The Amish Project

photo: Geoff Green

The real-life 2006 shootings of young Amish girls at their schoolhouse in Pennsylvania are the inspiration for this extraordinary and deeply affecting sixty five minute solo show, written and performed by Jessica Dickey. While always dressed as an Amish schoolgirl, a choice that not only unifies the production but also emphasizes some of the play's themes, Dickey plays a variety of characters - the shooter, his wife, neighbors, etc. - who are directly or indirectly affected by the crime. Her portrayals are detailed and distinct - Dickey can shift with lightning speed from one of the fresh-faced innocent youngsters to an outraged neighbor and register each so vividly that we recognize them again without a word. As a playwright, she avoids easy sensationalism - there is some needed expository information, but her focus is not simply on exactly what happened nor even on why but on the spiritual challenge presented in the crime's aftermath. The Amish Project gently asks enormous questions about our cultural capacity for forgiveness and grace; it's generous, thoughtful and nourishing for the soul.

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side

Photo: Larry Cobra

Playwright Derek Ahonen has a finely tuned ear for the way his Communist-Anarchist-Environmentalist heroes and heroines talk. The play skewers their free-love and pop-psychology platitudes, while loving the characters to death at the same time. I say "the play" because while Mr. Ahonen may be responsible for the dialogue, the Amoralists truly are, as their mission statement proclaims, an "actor driven" company. It feels as if these actors were born to play these parts. The play is a perfect whole -- not for a second is the theatrical spell broken.  And somehow the political and moral message survives all the mockery. Each member of this outstanding cast can dominate the stage in one way or another; together they're an ensemble of scary intensity, one minute boiling in anger, the next erupting in crazed funnyness, yet always, in their overcooked way, seeming to truly love one another. In the end they send us reeling into the street feeling provoked, enlivened, even a little bit enlightened.

Things Of Dry Hours

photo: Joan Marcus

If poetic dialogue alone made a play, this one (at NYTW) would be one of the best shows in town. The language is so rich and evocative that it's transporting, and the cast (under Ruben Santiago-Hudson's direction) deliver it with the precision and sensitivity of finely composed music. The play (by Naomi Wallace) opens up the soul through the ears. It's a pity then that it is weakened by its narrative construction - it's hard to track the logic in the shifting dynamics between an African-American father and adult daughter and the mysterious white fugitive who forces them to give him shelter, circa the early 30's in the Deep South. Example: the stranger is almost instantly attracted to the daughter - he advances clumsily, rudely, and she keeps him at bay with hostility and poisonous world-weary one-liners - but right after a scene that would seem to indicate that she's shut him out entirely, the next begins as if they've softened toward each other. There are similar missteps in the depiction of the relationship between the father, a member of the Communist Party, and the stranger, who he (with a bit too much dramatically static speechifying) sets out to recruit. The playwright seems to aim to keep us guessing about the stranger - are his motives essentially good or bad? - but she hasn't effectively dramatized him for that purpose, which puts limits on Garret Dillahunt's effectiveness in the role. Delroy Lindo conveys both commanding strength and thoughtful sensitivity as the father; as the daughter, Roslyn Ruff is deservedly embraced by the audience partly for her sharp, seen-it-all line readings.

Coraline

You think of words like "uncompromising" and "integrity" as you watch Stephen Merritt's musical of the enormously popular children's tale. The score's strange, angular melodies as primarily played on a single tinkling keyboard, the casting of mature Jane Houdyshell as the adventure-seeking nine year old heroine, the avoidance of anything that smacks of gratuitous crowd-pleasing: a unique artistic vision has been rigorously followed and realized. But it's hard to feel anything besides detached appreciation for the show's uniqueness: despite a uniformly wonderful cast and many isolated performance moments that tempt the imagination, the production is curiously remote and short on the inventive theatricality that would showcase the very special material to advantage.

Next Fall

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Make Me

photo: Doug Hamilton

The biggest problem with Leslie Ayvazian's comedy about S&M, which is that it isn't funny, might have been mitigated if it was sexy. But as written and directed (by Christian Parker) it has no heat: this is a play in which three couples in long-term relationships play sado-masochistic bedroom games but you don't have any idea why because nobody has any fun. It's as if the playwright thinks of these roleplaying games between consenting adults as the joyless rituals of the bored, and almost nothing in the play acknowledges that anyone is turned on sexually by them. It's written and performed (by an expert cast that you're embarrassed for which includes Jessica Hecht and Candy Buckley) as if there's a wagging finger hanging over the stage.