The Legend of Georgia McBride

The MCC Theater’s latest offering, The Legend of Georgia McBride, shows drag queens at work: those who dress up as a sparkly symbol of protest against discrimination; those who are just born for a life of high heels and sequined evening gowns; and those who find that their best male selves lie in the lip-synced songs of a woman.

Matt McGrath, Keith Nobbs and Dave Thomas Brown. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

When Casey (Dave Thomas Brown) discovers his Elvis impersonator act at Cleo’s, a backwater bar in Florida, will be replaced by a drag queen show he only agrees to stay on as bartender because there is a baby on the way for him and his wife, Jo (Afton Williamson). It’s the same reason he dresses up in drag to do an Edith Piaf number when a regular cast member, Rexy Nervosa (Keith Nobbs), goes on a bender. He awkwardly moves through the song, coached by drag queen extraordinaire Tracy Mills (Matt McGrath, who also appeared in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts premiere). By the third night, though, Casey is something of an expert impersonator and he find he enjoys performing as much as the money, a fact he cannot confess to his wife.

This gem of a show pleasantly explores the nature of self and the transformative power of fantasy, and while no surprising insight is revealed, the characters seem real and likeable. As their personal epiphanies are slowly unveiled, an unexpected emotional punch underlines the simplicity of playwright Matthew Lopez’s plot. Plus, the performances, directed by Mike Donahue (who also directed the show’s 2014 Denver premiere) are just oh-so much fun to watch.

Seeing Casey transform from bad Elvis to country vixen, mouthing tunes by hit makers such as Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, is pure entertainment. If Thomas Brown wasn’t slated to play Michael on the first national tour of The Bridges of Madison County this fall, he could give up conventional acting and become a full-time drag queen … if he wanted.  Equally terrific is the supporting cast, especially McGrath, whose exuberant sweetness always hints at the steel that lies beneath the middle-aged queen.

The production staff utilizes all the assets of the Lucille Lortel Theatre’s small space—transforming it seamlessly from Casey’s apartment to Cleo’s dressing room and stage, with all the glittery upgrades as the drag show gains momentum. There’s no curtain; even as the audience enters the theatre, the show begins with the staff in headsets, moving on and off  the stage as they roll in dressing racks and check the goods in the refrigerator.  

The scenic design by Donyale Werle exposes a tired watering hole with simple details, such as the shining, mismatched holiday lights that add a bit of sparkle, despite the insinuation that this establishment is the type that leaves their decorations out all year. Adding to the glitz and fantasy of the drag show are costumes by Anita Yavich and makeup/wig design by Jason Hayes, which transform Dave Thomas Brown into a true star and, as his pregnant wife eventually laments, a woman prettier than her.

Its New York premiere may be short-lived (August 20-October 4) but hopefully, this sweet show with sharp dialogue will come back again.

(Press tickets, 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 Sound of Murder (book review)

Ivy Meadows (nee Olive Ziegwart) is an actress by night and a P.I. in training by day. Her current evening gig is The Sound of Murder, a Cabaret-Sound of Music mashup that I'd definitely go to see. In Ivy's day job, her Uncle Bob, who is also her boss, has her filing old paperwork while he does the actual detecting. But then recent widower Charlie Small commits suicide, and Ivy becomes convinced he was murdered. She decides to do some detecting of her own. Let's just say it goes less than smoothly.

Ivy Meadows is a likable, funny, hapless narrator. She goes too far, says too much, sticks her nose in where it doesn't belong, suffers from camel toe in her costumes, and kinda burns down her house. And, like any good narrator in a mystery series, she knows a lot of people who get murdered. But the mysteries are only part of the fun in Cindy Brown's Ivy Meadows Mystery series. (The first book in the series is Macdeath.)

Brown worked in theatre for years, and she gets the charm, craziness, ego, fear, silliness, and bravery of the people who make shows happen. She gives us the has-been star, the sometime porn actress, the diva with memory problems, the creepy womanizer, 60-year-old cheerleaders, and people who just can't help saying "Macbeth" out loud in a theatre. They're entertaining company.

Brown's books are well-designed cotton candy, page turners sprinkled with genuine character-based humor and delightfully bad jokes. I greatly enjoyed both Macdeath and The Sound of Murder, and I look forward to the next one.

(By the way, the Kindle pre-order price for The Sound of Murder is only $2.99. It's also available in paperback for $15.95.)

