Great Hymn of Thanskgiving/Conversation Storm

Although the ability to ignore reality over a luxurious dinner and the knack for using torture are unfortunately unoriginal things in this country, the Nonsense Company's duet of one-acts is still terrifyingly original. They put the "fun" back in "fungible," first with "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving," a work for "three speaking percussionists" and then, without pause--for when are there breaks in life--with "Conversation Storm," a lightning-quick extrapolation--using theatrical techniques--of what torture inevitably leads to. It's political theater, but at times it is unrecognizably so, which is to its credit.

[Read on]

Flyovers

photo: Carol Rosegg

The dialogue in Jeffrey Sweet's play, set following a high school reunion, tells us why the successful celebrity film critic (Richard Kind) elects to spend an evening with the blue collar bum (Kevin Greer) who bullied him all through high school, but after a certain point the situation strains credibility. The bully isn't especially contrite, and his antisemitism and bitter hostility toward the liberal elite are so obvious that the critic seems like he's asking for trouble by hanging around. Trouble comes, on cue, when fellow ex-classmate Iris (Michelle Pawk) drops in and rekindles the critic's long-held torch. The ensuing business comes as no surprise, since the playwright has oversold the veiled menace in the bully's dialogue right from the start. Still, Kind and Pawk give terrific, well-judged naturalistic performances, expertly scaled for the intimacy of the tiny 78th Street Theater Lab.

The Third Story

photo: Joan Marcus

Kathleen Turner has rarely seemed above sending herself up. Her casting opposite Charles Busch in his new play would seem to promise a lip-smacking treat - a match made in camp heaven between a drag icon who adores Hollywood screen women and a game, one-time real-life Hollywood siren. One of The Third Story's many disappointments is that it confines Turner almost entirely to a (relatively straight) framing story where her grand theatricality is a liability rather than an asset: her throaty voice and broad delivery are at odds with what's needed to put over her material. The play is almost entirely divided between scenes where Turner plays a screenwriter collaborating on a script with her son (Jonathan Walker), and scenes from the movie the two are writing, circa 1949, which often feature Busch in lady mob boss drag. The Busch scenes are more lively than the Turner ones, and the supporting cast has the right arched eyebrow style for them, but the play's structure forbids comic momentum.

Sixty Miles To Silver Lake

photo: Monique Carboni

It takes just a short while to realize that we're watching a father and his son not on one car ride but on several, in short scenes spanning at least a handful of years. Rather than arranging the scenes chronologically, the playwright (Dan Lefranc) repeatedly jump-cuts forward and backward to heighten the recurring motifs in their conversations: on one trip, Dad is supportive of his son's soccer playing, but a moment later during a different car ride he's cruelly dismissive, reducing his son's extracurricular soccer to "day care with cleats". What emerges from the playwright's structure is initially fascinating - the juxtapositions of the scenes struck me as a means to illustrate the cumulative damage caused by the careless things that parents say to children - but the ninety-minute one-act, despite Anne Kauffman's fluid direction and fully convincing performances by Joseph Adams and Dane Dehaan, nonetheless runs out of gas around the hour mark. While the playwright succeeds at mining the grotesque from the ordinary in the dynamic between the father and son, their story is finally too ordinary to sustain our full engagement all the way to the play's end. Despite that, this is a playwright well worth watching out for, and a play well worth seeing.

The Fantasticks

I took advantage of the 20at20 off-Broadway promotion (in effect through Feb. 8) to catch The Fantasticks for $20. (Actually $21.50.) What better way to spend Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, after all, than attending a classic piece of musical theater? There wasn't very much to note; it's The Fantasticks, after all. Subbing for Lewis Cleale was Scott Willis, who made a formidable El Gallo. I teared up at "They Were You." A basic good time was had by all. There was something a tiny bit odd about the venue, though. It's in the Jerry Orbach Theater, in the Snapple Theater Center. Hence the lobby has a dual Snapple-and-Jerry-Orbach theme. Wonder what Orbach - who was in The Fantasticks when it first opened off-Broadway, in 1960, long before Snapple was a gleam in some marketer's eye - would have thought. The Fantasticks: maybe not the best stuff on Earth, but for a Jackson plus a buck-fifty, how can you go wrong? Bonus lobby feature: read all about Jerry Orbach during intermission.

Ruined

Photo: Joan Marcus

[I too would like to take a moment to introduce myself. I'm Wendy Caster and I'm a writer-of-all-trades. I've had plays produced at the Manhattan Theatre Source's Estrogenius Festival, my short movie You Look Just Like Him is being edited, I have short stories in various anthologies, and I also work as a business, medical, and/or tech writer, depending on the assignment. I saw my first show when I was 14--The King and I, with Constance Towers and Michael Kermoyan--and knew that I had found heaven. I'm delighted to be part of Show Showdown.]

There are shows that resist being reviewed. Ruined is one of them. Its topic--the endless, vicious, war-time sexual violence against women--is so devastating and important that to start discussing dialogue, lighting, or scenery seems trivial and churlish. I was so involved, so moved, that I spent the second act hugging my fleece jacket like a security blanket.

On the other hand, it seems equally churlish to ignore the imagination, intelligence, talent, bravery, and hard work that goes into creating a piece of theatre like Ruined. Lynn Notage's hard-hitting script turns the news coverage of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (of which there is not enough) into the human particulars that make other people's lives--and suffering--real to an audience. The uniformly excellent actors, particularly the women, show us both the profound suffering and the quotidian life-goes-on-ness of people under seige. Director Kate Whoriskey calibrates the emotional arc of the story perfectly, so that each shock is individually earned. Ruined has already had an extremely successful run at the Goodman in Chicago and opens officially on February 10th.