Remission

photo: Inverse Theater

Early on in this intense 90 minute solo show (written and directed by Kirk Bromley) performer Dan Berkey makes hand-to-hand contact with most of the people in the audience. That moment of connection is a shrewd, brilliant move, because it guards against us distancing ourselves once the calm, lucid man we've met transforms into a full-blown schizophrenic. The harrowing, claustrophobic show plays like a series of his psychotic episodes during which we're inside his often incoherent stream of consciousness - it feels like a terrifying, violent freefall into insanity. The playwright has very definitely organized the show into distinct vignettes and themes - a section in which a slidehow of graphic pornography segues into candids of non-sexualized female faces is the most wrenching, while a section where schizophrenia proves helpful for the make-believe needed for stage acting is downright funny. Despite the organization, the playwright has done all he can to erase his hand and let the show feel chaotic and random and the performer convinces at every single moment. The result is a one-of-a-kind, undilluted and unforgetttable trip into the crazy.

Dolls

Reviewed for Theatermania.

A Time to Dance

Photo: Damon Calderwood

In her wonderful new solo show (part of FringeNYC), Libby Skala channels her great-aunt, Elizabeth ("Lisl") Polk, who experienced just about all of the 20th century – both in timespan and in all it had to offer. As Ms. Skala tells it, before becoming a dance therapy pioneer in New York, Lisl grew up in Austria, was sent to Denmark for safekeeping during World War I, contracted and beat tuberculosis, got kicked out of a modern dance studio for the sin of studying ballet, and managed a harrowing (and apparently also magical) escape from the Nazis. That Ms. Skala is a confident and graceful dancer is clear from the nearly constant movement she weaves through the hourlong monologue. But what makes the show such a charming entertainment, aside from the meat of the story itself, is her remarkable skill as a comic actor, and the way character and actor fuse until we just about believe that Lisl herself, thick Austrian accent and all, is before us, telling story after story for us to laugh and wonder at. A Time to Dance is truly uplifting without being at all saccharine, and that is perhaps the greatest miracle of all.

Look After You

photo: Antonio Minino

When you learn early on that the protagonist (played by Louise Flory, also the playwright) has recently survived a brain aneurysm, you might be led to expect a tearjerker of the tv-movie variety. But the playwright isn't exploitative; her thematic focus is more true-to-life and her writing shows more curiosity than that. The play is really about the shifts that occur in the character's relationships after her mortality has seeped into everyone's consciousness. The play does have a sneaking cumulative emotional payoff but it's delicate and unforced. I wasn't totally convinced by the dialogue in the couple of scenes between the play's two male characters - it just didn't sound to me like the way men talk to each other - but the writing is otherwise solid throughout, distinguished especially by a sureness of tone and a keen understanding of the drama that builds incrementally with deceptively small events.

Citizen Ruth

Reviewed for Theatermania.

The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik

Reviewed for Theatermania.