2015 On Stage

It may be redundant at this point, but I want to echo my colleagues and reiterate that it's really just gob-smacking to be able to live in a time of such bounteous creation, and to have the opportunity to see as much theater as I do. Between my personal theater-going, my responsibilities for our humble blog and my position as a regional critic for Talkin' Broadway (where I cover theatrical productions in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware), I saw well over 100 shows in 2015. Some were unbelievably good, some unbelievably bad, and many held moments of wonder. Narrowing down the list to a manageable number of "bests" wasn't easy, but that is what I have attempted to do herein. So, without further ado, here are the theatrical experiences that have remained foremost in my mind throughout the year (in alphabetical order):

Daniel N. Durant and Krysta Rodriguez in Spring Awakening.
Photo: Joan Marcus

Barbecue

Photo: Joan Marcus

My colleagues Wendy and Liz generally offered praise for Robert O'Hara's Barbecue, which runs through next Sunday at The Public's Newman Theater (read their thoughts here and here). In keeping with their earlier reviews, mine will be somewhat cagey, as I agree that knowing too much about this play before going in may spoil the experience. However, unlike my co-writers, I am not going to enthusiastically recommend this play, which too often feels like a Tyler Perry movie without the Christian subtext. O'Hara may have set out to skewer the ways in which Hollywood/Broadway/the memoir industry prey on the sad, drug-addled lives of the downtrodden, but the finished product is neither profound nor particularly interesting. The large cast work their butts off but can't overcome the fact that the play isn't as funny the author thinks -- and I had a hard time believing that many of the actors, playing siblings, were family. (Most of them seemed like they'd just met moments before taking the stage.) Kent Gash's production is, oddly, too slow and too short. I wanted to like Barbecue, but like a burger that stays on the grill a few minutes too long, it left an odd and unsatisfying taste in my mouth. -- by Cameron Kelsall

[Member tickets, mid-orchestra]

Mercury Fur

I find it hard to believe that Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur -- written in 2005, but just now receiving its New York premiere, under the auspices of The New Group -- caused such ire upon its original London bow that the critic Charles Spencer to basically call Ridley a pervert and the author's regular publisher, Faber and Faber, refused to issue the text in print. After all, the play premiered a decade after Sarah Kane's Blasted, a truly unsettling piece that actually simulated rape, mutilation and cannibalism in full view. Horrible things are the purview of this dystopian drama, but the vehicle is almost entirely talk. The talk is laced with fucks and cunts, but it's hardly shocking on the language or the content level. The play portrays a post-apocalyptic world in which any fantasy can be bought for the right price; brothers Elliot (Zane Pais) and Darren (Jack DiFalco) facilitate these encounters and act as purveyors of the drug-du-jour, taken in the form of butterflies.

photo: Michelle V. Agins

I won't reveal the particular fantasy being bought in Mercury Fur, though other critics have. But I will say that by the time it becomes clear -- after nearly two intermissionless hours -- it's hard not to feel that the playwright hasn't earned the shock he's trying to sell. Ridley is obsessed with the minutiae of life in a dystopia -- surviving in a nightmarish landscape becomes just as boring as trying to climb the corporate ladder. But does his writing and the action that surrounds it (Pais and DiFalco spend much of the play's first half-hour cleaning an apartment, doing little else) have to actually be so boring in order to portray banality?

Although the acting is largely good -- Tony Revolori (late of The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Paul Iacono (apparently playing a cisgender woman, for reasons never fully understandable) are particular standouts -- the play never catches fire. And it never feels disquieting. The best works of art in this genre should make you question the darker aspects of your own society. That is something Mercury Fur simply doesn't achieve.

[discounted ticket, almost impossible to accurately describe my seat given the theater's current configuration]

The Flick

Not much happens in The Flick, but you probably know that already. The play's languid running time -- three-and-a-half hours, with the fist act clocking in at almost two -- and liberal use of silence caused a minor stir when it premiered at Playwrights Horizons, in 2013. The controversy was such at PH's artistic director, Tim Sanford, took the somewhat unprecedented step of actually writing an open letter to the company's subscribers to explain why he programmed the play. When Annie Baker's play went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year, the award was met by cheers from some and eye-rolls from others. That award -- and the growing interest in Baker's works, with include the currently-running John (Wendy's and my reviews here) -- prompted a commercial return of The Flick, which is currently playing at Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village until January 2016.

