What's That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling

Reviewed for Theatermania.

A Number

Caryl Churchill's A Number is dismissively vague about its plot, its language is built to circumlocate the small scraps of detail the characters are dying for, and it runs under an hour. And yet, every minute is brilliant . . . or at least, it should be. But Clockwork Theatre's revival of this play lacks the necessary nuance, focusing more on the literal science than the literary humanity, and their production comes across as digital rather than analog and certainly far from Swiss in its precision. These short, sharp pinpricks of lines no longer muse on identity ("If that's me over there, who am I?"); instead, they are heavyhanded runs of emotionally dry dialogue. Sean Marrinan practically blubbers onstage, rather than being the cold, distant failure of a father that he needs to be (Salter is a man who finds it easier to put his crying son in a cupboard than to actually comfort him), and this unbalances his partner, Jay Rohloff, who ends up overplaying and rushing through his three versions of Salter's son. Beverly Brumm's direction, like Larry Laslo's boring set design, takes everything literally, and flattens the play, focusing on the science (there are projections of cell division between scenes) rather than on the characters. There are moments when all the gears and cogs spin in alignment, but only a number of them.

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King Of Shadows

photo: Carel DiGrappa

There are four characters in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's new drama, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you which one is the most irritating and fictional. One, the gay teen runaway ragamuffin who lives on his wits on the mean streets of San Francisco, is too precious to believe. Two, the do-gooder social worker whose liberal guilt blinds her to the dangers of giving the teen a place to sleep, is written to behave idiotically. Three, her teenage daughter who is over absolutely everything, spouts almost nothing but sarcasm and wisecracks as if she wandered into the play from a sitcom. Four, the social worker's boyfriend, whose only purpose is sounding board and plot device. (He's a cop; the nice word for this is "convenient").

The Invitation

The Invitation is so well-cooked that the roars of laughter threaten to drown out the subtler points Brian Parks is making with his hyperactive style. As a social satire of the rich, Parks strips his characters down to five very similar blanks and stuffs them full of the fattiest (in a foie gras way) text, then watches as John Clancy amps up the violence and the speed, a gore- and gorge-fest on one very sharp skewer. The very able cast, led by the indefatigable David Calvitto, make this an evening you'll want to RSVP to.

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King of Shadows

Photo/Carel DiGrappa

King of Shadows leaves us grasping at thin air when, after a promising opening, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa starts to lose himself in an overcooked and fantastical plot. The play has some fine moments (particularly from Sarah Lords, who plays an unhappy teen) all the way through, but by keeping the evil offstage, his magical realism lacks any bite. Despite the aesthetic direction being nailed by Connie Grappo, this particular story seems better suited for the world of comic books, where such presentational and sharply polished dialogue and narrative asides wouldn't seem so out of place beside all those colorful panels.

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Beast

Michael Weller knows that war can't be understood from afar, but he doesn't even try: he just distills a secondhand vision into comedic form. He ends up beating a corpse to death, in this case, the otherwise fresh concept that has a GI (Corey Stoll) rise from the dead to travel America with his buddy Jimmy (Logan Marshall-Green), exposing corruption, decay, religion, and capitalism in America. The aesthetics are always top-notch at New York Theater Workshop, but the cold use of video clips and flag-painted boxes to show a once-removed America ends up as just a glib surface. Despite great performances from Stoll and Marshall-Green, not to mention double-cast ensemble members like Lisa Joyce and Dan Butler, the play is too elastic to ever snap back at us.

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