Fringe: "My Broken Brain"

Here's my review for the NYC Fringe Festival show "My Broken Brain":
http://adaumbellesquest.com/2010/08/15/review-mbb/

Happy in the Poorhouse

Photo: Larry Cobra

The first time I saw Happy in the Poorhouse, five months ago, I gave it a well-deserved rave review. I have now seen two other Amoralist productions (Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side and Amerissiah), plus Happy in the Poorhouse for a second time, and I remain impressed by this original, scrappy, intense, funny, smart theatre company. However, I am curious--and a little worried--to see what the future holds for the Amoralists. If author-director Derek Ahonen continues to work in his cartoonish-yet-three-dimensional manner, will it continue to be effective? Or will it grow into a rut? Will the attractive, talented Sarah Lemp and James Kautz get the opportunity to show their full ranges, which I suspect are impressive? Will all the actors get to show what they can do when they are not yelling? Whatever direction the Amoralists take, I look forward to their future productions.

Two Gentlemen of Verona

Artwork: David Huber

Everyone has bad days at work, and Two Gentlemen of Verona was one of Shakespeare's. The plot is dumb, the relationships arbitrary, the happy ending unearned. But the play has its charms, and the Judith Shakespeare Company maximizes those charms in its gender-bending production, playing through August 22 at the TBG theatre. With men in the female roles and women in the male roles, this Two Gents plays with Shakespeare's use of cross-dressing and comments on gender-based assumptions. It also allows both women and men to perform in roles that would not usually be available to them. The direction relies a bit too much on shtick, and the scene changes take too long, hurting the pacing of the play and making a long evening seem longer. Some performers are allowed to assume accents that make their dialogue unintelligible. But, on a whole, the show is well-directed and -acted. Interestingly enough, of the four leads, the men succeed better playing women than the women do playing men. I suspect that putting on a dress, feminizing one's movements, and affecting a high voice are more potent signifiers than putting on a tie, masculinizing one's movements, and affecting a low voice--particularly since many women now behave in ostensibly masculine ways. A woman in pants and a tie, sitting with her legs spread, can come across as just being a woman, perhaps a tomboy or lesbian, perhaps not. But a man in a dress comes across as either a drag queen or a woman; it is unlikely that he will be seen simply as a man in a dress. The cross-dressing might have been more effective if the women had bound their breasts; however, the full beard on the man playing Silvia (Hunter Gilmore) did not get in the way of perceiving him as a woman. In addition, while the women playing Proteus (Sheila Joon) and Valentine (Rachael Hip-Flores) were excellent, the men playing Sylvia and Julia were superb--particularly Alvin Chan as Julia, whose performance was both deeply funny and truly heart-breaking. Of the entire cast, all of whom did good jobs, it was only Chan who truly understood, felt, and conveyed being in a high-stakes reality.

Fringe: Bagabones

Bagacrap. Sorry, that's unduly harsh--Jonathan Nosan's Bagabones is mainly suffering from false advertising. While it's true enough that the first twenty minutes of his show might resemble "a contortionist's charming nightmare" (if you omitted the "charming" part), nowhere in the program guide does it warn that the next twenty minutes involve a static, pseudoscientific lecture, given in Japanese, with translations in English, Sanskrit, and French blurrily, painfully, scrolling beneath him. And perhaps you're in to that. Just know that while he's being metaphoric in his references to "primal spaces" that he's being literal when he says there's an "ultimately smashing end": i.e., he breaks a piece of pottery. It's embarrassing--for him....

[Read on]

Fringe: Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill!

In adapting Seijun Suzuki's surreal 1967 B-movie "yakuza noir" Branded to Kill, Patrick Harrison--who also directs and stars--has run with fundamental principle of Suzuki's: "There is no film grammar." This freedom from rules makes for a liberating show--and one becomes so immersed in the madcap presentation that it takes a while to realize that his company, Depth Charge, actually has a lot of structure behind their work. (It's almost disappointing to learn that this group has ties to Richard Foreman and John Zorn's Astronome.) The show is disturbingly erotic, too: Hanada (Harrison) has a boiled-rice fetish, and we see his wife, Mami (Alexandra Hellquist), tease him into violence with it; later, it will spill in slow motion out of the lips of his new lover, Misako (Margaret Odette Perkins). Don't dismiss this as pure imagery: when Mami mounts Hanada, wearing a butterfly mask and silhouetted in red light, the emotions are raw and very real. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Dis-u-grace-u-ful" and 5 being "The #1 killer," Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill! gets a 4.5.

[Read full review here]

Fringe: Love in the Time of Swine Flu

A title like Love in the Time of Swine Flu promises a series of themed, tightened skits. Instead, while the show has some recurring moments (an unfortunate series of parlor games a fiancee plays with his soon-to-be-parents-in-law), the ensemble Stupid Time Machine keeps it way too loose: it's obvious they've just thrown everything at the wall. On the plus side, one-note stuff (like new airport security measures that inevitably resemble grinding at a rave) remains mercifully brief; on the negative side, just as the show gets rolling (a vampire has performance anxiety and has to teethsturbate as his victim talks dirty about her veins), it cuts to something else. Jokes about making a Berenstain Bears porn (this may have beat them to the punch) repeat themselves too often to be funny.

[Read on]