An Evening With Carol Channing

Left at intermish.

Wings Theatre

In the ads for this two-act tribute there is a quote from the real Carol Channing: "The first time ever I have been shown with so much love, respect, and polish!". That sums it up nicely. But when real Carol Channing has so happily and actively become a caricature of herself over the years, what's the point in playing her any other way than for the laughs?- especially when you're a man in a dress. Throughout the classic Carol songs and monologues narrating her life story, Richard Skipper's carefully restrained portrayal is equal parts polite, genial and boring. Though it must be noted that there were plenty of people in the audience who were charmed by this comfortable, safe delivery- at one point there was happy clapping when "Carol" said at the end of a story that she'd "gotten the part!". Is it wrong to prefer a Carol Channing who gangsta raps and shows off her panties when she hitch-kicks? I suppose that's what my buddy and I were looking for on a Friday night on Christopher Street in the West Village, so we wandered out at intermission and started our bar crawl a little early.

The Maddening Truth

photo: Theresa Squire

The current Keen Company play, which concerns the career crisis of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Marth Gellhorn while in her mid-60's, is unfocused: I didn't know what it was driving at until the final scene. Until then, smartly-dressed Lisa Emery moves from chair to typewriter quite a lot as the famed journalist, looking too young for the role and talking to this one or that one (including Hemingway, in flashback scenes) mostly about the demons that have kept her from turning novelist. Too many of these conversations are contrived and ring false, especially the ones with a long term adulterous lover who is essentially a handsome silver-haired sounding board for her too-declamatory dialogue. The play provides something of a genuine character foil for Gellhorn in a young lit snob whose rising career contrasts Gellhorn's water-treading, but we don't see enough of him: if their confrontations were the narrative spine of the play, The Maddening Truth might not be so maddening.

The Main(e) Play

Photo/Ryan Jensen

I'm a fan of playwright Chad Beckim, but The Main(e) Play needs to drop the burdensome (and often contradictory) asides and get down to the main point. His new play is blessed with two good actors (Alexander Alioto and Michael Gladis), doing the best work I've seen from either, but it doesn't have the richness of character and circumstance that 'nami did, nor does it have the straightforward narrative and first-person demands of Lights Rise on Grace. It's also a lot tamer: almost all of the action in this play is implied or taking place off stage -- it also strains credibility that a seven-year-old "monster" of a child, whose toys are strewn about the place, and whose violence is enough to drive two brothers apart, never actually appears in the play. I'm also disappointed in director Robert "In the Continuum" O'Hara, who directs so leadenly that the set seems like an obstacle for him. In any case, with a little less telling back and forth, and some wisely edited scenes, there's a good story about the alienation from home that comes with age; until then, stick to more honest work, like Bombs in Your Mouth.

[Read on]

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.

[Read on]

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.