The Runner Stumbles

TACT's revival of Milan Stitt's 1976 play The Runner Stumbles has not aged well. It's no longer racy enough to tackle the real issues with the church (Doubt) or even to question the solitude of its priests (100 Saints You Should Know). The murder trial that frames this "illicit" affair between a nun and her priest is shakily conventional, and stilted, too, and the procession of ghost-like memories that haunt Father Rivard from his jail cell is far too orderly to shake things up. That's not all a terrible thing: Stitt's play is more suited toward contemplative soul searching, and his best moments are those that match Rivard's unstinting intellectualism against Sister Rita's practical interpretations of the Bible and Mrs. Shanding's deep-seated emotional beliefs. (No surprise, either, that these are the strongest actors of the bunch.) But proselytizing without passion can only go so far, and the reliance on rote and repetitive learning (we see the same scenes in the past that we hear confessed to in the present) never affords us the deep connection we see from theater.

[Read on]

Die Mommie Die!

***

New World Stages

Finally I have seen Charles Busch onstage in drag. I am an official New Yorker now. This old-school satire lampooning the cinematic melodramas of yesteryear features Busch as the sinister(?) matriarch of a dysfunctional Hollywood family. At times gut-bustingly hilarious and at others a bit tedious and wordy, the script sometimes gets bogged down in a little too much exposition and explanation. The magic of this production lies not only in the naughtiness (a Chad Hunt sized suppository. HA!) but in those campy comedic flourishes that come in the form of an evil backwards glance or a panicked breakdown after a well placed slap across the face. This production was most entertaining when Busch, decked out in gorgeous gown after gown, makes grand entrance after entrance and milks the sick glamour for all it's worth.

Also blogged by: [Patrick]

The Brothers Size

photo: Michal Daniel

The breakout hit from the most recent Under The Radar festival, written by a twenty-seven year old playwright named Tarell McCraney, The Brothers Size is in many ways an impressive piece of theatre and a promising piece of writing. The dialogue is often highly lyrical, the presentation (in the manner of African storytelling) highly stylized. Yet I found the play unsatisfying: the story, loosely adapted from West African mythology according to press notes, is pedestrian and predictable and lacks, well, the size that we associate with myth. Until an especially vivid monologue in which one of the two brothers of the title recounts his despair in prison, I didn't feel the slightest emotional engagement with the material. The play also has its baddie making a dramatically unnecessary, unwanted (homo)sexual advance on one of the brothers: that made me cringe, and not in the "challenge my world" way.

1001

Photo/Evan Sung

Jason Grote's new play, 1001, reminds me of an ingenious string of computer code I once saw: filled with nested for loops, these endlessly sharp lines (specific and yet filled with broad generalizations that left room for hundreds of back and forth variations depending on the value) were a pleasure to browse, yet at the end did no more than perform a routine task on the PC. Grote's play has wider ambition than the routine, and he uses the conceit of storytelling -- and not just those of The Arabian Nights (though he riffs on it well, with one scene more melodramatically staged than a '50s Hollywood romance) but the stories of our history, from fabulists like Borges (and his ingeniously infinite stories) to the spooky narratives of people like bin Laden (now staged alongside a clip from Michael Jackson's Thriller). The plot parallels Scheherezade and Shahriyar with that of their modern equivalents, Dahna and Alan, and Ethan McSweeny's beautifully inventive staging unites the scenes, with an ancient tome appearing also as a suitcase nuke and a laptop and the sky blue theme popping up in both costumes or as the waves of Sinbad's voyage, giving way to the bed of two trapped lovers. These two leads, a bewitching Roxanna Hope and the serious and seriously talented Matthew Rauch bring life to the play, allowing the politics to exist around them, but Grote doesn't manage to contextualize the majority of his dreamlike characters (from one-dimensionally Arab-hating Jews to a grossly comic Flaubert, mystic Borges, and digital Dershowitz) and that turns the exotic postmodernism into little more than the present, filtered, gutted, and paraphrased through the haze of fiction. I was happy to lose myself in the story (Grote is a sort of Rumpelstiltskin, spinning yarns into golden prose), but disappointed that all this labyrinthine storytelling had such vague messages.

The Turn of the Screw

Photo/Wandrille Moussel

One of the best things about a ghost story should be the lighting, and thankfully I have nothing but praise for Karl Chmielewski's thick-shadowed design in Jeffrey Hatcher's stage adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. But unfortunately, I have nothing else positive to say about this Wake Up, Marconi! production: Don K. Williams allows the actors to prance about the stage with broad strokes and as a result never gets anywhere near the specific tension that Henry James's novel tried to conjure up with symbolic ghosts and unreliable narration. It's not an easy adaptation to do, especially since "The Man" (Steve Cook) plays everything from an old maid to a precocious child, but it's made worse by adding verbalized sound effects (whispered footfalls and creaks). The script has some merits to it -- the dialogue it has added to James's rambling text is, at times, punchy -- but delivered as it is by a creepy Cook and his overdone counterpart, Melissa Pinsly, it's hard to see the ghost story as anything other than a comedy.

[Read on]

Things We Want

photo: Monique Carboni

I have nothing but praise for the ensemble of this current production from The New Group: all four actors, under Ethan Hawke's able direction, give natural and vibrant performances. (And Zoe Kazan, the lone female in the group, is by now enough of a reason to see anything she's in: she's easily one of the best and brightest young actors of today.) But the play, despite some snappy dialogue, too often smacks of contrivance: the first act concludes with an exchange between Kazan and Paul Dano that is meant to convincingly move their characters' relationship from strangers to something else, and the fact that it doesn't convince can only be blamed on the playwrighting.