Girl Gang

NYMF

This festival entry was a send up of those sassy-brassy bad girl 50's empowerment novels. Promising idea but quite oddly it featured a smooth jazz score complete with acoustic guitar and ever present bongo drums (at least for the Act that I stayed for). The musicians wore berets. Presumably the choice was inspired by the beatnik culture but I felt like I was at brunch.

Iphigenia 2.0

photo: Carol Rosegg

Charles Mee's radical, theatrically exhilarating reinvention of Iphigenia is jagged, rough-edged, beautiful: it's like he's reassembled the shattered pieces of the myth in the aftermath of an explosion. The resulting collage is thematically and narratively coherent but full of jolting juxtapositions and violent cracks in tone: this is theatre that puts us on high alert and keeps us there. Mee's version of the wartime tragedy takes place in the world we live in now and the gods have next to nothing to do with it: it's now the soldiers, in American fatigues, who demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter, reasoning that a leader should not ask his followers to risk sacrifices that he himself is unprepared to make. Many of Mee's other revisions are similarly systemic rather than cosmetic and fire missiles at our current-day culture. This bold, sensationally vivid production, currently in its final weeks at Signature Theatre, is both viscerally exciting and intellectually devastating. Don't miss it.

The Australia Project II: Australia Strikes Back (Week 2)

More of the same can be a good thing. Last week, The Production Company treated us to four off-kilter one acts, all of which were written by Australian playwrights who were thinking of America at the time. This week, it's another three one-acts, from the occasionally filth "967 Tuna" (Australian for excellent) to the beautiful "The Beekeeper" (no Australian translation needed there) and the hypnotically turbulent "Syphon." I fell in love with Emma Vuletic's "The Beekeeper," as it achieved what the other two plays didn't: a clear, simple, honest connection between American and Australian values (that unified rather than obscured), as well as an interesting parallel between colony collapse disorder and the Death of the Traditional Family. Also, always great to see Todd d'Amour perform: with his quizzically menacing stare, he's perfect for the Mamet-like stutters of "Syphon," a role that requires a range large enough to turn dismissive yeahs and dunnos into rich sentences of disaffection.

[Read on]

Walmartopia

*

Minetta Lane Theatre

In one corner we have the sincere, heartfelt struggle of a mother and daughter futilely trying to make ends meet on their paltry Wal-Mart wages. In the other corner we have a wacky, fey scientist who has built a time machine and is and toting around the disembodied head of Sam Walton. When these two worlds collide it is jarring and stupefying as our proud, ballad-singing mother/daughter team are manhandled by goofy Wal-mart cronies and tossed into a time machine. It's Norma Rae meets Spaceballs. Wal-Mart is EVIL with a capital "E!!" seems to be the unsubtle point they are making here but with their poorly juxtaposed, puerile plot and generic ditties not much else is conveyed except for the ever increasing desperation to make the audience guffaw at this cloying mess. In the end it was condescending, insulting to our intelligence and reminiscent of poorly conceived children's theater.

The Misanthrope

****1/2
New York Theater Workshop
Photo: Joan Marcus


BALLS OUT! Simply put, that is director Ivo Van Hove's M.O. as he reimagines Molière's The Misanthrope for the stage. Currently in previews at NYTW, Ivo does not offer us the traditional but instead heads straight to the emotional gut of this 1666 masterpiece and literally shines a fluorescent light on all the rage and jealousy exploding in this play. Check out the production photos. Does that look like a Molière to you?? Hell no, but I've never understood The Misanthrope more clearly than I did here. Bill Camp, pictured, is already giving an astounding performance as the people hating douchebag who can't keep his mouth shut and the rest of the top notch cast fits right into this ultra modern ketchup-splattered world. I am now upset with mystupidself for missing Ivo's reimaginings of A Streetcar Named Desire and Hedda Gabler. I will not be so foolish as to miss whatever play he fucks with next.


Also blogged by: [Aaron]

Six Degrees of Separation

Photo/Jennifer Maufrais

The heart of this revival of Six Degrees of Separation still beats strong, but it's clogged by some odd directorial choices that add absurdism to the opening, and prolong the farce too far into the drama. Some uneven acting (in a cast of 17) doesn't really help, and the play winds up a tame, pleasant production, rather than a sharp glimpse at our anonymous lives. Tom Wojtunik's direction is just a little too overzealous at times: he clearly knows how to focus the action (as with the spotlit asides) and the actors are never so open as when discussing loves like Kandinsky or Catcher in the Rye, but he seems to get overwhelmed by all the things happening. As a result, many of the characters--the children, detectives, Dr. Fine, and friends of the family--are awash in generic choices, which for a show that in part is about the death of imagination, makes the play less affecting than it should be. The center, Laura Heidinger's Ouisa and Richard Rioleau's Paul, have great moments together, but the big breakdown at the end is kept at a seventh degree of separation because of Wojtunik's choice to place phone callers in a recessed black box. Break the box: we must be more than anecdotal jukeboxes, and must not lose the experience.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]