By the Way, Meet Vera Stark

If you wanted to explain the concept of "range," you could do worse than to compare Lynn Nottage's current comedy, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, to her recent devastating drama, Ruined. Few playwrights, if any, can write so effectively, so honestly, and so beautifully at both ends of the theatre spectrum. Certainly not O'Neill or Miller, both of whom veered toward the ponderous. Not Williams (though he considered Streetcar funny). Albee has played with humor, but has written no flat-out comedies. Ditto Kushner. Only Michael Frayn comes to mind, with his Noises Off and Copenhagen, but while that's quite a range, it still isn't as impressive as the distance from Vera Stark to Ruined. (Of course, there is that Shakespeare guy.)

It's the early 1930s, and Vera Stark (the amazing and beautiful Sanaa Lathan) works as a maid for the ravingly self-centered, mediocre actress Gloria Mitchell (played with great elan by Stephanie J. Block). Vera also wants to act, but there is little opportunity for African-American performers. Over time, both Vera and Gloria find out just what they are willing to do to be on the silver screen. Rounding out the story are a 1973 talk show appearance by Vera and a 2003 symposium on her career.

Nottage mixes satire, compassion, and serious commentary on racism into a hysterically funny, ultimately touching stew. While her satire can be quite pointed (the people speaking at the symposium are etched in acid), her writing is anchored in compassion and a sweet sense of the ridiculousness of being human. The show is well-directed by Jo Bonney, and among the other performers Daniel Breaker and Karen Olivo deserve particular kudos.

The brilliant Ruined was arguably the most upsetting show I've ever seen; Nottage calibrated the emotional trajectory of the show perfectly. Vera Stark is often delightfully silly, with dips into high-stakes reality, and Nottage's calibration is again perfect. It's as though an elegant ballet dancer turned out to be a great football receiver. It's that range thing, and it's amazing.

($56 seats, side front orchestra)

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures

Michael Cristofer and Linda Emond
(photo: Joan Marcus)

To those who point to previous generations of theatre as being better than this one, I have two words for you: Tony Kushner. (I have two others as well--Lynn Nottage--but that's a different review.) If he had only written Angels in America, Kushner would still be a major American playwright, up there with Williams and Albee and O'Neill. But he didn't only write Angels in America. He also wrote the amazing, heart-breaking Caroline, or Change. And he also wrote the feast that is The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.

Intelligent Homo tells the story of the Marcantonio family, a tribe of smart, intense, damaged, searching people, loosely led by paterfamilias Gus, a retired longshoreman and union organizer in his 70s. Daughter Empty is a labor lawyer, which would seem to be a way to earn Gus's approbation, but it's not--her work is the wrong sort of activism for him. Older son Pill, a high school history teacher, has been with the same man for 24 years but is in love with the hustler on whom he has spent ten of thousands of dollars. Younger son V is the nonintellectual of the family, a role that was foisted on him and that he wears uncomfortably. All of them want love and acceptance and to understand their place in the world. That's the family drama side of the play.

Then there's the ideas side. As the title states, those ideas include capitalism and socialism, but they also include questions such as, What is a worthwhile life? What is love? And, in particular, What is a good man? The Marcantonios are a family of arguers, and their arguments (depicted in wonderfully hectic scenes) veer from the personal to the political and back again. For this family, the personal genuinely is political.

To get my cavils out of the way: the title is cutesy and misleading;the odd character names come across as mispronunciations of real names; Kushner unfortunately succumbs to lesbians-sleeping-with-men-osis, a disease that is sadly prevalent in movies and shows; and the family's house is perhaps inappropriately impressive.

On the plus side? Intelligence, three-dimensional characters, even-handed discussion of issues, surprising plot points, wonderful dialogue, smart humor, compassion, warmth, and a deep engagement with the world.

The production currently at the Public (coproduced by Signature Theatre) does Kushner full justice. The cast comprises brilliant, subtle performers, led by Michael Cristofer, Stephen Spinella, Linda Emond, and Steven Paquale. Mark Wendland's gorgeous set is a distinct character in the play, full of detail and history and beauty. The costumes by Clint Ramos, the lighting by Kevin Adams, and the sound design by Ken Travis are excellent, and Michael Friedman's music nicely maintains the play's mood during set changes. Michael Greif's superb direction brings all of the elements together into a compelling, impressive, vibrant whole.

(member tickets, 2nd row center)

Catch Me If You Can

If you ever have to choose between catching an STD or Catch Me If You Can, you should know that in either case, you’re screwed—and in only one is there a chance of having a good time. And once you’ve caught either, you’ll just be itching for it to be over.

Yeah, it’s a little late in the game to be reviewing a show that opened in March, but I could, so I caught it.

The show wasn’t engaging enough to hate, wasn’t awful enough to love guiltily. It was just so relentlessly mediocre that I resented every second of it. On top of that, it was overly produced, presumably to compensate for the core deficiencies, which made it look all the more mediocre. All the great choreography by Jerry Mitchell, the perfectly lovely costumes by William Ivey Long, the wonderful (and Tony nominated) orchestrations by Marc Shaiman and Larry Blank, and the bigness of the lights and sets all amounted to Bedazzling a turd. The show sparkled but it stunk.

