FRINGE: bombs in your mouth

Photo/John Scott

Here's to putting the fun back in dysfunction, be it through arm-wrestling, beer-chugging, side-splitting shit-spitting stories, or simple honest sibling rivalries. I'll drink to Corey Patrick's bombs in your mouth, a compact comic drama that really defines the struggles of half-siblings Lily (Cass Bugge) and Danny (Patrick) to find meaning in their adult lives. To get there, they revert to their childhood antics, yet never seem crude, over-the-top, or false. Instead, director Joseph Ward leads them to sincere moments of acknowledged uncertainty, at which point the two look to each other for comfort, which they ultimately find. The shared jokes over cold spaghetti with tomato and ketchup sauce are as warm as the shared rivalries over cold beers, and the entire play is endearingly entertaining. Fantastic work; hope they bring it back soon!

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick | David]

Six Degrees Of Separation

photo: Jennifer Maufrais

It takes a couple of scenes for the ensemble to move at the needed clip (this is a play that hits the ground running) but once they do this smartly-staged off-off revival of John Guare's best-known play (at the Gallery Players, in Brooklyn) is absorbing and effective, approaching the expert balance of bite and wit that I remember from the original production. The compelling story - which begins as a college-aged black man ingratiates himself with a white upper class Manhattan art dealer and his wife by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier - was inspired by Times-reported events of moneyed New Yorkers who were fooled by just such a con man. Guare's perceptive and compassionate play is both briskly entertaining and thematically rich, manipulating the story to riff on our connectedness to and our assumptions about each other. The two most important characters are Ouisa, the art dealer's wife, and Paul, the con man. Here, Richard Prioleau convincingly plays both sides of Paul - confident in the early scenes, desperate in the later ones; apart from the minor complaint that he needs more intensity for the Catcher In The Rye monologue, it's a solid performance. As Ouisa, Laura Heidinger is substantial and affecting, especially for the eleventh-hour "it was an experience" speech. The only let-down in the ensemble is that the three boys in the quartet of college kids aren't yet getting laughs out of their lines; I bet they will get there. Radiant standout supporting performance: Jacqueline van Biene, in the minor role of Elizabeth. After this and her performance in You Can't Take It With You a few months back at T. Schreiber, she's high on my To Watch For list.

Alfred Kinsey: A Love Story

photo: Sarah Lambert

Mark Folie's play about famed sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey takes too long to make itself known: the first act is competent and reasonably entertaining but (despite a non-linear structure) it doesn't seem especially distinctive, covering material that we already know with the emphasis on the scientist's gay affair. Things get far more interesting sonewhere in the second act, as it starts to become apparent that one of the playwright's aims is to gently question what Kinsey may have missed by putting sexuality coldly under a microscope. There are a couple of thought-provoking speeches near the end of the play - one, delivered by a madam who functions in the play like Kinsey's counterpoint, leads us to wonder if shame may be an important component of sexual pleasure. (There's also, unfortunately, a completely misguided video presentation at the end of the play that seems to come out of nowhere and is besides the point) The play isn't entirely successful building to the ideas that it finally presents, but it is at least a play with some ideas. I liked the wit of staging all of the play's action around a bed - the production would have a lot more punch if nearly everything else on stage was thrown out - and all four actors in the ensemble (Jessica Dickey, Wayne Maugans, Carter Roy and Melinda Wade) are excellent.

FRINGE: Hillary Agonistes

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

To put it in the politically correct ambiguity of Nick Salomone's satirical writing, Hillary Agonistes is a seemingly relevant play. Emphasis on "seemingly." The alarmist plot (emphasized at every scene change by a blaring siren and sharp blackout) involves Hillary's first challenge as president (2009). Rather than face reality, Salomone turns to a full-blown Rapture: 65 million people vanish. The good parts are the slight observations as to how our government might deal: the military looks to cover up their ignorance with an alien scenario, Pat Robertson fakes his own Rapture so his followers won't think less of him, and Americans target Muslims as that legion of anti-Christs. The thought of Christ as a four-watt lightbulb of safety is nice, but the supporting dialogue is wildly uneven, prone to blustery sentiments and little faithfulness to real characters like Bloomberg (now in the Treasury), Chelsea (now a convert to Islam), and Hillary (played by Priscilla Barnes of Three's Company). Barnes is tightly drawn, yet always pandering to an invisible camera; there's evidence of a good performance, but she needs multiple takes to get it right. Most of her work is utterly unconvincing, and director Jon Lawrence Rivera (as with P. Diddy in Raisin) often has her emote with her back to the audience. (Talk about spin!) Salamone needs to tighten his grip on reality (the characters) before he tries to flush out a parable.

Scarcity

photo: Doug Hamilton

Shallow and thoroughly unconvincing, Scarcity is set in the kind of lower middle class home where stinking drunk Dad and world weary chainsmoking Mom scream at each other when they're not going at it like rabbits in earshot of the kids. Dad's one beer away from giving the eleven year old daughter the bad touch, while Mom is yanking the chain of his best friend in order to stock the kitchen with groceries. We're told that the rageaholic teenaged son is exceptionally bright but we see no evidence of it, except that he's well aware that the interest a female teacher has taken in him has more to do with his crotch than his brains. All of this ugliness is meant to strike us as hard and truthful, but it's just ugly, a Jerry Springer Show for middlebrows. Since the playwright hasn't done it, it's up to the actors to provide any illusion of humanity, and for the most part they do although it's not enough to redeem the play: Kristen Johnson is especially vivid and finds a way to maintain a hint of maternal warmth underneath a coarse exterior; The Squid And The Whale's Jesse Eisenberg sometimes pushes too hard but is a compelling stage presence; Michael T. Weiss, in a woefully underwritten role, conveys the wounded pride under a broken spirit.

Grease

photo: Joan Marcus

By now, the property known as Grease has been reshaped and reformed so many times over that it is difficult to answer this question: was it ever a good musical? As it is in the current Broadway revival, which seems designed as a star vehicle for its two non-stars (cast by television contest) and which melds material from the play with the movie, its message seems to be that a girl can get a guy by dressing like a slut and hold on to one by not getting pregnant. I did in fact see the original Broadway production way back when as a tyke, and mostly remember that it looked like a high school yearbook come to life and that it had enough sexual innuendo to make my aunt second-guess taking me along. But on the surface, this revival is the most family-friendly Grease I could imagine and safe for the kindergarten set: now the chicks will scream for Greased Lightning rather than cream. Beyond the blanding sanitization and the casting of two leads who can not hold the stage, this revival fails to capture any feeling of nostalgia for the 1950's and repeats many of the mistakes of the movie (the "kids" look like 30 year olds) minus the compensatory charisma of the film's stars. If Grease ever had a soul it's long gone now. There is one, and exactly one, performance that pops off the stage: surprisingly, it's not Jenny Powers, who belts "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" with feeling but who otherwise is a bland Rizzo. No, it's one Robyn Hurder, who manages to do something with the nothing role of Marty. Robyn Hurder is to Grease what Leslie Kritzer was to Legally Blonde.