January Blew In ...

"[Porto]" at the Bushwick Starr was pretty thin stuff.  Two hipsters walk into a bar... You get the picture. Following on the heels of Clare Barron's wonderful "I'll Never Love Again" (One of my best pics for 2016) at the Starr, this was a let-down.  I feel really strongly about supporting off-off Broadway theatre companies presenting works by up-and-coming playwrights but the play by Kate Benson didn't bring anything new to the table and, apart from a few top-notch performances, in particular Noel Joseph Allain as Doug the Bartender and Julia Sirna-Frest in the title role, there was little of interest unless it's impelling for you to follow the lonely lives of singletons in Brooklyn. I think Benson imagines herself clever by throwing in an on-stage conversation between Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem discussing feminism. Perhaps this would have been a more interesting play?  I found no fault in the direction by Lee Sunday Evans who will be directing the upcoming LCt3 production of "Bull in a China Shop" by Bryna Turner.  I hope Evans will have more to work with.

Fortunately for me, the follow-up to that disappointing trek out to Bushwick were two extraodinary productions, "The Tempest" at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo and "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM Harvey.

"The Tempest" is the third in a trilogy of Shakespeare's plays following "Julius Caesar" and "Henry IV" with an all-female cast directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter.  Set in a woman's prison in upstate in New York (Bedford Hills?), "The Tempest" is framed by the story of an American woman named Judy Clark (Harriet Walter) who is in prison for life after having participated in a politically motivated crime much like the Brink's robbery.  Hence, the prison is the island to which she as Prospero is exiled.  Presumably we all know the story of the "The Tempest" but what makes the play fresh is the way the story has been woven into a tale of prison life once again using the same actors who were so brilliant in "Henry IV."   I didn't feel transported as I did in "Henry IV" but it worked it's magic.

The Druid's current production of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" directed by Garry Hynes at the BAM Harvey is a stunner.  I didn't see the Tony Award 1998 Broadway production but am betting that this rivals and even surpasses that  production.  Long a fan of Martin McDonagh since seeing "The Pillowman" on Broadway in the 2005, I knew that this would be a very dark fable.  Set in Ireland, it's the story of an aging mother Mag and her adult daughter Maureen who acts as her caretaker. Theirs is an aggressively hostile relationship and when the daughter has a chance to break away it seems to be thwarted by the mother.  I say "seems" because what you see is not necessarily the reality. Marie Mullen who played Maureen in the 1998 production is here cast as the mother.  So convincing is her portrayal of an elderly infirm woman that it's hard to imagine her as the beautiful 40 year old Maureen less than 20 years ago, a portrayal for which she won a Tony.  The performances of Aisling O'Sullivan as  Maureen, Marty Rea as her presumable suitor Pato Dooley and Aaron Monaghan as Pato's lay-about brother Ray were all seamless.  But prepare to be shocked.

Oh, December

The National Theatre of Scotland never fails to deliver.  The two previous shows were at St. Ann's Warehouse: the award-winning "Black Watch" about a troupe of soldiers in Afghanistan and "Let the Right One In" a theatrical adaptation of the very successful film of the same name about a child vampire looking for connection.  The current production, "The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart," is much looser as presented at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, home to "Sleep No More." We meet in the bar of the hotel, sitting comfortably in groups at tables and plied with free shots of Scotch. And at intermission, when I was feeling weak from hunger having not had a proper lunch, tea sandwiches were served.  The play takes place, in and around the audience and bar, at an academic conference in Scotland.  Prudencia Hart is to deliver her paper on the Devil as portrayed in Scottish ballads but instead comes face to face with him.  Its clever and fun and takes the mickey out of academic theorists.  Plus, free booze.

"Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812" ,however, did not deliver for me.  I haven't read "War and Peace" the big Russian novel by Tolstoy on which it was based but have always assumed it to be deep and tragic. "Natasha, Pierre..." cannot make this claim. The play, as conceived by Dave Malloy and directed by the current New York theatre darling Rachel Chavkin, is a silly circus act operetta. Josh Groban was absent on the day I went but I can't imagine that his Pierre would have upped the action much.  This production was originally mounted by Ars Nova but I much preferred their "Futurity," a musical collaboration with Soho Rep about the imagined correspondence between Ada Lovelace and a Civil War Soldier.  While that production did not lack for originality, "Natasha, Pierre ..." draws heavily on "Candide."   The ensemble though is particularly good and one performance stood out for me, that of Lucas Steele as the rascal Anatole.

"Finian's Rainbow" at the Irish Rep was an especially appropriate musical to mount in this past election year, the subject being racism in America. Too bad the postage stamp sized stage in the newly renovated theatre on West 22nd was too small for such a grand production.  Singing yes, but where were they supposed to dance? Melissa Errico has a gorgeous voice but was perhaps a bit long in the tooth for Sharon. Charlotte Moore did a fine job directing the excellent cast and the score by Yip Harburg and Burton Lane is to die for but the Choreographer Barry McNabb had an insurmountable task given the size of the stage.