(reviewer copies)

Looking Forward: The 2015/2016 Season

The 2015/2016 theater season has already begun, with the much lauded Broadway premiere of Hamilton (and the less-lauded debut of Amazing Grace) and the first new shows of the Off-Broadway season -- Annie Baker's highly acclaimed John, which Wendy and I both greatly admired, for instance -- cropping up. However, like kids going back to school, we often associate a theater season with a calendar that starts in September and ends in June, with the Tony Awards. And looking ahead, this promises to be a busy and interesting year on the Great White Way and beyond. A particularly busy fall season -- by my count, nineteen plays and revivals opening or beginning previews on Broadway between September 1 and December 31 -- gives way to a spring that will host the likes of Audra McDonald, Jessica Lange, Ben Whishaw, Frank Langella, Sophie Okonedo, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Saorsie Ronan, to name just a few. Off-Broadway remains as vibrant as ever, with world premieres from David Lindsay Abaire, Michael John Lachiusa, Naomi Wallace, Danai Gurira, and Nick Payne on the docket, and appearances by Lupita N'yongo, Kristine Nielson, Mario Cantone, Mamie Gummer, Sherie Rene Scott, Dame Harriet Walter, and Holland Taylor.

To the folks at Show Showdown, the impending arrival of a new theater season makes us giddy as kids at Christmas. We're happy to each offer a brief overview of what excites us the most from the crop of upcoming shows.

Cymbeline--Words for Its Final Four Days

Three Reasons to Go See One of Shakespeare's Least Liked Plays

There are four days left to see Cymbeline, the second offering of The Public's annual Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater. This flawed production (see Cameron Kelsall's excellent July review here) is worth seeing if you can get tickets (learn how to get tickets here).

One:
In the mid-August production I saw Lily Rabe (Imogen) was radiant, a fact I mention because some reviews dismissed her performance, calling her too "bitter" or that she "doesn't quite find access to the character’s radiant innocence and the pathos of her long suffering." Perhaps she grew into the role, but that night she gave a nuanced, rich interpretation of a character who changes drastically through the play, from a sweet innocent to a betrayed lover to an anguished mourner. Plus, her resonant, opulent voice is perfect for Shakespeare. Heck, it's fantastic for reading the phone book, too.

Two:
The other highlight of the show is Kate Burton as the Queen and the evil stepmother to Imogen. She brings the snarky out in a dark character who likes to play with poisons. Plus, she wears the show's only decent costume, a big, pitch-black hoop-skirted confection that makes you understand what Cymbeline, the King of Britain (Patrick Page, who also is solid in his role) sees in her. Like many of the actors, she plays a second character. Her Belarius, a banished lord from court, is not as compelling as the queen, but she does bring an emotional center to this rough-hewn back hills poser who, on one hand, fiercely loves the two boys she stole from the king and raised, and yet is someone who seethes with an underlying bitterness.

Three:
The original music by Tony Award-winner, Tom Kitt (Next to Normal, If/Then) strengthens the potency of some of the passages, allowing sweet or sorrowful notes to linger in the night air.

The final show in the Shakespeare in the Park series, The Odyssey, runs September 4-7 and will unite onstage professional actors with regular New Yorkers.

Photo credit: Carol Rosegg 

John

In her absorbing new play, John (directed by frequent collaborator Sam Gold), Annie Baker shows that there are many ways to be haunted and many ways to be in touch with the universe--but perhaps fewer ways to love.

Engel, Abbott, Smith
Photo: Matthew Murphy

It's the present. Jenny and Elias are staying at a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, where Elias wants to see the historical sights and both want to work on their damaged relationship. They are haunted by one partner's past indiscretion, their childhoods, and even an American Girl doll. Mertis, known as Kitty, is the owner of the bed and breakfast. At first glance she seems to be kind of simple, even silly, but she isn't, and her relationship with the universe is unusually close. Genevieve, Kitty's blind best friend, speaks frankly of "the time I went crazy," explaining how her ex-husband took over her brain after their split, in the most intimate form of haunting. Genevieve's craziness was the literalization of heartbreak.

Mercury Fur

Two brothers come into a deserted room strewn with debris. Elliot is clearly the leader, smart and full of authority. Darren is the ne'er-do-well, slow-witted and stoned. They are preparing for some sort of party. Elliot starts cleaning up and badgers Darren to clean up as well. They argue. They bicker. They say "fuck" and "fucking" about a million times. Elliot in particular uses a form of English I would label as "faux-lyrical ugly." Little by little we learn that ugliness is the state of their apocalyptic world. And the party will not be a joyous occasion.

