What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends

photo: Martin R. Miller

Larry Kunofsky's snappy semi-absurd comedy seems at first to depict the paranoid fantasy of a wallflower who believes that the friends who barely tolerate her are part of a exclusionary cult. Turns out it isn't a fantasy: the friends have formed a secret and soulless society that gives them access to popularity. The play has a lot of satirical fun with this central idea - as cold and as selfish as the friend system seems, it's only an exaggeration of how most people use each other - and although the play goes slack in the second act as it transitions into a less antic tone, it's nonetheless always clever and wholly enjoyable. It's also ideally served by the five members of the ensemble (Todd D'Amour, Josh Lefkowitz, Susan Louise O'Connor, Amy Staats, and Carrie Keranen) who all seem to be on the playwright's wavelength.

The Proposal

Seth Powers's disturbing The Proposal begins with a simple revival of the short Chekhovian farce of the same name. But the actor/director (Daniel Irizarry) isn't quite sure the message is getting across, and doesn't know how to simultaneously reach the older theatergoers looking to relive the peaceful past of passive theater and the younger iPod generation. The question he poses is a bloody difficult one--"Why can't theater be art?"--and it's made all the bloodier by the violence of good doctor Chekhov (Laura Butler) and the well-intentioned puerility of a thick-bearded, cookie-laden Nietzsche (Vic Peterson). Actor's search for truth twists into a dark farce, from an animalistic portrayal of the creation myth to a Gallagher-like climax, with a few breaks to dance the mazurka. Under normal conditions, such dangerous leaps in illogic would simply be dismissed as pretension, but Irizarry wrestles Powers's script to the floor by grounding everything in the intensely physical, and it's near impossible to look away.

[Note: To clarify a point, when a script tackles complex ideas in a nontraditional way, the casual theatergoer is quick to label it as "pretentious." If I were to have simply read Seth's script , I might have done the same. But this is why theater works best as a collaborative effort: I very much enjoyed The Proposal, and it illustrates the positive ways in which even pretension itself can be used to enrich the very valid critiques being made about art.]

Hair

photo: Joan Marcus

It's been over forty years since the birth of the cultural phenomenon of Hair but the wonderful outdoors production currently in Central Park doesn't smell like an antique: it very wisely emphasizes the show's immediate thematic current-day relevance. (Here we are again fighting an unpopular war, after all) Judiciously staged like a rag-tag happening rather than like a traditional musical, this production has been directed with a keen understanding of the show as a snapshot of a community: for the first time I understood the "tribal" aspect of this "American tribal Love-rock musical" and embraced rather than bemoaned the lack of a traditional narrative. I saw an early preview, so I won't comment on specific performances except to say that every one has been pointed in the same direction. Thanks to a sudden drenching downpour, the show had to be stopped with only ten minutes remaining. Before long the cast came back out on stage anyway and sang "Let The Sun Shine In" in the soaking rain, pulling people up from the audience to dance on stage with them. It was one of the most vivid and uplifting communal experiences I've ever had seeing theatre.

Greendale

Not open to review, and I respect that, so all I'll say is that Bruce DuBose and Katherine Owens of Undermain Theatre are in the process of adapting Neil Young's concept album Greendale (which Young also directed as a film) for the stage. Will this lo-fi album and amateur film find a place on the independent stage? Check it out; it's part of Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory festival.

What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends

I loved the cast, enjoyed the plot, and found the direction to be exactly what was called for, engaging with the pop-up book comedy of the plot and narrative. Weak spots? Sure. But what I won't forget for some time is the anonymous "Bert & Ernie" masturbation scene, in which I more or less shot a load of laughter.

[Reviewed for Show Business Weekly]

Damn Yankees

This year's Summer Encores! show may transfer to Broadway thanks to its two tv-famous stars, but Sean Hayes and Jane Krakowski do a lot less for the show than they do for its box office. He gets barely by on charm and on the enormous good will that the audience has for him after years of Will & Grace, but he's lightweight; he's less the Devil brokering deliciously for the soul of an average Joe turned baseball hero than he's a jaded brat. (He gets some of his laughs from camping some of his lines as if he's still on his tv show, but that gives his character's repeated advice to stay away from women an unintended, unpleasant subtext). Krakowski, who is regularly a delightful and engaging performer, has been asked to do the near-impossible: namely, to step into the Bob Fosse dances that were tailored for Gwen Verdon. She's fine in the book scenes, but her dancing is all exertion and no charm: we're aware of all the impressive work she is doing with her body and waiting for it to express what it means to express. The other two leads - Randy Graff and Cheyenne Jackson - are quite wonderful, and the supporting cast are uniformly terrific (with Veanne Cox and Kathy Fitzgerald especially fun and funny).