Crimes Of The Heart

Roundabout


First Preview Alert! As this revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play is still finding itself (and I think it will find itself within the week), I'll only offer up a few observations.

1. My Lily Rabe is MIA. Dammit. (Though understudy Jessica Cummings was charming.)
2. If you sit house left, you can intermittently hear dialogue from another play being performed- possibly from a rehearsal hall or from Speech And Debate playing in Roundabout's smaller space. Oops.
3. I can't stop looking at the way Chandler Williams is filling out his pants. Yum.

xodb

Almost An Evening

One of the toughest tickets in town right now is this trio of short one-act mindfucks by Ethan Coen. The middle one is a dud, save for a fun visual joke near the top, but the opener - about a guy whose afterlife in Purgatory gets screwed up seemingly by red tape and human error - is terrific. It plays like a black comedy version of an old Twilight Zone episode. Even better is the show's final one-act, which kicks off with God (played with gusto by F. Murray Abraham) berating the audience: "They're called the Ten Commandments you assholes not the Ten Suggestions!". Coen has written these plays so that each scene peels back a layer to reveal what's really going on - in other words, the less you know going in the better because the fun is in Coen's gradual reveal. While ultimately slight, the show is thorny, playful fun and, except that the scene changes are too long and threaten to break the momentum, the production is smart and precise. The show's entire run sold out in advance of performnces, but it's worth braving the stand-by line.

The 39 Steps

Photo/Joan Marcus

Everything that was impressive about Gutenberg! The Musical! and The Eaten Heart is lost on the gigantic set of the American Airlines Theater (Famous last words: "It was supposed to be a cast of four! A cast of four!"): Maria Aitken's clever direction often just gets swallowed up, as does this trite farce, which runs out of steam at about the same time that Richard Hannay (Charles Edwards) gets fed up with his co-stars (Cliff Saunders and Arnie Burton): "That's enough," he says at last, confronted with yet another "inanimate object" blocking his midnight escape. Saunders, who has already juggled roughly thirty characters (like lovable Mr. Memory) obliges, scurrying offstage to change for his next role -- that of a terse innkeeper -- while Hannay and fellow handcuffee, Pamela (Jennifer Ferrin) walk around in circles wide enough to set up the next scene. It screams gimmick, and while the first half of the play is loud enough to be wholly entertaining (especially if you recognize key props from the Hitchcock film or listen for the constant puns: "No! Don't go out that way! Use the Rear Window!), the entire package is too big and sleek for its own good. That said, the ensemble ought to get a gold star for being such good sports: it takes a very special sort of skill to be that believably silly.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Widows

Photo/Colin D. Young

Widows is a political play that digs remarkably deep, showing the stubbornness, futility, fearfulness, and courage of passive resistance -- and of military governance. Ariel Dorfman's script is best when it wells up into a rapids of sound that could smash even the sturdiest of rocks on the shore, but director Hal Brooks has done a solid job throughout, confining the action to a raft of a stage that, while occasionally tilting, is never in danger of sinking. Of particular note is the paradoxical tone of the play -- a loss even in victory, a victory even in a loss -- that has Sofia Fuentes (the strong Ching Valdes-Aran) rebelling by waiting (because she cannot bear to wait any more) and her nemesis, the good-intentioned but naive Captain (the excellently tormented Mark Alhadeff) trying to avoid using the force that he knows will only weaken them all.

[Read on]

Reading: Don't Fuck With Love

While Kate Matschullat has successfully modernized her adaptation of Alfred de Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour, in which a father tries to marry his son and his son's cousin (now a step-daughter), the philosophy of this play doesn't speak loud enough (despite the screaming title) to necessitate a revival, and this coming from someone who would love to see Jeanine Serralles playing so coy and intellectual a role. I have faith that it will get there in development with Red Bull, although I worry that while Lear deBessonet can easily direct this play (she connected well with the philosophical transFigures and got the heart of Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards), the mixed media of the cyberspace injected into the show might needlessly bog her down. I wonder, too, about the necessity of paparazzi who speak in verse . . . but these are just thoughts from a delighted audience member who knows this is a work-in-progress, and who is eager to see what comes next.

Under The Radar (Site-Specific)

-Small Metal Objects

Photo/Jeff Busby

The drug-dealing plot of Small Metal Objects may be slight, but the location -- a suspenseful South Ferry Station -- and the actors -- from diminutive specks to fully realized characters -- elevate it through the frisson of the unpredictable into the poetics of the ordinary. For once, we aren't tuning out the plights of our anonymous brethren, and by stopping our busy lives, looking around, and really listening, we get closer to the most beautiful thing theater can give us: a real sense of connection.

[Read on]

-Of All The People in the World: USA

Photo/Ed Dimsdale

I'm not sure the routine assembly of rice into breathtaking mounds of statistics counts as a play (I've put it down for half of one), but the theatrical presentation of raw numbers is a staggering success. This international tour, Of All the People in the World, finally stops in the US (specifically the World Financial Center), and, using one grain for each person, shows us contrasts that are both serious and slight, as with the ratio of millionaires in the world to the number of refugees or "Number of viewers for the final episode of "'Sex and the City'" versus "Single Women in Manhattan." It's all bigger than you'd think and thanks to the sheer willfulness of counting and displaying all that rice, its obtuseness in the midst of a business sector: these things make the facts unavoidable, and all the more powerful.

[Read on]