Devil Land

Looks like Devil Land will be the last play I see at this year's Summer Play Festival, where the shows are (say it with me now) not open for review.

The Wikipedia Plays

****

Ars Nova

17 playwrights have been instructed to write 10 minute plays inspired by Wikipedia entries ("Troposphere", "Bill Clinton", "The Defenstration of Prague"). Fun idea! As in most short play festivals we have scenes that work extremely well and others where you're like "WTF?". Happily Ars Nova's Play Group Writers are a sassy batch of wordsmiths so aside from a couple of WTF's?! (talking laptops?? umbrella girl??), we had a pretty hysterical night at the theater (a gun toting Greenpeace volunteer? HA!). As this is was just a weekend engagement and will have already closed by the time that most of you have read this, let my endorsement lie with the youthful, edgy, relevant energy that has become Ars Nova's hallmark. You'd normally expect shit this cool (The Wikipedia Plays, At Least It's Pink, Automatic Vaudeville, Dixie's Tupperware Party, Creation Nation, etc) to be south of 14th street among all the tattoo parlors and coffee houses but there it is hunkered down deep in the heart of Hell's Kitchen (Broadway's suburbs) like a hipster oasis.

The Brig

Photo/John Ranard

The Brig is a hard show to recommend, but I'm going to do it anyway. More of an experience, or a modern dance, than pure theater, it is a hyperrealistic (and therefore at times, hyper-tedious) play. It makes its point, like the military, by drilling it into you, one routine at a time, until your only hope is to blindly obey. But the stern discipline of the ensemble (at least 16 large), the firm direction of director Judith Malina, and the deliberate writing of Kenneth H. Brown demand one's attention: this work is grippingly boring and jarringly tight.

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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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