Vital Signs: New Works Festival (Series 2)

I'm generally a supporter of new works play festivals just because they get the writers writing, actors acting, directors directing, and everybody sort of just finding their way through the development of new works. It's also a great place to see what sort of topics are on everyone's minds. It pleases me to say that with Vital Signs, now in its twelfth year of production, I don't need to just blindly support a bunch of playwrights stumbling their way into greatness: there's already a lot of remarkable work on display here. Granted, much of the work still plays towards compressed, small ideas -- a lot of stand-ins for larger issues -- but what I saw featured some tender writing from Steve Yockey's Kiss and Tell, some political parallels about censorship in Catherine Allen's Class Behavior (beware, you may be doing it too!), the large way in which racism is still a part of our society, as shown by the twinned stories of Laura Eason's Lost in the Supermarket, the way in which we ultimately haunt ourselves in Sonya Sobieski and Jana Zielonka's one-act musical, Evict This, and the fantastic close to the evening, Jason Salmon's excellently written twist on the boy-meets-girl genre, a wistful and romantic Meeting that covers all the angles to love and all the exits away from it.

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The Devil's Disciple

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Is it murder if you're gentlemanly about it? Are you good if you are narrowly religious, or is true good measured by action? George Bernard Shaw's wit is in exceptionally good form in The Devil's Disciple, as is Irish Rep's production, condensed and well-directed by Tony Walton. Overall, the play is a bit narrow in scope and spends most of the second act repeating itself, but the performances from Curzon Dobell in the first act and Lorenzo Pisoni in the second keep us interested.

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No Dice

Photo/Peter Nigrini

No Dice plays a high-stakes game of craps but without the dice, which is good because they're letting it all ride on the yo, doing epic storytelling about mundane things but without a story. That's where they distinguish themselves, for other companies or playwrights have either theatricality to back up their slices of life or some larger aim (like The Debate Society or Charles Mee), but here, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma has only their parody of dinner theater -- which is a community thing -- and a series of physical gestures put together by Pavol Liska from disco videos or books about magicians and other such random, yet collectively uplifting, sources. The performers work orally, without memorization (though hardly without practice, for they seem so effortless on stage), getting their lines from an iPod (similar to experimental work from Rotozaza) that plays carefully an audio track carefully culled by Kelly Copper from over 100 hours of casual conversations ranging from pudding cravings to filling out TARs (Time Adjustment Reports) to the nature of storytelling, creativity, art, or, simply put, life. They channel this "cosmic murmuring" perfectly, even as they distort it savagely through their ridiculous costumes, intentionally amateurish accents, and delightful reactions, to a point where by the end of this near-four-hour ride, we can almost hear it, too.

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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.

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