Killing the Boss

Photo/Martin Snyder

Save for the fierce power of the play within a play in Catherine Filloux's new play Killing the Boss, I feel that this show is killing time more than anything else. The autobiographical parts of this play are buried in the nightmare-like presentation (both figurative and literal), and the play suffers from refusing to commit enough to any idea long enough for us to feel for it. I understand that the setting is unnamed, but since it's most likely Cambodia, the choice to embody the show with so little atmosphere or culture just leaves it floating in a void (much like the cryptic goldfish bags of water that make up the "set"). Worse still, the majority of the script shies away from the clever observations Filloux made in her last collaboration with director Jean Randich (Lemkin's House) and toward flippant dark humor (when an MS-riddled character, is told that he's "on the ground" of the embassy's attempts to locate his missing wife, he promptly falls out of his chair and says, "I guess so"). The play does not achieve the "strange existential kind of hilarity" with jokes like those, and the lack of substance drowns even the better actors in the shallows of empty talk.

[Read on]

Grace

photo: Joan Marcus

As the title character, a staunch "naturalist" who has long held firm that religion is ignorant superstition that is largely to blame for the world's horrors, Lynn Redgrave is riveting, electrifying. She gives Grace both crusty arrogance and near-consuming passion . As the sometimes provocative one-act drama unfolds, out of chronological order but always with clarity, we see Grace's belief system shaken to the core when her son (Oscar Isaac) decides to become an Episcopal minister. Their dynamic, lucid arguments are the meat of the play, each unwavering (until tragedy intervenes) at what seems to be an impossible emotionally charged impasse. Engrossing as the arguments are, and effective and memorable the performances, the dialogue often makes the two sound like walking mouthpieces rather than characters engaged in real-life debate. But if you can look past that, as I did, Grace is thoughtful and absorbing and scores high on the Talk About It After Over Drinks punchcard.

Applause

photo: Joan Marcus

Applause, which re-sets the All About Eve Broadway backstage story in the polyester early '70's, was never a good musical. But with a campy sense of humor and a larger than life star as Margo Channing it can be a fun and tacky-fabulous gassss, baby! This Encores! edition was about as groovy as a funeral, weighted down by joyless earnestness (thanks to Kathleen Marshall's humor-free direction) and the barely-committed, far less than fun star performance by a pitilessly miscast still on-book even for the songs Christine Ebersole. With all the cheap fun drained away to expose the mediocrity of the score and the book (strike that - the score is sometimes less than even medicore, with bummers like "Fasten Your Seat Belts" worthy of serious consideration as the worst musical number of modern times) the show is a disaster - straightfaced rather than camp - and you start to resent that talented people like Kate Burton and Chip Zien have been rounded up to lend support to such a woefully misguided enterprise. (Mario Cantone, subdued and acid-funny as Duane The Hairdresser, is the only performer who makes a favorable impression) Would Patti Lupone and Leslie Kritzer have been too much to ask the theatre gods for?

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?

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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.