationships like we would any other business transaction. With the help of a good dramaturg and a different design team, this piece could find some strong footing and be a solid piece of theatre. My hope is that it will do just that. 

I Want a Cool Fist Pump

For most people, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons does not summon images of people who commit armed robbery. Yet Lynn Rosen’s new play, Goldor $ Mythyka: A Hero is Born, is based on the case of Roger Dillon and Nicole Boyd, “a nice young couple enamored of fantasy role-playing games,” who an armored car of $7.4 million dollars. This is the second play to be produced by the New Georges special initiative known as The Germ Project, which basically asked writers to make plays of “scope and imagination.” G$M certainly qualifies, and the creative visual style of the play makes for an exciting audience experience of an odd story to be sure. Upon entering the New Ohio Theatre, the DJ -- who will be our dungeon master on this journey -- is already on stage spinning some tracks. Bobby Moreno’s DJ is not a bad concept, but it is unfortunate that this is the way that the piece begins, as it is the weakest aspect of the structure in a lot of ways. Director and co-developer Shana Gold seems unsure of what to do with this figure, a DJ/rapper who seems out of place in the world of the play.

Luckily, the other characters, including our “heroes,” Garrett Neergaard’s Bart/Goldor and Jenny Seastone Stern’s Holly/Mythyka, are particularly well cast and utilized. We watch as these two overlooked individuals come alive through the world of Dungeons & Dragons, and their mutual passion for the game becomes a passion for each other. This eventually culminates in their idea of robbing the money transport company for which they both work. The play also projects into the future to imagine what might become of this “Goth Bonnie and Clyde” and their son.

In the midst of this, our dungeon master DJ cuts, spins, and mixes the stories together with the media elements to create a story that not only resembles D&D, but also mimics the experience of being on the internet. I believe that Moreno’s DJ is supposed to invite us into the play, but his persona seemed forced in a way none of the other characters did.

The characters move with ease through the various locations created on Nick Francone’s minimalistic set, which brings to mind a basement, though it also transforms into homes, restaurants, and other places through various moving set pieces. Lenore Doxsee’s lighting design and Tristan Raines’s costume design also continue this aspect of less-is-more conceptualization, and though there are a lot of design elements in the show, they never seem overwhelming.

The show's multimedia structure is impressive; there is an interesting device of projection and live action that reminds me of having many windows open on a single screen at the same time. This engaged approach to the media, designed by Piama Habibullah and Jared Mezzochi, is closely linked to the sound design by Shane Rettig, both of which add to this idea of making the Internet experience a theatrical one. It is a very successful and interesting concept.

Of course, like any new piece, there are a few aspects of this piece that need a bit more attention. Melissa Riker’s choreography was interesting for actors like Stern who clearly have had movement training. Unfortunately, when dealing with actors who look like they can play D&D and who sit in front of their computers a lot, it is quite a challenge to find people who can move gracefully. This made the dance moments less successful than they could have been.

I also had a few questions about the play in general. The most important is this: what are we supposed to think of our heroes? The play vacillates between casting them as glorious underdogs who get revenge and the frightening loners who spend too much time in a fantasy world and eventually snap. I think it’s great that the play doesn’t shirk this complicated balance, but if you’re looking for a play with easy answers, this isn’t it. I do think that this is a very creative piece and one worth watching, especially if you have any knowledge of D&D, LARP, or any other kind of role-playing game. As the Federal Agent says at one point in the show, “I want a cool fist pump,” and if that describes you, then this is one not to miss.

Photo: Garrett Neergaard Jenny Seastone Stern and Bobby Moreno Photo Credit: Jim-Baldassare

Big-Top Horror

Don’t be fooled by the title: The Pilo Family Circus is by no means a show for children. It’s based on a novel of horror fiction by Australian Will Elliott. Whether Matt Pelfrey’s stage adaptation is faithful, only those who’ve read the book can judge. But if you think of “family” in the title as referring to a mob organization, and you throw in comic-book characters—not those featuring Donald or Daffy Duck, but the dark, sinister kind, with distorted visages and evil cackling—you’ll have an approximation of the tone of the Godlight Theatre Company production. The story might be lifted from—and belongs in—a comic book, in spite of higher-brow references to Tod Browning’s Freaks and Robert Louis Stevenson. An earnest and likable Nick Paglino as Jamie, a meek and aimless guy in his 20s, begins the tale, relating that he was found wandering the streets in a clown costume. Pretty quickly his adventures are seen in flashback. Jamie, along with his roommate, the overbearing Steve (Craig Peterson), was kidnapped in a home invasion by circus clowns (in distinctive, differentiating costumes, by Orli Nativ, and masks, by Brendan Yi-Fu Tay).

The ringleader of the clowns is the green-haired Gonko, played by Lawrence Jansen with a voice that starts as Ed Wynn and modulates to Jimmy Durante and then adds a layer of thug. Gonko and his cohorts (Chris Cipriano, Jarrod Zayas, and Michael Shimkin) are only minions to the Pilo brothers, who own the circus. The Pilos are George, suited but menacing, and played by a marionette (skillfully operated and voiced by Brett Glass), and Kurt, played by Gregory Kondow on stilts in a black cassock that apparently comes from Big and Tall, Taller, Tallest. He holds a very high wooden cross.

