Suspicious Package

I never thought I'd end up in acting in a show with The Playgoer, but thanks to Gyda Arber's pleasantly interactive "iPod noir," Suspicious Package, I spent 45 minutes running around Williamsburg in a felt hat, tailing a sleazy producer and chatting up a seductive heiress and her sexy showgirl sister. Each of the four roles has its own voice-over, but mine (the detective's) proved to be an amusing mash-up of stereotypes and witty one-liners ("She was a tarantula on angel's food cake"), and Aaron Baker's voiceover, fitting the golden age of radio, not only provided my backstory with plenty of boozing and gambling, but got me in full-on gumshoe mode. I'm a fast walker, so I wound up with some spare time between scenes (each "actor" meets the other "actors," one by one, by following the on-screen cues on their Zune Media Players): however, sitting on various stoops, looking out at the modern, fast-changing Brooklyn streets, listening to classic radio rebroadcasts, I didn't mind at all. I was too busy enjoying the unique experience.

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The Hired Man

Photo/Tristram Kenton

Whatever Melvin Bragg's lost in his condensed adaptation of his epic The Hired Man has been partially made up for thanks to Howard Goodall's music, a lively bunch of chorus numbers and operatically light chamber music solos that nonetheless pack a punch. But director Daniel Buckroyd is all business, and substitutes intimacy for tableaux, ending up with more of a revue than a musical. In truth, the rapid pace of Act II, which jumps from Katie Howell's airy "You'll Never See The Sun" to the talented Richard Colvin's moral aria, "What Would You Say To Your Son?" and from David Stothard's unyielding, unionizing "Men of Stone," to, of course, the ensemble's "War." It's not smooth enough to excuse the melodrama of a collapsed coal mine or a sudden illness, but the finale's resolution of all those counter-melodies shows that for all its ups and downs, all that hard work is ultimately worth it.

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Frequency Hopping

photo: Dixie Sheridan

The latest show at 3LD makes smart, artful use of technology: besides the moving projections both behind and in front of the playing area, there are automated musical instruments from floor to ceiling on either side of the stage. The resulting effect, which sometimes makes it seem as if the actors are inside a giant gadget, is of high visual interest and thematic validity but it's also a little distancing, and the script (by Elyse Singer, who also directed this production) lacks the needed drive to mitigate that. Nonetheless, the fact-based story here (in which movie star Heddy Lamar, privvy to Nazi secrets, seduces American composer George Antheil into brainstorming a technology to foil German missiles) holds our attention anyhow, especially when it uses the technology-rich environment to illustrate moments that would be impossible to dramatize on a traditional stage. The play makes gender-politics hay out of the gap between Lamarr's public sex symbol status and her private high-minded passions - for that reason I was reminded more than once of Insignificance, which imagines a get-together between Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein - but the show's style of presentation cries out for a larger unifying theme than that.

Benefactors

Michael Frayn's 1984 play Benefactors holds up pretty well today, even with Folding Chair Classical Theater's low-budget performance. Despite drinking from empty glasses, the lead performances from James Arden and Lisa Blankenship (as the good-hearted Kitzingers) are full of nuance, from David's frustrating sincerity to Jane's repressed and slow-boiling opinions. And although director Marcus Geduld loses some focus with his poor musical cues, he does pretty well with the material at hand, keeping the parallel between building towers and relationships upright, and keeping the darker thoughts about what it means to "help" someone (who has that right?) in the corner of every politely worded thought. I'm more uncertain about Ian Gould, who appears here almost exactly as he did in When Is a Clock: his over-enunciation places his accent in a different play, and he plays creepiness so overtly that it's hard to ever take him seriously. The only thing that shouldn't be natural in Benefactors are the monologued asides that, truth be told, are so smoothly inserted by the cast that they keep the action moving without becoming expository. The real benefit, however, will come when the melodrama is reduced.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Reviewed for Theatermania.

This Is A Cowboy Poem My Daddy Taught Me

photo: Stephen M. Price

This new play starts out as if it's one of those "long night of hard booze and hard confessions" dramas of the middle of the American desert variety, as a mysterious stranger named Love convinces a bartender named Scrappy to pour her a few on credit. But the lyrical, engagingly structured play (by Katie Bender) soon reveals a theme (about the ability of art to change lives) that isn't usually seen with characters like these in places like this, and it's also soon clear that the play is on a course that steers clear of formulaic melodrama. Although the staging doesn't meet all the challenges of the problematic playing area, the production does an admirable job of creating an environment that allows Bender's heightened dialogue to play out intimately. Ultimately, it's a play that leaves its mark by seeping in slowly, gently, surely.