27th Heaven

Look, when Steve Martin put Picasso, Einstein, and Elvis in a Parisian bar, he at least had the courtesy to make them funny. Not so with Ian Helprin's 27 Heaven, a painfully pun-filled show about Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin forming a supergroup in Heaven (on account of them all dying at 27). Helprin is, or was, an investigative journalist for Rolling Stone, and between jokes, solemn obituaries are read aloud, from the script, by the narrator (when he's not on saxophone). The jokes are little more than read, though it pains me that any cast had to memorize lines about jamming on invisible Harpocasters, talking with "Pod" (God is a typographical error, as, supposedly, is Ragnarök), or quoting Nordic legends. Honestly? The whole show is a typographic error, nothing close to a "rock musical," and a waste of time. I'd tell you to see it for pure camp, but it apparently costs $43 and has a two-drink minimum, so I'll just give you the best line, which is also accurate for the author: "You wouldn't know poetic verse if it hit you between the iambic pentameter."

Beyond Glory

photo: Joan Marcus

Playing eight soldiers who have been decorated with the Medal Of Honor, Stephen Lang gives the best and most generous kind of bravura performance in this 80 minute docu-monologue play: you may marvel at the actor's characterization skills, as he transforms from one real-life wartime hero to another, but you will leave thinking less about the actor's craft than about the war stories of the men he has brought to life so vividly. Lang is also responsible for adapting the stories (collected in Larry Smith's book of the same name a couple of years ago) for the stage and his writing is no-nonsense and unsentimental: he generally doesn't make the mistake of editorializing or politicizing. The cumulative effect is therefore all the more thought-provoking and emotional, even cathartic, as Lang honors not only the heroic acts of these soldiers but also the humanity.

Beyond Glory

****
Roundabout

The only frame of reference I had for Admiral James Stockdale, H. Ross Perot's running mate, was Phil Hartman's hysterical SNL impersonation of an out-of-touch, dim-witted old coot. Here in Steven Lang's one man play, Beyond Glory, he painted a different portrait: that of a courageous man who endured years of torture in Vietnam on behalf of his fellow soldiers. An enormous amount of respect and care went in to the presentation of 8 different soldiers who received the Medal Of Honor. Steven Lang, who adapted the book to the stage also portrays all the characters who performed enormous feats of bravery in WW2, Korean War, and Vietnam War. Very elegant, masculine and proud is Lang's work and I am very glad I went.

Saint Joan of the Stockyards

Photo/Rachel Roberts

Though Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards is filled with an overfawning look at communism and a deeply satirical stance on religion, Lear deBessonet has managed to take the alienating themes (and style) and ground it in the drama of a martyred innocent, our Jeanne d'Arc, brilliantly played by Kristen Sieh. It's hard at times to see Brecht, as Ralph Manheim's script has punched up the dialogue, and the cast delivers it with a real fervor, but it's not that deBessonet isn't trying to keep us alienated (the stage divides the audience and the props blockage the actors), it's that the avante-garde isn't as shockingly theatrical anymore, especially at PS122, a cultural center. Righteous indignation may be too expensive for the poor, but it doesn't look like deBessonet's team had to compromise for this production, and the polish, mixed with the industrial set, does wonders to bring Joan to life.

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One Thing I Like To Say Is

It is clear almost right from the start that Lina, central in this smart little gem of a new four-character play, is (perhaps defensively) prone to fantasy and flights of imagination: we know immediately not to believe that she grew up with a Scottish butler, even though she tells us she did, and when she says that someone "does not exist" after we've been listening to her tell us all about him, we're put on notice to listen attentively to sort things out for ourselves. The one-act play, written by Amy Fox and presented as the final show in Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks series, vigorously holds the attention from start to finish: it respects that we will intuit where a lesser play would simply tell us flat-out. Essential parts of the story (which is something like a collage of the most important moments between Lina and her brother) never fully concretize into facts. but that's part of what makes the show so interesting and dynamic: the looseness suggests that family history and mythology are open to change, built on memory's slippery slope, and it also honors the power of imagination in the face of painful disappointment and estrangement. As the relationships between the characters come into focus and we get the hang of the distinctively off-kilter and sometimes knowingly funny play (its strong point of view reminded me many times of quirky, intimate first-person novels) the play becomes quietly affecting and finally moving. If I had only one thing to say about One Thing I Like To Say Is, it'd be that if you have a chance to catch it before it closes on June 23rd, you should.

Off Stage: The East Village Fragments

Richard Sheinmel and Debbie Troche in Robert Patrick's "Camera Obscura."
Photo/Jim Baldassare

I take it that all of you reading this are theater fans; that said, why haven't you already seen Off Stage: The East Village Fragments? Peculiar Works Project, following up on their West Village version, has put together a historical homage, a walking-tour-de-force, of off-off-Broadway '60s plays (surreal, abstract, absurd, experimental, classical, satirical, happening) to help pass on the culture and teach us all more about the state of theater today. I saw a lot of glimmering talent in all those styles and performances, and I hope there are some producers out there who realize that this type of concentrated festival can do as much good, if not more, than a full-length summer series (if for no other reason than it being outside in the beautiful New York summer). I missed the West Village version because I didn't know about it: if you've read this far, you can't use that excuse. From The Public to La MaMa, it's time to really put the pieces together.

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