Thicker Than Water 2008

This collection of one-acts seems to be happier treading water, letting its under-35 playwrights get their feet wet, than in diving into anything serious. Even the laughs go no deeper than the kiddie pool, and with the exception of Justin Deabler's uncomfortably exaggerated Red, Blue, and Purple, the evening seems squandered on incomplete and marginal new plays: seven plays that at best put the cute in dysfuncutetion (as with Amy Herzog's 508) and at worst, sing -- badly (Delaney Britt Brewer's hippie folk musical about familial reconciliation It'll Soon Be Here). I could mention that the direction is efficient, but that's the last thing you want to hear in a review focusing on new one-act plays. It's also not enough, as the actors so often fall back on overemoting when they run out of things to actually say. I've seen great stuff from Youngblood artists before, so maybe this is just their way of getting it out of their system, pissing, if you will, into a wide ocean of thick, middling water. But hey, would it be too much to ask for some waves?

[Read on]

Sand

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Watching Trista Baldwin's play Sand, which in turn features actors staring, Godot-like, at more sand, brings to mind the words of everysoldier Justin (Alec Beard): "It's like I'm thirteen, at summer camp." Aside from Anita Fuchs's blasted clay set and Traci Klainer's mirage-like transitions in light, the plight of these three US soldiers, guarding a gas station, seems like nothing so much as a camping trip in hostile territory. The so-young veteran, Armando (Pedro Pascal), watches his warnings scatter into the wind, especially off the backs of Justin, a breezy kid from Springfield, and Keisha (Angela Lewis), a quiet girl born of the Wal-Mart generation. The strength of Baldwin's play comes from their casual conversations, utterly natural and unassuming bits of grit that seem both dirty and new, all at once. The show also benefits from the expert direction of Daniella Topol, who has made the dusty desert into a dreamscape that dances through gauzy backdrops and spins in and out of time to create an echoing effect -- like that of an hourglass -- in which minute scenes each fall, into a meticulous pile, until suddenly, there's an explosive result. But Baldwin's finale, which doubles Pascal as a fleshed-out Iraqi named Ahmed (who gives lines to the invisible border and voices to the unspoken truth), is so stuck in this halfway world that neither it nor the Glass-like music of Broken Chord Collective are half as effective as the quiet before the storm.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Passing Strange

If you've been reading this blog for more than a few weeks you already know that I was high last year on Passing Strange when it played downtown at The Public. I couldn't resist the show's first Broadway preview, hoping for the best but secretly worried that the show might get lost in a big house on a proscenium stage. I needn't have worried about that - the show fits easily into its new midtown home - but at first preview the show had a fresh round of issues thanks to revisions in the second act. By the time you read this, I've no doubt that at least some of them will have been fixed, so there's no good reason for me to say anything more about them than that. Instead, I'm going to reiterate that I'm rooting for this very special show to come together by the time it opens and I'm going to see it again in a couple of weeks when the show is frozen. More then.

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.

[Read on]

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.

[Read on]

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).