Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations)

Photo/Richard Termine

Will Eno's an excellent solipsist, and that helps him to be a great monologist, a writer of such specific dialog that he can trick the audience into soul-searching his every word. With Thom Pain, he found a droll enough actor in James Urbaniak that we wanted to drown in his reflexive thoughts and engage with his double-talk; but his new collection of short plays, Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations) eschews specificity of thought for grasping meditations on mortality, and while Brian Hutchison and Marisa Tomei are able to tone themselves down, for them, it seems reductive. Worse still, the five short plays that make up the show are redundancies of each other, starting with the excellently fresh "Behold The Coach, In a Blazer, Uninsured," and ending with the dismal "Oh, The Humanity," in which the characters dismiss the artifice of the stage as a cruel reflection of life ("And these are chairs. And that's it. And I don't know who I am.") but offer nothing in return.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David]

Atomic Farmgirl

Teri Hein's memoir about growing up on a farm "accidentally" being irradiated by a nearby atomic plant in the '50s and '60s is a real American tragedy: the unwitting effects of our own ingenuity (and the more sinister implications of our knowledge) on a hearty family of six. This sprawling saga crams in the growing pains of four sisters, the hardships of farm life (especially in sickness), and the guilt of the living, and overreaches only when it taps Native American mythos to force through an unnecessary parallel. The multi-decade sweep of the narrative isn't what sells the show, however, nor the acting, which often seems half-assed (save for a few, like Maria McConville). Instead, it's the rich little details -- Mona sees herself as patriotic because there's a tumor in her head the size of a baseball -- and the homey, era-appropriate anecdotes (about milk-bottle-shaped buildings) that yield the most nutritious scenes. C. Denby Swanson's adaptation is well-intentioned, so even though the Native American apparitions don't do much for the show, the attempt to draw out a parallel theme is clear, and though there's not much drama in one character talking to a ghost, director Brooke Brod milks it for what it's worth. I'm convinced there's an excellent family drama in there, and the production has a lot of value, so I'm still recommending it, but I do hope The Drilling Company continues to work on this play. It'd be a shame for it to only have a half-life.

[Read on]

The Receptionist

photo: Joan Marcus

We're in what appears to be an ordinary office watching the Mom-faced receptionist (Jayne Houdyshell) direct incoming calls when she's not dispensing no-nonsense love advice to a co-worker or making light chit-chat with the Central Office suit who's dropped by unexpectedly to have a word with her boss. This is the mundane, seemingly benign first half of Adam Bock's tidy one-act which, with one bombshell, reveals itself as a cautionary modern-day allegory. (Think of the reveal in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and you'll get a rough idea of the impact, and the gravity, of Bock's sucker-punch.) It could be said that the play is built around a single gimmick - for that reason there will certainly be some theatregoers who will say the play is "slight" - but I wouldn't agree. Do you know that adage that says that the first act of a play is the performance, and the second act is what happens when the audience digests it afterwards? I suspect that this second act will be repeating on me for a long time.

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.

[Read on]

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.