The Four Of Us

I've got no problem being the lone dissenter on this two-hander from Itamar Moses. I found the play-within-a-play conceit to ultimately work against the show: the only thing objectively real is the second-to-last scene, and the final scene is a cute little throwaway for those who have been paying attention to all the foreshadowing in the play. It's not even all that clever in a literary sense: Tom Stoppard's satirical The Real Inspector Hound did the same for critics that Moses is doing here with writers--except that he's attempt to delve a little into the corruptive power of celebrity and the pressures of sustaining one's integrity. But it's hard to listen to people complain about such empty issues . . . especially twice, with the scenes mostly parallels of one another. You can carefully construct an echo all you want--it's still just an empty sound. But let me not be too harsh: Moses's writing is, at times, very natural and--rightfully so--a reflection of his youth. Let him get the cricks out of his hand now, and his pen may yet write something truly engaging and not facilely fascinating.

Miss Richfield 1981 Flies Over The Coo Coo's Nest

** (...out of five stars)
The Zipper Theater


With this, her second limited engagement in New York, Miss Richfield 1981 tries out her drag schtick that has made her a local celebrity in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Through musical numbers and mock therapy sessions, this colorful, sassy, loud mouthed, middle aged man in a dress attempts to solve the problems of people yanked onstage from the audience. Though intermittently funny, her improvisations are hit and miss partly due to the fact that they're kinda not improvs at all. She doesn't engage the poor bastards who get pulled up onstage more than she just labels them with fictional "problems" ("You're afraid of clowns!"..."You're afraid of germs!") and then proceeds on to her scripted monologues. This grows tedious after a while and without any sort of dramatic structure or arc, this seems like something that belongs in a bar rather than a theater. Still she does an impressive headstand and she looks very funny in her tacky/slutty dresses and 3 pound cha cha heels. I'd happily toast her at Stonewall.

August: Osage County

***** (...out of five stars)

Broadway

I got to ride the August Osage coaster again! This time I let go of the bar and kept my eyes open. It's even better the second time around. I put a penny on my knee and towards the end of Act 2, it started to float! I wanna go back!

Inner Voices: Solo Musicals

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Colorful World

I was a little disappointed in Nosedive's latest production, Colorful World, because I felt that James Comtois too much respected his source material -- graphic novels like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns -- and too much indulged his usually on-the-money comedy to focus on his own writing. His show simply leaps into too much at once, and compensates with an abundance of exposition that lacks both action and drama. It's not until the second act that things shape up, with the talk of anti-heroes putting the remaining characters in real moral and mortal danger.

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The Unconquered

Photo/Eamonn McGoldrick

I laughed. I cried. I mostly laughed. Crafting a poetic rhythm out of repetition (think Seuss meets Churchill), Torben Betts's brute-force allegory, The Unconquered, is one of the most distinct and comically unsettling shows I've seen this season. It's far from subtle (imagine Edward Gorey making a life-sized pop-up book), but is all the more powerful by being completely, brutally true to form: a play following in the footsteps of many "righteous" nations before it. I'm probably reading too far into it, but given that Girl (the marvelous Nicola Harrison) becomes a symbol of her country's suffering when a Soldier (a creepily childish Neal Barry) rapes her, it's hard not to hear something beautifully vulgar in her cries to "Get out of my country!" Then again, you could just take it literally, too, and still leave the theater thinking this was one of the best things you'd seen all year, playing to the same crowds as last year's The Receipt and correcting all the grim missteps made by Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

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