And, finally, "The Encounter" written, directed and performed by Simon McBurney.  I wanted to love it.  I really did.  I put on my headphones and was ready for the encounter.  And the set-up was splendid. We meet McBurney at his home in London and start with putting on the set of earphones attached to our seat. He gives us a lesson in how the earphones are going to work at the same time as he repeatedly tries to put his young daughter to bed. This is actually really entertaining and surprisingly engrossing.  Unfortunately once in the story he is telling, that of a Western explorer lost in the Amazon rain forest, starts in ernest, everything begins to go in slo-mo.   I was in snooze land by the time our hero is rescued and McBurney can go to bed (or convince his young daughter to at least).

Best of 2016:   Sarah DeLappe's "The Wolves" at the Duke
                       Simon Stephen's "Heisenberg" on Broadway
                       Cesar Alvarez's "Futurity" Ars Nova
                       Clare Barron's "I'll Never Love Again" at the Bushwick Starr

Honorable Mentions:     Adam Bock's "A Life" at Playwright's Horizons
                                    The National Theatre of Scotland's "The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart"                                           at the McKittrick Hotel

Overhyped:    Bess Wohl's  "Small Mouth Sounds" at Signature
                     Dave Malloy's "Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812" on Broadway

Worst of 2016:   Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "War" at the Claire Tow Theatre Lincoln Center
                         Alice Birch's "Revolt, She Said" at Soho Rep
                         The Bard's  "The Winter's Tale" at BAM

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.





 

Fabulousness and more.

My recent theatre-going experiences included Simon Stephens' "Heisenberg"on Broadway, Peter Brooks "Battlefield" at BAM Harvey and Neil LaBute's showcase for Judith Light, MCC's "All The Ways to Say I Love You" at the Lucille Lortel.

Let me start with Simon Stephens' "Heisenberg," the standout of the lot (sorry, Peter Brook).  I haven't seen his adaptation of Mark Haddon's "A Curious Case of the Dog in the NightTime" on Broadway but I did see his Young Vic "A Doll's House" at BAM two years ago and was not impressed. "Heisenberg," though, has made me a fan. The play is sharp, fast and emotionally moving in a way that few recent Broadway or off-Broadway plays have been. The part of the unstable and needy Georgie Burns is tailored for Mary-Louise Parker. Her work is deeper and more nuanced than I have seen before in her theatrical performances and gone is the blank vacuousness that embodies many of her film roles.   Her performance is alive and tactile.  We feel her very nerve endings and want so hard for her to find some sort of peace. And Denis Arndt ,who comes to Broadway for the first time in his 77 years as an actor, is smart and sexy (yes!) and makes us believe the improbable chemistry between these two lonely souls.  Mark Brokaw directs the play with a few minimal pieces of multipurpose furniture and stark lighting but we move easily from a London train station, to butcher shop, to flat to Hackensack, New Jersey. I say, see it while you can.

Another play tailored for a specific actor is LaBute's one-woman play "All the Ways to Say I Love You," directed by Leigh Silverman. Judith Light,whose recent Broadway performance in "Other Desert Cities" was outstanding, has the task of making a pretty standard and unoriginal play move along and hold our interest for an hour.  She is wonderful but no actor could have brought this play, about a sexually frustrated and unhappy high school teacher with a secret, home. The ending has a good punchy twist but it does not excuse the dull material of the play.  Plus, I admit that I spent a good deal of the play distracted by her alarming thinness and wondering if she is battling some life-threatening disease.

Lastly, "Battlefield" at the BAM Harvey is good, solid Peter Brook. It is a condensed version of "The Mahabharata" an Indian opus (here adapted by Brook's collaborator screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere,  about the nature of human existence, war and destruction, and finding inner piece. That's a lot to cover in a mere 90 minutes.  In Brook's first time around with "The Mahabharata", in the mid-1980's, took up 3 1/2 hours on stage and film.  Perhaps it is shorter because Brook is now 91  has discovered that less is more?  The play, with superb performances by an international cast of four and the on-stage presence of the musician Toshi Tsuchitori (also a frequent Brook collaborator), still feels slow, almost sleepy with it's dark lighting and even darker performers but, like all of Brook's work, it is thoughtful and ultimately illuminating.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Three new plays.

Clubbed Thumb's "Men on Boats" by Jaclyn Backhaus at Playwrights Horizons is clever, perhaps too clever.  The conceit is to have an all female cast enact the all-male expedition in 1869 to traverse the Green and Colorado Rivers in Wyoming for the first time (by the white man). I applaud the truly ensemble cast, too uniform in excellence to single just one or two, under the direction of Will Davis. The minimal set and physicality of the acting create a large space for the imagination which could have been quite magical.  In this case, I found the magic lacking although I appreciated the muscle that when into the performances.  

