Betrothed

photo: Rachel Dickstein

Rachel Dickstein's Betrothed adapts three texts about women and marriage - Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian tale The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, Anton Chekhov's Betrothed and S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk - and succesively tells each story in highly theatrical, impressionistic terms. Choreography is integral to the stoytelling here, as is the haunting original music which underscores throughout, and the stage pictures are always visually rich and evocative. However, only the first of the three segments - Lahiri's story of a young modern-day Indian girl (sensitively played by Mahiri Kakkar) whose crushed hopes for marriage drive her to neurotic fits - struck me as wholly satisfying storytelling, partly because it is narrated by the ensemble. The other two parts of the triptych, adapted from more familiar works, are abundant in imagery and expressive movement but the price for that is muted dramatic impact. I appreciated their beauty and invention, but as if from a remove.

An Octopus Love Story

photo: Mike Klar

The love story of the title, between a gay man and a lesbian who agree to a sham marriage as a socio-political publicity stunt, sounds like it could make for a groanworthy sitcom-deep play, but Delaney Britt Brewer's comedy-drama is smart and snappy, and it's more questioning than you might expect. The play goes to places (about gay identity and about the importance of desire, for instance) that are unsettlingly messy and deeply human - there is sharp social observation under the play's entertaining surface of comic situations and nifty laugh lines. The shoestring production is less than ideal (some of the staging is clunky, and the set changes take too long) and I could quibble that two supporting performances are pushed to be too broad, but that doesn't hold me back from happily recommending this solid off-off treat by a new, promising playwright.

The Receipt

The Receipt is a postmodern comedy about urban life (London, but it adapts well to New York) that is so awash in cleverness that even the repetition is excusable as satire on city routines. Chris Branch and Will Adamsdale have a great chemistry together, and watching the energetic Will get bent entirely out of shape by the multitude of tormenting authority figures Chris plays is worth the price of admission alone. But you'll want to stick around for the truth beneath all that cleverness, which is that although we are fast becoming small, anonymous figures, happiness is what we make of it: what we choose to grab hold of. Here, it's a receipt that reminds Will that if we only follow the processed chain far enough, eventually we'll arrive at the real person on the other end of it.

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Coram Boy

The reason why Coram Boy works, why it grows beyond shallow melodrama, is because of its grandiose vision. One actor making the squalling of a baby is nothing, but a fleet of them becomes an unsinkable and theatrical armada of talent, and it is hard to go wrong with such overbearing emotion. When leading the entire cast (or the underlying choral score and orchestra), Melly Still makes the theater alive with action, from inspiring cathedral scenes to rich balls (not as nice as those in Coast of Utopia), or to the chaos of late-night wharves or underwater rescues. Scenes that are smaller in scope are hammed up and melodramatic, which only goes to illustrate how much of a musical Coram Boy is, despite not having any songs.

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Also blogged by: [Patrick]

The Good Thief

****
Prospect Street Productions


In terms of graphic violence this one man play was right up there with Lieutenant Of Inishmore however not a drop of blood stains the floor. Presented as a sad memory of regret, a mournful thug sips down a bottle of Irish whisky as he recounts the events of a "roughing up" gone terribly wrong. With a straightforward, wistful delivery, imposing and naturalistic actor Kit Wannen elicited sympathy as well as laughter from the packed house I sat among. That's no small task considering this here is a guy you wouldn't want to come across in a dark alley.

The Good Thief

Conor McPherson's The Good Thief is problematic to stage as a play: the one-man show is a passive narrative that works better as a short story, actionless as it is. Tom Wojtunik's direction confuses the work even further by adding two musicians to the cast who, stranded against the wall of the already overwhelming Access Theater space, are a constant reminder of the narration. We aren't ever made a part of McPherson's world, and Kit Wannen's interpretation of the role of this Irish street tough is so dispassionate that there's no charisma compelling us to even listen. Worse still, there doesn't seem to be any real reason for Wannen to tell this story; motivation, as in the story itself, seems but an afterthought. The play is built on understatements (which elicit laughs from only the most desperate of audiences); otherwise, it is a matter-of-fact accounting of past events, few of which are interesting. Toward the end of the play, Wannen finds an emotional hook -- the reckoning -- and at last, we can see where this whole production has been leading. "I felt as though my soul was being bleached," he says at one point (the language itself is always appealing), but it's unfortunate that McPherson's story takes an hour to get the point at which we care.