Louder

Photo/Asle Nielsen

Verdensteatret's louder wades into the torrent of the Mekong River, but when it tries to recreate that environment in an eccentrically orchestrated soundscape, all sense of meaning ends up washed away. There's nothing wrong with performance art, but this masochistically loud bit of theater is divorced of meaning; stripped down to cold wires, absent puppets, and mechanized spider legs, it has the numbing effect of watching Foley artists at play in a field of possessed megaphones. This is to take nothing away from the pure experimentation, or the unique effect and visuals: the sight of two men sawing at high-tension, near-invisible wires makes it look as if they are playing air, a Zen-like anti-Blue Man effect. But illusion is all, and the uncomfortable sensation of lying on an airport tarmac in the midst of a hurricane fails to conjure up as much resonance for me as it does for the vibrating cables or the emotionless performers.

Jason & Ben

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Parent/Teacher Conference Plays

Here's the difference between a blog and a review: here, I'm just going to tell you that I give this show a giant A+, on account of Clay MacLeod Chapman's Rugrats, the brilliant site-specific work, and the fact that there are two other excitingly different one-acts on the bill. If you click the link below, I'll tell you more about them, but as this show closes in three days, it's easier to just stress up front that you're never going to have a better reason to go back to school.

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Three Changes

Reviewed for Theater News Online.

Bedbugs!

photo: Quinn Batson

This ridiculously enjoyable pop-rock sci-fi musical, in which an uptight lady exterminator's custom-made spray accidentally turns the city's bedbugs into giant rock singing man-eaters bent on world domination, is the kind of cheesy silliness that has so often been done badly in the past that it's a wonderful shock to see it done so well. The score (music by Paul Leschen, lyrics by bookwriter Fred Sauter) satirizes power-pop ballads and old school hair-band rock anthems while still delivering their pleasures - as performed by Chris Hall (every bit the rock icon as the king of the bugs), Celina Carvajal (a vocal powerhouse as the lady bug killer turned bug lover), and especially Brian Charles Rooney (in drag and brilliantly sending up a pop superstar named - one guess who this is based on - Salon Dionne) the songs are a goofy arena-rock blast. Top to bottom everyone in the ensemble is with the spirit of the material; I haven't had as much what-a-goof, laugh-out-loud fun at a campy musical since the first time I saw Rocky Horror.

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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