Jack DiFalco, Zane Pais
Photo: Monique Carboni 

Philip Ridley's play Mercury Fur (directed by Scott Elliott) explores the struggle for humanity in an inhumane world, and parts of it are hard-hitting and thought-provoking. It runs over 2 hours without an intermission and would be well-served by some judicious trimming, particularly in the first half hour. The dialogue is not always intelligible, which is a tremendous weakness in such a verbal work. Many stories are told, and while they are well-written, they eventually hurt the play's momentum. The cast is uniformly strong: they are Jack DiFalco, Bradley Fong, Paul Iacono, Peter Mark Kendall, Emily Cass McDonnell, Sea McHale, Zane Pais, and Tony Revolori.

Schooled

I cannot predict that Schooled will be the breakout hit of this year's Fringe, the vagaries of theatre being what they are. However, I can say that it should be. Schooled is just this side of superb.

Stein, Maré
Photo: Andrea Reese

Smartly written by Lisa Lewis and smoothly directed by James Kautz, Schooled focuses on the triangle of Claire, an ambitious screenwriting student at a ritzy film school; her professor Andrew, a semi-successful screenwriter who mentors her, or perhaps "mentors" her; and her rich boyfriend Jake, also a student and also ambitious, with whom she is competing for an important grant. 

An Inconvenient Poop: Fringe Festival

On hearing the phrase "political theatre," most of us think of painful shows discussing life-or-death issues, often with unhappy endings. (Anyway, that's what I think of, and not without reason.) Shawn Shafner's one-man show, An Inconvenient Poop, is political theatre as stand-up comedy meets crazy professor. Shafner's humor is the proverbial spoonful of sugar, and An Inconvenient Poop--which, yes, considers life-or-death issues--is often delightful. And Shafner makes it clear (without guilt-tripping) that whether the ending is happy or unhappy is up to us all.

An Inconvenient Poop is not coyly or symbolically named. It is truly about poop, including taboos about poop, the history of humans' relationship to poop, and how composting toilets might (literally!) save the world. Shafner knows that many people in the audience will have objections to hearing about excrement for 70 minutes, so he (with his co-writer Julia Young) has a Dr. Oscar von Shtein stand in for us. Dr. von Shtein initially believes he is about to give a "Fred talk" on Proust, so he is astonished and horrified when faced with "The Puru." As The Puru insists on discussing mores about pooping--and farting--from ancient times to the present, Dr. von Shtein tries to get him to be less blatant and less crude. The von Shtein-Puru debate takes what might be a lecture and makes it a play.

An Intervention

photo: Paul Fox

Mike Bartlett --whose Oliver-winning satire King Charles III will premiere on Broadway in the fall -- wrote his taut, often funny, surprisingly moving An Intervention for a man and a woman. However, there is nothing in the text which specifically genders the characters, called only "A" and "B". (I know, I know: that does ping pretty high on the pretension meter). Williamstown Theatre Festival -- which is producing the American premiere of the play, in a production by the talented Lila Neugebaer -- is presenting the play with two rotating casts: a male/female pairing (Debargo Sanyal and Betty Gilpin) and a male/male pairing (Justin Long and Josh Hamilton). And on four occasions, including yesterday afternoon, both casts will take the stage.

It's certainly taking a big leap of faith to assume that your play is good enough that an audience will want to watch a play, take a ten-minute break, then immediately watch it again, albeit with different actors. And there were a handful of walkouts after the first cast performance yesterday. However, after watching Sanyal and Gilpin, I couldn't wait to see it again with Long and Hamilton.

In brief, the action centers around a friendship between A (Gilpin/Hamilton), a socially conscious teacher, and B (Sanyal/Long), his so-called best friend. Their relationship becomes strained when their government initiates the intervention of the title, which B supports and A vehemently opposes. Further, A is openly hostile towards B's new girlfriend, who views him/her as an incorrigible alcoholic and bad influence.

Although both pairs have their strong selling points, I felt it worked better with Gilpin and Sanyal. There was something kinetic about the male/female dynamic that was missing from Hamilton and Long's interpretation of a platonic heterosexual male friendship. Also, Betty Gilpin -- of whom I've heard but I don't think seen in anything before yesterday -- is a star in the making. What a committed, daring, and heartbreaking performance she is turning in.

Neugebauer's staging is bare bones, yet effective, with subtle differences in pacing and blocking to accommodate the variances in style between the two acting partners. An Intervention runs through Sunday, with Gilpin and Sanyal performing tomorrow night and both performances on Saturday, Long and Hamilton performing at the Thursday and Sunday matinees, and both casts performing on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. See one or both casts, but see the play if you can. Bartlett is an undeniable talent.

