The Homecoming

****1/2

The Cort

Wow. I loved this play. Going to a gorgeously produced revival of a play or musical that I have never read or seen is right up there with a medium rare rib eye or an expensive bottle of wine. With its expertly designed dialogue and its controversial subject matter centered around a family, Pinter's The Homecoming reminded me a little of Albee's The Goat (another play I went apeshit over). The cast is near perfect with Raul Esparza turning in yet another intense, multi-layered, intelligent performance as a horny son who hates his family (I love you, Raul xo). And Eve Best- amazing. As the only girl in this cast of five boys her feminine presence is amplified up to 11 and as she moved in slow motion through this play I couldn't take my eyes off her. Thumbs up old school.

The American DreamThe Sandbox

photo: Gabe Evans

The American Dream, the first half of this double bill of early Edward Albee one-act gems, is widely regarded as a landmark masterwork of American absurdism although it can't, despite the whiff of Ionesco that it puts in the air, be fully categorized so simply. The targets of its dark, indelibly disturbing satire are specific: as Albee once said, the play is "an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society". Seeing it now, directed by the playwright nearly fifty years after it was first performed, is to again recognize not only Albee's influence on American drama but also the force of this play's bite: has any other playwright sunk teeth as hard into American complacency and commonplace cruelty? This production boasts two flawless performances by Judith Ivey and George Bartenieff - both understand the heightened style and confidently deliver Albee's dialogue. The production is less effective when Lois Markle joins them but that probably won't be the case by the time you see the show: the actress was an eleventh hour replacement and was clearly still working through the role at the performance I saw. As Markle is central to the evening's second play (The Sandbox, which clocks in at about fifteen minutes) it understandably was not yet where it needs to and will soon be. But never mind: there isn't any good reason to miss these Albee-directed Albee plays.

Silver Bullet Trailer

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

Faint praise for me to say that of all the current productions prizing the death of The American Dream, Silver Bullet Trailer is at least the most fascinating failure. Julie Shavers's script has some great zingers (which makes it more interesting than Paradise Park) and Dan O'Brien's direction is at least more creative (especially in its use of videography) and contemporary than The American Dream/The Sandbox. Right now, Shavers's play is being held up by her own performance as a banana-mayonnaise-eating hillbilly, and from the few moments that don't feel completely overdone. Still, far too much of Silver Bullet Trailer comes across as an overzealous, characterless mash-up of George Saunders short stories, with far less focus and far less punch. Some of that blame rests with actors like Sean-Michael Bowles, Benjamin Ellis Fine, and the three gals playing the burlesque Buckle Bunnies, for Dan O'Brien gives them a suitably creepy staging that they just don't take far enough. But most of the flaws remain with Shaver's script, which gets so focused on satire and symbolism that it loses sight of character entirely.

[Read on]

Juno

photo: Joan Marcus

Watching this Encores! version of the 1959 musical based on Sean O'Casey's downbeat tragicomedy Juno And The Paycock, it is easy to see why the musical was not a success when it premiered: too much of the first act tries, counterproductively, to provide levity and merriment and the source material resists being reshaped to oblige. It is also easy to see why the musical has attained some measure of cult status: the score (by Marc Blitzstein) is a shining gem, a sophisticated and dramatically expressive collection of Irish-tinged songs that range from the stirringly anthemic to the delicately lilting. However problematic the show, this astutely directed, often gloriously performed staged-concert production (directed by Garry Hynes) showed the piece to spectacular advantage: what worked here worked magnificently, and what didn't work probably never could. As the put-upon, salt-of-the-earth matriach of the hard-luck Boyle family, Victoria Clark gave a detailed and superbly judged performance that honored the spirit of the material. This was not the kind of performance where the diva plays poor and downtrodden while winking to the audience that she's only "acting": Clark disappeared into the role. Celia Keenan-Bolger rendered the Boyle daughter with touching vulnerability: the show's musical highlight was the mother-daughter duet of "Bird Upon A Tree", a deceptively pretty but deeply sad song that expresses their mutual longing to be freed from their hardships. (A second noteworthy highlight: the lovely ballad "One Kind Word" as superbly and sensitively sung by Michael Arden.) Although the pathos in the show's opening number - in which Dublin's Irish witness one of their own being murdered in the streets - was played so broadly that I half expected to see Officer Lockstock and Little Sally among the ensemble, the cast seemed otherwise at the right pitch for the material. Of special note were the male dancers (led by Tyler Hanes, playing the Boyle son who'd lost an arm fighting for Ireland) who performed a spellbinding and physically demanding second-act dream ballet as choreographed (with vital dramatic expressiveness) by Warren Carlyle. For me, Juno's most lingering stage picture is of those five dancers leaping through the air in unison, each with an arm behind his back under his shirt.

Juno

photo: Sara Krulwich


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


By this time we should all know that Juno is a flawed musical. Heck, I hadn't even known of its existance until I saw a Playbill press release with Victoria Clark's photo attached (and I call myself a show-junkie). Based on the Irish play Juno And The Paycock definitely has all the ingredients of a great musical- political drama, romance, comedy, tragedy- but it just seems like the creators didn't know how to stir it all up properly. Obviously, though, as usual City Center has dressed this production up with a dream director (Garry Hynes) and a dream cast and has fashioned a wonderful history lesson on what it was like to be a flop musical in 1959. Victoria Clark is stunning as the matriarch and title character and Tyler Hanes as the one armed dancing hot guy, continues to force me to be obsessed with him.

Paradise Park

Photo/Carol Rosegg

"Listen to me carefully," says the ticket seller, an ominous face peering out from a small slit in the wall. "What do you want?" Benny, his back to the audience, ponders the question, then hesitatingly responds: "I guess I want to escape from my daily life, you know, from the abyss of total meaninglessness that I know lies just beneath my feet at every moment." He needs, in other words, distraction, and that's what Chuck Mee provides in his latest piece, Paradise Park, an unfocused reflection of a run-down America. However, entertainment is nowhere to be found: Mee's collaged writing has never been more jarringly disconnected than here, and even though the original script has thankfully been edited for the Signature stage, it still lacks a center to hold everything together. Mee's idea of love, a silly, childish, but ultimately fulfilling need, doesn't help: Vikram, who is dressed as the park's cloying mouse mascot, is in love with Mortimer, Edgar's dummy; Darling, daughter to the argumentative Morton and Nancy, loves Jorge, a sweetheart with a penchant for stockings; and Benny lusts after Ella, a character who, for all the sense she makes, could've skated in right out of Xanadu. The play, which runs for two intermissionless hours, only occasionally breaks out of Limboland, and that's only when Daniel Fish pulls a sight gag, such as launching fruitcake across the stage or attempting to inflate a castle-bounce in a space that is clearly too small for it. (That's not to say Fish directs this play well: most of the show takes place on a stage lit only by badly projected images, and more than a few actors, particularly Vanessa Aspillaga, seem to have no idea what they're doing.) Paradise Park feels like a work devised by Andy Kauffman; I hope Mee is backstage laughing, because from the audience, we're just prisoners in someone else's imagination.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]