About Face

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Underpants

Photo/Jen Maufrais Kelly

Compared to the fine wine of Steve Martin's last play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, this adaptation of Carl Sterheim's 1911 play, The Underpants, is a six-pack of cheap beer, hastily chugged to numb the unhappiness of home life. Directed on high spin by Seth Soloway, this production manages--with the help of manic comic actors like Nat Cassidy and the sublime subtlety of Catia Ojeda--to iron out the kinks of the original characters and get back to the wild and crazy puns of Martin's adaptation.

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Refuge of Lies

I know I'm jaded, but I've never been so bored by a play dealing with the Holocaust before. In this case, it's the aftermath--some forty years later--when Simon (Drew Dix) comes knocking on Canada's door, demanding that Rudi (Richard Mawe) be extradited to Holland for trial. It's based on a true story (Jacob Luitjen's), but rather than confront the issue of fitting the punishment to the crime (especially as Rudi's a reformed Sunday school teacher), playwright Ron Reed fits the characters to a faux-Miller mold, exploring how the guilt destroys Rudi's mind in a series of increasingly erratic flashbacks. Steve Day's direction does little to help establish the shifts in character, and the actors play each role as if they're recording an audio book: it's lifelessly crisp. The play feels anti-Semitic, too: gentle Rudi is tormented by the menacing "Old Jew" his father warned him about, and Simon just seems angry and vengeful--in other words, evil. Simon dehumanizes Rudi by judging him solely on the past, but Reed dehumanizes all of his characters.

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ANGER/NATION

Photo/Paula Court

Radiohole's latest piece, ANGER/NATION, literally goes balls out as it juxtaposes the life of the anti-drink anarchist, Carrie A. Nation, with the videos of occultist Kenneth Anger, the performance art of Eric Dyer, Scott Halvorsen Gillette, and Maggie Hoffman, and a sampled soundscape that vibrates through the free beer. Don't worry if you don't know any of those people: this show invents its own reality, so if you can let go, then go.

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The Invitation

photo: Word Monger

I would have been more satisfied with this new black comedy (by Brian Parks) if it had ended shortly after the black out that divides it roughly in two: the first half of the play, in which dinner guests squirm in their seats over the ugly near-Fascist snobbery of their hostess, is as smart and as absorbing as the second half is overlong and contrived, although ripe with bold and welcome socio-political statement. John Clancy has wisely directed the play to move at a fast clip, but not all of the actors are up to the task of finding levels at the brisk pace. Nonetheless, the production is vivid and memorable despite the play’s indulgences.

Oh What War

Photo/Ryan Jensen

I won't pretend to understand all the nuances or layers to Jason Craig's 2008 reinvention of Joan Littlewood's 1963 Oh What a Lovely War, but I can say that it's an utterly fascinating war. Less confrontational than his punk send-up, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, Craig's latest work quietly murmurs through a sense of Brechtian loss (and songs, pulled right from the WW1 era), clownish satire, and mysterious performances (the Dadist's Cabaret Voltaire is cited), provoking our fascination through the complexly beautiful language and the Peter Ksander's elegantly rustic set. Things get muddy toward the end, when the nonlinear snippets--reports from an underground (metaphoric or otherwise) of ragtag deserters and victims--not only coalesce, but try to put the focus on the audience, and away from the tremulous language and potent stories. We can't explain war, we can only look at interpretations of it.

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