[Rush tickets, house left box seat]

A Moon For the Misbegotten

photo: T. Charles Erickson

Audra McDonald cemented her living legend status in 2014, when she won her sixth competitive Tony, becoming not only the first actor to achieve that feat but also the first to win an award in each of the four major acting categories. She's excelled in musicals and opera, in Shakespeare and contemporary drama, in concert and on television -- to put it simply, she has nothing to prove. And yet, she continues to dazzle with her seemingly limitless range, which is currently on view in Gordon Edelstein's somewhat lopsided production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten, playing through Sunday at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

Anyone familiar with the play will know that the character of Josie Hogan is written as Irish American. McDonald, of course, is black, as are the excellent Glynn Turman and Howard W. Overshown, who play her father and brother. Having the Hogans played by actors of color offers two benefits: it strips the roles -- particularly that of Phil, the patriarch -- of their blarney, and dissuades the actors from playing them as drunken shanty stereotypes; further, it accentuates the class distinction between Josie and Jim Tyrone (played here by Will Swenson, who is white), the landlord of the farm the Hogans tend, for whom Josie secretly pines.

Gypsy

The character of Rose in Gypsy, the masterpiece by Jule Styne (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), and Arthur Laurents (book), is the quintessence of larger-than-life. She's a force of nature, implacable, unstoppable. She is scary.

Sally Mayes, currently playing Rose in the Harbor Lights production on Staten Island, is life-sized. In the scenes in which she and the director acknowledge that fact, her performance is moving and meaningful. In the scenes in which she and the director try to make her seem more forceful through fast talking and frenetic gesticulating, not so much. I would bet that Mayes is capable of a thoroughly credible and satisfying Rose, but here we get an uneven performance that, fortunately, is still worth seeing.

John

photo: Matthew Murphy

No one path leads to an indelible, unforgettable performance. Sometimes an actor takes a classic, timeless role and makes it truly their own, to the point where anyone else repeating it seems pointless. For me, Vanessa Redgrave's fearless Mary Tyrone (in 2003's Long Day's Journey Into Night) and Simon Russell Beale's intense, broken Lophakin (in Sam Mendes' underrated production of The Cherry Orchard, at BAM) fill out this category. Sometimes, an actor plays a real person more clearly than the person herself: think Christine Ebersole' Little Edie in Grey Gardens, or Audra McDonald's Billie Holliday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, both instantly legendary. Occasionally, a writer creates a role for an actor that fits them like a glove, and the synergistic effect is immediately evident inside the theater: I felt it watching Tonya Pinkins at the first performance of Caroline, or Change, and I felt it again more recently, at two performances of Annie Baker's John at Signature Center.

The actor, in this case, is Georgia Engel, probably best known as the daffy Georgette Franklin on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That instantly-recognizable voice -- something between a squeak and a wheeze, though carrying layers of possibility underneath -- is still there, but Engel's current creation couldn't be any further from her sitcom past. She plays Mertis Katherine Garven, the amiable proprietress of a tchotchke-stuffed bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where she's as likely to discuss the transmigration of birds or theories of love as she is to serve Vienna fingers and chocolate tea to the young couple (Hong Chau and Christopher Abbott) who serve as her only guests.

The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey

Matthew Murphy

The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, currently at the Westside Theater, is a sweet, thoroughly engaging one-person show, and I say this as someone who is not particularly fond of one-person shows. Over a brisk 75 minutes, several characters--all depicted by Lecesne, who is also the playwright--discuss the events surrounding the disappearance of the title character, a flamboyant and highly independent 14-year-old boy who lives in a small town on the Jersey shore. It's no surprise that Leonard turns up dead, or that he was killed by a person with no patience for difference; if you're looking for a really tautly-written crime drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat before all the loose ends get tied up in the last five minutes, you're looking at the wrong show. Rather, the pleasures of Leonard Pelkey lie in its vivid characters, all of whom are played with enormous sensitivity and insight by Lecesne.

Performers who inhabit many roles during a single performance tend to broadcast their own feelings about the characters they portray. I've seen a number of very well-respected storytellers and monologists who, either consciously or unconsciously, adulate or demean their own characters, thereby informing the audience whom they dig and whom they think are total douchebags. Yet Lecesne's characters, all humans and some more flawed than others, are presented without judgment. Characters that could very easily slide into parody never do. Lecesne depicts the mob wife with the heart of gold, the fey British drama teacher, the heavily accented hairdresser and her sullen adolescent daughter with the same nuanced, respectful distance that he does the aged and regretful clockmaker, the hard-bitten detective who investigates the disappearance, and even Pelkey's killer. The show benefits enormously from its creator's refusal to condescend to his characters or, by extension, to his audience.

