You Wouldn't Need An Anchor if You Didn't Have a Story

Dan Rather, longtime CBS new anchor, is a monument. Before his recent brush with the faulty records regarding George W. Bush, he was a paragon of media

Rock and Parole

Just when you thought The Fringe was over and we could get back to more conventional musicals, here comes Wrong Way Up, a

Antigone Rides Again

With its vivacious chorus, original score, live orchestra, Balinese dance, aerial choreography, and video projections, Fire Throws invokes layered, mythic grandeur in retelling Sophocles' Antigone. Yet, narrated by an older, wiser, introspective Antigone, the production is oddly reminiscent of the final scenes of Our Town. That juxtaposition makes the play well situated within the current off-Broadway season. A Chicago transplant of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town opens this month downtown at Barrow Street Theatre while adaptations of the Greeks are enjoying representation on a number of New York stages this year. The New Group’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s epic reimagination of Aeschylus’s Orestia which sets the play cycle in Post-Civil War New England, also opened this month. Rising Pheonix’s Antigone adaptation, Too Much Memory, which drew heavily on both Sophocles’ text and Jean Anouilh’s 1944 adaptation of it, as well as other sources, earned raves in December at New York Theatre Workshop. Now the cultural prevalence of iconic Greek characters is itself the subject of interdisciplinary theater company Ripe Time's Fire Throws.

The production's intrapsychic interpretation of Antigone posits that Antigone's contemporary status as cultural icon is among the most dynamic aspects of the Sophocles play, yet Fire Throws never fully makes good on that supposition. Erica Berg leads the production with disciplined calm as “Antigone who is” or, as described by writer-director Rachel Dickstein, “the 2400 symbol she has become, looking back on her story and searching for the person inside the icon.”

Berg creates appropriate contrast with “Antigone who was,” imbued by Laura Butler with the youthful, passionate righteousness traditionally ascribed to the character. Yet contrast between the two Antigones never develops beyond that static dissimilarity. Antigone reliving her story from the outside functions less as a cathartic device than as a narrative one.

Happily, the story she narrates is a unique, graciously rendered depiction of the drama. Under Dickstein’s direction, the crossing of multiple disciplines creates a textured, cohesive whole that enhances the epic nature of the story. Jewlia Eisenberg’s original score, performed by music ensemble Charming Hostess, creates a soundscape that both accompanies the production’s Balinese-inflected choreography as well as its spoken-word scenes. Striking lighting, designed by Tyler Micoleau, adds splashes of bright color to Susan Zeeman Rogers’ set design.

In nearly every scene, the athletic chorus maintains a watchful presence, with occasional performers stepping out of the chorus to play the familiar characters of the drama. Kimiye Corwin delivers a well-drawn performance as Antigone’s pragmatic sister Ismene while the rest of the chorus frames their interaction. In the following scene, she and Antigone watch as the chorus performs a heated dance of the mythic battle that killed their brothers. Having characters witness their story unfold before them enhances the production’s emphasis on the fact that the drama is widely known. It also makes Berg’s presence as the omniscient Antigone less obtrusive than it might otherwise be. When she comments on the dramatic action or addresses its participants, her interjections feel organic rather than incongruous.

Video projections, designed by Maya Ciarrocchi, literally cast larger than life images of Creon, the ruler, and Tiresias, the seer. A particularly evocative image early in the play shows Creon upstage, delivering the story’s central edict, while Antigone, downstage of him, runs in place in disobedience of it. Across the backdrop, we see an enormous silhouette of Creon’s profile and crossing that: Antigone's shadow. The production is at its strongest when using its extensive visual vocabulary to depict mythic conflict in such bold, concise images.

“If you only knew there was more to her than this one act,” says Antigone who was, watching Creon condemn her former self. Yet, for or better or worse, her defiance defines her, and in that respect Fire Throws is no exception. In its vibrant, multidimensional depiction of her story, it’s a remarkable achievement.

Eat the Taste? Don't Mind If I Do!

Several times during Eat the Taste, I seriously contemplated yelling, "Is there a doctor in the house?" The Barrow Street Theater should consider adding some sort of emergency medical technician to their staff, in addition to ticket-takers and ushers; there is, a very real possibility that, at the end of Eat the Taste, your gut will be busted and your sides permanently split from laughing too hard.

Eat the Taste is the latest venture by playwright Greg Kotis, who wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics for the Tony Award-winning musical Urinetown. It stars Mr. Kotis and his writing partner, composer Mark Hollmann, as themselves. It takes place several years in the future, at the end of a second Bush administration, as three agents of the Department of Homeland Security and Attorney General John Ashcroft

The Transformers

Improvisation as performance is much maligned. That has less to do with the form itself than with the performers. Improv is also seen as good training for serious theatrics, or as a quick laugh a la Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Those multiple and overlapping perceptions need not be so, as demonstrated by the graduates of the New Actors

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.