The Main(e) Play

photo: Ryan Jensen

I thought I had this new living-room drama (by Chad Beckim) all figured out within fifteen minutes: here we are again as so many times before watching the guy who's made some good in the big city returning to the frozen-in-time working class suburban home he fled years before. But the condascension I feared toward the blue collar characters was nowhere to be seen, and it quickly became apparent that the playwright was interested in rendering the two brothers at the center of the story - the actor who left and the single father who stayed - with respect and dignity. The play is at its naturalistic best when these two are its focus: the gulf between them, even at their kindest to each other, is well-observed and credible. The play gets a bit bogged down with eleventh hour exposition of the melodramatic backstory kind - less would have been more there - and the play's other characters are not as interesting as the brothers. But the playwright's dialogue almost never rings false and the play ultimately has a quiet, affecting melancholy as it finally evokes the contradiction that while you can never go home again, neither can you ever really leave home behind.

Slaughterhouse-Five or: The Children's Crusade

Photo/Donata Zanotti

Despite Joe Tantalo's interruptive "time shift" staging, Eric Simonson has adapted enough of Vonnegut's novel to thrill those familiar with Slaughterhouse-Five. It doesn't help that the acting is divisive, and although the central Billy (Gregory Konow) holds the show together with a knowing smile and Zen-like grace, the message doesn't connect, and the satire turns to clowning, clowning done atop a blood-soaked stage. There are glimpses of strength in the palm-flashlight portrayal of the alien Tralfamadorians, but even the best work of Deanna McGovern, who bleeds bits of her characters into one another as she spins from Billy's wife to daughter to mother, comes across as accidental: that's how loose of a show this is.

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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.