photo: Joan Marcus

Like most of Baker's plays, The Flick is set in a somewhat crumbling corner of New England -- in this case, a run-down single-screen movie theater in Worcester, Massachusetts. The theater's claim to fame, if it can be described as such, is the presence of one of the last 35mm projectors in the state. This is the express reason why Avery (Kyle Beltran), a 20 year old cinephile on leave from college, decides to work there. His colleagues include Sam (Matthew Maher), a 35-year-old lifer who seems to hide a wellspring of sadness under his Red Sox cap, and Rose (Nicole Rodenburg), a mysterious, sexually vivacious projectionist. Over the course of the play, we watch these three enact the mundane indignities of daily life, from sweeping popcorn to threading projectors, punctuated by a healthy amount of movie trivia and hard-won personal revelations.

The Flick is not as grand and philosophically concerned as John; nor is it as precise as Baker's 2009 breakthrough play, Circle Mirror Transformation. It does, however, feature her most astute characterizations of human life. The trio of movie theater works -- a fourth actor, Brian Miskell -- plays two small parts -- regularly find profundity in minutiae, whether or not they realize it. The acting is unbelievably good, especially considering that Beltran, Rodenburg, and Miskell are only in their first week of performances. (The peerless Maher has been involved since the Playwrights Horizons run). Beltran especially puts a quivering voice and tender, expressive face to good use in projecting both Avery's savant-like cinema knowledge and deep-seeded self-doubt.

The Flick won't be for everyone. Large swaths of the audience at the performance I attended fled at intermission; many of the audience members who stayed allowed their boredom to give way to boorish behavior. (I also witnessed this behavior at John, which is similarly lengthy). I question whether these attitudes towards Baker's plays have less to do with her content -- even though the plays are long, and slow, they are fairly conventional -- and more to do with her style. My suggestion is that if you go to see an Annie Baker play, give yourself over to the experience. You might end up beguiled.

[Rear orchestra]

The Weir

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Irish theater values the act of storytelling as much as -- if not more than -- the story itself. The danger each playwright faces is that taken too far, this approach can feel like fetishization. Unfortunately, that's my impression of Conor McPherson's 1997 drama The Weir, which the Irish Repertory Theatre is reviving at its current digs in Union Square (the company previously presented this play -- with several of the same cast members -- two years ago). The play is little more than storytelling: in a remote Irish pub, the locals belt Jameson and Harp and indulge in spinning supernatural yarns they claim as true. McPherson is fascinated by the supernatural -- his plays The Seafarer and Shining City address the spirit world more directly -- and The Weir is a humanist attempt at a ghost story. It's also neither particularly poetic nor convincingly chilling. The actors give mostly fine performances, although more than a few line readings felt oddly tentative, and Amanda Quaid -- the lone woman, who shares the most disturbing story -- seemed young for her role. However, although only ninety-five minutes, Ciaran O'Reilly's production feels like a night where you stayed at the pub a few drinks past your limit.

[4th row, discounted ticket]

Heisenberg

photo: Joan Marcus

An almost-bare stage, two actors, razor-sharp direction, simple lighting, a few props: sometimes this is all you need to create an absolutely magnetic piece of theater. Such is the case with Heisenberg, the new play by Simon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) Stephens receiving its world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club's intimate Studio at Stage II. It may well be the hottest ticket in town these day, due in large part to the low ticket price ($30 a pop) and the presence of Mary-Louise Parker, returning to her Off-Broadway roots and giving her best stage performance in over a decade.

In Georgie -- a pathologically lying American living in London -- Parker has found a role exquisitely tailored to her particular strengths. We first meet her in a train station, where she's embarrassed herself by kissing the neck of a complete stranger, an Irish butcher named Alex (the extraordinary Denis Ardnt). You see, she momentarily lost herself, thinking Alex her late husband. She poignantly explains how much she misses him, tears held perfectly in her eyes. Moments later, she confesses that she's never been married.

After the chance meeting, Georgie continues to insert herself in Alex's life, alternately exasperating and beguiling him. She appears at his butcher shop, not looking to buy any meat. She makes confessions as quickly as she retracts them. The writing places Georgie perilously close to stereotype -- the audience could as easily be annoyed with her as Alex sometimes is -- but Parker's finely wrought work helps accentuate the character's seductive and sensual elements. Parker has never been a particularly sexy performer, despite playing sexualized characters; here, when she asks Alex to bed, you never question whether it's something she would do, or what the outcome would be.