But even the Pilos aren’t in charge. “Spooky powers” are the ones who really run things, and “they live in a very hot place.” And what do the circus acts get for their obedience? The use of “wish powder,” which grants almost anything they want, if it’s OK with the spooky powers.

Jamie hopes to escape, but can’t, according to fortune teller Shalice, because he’s “in another dimension.” Or, as Steve puts it, “It’s like Alice in Wonderland, bro, only way more twisted.” Jamie is slowly pulled into a nightmare. Trapped in the circus, he attends a clown wedding, discovers a splinter rebellion against the Pilos, and, most important, battles himself. When greasepaint is applied to half his face, his personality splits à la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: half of him becomes the evil clown JJ.

Directed with verve by Joe Tantalo, the show is designed within an inch of its life—and frequently several yards beyond. Maruti Evans creates some spectacular lighting, especially with backlights and bulbs on four strings descending from the flies. Using primarily white and red, he achieves the garishness of film noir with ease, from the opening moments when Paglino stands in a pool of light amid smoke and silhouette, throughout the wearying story. (To be sure, there are a few glimmers of humor, as when Gonko declares that the resistant Jamie is a clown. Jamie protests, “That’s just it. I’m not! I’m a concierge. I have a BA in theater.”)

Neither the script nor the sound design, however, helps the actors. Broadly played, the characters growl, snarl, whoop, guffaw, shriek, and shout at one another. When, at the last, Paglino stands and recites his prelude a second time, it’s a relief to hear a normal voice. One longs to see Paglino as a real character rather than a cartoon. It’s possible the other actors playing clowns hold as much promise—at least they manage to distinguish their characters vocally—but it’s impossible to know.

Ien Denio’s sound design starts well enough, incorporating such appropriate sources as a midway pinball machine, calliope, and even a brief passage from Franz von Suppé’s “Poet and Peasant Overture,” de rigueur for a circus show. But as the evening barrels on, it becomes relentless. It seems every line is punctuated by a percussive bang, zing, clang, or dong, or some other noise. When Shalice holds up an imaginary crystal ball for Jamie to see his grim future, in an echo of It’s a Wonderful Life, we hear the sound of a balloon squeaking. The sum effect is of being trapped inside a funhouse, with precious little fun.

Photos by Sean Dooley

Facing the Great Beyond

The actor Hamish Linklater, perhaps best known for playing the brother of Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the CBS series The New Adventures of Old Christine, makes an impressive debut as a playwright with The Vandal. In a mere 70 minutes he makes a persuasive case that he has a promising career to fall back on if acting fails him. The play opens at a bus stop in Kingston, N.Y., on a frigid night. A middle-aged woman (Deirdre O’Connell), huddling in layers of clothing and looking weary, sits on an exposed bench. A teenager (Noah Robbins) approaches her and tries to engage her in conversation, explaining that he’s been in the nearby cemetery cleaning the grave of a friend who died. There’s something not quite right about him—is he a robber? A molester? Eventually, he wheedles her into going to a nearby liquor store and buying him some beer. But that’s not all he’s hoping for.

Inside the liquor store one learns the woman’s identity as she attempts to make the purchase. She is Margaret Cotter, and the owner, Dan, gives her an inordinate amount of difficulty, but with reasons that are slowly revealed. In an explosive scene, we learn Margaret’s story, and O’Connell gets to cover a lot of emotional bases—fear, desperation, pain and sadness among them.

The boy’s identity, Robert, is also known to Dan. He has been sending people in on a regular basis to buy beer for him. Though Dan has occasionally gone out to look for him, he has failed repeatedly. Oonce Margaret delivers the beer to the boy, they open up to each other. The final scene takes place in the cemetery, after Robert and Margaret have left the bus stop to go drinking there and have become separated. As a drunken Margaret searches and yells for Robert among the gravestones, she runs once again into Dan.

Those are the bare bones of the plot, and you don’t want to know more, because there are nifty surprises all along the way, handled with both daring and assurance. The Vandal is about grief and the ways in which people cope with it, and how it can seize you and immobilize you until you become deadened to life.

The Flea Theater production, directed by Jim Simpson, is beautifully judged and splendidly cast. Linklater provides vivid, poetic imagery for his actors, and they all rise to the occasion. Even so, O’Connell is riveting in her silence, reacting minimally as Robbins natters on, yet she conveys volumes with a sidelong glance. Claudia Brown’s costume for her incorporates layers of fabric, from a T-shirt to pullovers and a scarf; they are both appropriate for the weather and serve as visual parallels to the many layers of defense Margaret has in her misery. And when Margaret lets loose emotionally, she’s frightening and pathetic.

