Lady

I saw Rattlestick's production of Craig Wright's new one-act Lady last night and have three questions. 1) Is Paul Sparks the most exciting New York Stage actor of his generation? Not to take a thing away from Michael Shannon (excellent, as a depressed pothead) or David Wilson Barnes (pitch-perfect as a politician whose values have moved to the right over the years) but Paul Sparks has been so consistently dead-on in role after role, with markedly different characterization in each, that he's become compelling reason enough to see anything he's in. 2) Is Lady the best new play I've seen so far this year? I certainly know it's one of the most stimulating and absorbing I've seen yet to draw on our feelings about 'the war'; the playwright's respect for all three characters makes it clear he is after something more resonant than landing easy shots from the left. 3) What can I do to get you to see it? There's a discount code out somewhere and I am going to post it in the sidebar at my blog as soon as I track it down.

Kidstuff

Photo/Ryan Jensen

This crude, shallowly imagined, frantically leaping, childishly portrayed new play of Edith Freni's is, without a doubt, Kidstuff. There's the rare sense of depth, buried deep down in Sarah Nina Hayon's quick retorts and self-denigrating attitude, but for the most part the play is too flat to even pretend that it's good. Partial Comfort Productions often tend to be exaggerated, but they're usually tethered to a sympathetic character who is suffering through an unjust world: here, it's hard to feel bad for a whiny girl who can't get past her first love's betrayal, especially when she surrounds herself with such idiots, all of whom are so cartoonishly portrayed that they end up making her seem far more stable than we're meant to believe.

[Read on]

Fela!

photo: Monique Carboni

More narrated Afro-beat concert than traditional musical, this celebration of Nigerian musical genius and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti features vibrant, spirit-lifting dance, sensationally performed world music, and a charismatic lead performance by Sahr Ngaujah. (It also features an extended ensemble dance sequence in the first act that is among the most electrifying I've ever seen in a theatre; it's the kind of dancing that makes bodies look as if they've been freed from the limits of their spines.) Unfortunately, the show's high level of artistry doesn't extend to the underdeveloped book; the show's primitive overuse of narration and over-reliance on visually projected information is as deadly as the music and dancing are thrilling. The show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, is organized around the conceit that we're in Fela's "shrine" in 1977 watching him perform. Too often, we feel instead we're in history class.

Night Maneuver

Photo/Jordan Fleet

You just never know what you're going to take from a play--turns out that while I didn't care much for the acting, another critic found the acting to be just about the only good thing in the show. That leads me to think that, on the whole, things are probably even darker for this show than I painted it for Time Out.

[Reviewed for Time Out New York]

A Perfect Ganesh

Workshop Theater's production of A Perfect Ganesh comes across as a thrift-store version of Terrance McNally's tale of self-discovery in India: experiences are often reduced to tacky, comic statements and all the vibrant exotic color is often reduced to a bland commercial hue. However, Peter Sylvester's direction, while slow, is actually suited to some of the self-satirical cultural tones, and the two leads, Charlotte Hampden and Ellen Barry, are bright enough spots that, every now and then, we can live vicariously through them.

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From The Inside, Out

The narrative spine of this play by Maggie Keenan-Bolger, in which she portrays herself and dramatizes her highly personal struggle with self-injury, is essentially a conversation with her father that leads up to her confession that she cuts herself; the scene keeps freezing so that Maggie can leave it and gather her courage, usually by re-visiting moments from her past. The theatrical conceit goes a long way toward enlivening the show, helping to keep the play from becoming overly dry while it informs, and the play certainly enlightens as it intends about the motivations of self-injurers. (Often, the motivation is to make emotional pain visible; it can't be talked about, so the pain needs to be seen.) The play is constructed to build to the breakthrough when Maggie tells us what her deepest, unspeakable pain is, but that bare honest moment comes in a projected video segment. There's thematic validity to presenting it in that way, but the price is that it unfortunately makes the final moments in the play remote.