Two Rooms

Photo/Aaron Epstein

Despite Lee Blessing's heavy-handed metaphors and Peter Flynn's too-literal direction, what ultimately matters is not the room, but what's inside it: on that account, Angela Christian and Michael Laurence acquit themselves nicely as a husband and wife separated by a terrorist's political demands. If only their emotional journey weren't constantly interrupted by the bland and all-too-familiar use of an ice-cold government agent, Ellen van Oss (Adinah Alexander), and a manipulative reporter, Walker Harris (Patrick Boll), not to mention the slide-show accompanied political lecture. Two Rooms was revived for its relevancy (it's otherwise a rather lifeless play): in that case, the audience needs to be trusted a little bit more.

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Eureka!

Photo/Jocelyn Gonzales

If one is going to call Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka a prose poem (it's an essay), one might as well call Hanon Reznikov's theatrical adaptation of it a play. But if one wants to be honest to the hard work that Judith Malina has put into the choreography, it's far closer to interpretive dance: Fuerzabruta for the New Age crowd. It's a beautiful idea, re-creating the Big Bang by using the audience (and dancing/acting cast) as component parts, but being so close to the action, striving to follow the cues, makes us work too hard to appreciate, let alone hear, "the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." The end result feels like doing the work of an Alexander class while watching Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, with a big self-congratulatory "Let The Sunshine In"-type conclusion. The Living Theater's committment to larger-than-theater work is admirable, but the question you need to ask is, do you feel transcendental, punk? Well, do you?

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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.

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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").

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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.

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