UNDERGROUND ZERO FESTIVAL: "Go"

Go cleverly subtitles itself "a life in progress," but the downside to that is that it's also a work in progress. That means it is uneven, technically wobbly, and all over the place. In other words, perfect for the festival circuits. The play is further confused by being split into two parts, "A" and "B," which can also be identified as Here and There, or by Gillian Chadsey and Michelle Talgarow, who play themselves. Their goal is to get from their part of the stage to the other; to do so, they recount scenes from their own lives that have them either growing or stagnating (as we are wont to do from time to time). However, the show isn't an even split (Chadsey does most of the work [which is fine; she's the more engaging actress]), and their framing scenes (at a school desk or in a subway car) are too obscure to be helpful.

Go is a work of neo-futurism that doesn't go far enough: Chadsey runs, but never truly collapses, and when interacting with the audience (most notably as a dominatrix), shies away behind a wall of bluster, which lessens the effect. The key scene is a six-verse song called "Relationships" that Chadsey sings while badly playing a ukulele: that one scene alone goes from happy to sad to manic to violent. Go from that, and Go gets a whole lot better.

Not Waving

There didn't seem to be a ticket to be had for this one - every performance sold out - but I braved the (efficiently-run) cancellation line with a friend and we got in. I can't review Summer Play Festival shows (psst! I enjoyed this one quite a lot) so, in these last days of the Festival's fourth year, I'll say instead how thankful I am for SPF and for the environment it creates: emerging playwrights get to see their work professionally produced in a "protected" environment, and audiences get to have a look for the price of a couple of lattes. Taking in *anything* at the SPF is a great big I Love New York moment.

Two Thirds Home

Two Thirds Home is a memory-driven play, one that relies on an actor's ability for elegy to produce its dolorous drama. Thankfully, Padraic Lillis's strong writing has aged those bottled emotions well, and he uncorks each new surprise with a samurai's clean-cut flourish, allowing the frothy emotions to explode with such vibrancy that we can hardly distinguish the tears on our cheeks from the dew of finely poured champagne. Of the three actors, Peggy J. Scott and Ryan Woodle pay fantastically talented respects to Lillis's tale of a family divided by the "widow" their mother has left behind; Aaron Roman Weiner really needs to step up his game if he wants to play in the same league as his companions.

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Gone Missing

photo: Sheldon Noland

I'm more than a little disappointed that this rave-reviewed documentary musical left me exhausted and underwhelmed: even at an intermissionless seventy five minutes it felt woefully overextended. Six members of the downtown troupe The Civilians, clad in nearly uniform grey suits, deliver a collage of songs, comic bits and dramatic monologues all based on interviews with New Yorkers who've lost something. The show has some strong, isolated moments (a funny monologue about disposeaphobics, delivered by Jennifer R. Morris, was my favorite bit, and Michael Friedman's songs, which come in a variety of genre flavors, are often engaging) but they don't add up to much because the evening hasn't been organized into something cohesive and it hasn't been shaped to have momentum. It's scattershot and muddled, as meandering at the end as it is at the start. A vignette about the loss of a black Gucci pump might be tossed between one about lost virginity, and one about the lost continent of Atlantis: the theme of "missing" is too widely applied and the episodes pile up in an everything but the kitchen sink clutter. The show had already, um, lost me by the time it tried to sweep everything together with an eleventh hour attempt at profundity.

Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer

It took a long time for me to warm up to Aidan Dooley's portrayal of Tom Crean, one of the unsung "heroes" of Ireland (this, assuming that there is something heroic about plunging into the unknown whiteness of the Antarctic not once, not twice, but three times). Ironically, it was at Crean's coldest moment--the approximately 40-mile solo trek through the snow, blizzard at his back, that he undertook to save his companions--that warmed me to the survivalist narrative. I can't say, either, that Dooley oversold the role: his wild gesticulation and shrill, incredulous commentary at his own accomplishments seem a bit hyperbolic, but not any less believable. What I can say is that Dooley's writing was held back by his own slurring, stumbling performance in the second act: short of that, I was on the edge of my seat at the odds-defying account of an 800-mile voyage with Captain Shackleton (all undertaken in a tiny, wooden rescue boat), not to mention the pitch-dark slide down the side of an icy mountain, nor the depraved conditions of their various camps. There are a few anachronisms that Dooley should remove ("like banshees on a roller coaster"), and the show would be better as a 90-minute one-act, but Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer is pretty arresting stuff.

The Black Eyed

photo: Joan Marcus

In Betty Shamieh's provocative, stunningly lyrical and sometimes darkly funny The Black Eyed - currently being New York premiered in a brilliant production at NYTW and easily one of the most exciting new plays I've seen so far this year - four Palestinian women from different historical periods congregate outside a mysterious door in the afterlife, unsure if they are in heaven, hell, or some terrible limbo. Each of their lives was deeply altered by violence: they spend the play trying to make sense of and peace with it, sometimes with profound humour and sometimes with passionate urgency. The play is bold and thematically ambitious - the characters' reach through the ages (for instance Delilah, from Biblical times, is right alongside a modern-day secular architect) widens the playwrights' questions about oppression and violence beyond the context of modern-day conflicts. That's one of the play's strongest qualities: it pushes buttons about terrorism, religious divisiveness, and warfare, but none of them activate hate. The play has a humanity-affirming bird's eye view and it challenges us to take one too.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David]