Trumpery

Despite playing God with the precise facts of Darwin's twenty-year delay in the publication of his theory of evolution, playwright Peter Parnell still can't manage to take the gloves off the science and get from the brain to the heart. Perhaps taking a cue from Santo Loquasto's forested set, Darwin (Michael Cristofer) spends much of his time rooted in place, being lectured to by his religious peers, the vicar (Timothy Deenihan) and God-fearing scientist Richard Owen (Peter Maloney), and then by his steadfast allies, the all-too-sensible Hooker (Michael Countryman) and his excitable ally, Tom Huxley (Neal Huff, far too tame to be "Darwin's bulldog"). When Darwin actually takes action, prodded by the unnervingly polite Alfred Wallace (an excellent Manoel Felciano) and internally questions the faith he needs to his marriage to Emma (Bianca Amato) and for his sick daughter, Anne (Paris Rose Yates), the play starts to get down into that godless mud; unfortunately, director David Esbjornson ups the melodrama of a sick child and a lightning-punctuated séance (not science) too often to stay there. The one flawless moment: Darwin's attempt to pray, a thrillingly quiet moment of reflection from Mr. Cristofer that goes a long way to sell the good idea that Trumpery surely must have started with.

The Puppetmaster Of Lodz

photo: Jim Baldassare

This play's title character is a puppeteer who escaped the Birkenau concentration camp for refuge in the attic room of a boarding house; the landlady has been assuring him for five years that the war is over - she even brings people in from the street to corroborate - but he's convinced it's a trick and he won't open his door to anyone. The play is at its most involving when someone's at his door - there's not only the suspense of what it will finally take to persuade him, there's also the dramatic charge in the meanwhile of watching him cling to his fear-based beliefs despite all evidence. Unfortunately, the majority of the play involves only the main character alone in his room, interacting with his puppets: it's far too contrived that he's rehearsing a puppet show to tell the story of the trauma he experienced at the camp and how he got to the room in the first place. More regretably, there's a subtext missing here that would somewhat redeem the contrivance and tell us *why* he's driven to do this. Is he dramatizing his story in order to understand it? Is it his way of clinging to the truth? With these scenes played and directed just page-deep, the play's potential for credible psychological portraiture is limited. What is well-communicated is the character's sad isolation and his pervasive suspiciousness: the play's final scenes, which bring about a profound change, are powerful and affecting.

You People

In five short glimpses of people you've seen before but possibly never considered, The Shalimar have painted an impressive mosaic of American life -- through the eyes of the disaffected, the obese, the immigrants, and the religious. From comic parables like Josh Liveright's "Deseret Desire" to the bleak realism of Michael John Garces' "Tostitos," it's time to meet You People. While it's admittedly not as well put together as their last Phaedra-conflating epic, LA FEMME EST MORTE (or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son), it succeeds at being a melting pot of ideas. It's not a very hopeful glimpse, though: there are a lot of dissatisfied people in these plays, willing to compromise themselves (often for sex), and as if playwrights are simply reflecting the current attitudes of America, then I worry about where we're going.

[Read on]

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.