The Play About the Naked Guy

I've always prided myself on my ability to speak honestly and without bias, so I hope you'll trust me when I tell you that if fellow Show Showdowner David's play, The Play About the Naked Guy, had sucked, I'd have let you all know with a quiet demurral. Luckily, I can instead praise, full-bore, this insider satire (I want to say insitire) about the lengths -- pun intended -- art has to go if it wants to be commercially viable. For all the depressing observations about what succeeds Off-Broadway, I didn't shed a single tear as I was too busy laughing at the exaggerations: think the style of Ugly Betty, but applied to theater, rather than fashion. And director Tom Wojtunik, who I thought was trapped by the conventions of Six Degrees of Separation, is thankfully free to crank things up to 11 here, a level of volume that the cast is all too eager to indulge in.

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Claymont

Kevin Brofsky's Claymont is one hell of a plausible play, and it steps so quietly that it defies of the cliches of a much-traveled road. As directed by Derek Jamison, it even manages to make the most of necessarily comic devices (like Wynne Anders, who finds real heart in the human concern of Dolores) or to play enough against type that it can joke about Sharon Letts (Aimee Howard) seeming to come straight out of Valley of the Dolls. But, like the town in question, the play is unconscionably flat: talented as Jason Hare is -- playing the lead, Neil, as an excitable boy whose repressed sexuality makes him vibrate out of his own skin -- Claymont aches for something as conversation-starting as a pool of blood. Despite having high stakes, like rebellious Dallas's impending draft notice (the play is set in 1969), the play refuses to have a cow about any of it. Sweet's fine for Neil's climax in Act I, but everyone's just a little too easy-going (or lifeless) throughout for the play to leave a lasting impression.

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Providence

photo: Ian Crawford

Two couples (one platonic, one married) have a brief chance meeting in an airport terminal: the men are seeing the ladies off to a flight that goes horribly wrong and takes their lives. In the aftermath, the men form an uneasy connection with each other rooted in loss and grieving. The play skillfully follows their increasingly meaningful friendship while simultaneously depicting the ladies on board the doomed airplane and, as if that wasn't enough for a playwright (Cody Daigle) and a director (Ian Crawford) to have on the plate, then alternates these scenes with flashbacks of both couples leading up to the fateful flight. It's evidence of Daigle's ability with structure and Crawford's talent for concise staging that the play's events seem to flow naturally and easily with complete clarity, and it's always a pleasure to encounter a new writer who has come up with a real dyed in the wool play that makes use of possibilities unique to the stage. (The payoff here is a quartet where the two couples' scenes play out simultaenously). However, the flashback business that Daigle has written for the platonic couple rings false and overdramatic, a minor disappointment in a play with so many otherwise true and lovely moments about grief. (Not to mention welcome moments of mitigating humor particularly from Aly Wirth, an actress who can get a knowing laugh out of a single withering look at a stewardess).

Langston In Harlem

The good thing about seeing a new musical in workshop is the excitement of fresh work up on its feet before it's sure of its legs, especially when there's the will and the talent to try some new unknown and untested moves. Langston In Harlem most definitely falls into that adventurous, form-pushing category. The downside is that I can't, with conscience, say much of anything about ithe show except that the workshop left me keenly interested in seeing a fully realized production.

Sand

photo: Carol Rosegg

Although the presentation is sometimes heavy-handed, and the play doesn't offer (or aim for) the neatness of a tidy narrative, there is plenty to admire about Trista Baldwin's serious and often spellbinding new play in which three U.S. soldiers find themselves at a gas pump in the Iraqi desert. The drama begins simply enough in straightforward fashion - the three seem to form a microcosmic sample of current-day American soldiers, encountering varying degrees of moral struggle with their mission - but the play soon begins toying with continuity and destroying our sense of security with what we are seeing. By the time one of three (the always excellent Pedro Pascal) enters as a fourth character - a boombox-toting Iraqi - the play has so effectively meshed reality and the hallucinatory that we are on high alert to tease the two apart. Yet, part of what is distinctive and interesting here is that figuring out what's real and what's not is not really the point of this war play. The confusion and the disorientation is. Sand isn't agressively abrasive but neither is it comfort theatre offering easy answers. Recommended.

The Lifeblood

Photo/Gerry Goodstein

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble puts on a beautiful work of political intrigue and dark drama that manages to be subtle and broad, funny and tragic, and well-staged throughout. I'm a particular fan of the heady physical rage that Craig Smith channels through his menacing Spymaster Francis Walsingham in contrast to the graceful but sharp tongue of imprisoned Queen Mary (Elise Stone, whose performance took a while to grow on me). Robert Hupp does well to keep things bleak yet hopeful in his staging of this historically entertaining play: only the final act of Glyn Maxwell's The Lifeblood is disappointing. Otherwise, this play is filled with rich villainy, scathing wits, and desperate souls.

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