Arndt is an actor primarily seen in California and West Coast regional theater. If the Lortel Archives are accurate, this production represents his first foray onto the New York stage in nearly thirty years. Let's hope the next interval isn't so lengthy, because he is a revelation. Playing against an actor as plugged into the text as Parker cannot be easy, yet Ardnt's Alex matches her step for step, and he manages to be just as spontaneously surprising as his co-star. Together, they comprise the most kinetic couple on the New York stage.

[$30 full price ticket, fourth row audience right]

The Liquid Plain

Ito Aghayere, Michael Izquierdo, and Kristolyn Lloyd
Photo: Joan Marcus

As with her previous offering earlier this season, And I and Silence (which Wendy reviewed), Naomi Wallace's The Liquid Plain is daring, messy, serious-minded, and unapologetically poetic. It's also quite possibly the most interesting and invigorating play I've seen all year. Working from the true story of a smallpox-infected female slave who was thrown into the Atlantic Ocean, Wallace constructs an admirably complex narrative that encompasses the history of slavery in America, the fluidity of love and gender, and the overwhelming familial bonds that even profound indignity cannot weaken. In the first act, Adjua and Dembi (Kristolyn Lloyd and Ito Aghayere, respectively), two runaway slaves, toil on the docks of a Rhode Island port town to earn enough money for passage to Africa. They are deeply in love and long to start a family, a fact complicated by the fact that Dembi is biologically female. One day, an amnesiac sailor (Michael Izquierdo) washes onto their docks, sitting in motion a series of mystical events that threaten the two lovers best laid plans. Act Two takes place forty-six years later, when Adjua's daughter, Bristol (the extraordinary LisaGay Hamilton), a free black woman raised in England, arrives stateside to enact a long-dreamed revenge plot. However, it doesn't take her long to realize that the history she believes she's been sent to avenge is far more complicated than she could imagine.

Placebo

Carrie Coon and Florencia Lozano
photo: Joan Marcus

I can’t stand people who talk during a performance. It demonstrates rudeness in the extreme and an utter lack of consideration for the enjoyment of fellow audience members. Yet when the man sitting next to me at Placebo, the new play by Melissa James Gibson, currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons, turned to his wife and whispered, “this is one of those plays where everyone just sits around and whines,” I couldn’t help but nod and agree. (Though in the future, sir, please save your commentary for after the show).

Verité

Robert Sella, Anna Camp, Matt McGrath
Photo: Erin Baiano

I've seen shows that I disliked. Shows that bored me. Shows that confused and confounded me. Yet rarely have I seen a show that is so irredeemably awful that I leave the theatre completely clueless as to how it managed to make its way onto a professional stage, let alone a prestigious one. Verité by Nick Jones, currently playing at the Claire Tow Theater under the auspices of LCT3, is such a show. A supposedly satirical take on consumer culture, the publishing industry, and the lengths to which some people will go to achieve a modicum of fame and success, this torturously boring tantrum of a play wastes the considerable talents of an unusually fine ensemble cast. When actors as strong as Robert Sella, Jeanine Serralles, Matt McGrath, and, in the largest and, in many ways, most thankless role, Anna Camp, are at sea, you know that something is hugely amiss. These terrific performers will move on to better things; for the sake of the American theatre, I pray that Mr. Jones will not.

[Last row, full price ticket which, thankfully, only put me out $20]

 

The Year-End Roundup

Every year, I rack up regrets over shows I never got the chance to see. I missed Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 &3) this year, for example, and also Sticks and Bones and Bootycandy. That being said, I got to see some great productions, among them 18 I blogged about for Showdown. While a few of them--Bread and Puppet Theater's summer circus and New Hazlett Theater's production of Parade--were so far off Broadway as to be in different states entirely, most of them were right here in New York, a city that I love mightily and want the very best for.

Sure, this year, I experienced some theatrical lows. I made no secret of really, really disliking If/Then. And I really have no idea what the fuck was going on with Outside Mullingar, despite some good performances and a nice set. There were a few shows I chose not to blog about at all because I had nothing terribly insightful to say about them (and, in the case of The Death of Klinghoffer, because I just didn't want to wade into the controversies that drew away from what was, in the end, a beautiful if flawed opera in a beautiful if flawed production).

But as Wendy notes in her end-of-year post, one of the joys of being a theater blogger is that we don't have to see stuff that we know will suck. We might pay for all our tickets, sit in crappy seats, and waste far more time on this blog than we should, especially when we have books to work on and classes to prepare for. But on the other hand, we are predisposed to like the things we choose to see, and we get to share our impressions with people who read our blog posts and almost never feel compelled to leave abusive comments or spam us with porn. Really, as I see it, it's a win-win situation.

