The Coast of Utopia: Salvage

Before anybody lavishes more praise on Tom Stoppard's trilogy or attacks it with an inevitable (and unenviable) backlash, let me go on the record as saying that Salvage is my favorite part of Coast of Utopia. Whether or not this would have been the same without having my expectations lowered by the second part, Shipwreck, or if Jack O'Brien were not such a talented and visual director (and almost certainly a soon-to-be Tony winner), I can't say. I do miss Billy Crudup in this final installment -- surely they could have worked in a part for him, as they have for returning character actors David Harbour and Richard Easton, or at the least, given him a cameo in one of the lively and creative dream sequences. But I won't debate directorial decisions: the tragic comedy is clearer now without melodrama cluttering the frame, and the revolutionary struggle has risen to the forefront with Herzen's struggle to find a means to express and keep up with the times, and characters like Bakunin are so established by now that they practically sing their lines, even as their faces decay under the expert touch of the makeup artists. This is a remarkable conclusion to the trilogy, even if the final thirty minutes jump around a little too much into the neat little corners of a bow, and the work has aged well since it started with Voyage back in November. This is a must see, folks.

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Uncle

photo: Jim Baldassare

This new drama alternates between scenes a generation apart of the same well-meaning but quietly terrified woman unable to acknowledge the homosexuality of her brother (in the flashback scenes) and of her son (in the present tense ones.) The woman is played with compassion and strength by Nancy McDonnel: the integrity of her performance grounds this production (even though the focus of the play is more on the men) and her characterization reminded me of Lois Nettleson. High praise. The play's aim is more ambitious than its throw but there's no denying that the final emotionally charged scene hits the mark.

anon

I've at least a handful of complaints about Kate Robin's play anon, including that it's too long at two and a half hours, that it too often threatens to go to the "sisterhood of womyn" place when it locates sexually compulsive behavior as a strictly male evil, and that (in this production, at least) it wavers unsteadily in tone. Happily, I've more than a handful of reasons to recommend it anyway: the issues it raises (playfully and gently in the main story of a man and woman dealing with his sex addiction two months into their relationship, more darkly and unsubtly in the secondary story of the man's parents also struggling many years into their marriage) and the arguments these issues inspire are likely to sound bells of recognition. Have we become a sexually compulsive culture in danger of losing our capacity for genuine intimacy? I admired where Robin's play wound up - it recognizes that it takes two to do a co-dependent tango - and I very often smiled at the play's spot-on observations about the struggles of sex and emotional connectedness. I also laughed alot - the play alternates the scenes of the two couples with monologues from women at a support group, and half of them are laced with sharp, comic observations. (Susan Blackwell's monologue is, surprisingly, one of the gravely serious ones, and she delivers it with appropriate intensity and deliberateness). The play is short of coming together fully, but it passed both the "does it speak with relevancy to the world I live in?" and the "does it stimulate passionate discussion afterward?" tests with flying colors.

Jackie With A Z

****

"Can I go visit the sick children? I'm a comedy writer and I need material." Thank God Jackie Hoffman almost had cancer for if she hadn't we wouldn't have this sick, atrocious collection of stories and original songs about her recent hysterectomy. Yet another gay man trapped in a woman's body, Ms. Hoffman's crass, politically incorrect diatribes are candy to silly boys like me. At one point she sings a duet with her uterus which she has pulled out of a glass jar. I love this woman.

All That I Will Ever Be

I'm certainly glad I didn't leave after Intermission. The first act of Alan Ball's new play is insufferably bland, and, so far as I can tell, exactly like The Little Dog Laughed, minus all the entertaining monologues and wry humor. However, the second act brings us deeper into Omar's skin, and Peter Macdissi, who plays the role, manages to let go of the facade that I hated so much in Act I to reveal the pained individual underneath. There are plenty of glib moments in this play that seem written to dazzle rather than impress, and there are a lot of scenes that are never followed up on, specifically between Dwight (Omar's boyfriend) and his father. There's also a lot of falseness in the actors, though it's an intentional device meant to show how little we really give of ourselves. I'd like to hope that we will be more than we are today, and even though Ball's play is sloppy, there's truth spilling out all over the place in it.

Elephant Girls

For the first ninety minutes, I buy Elephant Girls. I wouldn't normally enjoy this kind of special, but the evocation of "terrorist" in an ordinary New Jersey household is amusing to me. Rather than just being a pleasant after-dinner party complete with parlor games, cookware demonstrations, and racist jokes among well-bred friends, the introduction of an exotic stranger (Sarah Miriam Aziz) and a police alert throughout the area make for an exciting build. But when we come back from intermission, Carl Gonzalez's script relaxes the tension and starts making subdued conversation about the so-called 'elephant girls' of the Muslim world, using the famed "Afghan Girl" photo from National Geographic to make some sort of point about cultural differences. When this doesn't go anywhere, Gonzalez makes an inexcusable dip into Ridiculous Land (TM), and pulls the most out-of-character twist ever over a truly inconsequential event. I think Gonzalez is a talented, natural writer, full of wit and well-humored characters, but unless he loses the melodrama and grounds his characters in something more dramatic than a dinner party, his stakes will never be high enough to make any sort of lasting impression on the audience. Well, not a good one, at least.