Politics of Passion: Plays of Anthony Minghella

Photo/Stan Barouh

Anthony Minghella, somewhat of a cold and intellectual director, is also a playwright -- the mind behind Truly, Madly, Deeply, among other movies you might never have seen. He's the same as a playwright: harshly reliant on language and even more so on silence. As a result, Cheryl Faraone's staging seems overdirected at every turn and a real hodgepodge of one-acts. "Hang Up" does well to divide the two actors, MacLeod Andrews and Lauren Turner Kiel, but the choice to have Kiel sitting on a ladder adds nothing to what is already turning into a terse conversation between He and She. A short excerpt from "Truly, Madly, Deeply," is filled with overflowing energy as a man tries to prolong what would otherwise be the shortest date ever with his art therapy insanity, but its brevity makes it seem like a scene being workshopped in class. The anchor of the night, the 70 minute one-act, "Cigarettes and Chocolate" begins too much in the misty vignette style of Jim Jarmusch, and by the time it settles and shows off Minghella's strengths as a storyteller (in monologue form), Faraone has already lost us with her pastel backgrounds and slanted lighting, all of which serve to make the play seem far more pretentious (or portentous) than it actually is.

[Read on]

No End of Blame

Photo/Stan Barouh
Art/Gerald Scarfe

"Art don't hurt, but cartoons do," says Bela Veracek, the stubborn and brilliant political cartoonist who is the center of Howard Barker's excellent No End Of Blame. "I shock the bastards into life." The Potomac Theatre Project is wonderfully versed in the dark satire needed to revive such an epic play, and while it isn't shocking so much as provocative, it's filled with life. The strong ensemble of thirteen has a great range that lets them span sixty of the fictional Veracek's embattled years, not to mention the intricacies of the language, which puts the politeness of words to the test and views the world as the "Castor oil of life." Much recommended, especially for political theater buffs.

[Read on]

Doppelganger

Theater is about moments like the one represented in this picture. Unfortunately, this singular snapshot is one of the few things Doppelganger gets right: the rest of Emanuel Bocchieri's direction uses a new technology developed by Feed the Herd at 3LD to randomize cues based on human interaction. In other words: every show has the potential for gripping imagery, or just a lot of dead time on stage and awkward interactions between actors (none of whom are that good in this production). Simon Heath has good set pieces--a sleep lab, a cluttered apartment--and some tangible, albeit science-laden, ideas, but none of it comes together so much as in the one picture above. The rest of the show is this moment's double, its doppelganger, and the play is as far from transcendent as it gets.

Doppelganger

photo: Ian Tabatchnick

Doppelganger, developed at 3LD through their Curated Residency Program, features a wealth of multimedia events, some of which are motion-activated by the actors and therefore left to chance. This idea seems to promise a risky, anything-can-happen playing ground (appropriate for a story that gets started following a freak accident) but the night I saw it, the multimedia mostly seemed as stiff as a Power Point presentation. Perhaps that's intended, in service of one of the play's subthemes of the inhumanity of corporate culture, but the result is that too much of the play is distant and inhuman; it's telling that the moments when the play most held the attention were ones that involved the least technological business.

Passing Strange

photo: Michal Daniel

The first time I gave Passing Strange a thumbs-up, I found it wildy exhilarating but frustratingly problematic. But I couldn't shake the thing - it just kept kicking around in my head saying "see me again". Now that I have, I want to say it's the most thematically sophisticated, musically exciting and stylistically inventive musical I have seen in years. Seeing it a second time, already knowing the lay of the land, I could appreciate another layer of the first act that I couldn't before - namely, the dynamic between the narrator and the main character, his younger self. (The show lets you come at your own speed to the connection between the two, but the show is far richer if you know it right at the get-go. Spoiler babies: just trust me on this) I initially had problems with the second act (the second half of it, specifically: the first half, in which our hero makes a hit on the 80's performance art scene in Berlin by exploiting his race, is flawless) but even those concerns disappeared when I realized that what I had interpreted initially as sentimental was actually quite dark and strange. The show's boldy ambitious blend of concert and music theatre creates many unique, exciting moments that open the door to a new way that musicals might be constructed - how often does something come along that is genuinely so ground breaking? The score of the largely sung-narrated show runs a gamut from funk to pop to punk spoof but is always authentic and sophisticated, both musically and lyrically. All four of us at Show Showdown are way into this show (hey Christopher - post your review already!) and it closes this weekend, on July 1st. Don't miss it - this is one that people are going to be talking about and referencing a decade from now when ten times the people who've seen it will be claiming they did.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David]

Rabbit

photo: Tristram Kenton

Early in the second act of this debut play by Nina Raine (who also directed) one character likens the phenomenon of memory in the brain to a room full of tuning forks: one vibration sets off another and another. It's only at this point that the bifurcated play reveals its purposefulness - it alternates punchy, lively scenes of a young woman's 29th birthday party with somber flashbacks of her interactions with her father, now deathbed-ridden. At its best the play depicts the chasm between what we display outwardly in a social situation while another secret unspoken story reverberates inside. The scenes at the party - where four of the woman's friends mostly needle each other about sex to hide the anxieties and animosities under the surface - are rendered naturalistically, credibly; Raine clearly has an ear for how these young, middle class people talk and flirt and one-up each other and for what they try to leave unspoken. On the strength of these snappy, sharply observed scenes, the play is worth seeing. The pity is that the flashback scenes, even allowing that they are memories, feel ill-defined and vague and aren't as compelling as the scenes at the party; the idea is better than the execution.