Baby with the Bathwater

Photo/Randy Morrison

Just when you thought it was safe to have a baby, Christopher Durang's hilarious (yet hopeful) look at family values, parentage, and maturation (despite it all), is back on the stage. Baby with the Bathwater is no-holds-barred comedy, and under Kevin Connell's playful direction and the cast's exaggerated smiles, the play is as relevant now (if not more) as when it premiered in '84. The moral value of The Brothers Karamazov, as interpreted by the Mary Poppins-like nanny, Nanny (Anna Fitzwater) is that there is no right or wrong, only fun, and in that context, it's hilarious to watch John (Victor Verhaeghe) offer his depressed child, lying prone in a basket of laundry, some of his vodka -- in fact, it's almost heart-warming. John's wife, Helen (Karen Culp) is just as funny sitting on a swing at the park, encouraging other children to poke her "daughter" out of her comatose state. ("No, Billy! Don't poke her with that! Put that away!" calls another, yet no more active, mother.) When Daisy (Jeremy King) actually appears, late in the second act, he is exactly what you'd expect from such neglecting parents, but all hope is not lost. Between his seventh year as a sophomore, his 435th session with a therapist, and his 1,034th random girl, at least he, out of everyone else, may have actually grown up.

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Peter And Jerry

photo: Joan Marcus

Zoo Story, the nearly fifty year old one-act which put Edward Albee on the map, is still ferocious, riveting theatre: its enduring theme (that what we human beings call "humanity" is barely more than a push and a shove away from our true animal natures) is communicated succinctly, powerfully, in Albee's tight and suspenseful dramatic masterpiece of two men who encounter and provoke each other on a park bench. The play has been re-set in the current day and paired with a newly penned one-act prologue called Homelife: not only does this new first act go a long way toward fleshing out the character of Peter, now seen at home with his wife before he ventures out to the fateful events with Jerry at that park bench, it also deepens Albee's theme by including the more commonplace acts of emotional savagery that can occur in a long-standing intimate relationship. While I have some quibbles with the first act (the dialogue sometimes doesn't flow smoothly, even allowing for Albee's heightened style) I can't argue with the overall effect and impact of this double bill: Peter And Jerry is one of the most exciting shows of the year - both intellectually involving and viscerally powerful. Superbly directed by Pam Mckinnon and expertly performed by Dallas Roberts, Johanna Day and especially Bill Pullman, the production is a don't miss.

Peter And Jerry

photo: Sara Krulwich

****1/2

Second Stage

When the curtain rises on the Edward Albee's Homelife, Act One to The Zoo Story's Act Two, sitting there on the sofa is Peter and sitting on the table in front of him is a tiny cell phone. It is never used but it is a vital prop that zoomed us directly into the post-millennium. Albee was updating his 50 year old classic?? How he was going to go about it? Cut to Act 2. Wow. Aside from the name dropping of one modern author and a bit of welcome profanity, I detected no significant change. Zoo 49 years later still works in the now and is continues to be as shocking and relevant as ever. And Homelife, a husband/wife conversation that evolves far beyond typical afternoon banter, is loaded with that vintage Albee language- you know- where one person says something and then ponders what they've said and then re-phrases their thoughts? Love that. Homelife gently grabs us, picks us up, shakes us up and down a bit and then sets us down in Central Park to wander down a familiar path with a completely new perspective. And the director/cast? Pat MacKinnon/Bill Pullman, Johanna Day, and Dallas Roberts? Perfect. This is theater at its finest. Don't miss it.

The ACE train intermittently rumbled underneath the Second Stage theatre. Nice touch.

Secret Order

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Secret Order is an actor's play, full of barbed lines, wry deliveries, and so little substance that the play revolves around exaggeration and half-truths. That said, no matter how well Bob Clyman arms them with lines, or Charles Towers removes all other distractions from their work, the play fails if the actors aren't all on their game, and Larry Pine has a ways to go before he's comfortable enough to play the confident Dr. Brock. Right now, he's not a strong enough father figure to make William Schumway (Dan Colman) fudge his cancer research so as to make the old man proud. And his affected delivery, all bluster, takes the bite out of the snubbed Saul Roth (Kenneth Tigar) and lessens the influence and impact of the ambitious undergraduate, Alice Curiton (Jessi Campbell). Given that Charles Tower's direction is to minimize the surroundings (there's really just a rotating metal workbench) and spotlight the actors, the show has moments where it soars, and moments where it's just hot air.

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Make Me A Song

photo: Carol Rosegg

Many of William Finn's most memorable songs are included in this 90 minute revue, and an able cast of four has been assembled to sing them (I especially liked Adam Heller, who never sounds a false note all evening, and Sally Wilfert, who has a pleasing creamy-smooth voice), but somehow the show adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The ante has been upped on this genre of show after the most recent Putting It Together revue of Sondheim songs and last season's Jacques Brel... at the Zipper, both of which found ways to use their respective composers' songbooks to suggest a narrative spine and to chart an emotional arc. Apart from an extended section of Falsettos numbers, the songs in this revue aren't sequenced in any meaningful way: it's simply a parade of numbers, marched out one after another. While the best of them are moving and effective ("Unlikely Lovers", which builds to four-part harmonizing, is very beautifully sung here) the show (which uses just a single piano to accompany the singers) feels at its least good like some cabaret room in the Catskills.

Archipelago

Photo/Joanna Wilson Photography

In "The Way Down," one of the ten short one-act, one-man playlets that make up the isolating spine of Archipelago, a boy named Danny (Nick Lewis) has jumped to his death, only to find that time now passes remarkably slow, allowing him enough clarity of thought to regret the choice he made. But playwright Richard Strand doesn't give Danny any room to develop, nor does he waste much more than Danny's three seconds to consider anything broader than the cheaply developed gimmick of the short play, and he dies without any catharsis at all. The rest of the plays largely follow suit, giving largely unimaginative glimpses into the lives of characters whom we meet too briefly to care much for. This is especially true of an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' "(A Diptych)" and for Davy Rothbart's "Scarface," which spends more time trying to convince us of its feelings through an anecdote about a bat than by giving us anything real to ground ourselves with. There are sparks of creativity in Shelia Callaghan's "Hold This," and in Brian Patrick Leahy's "Cranberry" (about a suicide artist who is literally going to leave her mark), and both the performances and the writing of Anton Dudley's "Up Here/In Here" and Erica Rosbe's "Orbit" are satisfying wholes. Along with the passably performed Beckett piece, "Act Without Words I," that makes the show about as even as you'd expect, a fifty-fifty mix of theater that demonstrates just how important it is for a show to eventually come together.

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