Me, Myself & I

photo by: T. Charles Erickson

****1/2 (...out of five stars)

McCarter Theatre Center

Princeton, New Jersey

Two down, two to go in this happy season of Albee productions! I'm just gonna sit here and drool for a few sentences- I hope that's not a problem. Just as fascinating and edgy as his recent production of Peter And Jerry, Albee's newest play, Me, Myself & I, provoked gasps of shock and hysterical laughter from our audience. This very theatrical, highly personal work concerned a mother- accused of being 'demented"- who is having terrible problems with her twin sons. Everything we've come to expect from an Albee production is here: the top notch cast (fucking Tyne Daly and Brian Murray!), tight direction (Emily Mann is on fire), fierce dialogue, ten dimensional characters, and those brilliant moments where you're caught completely off-guard. Favorite line: Maureen: "Cunt!" Mother: "You can't say that onstage!". Pay New Jersey transit $11.75 and they will pick you up at Penn Station and drop you off right in front of the McCarter theater in around 80 minutes. Princeton is gorgeous and the McCarter is the real deal. It was a very good day.

Hunting and Gathering

Photo/James Leynse

Brooke Berman's new play, Hunting and Gathering has the personal connection -- the playwright's been in and out of homes since the '90s (she writes about it on her blog) -- the hipster street cred of a YouTube tie-in, and a ticket initiative at the occasionally musty Primary Stages ($20 tickets through 2/2 with code PS35 if you're under 35). It's got an LED, Buck Hunter, and plausible definitions for words like "couch surfing" and "housesitting." But the big-box ideas of Hunting and Gathering are overflowing with Styrofoam wit; from Ikea to Park Slope ("a place where everyone pretends it's Woodstock"), it's all just glittery surface, a long stretch of disconnect between what's said (ahem, referenced) and what's experienced. This works well for the direction of Leigh Silverman, who dresses up the presentations as slickly as she can, emphasizing that home is what you make of it, and for the cast (especially Michael Chernus), who excel -- perhaps a little too well -- at playing in the shallows.

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Sunday In The Park With George

***
Roundabout

Second Preview Alert! No sense in elaborating on the performances as they will be evolving over the next couple of weeks. I assume the design is frozen so lets talk about that. The science of animated projections, which was the big gimmick in The Woman In White, is back again here in Sondheim's Pulitzer Prize winner and it's just as dim, faux and blurry around the edges. There is intermittent visual whimsy like when our George Seurat is narrating a conversation between a pair of dogs "rolling around in mud and dirt" but for this first Broadway revival to rely so heavily on the projections in a show that is so noted for its gorgeous scenic design was a bit of a let down. Aside from a few pieces of furniture and a couple of draped curtains (and no tangible Chromolume), all we have to transport us to La Grande Jatte is projected onto the walls via this digital trick that seems to still be in its novelty phase. Add to that a mere 5 person orchestra tucked away in a box stage left and we have a first major revival that came off looking kinda cheap.

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.

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