The Medea

Is there anything new and fresh that a fledging theatre company can bring to the oft-told ancient story of Medea? Yes, as it happens. The inaugural show from Wide Eyed Productions doesn't fuss much with the popular Gilbert Murray translation of the play - the dialogue is as it has often been heard for about a hundred years - yet this production has an intimacy and a restraint that make it identifiably contemporary and emotionally immediate. As judiciously played by Amy Lee Pearsall, this Medea is a trapped and broken woman whose extreme actions are made to seem logical, inevitable: even in the wake of her horrific crime, it's possible to understand her psychology and to identify it as all too human. While the production doesn't quite pull off its anachronistic design concept (among the Chorus, there's a dagger on one man's belt loop while another man carries a briefcase) the ensemble, under Kristin Skye Hoffmann's sharp direction, more than compensates by ably mining modern characterizations from the text. I'll certainly be on the lookout for what Wide Eyed does next.

Sister Cities

Photo/Gili Getz

Sister Cities has all the right elements for a comic drama: four bickering half-sisters, each intellectually sharp and as different in attitude as in their namesake cities: out-of-control Baltimore (Jaime Neumann), warm and maternal Dallas (Emberli Edwards), liberally controlled Austin (Maeve York), and uptight Carolina (Ellen Reilly). And yes, Carolina isn't a city -- in fact, it isn't even a state -- but that's just one of the many lovable quirks that Colette Freedman has written into the show, in this case as an example of their mother's whimsical mannerisms (also up there, "Match your panties and knickers or the policemen will give you snickers"). From the small moments over a game of Scrabble (look up zooerastia if you ever want to impress and disgust your friends), to the big moments spent coping with their mother's suicide, Freedman's writing is always genuine and entertaining. My only complaint is that the excellent shock of Act One is squandered in a redundant flashback (and unnecessary intermission); aside from that, I enjoyed my time in Sister Cities.

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Young Frankenstein

Photo/Paul Kolnik

From the "there, wolf" visual pun that appears during a hay ride through a computer-generated forest to Igor's admission (after an oddly enunciated phrase) that he doesn't know why he's talking like that, it seems obvious that nobody really knows how any of the humor in the show actually got there. Sure, some was scavenged from the film version, by producers (Mel Brooks among them) operating like gravediggers in the night, and some came from a roulette wheel of sight gags spun by Susan Stroman, marching around like angry villagers, wielding torches, pitchforks, and whatever else they could get their hands on. But the score is incredibly weak, the talents of comic actresses (like Andrea Martin) and fabulous dancer/everythings (Sutton Foster) are put to waste, and few of the highly budgeted special effects offer anything that hasn't been seen on stage already (the trembling double-vision of a dream-sequence segue stands out as an exceptional visual moment). Even Roger Bart, as Frederick Frankenstein, brings little to the role beyond his wooden affability, shrill shrieks of astonishment, and quick little tongue (the patter of "The Brain" is one of the few songs that actually sticks, along with "Listen to Your Heart"). Diversions, like the Hermit and his "Please Send Me Someone," jut out of the framework because a suitable context hasn't been found for them, and too much of the stage version is disconnected from the plot itself. Musical theater needs to be more elegant than putting together Ikea furniture: it can't just be banged together by people too busy to follow the directions.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Bad Jazz

Photo/Carol Rosegg

To put it mildly, Adam Rapp just got fucked. Robert Farquhar's Bad Jazz is years ahead of Bingo with the Indians, both elegant and perverse. Trip Cullman's expertise as a director shows: the discordant theme runs out from the music, across an increasingly cluttered stage and through actors caught up in the catharsis of cursing. The play shifts from serious conversations about, say, the ethics of actually performing oral sex in a play into the farcical consequences of taking character too far in the rehearsal process, but only drops a beat with a small diversion into the director character's private life. The intensity is balanced by an exaggeratedly comic tone, and the thoughts are clearly delineated by the wonderful Marin Ireland (as free as I've ever seen her on stage) and gruffly garrulous Rob Campbell (think James Lipton + Sean Connery). There isn't a dull moment in the entire play (though the acoustics sometimes drop lines you're hanging onto the edge of your seat to hear), and though it's ultimately more mocking than meaningful, it's pretty visceral no matter how you parse it.

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Bingo With The Indians

photo: Joan Marcus

****

The Flea Theater

I somewhat agree with Aaron that this play is a "series of stray dots that happen to closely approximate a dramatic thought", however, within this unfocused structure lies those Adam Rapp hallmarks that I have fallen in love with: the borderline insane and vibrant characters, the gratuitous, yet obligatory profanity, the violence, the obsession with sex and the ridiculously high stakes. As a struggling theater company is in the middle of a bingo hall heist, a poor outsider and his mother are exposed to just what a sick and twisted culture the theater can be. Fun! I have never seen a poorly cast Rapp play (I wouldn't be surprised if he had a collection of future drama desk nominees chained up in a basement somewhere) and the entire posse here, from Evan Enderele's lost stoner to Cooper Daniels' rabid thespian (both pictured), completely understands and seems quite at home in Rapp's gritty, angry, whack world. The worst sin is to be boring and at Bingo With The Indians, I was on the edge of my seat.

Bingo With The Indians

photo: Joan Marcus

In the world premiere of this Adam Rapp play, we're holed up in a downscale New Hampshire motel room with some violent extremists who are planning to stick up the local bingo game...so that they can fund their edgy East Village theatre company. The military-fatigued artistic director, the sometimes hopped up and naked cokehead actor, the coldly manipulative stage manager - they come off like the cinema-terrorist band of outsiders in John Waters' Cecil B. Demented except that Rapp doesn't have the affection for his characters that Waters did, and since Rapp has directed this production, it's a fair assumption that the singular nastiness is exactly what he wanted. It wears thin quickly. Despite some interesting moments analogizing crime to theatre (when the artistic director is recalling the actor not following orders during the armed robbery, it sounds a lot like she's complaining about a fellow performer who's missed a cue) the black comedy in Bingo With The Indians doesn't build and it's never clear where Rapp is hoping his bullets will land: is he satirizing low-budget theatre, or political extremism? The play is like a long snarl, relieved (if that's the word for it) by a harrowing and graphic rough-sex scene. The six actors in the ensemble bring a high level of intensity, but their blood sweat and tears can't bring any real life into a script that is poison-hearted at its glib core.