Edward The Second

photo: Brian Dilg

While Marlowe's four-century-old tragedy has always featured the doomed gay love affair between the King and his low-born "favourite" Gaveston, this highly visceral production (from Red Bull, using an adaptation by Garland Wright) hyperfocuses on it with relentless intensity, as did Derek Jarman's film version a couple of decades ago. It's now, more than anything else, a story of devastation wrought by homophobia. While this mutes some of the play's themes (we're likely to think that Edward is an ineffectual king not because of his consuming passion for another person but because he's the victim of anti-gay persecution) the in-your-face, queer-revisionist result is nonetheless vivid and exciting theatre: it jolts us into seeing the story in a new way. The production, under Jesse Berger's intelligent direction, derives some of its power from its volatile blend of the elegant with the sensational (the sex and violence play out overtly) and its stylish, always purposefully anachronistic visual design. The rest is derived from the cast, commendably up to the challenge of delivering this freshly-contextualized story with sharp clarity. Although Gaveston's political ambitiousness is absent from this version, Kenajuan Bentley is able to hint at some stirrings below the character's surface. And in the production's most electrifying performance, Matthew Rauch plays an entitled, hurricane-eye deliberateness at the center of Mortimer's animal aggressiveness.

Trojan Women

Photo/Enid Farber

The problem Alfred Preisser runs into with his adaptation and direction of Euripides' Trojan Women is that the audience he's trying to affect with lists of modern atrocities is protected by two things: first, a steel cage designed by Troy Hourle that shields us more than it imprisons them; second, a wide variety of general statements, delivered by a bland ensemble that bleeds together into a wall of sound. The play needs to step outside the box, not hide within it. There are some standout performances from Tryphena Wade, as the aggrieved seer, Cassandra; Michael Early, as a two-faced diplomat with genuine remorse with his task; and Zainab Jah as an oily Helen of Troy, wrapping both her body and words around men like Meneleus (Ty Jones), but there's a disappointing uniformity in the rest of the cast, especially in deposed Queen Hecuba (Lizan Mitchell), who sputters and fumes without any real desperation or sense of purpose.

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Heather Christian and the Arbornauts in "North"

Photo/Courtland Premo

Heather Christian and the Arbornauts could've chosen a better theatrical vehicle to widen their exposure than the crashing plane of their new show, North, but given the seemingly unlimited range of Mrs. Christian's voice, the packaging hardly matters. She's absolutely arresting, one of the few female singers I've seen who can honestly be called a siren (after her ability to freeze her upper register and vibrate it so it sounds like the wailing of a melodic police car). That shouldn't excuse the ambiguity of the wintry set, or the static snow and loopy graphics of the sundry televisions, but it does. Had the actual theater been as cold as the "plot," I'd have sat through it to hear Heather lilt through covers of The Decemberists ("The Engine Driver") and Cyndi Lauper ("All Through The Night"), not to mention her own songs, like the titular "North."

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2.5 Minute Ride

It's not easy to walk a mile in another person's shoes, especially when they're as cynically comedic as Lisa Kron, and yet, Nicole Golden, playing sweet innocence as Kron in a revival of the actor's autobiographical 2.5 Minute Ride, manages to go the distance. She does so in her own way, with lights instead of photographs, and warmth instead of crackling self-deprecation, but the emotions are the same, and it's impressive that Golden can shed tears for a theatrically adopted family. The play occasionally falters when director Matt M. Morrow has to slow the jumps between Sandusky, Ohio, and Auschwitz, Poland, or when Golden has to imitate Kron's father, but what roller coaster isn't a little bumpy? There's honesty aplenty, and that's the important part.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Photo/Neil Hanna

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, in addition to being the premiere play of new multimedia theater group 1927, is also an idiomatic expression for being given a choice between two dangerous alternatives. I'm sad to report that this production, which has won several awards in UK festivals, is actually a remarkably tame and crude combination of real people and animated backgrounds -- writer/director/performer Suzanne Andrade speaks truly when she announces that what we'll see are "ten strange stories and terrible tales." But saying so doesn't really excuse such scrapheap stories, stories only occasionally salvaged by their unique presentation as faux 1920 video projections: multimedia done classically. Their result is what I imagine rerecording an mp4 onto an eight-track might sound like.

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Etiquette

You know how Heddatron tried to make Ibsen larger than life? Well, Rotozaza's extremely intimate new piece, Etiquette, places the world of Ibsen solely on your shoulders -- specifically in the palm of your hand and on the stage of your dinner table, as that's where you (yes, you) will be performing their play, if you buy a ticket for you, A, and a friend, B (the $20 tickets only come in pairs). To a degree, this is a gimmick: to a larger extent, it's an immersing experience which you take part in by simply putting on headphones and following the instructions (without fear of right or wrong). Now how's that for theater conversation?

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