The Miracle Worker

[spoilers below, though I imagine the odds of anyone reading this website not knowing the whole story are slim]

William Gibson's 1959 play, The Miracle Worker, is a bit creaky. Many of the characters are one-dimensional, and the father-not-respecting-the-son-until-he-yells-at-him subplot is the theatrical equivalent of color-by-numbers. Also, the Circle in the Square theatre works against the play. The actors have to carefully contain the physical scenes. The all-important (both pragmatically and metaphorically) doors are only frames within frames, which negates their power yet doesn't stop them from blocking the view of much of the audience. I and dozens of other people missed a chunk of the climactic scene because Abigail Breslin's back was to us (not getting to see the "waa-waa" moment is ridiculous and unacceptable, really). Whatever the limits of this production, however, the play still packs a wallop, and Alison Pill excels at depicting a young woman who has invented herself out of intelligence, anger, strength of will, and compassion.

Legs and All

A girl (Summer Shapiro) attempts to outwit her unwieldy arms and legs by using only her head to eat crackers and winds up doing a hand-stand atop a box as she tries to reach a morsel that's fallen to the floor. A boy (Peter Musante) attempts to steal a misplaced ball without being noticed, unaware that his suspender is tangled up in a loud suitcase. Apart, they're endearingly comic; together, they're relentlessly charming. Legs and All is a terrifically inventive, perspective-shifting physical work, and it successfully lives up to its subtitle, "A magical look at the mundane." I couldn't possibly gush enough: go and see it.

[Read on]

The Wonder

Photo: Bob Pileggi

Farce is difficult to pull off. Farce on a low budget, with no actual doors to slam, is even more difficult to pull off. But the talented Queen's Company, an all-female troupe, do more than pull off The Wonder, an early 18th-century farce by Susanna Centlivre. They triumph. The Wonder pivots on young lovers, avaricious fathers, and mistaken identities. As adapted and directed by Rebecca Patterson, it includes pantomime, dancing, and rock music; I particularly enjoyed the use of Cat Stevens' song Father and Son. The entire cast is excellent, and the women playing the men's roles are amusing and convincing. In an interview on nytheatre.com, Patterson said, "if you just cast men in the male roles there is limited opportunity for female actors to act in classical productions—there is no reason why the wealth of talent of our female actors should be denied access to playing the male classical roles." It is sad to contemplate that some of the women in The Wonder will not have the careers they deserve because they don't match some template of gender, looks,weight, and race. May the Queen's Company live long and continue to gift us with their talent.

The Jackie Look

In The Jackie Look, famed performance artist Karen Finley plays an angry, bitter version of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, back from the dead. (Jackie doesn't overtly mention that she knows she's dead, but it's clear she does.) Using projected photographs and visits to relevant websites, this Jackie offers a presentation on how the media--and the public--fed on her fame and the frequent tragedies she suffered, while ignoring her actual accomplishments. Finley's point is legitimate, but not new or remarkable, and while she provides some deeply emotional moments, the piece is overlong and disjointed. The most interesting parts of the evening, for me, were the sections that she read from pages on music stands, but she zipped through them so quickly and awkwardly that it was hard to digest her words. Fewer words, more accessibly presented, would have been more powerful. I also think that Finley is arguably guilty of the exact sin she's finding in others--using Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her own ends.

Palestine

Najla Saïd lives in multiple, sometimes warring, cultures. In her insightful, compassionate one-woman show Palestine, she shares her coming-of-age story, evolving from Upper West Side princess to proud Arab-American. Saïd has a big heart, a sharp mind, and a wry sense of the absurd. The show clocks in at 100 minutes, and could use some trimming; Saïd just doesn't have the skill to remain consistently compelling and engaging for that long (few humans do!) , and the choppy blocking and odd lighting (which often throws distracting shadows on her face), do not help.

Blind

A baffling stylistic departure for playwright Craig Wright in which the ancient Oedipus tragedy is given a modern-times revision, Blind is an unfortunately weak and consistently uninvolving 80 minute one-act that feels far longer. We watch Oedipus (Seth Numrich) and his wife-mother Jocasta (Veanne Cox) arguing in their bedroom, mostly with accusations that the other knew they were blood-related before they hooked up. The atmosphere should be tortured and intense but Wright's dialogue, an awkward and deadly serious mix of the modern and the faux-ancient, keeps getting stuck in the actors' mouths and tripping them up. It's not clear why Wright decided to take Oedipus on in the first place - putting the story in a modern setting doesn't add anything to it and strips it of its gravitas. Cox spends a good deal of time on the floor propped up by one arm as Numrich stands over her going on, and on, with complaints - Wright has reduced Oedipus to a wearying lightweight and Jocasta, for most of the play, to a doormat. The two actors are at least in the same play; Danielle Slavick, who occasionally intrudes as a servant, is in a different one altogether.