Is it December already?

"The Wolves" excites.
"Wilderness" moves.
"A Life" illuminates.
"The Babylon Line" stagnates.
"Rancho Viejo" numbs.
"The Winter's Tale" confuses.

Try and catch The Playwrights Realm production of  "The Wolves" in its limited return engagement at the Duke Theatre.  The small theatre works well for the play which focuses on a suburban girls' high school soccer team.  We know the girls by the numbers on their jerseys, not their names.  The play is physical, visceral, pumping sweat.  Everything is on the line.  Some of the girls are hoping to be scouted for college soccer teams, others are trying to fill a vacuum in their lives. They struggle with bullying, bulimia, depression, unwanted pregnancy and the need to have a bond with each other. The play is written by Sarah Delappe and directed by Lila Neugebauer, both of whom were avid soccer players in their youth and was rehearsed much like a soccer practice.  It shows.  The team is tight, the dialogue is on target and the feelings are real.

I caught the last performance of  "Wilderness" at the Abrons Arts Center.  I'm glad I did.  It's a shame that this nifty little play about a boot camp in the wilderness for challenged teens will not be transferring to a bigger theatre uptown.  The acting by the young troupe is outstanding as is the direction of Ann Hamburger.  Like "The Wolves,"  the play centers around teens struggling to function in the world.  These teens feel isolated from their peer group and their families. The boot camp is an attempt to draw them into a circle and make them feel less alone. Well done.

"A Life" by Adam Bock at Playwrights Horizons is a story of life, death and what comes after.  David Hyde Pierce, looking shockingly old for those of us who remember him from Frazier,  gives a devastating performance as Nate, a middle-aged gay man.  He has never been able to sustain a long term relationship.  He has a boring job.  It is the kind of life that is perhaps full for him but seems dull to us. Then he dies.  And this is where the play gets really interesting.  Most moving for me was the actual death of a sudden heart attack, at home, alone.  He is not found immediately and we, the audience, watch him in the still state of death for what seems like hours although I'm sure it is only a few minutes. Nothing happens ...  but it speaks volumes.   It gives us time to ponder death. How final it is.  And how the playwright approaches what comes after is thoughtful and somehow comforting. We watch as Nate is bathed and attended to at the funeral home with exquisite respect.  We see how how his best friend and his sister grieve and get a very real glimpse of what life is like for those who remain. And Nate watches. We mourn them, not him.
Lovely.

Less lovely is "Mission Viejo," also at Playwright's Horizons about several American couples living in what appears to be a retirement community in Mexico. Written by Dan LeFranc and directed by Daniel Aukin and starring Mare Winningham and Mark Blum, "Mission Viejo" never really took off for me.  The play is long, three hours long with two intermissions, which is a long time for a play in which very little happens.  I mean, LeFranc is no Beckett.  The dullness of the play is not helped by the creative set design which obscures from view some of the action of the play depending on where one is sitting. There's also an extraneous character, an odd young man who wanders through the action from time to time and ends up tying up one of the characters and making him watch an interpretive dance on the beach.  By the end we care a bit more about the characters, but not much, not enough.

"The Babylon Line" by Richard Greenberg is just thin stuff.  Under the direction by Terry Kinney, the performances by Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Reaser are stilted.  And why does Reaser have a weird unexplained southern accent?  I was a bit surprised at how flat the play was having been totally knocked over by Greenberg's "An American Plan" on Broadway a few years ago.  You win some, you lose some.

Cheek by Jowl's "The Winter's Tale" at BAM is just a big hot mess.  Not one of Shakepeare's best plays to begin with, in this production King Leontes is a psychopath. Okay ... and?  The direction by Declan Donnellan is intent on making us so dizzy that we don't realize that he, the director, has not a clue what he is doing.  Less said the better.

October. So Overdue.

Let's see.  It started with  James Lapine and William Finn's "March of the Falsettos" in October. Then I kind of got lost in travel, the election and a bad case of the flu (or was it just the blues over the election results?).

I have a hard time tallking about musicals because I'm not a fan of the form.  There are exceptions, like anything Sondheim and South Pacific but, in general, don't expect me to turn cartwheels over anything else.  Case in point, the current revival of "Falsettos' which I found to be dated and thin on story.  Yes, there is a story:  married man leaves wife and son for another man but tries to keep the wife and son and thereby have it all.  And aids enters in, of course.   I find this subject a little tired at this point in time.  In the years since Falsettos" debuted we  have had the great Tony Kushner's "Angels in America", which has so much more depth and universality, not to mention the explosive "The Normal Heart," by aids activist Larry Kramer.  Neither are musicals, but they share common themes. The minimal and cheap-feeling set by star architect David Rockwell was more what I would expect from a high school production,  interconnecting cubes that were reconfigured from scene to scene on a bare stage. That said, the music and the performances are good enough to sustain the two plus hours and it's perhaps a better bet than seeing "Fiddler on the Roof" for the umpteenth time.

Another revival, David Hare's "Plenty" with Rachel Weisz at the Public, does not fare as well.  I'm a huge fan of Hare.  If you're a regular reader of this blog you will know how I swooned over the recent Broadway revival of "Skylight" with Carey Mulligan and Bill Nye.  In 1982, "Plenty" with Kate Nelligan, also at the Public, felt profound.  The story is of a resistance fighter in WW2 who carries with her the memory of a great love who she met at a hightened moment in time and then never saw again. Ultimately this romanticized memory destroys her life because it was not merely the man but the moment in time that she cannot replicate.  In the current production, as directed by David Leveaux, it felt like a one-night-stand gone bad.  Whatever immediacy I felt in 1982 was gone. Weisz was more Cosmo girl than Gloria Steinem. I missed the strength.

But two dance pieces at BAM delivered.

With music by Morton Feldman, Shen Wei's gorgeous painted backdrop and a libretto by Samuel Beckett, "Neither" was an evening of blissfully beautiful and controlled dance marred only by some distracting business with plastic wrap dropping from the ceiling and enveloping the dancers toward the end. The lighting by Jennifer Tipton and production design by Rocco DiSanto, both old pros, were superb but, ultimately, it's the dance.  "to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither." - Samuel Beckett

The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is a big favorite of mine.  Her company Rosas is forever stretching the boundaries of dance, blurring it with other artforms.  In "Vortex Contemporum" her Rosas company works with Ictus, a Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble who appear on stage with the dancers.  On a bare stage, save for a grand piano,  dancers and musicians work off each other, music guiding dancers and dancers influencing the music.  Fresh and thought-provoking, it didn't embrace me the way "En Atendant" did in 2010 or "Cesena" in 2011, both also at BAM, but it didn't leave me empty.

And, to round out October, there was Soho Rep's "Duat," an exploration of queer black identity by Daniel Alexander Jones.  The first act, beautifully directed by Will Davis,  tells the story of his "otherness" from boyhood to early adulthood (the very gifted Tenzin Gund Morrow and Toissaint Jeanlouis) wrapped around the library card catalogue system.  I couldn't get enough of seeing the young Jones morph into the person he became.  Unfortunately the second act goes bit wild and has no cohesiveness, most of the action taking place in a classroom where Jones comes out in drag as a statuesque teacher and the ensemble of actors are students who are preparing to perform as flowers.  I didn't get it and wish that Jones had left well alone after the perfect act that preceded it.

So that rounds up October.  Yes, October!  I told you I was behind.  Look my very opinionated thoughts on November in the next few days.