The Sound and the Fury

Photo/Sara Krulwich

Whether or not you end up enjoying The Sound and the Fury really depends on whether or not you can see the beauty present in an actor speaking their dialogue in the same breath as their he and she saids. It depends on whether or not you are as willing as Benjy to lose yourself in the hypnotic glow of a flame, to invest yourself in this reinvention of the mundane. For me, I found the production to be triumphantly emphatic of all the flaws in Faulkner's work, the most all-encompassing work of love that I've seen in some time. It's ridiculous to say that, as much as it is to reflect on the absurd beauty of a cake-cutting ceremony, but for all the lumps and grumbles I jotted down during the play, it's only that beauty that I remember now.

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Man Of La Mancha

photo: Jennifer Maufrais

A no-nonsense, thematically clear production of a musical that is very easy to muddle and ruin, the current rendering of Man Of La Mancha (at Gallery Players, in Brooklyn) is modest but effective and, on occasion, stirring. The directorial focus is squarely on telling the story with clarity and a minimum of fuss, as evidenced by choices that demonstrate unwavering trust in the strength and weight of the material. The production is fortunate to have a strong Aldonza in Jennifer McCabe, whose wrenching performance as the whore barmaid is sometimes like a stunning fit of controlled rage, and an enderaing Pancho in Robert Anthony Jones, whose "I Like Him" is one of the production's crowd-pleasing highlights. Although vocal stress kept Jan-Peter Pedross from making an ideal Cervantes at the performance I saw, his performance was otherwise well-judged and quietly touching.

The Accidental Patriot

Photo/Carrie Leonard

Having so enjoyed Kinderspiel and Commedia dell'Artemisia, the last two plays by Stolen Chair Theatre Company, it pains me to write this less than positive summation of Kiran Rikhye's The Accidental Patriot. As part of the company's CineTheatre Tetrology, the play mimics the swashbuckling genre of film, and while it gets the raucous energy of the large-scale swordfighting down, it loses something in emphasizing the melodramatic dialogue, and throws momentum to the overboard with a few sea shanties too many. The point where I draw my cutlass is that director Jon Stancato, in his efforts to remain faithful to the movies, replicates close-ups by pausing the action, bringing the actor into a center-stage spotlight, and having him continue from there as the rest of the cast carries on as if nothing's changed. The effect is artificial -- more alienating than Brecht -- and it bleeds over into the rest of the show, from the forced emoting to the by-the-numbers blocking. I get the intention, but I don't appreciate the result, and I spent most of the show hoping for an accident to force the actors to actually play off one another. I thought I'd have my opportunity when Liza Wade White, the ingenue, tripped over a sword while rushing to kiss the patriotic pirate (Cameron J. Oro) who had just revenged himself against her father (David Berent). Unfortunately, she didn't miss a beat. I go to plays to get away from such stoic theatrics, the unflinching resolve that celluloid captures so well; I was disappointed to find that The Accidental Patriot aspired to so little.

House

"Oh oh. Oh no. Here he comes!" says John Calvin Kelly, the electrifying actor taking on the role of Victor in Daniel MacIvor's one-man show, House. "He's ruining everything! I thought this was a PLAY! Stop! Stop!" Standing in the narrow aisle of the Red Room, surveying the audience and acknowledging the theater itself, John is stripping away the artifice of the show, and with that, he succeeds in removing the artifice of character, thrilling us with a performance that never seems forced, even at its most abstract. (Metaphors are literal to our "fucked up" narrator: his mother is possessed by the devil, with "eyes the size of turnips"; his father runs a circus act in which he's "the saddest man in the world.") As John speaks, he pulses with all the barely repressed rage at the idiocy in Victor's life, building up the walls of his house (HOUSE!) before hitting the next part: "My calming action," he says, ". . . used to be counting to fifty but it took TOO GODDAMN LONG!" Fritz Brekeller is a confident director, which means he lets John go out on a limb, but never so far that it snaps. It also means the focus stays on Victor's quest to find a place of his own: ignored at work, despised by his wife, and ridiculed at group, his life is unremarkable, to the point where "See ya tomorrow," "Call ya Friday," and "Wanna go for breakfast" seem poetic, for it "might not sound like poetry but it does if you never heard it and I never did." In the finest moment, Victor describes the only award he's ever won: first as a fantasy, then as it actually was, settling for each flaw with an increasingly bitter "Fine." Septic salesman or not, that's a lot of shit for one man to suck up, and kudos to John for keeping it all in with a slowly cracking grin.

Babylon, Babylon

Photo/Ken Stein

For a while, Jeff Lewonczyk's ambitious illusion, the thirty-man Babylon, Babylon, holds up. But the writer/actor/director stacks the deck against himself, putting the audience so close to the action (lined up against opposite walls) that the lack of drama becomes all too apparent. Nothing sustains the momentum of the overall piece; it's just that there's so many characters on stage that it seems like things are developing, when in fact we're just watching lots of under-developed pieces. It is any surprise, then, that when they all collide in a forced climax that the whole thing seems more than a little ridiculous?

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Alice: End Of Daze

photo: Carol Rosegg

There's one long section in this experimental, surreal variation on Alice In Wonderland (currently at La Mama) that holds our strrict attention: we watch the performers enacting a kind of torture ritual with highly stylized, somewhat slow-motion movements in front of a wall of projections of Inquisition scenes, set to a modest but sonically strange and dramatically haunting soundscape performed by Edward Herbst. This is the show's most effective stretch because it gives the audience something specific (that is, torture in the name of religious purification) to use to decode what's happening on stage. Besides this sequence, too much of the show is otherwise thematically obscure: the intended exploration of "the nature of time, visual perception and consciousness" (according to press notes) doesn't prove to be much of a driving force to organize the material. Instead we watch nine year old Alice (played by Mari Andrejco, an actress in her sixties) wander from one moment to another and we're often as lost as she is.