A Feminine Ending

Frequently our heroine breaks the fourth wall and addresses us directly, and projections announce each section of the play as if each is a movement in a symphony, but this new show at Playwrights Horizons isn't any more theatrical (or any deeper) than a sitcom. I'm at a loss to decide which of the bland main character's situations is the most shopworn thanks to decades of television and movies: could it be the conflict with her mother, who's one of those cuddly kooks whose wild say-anything inappropriateness is supposed to make us scream with laughter? (Mom is played by Marsha Mason but the cutesy-neurotic character would remind you of Neil Simon at his yuk-hungry worst anyway). Hmm, perhaps it's the conflict she has with her pop star fiance: while she's planning the ceremony she has a meet-cute with another guy who (stop the presses!) is so goofy-loveable that she's got to call off the wedding. For what it is - shallow, derivative - the play has its moments, and half the audience was clearly having a good time. Toward the end one character steps up and behaves like an adult. Too late.

Mauritius

Photo/Joan Marcus

Stamp collectors (or should I say philatelists) know this better than anyone: errors are what keep things interesting. Theresa Rebeck is an overt writer, very explicit and crisp in tone and mannerisms, so she explains this within the play itself: damaged people are interesting too. So are interesting hybrids of character types: F. Murray Abraham plays an arms-dealing stamp enthusiast named Sterling, and Alison Pill plays both a scrap and scrapper of a girl as Jackie, who is best described as the flickering exhaust of a lighter: dangerous and fragile all at once. This is important, as Rebeck's plot is fairly obvious and in the familiar con-game tenor of early Mamet: her characters are what sustain the script, her actors are what fill the stage (John Lee Beatty's sets are intentionally bland so as to support the squalor of Jackie's life). I'm glad, then, to have Doug Hughes (Doubt) in command, who eschews spectacle for essence, and as a result often gets it. As for the rest of the cast, Bobby Cannavale understands both the aggression and the silence of a smooth talker, and Katie Finneran (who was a riot in Pig Farm) inverts her deadpan to make one of the most numbingly unconscious villains I've seen on stage. (As for Dylan Baker, both the actor and the character are superfluous: Baker's sleepwalking through a boring role.) Doesn't matter, really: I couldn't keep my eyes off Pill, who has a special tenacity of spirit that is as irresistable here as it was in Blackbird and Lieutenant of Inishmore. She'll grow up to give my favorite actress, Mary Louise Parker, a run for her money, mark my words.

The Good Heif

photo: Jim Baldassare

In a dry backward wasteland we meet a father and son who, like every other human being in their world, spend every hour of every day pounding the Earth with sticks. This should serve as a forewarning to the audience: the play has as much subtlety and variation as that constant monotonous stick-jabbing. The son, known only as Lad, pops an erection through his pants in the first scene, which his Mom, known only as Ma, points at and condemns as a sign of the devil. We're not talking about mere repression here, but full blown ignorance: she thinks it's a deformity and she doesn't know where babies come from. Dad, known only as Pa, is only marginally more evolved, suggesting the boy deal with his manhood by heading off to the woods to find a good heifer. There are plenty of signs, such as the staging of Ma's periodic tip-over-and-convulse seizures, that this is meant to be funny. It isn't, but even if it were it would be the lowest kind of entertainment: we're invited to snicker with superiority at the ignorance of the hillbilly-variant characters. And then it's essentially eighty minutes more of the same.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]

The Ritz

Photo/Joan Marcus

There's nothing momentous about The Ritz; the closest Terrance McNally's script approaches to serious issues is when Gaetano Proclo (Kevin Chamberlin) tells Chris (Brooks Ashmanskas, delightfully spry, and as swishy in his movements as his floral robes), that gays aren't normal. He doesn't say it exactly like that, but his accidental outburst is clear: American "tolerance" is more ignorance than acceptance. However, The Ritz is a farce (one already stripped of the pallor of AIDS), so Gaetano apologizes and befriends Chris. He's just a straight man (literally) in this comedy hiding in a gay Manhattan bathhouse to escape his murderous brother-in-law, Carmine Vespucci (Lenny Venito, a real ham). And what a place: on Scott Pask's three-tiered birthday cake of a set, there's always some sort of icing going on, be it that of the chubby chasing Claude Perkins (Patrick Kerr, who plays the part as creepily as the character's name), or that of the go-go goer, Googie Gomez. (Rosie Perez plays the part well, enthusiastically violent in both her intentionally awful singing and clumsy seductions, but she's just inaudible or unintelligible half the time.) Joe Mantello does a tremendous job of keeping a lot of half-naked men in action (Take Me Out had to have helped), and the only irritating part of the show remains the role of Brick: Terrence Riordan doesn't look intimidating enough for that Mickey Mouse voice to be funny. Luckily, Chamberlin grounds the whole show in a wide-eyed glaze of stupor, terror, and (at times) curious amusement: he's the row of neon bulbs in "The Ritz" that keeps it from being "The Pitz."

[Also blogged by: David] [Patrick]

Three Mo' Tenors

***

Little Schubert Theatre

Shh! If you perhaps run into fellow showdowners, Patrick or Aaron, at say Triton Gallery or Applebees, don't let on that you know that I'm going to try and count Three Mo' Tenors towards our race. For even though this production has an official Playbill and a few showtunes are sung, this is admittedly not theater, but a musical revue (and that's okay! as long as you're not in the middle of a cutthroat theater race). The gimmick here is 3 guys (James N. Berger, Victor Robertson and Duane A. Moody at the performance I attended) over the course of 2 hours sing 8 different styles of music. Sometimes they were electrifying, especially during the soul and blues medleys and the Ray Charles tribute. At other times like during the opera and showtune segments, the ease of delivery gave way to focused, careful work as though they were uncomfortably teetering on a tightrope. They got the hard stuff out of the way first though and much of Act 2 was loaded with showstoppers that rocked the house out old school.

Harm's Way

"If you're not part of the show," says one of the myriad tricksters in Mac Wellman's Harm's Way, "you're part of them what takes it all in, and that's a fool." Maybe some people will be in on the show, but I felt like a fool, a perplexed yet curious fool. Perplexed because I couldn't make sense of Wellman's oblique and perhaps meaningless usages of McKinley and Cleveland, nor of his scattered episodes of dark moral wandering, short segments of murder and deceit. Curious because johnmichael rossi, who directs the newFangled theatReR, has some inventive ways of staging Wellman's work, dressing up the rags of words in rags of clothes and stitching it all together with a dark circus of vagabonds. Ultimately, however, just a fool, because I didn't walk away from this production feeling much of anything, and that makes me a time-squandering fool.

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