The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey reminds us that for all the new freedoms we celebrate in this country, we still have a very long way to go when it comes to the embrace--or even understanding--of difference. This is an important message, but not one that's forced, here. This is a gentle, moving show, written and performed by one of the absolute brightest and most careful storytellers I've seen.    

Cymbeline

Photo: Carol Rosegg

There really is no such thing as a bad night at the Delacorte Theater, the venue nestled inside Central Park where The Public Theater has offered free Shakespeare (and Sondheim, and Chekhov, and Brecht, etc) for over 50 years. But this past Saturday was a night to beat the band. The weather was ideal: neither too warm nor too cold, with just enough breeze to stave off sweaty discomfort. The sun was still high at the beginning of the performance, but it gradually faded into a perfect rouge sunset, before settling into a clear, dark night. There was minimal air traffic going on in the sky above the stage. The audience was appreciative and exhibited good theatrical manners -- not always a given in this particular theater, where eating and drinking is not only allowed but encouraged, and the staff seems to let people wander in and out as they please. Yes, everything about Saturday night at Shakespeare in the Park was perfect ... except the production.

Pound

Pound, the fabulous Marga Gomez's satirical exploration of the depiction of lesbians in old movies, has only one more performance (Dixon Place, on July 25, 2015). If you have any interest in Marga Gomez, lesbians, old movies, and/or laughing your butt off, run down there.

Pound (smoothly directed by David Schweizer) focuses specifically on The Children's Hour, The Killing of Sister George, The Fox, Bound, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls. It also makes quick visits to The Hunger, Orange Is the New Black, The Kids Are Alright, and Sphere, a movie in which Gomez and Queen Latifah had small parts, back in the day. Much of Gomez's commentary is well-trod ground. However, via her unique slant, intelligence, wit, comic chops, and likability, her insights morph into hysterically funny and fresh material that is both political and very personal.

Pound goes off the rails a bit when Gomez is sucked (don't ask) into a portal leading to a cloud populated by fictional lesbians. It becomes a bit difficult to keep track of the flashbacks and flashforwards, and it's not always 100% clear who's speaking. The writing in this section is also less incisive and pushes a little too hard for laughs. It's still funny; it's just not at the high level of the rest of the show.

Overall, however, Pound is a great way to spend 75 minutes.

I hope that some day Gomez extends her satire to the present day. One line on Orange Is the New Black is not enough, funny as it is. And it would be wonderful to hear her take on Blue Is the Warmest Color, Reaching for the Moon, Kissing Jessica Stein, Kalinda in The Good Wife, the treatment of the lesbian couple in Last Tango in Halifax, Cosima on Orphan Black, The Fosters, Kima on The Wire, Callie and Arizona on Grey's Anatomy, and the women on the dreadful social event that was The L Word. That the list is long might suggest that satirizing fictional lesbians is no longer necessary, but of course there's still plenty to say. And I'd love to hear Gomez say it!

(press ticket; 2nd row)

Threesome

At one point in Yussef El Guindi's brilliantly surprising play Threesome, Leila (Alia Attallah), author of a book on sexual and racial politics, says to the man about to photograph her for the book cover:

I used to think men were a little like onions. Layered creatures who often make you cry, just because of who they are. But recently I have come to think of men as much less complex vegetables. Like carrots.

Quinn Franzen, Alia Attallah,
Karan Oberoi
Photo: Hunter Canning

Interestingly enough, Threesome is the opposite. In the beginning, it seems very much like a basic sex comedy--a carrot. Leila and Rashid (Karan Oberoi) are partnered, and they have invited Doug (Quinn Franzen) to have sex with them. Well, Leila has invited him, and Rashid has grudgingly acquiesced, partially as penance for a flirtation with another woman. Leila and Rashid wait in the bedroom, dressed, and Doug enters fully nude, telling a gross story about stomach problems. At this point, Threesome seems like a version--a smart and superior version--of the one-dimensional Bruce Norris play, The Qualms. It's very funny.

Judith & Vinegar Tom

Well-done political theatre can be invigorating, inspiring, and infuriating in the best way. Not-so-well-done political theatre, however, can be pretty tedious, as shown by the pair of one acts now at PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Company).