Meanwhile, Robbins tries to find out why Margaret isn’t using her car; he describes his love of French and his teacher’s obsession with another student; and he guesses that she has been to the hospital across the street (represented in David M. Barber’s spare set simply by an Emergency sign on the wall). Noah Robbins is engaging, irritating, and fascinating in the part, as well as a bit snarky at times, providing welcome humor.

As the liquor store owner, Zach Grenier is an irritating foil for Margaret, provoking her with his questions and asides and a demand for identification, though she is clearly past the threshold age for a purchase of alcohol. Although he knows Robert has sent her in, his reluctance to make it an easy buy for her goes beyond safe business practices. He’s weary, too, and beset by personal trauma, which he gradually reveals.

Occasionally a question arises: Do teenagers really clean off their friends’ graves? Why does Robert lounge with his jacket and shirt open, seemingly unaffected by the cold that had made him shiver minutes earlier? But Linklater ties up those loose ends nimbly. The Vandal isn’t a “big” play, in spite of its themes and the listing of the characters as Man, Woman, Boy to indicate intentions of universality. It’s better to think of it as a sterling novella, a harbinger of bigger things to come.

Photos by Joan Marcus

A Stendhal Misstep

Adaptations of great novels for the theater have a pretty spotty record. Among big-budget, nonmusical successes, only Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Steppenwolf’s The Grapes of Wrath come easily to mind. However, in the last decade Moby-Dick and The Turn of the Screw had imaginative, shoestring productions Off-Off-Broadway, and director Deloss Brown, in staging Stendhal’s great novel, The Red and the Black, has chosen the bare-bones approach for his own script, using only several chairs, a cloth backdrop, and a minimum of props. The unwieldy result suggests that Stendhal's novel isn't a natural for the stage. The story follows Julien Sorel, a young man of 19 who worships Napoleon, but in secret. In 1826 France, with the royalists back in power under conservative King Charles X, any mention of Napoleon may mean arrest and imprisonment. “Under the Emperor, a man could make his way by his talents,” explains Julien ardently. “Napoleon—poor—with no friends—made himself master of the world with his sword. But nowadays the army’s for the rich, and a priest makes three times as much money as one of Napoleon’s generals.” Thus Julien, whose father and brothers beat him for his love of learning, has determined that becoming a cleric will give him the means to escape his horrid family. Before Julien takes his vows, though, his mentor, Father Chélan (Jeremy Johnson), arranges for him to become a tutor to the de Rênal family.

M. de Rênal (Brian Linden) has little interest in whether Julien can educate his child, but he hires the young man because of a bitter social rivalry with M. Valenod (Keith Herron). Valenod, a crass lecher, has some fancy horses that give him cachet among the aristocracy, but, exults de Rênal, “His new Norman horses won’t matter. His children don’t have a tutor!”

Once installed as a trophy instructor, the 19-year-old Julien soon discovers that de Rênal’s wife, Louise, who is ten years older than he, is attracted to him. Eventually, Julien decides he should have experience of a worldly kind, namely an affair with Louise. Happily, the strikingly youthful Lucas Wells conveys Julien’s confidence, apprehension, and philosophical observations, along with a sly rakishness, in a measured and well-spoken performance, and one follows the hero eagerly when he is on stage.

Unfortunately, most of the other performers seem to struggle with their parts. Brown relies on the actors to narrate large chunks of the story in an abundance of monologues. Two or three characters in succession will have a monologue, then a scene will follow, often brief, sometimes not. At times actors enter to deliver a single line, or swerve in and out of a scene to speak to the audience. The dizzying staging adds an air of desperation: it's no wonder many of the actors veer toward Dickensian caricature, particularly Linden and Krista Adams Santilli as the cuckolded husband and neglected wife.

As the peremptory, snippy de Rênal, Linden is, according to the situation, appalled or comically grateful that Julien, “a servant,” has his way. (The vaguely Edwardian costumes of Lux Haac manage to convey the social backgrounds of the characters effectively, though the maid’s above-the-knee outfit seems ill-judged.) Santilli as Louise displays little sense of period movement or grace. She might have stepped out of Sex and the City, and she makes Louise so whiny and mercurial that you wonder why Julien doesn’t just take a vow of celibacy on the spot.

When the play works best, as in a garden scene with Louise, Julien, and Louise’s cousin Marie (embodied by Jessica Myhr with poise and intelligence), it allows some breathing space and a build-up of dramatic momentum. But then the rapid-fire pace resumes.

In spite of the haste, the show exceeds the posted running time by at least ten minutes. One suspects that the chief problem is that Brown is loath to cut his own script. Hypocrisy, Voltaire, wealth, aristocracy, and politics—in spite of assurances by Stendhal and his editor (Herron and Linden, respectively) at the outset that politics will be kept to a minimum—are  touched on rather more frequently than seems necessary. An amusing remark de Rênal makes about women as machines is quite funny the first time; the second time, not so much; the fourth time, it thuds. A different director might have done a better job in helping Brown condense the novel. In this case, however, The Red and the Black more aptly applies to a checkered production.

Photo by Hunter Canning