Thank For The Scabies, Jerkface!

***1/2 (...out of 5)

Frigid Festival

This is yet another fine example of me racing to a show simply because of its title. Sexually transmitted parasites? Jerkfaces? It reeks of high drama. Dan Bernitt, one of the latest in a crop of emerging one-person-showpeople, treats us to a handful of stories many of which deal with the horrifying embarrassment of being a young adult. Topics such as tubes up the urethra to parents who talk to stuffed animals to yes, scabies, are presented in a fresh, charming and wholly engaging way by our bright hero. All the more impressing is this darling chap is only 21 years old. At 21, I also caught scabies but I wasn't nearly organized enough to write a show about it.

Adding Machine

Photo/Carol Rosegg

In truth, Adding Machine doesn't add up. The music doesn't portray the mechanical; instead, it's tinny and dissonant, and only really effective when shrilling out of Mrs. Zero (Cyrilla Baer), who relies upon her husband's constant and considerable failures to make herself seem better. Combined with the original text of Elmer Rice's 1925 expressionistic play, the stark, dimly lit sets convey a gloom that is abject and anachronistic with the synthesizers, and even the racial slurs seem defanged. Joel Hatch, as Mr. Zero, does a tremendous job of carrying the leaden pace on his shoulders, a walking figment of defeat, but when he first sings -- a confession of murdering his boss -- he seems defeated by the song, too, drowned out and hoarse. If that's intentional, it adds nothing, and only heightens the contrast with a fellow-prisoner, a tenor named Shrdlu (Joe Farrell), who steals focus (by default; Farrell himself is quite forgettable) from what should be Zero's self-inflicted fall from grace. The staging is fun, with the lights creating a claustrophobic darkness and walls or cages creeping ever closer upstage, but overlong set changes make things like the uneasy transition from the real world to the Elysian Fields even more confusing. Adding Machine talks about efficiency and purpose in both the real world and in what passes for the afterlife; David Cromer's direction is to the point, but Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt need to learn to subtract.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]

Paradise Park

photo: Carol Rosegg

Sadly, the third and final show in Signature's Charles Mee season is easily the low point of the series. An intermissionless fantasia that drifts around a group of people who've chosen to live indefinitely in an amusement park, the play has no rising action to speak of and is instead, in typical Mee collage style, organized thematically. But in the absence of a narrative spine, Mee doesn't do enough with the theme of escapism American style to sustain (much less, build) interest over the play's length, and the slow-paced production ends up feeling longer than its two hours. The play is loaded with whimsical business - a freefall of toys, a castle that inflates and deflates before our eyes, etc. - that mostly just sits on stage dead, failing to resonate. Some of the actors cut through the numbing mood now and then - Veanne Cox and Christopher McCann most effectively among the able ensemble - but Paradise Park is otherwise remote and unreal.

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.

[Read on]

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.

[Read on]

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?