Actors Are F*@#ing Stupid

*** (...out of 5 stars)

Push Productions

Never underestimate the importance of a good title. I ran to this. Written by actor Ian McWethy, this is his scathing one act rant against the soul-crushing machine of the audition process. Pretty much every character inhabiting the audition room and the adjacent waiting room is diabolical and self-absorbed. Everyone craves money, fame, and sex and if you're not offering then fuck you. This is guerilla theater at its most acidic and if sometimes it goes a little overboard with the profanity (I appreciate a good "fuck" as much as the next guy but less is more) and the yelling (the director character is going to lose is voice!), there is an edgy, raw, underground vibe made this a very fun and snarky night at the theater. HGA!

The Play About The Naked Guy

photo: Erica Parise

Personal Bias? Meet Door. I leave you there time and time again as policy. Not this time: I'm too pleased for my friend and fellow ShowShowdowner David Bell to have anything remotely objective to write about his fun and farcical, often theatre-insiderish comedy. Instead, I'll point you toward this thumbs-up in Variety and this "critic's pick" take in Backstage. And I'll tell you that "My safe word is Sutton Foster!" is the funniest line I have heard in months. Forgive me for spoiling it, but it's just too delicious. Congratulations, David!

The Crucible

photo: Schoolhouse Theater

Who could say how many thousands of young girls have sprung up from their seats to shout "I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil!" since Arthur Miller's classic Salem witch hunt drama premiered? Oft-performed all over the country at all levels of proficiency, the play has endured beyond its shelf life as an indictment of the McCarthy trials of the 1950's and surely stands as the most popular, widely-read American play to caution against theocracy. (Really, is there anything else that comes close that is assigned reading year after year for the average public high schooler?) It's partly because the play is so familiar and so often seen that this production's most distinguishing directorial touch is so effective: all of the actors in the ensemble sit on either side of the stage when not needed in a scene, as if they form a community that has come together in ritual to tell us this story. This conceit also suggests, as echoed by the set design, that all the settings of the play from bedroom to courtroom are public spaces when Church and State are enmeshed. The production, transferred from Westchester's Schoolhouse Theater and currently enjoying a limited run on the Upper West Side, is effective and finally wrenching as it should be, thanks in part to the play's especial revelance in this election season (Mike Huckabee, anyone?) and in part of course to some very good performances from key members of the ensemble.

Sunday in the Park with George

Photo/Joan Marcus

I don't buy the shift between the first act and the second, either in tone or in music, but I'll take everything else about this masterful revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, especially the integral projection design of Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, a seamless effect that allows us to see what the music makes us feel for George Seurat's passion. Jenna Russell deserves to steal the spotlight as Dot, the model-turned-lover that Seurat abandons for his drawings, and then again as her granddaughter, the aged but saucy old Marie: she nails the patter of "Sunday in the Park with George," slides resignation into the yawning notes of "Everybody Loves Lewis," and puts the pain in painting for the tragic, "We Do Not Belong Together." She's also one of the few people aside from Patti LuPone who can sing a groan. But credit where credit is due to Daniel Evans, who dabs his notes in "Color and Light" as if he were painting rather than singing, and finds the high playfulness and low seriousness as he explores his subjects -- two dogs -- in "The Day Off." I say little about the songs in the second act because the first act's already done them right, although "Putting It Together" does well to show the fixed smiles and strains associated with modern art. If "pretty isn't beautiful/beautiful is what changes before the eye" then it's no wonder that the first act, with a set scribbled in and out of existence, is so marvelous.

The Slug Bearers Of Kayrol Island

photo: Carol Rosegg

This deadpan-hip sung-through musical is visually strange and strangely hypnotic: the actors move about a stage full of flat projections of colorful drawings and animations, an alternate reality in which the characters live in cartoon apartments in a cartoon Manhattan. The visuals, along with the melodically simple music, give the sensation that we're watching a modern-day urban fable: when the bored-with-life daughter of a moneyed philanthropist is suddenly compelled to right one of the world's wrongs (specifically, she travels to an island where exploited workers toil for the metal slugs that wind up, for no good reason except to give the illusion of heft and value, in modern appliances) we're prepped for a gentle condemnation of misguided liberal do-gooders. (The fact that the new beau on her arm adores and collects instruction manuals, and expects the workers to embrace such "poetry", seals the deal). But this message is confused with another cross-purposed one early in the second act and thereby doesn't land as it should; I'll simply say, in the interest of not giving anything away, that the workers' exploitation is not what it seems. And although I wouldn't call it monotonous, the show's music becomes fatiguing in its sameness after about an hour: you want to say "get on with it already!" during most of the recicative, when the music does little except protract simple conversation. The material cries out to be cropped down to a one-act. All this said, I wouldn't warn anyone who values the offbeat away from this show. There's thought and invention here, and more than a little bit of visual magic.

The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower)

Photo/Carol Rosegg

I found Ben Katchor's The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island to be about as satisfying as I imagine the codeine-laced Kayrol Cola used to drug the stevedore population of slug bearers would be: stuporterrific in the theater, while under constant dosage, and bemusedly benign afterward. The direction, performances, and music are all strong enough to even out the intentionally broad strokes, and the play is decidedly jubilant in mood and satire, but there's no development, simply a roughly hewn plot. There's also a slight design issue: Katchor's art, animated and projected onto both a foreground and background scrim, so as to perpetually sandwich the actors in the midst of wacky colors, looks good, but not up in the first few rows of seating (the illusion doesn't work). Ultimately, the actors in the play are like the metal slugs from the title: they weigh down flimsy thoughts with their presence, from the maniacal rictus found on Stephen Lee Anderson's face to the determined naivety of Bobby Steggert or the contrasts between Peter Friedman's strong paternal presence and Tom Riis Farrell's comically maternal characters. I'm detecting a linguistic theme in the Vineyard's programming this season, but whereas the upcoming God's Ear has a extreme focus, The Slug Bearers comes across as entertaining largely for being defiantly different, not for being extraordinarily engaging.

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