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.

I have seen "A Midsummer Night's Dream" more times than I can remember but each time brings something fresh.  The New York Classic Theatre's production which I saw this year in Carl Schurtz Park on the far Upper East Side delights.  The company does stellar productions of Shakespeare and occasionally other classics each summer in various parks around Manhattan and Brooklyn.  The conceit is that we, the audience, must move with the action from spot to spot in the park.  The most engaging aspect of this particular production are the "rude mechanicals" led by Nick Salamone's Peter Quince who are enlisted by Duke Theseus(the excellent Clay Storseth) to put on a production of "Pyramus and Thisbe," in particular Ian Gould who plays Bottom with enormous flair.  Another device in this production which works to great effect is having the mechanicals double as Titania's creep steam punk fairies.  But the highlight of the production was Montgomery Sutton as Francis Flute performing Thisbe with enormous, and I mean truly enormous, balloon breasts that prevented movement.  I thought I would burst my appendix laughing. On the negative side, I could have done without the seemingly arbitrary passages of the play that were set to music and Matt Mundy's Puck was a bit ADD for my taste. But all in all a very pleasing evening with the Bard.

On the flip side, "Coriolanus" at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey on the Drew University campus was a disappointment.  The production design, to begin with, was a mess, a mash up of everything from cheap Liberace suits to bathrobes with epaulettes standing in for military attire.  What were they thinking?  Well, I know what they were thinking because I stayed for the Q&A with actors.  They seemed to think that this made the productions "timeless." Hmmmm... The acting overall was quite good although I detest the casting of women in men's roles unless that is the intention of the production as in Phyllida Law's recent all female productions of "Henry VI" and " The Taming of the Shrew".  I find it distracting and it changes the tenor of the scenes. I must give a nod to Jacqueline Antaramian who was especially fine as Volumnia,  the helicopter mother of Caius Martius Coriolanus.  Greg Derelian is a very good actor but as Caius Martiuis  he looked too much like a character out of the "The Sopranos" for me to take him seriously.  Perhaps if the costumes had not been so ridiculous ....

"Privacy" by James Graham at the Public Theatre, is a bit of fluff about the invasion of privacy in the age of the internet, initially brought to our attention by the Edward Snowden who himself appears briefly on a screen at the end of the play. I think anyone who was shocked by the "revelations" in the play probably has not been following the news since Snowden became the most famous whistleblower in the world and most definitely has not see "Citizen Four" which shocked socks off anyone who saw it.  No, the subject matter of this play not longer has the power to be shocking but, as directed by Josie Rourke with a cast that includes Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, Rachel Dratch late of SNL and many many many Amazon boxes, it is charming and extremely good fun.

Misogyny turned upside down and going Incognito

The current production of "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Delacorte Theatre directed by Phyllida Lloyd is a curious one.  In her attempt to stand the play's obvious misogyny on it's head and make it relevant for today's audience, she had cast an all female version.  Unfortunately, "Shrew" is not as successful as her also all female "Henry VI" set in a women's prison in Scotland.  That production had gravitas.  Her "Shrew" is a bauble. There is a fine performance by Janet McTeer a Petrucio but for the most part the performances feel thrown off and slight.  The best aspect of the production has nothing to do with Shakespeare at all.  Lloyd frames the play with a beauty pageant hosted by Donald Trump.  Kate and Bianca are contestants, of course.  Then, interspersed with the action of the play, are vignettes delivered by a stand-up comic.  The humor is sexist but, delivered by a woman dressed as a man, is actually mocking the current climate of sexism and misogyny of Trump's campaign. Unfortunately, during the performance I attended, there were disgruntled audience members who shouted angrily at the comic with cries of "Misogyny!"  I guess they didn't get the joke.

"Incognito" at Manhattan Theatre Club is another effort from Nick Payne who wrote the excellent "Constellations."  Again he incorporates the physics of time and place into a play, but this time about the brain: memory, loss of, and the actual brain of Einstein.  Directed by Doug Hughes, the play asks a lot of questions: Why would a man married for 30 years murder his wife in his sleep? How can a person not remember from one moment to the next? Does the study of a human brain give us an information that we can play forward? The answer to all these questions is simply that we do not know, that we may never know. "Incognito," while thought-provoking and entertaining, doesn't have the focus of "Constellations," a two character play that applied string theory and quantum mechanics to endlessly fragment and refract the story of a relationship. Jack Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson's performances in that play were exquisite and more powerful than those of the current crop, with the exception of Charlie Cox who brilliantly embodies several characters over the course of the play including Henry, an amnesiac who remembers and longs for his wife Margaret but can't remember that he has seen her a moment before.  Heather Lind, Morgan Spector and Geneva Carr each slip in an out of various American and British accents effortlessly but I had a hard time keeping track of their various story lines. The play is "brain" food though and I recommend the 85 minutes in the dark.

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