Nesba Crenshaw, Tara Giordano
in Vinegar Tom
Photo: Stan Barouh

Howard Barker's three-hander Judith presents the night that Judith, "a widow of Israel," meets with Holofernes, "a General of Assyria" and eventually cuts off his head. But first they talk, a lot: the cost of killing to both victim and murderer; the strange cravings of sex; the complex reality of power. Under the conversation throbs (or should throb) desire, not only for sex per se, but to remember how to feel.

In the PTP production, words win and ideas and desire lose, due to the directing (Richard Romagnoli), casting, and acting. The presentation is monochromatic, from the dark costuming to the deadpan pontificating. The sexual tension that could make the thing work is nowhere to be found. (Also, just to pick a nit, if you're carrying someone's head, it's heavy. It has heft. In Judith, it's carried like the rolled-up sheet it obviously is.)

Vinegar Tom, by Caryl Churchill, is more successful, but still a disappointment. Reminiscent of The Crucible (could any play about witches not be?), Vinegar Tom makes explicit everything that Arthur Miller left as subtext--and then some. Much of its honesty is wonderful: these women are sexual and strong and real. Their vivid characters provide a stark contrast to the restrictions that bind them. In the 18th century, they control little but their own souls, and even those seem up for grabs.

Nominations for the 11th Annual New York Innovative Theatre Awards

I believe this is the entire list.

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE

And If You Lose Your Way, or A Food Odyssey, Lauren Rayner Produtions

Maha Chehlaoui, Nick Choksi, Damon Daunno, Rachel Rusch, Josh Sauerman, Terrell Donnell Sledge,Leah Walsh

The Believers, The Storm Theatre

Christopher Bellant, Laura Bozzone, Joe Danbusky, Ted McGuinness, Patrick Melville, Taylor Anthony Miller

Much Ado About Nothing, Smith Street Stage, Inc.

Olivia Caputo, Michael Vincent Carrera, Mary Cavett, John Patrick Doherty, Austin Durant, Maxwell Eddy, Patrick Harvey, Alexandra Henrikson, Jonathan Hopkins, David Pegram, Lauren Pennline,Georgina Richardson, Sam Rosenberg, Will Sarratt, Kim Taff, Sophia Tupy, Corey Whelihan

 

Run For Your Wife, The Gallery Players

Joseph Cassese, Michael Hardart, Emily Hooper, Graciany Miranda, Joshua Nicholson, Timothy Park,Maria Silverman, James Swanson

 

Short Life of Trouble, Wandering Bark Theatre Company

John C. Egan, Gregory Isaac, Sheila Joon, Suzy Kohane, Michael Markham, Joseph Mitchell Parks,Valerie Redd, Brendan Spieth, Andy Talen

Topography, Broken Box Mime Theater

Becky Baumwoll, Dinah Berkeley, Géraldine Dulex, David Jenkins, Tasha Milkman, Marissa Molnar,Joel Perez, Leah Wagner, Joshua Wynter, Matt Zambrano

Preludes

Kyle Froman

Preludes, which has been extended through early August at the absolutely lovely Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, is a dense and chewy musical that will not thrill everyone who sees it, but will certainly intrigue and challenge those with patience and an affection for postmodernism. An endlessly layered, circuitous, diffuse piece, Preludes is more intellectually challenging than it is warm and fuzzy. Riveting in some segments, quietly mesmerizing in others, and uncomfortably edgy in still others, Preludes comes off less as a straightforward musical than as an extended waking dream. This makes sense, since the show takes place in the hypnotized mind of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. 

Fish in the Dark

Photo: Joan Marcus

Larry David may have left his hit play Fish in the Dark, but make no mistake: he's still up on that stage. And I'm not just referring to the fact that his replacement is his one-time television alter ego, Jason Alexander -- although that's certainly part of it. The role Alexander now inhabits -- Norman Drexel, a nebbishy, middle-aged Jewish man -- is little more than a David stand-in. But so is his wife, Brenda (the odd Glenne Headly) and his mother, Gloria (the always reliable Jayne Houdyshell). Norman's brother (Ben Shenkman, always a welcome presence) is supposed to be younger, richer, cooler -- nope. He's Larry David. Norman's maid, Fabiana (Rosie Perez, who barely acts), who harbors a secret you can smell a mile away: Larry. David. Even Norman's father, who speaks four lines before dying (a waste, since the fine Jerry Adler has the role), is Larry Fucking David.

