The Only Tribe

Photo/Sheree Hovsepian

How does such a simple concept get so conceited? There hardly seems the room for so much stuffiness given the plain stage, gray one-piece outfits, and white minimalist masks (each with a pixilated Katamari Damacy-like cut-out that gives it a “personality”). But sure enough, there’s a trademark in The Only Tribe’s logo. The “simple” stage actually houses 3LD’s Eyeliner technology, which lets Reid Farrington clutter it with commercial images and dancing holograms. Roland Gebhardt’s masked modernity is well-matched by Peter Kyle’s geometric choreography, and they move nicely to Stephen Barber’s chic electronica, but all this conjures is a high-brow Alexander movement class. Perhaps most damning is that Rebecca Bannor-Addae is credited as a writer for this silent piece: you can read her “story” at www.theonlytribe.com, but why bother? A few pretty moments and a solid back-beat can’t mask The Only Tribe’s flaw: after all, what is pretension but the meaningless grasp for importance?

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Out Cry

Photo/Czerton Lim

While performing Two-Person Play, the play within Tennessee William's metadramatic cry for help, Out Cry, the "audience" walks out, leaving Felice (Eduardo Machado) and his sister, Clare (Mia Katigbak) alone, lost in their own world. That’s no surprise: after all, Felice reveals early on that their company has left them: “Your sister and you are—insane!” reads the charming letter. What is surprising is that nobody walks out on NAATCO’s revival of this troubled play. As it happens, the second act is much better: having dispensed with the circumstances, it brushes the madness of “artists [who] put so much into their work that they’ve got little left over for acting like other people.” It is not enough, however, to excuse Machado’s atonal line readings, Thom Semsa’s listless, restless, and senseless blocking, or the constant textual stumbling.

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Road Show

photo: Joan Marcus

Now scarcely longer than 95 minutes, Sondheim's oft-reworked musical about the fortunes of the Mizner brothers remains maddeningly unfocused: even the score's most accomplished songs don't resonate without a strong narrative theme to organize them. We watch one brother rise to fame and fortune as the other falls from it, but none of it means anything to us since neither character stands for anything. This conceit of this John Doyle-directed production, which keeps the ensemble on stage to tell or stand witness to the story, may be close in spirit to show's early incarnation at NYTW years ago, but it keeps the characters at an emotional distance from us and emphasizes just how thin the story is. Michael Cerveris makes some interesting choices as Wilson, the more baldly manipulative brother - I would rather have seen the show told from his perspective, even though his huckster character generally seems like something out of Kander & Ebb - but all else on stage is a dull, beige blur.

Geometry Of Fire

photo: Sandra Coudert

There hasn't yet been a high number of plays to prominently include an Iraqi War serviceman returning to civilian life, so it's especially disappointing that this one, by Stephen Belber, is more pedantic than enlightening. It's also far too tidy and predictable: the subplot, in which the Saudi-American comes to believe that his dying father's blood cancer was caused by U.S. chemical testing in his Virginia backyard, is an instantly transparent device to bring him into inevitable angry opposition to the ex-soldier. Belber's dialogue is natural and believable, but the play lacks a suitable amount of escalating tension, which dulls the power of the characters' confrontation.

Cape Disappointment

Photo/Ryan Jensen

The latest work by The Debate Society, Cape Disappointment, is slightly disappointing, but only in comparison to their previous plays. More is not always better: the two new actors joining writer/performers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen pick up the uneasy rhythms of casual conversation, but the awkward transitions create a lot of dead space. When it's moving though, you'll find that director Oliver Butler still has a wide variety of tricks up his sleeve, and that TDS still leaves most companies in their creative dust.

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The Grand Inquisitor

It's rarely more austere than this: one thin, white raised platform, two black chairs, one actor talking while another listens. And yet for its full 55 minutes the simplicity here makes for an electrifying theatricality, forcing a focus where one actor raising his palms in the air becomes a cataclysmic event. The intensity is not a surprise, considering that Peter Brook has directed and that the text is an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's intellectually staggering tale in which Christ returns to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Bruce Myers, as both narrator and Inquisitor who (in a manner of speaking) puts the silent Christ on trial, is spellbinding, anchoring his performance with a gravity so core-shaking that the stage can barely contain it. Is man's free will incompatible with happiness? Are the edicts of Christianity impossible for its followers to ever achieve? How does evil masquerade as good? These are the kinds of questions I was left with after seeing Dostoyevsky's arguments put on stage and made newly vibrant and disturbing here. In a word, it's devastating.