Hair

The best thing about Hair, more a three-ring circus than a musical, is that Diane Paulus, working in the wonderfully outside and natural Delacourt Theater--and with tickets costing nothing--has captured the energy that led Gerome Ragni and James Rado to grow Hair in the first place. How can you not want to "Let the Sunshine In" when the actors are running up the aisles to sit next to you, propellering their hair around? (Even more so given that the show was almost rained out.) However, even though the actors did marvelously, nothing about the show itself actually stands out--not beyond the pure spectacle. The songs are soundbites, and often repetative at that, and rather than developing character and plot, Hair attempts (and occasionally succeeds) at evoking a raw mood: some of the meditative chants build to something quite larger than the sum of their parts. As for the show itself, which ends in a large symbolic statement about the underlying cost to all of this freedom and fun (oddly enough, it is as much pro-war as anti-war), it seems ultimately reductive of everything it's been singing for.

Elizabeth Rex

Photo/Erica Parise

I'm a fan of bantering characters, especially charismatic ones, which makes Michael DiGioia's Ned Lowenscroft one of the things worth seeing in Elizabeth Rex. He's paired with a talented tyrant, Stephanie Barton-Farcas, and like their relationship, some of Timothy Findley's play is unbalanced, but it's almost always entertaining.

[Reviewed for Time Out New York]

Mare Cognitum

Theater of the Expendable drew me to this show with its rampant cry for escapism: given the sorry state of affairs in the world today, fuck it, let's go to the moon indeed. But just like their last show, Cherry Docs, the blatant dialogue gives rise to something more tender underneath, and Mare Cognitum manages to blast off above the calamity and commotion. David McGee finds a nice contrast in setting the all-too natural dialogue of excitable Lena (Devon Caraway), shyly intelligent Jeff (Kyle Walters), and contemplatively serious Thomas (Justin Howard), against their hopeful thought experiment, and director Jesse Edward Rosbrow uses long pauses and full lighting shifts to refocus moments, allowing him first to move the action into the past (Walters slyly doubles as a snobby political activist in Lena's world and as an interviewer/confessor in Thomas's self-deceptive routine) and then into a more optimistic apogee. The importance of what these characters are saying (beyond the cheap jokes about Pluto's demotion and Quantum Leap's "god"), help to elevate their conversation beyond sitcom fodder: the thoughts become, in essence, the dramatic hook. It's a clever solution, given that our generation's apathy is defined by the lack of an obstacle, and the show, despite being one ending too long, is a creative change of pace. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "The dark side of the moon" and 5 being "No other words: just fly me to the moon," Mare Cognitum gets a 3.5.

III

III means to romanticize a non-fictional menage a trois, but what we see is two men both in love with the same guy. The only thing that might make the situation interesting (and, frankly, sympathetic for those of us with little patience for martyrs and narcissists) is a palpable sense of the social codes of the time period when it is set (the first half of the last century) but apart from a nod here and there that is exactly what the play lacks. In the first scene, when Monroe Wheeler seeks out the poet Glenway Westcott to tell him that he "gets" what his poems are covertly about and the "men like us" they are written for, there is no sense of shared danger or excitement. The two could be discussing which lattes to get at the corner Starbucks. None of the three actors seems to have brought his crotch into his performance - you don't believe for a second that any two of these men have been in bed together - and without that, there's rarely a believable moment in the play.

The Alice Complex

Photo/Nelson Hancock

Peter Barr Nickowitz's The Alice Complex suffers from only one thing: it's a little too complex for the modest little story he's crammed into an hour. It hardly matters, as Bill Oliver's expert direction and the perfect performances of Lisa Banes and Xanthe Elbrick make this one of the slickest productions of the entire Fringe Festival '08. Here's an example of the abundant cleverness: Elbrick plays Quinn, an actress who is about to star in her theater professor Margo's new play, which is about a young girl named Rebecca (Elbrick) who, in order to work out her love/hate relationship with her idealized feminist teacher, Sally (Banes), takes her hostage. Along the way, Elbrick plays a younger version of Sally, and Banes plays an older versino of Rebecca, touching on a lot of nuances and shades, but forgoing the need to stress anything deeper in these relationships for surfacey lines ("I hate beginnings," says Quinn; "That's because you haven't seen enough endings," replies Margo) and melodramatic mania (as when Rebecca pretends to go off the deep end, hoping to wake up the Sally she is in love with). It's a brilliant showcase, though, and if the overall story winds up a little muddied, the individual choices and chemistry between these two women are terrific. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "A, my name is Awful" 5 being "I'd jump down this rabbit hole again," The Alice Complex gets a 4.

Becoming Britney

Reviewed for Theatermania.