Lips Together, Teeth Apart

photo: Joan Marcus

 

Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart was written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and premiered Off-Broadway in 1991. The original production—which starred Nathan Lane, Swoosie Kurtz, Christine Baranski, and Anthony Heald—was an instant smash, running for over a year; an LA production, with Lane, Andrea Martin, and John Glover, was also very successful. The work of a gay author who would go on to write several plays about AIDS from a gay perspective, Lips Together is unique—both then and now—for portraying the experience of a disease so often linked with the gay community through a heterosexual lens. Some might even call the play a precursor to McNally’s enormously successful, similarly-themed Love! Valour! Compassion!.

Lips Together was set to make its Broadway debut in 2010, via the Roundabout Theatre Company, but that production was derailed just weeks before it was set to begin previews when its star, Megan Mullally, abruptly quit. (Rumors at the time swirled that Mullally had tried to get her co-star Patton Oswalt fired, in order to replace him with her husband, Nick Offerman). The piece is now receiving its first New York revival under the auspices of the Off-Broadway Second Stage Theatre. As with any once-current play that has aged into a period piece, there are more than a few creaky moments. And while this production is smoothly directed (by Peter DuBois) and features at least one stand-out performance, it does not make a convincing case for the play as an enduring masterpiece.

The Oldest Boy

photo: T. Charles Erickson

Tenzin is three years old. He lives in what is described as "an American city with a large Tibetan community." His Mother (Celia Keenan-Bolger) is a white American academic, whose literary specialty is the use of religious symbolism in the works of atheist authors. His Father (James Yaegashi) is a Buddhist exile who owns a Tibetan restaurants. In all respects, Tenzin appears to be a normal toddler. That is, until the day two monks arrive at the family's house and inform his parents that they believe him to be the reincarnation of a venerated Lama.

Sarah Ruhl's The Oldest Boy, currently in previews at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, looks at issues of faith, family, and sacrifice through cultural and religious lenses. The characters, particularly Mother and Father (with the exception of Tenzin--the title character--no other figures are given names), are forced to question the duties they owe to their past, their future, and their culture. When the monks ask permission to take Tenzin to India to be "enthroned,"
and educated so that he may achieve his full potential within the Buddhist tradition, the American notions of childhood and family are placed in contrast with the Tibetan monastic custom. The family must decide whether to keep their son at home, in America, or sacrifice his life for the well-being of a country he will likely never see.

Indian Ink

[Note: This review contains potential plot spoilers. You have been warned. -CK]

Photo: Joan Marcus

Roundabout is starting its Broadway season with an all-star revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Beginning October 4, that production will shepherd the Broadway debuts of Ewan MacGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and feature the talents of Cynthia Nixon (who appeared, at eighteen, in the original New York production of the play) and Josh Hamilton. By all accounts, it will be an event. But Roundabout was not content to mount only one Stoppard offering this fall. The English master’s 1995 saga Indian Ink, featuring the indomitable Rosemary Harris, is currently in previews at the company’s Off-Broadway space, The Laura Pels Theatre. Helmed by American Conservatory Theatre’s artistic director Carey Perloff and featuring a smashing performance by the British actress Romola Garai, it’s a lush and luxurious staging of one of Stoppard’s most gratifying works.

Allow Me to (Re)Introduce Myself

Hi, everyone! I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. Or, depending on your history with this blog, re-introduce myself. I’m Cameron Kelsall, and I’m the new (old) writer for Show Showdown. Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while may remember me; I posted regularly as a contributing blogger here from 2009-2012. Prior to that, I was also a contributing writer for New Theater Corps, Channel 13’s companion blog to their wonderful program Theater Talk, and I maintained my own theatre-related blog, Theatre Snobbery, from 2006-2009.

I had to leave Show Showdown in 2012, when I moved to North Dakota for a teaching position. (Pro-tip: Don’t move to North Dakota for any reason. Just don’t do it.) After two years in the tundra, I recently moved back to NYC, and I am so happy that my fellow contributors have allowed me to resume sharing my opinions about my favorite subjects: live theatre and the arts. On a personal note, I am deeply honored to have this opportunity to continue the work of my dear friend Patrick Lee, who put his heart and soul into making this one of the best theatre blogs on the Internet.