Peter and Jerry

This is about as perfect a production of The Zoo Story as can be. Not only does it have the deft conversationalist, Dallas Roberts (who I last saw in A Number), but it has an elegant balance for him in the stuffily polite Bill Pullman, one of the best squirmers around. And Edward Albee loves to make his characters squirm through his sly eruptions of the animal hiding within our (hu)mundanity. However, this isn't just The Zoo Story; it's also the far more artificial Homelife, a prologue that, despite the giggly warmth of Johanna Day, only serves to show how much better The Zoo Story is. Homelife has been clearly written to fit the world already established so succinctly within The Zoo Story, in which Peter (Pullman) is pulled out of the safety of his textbooks and into the real world, forced to actually fight for something real, no matter how trivial. As a result, Albee limits himself in Act I to slight foreshadowing and obvious parallels (just as Jerry gains loss through his encounter with a vicious dog, Peter is shown to have the same safe indifference with his wife). Even the plot seems like it's recycled from Philip Roth's "The Breast," another tale in which a mental malady takes on a physical condition (Peter is concerned that his penis is retreating). Homelife is by no means a bad play, and if that's what it takes to deepen our connection to The Zoo Story, I'll gladly sit through it again. But I'd rather just watch the way Roberts humanizes Jerry, with slow caresses of English, a childishly high pitched voice, and a nervous quaver to his otherwise assertive probing. What a magnificent interpretation, with not an awkward moment of silence (Pam MacKinnon uses it all up in the first act) between two real animals.

[Also blogged by: Patrick | David]

dai (enough)

Before they were statistics, the victims of suicide bombings were people, and the power of Iris Bahr's multi-faceted performances in her solo show, dai (enough) is her ability to resurrect them, just moments before the explosion, in such a way that we can remember them as humans, first and foremost, and political statements later. Bahr's comic approach doesn't always work -- many of the characters still seem like figurative points -- but when it does, her work is explosive.

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Rag And Bone

photo: Sandra Coudert

Near the top of Noah Haidle's absurdist play, a poet is begging in the street because he can no longer feel emotion since his heart was stolen. He means it literally: his heart was thieved right out of his chest, hence the bloodsoaked shirt. What he doesn't find out until well into the play, but we learn almost immediately, is that his sensitive poet's heart is a desirable commodity on the black market, where numb-hearted customers can buy a transplant. This is the third absurd comedy I've seen by this playwright and I'm turned on by the mix of whimsy and wisdom he gets by concretizing the metaphorical (in his play Vigils, for instance, he depicted a widow who had trouble dating again because her dead husband was still with her, literally, in a trunk in the bedroom) and I'm jazzed by the worlds he creates, which are ruled by a warped logic. But Rag And Bone grinds almost to a halt when it breaks with its own logic early in the second act - the poet's heart gives a millionaire profound empathy but it doesn't transform him into the poet, yet a son is changed into his mother when he installs her heart. While the play is nonetheless always engaging and scores high on the freshness scale, the actors in this production have been pushed (and costumed) too far to the extreme; that comes dangerously close to taking the heart out of the play.

Sive

I suppose in retrospect Sive is an all-too predictable tale of what happens when money clouds judgment, but John B. Keane's 1959 drama caught me entirely by surprise. I was so blinded by the overblown antics of the matchmaker Thomasheen Sean Rua (Patrick Fitzgerald) that I genuinely believed that the young lover, Liam (Mark Thornton) would rush in at the last moment to save Sive (Wrenn Schmidt) from her marriage to the old, rich Sean Dota (Christopher Joseph Jones). Or that Sive's Nanna (Terry Donnelly) would manage to convince Uncle Mike (Aidan Redmond) to follow his heart. Or that Mena (Fiana Toibin), Sive's step-aunt and Mike's wife, would get past her stubborn resentment of her ward's comparative freedom and not cruelly condemn her to a life without love. And I had every cause to believe: save for the one-dimensionally written Thomasheen, Keane's play is a long struggle of convictions, customs, and character, and there were many well-paced moments of hope. Ultimately, I was emotionally blindsided by Ciaran O'Reilly's steady direction, and then forced to linger in tears by some terrifically human performances out of Mr. Thornton and Mr. Redmond (and the two somewhat jokey musicians, played by Donie Carroll and James Barry).

Die Zauberflote

photo: Beatriz Schiller

Julie Taymor's spectacular production of Mozart's most popular opera leaves you almost giddy with happiness: it's a carnival of theatrical delights to captivate both young and old. The jaw-dropping puppets, the dazzling visual effects, the eye-popping sets: I've never seen a production of The Magic Flute as dynamic and as boundlessly inventive as this one which manages to make so much of the opera's potential for both grand spectacle and intimate fairy-tale charm. But I'm coming late to that bit of news: the production was such a success when it premiered a few years ago that the Met has promised to bring it back (albeit, sometimes as a heavily abbreviated English language one-act) every other season. This particular performance marked one of German soprano Diana Damrau's last-ever-anywhere appearances as The Queen Of The Night: she's chosen to retire the famously difficult role from her rep after triumphing with it all over the globe. If the demands of the arias ever lost her a night of sleep you would never have known it, as her ringing coloratura was precise and exciting, each note thrillingly delineated and shaded with feeling.

The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide

Photo/Heather Clark

South Park gets away with its fourth-grade antics because it's an animated comedy. Sean Graney's play, The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide, has a harder go of it, since the adult actors are so obviously not nine years old. The contrived introduction, in which the fourth graders introduce the play within the play they're about to perform (a suicide note of a drama left behind by their friend, Johnny), makes things worse, as the actors play characters who will soon be playing characters, but they're assisted by Graney's quaint kid-speak ("I am over with him" signifies a break up; an argument is a "shouting-at") and Devin Brain's confident, Lynch-like direction. Things start simply, with Johnny (Joseph Binder) crushing on Rachel (Jennifer Grace) and fretting about a warm juice box, but they slowly grow more adult (and therefore tragic): popular Sally (Stacy Stoltz) forces Johnny to date her, even though this enrages her ex, the bullying Mike Rice (Tim Simons), and it isn't long before there's a balletic death scene between two animal-masked children (industrial strength glue is toxic, go figure!), a suicide ala rat poison, and a magical moment with a gun that leaves a pool of ketchup in its wake. Given this ending, the awkward moments (like a singer who hovers ominously on stage) help the show more than hurt, but it's perhaps just a little too disaffecting.

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