Matthew Passion

*
Chernuchin Theatre

When the playwright himself stands before the audience just prior to the start of the show and delivers a homily which concludes with "The theme of this play is...." and then proceeds to tell you the theme, you should be afraid. This actually happened. Did he not trust us to get it? Or did he not trust his own production's ability to deliver his message? I find it difficult to pan this musical because it's filled with nothing but naive good intentions but attempting to compare the crucifixion of (a buff, chest-waxed) Jesus to the murder of Matthew Sheperd I feel is baffling, misguided, and offensive to Christianity (and I'm not even a religious person) and the memory of Sheperd.

Also blogged by [Patrick]

Suburban Peepshow

Over-the-top satire such as Suburban Peepshow is more about form than substance, so it's okay to have cross-dressing ninjas and it's fine that the actors break character to complain to the playwright about their "part" in the script. On the whole, the show is lively underground theater, and the only real issue with James Comtois's play is that it doesn't go even further in breaking down both the traditional family and the theater's common depiction of them. The jiggling dance of "Chubby Guy" (Comtois himself) really is the image that sticks with us the most, and the banal observations ("You know what was a good movie? Major League. Yeah. That was a good movie.") make for all-too-familiar small talk. Brilliant? No. Entertaining? Yes.

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Matthew Passion

photo: David Morgan

Nothing can grow in bad soil, and the idea of linking Christ's suffering on the cross to Matthew Shepard's death at the hands of gaybashers is about as fertile as cement. The play's brand of offensiveness is not the rock-your-world and challenge-your-beliefs kind, it's of the gleefully naive variety. There's an almost grade school level of innocent badness here, as we watch a completely oblivious Jesus visiting a gay bar, or as we see Matthew Shepard's two gaybashers dance a homoerotic dream ballet in their underwear around his dying body. The playwright (who also wrote the songs - yes, this is a musical) seems to be writing with commendable spirituality-affirming, gay-validating good intentions, but the road to hell, as they say...

Also blogged by: [David]

Five in the Morning

Last week, Rotozaza's Doublethink showed us what happens when guest performers attempt to follow directions; this week's Five in the Morning shows us what happens when real actors attempt to be guest performers attempting to follow directions. Ant Hampton's direction is just as clever here as it was last week, and the stark white floor and curtains of the stage provide a blank slate for the character-building thrust of the show. As the three "hapless" visitors to Aquaworld, Silvia Mercuriali, Greg McLaren, and Melanie Wilson are doing great theatrical work, and while their results aren't as surprising (or thereby engrossing) as Doublethink, it's curious to observe how the same struggles ("Build a human tower") and directions ("Chew your lip" or "Die") are handled by "professionals" (who are in turn pretending to be amateurs). The neat effect is that each actor is assigned a specific voice (their own, I believe, though it's distorted at first): they only do something when they are told to do it. A scene is created by various commands overlapping, and the beauty is in watching the chaos of individual actors coalesce into the kind of structure formed by going so far past disorganization that the randomness comes full circle and is specific again.

Prometheus Bound

Photo/Richard Termine

Not only wasn't I blown away by this show, but I wasn't blown away by David Oyelowo's Prometheus either. I found the chains to be more impressive than him (to some degree the point, since they hold him firm), but honestly, beyond that imposing effect, the play has little weight, substance, or steel. It doesn't help, either, that the show is plagued with repetitious rhetoric: whether it's a Greek chorus of birds come to visit, or the maddened Io, or even the friendly Oceanus, Prometheus speaks the same to them all, with very little variation in his tactics (which got him chained to a rock in the first place). Stubborness may be an honest appraisal of Prometheus, but it's hard to watch for 90 minutes. I don't fault James Kerr's direction or translation of the show, but he ought to have noticed that the script was a little lacking: it's notable that the best moments of Prometheus Bound come when there is no text, simply the silent struggle between man and chain. Fiddle with the lighting all you want, add wave-crashing music in the background, and that's still going to be the most important part of the play: what the Greeks lack in character, they make up for in suffering.

Also blogged by: [Patrick] [David]

Losing Something

Losing Something is dressed up in so much fancy technology and highbrow text that confusion is beside the point. Everything is subsumed by the philosophy, which in turn is simply a metaphor for the play's title and the unnamed protagonist's struggle. However, Kevin Cunningham's play isn't meant to be a passionate journey of self-realization or triumph, nor does performer Aldo Perez mean for his actions to be heroic. The show operates as a sexed-up fugue, an anti-passion play, and while I love the visual aspect (the projected images are elegiac), I hate settling on the thought that the entire work is simply a metaphor for the diassocative but consensual reality discussed so heavy-handedly in the play.

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