Particularly In The Heartland

*

The TEAM

What a horrible, chalkboard-scratching, aluminum-chewing mess! As you enter the theater, the cast is yelling- no, screeching out "American!" songs ("Glory, Glory Hallelujah", "...Tis Of Thee", etc). As they chat with the audience members, they encourage everyone to SING ALONG!!!!!!!!! Come on! SING!! When the lights go down, the yelling (in this claustrophobic brick-walled echo chamber at PS122) doesn't stop. It just gets louder and more annoying. Premise: three Kansas siblings loose Mommy and Daddy to the rapture and they are left to fend for themselves and also ponder the benefits and disadvantages of living in modern America. Or something like that. I don't know. It was all so confusing, disorienting and bombastic. I felt trapped in this intermissionless theatrical purgatory. It reminded me of when I worked in day care and the 4 year olds just WOULDN'T SHUT UP! The crowd went crazy at the end of it and a few even gave it a standing ovation. Show's what I know.

Tea And Sympathy

photo: Dan Cordle

Robert Anderson's 1953 drama is pre-tolerance: the two characters who defend the sissyboy protagonist from widespread bullying do so only because they are sure he isn't "a queer." The play, thought to be intended as a cautionary tale about McCarthyism, doesn't let us believe for long that the lad in question is anything but a painfully sensitive hetero wallflower who is being tormented based on lurid gossip. The drama's omnipresent homophobia is a product of its time, and the most interesting thing that the Keen Company have done with it is to put it on without irony for today's audiences, affording us an interesting peek at the sensibilities of yesteryear. Even on those terms, the production doesn't fully engage: the staging is often counterproductive, and the actors don't seem to have been guided toward creating the needed atmosphere of stiff formality. Excepting that, I thought the three main performances (by Dan McCabe, Heidi Armbruster and Mark Setlock) were all at least quite good and that one supporting performance (by Brandon Espinoza, as girlyboy Tom's star athlete roommate) was best of all.

Les Miserables

photo: Michael LePoer Trench

You really have to work hard to make Les Miz fail outright but this revival, which uses the scaled-down touring sets, the no-time-to-breathe edited book, and some new re-orchestrations thoroughly inferior to the originals, has managed it. There's nothing wrong with the staging, which stays close to the modern masterpiece of music theatre that was Trevor Nunn's original, but almost none of the principals in this revival cast are playing high-stakes enough. Alexander Gemignani is too young and too lightweight with no urgency in his Valjean - not only does he fail to depict a man with inner demons, he fails to depict a man with an inner life at all. Norm Lewis, who naturally projects sunniness and good cheer, makes a decent attempt at dark Javert, but a decent attempt is all it amounts to. Gary Beach's flying leap off the cute end as Thernardier is not even that, it's just a mistake. I do have two nice things to say: Lea Salonga is a very fine Fantine - she sings beautifully and with a depth of feeling that is otherwise missing here - and Aaron Lazar, in the brief and usually thankless role of Enroljas, steals all attention whenever he's on stage.

Fugue

Based on the first day of previews, I think there's promise for Lee Thuna's script and the strong lead performance of Deirdre O'Connell, who plays an amnesiac trapped in a fugue state (i.e., on the run from a memory she cannot deal with). Unfortunately, there's little chance of cutting the show down to a more manageable one-act, and even less of a chance of replacing her inquisitive doctor, currently played by an unflinchingly bland Rick Stear. The play's direction by Judith Ivey is modest: the way in which the memories invade our heroine's present is interesting, but it grows a bit old, which is yet another reason to pare down. Too much of the show is currently exposition, and too much time is spent developing red herrings. To find that the stereotypical mother, annoyingly awkward love interest, and exuberantly false "friend," are all superfluous to the story makes the otherwise effective climax rather manipulative: there's no reason O'Connell can't confront her memories earlier in the show. Despite all the middling, muddling performances (especially the loose accents), there's a star and a story gripping enough to interest me.

Also blogged by: [David]

The Director

This multimedia work plays in and out of the conceit that it is a recreation of interviews with the victims of a lecherous (and pedophiliac) director. At first, the play bored me: Jessica Davis-Irons' choice to have Shooter, a stoner, watching TV in the corner throughout all the scenes (even before the play) seemed to be grasping at straws, and an early scene where four stoned friends just listen to one of the interviews in the darkness was way too heady to follow. But Davis-Irons finds an interesting blend of recorded feeds (none of which reveal the face) along with actual actresses delivering monologues to creep us out, even though the show ends too abruptly for it the androgynous dolls and dream sequences to sink in. What sells this show, though, are Sadie's confrontations with her lesbian friend and her jealous boyfriend: Lauren Shannon plays a confused but brazen Sadie, and her empathy for the director is both creepy and heartfelt.

[Read on]

Jack Goes Boating

photo: Monique Carboni

I liked all four characters in this peculiar romantic comedy, currently at the Public, and I liked all four actors. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Beth Cole credibly play a pair of loveable, damaged losers - he's a bit dim-witted and undermotivated, while she's neurotically defensive and oversensitive - and John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega radiate a lot of warmth playing a married couple who push the two gently together. The first act is overlong and too lazily paced besides feeling tentative in tone - by intermission you can't be sure whether the second act is going to lighten up or turn dark - but when the characters have quirky moments that are well-defined, the play does offer some distinctive, sunny pleasures. It may not be so exciting to watch these two couples negotiate intimacy - one just starting to know each other, and the other with a few years of marriage under the belt - but there is at least an unforced, believable spark in their interactions. That's not nothing.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David] [Christopher]