Saturn Returns

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents

Photo/Thomas Hand Keefe

The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents throws around the word "fuck" a lot, especially from the mouth of its protagonist, Dora (Grace Gummer), an emotionally challenged girl who is, for the first time in ten years, "pulling down the pharmaceutical curtain." But the show's about sexual awakening just as fucking's the same as making love: and this is where Kristjan Thor's direction (every bit as closed off as Dora) works small miracles. For instance, the Fine Gentleman (Max Lodge)--who is actually a sleazy door-to-door salesman--seduces Dora by talking about how perfume is made from ox shit, and soap from pig fat: the underlying lies are given up by their surfaces, and that's what makes Dora's slow awakening so tragic. This is Gummer's play, and she commands the play despite a necessarily restrained performance. Beyond the dull surface of "I dunno"s and her energetic parroting, this girl, described as "almost not being involved," actually has feelings. "No big deal," she says, after revealing that she hates wearing pants, but also when describing what it felt like to have her baby sucked out of her. It's the cold, casual tragedy of the everyday, and it's the bitterest sort of love story.

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8 Little Antichrists

Photo/Johnna Adams

If 8 Little Antichrists is supposed to be taken seriously--which it might seem, if you've seen the first two parts of the trilogy--then it has some very hefty problems. Thankfully, Flux takes it only as seriously as it needs to--and the thought of black-winged angels facing off bloody-horned heroes in California, 2028, is already sort of ridiculous--and takes a tongue-in-cheek approach that lets us suspend our disbelief in a cheesy Max Headroom sort of future. For all the creative satire that goes into fashioning a Philip K. Dick plot for Claudia (Candice Holdorf), a detective investigating the death of her clone sister, or to Melanie's (Rebecca McHugh) attempt to get the vessel of God back from Clockwork Orange-style drizz-heads Thump and Fibber (Jake Alexander and Joe Mathers), it's really just an excuse for over-the-top action that Vampire Cowboy Theater fans will be proud of. So long as you don't think about it for too long.

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Rattlers

Photo/Justin Hoch

The second part of the Angel Eaters trilogy finds Johnna Adams at the top of her game, starting with a box full of rattlesnakes and a madcap kidnapping, jumping to a creepy encounter between a local undertaker and a drunk husband who share the same love, and flipping with a Southern Gothic romance between a young boy and a grieving mother. Jerry Ruiz jumps neatly between the three disparate parts of this play--a trilogy on the micro level--but what really makes this play is that for all the plot, the emphasis is on the characters first. (The cast is outstanding, too.) When she's not rushing, Adams has a terrific voice, and her stories work on multiple levels: as her characters grow more and more desperate, we see clearly that there's no price we won't pay to get back the ones we love.

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Made in Poland

Photo/Carol Rosegg

There's a Holden Caulfield anger brewing inside Bogus (Kit Williamson), and if you can't tell from the way he slams his iron pipe against the metal scaffolding that metaphorically represents his life as an unfinished construction site, he's got the words "Fuck Off" tattooed across his forehead. Was something lost in Alissa Valles's transition? It's possible: there's no American parallel for the strange devotion and peace these characters all find in Krzysztof Krawczyk, a real pop singer. But even the universal pursuit of love doesn't come across; Jackson Gay's direction is turned up so loud (and yet the action is still clearly faked) that it's all drowned out. The anarchist impulses of Fight Club were at least directed by broader statements about society, but Przemyslaw Wojcieszek's writing is focused so narrowly on a punk/sharpskin aesthetic that it's impossible to get inside Bogus's head, or to extract something resonant from him. "How does one live?" is a question well worth exploring; unfortunately, that tattoo on Bogus's head seems to be the answer--at the least, those big, black, gothic letters prevent us from seeing anything else.

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Clay

The first production from LCT3, Lincoln Center's initiative to offer new works from emerging artists at commonly affordable prices ($20), is a solo hip-hop musical by and performed by 24 year-old Matt Sax. I wish I liked it more. Or, frankly, at all. While LCT should be commended for stepping outside the cultural box, and Sax clearly has a talent for bustin' rhymes, Clay is deficient as a piece of theatrical writing, lacking discernible conflict until halfway through the show. Sax isn't especially accomplished at delineating character either, and the story he means to tell here of a dysfunctional suburban home life comes off rather whiny when set to a music form that grew out of urban marginalization. While the piece has been given the best staging that could be hoped for (under Eric Rosen's direction) the show's only urgency comes from the hope that its hip-hop music is potential bait for new audiences. But it'd been far better if said new audiences had seen BASH'd earlier this year, a show which ably put rap and hip-hop to stageworthy use in service of legitimate, well-crafted musical theatre.