Kate Tarker's "Thunderbodies" at Soho Rep is a loud, messy play reminiscent of Ionesco's "Jack, or The Submission" and "Rhinoceros." It is directed Lileana Blain-Cruz who is having a moment now, having just come off the successful run of Marcus Gardley's divine "The House That Will Not Stand." at NYTW. It's hard not to love the actors, Specifically veteran actress Deirdre O'Connell as the monstrous Grotilde and Matthew Jeffers as Boy, Grotilde's son. Jeffers was the only "light" in the recent revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW and he is mighty good here as well. "Thunderbodies is about war and politics and no way out... As usual there too much throwing garbage around the stage for my liking but it makes it's point.
The only good reason, and it is indeed an excellent one, to see Alexi Kaye Campbell's "Apologia" at The Roundabout is to see Stockard Channing flex her acting muscles. I have to admit that I'll see her in anything. She usually has better material to showcase her talent, "Other Desert Cities," "Six Degrees of Separation," "Joe Egg" to list a few, but her performance here as Kristin, an aging social activist who has just written a memoir, elevates the material. The other performances are pretty wan, including Hugh Dancy as both the sons who she has managed to completely leave out of her memoire (hence the crux of the play). I have also have been less than impressed with recent work of director Daniel Aukin: "Admissions" at LTC and "Fulfillment Center" at MTC and Ranco Viejo at Playwright's Horizons. He is either managing to trivialize good material or opting to direct less than excellent works. Take your pick.
"The Hard Problem" at Lincoln Center is a new but minor Tom Stoppard. It's enjoyable but doesn't go deep the way his best work does. Jack O'Brien is Stoppard's go-to director at LTC and although he does his best he can't raise the play to the level of "The Coast of Utopia" or "The Invention of Love." A sticking point for me is that Stoppard's muse this time around is Adelaide Clemens. This is yet another strong Stoppard role for an actress and Clemens just doesn't have the weight of, say, a Carey Mulligan (sorry Stoppard, but Carey is already taken by David Hare). The play about an ambitious young woman with a secret in her past, rests on her shoulders and she's just too uninteresting an actress to pull us in completely. Even so, an evening with Stoppard is always food for thought and time well spent.
"The White Album" at BAM is pointless. Mia Barron, who we last saw in Sarah DeLappe's "Wolves" at Playwright's Realm, is convincing as Joan Didion although she bears absolutely no resemblance to her. But then, Vanessa Redgrave in "The Year of Magical Thinking" didn't either. The staging by Lars Jan for his Early Morning Opera company with a literal glass house, smoke and mirrors and enactments is mostly unnecessary. Read the book instead.
Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne's "The Prisoner" at Theatre for a New Audience is also disappointing. Perhaps Brook, in his 90's, is losing the thread of how to tell a story. This is parable, if you will. A man is condemned to sit outside a prison in punishment for the unspeakable crime of having murdered his father. But his crime is muddied by the fact that he killed his father because he caught him sleeping with his sister who he also desired and that he received his punishment from his uncle who stood idly by and did nothing and so on... I suppose the question is whether we need to be behind actual bars to be in prison. Although culturally and ethnically diverse the actors are not very interesting and fail to make us care.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" at the Shubert, adapted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, feels like a better than average television drama. Which makes sense since in addition to the much loved "West Wing" Sorkin created "Newsroom" in which Jeff Daniels starred, as he does here. Daniels doesn't have to compete with Gregory Peck but he is still no Atticus Finch. He fails to make us see the goodness and decency of the man. Instead we get a scolding father and self-righteous lawyer. I found Celia Keenan-Bolger believable as the 12-year-old Scout even though I have an intense dislike of seeing adult actors portray children on stage. She brings layers to her performance lacking from the other performances. Too many of the characters are stock: the white trash accuser, the drunk with a heart of gold, the fair and jovial judge and so on. The whole play feels rickety, like a summer stock show thrown up in a week or two. Still, the night I went, there was a standing ovation. I wasn't surprised considering how much the both the book and the movie have become such a part of our cultural narrative. The audience wanted to love it so they did.
Twyla Tharp at the Joyce delights with "Minimalism and Me" an instructional piece on her earliest dances narrated by Tharp herself. She remounts her earliest works from 1965 to 1971 and we see the progression of her choreography leading up to the perfect "Eight Jelly Rolls" from 1971. As ever, Tharp has and eye for picking exquisite dancers and it's such a treat to see Tharp step out at 77 and dance for a few moments. Heaven.
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