But I guess that's what people paid upwards of $500 a pop for when the man himself was headlining. Full disclosure: I loathed Curb Your Enthusiam, David's screed of an HBO series that passed reprehensible behavior off as comedy for far too many years. And a lot of that "humor" inhabits this play, although I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few legitimate laughs. But the play itself is thinner than a dime, and the "twists" are about as expected as Kramer sliding uninvited through Jerry's apartment door.

I will say, though, that Alexander impressed me. A Tony winner for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, this replacement gig marks his first Broadway appearance in twenty-five years. (He's been active in West Coast theater, including several years as artistic director of the now-defunct Reprise series). Rarely have I seen an actor so confident in his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand. It's even more impressive considering that Norman is a pretty terrible role, written in such a way that a non-actor (which David firmly is) could succeed. I'm glad I saw him. He made me laugh. But if I'd paid more than rush prices, I would've felt somewhat cheated.

[$35 rush ticket, the most full-view box seat I've ever had]

Happy Days

In the first act of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her waist in a large mound of barren earth. In the second act, she is buried up to her neck. The mound of earth can be seen as life, or aging, or even just a mound of earth. No matter the interpretation, Winnie tries to make the best of it, carrying out her (limited) rituals, sharing her thoughts with a man we barely see whom she has clearly know for years (her husband? lover?), and being ever grateful when a day turns out to have a good moment or two. "Oh, this is a happy day," she says. She adds, "This will have been another happy day," as though to file it for the future when it will be a precious memory.

Brooke Adams
Photo: Joan Marcus

In the production currently at The Flea, directed by Andrei Belgrader and starring Brooke Adams and (her husband) Tony Shalhoub, Winnie chirps along, accentuating the positive and barely listening to her own words. Adams' performance is flat, with a largely monotonal presentation. She recites words rather than inhabiting them. (Full disclosure: the night I saw Happy Days, the audience gave Adams a standing ovation, so mine is clearly a minority opinion.)

[spoilers] 

The production as a whole doesn't listen to Beckett's words or else fails to examine the anguish behind them. It is a coarsened version of Happy Days, complete with masturbation and flying snot. Willie's reappearance at the end of act two is treated as slapstick rather than desperation. These decisions, while lessening the impact of the play, can be justified based on the text. Less justifiable is the moment when Winnie signals the audience to clap to try to entice Willie to sing. If Winnie is aware of the audience, than her isolation is considerably less isolated.

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]

Equality!

Shows For Days

photo: Joan Marcus

The trickiest part of crafting a memoir is getting your very personal story to speak to something universal and recognizable for a wide audience. The best works of autobiography -- whether on the page (think Helen Keller's The Story of My Life or, more recently, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking) or the stage (Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie) -- burrow deep into their authors' most private, painful and significant life experiences to create work whose power supersedes the specific. In an era where memoirs are more ubiquitous than ever, it is becoming harder and harder to strike this balance.

Unfortunately, Douglas Carter Beane's Shows For Days (at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater) misses the mark by a wide margin. In telling his own story, Beane is so hyper-specifically focused on minutiae that you're left to wonder if the people he's writing about would care to spend time with -- much less recognize the humanity in -- themselves.

Men on Boats

In Clubbed Thumb's production of Jaclyn Backhaus's extraordinary Men on Boats, perfectly directed by Will Davis, it is 1869, and ten men are canoeing down the Colorado River in search of the "big canyon." They are in many ways a familiar bunch: the laconic hunter, the effete Englishman, the quirky old man (think Walter Brennan), the young man on his first adventure, the brilliant map-maker, and so on. They are led by a brave, stubborn one-armed captain. Their adventures and misadventures echo those of dozens of movies, old and new. No cliché goes unturned.

This might be business as usual, except that the actors are all women. They play the men as men, with no sense of drag or winking at the audience. They commit! They are a brilliant bunch of performers, and they nail the male clichés, all of which become sparkling new in their hands. Macho posturing, half-whispered voices, plaintive campfire songs, jostling for command, and other manly activities and traits all demand a fresh look when played by these amazing women. That the cast is multi-racial adds another layer of built-in commentary.

My Perfect Mind

Here is how My Perfect Mind is described in press materials and on the 59e59 website:

Petherbridge, Hunter
Photo: Manuel Harlan

Acclaimed classical actor and two-time Tony Award nominee Edward Petherbridge was cast as King Lear, when on the second day of rehearsals he suffered a stroke that left him barely able to move. As he struggled to recover Edward made a discovery: the entire role of Lear still existed word for word in his mind.

