Southern Promises

Photo/Ryan Jensen

Slavery is wrong, period, a simple truth that will surprise no-one in the educated crowd at PS122. What will surprise them--especially given the emphatic and broad strokes of Thomas Bradshaw's writing--is how strongly the acknowledgment of such a vast moral wrong can still impact them. Stereotypically evil slaveholders take care of the graphic rapes and abuses even as their satirically hypocritical lines give way to the darkest comedy, but what's important to focus on is the depth of the victims, married house slaves Benjamin (Erwin E. A. Thomas) and Charlotte (Sadrina Johnson), who we suffer vicariously through. Along with director Jose Zayas, these actors capture a subtle explicitness that make the deep sorrow reflected in their eyes more graphic than their own physical degradation. Save for one misstep in which Benjamin dreams of being the master (which tarnishes his suffering), Southern Promises is a fine work of evocative theater. That it is not harder to watch says something more about the audience than it does about the highly capable cast and crew, who have created a lingering mood that sends aftershocks long after the curtain call.


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The Hatpin

photo: Danielle Lyonne

The plot of this Australian musical (performing at NYMF) may be based on true crime events, but it's Gothic soap opera: your tear ducts prepare for a workout as soon as the penniless unwed mom - circa 1892 - hands over her bastard infant to a respectable family near the top of the first act. It's entirely predictable and overheated but it undeniably gets its job done, partly thanks to the lean effectiveness of the book and the pleasures of the accomplished, often lilting score. The csst is uniformly excellent but Caroline O'Connor, playing a fruit merchant who befriends and shelters the vilified mom, is especially captivating.

Love, Jerry

Reviewed for Theatermania.

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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