Under the Radar: Day 2

- This Place is a Desert

Photo/Hayden Taylor

"We can talk about love and all the ways it wraps itself around us until it's just another form of suffocation," cries one of the many characters caught up in the pains and pangs of Jay Scheib's This Place is a Desert. And that's exactly what happens: a series of tight and interconnected rooms give way to a tangled snarl of relationships that overlap and clash like human hurricanes. Furthermore, a series of cameras and a passive observer (Kenneth Roraback) air the real time scenes from multiple angles, catching each character's reactions like windows to the soul, a creative use of multimedia that allows for poetic, image-heavy transitions.

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- In Spite of Everything

Photo/Caroline Harvey

In Spite of Everything is the best use of spoken word that I've seen in a play yet; an urban yet arty mix of Laramie-like exploration and poetic imagination that divorces itself from reality even as it plunges itself back in, deeper, through brilliant metaphor. Only The Suicide Kings (Rupert Estanislao, Jaime DeWolf, and Geoff Trenchard) know how much of their story is true, but it hardly matters: whether it's a poem about getting fed up in the service industry, dealing with acne, or watching Columbine in reverse, there isn't a verse that isn't relevant, not a thought that someone in the audience won't agree with.

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- Low: Meditations Trilogy Part 1
Photo/Jean Jacques Tiziou

Low opens with a blank slate: an empty chair on one of those white-floored and white-walled setups most familiar from a modeling session or an Apple commercial. For the first fifteen minutes; Rha Goddess endears us to Low, putting a high squeak in her voice to sound purposefully cute, moving around the space freely yet gracefully. But Meditations is an all-too accurate description of this trilogy, for if the first part is any indication, her characters will all be internalized rather than experienced. Chay Yew has done an excellent job of casting cages of light on the floor, and moving his actor across the stage, but it's up to Rha to show us something more. Right now, Low is just talk, and it's nothing we haven't heard before.

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- Regurgitophagy

Photo/Debora 70

I'm sure that Michel Melamed's Regurgitophagy is a great stream-of-consciousness play: I say this because it's one of my fundamental beliefs that you should always give a man who is electrocuting himself the benefit of the doubt. But what I saw was a man desperately trying to communicate something to the audience about consciousness, and an audience desperately trying not to laugh. You see, thanks to Melamed's "Pau-de-Arara," any time we made noise, he'd get an electrical shock. Honestly? After ten minutes, I wanted to clap just to hurt him.

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Pinocchio

**** (...out of 5 stars)

Teatro Del Carretto at La Mama

This sexy, highly stylized, wildly theatrical production of the story of the puppet who wants to become a boy is glorious. Italian director Maria Grazia Cipriani has meticulously created a dusty, surreal, dark world that at times has the feel of a well produced Beckett play. Just beyond an imposing circular black wall, curious- possibly malevolent- masked figures lurk in the shadows and drift in and out of the playing space leading our hero on his journey. WARNING: This production is performed entirely in Italian. If you don't know a lick of Italian (like me) relaxing into the fact that you're not going to understand a single word and allowing the music of their movement and expressiveness guide you through this beautiful production is the best way to go about it. Whether you speak the language or not, this show is worth it.

Under the Radar: Day 1

I'm doing four days of Under the Radar mania. The first three days will focus on what's at The Public, while the fourth day will take in some of the site-specific works.

- Church

Photo/Ryan Jensen

For the most part, Young Jean Lee's Church, a quiet exploration of the power of faith, avoids the pontification that she declaims early on as "masturbation rage." Instead of focusing on anything negative, she opens with a voice calling out from the darkness, then introduces us to four ordinary people, Reverends Jose (Brian Bickerstaff), Weena (Weena Pauly), Katie (Katie Workum), and Katy (Katy Pyle), who each deliver a sermon asking simply for our prayers to help them (and us) through the most understandable of troubles in our lives: the tendency to whine, for instance. The play then moves into a series of absurd testimonials which, because they are delivered straightly, without satire and with tenderness, give us a touchstone for why some people are able to believe, and why others are not.

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- Poetics: A Ballet Brut

Photo/Peter Nigrini

They may not be from Oklahoma, but if Nature Theater of Oklahoma's recent works prove anything, it's that they understands nature: human nature. Just as No Dice exaggerated our casual conversations through the veil of dinner theater, Poetics takes our ordinary movements and filters them through a dream ballet. They dress like hip twentysomethings, all colorful sneakers, funny socks, and graphic Ts; and they act like us -- sipping on a soda, crossing their arms behind their head or placing their hands in their pockets, basically trying to find a way to idle comfortably on a narrow swath of space between the audience and a looming red curtain. And when these movements start coming together in sync, as "All By Myself" starts playing, they dance like us too, or like those of us who don't know how to dance would dance (or have danced: like children, unfettered by form, unrestricted by rules).

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WORKSHOP: Crime or Emergency

This performance of Crime or Emergency was part of the SoHo Rep Studio, and as such is still a work-in-progress. That's good; I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable reviewing it: Sibyl Kempson's half-cabaret half-theater schism of a play is not the sort of thing I'd normally go to, and it's a valuable lesson learned on my part. I don't like entrenched, cult theater: I want everything for everybody. Still, I certainly support Kempson's risks, and I'm glad she's got an audience that appreciates her.

Amazons And Their Men

photo: Carl Skutsch

Rebecca Wisocky plays "The Frau" (code for Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl) with eyebrows up and cheeks sucked in: she's a couple of hand flourishes away from turning into Norma Desmond descending the staircase. No one else on stage seems to live in the same silent screen pantomime world that The Frau does, which is fine considering that she's the only one gripped by an artistic vision. As Jordan Harrison's seriocomic play imagines the director, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland, she's tired of filming rallies and hyperfocused on making a "pure art" feature film in which she plays Penthesilea. She has to employ Jews and gypsies and other "undesirables" on the Nazis' dime to realize her vision: the playwright intriguingly links her ruthless artistic perfectionism and her blind passion with Fascism. But the most compelling contradiction about Riefenstahl - that her work honoring the heinous Nazi party which subsidized her did in fact yield stunningly beautiful works of visual art - seems beside the point of this play, which is more interested in her as a metaphor than as a believable complex character and visionary artist. She's simplified into dictator and destroyer to serve the playwright's aims.

COIL: Particularly in the Heartland

Particularly in the Heartland is a fantastic journey into the meaning of America, a tale that unites not only a left-wing New York businesswoman (Jessica Almasy) with a trio of Rapture-fearing Christian children (Kristen Sieh, Frank Boyd, and Libby King), but with their American past, a resurrected Robert Kennedy (Jake Margolin), and their probable future, a pregnant alien (more like the immigrant kind) named Tracy Jo (Jill Frutkin). The collaboration of a hard-boiled theater group shows: their subtle nuances all succeed, and director Rachel Chavkin gets away with some of the most fluid and heartbreaking montages. If anything, it's the more experimental stuff that gets in the way -- the audience adds nothing to the performance -- and the play, though I suspect left intentionally lumpy in places, could benefit from being about fifteen minutes shorter.

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