The Redheaded Man

Photo/Jesse Garrison

Halley Bondy's new play, The Redheaded Man, starts out as a comedy that explores the difference between illness and insight, but by repressing the drama until late in the one-act, Bondy ends up with a lot of unprescribed side-effects: exaggeration, implausibility, and senselessness. Luckily, these unpredictable moments are still largely entertaining, thanks to the relationship between Brian (David Jenkins), the "ill" architect who creates buildings by altering his symbolic memory, and his roommate, Jonathan (James Edward Shippy), whose family adopted him after his mother's death. When these two argue, it's with years of happy memories mixed in with resentment, which makes their conversations far richer than the one-sided and berating "lectures" from The Redheaded Man (Bruce Bluett), a manifestation of Brian's absent father figure, and far better than the manic scenes with Dr. Jones (Michelle Sims), a psychiatrist who is addicted to the drug she's a shill for. The final character, Lydia (Bondy), is another device, but at least she has a dramatic purpose, one that goes beyond manifesting Brian's madness or criticizing an industry that would rather medicate effects than treat the cause. Like the character she plays, Bondy arouses a lot of interest in Brian's unique condition, but despite Jessica Fisch's surefire direction (projections show us what Brian sees), the show is repressing a deeper, richer, meatier second act. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Untreated depression" and 5 being "Pill-popping euphoria," The Redheaded Man gets a 3.

Walls

Photo/Jordan Matters

No matter how complex the characters, coming up with convincing obstacles always seems to be what stands between a playwright and a natural drama. To his credit, Aron Ezra skips straight to the character building, dipping into the fertile territory of magical realism to manifest a literal (and symbolic) obstacle: a warm, wet, pulsing wall that has, one day, split the Pierce's "happy" home in half. As it turns out, the only way to dissolve this supernatural barrier is by tearing down the invisible walls of their hearts: that is, confessing their secrets. And this is where Ezra runs into a wall of his own: the premise is fine, but the characters end up being rather artificial. Dennis (Adam Richman) is a workaholic because he's bad at his job, and while he loves his wife, he's not attracted to her because he still mourns his dead first love (of eleven years). Naomi (Julie Jesneck) is, of course, pregnant, and because she's felt neglected by her husband's long hours, she's recently had an eleven-month affair (which adds just enough ambiguity to the baby). While the little lies that lead up to these big confessions are cute and occasionally romantic, it's pretty obvious where the big lies are leading: how could two people, married for four years, not know these basic things about one another's needs? Ezra's play is also dramatically unbalanced: both actors do good work, but Naomi is made into a sharp-tongued villain, and Dennis is, at heart, a victimized romantic. It's somewhat appropriate that the play comes together, with only minor repetition, up until the very end, but it's ultimately disappointing, too. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "A nasty, rusty, chain-link fence," and 5 being "A spotless, perfectly painted mural," Walls gets a 3.

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.