13

Reviewed for Theater News Online.

Brew of the Dead

The jovial energy and rough yet polished performances of the ensemble in Brew of the Dead makes the production seem as if it's been poured straight from the tap, though it's clearly gotten a good oast-like rehearsal process under Justin Plowman's direction. Though the simple "flee zombies and drink beer" plot isn't far from the cheap "drinkability" humor of a Bud Lite commercial, the pun-heavy result ends up resembling a Guinness: dark, frothy, and practically a meal in a can. Patrick Storck's puns are fresh and clever (although, with lines like "insert Tab A into zom-B," you may need a drink), and he's clearly been eating some pop-culture saturated brains, as there are references to everything from Shaun of the Dead to the crowbar-wielding hero of the Half-Life video games. The cast, however, really sells it, especially Peter Schuyler and Amy Beth Sherman, who go over the top, but have so much fun doing so that we're happy to just drink along for the ride.

[Read on]

Nemesis

Michael Buckley's new play, Nemesis, features two charming actors who are trapped in an unglamorously extended episode of Entourage. Buckley bestows some hard-earned honesty from his own experiences on the trials and tribulations of these friends turned rivals, easygoing Eric (Will Poston) and talented but egotistical Dan (Buckley). However, by relying on monologues to convey large amounts of plot over a long period of time, he loses the development he would get from scenes, and his characters are stretched far too thin (high school to Hollywood). If there is a real nemesis in Nemesis, it is the playwright himself (and perhaps the director, Chad M. Brinkman, who throws a single meaningless screen onto the set so that he can call it "multimedia").

[Read on]

A Body of Water

Photo/James Leynse

If you somehow managed to condense Lost into a two-person play, added a third character to twist the plot in a Memento-type fashion, and then stripped out the drama, you'd have Lee Blessing's aimless new play, A Body of Water. Normally, plays either suffer from characters in search of a plot, or a plot in search of characters: here, Blessing suffers both simultaneously, for his characters are in search of their character, and that, in effect, is the plot. The play uses cheap narrative tricks to keep us as confused as Moss (Michael Cristofer) and Avis (Christine Lahti), and Maria Mileaf confuses directing with entertaining, which is perhaps why Laura Odeh is the most enjoyable thing about the show: her character doesn't bother trying to make sense. Water's fine, and a liquid plot has suspenseful purposes, but without any meat--or nutrients--in the show's diet, it just trickles interminably on. Lesson learned: when you're stuck going down shit creek without a paddle, the last thing you want is a clown juggling in the backseat.

[Read on]

Fifty Words

Photo/Joan Marcus

Everything you need to know about the marriage in Fifty Words can be summed up by Austin Pendleton's silent, pre-blackout moment. Adam (Norbert Leo Butz) marches down the stairs and Jan (Elizabeth Marvel) comes through the front door: the two pointedly ignore one another as they cross paths. It's a necessary bit of staging, for Butz and Marvel are such tremendously subtle actors that without clueing us in, one could easily spend the first twenty minutes wondering where all the drama was, missing the tension around a smiled line like "In case there's any ambiguity, that was foreplay," and failing to spot the active choice to compliment the food instead of the waiter. There's a precise imprecision to this failing marriage that epitomizes America today just as Albee captured our past in Virginia Woolf, and Michael Weller's on his A-game, keeping the two-hander clever, despite traveling a much beaten-to-death path.

[Read on]

Estrogenius Festival: Series A

From a marketing standpoint, the Estrogenius Festival is brilliant. But when it comes to honesty and entertainment, the first week's five one-act offerings fall short of Mensa's theatrical standards (except for Ashleigh Murray's stirring performance in Cheryl Davis's "Child of the Movement"). The festival is still a success: the playwrights show remarkable range and, even in the rockiest moments, take on an energetic, unfaltering pride in their voices. If they're tripping on anything, it's not having enough to actually talk about.

[Read on]