The Singing Forest

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Is it possible to combine mistaken identities, accidental murders, jealous lovers, two different time periods, slamming doors, Freud, Starbucks, a psychiatrist ex machina, the Holocaust, rape, and reconciliation into one coherent, moving, comic drama? Maybe not, but in The Singing Forest, Craig Lucas comes close, with moments of brilliance and heartbreak along the way. Loe Rieman (the amazing Olympia Dukakis), severely damaged by the loss of her brother in the Holocaust and the seeming betrayal of her children decades later, has deliberately isolated herself from the world. Yet part of her still needs and wants to connect. A phone sex/therapy line, memories/hallucinations, and more coincidences than in a Dickens novel bring her face to face with her life, past and present, and help her achieve a measure of peace. Lucas's juxtaposition of farce and grim reality veers from starkly effective to uncomfortable and back again, and the varied plot lines achieve varied levels of success. Overall, Lucas has written a piece that is both messy and dazzling, impressive in its ambition even when it falls short. Beautifully directed by Mark Wing-Davey, with an excellent cast including Mark Blum, Jonathan Groff (whose ability to cry onstage is on a par with Bernadette Peters' and Alice Ripley's), and Susan Pourfar.

The Norman Conquests

photo: Richard Termine

Seeing any one of the standalone plays in Alyn Ayckbourn's trilogy makes for a tasty snack; it takes seeing two to make a meal and all three a full feast. Each of the three plays depicts the same six characters during the same weekend in a different part of an English country house yet there's hardly any feeling of repetition, maybe because the comedy comes much less from situations than from observation of character. The plays' events are simple - an aborted weekend tryst between Norman (Stephen Mangan) and Annie (Jessica Hynes) becomes everybody's business - but the humor is sophisticated and, despite plenty of farcical hilarity, it's anything but trivial. The six performers in the cast, under Matthew Warchus' pitch-perfect direction, are each in touch with the vulnerability of Aykborn's comic characters. I suppose that anything is possible, but I really don't see how a production of these plays could be any better.

The Dishwashers

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Interviewed actor Tim Donoghue here.

Way to Heaven

Photo/NestorCD.com

See enough Holocaust plays, and inevitably, one grows at least a little inured to the scenes of violence (sad as that may be). That's why Juan Mayorga's Way To Heaven makes for such an effective show: instead of showing the actual atrocities, it shows only the artificial atmosphere of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, at which Jews were forced to pretend that they had been happily resettled so that the Germans could quell the worldwide "rumors" of mass extermination. The audience, cast at the wide, parallel ends of the set--a narrow strip of dead leaves--sits on with the burden of hindsight, much like the Red Cross Representative (Shawn Parr), whose opening monologue establishes the tone of the show: "I needed one of them to give me a signal," he says. In other words, we watch Way to Heaven with the horror of knowledge, not the bliss of ignorance.

[Read on]

The Merchant Of Venice

photo: Nobby Clark

This all-male co-production between Propeller and Watermill Theater (at BAM) re-sets the action of Shakespeare's play to a prison, a choice that does more for the play's second act than for its first. There are as many fresh, inventive ideas as in Propeller's brilliant The Taming Of The Shrew, seen a couple of seasons ago, but here one would need to already be well-acquainted with traditional presentations of the play to be engaged: the production's prison conceit makes a muddle of most of the play's secondary action. The production's interpretation of the main conflict - the bargain between Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands interest on his loans, and Antonio, the Christian businessman who does not - is uncomfortable in its choice to keep Shylock from our sympathies: for instance his appeal to the courts and to the anti-Semitic crowd that his people bleed like any other seems here less an emotional appeal for humanity than cold lawyerly argument.

Joe Turner's Come And Gone

photo: T. Charles Erickson

August Wilson's most lyrical drama of the ten in his "Century Cycle" has been given an enthralling, first-rate revival (by Lincoln Center Theatre) that is at once intimate and operatic. The play, set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, captures a time of transience in African-American history during which lives were routinely uprooted by choice or by force. The production (directed by Bartlett Sher) emphasizes the overarching religious themes in the play but not at the expense of detailing Wilson's finely drawn characters. here brought to life by a near-flawless ensemble who deliver Wilson's heightened oft-poetic language with conversational ease. Theatergoers who didn't venture to the superb Wilson season at Signature a couple of years ago and who know the playwright only from the last few Broadway productions of his plays are especially urged to see this top-notch production of what is arguably his finest, most meticulously crafted play.