Fringe: "A Matter of Choice"

Review: http://adaumbellesquest.com/2010/08/14/review-a-matter-of-choice/

The Fringe Fringedown

Over the course of the next two weeks of the Fringe Festival, we at the Show Showdown have invited a bunch of guest writers from the ITBA to share their coverage here, with us, as we attempt to cover more shows than ever before. The shows must go on, as many as possible: that's a lesson we learned from Patrick.

Our Town

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Our Town, currently playing at the Barrow Street Theater and starring Michael McKean as the Stage Manager, is a marvel of a play. Having somehow escaped high school without reading it or seeing it performed, I found this performance nothing short of fascinating.

The staging at the Barrow Street Theater is at once unique: along with a sparse stage set with only two kitchen tables and four chairs between them, the first row of seats on the left and right side of the stage are actually on the stage, in the middle of all the action. Actors and actresses not only use the chairs and people in them as props, but during certain intermediary segments of the show, audience members are discreetly slipped index cards and prompted to take part in a "Q&A" with the editor of the Grover's Corners newspaper.

The story is slow and steady, with a Stage Manager who maintains a certain sense of defensive placidity as he describes the people, places, and daily activities in this small New Hampshire town. The normality of the play captures the audience's attention so easily that it's not until the very end of the first act -- or even the beginning of the second -- that the viewer can really tell what the arc of the story is. This quaint, idealistic storyline is shattered in the third act, in a series of events that caused more than one audience member to gasp quietly. The final scene is heartwrenching; James McMenamin's portrayal of George Webb simmers so subtly throughout the first two acts that his final, agonizingly emotional scenes are breathtaking.

In The Heights

Photo by Joan Marcus

In The Heights is one of those rare shows that starts quickly and manages to keep its brisk pace throughout, without feeling rushed, or worse, lagging halfway through the second act while the cast catches its breath. The quick rhyming by Usnavi (currently played by Corbin Bleu) introduces the setting and all of the major characters before the show is even ten minutes old, yet the audience is never lost.

Rather, they are welcomed in by the community. Set in the Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights, around the 181st Street subway station, the show could easily become a cultural study that the audience watches but doesn't invest in. Instead, with a clever wink to such thinking, Usnavi lets the audience know that he knows what you're thinking -- "I'm up sh*t's creek, I ain't never been north of 96th Street!" Yet the audience is drawn in. The music, dancing, and complete joy that infuse the show are nothing short of infectious. In The Heights apeals to such a broad audience -- adults who can empathize with the day to day struggles, teens looking for a more relatable musical, and kids attracted by the wildly talented Corbin Bleu -- that it could easily paint its characters with broad strokes, but instead each is fully realized and wonderfully complex.

In The Heights deserves every one of its five Tony Awards. Bring your kids, bring your parents, bring the people down the street -- just make sure you see it, because no other show on Broadway captures summer in the city quite like this.

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side

Photo: Larry Cobra

David Ahonen's amazing play, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side (directed by the author), deals in contrasts. Its characters are cartoons, yet three-dimensional. The performances are full-bore, with much yelling, yet often subtle. The good guys do bad things and the bad guys do good things (and who is good and who is bad is up for debate). Anarchy is glorified and skewered, and free love is shown to be not all that free. The plot follows a tradition going back to You Can't Take It With You and Arsenic and Old Lace (and probably further back than that): a quirky, nonconformist family is visited by an ostensibly normal person. In this case, the family is composed of two men and two women leading lives of political, financial, and sexual anarchy, and the normal person is a relative who comes for a visit. With Ahonen's constant puncturing of assumptions, anarchy and normal are revealed to be empty terms, and we see how people are the sum of their desires and their deeds, labels be damned. The show is rowdy, silly, funny, and deeply moving. It also includes the funniest nude scene I've ever seen. And the performers, led by the amazing Sarah Lemp and James Kautz, provide everything you could ask for in a meaningful farce.

The Barker Poems

Photo: Stan Barouh

Excerpted from Theater Review (NYC): The Barker Poems: "Gary the Thief" and "Plevna" on Blogcritics.

Primarily a playwright, Howard Barker proves a really fine dramatic poet as well. The wondrous Robert Emmet Lunney performs "Gary the Thief," which follows said thief through an epic series of existential adventures as he's arrested and imprisoned. "I live among you/Hating you," he addresses us; "I charm you/With the ease of one who holds/All effort in contempt." Mr. Lunney's performance does indeed seem effortless. Breezed from mood to mood by subtle, perfect lighting (Hallie Zieselman) and directed deftly by Richard Romagnoli, Lunney makes Gary a delightful, philosophical, and slightly dangerous rascal.

The second poem, "Plevna," comes to us through the rapid-fire delivery of Alex Draper, who was so fine as Alan Turing in Lovesong of the Electric Bear. Subtitled "Meditations on Hatred," the work is named for a Bulgarian city that was the site of a long siege in the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s, but Plevna stands in for all sites where the horrors of war rear up. It's a disturbing, at times bewildering ride, and in the end less successful as a piece of drama than "Gary," perhaps because we simply don't need to be reminded of the endless human cycle of war and atrocities, even from as great a writer as Barker, as much as we need the individual and irreproducible meta-yarns of Everyman-oddities like Gary the Thief, which can challenge our stodgy ways of looking at our violent and beautiful world.