Passing Strange

Photo/Carol Rosegg

According to his fictional autobiography, Stew had a religious experience listening to the rock 'n' roll of his local church service; his play, Passing Strange, now passes that music back to its Broadway audience as if to make it a religious experience for us. The music is certainly big enough to do the trick -- particularly when Stew booms the words on "Keys" or "Work the Wound" -- and it's also diverse enough to play bright contrasts and colors, jumping from the pure comedy of "We Just Had Sex," to spoofs of punk ("Sole Brother") or Broadway ("The Black One"), to layered songs like "Must've Been High," and to character pieces like "Amsterdam." Stew knows the rules, he just chooses to break most of them, and as a result, his powerhouse show comes across as philosophy with a beat as his younger self, Youth (Daniel Breaker) struggles to identify himself, and to find the Real. I'm also happy to report that the Broadway transfer has tightened the gears on everything except for the finale, which feels disconnected now. Not that you'll notice, given how much better Mr. Breaker's gotten, both physically and lyrically.

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Year One of the Empire

Photo/Louise Elard

The problem with Year One of the Empire, aside from the fact that it's three acts long, is that it bloodlessly tackles a large American injustice. Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler have assembled hundreds of texts for this "play of American politics, war, and protest taken from the historical record," but one begs for some measure of Chuck Mee-like elaboration to this collage, for without some boundary pushing flair, the show flatlines through the paces. At its best, the show is history up on its feet, but those unwilling to read a New Yorker essay about the water cure are unlikely to sit through three hours of back-of-your-seat drama; at its worst, the show features actors who would make your seventh-grade history teacher look good. Due to illness, a stand-in went on for Lee Dobson: understandably, he read lines off a clipboard. (I'm can't say why John Tobias was using a script, only that it looked very unprofessional.) It says a lot about the passivity of the play that these recitations sounded no different from anything else.

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Lustre, A Mid-Winter Trans-Fest

photo: Adrian Buckmaster

Justin Bond's show at PS 122, on the occasion of his Ethyl Eichelberger Award, is a queer-cool cabaret-style evening in which he generously shares the lounge-lit stage with several other gender-bent performers. The show is instantly downtown hip but it's pleasurably unpretentious and laid-back: no one is trying to one-up anyone else and a palpable sense of fabulous but humble community makes itself felt. (So much so that it almost seems redundant when Bond's banter becomes briefly political.) Accompanied by a small combo led by downtown star Our Lady J at the piano, Bond goes through almost as many costume changes as he does songs: respectively, my favorites were the mesh gown and the cover of Traffic's "Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys". His guests provided more variety than I expected: in their appearance and movement, a group called The Pixie Harlots paraded a distinctive blend of masculine aggression and feminine flourish, Nathan Carrera played acoustic guitar in a glitter loincloth, Glenn Marla performed a memorably vulnerable monologue on gender body issues. Is it too much to hope for, that this kind of transgender variety show could be an annual event?

The Beebo Brinker Chronicles

photo: Dixie Sheridan

Lesbians are disproportionately under-represented on New York's gay-friendly stages, and for that reason I'm inclined to stress that this off-Broadway one-act (which adapts Ann Bannon's 1950's-era lesbo pulp novels) has some girls-night-out value. (And David loved it too.) It's a lively and sometimes amusing show, although it lacks the strong point of view that the purple material demands for current audiences. The play wants to have it both ways by gently playing the then-tawdry exploits in the books for camp, while mining them for a now-typical gay-is-okay coming out story. The result is that the show doesn't do a bang-up job of either: the tone is all over the place. (I was reminded how much more successful Nosedive's Halloween show was, on a shoestring budget, at staging pulp fiction style). The production, which hasn't been adequately re-imagined to work in its new, bigger space after its hit run last year downtown, looks underfurnished and on-the-cheap. Yet it isn't boring, and the performers often get to look like they're having fun. That, and the fact that gay girl stories are relatively uncommon on stage, gives it some coolness points.

FRIGID '08: Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm

The Nonsense Company is exactly why I go to festivals: they're a fresh, vibrant group, producing theater that's unlike anything else out there. That it's politically themed adds an extra edge, but I'm giddy enough to pronounce this the must-see play of the FRIGID Festival. Their first play, Great Hymn of Thanksgiving looks like Chuck Mee slamming into Philip Glass, and features "three speaking percussionists" (more like Foley artists here) who use ordinary dinnerware (and a few musical instruments, like a cymbal and harpsichord) to create a thankless Thanksgiving. Their second play, Conversation Storm, presents a series of non-linear scenes that, nonetheless, escalate and oscillate between humor and drama as three friends go at one another over the morality of using torture in the so-called "ticking time bomb" situation. A little dinner talk, a little nuclear apocalypse, a fancy meal, a torture session -- wow. What's most impressive is how human the cast is, despite the machine-like precision of their shifts between on only scenes but entirely different plays.

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FRIGID '08: Diversey Harbor

There's not much theatrically going on in Annie Coburn's direction of Diversey Harbor, but she's really nailed down the acting, which in turn has cemented playwright Marisa Wegrzyn's very young, very talented voice. Her monologued play feels like a cross between Brooke Berman and Connor McPherson; I only wish that the ghost story she introduces late in the game tied more into the other loosely connected narratives, or better still, remained grounded in the sort of grim reality that can call craigslist "a dark alley littered with crack pipes," sum up a character with "I'm off to watch Jerry Springer with my thumb in my vagina," and honestly depict the cavalier attitude of some Lotharios: "It's entirely possible that I'm about to fuck up someone's life. And I can't wait." From the laid-back, drinking dog-walker James (Avery Pearson) to the selfish and angry Dennis (Dorien Makhloghi), to the high-strung Grace (Dana Berger) to the carefully poised and meticulous Stephanie (Amanda Sayle), Wegrzyn presents four very human chapters in life and loss, and, up until Stephanie's encounter with some muddy footprints, has a very funny and fresh look at kids today.