From Up Here

photo: Joan Marcus

Twenty-eight year old Liz Flahive's play is a reasonably diverting but superficial comedy-drama that centers on a troubled teenaged boy who has just returned to his high school classes; we quickly learn that he was suspended after an incident with a gun, and that he's expected to publicly apologize at the next school assembly. The play's events are meant to lead up to that event, but we never find out very much about the boy or his motivations in the interim - the gun incident is little more than a plot device that paves the way for some tearful family scenes after a whole lot of quirky-adorable ones. And by a whole lot I mean an endless assault of them: Mom is high string quirky, Sis is sarcastic quirky, her boyfriend is awkward quirky. It all plays like a very special episode of Roseanne except that I didn't, despite the efforts of the playwright and the hard-working cast, warm to or believe any of these characters.

I Have Before Me A Remarkable Document Give To Me By A Young Lady From Rwanda

Photo/Gerry Goodstein

For a week, I've been unable to write this review, wanting desperately to do this play justice. I struggled to describe I Have Before Me . . ., for at a surface glance, it is a tacky: Sonja Linden has created a pretentious yet talented poet to stand in for the playwright, and this poet then instructs (and is instructed by) a fiercely intelligent yet emotionally fragile Rwandan refugee. But it's clear from the writing that Mrs. Linden was shaken to the core by her experiences: knife-sharp slivers of detail in this play cut holes in the facile frame, allowing for a fuller picture. More so, despite some missteps by director Elise Stone (none that are serious), Susan Heyward delivers a performance so textured that the show achieves its self-proclaimed goal: "Good writing makes you see what the writer wants you to see--and feel."

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Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)

Photo/Justin Bernhaut

If Miranda July made plays instead of movies, they'd look and sound like Jay Scheib's frenzied yet passionless, meticulous yet sloppy, artificial yet somehow realistic new play Untitled Mars (This Title May Change). As with his last work, This Place is a Desert, Jay relies on hyperphysical action to compensate for dry yet hammy dialogue (spam?), and uses multiple camera feeds and projections to create a visual mash-up of landscapes and emotions that's cool. But this coolness comes at a price, an arctic absolute zero that freezes out plot and gets lost in the fiction. All that humanity on Mars serves as a parable for human behavior -- we won't just terraform Mars, we'll psychoform it, too -- but it's only occasionally expressed well, as when Norbert (Balazs Vajna) rips a hole in his suit, literally dying of depression. Ultimately, it's hard to be taken seriously in anti-gravity, and Jay Scheib -- even with his abundance of creativity, fierce charm, and surprise -- never quite manages to do the trick.

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Fire Island

Reviewed for Theatermania.

thirty-seven stones (or the man who was a quarry)

Granted, there should be some level of discomfort in a play about a emotionally (and henceforth physically) traumatized man-child who goes around passing stones. But what unnerved me about Mark J. Charney's production was how rough the acting was, and how strained that made the text. I've liked past productions from Working Man's Clothes, but this play lacks the intense commitment of Penetrator or the comic charm of I Used to Write on Walls; instead, it uses a very obvious device (the medical condition) to parallel the many ways in which Edna (Mary Round) has ruled and ruined her son Nathan's (Steven Strobel's) life. After a while, the scenes are just the same old, same old, and director Will Neuman gets left holding the plausibility bill as he tries to pull laughs from a recalcitrant cast. If you crave the uncomfortably immature, look no further, but this is far from a working show.

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Dirt

photo: Jordan Craven

He has no right to sit on our park benches nor to foul up our air with his stink. He's a piece of shit who shouldn't even be looked in the eye. So go the disturbing, self-loathing confessions of an Iraqi immigrant flower peddler named Sad in this striking, provocative monologue (seen previously at the Fringe Festival and now at Under St. Marks). The play ultimately resonates well beyond the scope of one person's pathology and becomes a sometimes harrowing, often sorrowful statement about the damaging cycle of racism. How could it not, as we watch the hated hate himself and speak it back at us in a calm, even charming, manner? Although the play is a tad too long and once in a while feels dated (it was written pre-9/11, and doesn't address the fresh fear-based prejudices against Iraqis) its specifics are less important than its ultimate message, which is timeless and powerful. Christopher Dornig embodies Sad so fully and mines his monologue so deeply that I had to double-check the credits to be sure he wasn't also the playwright (he's not; the play is by Robert Schneider).