God of Carnage

photo: Joan Marcus

The overarching idea is ripe for comedy - two civilized well-to-do married couples meet to smooth over a playground fight between their children but soon sink to sandbox level themselves - and the quartet of fine actors have a blast throwing mud at each other. Once the play gets up to full swing, there are laughs to be had of the "rage beneath the calm" variety, as well as the considerable pleasure of seeing these performers (James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels, and Hope Davis) play such primal emotion and childish behavior. But too much in the set-up of Yasmina Reza's play, translated from French by Christopher Hampton, is woefully contrived: we don't believe that the couples would stay in the same room together after their first insults, and after that we especially don't believe, as written and staged, that each of the couples would in-fight in front of the other. Since the premise of the bitter comedy depends on our belief in and recognition of the civilized social pretenses that the couples first exhibit, the careless set-up costs the play a good deal of its potential impact and keeps it from amounting to anything more than an actors' playground.

Incident At Vichy

photo: Steve Kunken

While not from the playwright's top drawer, this one-act strongly bears his unmistakable stamp: you know you're in Arthur Miller territory when characters turn to each other and say things like "We have learned the price of idealism". The play - in which a line of men await questioning in Nazi-occupied France with the gradual realization of their fate - is wordy and creaky, but its arguments are world sized and timeless, and it can work well enough if there is sufficient gravity and tension on stage. Unfortunately that's exactly what's lacking in this production by The Actors Company: the stakes haven't been raised to life-or-death level, so the actors too often sound like they are making the playwright's speeches rather than struggling to make sense of humanity.

Thirst: A Spell For Christabel

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Cambria

The young Frederick Douglass spent six months in Ireland, finding there the morale boost he needed to continue his abolitionist crusade. I spent an hour and a half at the Irish Arts Center in New York on St. Patrick's day, getting my first taste of Donal O'Kelly's work. The Cambria concerns not Douglass's time in Europe but the ocean voyage itself. Mr. O'Kelly and director Raymond Keane bring it to life as a richly fictionalized tale of colorful figures and high drama at sea. Embodied by Mr. O'Kelly and Sorcha Fox — both superb actors — these people are by turns amusing, inspiring, and a little scary. The language is worthy of the mantle of the great Irish dramatists of the past — warm, poetic, funny, pained, sprightly yet always faintly weighted, but never bitter. The Cambria provides one of those concentrated, magical experiences one hopes for every time one takes one's seat in a theater.

Exit the King

Photo: Jason Bell

It's interesting to imagine experiencing Eugene Ionesco's work in the 1950s and ‘60s when it was new and groundbreaking. In the past four or five decades, many of Ionesco’s devices have become, if not commonplace, not unusual, and Ionesco's work simply cannot have the impact it once had. Exit the King, currently previewing on Broadway with Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon, seems a bit like a museum piece, only intermittently brought to life, mostly by Rush’s staggeringly textured, physical, and brilliant performance and Andrea Martin’s comic timing and sheer likeability.

Our Town

photo: Carol Rosegg

You don't walk out of David Cromer's bold, unforgettable production of Our Town talking about its craft, although there would be plenty to say in praise of it. You walk out newly devastated by Thornton Wilder's play even if you went in, as I did, feeling that you already knew it and were at least a little immune. Cromer (who also plays the Stage Manager narrator) makes some daring directorial but they are brilliant and purposeful in their service to the play, culminating in a third act that is almost unbearably powerful and immediate. This is a must-see, as soon as possible.