Penetrator

Photo/Julie Rossman

A terrifyingly decent work by Anthony Neilson, now updated for the Iraq War, this show puts a giant knife not only to an innocent teddy bear, but to your fragile heart as well. The fact that it's graphic and disturbing is only amplified by the intimate space, and the audience reactions (they ring the stage on three sides) become as much a part of the show as the shocking story itself. However, there isn't really much revelation, and even less resolution: the plot is jumbled within the twisted mind of a deserting US soldier. The lighter first half, which focuses on the friendship of two roommates, is far more accessible, and when this old, AWOL friend of theirs shows up, all that really happens is a lengthy and somehow uniformly jagged series of scares. With more revision, the play could do a lot more to talk about morality: instead, it uses its knife-point monologues to wax about the way things used to be. Certainly not for everyone, but if you've forgotten what it was like to be disturbed at the theater, Penetrator is waiting for you.

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God's Ear

photo: Jim Baldassare

At first the use of language in Jenny Schwartz's play is exciting and bold: the people talk in nearly non-stop cliches and elliptical phrases, and sometimes repeat a sentence or an exchange with minor but meaningful variation. For the first forty five minutes or so, as we watch a married couple struggling with each other over the death of their child, it makes for thrilling theatre: the highly stylized, fractured speech is like the music of profound anguish constructed from the superficial sound bytes of everyday talk. But then other whimsical characters begin to figure into the play - a transvestite airline stewardess and The Tooth Fairy, to name two - and the expressionistic language doesn't have the same impact coming from their mouths. The play begins to seem more style than substance, and all but one of its forays into humor fall flat. (The exception is a punchy pick-up scene between the grieving father and a one-night-stand, played by Annie McNamara) Thirty minutes into this play I couldn't wait to tell all my friends about it. After the full ninety, despite a top-notch production directed with snap and smarts by Anne Kaufman, I crossed all but the freshness seekers off my To Tell list.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]

Close To You: The Carpenters

photo: Russ Turk

The idea of performance artist Justin Bond (the "female" half of Kiki and Herb) performing the Carpenters' album "Close To You" in its entirety might sound like a recipe for camp send-up. Instead, the most cutting edge thing about the evening was that it was played (mostly) as sincere, respectful, and highly personal homage. A couple of attempts to give the evening a momentary '70's variety show feel didn't change that, and when Bond got a seemingly unexpected laugh out of a lyric in "Baby It's You," he pulled back from it immediately. Backed by an impressive (but, regretably, underrehearsed) band aimed at approximating the Carpenters' distinctive sound, Bond marched through every song on the album in order, including the hit singles "We've Only Just Begun" and "Close To You," covers of The Beatles' "Help," Rod Stewart's "Reason To Believe," and the aforementioned Shirelles song, and little-known Carpenters oddities such as the album's closer "Another Song," which ends with three minutes of acid-lite jam session. It's a weird, early album that could never lay claim to being representative and typical of the brother-sister duo's music, but its variety and relative obscurity make it a lively set on stage. More urgently, it means something to Bond - the flyer that served as the evening's program includes his recollections of first hearing it at the age of seven, and being profoundly affected by Karen Carpenter's voice, both "reassuring and profoundly sad." Bond's own voice is an entirely different kind of instrument somewhere in the gin-soaked, world-weary Marianne Faithfull family, but that's what makes the evening's drama. Listening to Bond reverently reproducing each of Karen's vocal phrases without any of her prettiness, the underlying sadness is front and center. It seemed an entirely appropriate tribute.

I.E., In Other Words

Somewhat of a cross between the ironic metadrama of Urinetown and the over-the-top mood of Essential Self-Defense, Mark Greenfield's comedy, I.E., In Other Words speaks for itself. In fact, it does so literally, marking its unique language by often announcing what its doing, a postmodern trend that would be annoying if it weren't so cute and infectious at The Flea, performed in an epic ham style by The Bats, the young resident company there. Kip Fagan does an excellent job of directing fourteen actors (playing thirty-three parts) in ninety minutes, all while conveying the story in a more-or-less consistently funny fashion (whatever isn't funny is soon over and done with). Using a new narrative style to tell an old-fashioned story is a winning combination almost every time, i.e., you should check this surreal playsical out.

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Wonderland: One-Act Festival

I hate to compare Wonderland, a one-act festival at Theater Row, to anything so crude as reality TV, but it reminds me a lot of the first week of movies being premiered on FOX's On The Lot. Substitute theater for film (call it Standing Room Only) and leave the judges off-camera, and you've distilled the popular elimination format of TV for off-off-Broadway, a battle of the fringe. The work is what you'd expect: it's crammed, sometimes crude, and certainly rushed from a technical standpoint. But that just makes the performances and the plays all the more surprising: diamonds in the coal bin seemed to be a dime a dozen when I went, and three of the four one-acts I saw were engaging enough to make me want to see more. From heightened language in one play to an all-out battle of personal put-downs in another, or domestic violence stuck in a poetic frame alongside brothers making peace on their father's deathbed, these plays found ways to work around cliche to do good work, and while they're far from perfect, they're getting there.

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Fate's Imagination

The armchair psychologist in me was fairly irritated halfway through this new unruly play, which has some good moments of keen interpersonal observation but too many others where the characters' actions simply don't pass the believability sniff test. Playwright David Randall Cook has a good ear for dialogue and a solid dramatist's sense of how to put a kink in a story, but he piles on too many twists in this play at the expense of credibility, before finally overreaching for political statement. Cook is promising - he's especially good at rendering the hollow rhetorical speeches for the character of the female Presidential candidate (played deliciously by Donna Mitchell) - and the play is lively and moves at a clip, so it's never dull. The play doesn't lack imagination. Discipline, perhaps.