Bouffon Glass Menajoree

***
The Brick

Picture The Glass Menagerie performed Marat/Sade style. However instead of prison inmates performing, picture instead three toddlers who got into mommy's stash of cocaine. Hyperactive lowbrow poo-poo humor abounds in this childish wacky needy often hilarious madness. The program warned us that the gentleman caller would be chosen from the audience. As there were only four of us men in the audience I, obviously, was in a panic as I hid in the very back row of the theater. They chose some poor bastard in the front row. My strategy worked. Thank God. If you like your comedy as low as it can go, definitely check it out. Just have a couple of cocktails at Jr and Son's Bar next door first.

Be

Be what, exactly? I was dazzled by the charm and enthusiasm of the performers, but there was a distinct lack of cohesiveness to the individual skits that made up Mayumana's Be. Rhythmic theater relies as much on visuals as it does on the sound itself, and there just isn't as much creativity here (or as solid a gimmick) as in long running shows like Blue Man Group and Stomp. Some of the bits, in fact, seem stolen directly from the former (albeit in burlesque) and there's a lot that's just shades of what Stomp innovated over a decade ago. Also, so far as performance goes, the co-creator, Boaz Berman, and African dancer Aka Jean Claude Thiemele appear to be steps ahead of the rest of the ensemble. Not that I could do even the simplest routines they perform, but while a few segments (like the opening) were inventive and fun, I don't think Be has made enough of a mark to edge out its competitors.

[Read on]

a discount offer for ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE

I'm happy to pass along a blog discount for the new Adam Rapp play Essential Self-Defense, good for the first month of performances March 15th through April 15th.

Mention code EDBL and tickets are reduced to $40 as long as you order before March 28th.
Online: www.playwrightshorizons.org
Voice: call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily)
In Person: Visit the Ticket Central Box Office, 416 W 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily)

As always, students can rush the show for a mere $15 with a valid student ID, one ticket per person, starting one hour before each showtime. And if you're not a student but you're under 30, you can take advantage of the Playwrights Horizon HOTTIX program, detailed here, and see the play for $20.

Why am I posting this? I get comped into the show in exchange for blogging the discount offer, but in the interest of full disclosure let me tell you that I already have a season flex pass to Playwrights Horizons. I would have been able to see it anyhow without having to crack open my wallet again. I'm posting because the question I most get in my inbox is how I can afford to see so many shows, and part of the answer is discounts and deals like this one. I'm posting because this play features Doubt's Heather Goldenhersh and Paul Sparks from Landscape of the Body. I'm posting because Adam Rapp, Pulitzer nominated last year for Red Light Winter, is a young playwright with his own distinctive voice and style and I want to support that. Don't you?

The Year Of Magical Thinking

photo: Brigitte Lacombe

My profile will attest that I have a lot of feeling for Joan Didion's book. That said, it is one thing to sit intimately with Didion's interior, deeply personal words on the page about the experience of profound loss and quite another to see someone reciting variations on it in the author's absence, even when said someone is the great Vanessa Redgrave. This isn't theatre, it's an expensive audiobook. Didion hasn't adapted the book for the stage so much as she's simply organized it into a ninety minute essay so that it can come out of Redgrave's mouth, American accent and all. Besides the mostly chair-bound actress, the production's only points of visual interest (not counting the Broadway debut of the giant roach that meandered across the stage) are a series of scrims that successively drop to deepen the stage space. Eventually Redgrave looks dwarfed on the empty stage, an accidental but apt visual metaphor for what is wrong with this evening.

Also blogged by: [Christopher]

Some Men

****1/2

Second Stage

This play is special. Patrick and I went to the Wednesday matinee (thanks Patrick) and NOBODY left at intermish (we paid close attention to this). This colorful tapestry of gay personistas dappled throughout the past 80ish years spelled out the pain and joy of being American cocksuckers and succeeded in validating us (me) as legitimate human beings with legitimate histories. Other cocksucker plays address these but here it seemed less confrontational and more congregational which turned out to be quite meaningful. I hope that everyone who reads this makes an effort to go see it as, again, this play is special. And yes, this production is wonderfully cast and I want to make out with Pedro Pascal (and Frederick...and Romain....and Jesse... and well... all of you). xoxodb

Also blogged by: [Patrick] [Christopher]

Some Men

photo: Antoine Tempe

Terrence McNally's new play begins and ends in current times as a group of gay men gather at a same-sex wedding, but it isn't some polemic that pleads for marriage rights. The thoughtful, unpretentiously ambitious and often very touching play seems designed to ask gay men if marriage is really what we want and to take stock of this particular moment in the context of gay American history. The play flashes back through the ancestory of its characters, who are often depicted against the backdrop of a key moment or a defining trend in 20th century gay life: we're in a piano bar during the Stonewall riots, where a drag queen is initially ostracized, or in a gay nightclub during the Harlem Renaissance, or in St. Vincent's Hospital in the 1980s while the AIDS crisis hits. The effect is almost collage-like, as we zigzag from bathhouses to chatrooms from one decade to another, and although this production doesn't always achieve clarity on account of the (uniformly excellent) cast of nine doing double or triple duty, the notes that McNally strikes by juxtaposing gay consciousness past and present are what really matter more than always knowing who is who. I could go on and on about this play - McNally's shrewd use of music, the recurring moments where the gay community perpetrates its own prejudices on others, the moments where characters struggle with sexual compulsiveness while looking for love. I haven't been as personally affected by a McNally play since The Lisbon Traviata.

Also blogged by: [Christopher] [David]