From A Male Perspective

I'm having very mixed feelings about The Playwright's Realm production "The Rape of the Sabine Women, By Grace B. Matthias" at the Duke.  My first reservation is that it is a play about rape told from a woman's point of view by a man, playwright Michael Yates Crowley (no, it was not written by Grace B. Matthias ,who is in point of fact the actual teenage victim of the rape in the play).  Now, I'm not saying that a man shouldn't have the right to tell a story from a woman's point of view but it's hard to image how a feminist audience will take to a man presuming that he knows whereof he speaks/writes when it comes to rape.

What is missing from the play is the actual rape.  We see the events leading up to it but not the actual rape so we are, in effect, left to figure out for ourselves what the circumstances of the rape actually are. It's a bit muddy.  Yes, it's described but that's not enough. We are left to wonder which I think is opening the door to misinterpretation. Would a woman have told the story differently? Yes, I think so, because a woman, especially one who has been a victim of rape herself, would know that it needed to be shown not told.  And although Grace appears in a state of semi-shock throughout the play it's unclear whether this was her state before the rape or because of the rape. We don't really get a real sense of how the rape itself has affected her except for her fascination with firemen and the desire to become one in order to put out fires. I get the heavy-handed metaphor but am not sure if it is entirely appropriate. She doesn't display anger or pain beyond shock. She even believes that she will marry one of her rapists.   Her rapists are high school football stars on whom the hopes and dreams of the community hangs and so her story is pushed under the carpet because it upsets a balance.  But theirs is only a gentle negation of what has happened to her.  In reality, wouldn't she have been ostracized by this same community?

The most interesting aspect of the play is the use of a painting of The Rape of the Sabine Women that Grace and her classmates are studying in school and how the characters from the painting come alive embodied by Grace's classmates, including her rapists.  The best line in the play is uttered by the raped Sabine woman who married her rapist when she says to Grace, "But you have no cattle.  Why would he marry you?"

All in all, the ensemble acting is well done as is the direction by Tyne Rafaeli.  But this production doesn't have the power and scope of The Playwright's Realm recent production of "The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe which is being revived at Lincoln Center this fall which addresses some of the same issues and in which Susannah Perkins who plays Grace has a much more developed role. Go see that instead.

Run, Don't Walk

Two shows not to miss while they are still on are The Public Theatre's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park featuring the incomparable Annaleigh Ashford as Helena.  If you have to wait on line all day in the park it will be worth your while but there are a couple of other options.  The Public Theatre also has a line downtown which you can get to at 11am and still score tickets or you can try your hand at the on-line lottery (which is what I did).   I know, you're saying "ANOTHER "Midsummer Night's Dream?"  I've only seen it a million times already," but don't! Annaleigh Ashford brings new juice to the play which in this case would be more appropriately titled "All About Helena" or "Helena's Dream."  From the moment she hits the stage she owns it, every inch of it.This is not to take away from the performances of the rest of the stellar cast but they are merely her supporting players here.  A side note is that I loved the use of elderly actors as Titania's fairies, especially the diminunative 88-year-old Vinie Burrows whom I last saw in "Sumara" at The Soho Rep. I mind-checked her name because she made the otherwise baffling and directionless "Sumara" watchable. The director is Lear DeBessonet, one to watch if you're not already familiar with her name from the recent production of Suzan-Lori Parks' "Venus" as Signature and her various productions of Shakepeare as the Founder of Public Works at the Public Theatre.

The other show you should be buying tickets for RIGHT THIS MINUTE is the PTP/NYC production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" at the Atlantic Theatre.  I went not expecting much after having been so in love with the Broadway production several years ago that I begged another ticket and went twice.  That production had a stellar cast, including Billy Crudup, Margaret Colin and Raul Esparza, and directed by David Leveaux  it would be hard to beat.  But I loved this smaller intimate production four floors underground at the Atlantic with it's no-name cast, directed by an in-house director Cheryl Faraone.  The play straddles two time periods, 1809 and present at Sidley Park, a large country house in Derbyshire, England and revolves around a mystery. Intrigued?  And let's hear it for all the unsung actors and directors of the theatre world who are doing strong work and will never get the recognition they deserve.  I had been prepared to leave at intermission (it is a long play) but I was so engaged that after the break I couldn't wait to take my seat again. Let me give a special shout-out to several of the actors:  Andrew William Smith as Septimus Hodge, a tutor and a great friend of Byron, Jonathan Tindle as Ezra Chater, a "poet," Megan Byrne as Lady Croom of the 1809 cast; Stephanie Janssen as the historical author Hannah, Jackson Prince as Valentine Coverly, an heir to the estate and a mathematical genius and Alex Draper as the recklessly ambitious academic Bernard Nightingale in the present day cast.
And there is a tortoise...

Less captivating is "The Fulfillment Center" at MTC.  Directed by Abe Koogler, this is the second play I have seen by Daniel Aukin.  I was blown away by "The Kill Floor" with Marin Ireland at the Claire Tow black box theatre at Lincoln Center a year or so ago.  Taking place (for the most part) in an abattoir, the play was much more timely than the recent Pulitzer Prize winning Lynn Nottage play "Sweat," which dealt with some of the similar themes and felt old and regurgitated IMHO.  Although the cast of "Fulfillment Center" is uniformly excellent (Eboni Booth, Bobby Moreno, Frederick Weller and the great New York mainstay Deirdre O'Connell) the play, which takes place in a shipping facility in New Mexico, a trailer park and a characterless apartment, lacks the immediacy of "The Kill Floor."  The story is similar though, characters pushing to move on, to move up and to have some meaning in their lives.  Worth seeing, still.

The very disappointing "Pipeline" by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz at Lincoln Center is one to safely miss. Blaine-Cruz directed the deadly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "War" at the Claire Tow and Alice Birch's excruciatingly awful "Revolt, She Said" at Soho Rep so either she just chooses bad material or she is doing an injustice to these works.  It will be certainly something for me to think about before I buy another ticket to a play she has directed.  "Pipeline" an angry play about a black teen who has lashed out at his private school teacher in a moment of frustration and rage and looks to loose everything.  But it is as much about his divorced, ostensively single-parent mother who teaches in a large inner-city public high school in Detroit.  Karen Pittman gives a high pitched unmodulated performance as Nia, the lonely and unhappy mother, desperate to understand her son and do what is right for him, The stand-out performance comes from Tasha Lawrence as Laurie, a veteran white colleague of Nia's, who lashes out in anger at the futility of their job. Morisseau wrote the play as a tribute to her own mother who taught for 40 years in Highland Park, Michigan.  The allusions to Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in Native son are apt but the overuse of the the Gwendolyn Brooks poems is tiresome and lazy.