Man Is Man

photo: Jackie Munro

A group of ambitious, talented NYU/Tisch students, forming a new company with director Paul Binnerts called The Elephant Brigade, are presenting (through HERE's Supported Artist Program) this wartime Brecht play as "real-time theatre": the performers don't inhabit their roles as much as they purposefully serve as storytellers enacting the play. For this reason, the fact that everyone in the cast is young is not a hinderance; it helps to make Brecht's cautionary message (about the changeability of man during wartime) direct and clear. While the production's attempts to modernize Brechtian devices are hit and miss (the use of live cameras panning toy-sized military structures and projecting them onto a backdrop scrim is a big miss; it doesn't add anything more to the proceedings than decoration) the troupe's urgency and unquestionable passion to tell the story with contemporary relevance are what's most vital and memorable here. No one in the ensemble lets the show down, but especially strong impressions are made by Natalie Kuhn and Sarah Wood.

Queens Boulevard (the musical)

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Excited as I am to see William Jackson Harper make it to a larger stage, and thrilled as I am by the multiple characters he and other standouts like Debargo Sanyal and Demosthenes Chrysan perform, I don't see the point of Chuck Mee's latest interpretation (this time of a Katha-Kali play, The Flower of Good Fortune). Signature is fortunate to have found such a talented set designer in Mimi Lien, as she mirrors Mee's script: attention-grabbing billboards (in various neon, LCD, and plasma) that sharing only the location, Queens Boulevard (incidentally also the name of this play). And director Davis McCallum gets the energy off on the right foot with a DJ (Satya Bhabha) riling up the bride and groom's parties, letting the diversity of the show and cast mingle with the diversity of the audience. But this is not a musical -- what few songs there are are canned, and they have little to nothing to do with supporting the story -- and this is not really a play, simply an adventure narrative (somewhat like that of Forrest Gump, but on a far less epic scale) that lets Mee throw in the latest things he's read, be that about fertility doctors, tips for immigrant survival in New York, or more taxicab confessions . . . There's less cohesion or precision in this collaged material than in Iphigenia 2.0, and the result is a trivial play that at best is only mildly amusing and at worst painfully inaccurate about New York life.

[Also blogged by: Patrick | David]

Yellow Face

Perhaps because I recently read The Accidental Asian, Eric Liu's thoughtful collection of autobiographical essays which explore his personal feelings about Asian-American identity, I ran quickly out of patience for David Henry Hwang's rambling but similarly-themed play. Hwang begins by recounting his real-life newsmaking protest of Jonathan Pryce's casting in Miss Saigon: although it's a bit insidery (including a spot-on impression of Cameron Mackintosh and a completely off-the-mark one of Lily Tomlin) it's a good place for Hwang to begin his theatrical conversation. (The play's format has Hwang - as played by Hoon Lee - in direct address mode with the rest of the ensemble called upon to each play a variety of roles.) But immediately after that intriguing start, Hwang presents a not-very-credible fiction in the same true-story confessional format. That quickly killed off my trust, and I spent the rest of the play sifting fact from fiction.

Chekhov's Chicks

Though the individual scenes that Elizabeth Rosengren has pulled from Chekhov aren't much more than exercises in Scene Study, the way in which she makes their ideas about love collide is a insightful (and hopeful) study in the bittersweet life. These pieces also culminate in a much richer interpretation of The Bear that is usually found in the light farce; it makes the evening into a delightful reintroduction to Chekhov's harsh hopefulness. Simply directed by Jewels Eubanks, the work twists between a study of acting and a study of love, marrying the two into a love of Chekhov that survives even the cryptic lighting (a forlorn moon beaming intermittently against the window) and occasionally melodramatic surface readings of scenes from Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya.

[Read on]

Is He Dead?

photo: Joan Marcus

The premise of this farce, which has the painter Millet faking his own death in order to drive up the value of his artworks, doesn't lead to anything substantive about art and commerce; it's just an excuse to have a guy run around in a dress. It's easy to smile watching the seasoned farceurs in the cast (David Pittu and Byron Jennings, for instance - both deliciously hammy) and there probably isn't a director alive who knows as well as Michael Blakemore how to guide a cast in and out of slamming doors and mistaken identities. Yet the star clown here - Norbert Leo Butz - is an odd choice for this kind of thing: he gets by on the naughty-boy likeability that served him so well in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but he's in a different play than everyone else. It's likely that the sore thumb casting is intentional to put some extra zip in the so-so slow-to-get-going first act, but I couldn't help but wonder what someone like Jefferson Mays could do with the part.

August: Osage County

Photo/Joan Marcus

If I only had a script, I'd be able to sit here and dissect the powerful final scene from the second act (of three), an 11-person family meal that goes from comic pratfalls (awkward Little Charles and his spilled casserole), to a graceless recitation of grace (steady, sterile old Uncle Charlie), to a comic aside about the dangers of eating meat (according to precocious granddaughter Jean, meat is just a container for chemically processed fear), to a series of scathing, loveless remarks (from the shaky, pill-popping matriarch, Violet), to a physically violent breaking point (the frayed, eldest daughter, Barbara), and the hilarious blocking for what should be terrifying. This scene, which incorporates every bit of character introduced in the first hundred minutes, should be a chaotic mess, but it's so naturally written that you'd never notice. Between the excellent craft of these Steppenwolf actors, the layers of deep dialogue and nuanced thought from playwright Tracy Letts, and the impressively orchestrated direction from Anna D. Shapiro, this scene is a boiling point that captures not only the generational gap, but the emotional gap, too, and the way in which dysfunction has become the new function. Whether you're taking uppers, downers, or both, this show is the all-around riot of a show that it's literally cracked up to be.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David]