Runt Of The Litter

photo: Joan Marcus

Bo Eason's career, as defensive back for the Oilers, was overshadowed by his brother Tony's more celebrated success as starting quarterback for the Patriots. Bo's solo show (now at 37 Arts following a successful run downtown a few years ago) changes their names and adds some fictional events, but it seems essentially to be a monologue written from the blood and sweat of his real-life struggles in his brother's shadow. The play's greatest strength is its inside-the-helmet view of the experience of playing pro football: the most fascinating segment has Eason suiting up for a game and changing before our eyes from a doggedly determined but physically improbable pro hopeful to a steel-edged NFL gladiator. He becames grandiose, elevating football to a mythic level and taking pleasure in the uniform's implicit permission to let him play out naked animal aggression. In other words, it's a sensationally honest moment. Eason is the narrator of this story more than he is an actor, and he's been directed to do a lot of business to sell it on stage. Once in a while that proves to be overly indicating, because his writing is strong enough and he's an inviting and confident enough personality to do the job with less.

New Jerusalem

I'm such a fan of David Ives that I rushed out to see the very first preview of his new play, New Jerusalem, and although there was some of that increasingly common line flubbing, I'm happy to report that this is a great new comic drama. Ives is a master of writing other people, and what he did for Twain's farce (or for the adaptations for the Encores! series) he's now doing for a great philosopher, Spinoza, communicating his thoughts with such clear strokes that it makes you want to rush out and buy a treatise or two. The play would be stronger to cut down on the gratingly comic half-sister, Rebekah (Jenn Harris) and the bland, shiftless friend cum traitor Simon (Michael Izquierdo), as their "revelations" at the end of the play aren't earned or justified, but it hardly matters so long as Jeremy Strong remains so breathlessly animated as Spinoza. The "interrogation" is casually directed by Walter Bobbie so as to make the audience the actual onlookers, and while this leads to some sloppy blocking, it actually works to help make the overacting seem more plausible -- this is, after all, one of the first trials that's a real circus, and it makes the proselytizing all the more engaging when it's spoken directly to you. Beneath the radical ideas about religion, faith, and humanity's place in the universe, there's also a neatly tragic tale of the father-figure forced to turn on his "son," and Richard Easton, who warms up to the role in the second act, is appropriately pained when he sadly announces "You've turned the stars into wandering dust." This show will get better by the time it actually opens in '08, and I urge you to check it out: Fyvush Finkel and David Garrison both also give solid, albeit stereotypical, performances as (respectively) a Jewish parnas and a Christian politician.

Cymbeline

Photo/Paul Kolnik

Ever wonder what a Shakespearean opera would look like? Well, Marc Lamos's cavernous production of Cymbeline has the visual feel of a modernist composition, all green-columned trees and ornate, clockwork landings, and it's tonally minimal at all, with very few actors rising above the general feeling of deja vu this play evokes (Iacomo could be Iago, Imogen's empotioned "death" could just as well be a more mature Juliet's). Short of the play's own failings -- the first act, for instance, is filled with familiar innuendos and comic twists whereas the second is all epic sword fights and visitations from spirits like Jupiter -- only Martha Plimpton, as Imogen, seems to be in complete control, channeling a little of playful Helena from Midsummer and a little of her tragic turn in Coast of Utopia, though she's well met by a very funny Adam Dannheisser as the incompetent Lord Cloten. However, much of the play feels like a waste of talent: Phylicia Rashad is talked about more than seen (as the Queen), and Richard Topol and Daniel Breaker, who introduce the play rather nicely, do little else.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Pumpgirl

Photo/Joan Marcus

Whether I was fatigued or not when I saw Pumpgirl, I found Hannah Cabell's performance as Pumpgirl, a butch-looking but inwardly feminine character caught up in the dismissive masculinity of Hammy (Paul Sparks) and his frigid wife, Sinead (Geraldine Hughes), to be the only good thing in this trio of interlinked monologues. With Pumpgirl herself, there's a human element, and that's lost on all of Hammy's reckless tics and Sinead's aimless affairs; worse still, the glass-over-desert-scrub set aims to be reflective and transparent, but accomplishes neither, a fogged over effect of Carolyn Cantor's work (whereas with LaBute's In A Dark, Dark House and Rapp's Essential Self-Defense, she was far more colorful, both in design and direction). There's also a brutality in Abbie Spallen's script that, while perhaps accurate, doesn't ever seem justified or linked to anything. The slightest mention of compassion makes the characters sneer about how they'd like to hit their wives or kick a child, and while this leads to some creative lines ("The bed with the invisible barbed wire down the center" or "it's like being spunked by an elephant"), for me, the show was best summarized by this subtle zinger: "I want him to go, but there's conversation to be made."

A Christmas Carol: the new musical

Scrooge's new story, as written by Kris Thor and Joel Bravo, isn't so much about moral redemption as it is about environmental reform, and the lesson here, delivered by a Grim Beekeeper -- as haunting a Christmas Future as can be -- is that it may in fact be too late to "reschedule" our fate. Jason Trachtenburg, a quirky indie-folk singer, plays a Scrooge oblivious to the harm his corporate actions have had on the environment, and even his patented humbug comes at the behest of an exceedingly creepy Christmas Present (Julie LaMendola). The hollow Vortex Theater allows for an informal presentation that has the audience sprawled on opposite lengths of what becomes a narrow hallway, cluttered on both other sides by Christmas Past's archives and Tiny Tim's radio broadcast center. However, the conflict is hard to distinguish amidst all the overlapping tunes -- which is, oddly enough, fine. While the dialogue might not make sense, the songs at least build to a frenzy of conflicting parts, and Act I ends with an appropriately bleak suicide; that of gruff Jacob Marley (Joe Ornstein), who is married to Scrooge's old flame, Belle (Tracy Weller). The music takes as much getting used to as the story; ultimately, the show is more interested in lyrics which are keened than plot points to be gleaned, which makes it the first act of musical absurdism I've ever seen. Bravo?

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

August: Osage County

photo: Joan Marcus

I'm not convinced that Tracy Letts' tragic/comic portrait of a dysfunctional family is ultimately a great play, but there's no doubt it's greatly entertaining melodrama and frequently very funny: it never lags, even at three and a half hours. (Its length is part of what's exciting about it: you don't expect the play to be able to sustain its juicy mix of comedy and soap opera over three acts but it does). As our attention is led around the rooms in the three-tiered house that is the play's set, the lurid subplots pile up one on top of the other - drugs, secret affairs, pedophilia, and so on - and although the inspirations may be some laughing-gassed mix of Sam Shepard and Chekhov, the result feels more like Robert Altman's film A Wedding: we laugh as we watch the colorful characters and their telenovella-level problems but we're halted at irregular intervals by something inescapably painful and sad. Letts' writing is textured and his dialogue lively and involving - he's given everyone in the ensemble some sensational material to play - and this is obviously a departure from earlier plays like Bug and Killer Joe. It restores the good name of melodrama, and that's more than enough to make it one of the year's best, but I suspect that August Osage County will turn out to be a warm-up for something with more depth and more thematic resonance from Letts in the future.