From being on the brink of playing one of Shakespeare's most revered roles, to lying in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors, Edward never imagined what tragedies and comedies lay in store for him.

I would have liked to see that play.

The Qualms

Photo: Joan Marcus

Bruce Norris can write. His dialogue crackles, his jokes mostly land, and occasionally he creates surprisingly vivid, three-dimensional characters. He's also a polemicist, and while he's less didactic -- and far less capital-S Serious -- than present-day windbag David Mamet, it's always clear that he has a point to put across, and he won't rest until you get it. This usually results in his plays, at some point, devolving from breezy, mildly unsettling evenings into a full-on death match, in which the characters basically form a circle and start berating each other. (For reference, see: pretty much the entire second act of his Pulitzer Prize winner, Clybourne Park). Again, this is not to say that the man's without talent. It's just that some people are better at using the sugar to make the medicine go down.

Norris' latest, The Qualms (at Playwrights Horizons through July 12), has a lot going for it. For my money, it boasts the tightest acting ensemble currently treading boards in New York. The action -- no pun intended -- centers around a beachfront condo where a group of middle-aged, well-to-do suburbanites have gathered to swap partners. Most of the guests are old pros; the too-cutely named Chris (Jeremy Shamos) and Kristy (Sarah Goldberg) are the newbs. Kristy hooks up with the host's partner (the brilliant Kate Arrington) within the first five minutes of the play; Chris spends the full ninety minutes resenting the entire arrangement, despite the fact it's implied that the idea to attend was his. 

The Qualms

The Qualms, by Bruce Norris, focuses on a bunch of friends who get together periodically to have sex with one another in twos and threes. They are mellow, sure of what they want, and loving. On the night of the play, a new couple has joined them: Chris and Kristy. Chris and Kristy radiate the awkwardness of people who have never done this before and aren't 100% sure they want to do it now.

Champlin, Lucien
Photo: Joan Marcus

In a way, The Qualms is a Utopia story. A group of people have made the world they want, and it works, until (not to mix metaphors) the snake shows up in the garden of Eden.

Chris is the snake here, and what an overwritten, straw man of a snake he is. Of course, he's white and works in finance. Of course, he's rigid and humorless. Of course, he's moralistic and judgmental. Of course, he's racist, sexist, homophobic, and size-ist. Of course, he's jealous and paranoid. Of course, he's unrelievedly rude. And, of course, they don't just throw him out on his ass, because then there wouldn't be a play.

Guards at the Taj

Doug Hamilton

Rajiv Joseph's stunning heart-breaker of a play, Guards at the Taj, is currently running through the end of June at Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater. It is a beautiful production: crisply directed by Amy Morton, sumptuously lit by David Weiner, and superbly acted by Omar Metwally (Humayun) and Arian Moayed (Babur). I hope it gets extended, and I hope you get the chance to see it.

Guards at the Taj is similar to Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in its moody ruminations and its gently absurdist bent. But it is a smaller, more carefully constructed, and thus more emotionally satisfying affair: two characters, two sets, five brief and tautly constructed scenes. The show examines a few years in the lives of two (very) low-level imperial guards in Agra, India during the mid-1600s. Humayun and Babur are just as lost and yearning as many of the characters in Bengal Tiger were. But while that play felt looser and less cohesive, Taj zooms in on its characters' preoccupations, philosophies, emotional needs, strengths and weaknesses. Also, their lifelong friendship and love for one another, which is central to this play's warm, if also rather bloody, heart.

10 out of 12

Tech rehearsals occur in the days immediately preceding actual performances. They allow the set, lighting, and sound people, along with the stage management team, to practice, polish, and sometimes even perfect their end of things. Tech rehearsals are notoriously stop-and-go. For example, a scene might get a line or two in and then be stopped for 20 minutes as lights are dealt with. Two lines later, the scene might be stopped again to fix a sound cue. Tech rehearsals tend toward the tedious, but they can also be full of humor and comradery.

Sue Jean Kim
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Anne Washburn's new play, 10 out of 12, directed by Les Waters at the Soho Rep, immerses the audience in the not-very-smooth tech rehearsals of a not-very-good play. We watch scenes from the show and see and hear the designers and director make artistic decisions and deal with obstacles. The characters are located all around the theatre, as they would be in a real tech. Through individual audience headsets, we also hear the stage manager and backstage techies do their jobs and chat about this and that. We witness personal interactions both in the theatre and on the headsets. It's a nice setup.

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]