Jollyship The Whiz Bang

Reviewed for Theatermania.

EST Marathon 30: Series B

As I said about Series A, it's not worth focusing on the flaws of an uneven one-act festival: better to take note of those runners who hold up their leg of the race. To be fair, it's necessary to at least mention Neil LaBute, who has grown so sharp in The Great War that he's cut off all emotion and become an incindiary M. Night Shyamalan. That makes it easier to note the wild story of David Zellnick's Ideogram which manages to sharply satirize stereotypes while at the same time boiling down and condensing jealousy into a weird sort of mental noir. The weaknesses stand out right now (the forced flute solos), but that's only because the play is so short, and the concept otherwise so comic: undeveloped, it's still right up there with, say, the magical realism of Kevin Brockmeier. It's also important to illustrate the struggle, because then when you hit upon a winner, like Taylor Mac's fully developed and wholly satisfying Okay, it's clearer how good of a race the playwright's run. Setting a tragedy in a series of bathroom stalls keeps the door open for farce, and Taylor balances not only between the two styles, but seven wholly different voices, too--the show bursts with personality as the characters rant, snort, drink, and . . . sadly . . . give birth. Sound like your high school's senior prom?

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How Theatre Failed America

The Times, the "Internets", the Mermaids on skates: Mike Daisey makes it known right at the top of his brilliant, energizing ninety-minute monologue that he's not interested in these usual superficial complaints about what's wrong with theatre today. His targets are more systemic: theatre in America is broken, and the reasons are more cultural than economic. He puts over his lively state of the art address in the manner of a trusted truth-telling friend, using personal recollections and experiences to ease in and out of his (ultimately sobering) grand statements. The success of the piece is that it is capable of being strong and provocative without being assaultive, informed and informative without being the least bit dry. Its genius is that it has been carefully crafted to empower the audience and to covertly rally us into action; for theatre lovers, this is not to be missed.

How Theater Failed America

Spalding Grey meets Chris Farley? I don't know how else to really talk about the manic energy that Mike Daisey brings to such serious and well-spoken topics, but it's his cross of personal stories and irrepressible personality that make this man such a powerful monologist. Because he spends the whole evening sitting at a table, there's no sense of showboating and, because he speaks without a script (extemporaneously, to a well-rehearsed extent), his connection with the audience seems more direct, more intimate. The play isn't so much How Theater Failed America, so much as it is How Theater Failed Mike Daisey, and as he quickly glosses past Charles Isherwood, Disney, and the big "capital T" Theater industry, that's something to be glad for. Daisey's story is far more interesting, from his inspiring school days to intrepid theater company work to suicidal dejection and the "super fucked up" garage theaters of Seattle. The play is filled with well-spoken insights about the regional machine-like "freeze-dried" actor model or the ironic atrophy of institutions that, having made the money to take risks, now become too afraid to take them, along with witty observations, like how subscriptions are "an opportunity to be randomly fucked in the ass." If the theater has failed, nights like this are exceptions that hopefully don't prove the rule.

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reasons to be pretty

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

MCC

Ah the world of Labute... where all the women are hysterical bitches and all the men are douche-bags. For those of you who like some yelling in your plays, there's quite a bit of it in this 4 character play about a dude who doesn't think his girlfriend isn't particularly pretty. Though not destined to be a classic, I did find the play to be consistently engaging and I got a little schadenfreude thrill from all of the backstabbing. Actors heads up- there are quite a few two character scenes and monologues that would probably work well in scene study. I've got major theater crushes on Allison Pill and Pablo Schreiber and they're both doing some great work here. Can't wait to see what they do next.

Reasons To Be Pretty

photo: Joan Marcus

I usually like Neil LaBute's plays but he has, of course, had his share of bummers. None yet that I have either seen or read, however, to rival Reasons To Be Pretty, a woefully thin and unfocused effort in which LaBute aims to depict a main male character who matures emotionally past the playwright's typical testosterone-pumped overgrown adolescents. (The character gets a best bud who more than picks up that slack: the guy's misogyny and duplicity are so over the top that he plays like a failed parody of a LaBute man.) The main character's revelations near the end of the play, spelled out for us in a direct address monologue which unthinkably begins with "So what have I learned from all this?", aren't any more insightful than "beauty is subjective". The play manages to be banal, superficial and aggressively repellent all at once, and also features one of the weakest monologues I have heard in some time. (It's about the hardship of being physically beautiful, which turns out to be that guys might try to hit on you in the supermarket.) Committed performances by Alison Pill and Thomas Sadoski provide an occasional illusion of depth, but the material is skin-deep.