"Nat Turner in Jerusalem" at New York Theatre Workshop is a fine play but perhaps too didactic and linear.  We are fed the history of the black revolutionary slave on his last night before execution and a look into the mind of Thomas Gray, the man who met with him that night and wrote "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which has become required reading in many American high schools. But that's just it.  I felt the play, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian, was a history lesson rather than a theatrical experience.  In an effort to break up the static nature of the play, 90 minutes in a cell, the footprint of the cell is moved incrementally across the stage but this is also static.  We wait for the next move, 20 feet along, each time the lights are dimmed between scenes.  Philip James Brannon and Rowan Vickers, however, are extraordinarily good as Turner and Gray.  I wished for them to have a more adventurous play to act in.

"Phaedra(s)" at the BAM Harvey is a long bewildering mess saved only by the exquisite performance(s) of Isabelle Huppert. I would like to leave it at that but I'll plunge onward.  Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, the three different versions are "after" (as stated in the program) the plays of Sarah Kane, J.M. Coetzee and Wajdi Mouawad.  The first of the three "Phaedra"'s in the work of the Lebanese-born, French-bred Wajdi Mouawad. Just a mess.  Why and to what purpose the androgynous Arab go-go dancer? It sucked the air out of the room and went on and on and on to no purpose in service of the story.  We could have been spared at least 30 minutes of the exhausting 3 1/2 hour play by eliminating her (him?).   For that matter, why the Arabic song that opens the play and goes on interminably?  Oh, never mind...   Huppert appears first as a very campy Aphrodite before transitioning into Phaedra where she spends almost the entirety of the action of the play writhing about on a bed in the center of the stage with a bloody crotch. You get the idea.  The second is by the talented British playwright Sarah Kane whose brilliant "4:48 Psychosis" Huppert performed at BAM ten years ago and who, like Phaedra herself, committed suicide by hanging.  This version of the Phaedra story is the most cohesive but a bit leaden.  The final Phaedra is realized by the novelist J.M. Coetzee. Huppert is presented as the Australian writer Elizabeth Costello who has come to where(?) to deliver a lecture on the subject of Eros.  This version, coming at the end, is the lightest and Huppert is wonderful as the scatty intellectual who pings and pongs all over the subject and finally enacts a scene from Racine's great interpretation of Phaedra. It's beautiful.  Oh, to have seen this "Phaedra" in it's entirety instead of this ratty batch of imposters.

Shakespeare, More Shakespeare and some Small Mouth Sounds

Lisa Wolpe is a gender-bending Shakespearean actress.  Her one-person show "Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender," currently running in repertoire with her three-person condensed "Macbeth" at Here on Dominick Street in Lower Manhattan, is an ode to her father, Hans Max Joachim Wolpe, a Holocaust survivor and war hero born in Berlin who fought the Nazis with Canadian Winnipeg Rifles and committed suicide when she was 4. It is interspersed with monologues from the different Shakespearean roles she has played that resonate with her journey to contextualize how she was able to develop empathy for her dad and ultimately for herself.  She takes us on a fascinating hour-long journey into her mind and we come away not only with an understanding of the complex person she is but perhaps even a greater appreciation of Shakespeare.

"Macbeth3" is a mad dash through the play we shall not name.  With three actors, she manages to create an enormous cast of characters and.  Wolpe herself is Macbeth but she also appears as one of the witches.  Nick Salomone is delightfully unctuous as Lady Macbeth and as Satan is the embodiment of evil, imaginary flames seemingly licking his buff body.  And Mary Hodges brilliantly shifts back and forth between a multitude of roles, Banquo, Duncan, MacDuff and, perhaps most exquisitely, the Porter.  The set is a scrap yard which seems somehow to make complete sense.

After all that talk, it was almost a relief to switch off the noise for the revival of "Small Mouth Sounds" currently running at Signature Theatre.  Ironically "Small Mouth Sounds" from the playwright and actress Bess Wohl began at Here as well.  Directed by Rachel Chavkin, who most recently directed"Hadestown" at NYTW, it has a cast that includes Quincy Tyler Bernstine ("10 out of 12") and Zoe Winters ("An Octoroon," "Red Speedo").  The six characters are attending a weekend retreat at an Ashram somewhere in New England.  The catch is that they must be silent.  Over the course of the two hour play, they expose themselves to each other and to the audience without much verbal interaction so that by the end we feel we know them and their stories better than if they had been able to speak.  Although entertaining, engaging, well-acted and well-directed, it felt contrived and never dipped too far below the surface.  Wohl doesn't take us on the emotional journey that Clare Barron ("You Got Older"), Anne Washburn ("10 out of 12") or Annie Baker ("The Flick") have been able to.  In other words, though delightful, it didn't leave with me anything to chew on.