Aaron Tveit, who was so brilliant in Next to Normal, sings this leading role equally beautifully; but he lacks the charm to turn 2 hours of narration and his 14 songs (each a different flavor of vanilla) into a show. It isn’t his fault. Terrence McNally only bothered to write eleven minutes of drama. The rest is just telling. All the things that might be interesting about a young man who is wanted on 5 continents are left off the page and off the stage. The book was so lazy and heartless, it didn’t even have autonomic reflexes.

Marc Shaiman and Scott Whittman, whose book and lyrics for Hairspray were thrilling, have written some decent novelty songs but they have nothing to do with advancing the story. Sometimes they don’t even have anything to do with the story. Of course when the story is based on telling you what happened and not making anything actually happen, there isn’t much to musicalize that would advance the plot.

Norbert Leo Butz is one of my favorite musical actors, but watching his performance was like getting lice at a traffic accident—I was scratching my head but couldn’t look away. His characterization was not original. It was a bizarre combination of Jeffrey Skilling from Enron and Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—cheese schtick wrapped in smarm. And he was saddled with the worst songs in the show. To be fair, the audience went crazy for him, and I am still crazy about him and can’t wait to see what he does next—please God, let it be soon.

The supporting cast is too good for what they are given to do. Kerry Butler has the most sweeping song in the show and delivers it well if occasionally weird, and I am not convinced that her pigeon-toed rag doll routine is really enough to make a man leave a life of crime. Linda Hart and Nick Wyman are underutilized but are a treat and welcomed relief. Rachelle Rak’s performance in the documentary Every Little Step proved that she’s a class act who was robbed. She is in a toss-off role here that demands better writing, and she deserves better writing. Someone, please write something better for this woman. Probably the most truthful and most powerful moment of the show belonged to Tom Wopat. He was a real person with real dreams but real torments. His disappearance into a consuming blackness, dying in the shadow of his son's success, is heartbreaking.

Jack O’Brien is keeping a lot of parts moving, but this is hardly his best work. If he could have elevated the drama with the same consistency as the props, it would have been an entirely different experience. As a matter of fact, props and people entered and exited through the floor constantly. I’ve seen fewer ups and downs in a backseat on prom night. The set design could have used more design. It was a Carol Burnett skit on steroids.

The roar of the crowd and a Tony nomination for Best Musical notwithstanding, my advice—avoid it if you can.

Follies

In 2003, in the Signature (Arlington, VA) production, Eric Schaeffer demonstrated that he is capable of directing a sensitive, textured, multidimensional, heart-breaking Follies. Has he forgotten everything he knew back then? Did he feel that the much larger Eisenhower Theatre (Kennedy Center, Washington, DC) required much larger acting? Was he afraid that the subscription audience at the Kennedy Center wouldn't be able to appreciate the nuances enjoyed by the Signature audience? Whatever the reason(s), while his 2003 Follies was one of the best I've seen, this current version is definitely the worst. (For the record, many people in the audience clearly enjoyed it a great deal.)

Schaeffer's first mistake is using a pared-down version of the book, in which character development and atmosphere are given short-shrift and relationships are insufficiently delineated. This wouldn't matter as much if Schaeffer had directed the actors to take up the slack. Instead, he has led them into one-dimensional, ham-handed performances that telegraph the obvious points while completely ignoring the subtle ones.

Here's the rundown: Phyllis (Jan Maxwell) is angry. Ben (Ron Raines) is angry. Buddy (Danny Burstein) is angry. Sally (Bernadette Peters) is losing her mind. Period.

There is no sign of the spark between Phyllis and Ben that makes their somewhat happy ending effective. Maxwell shows no build or development in "Could I Leave You?" and Raines sings every note in every song the same exact way. Burstein's Buddy has a bit of a trajectory, going from vaguely hopeful to angry and resigned, but his version of "The Right Girl" is all grimaces and grunts.

Bernadette Peters, very much the star of this production, is not up to the task. She gives a whiny, teary, baby-voiced performance that is occasionally flat-out embarrassing. In fact, to find a line reading as bad as her "If you don't kiss me, Ben, I think I'm going to die," I have to go all the way back to Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance in the 1970s. And Peters' "Losing My Mind" is dreadful, featuring every obvious depiction of losing one's mind short of eye-rolling.

The supporting cast is no better. Elaine Paige's "I'm Still Here" is about her ego and not about the song. Linda Lavin's "Broadway Baby" is about her ego and not about the song. God only knows what Regine's "Ah Paris" is about, but it's certainly not the song. Terri White's rendition of "Who's That Woman?" is good, but the direction removes the bittersweetness, leaving it as one-dimensional as the rest of the show.

The good points: Rosalind Ellis and Leah Horowitz did a lovely job on "One More Kiss," providing more subtlety than the rest of the show combined. Bernadette Peters' dresses were both beautiful, though the first one was wrong for the character. My friends and I had a lovely trip to DC. The crab cake at lunch on the way home was amazing.

($115 seats, 4th row center)

Shakespeare's Slave

If you are going to create a play about Shakespeare, it better be about the writing. The Resonance Ensemble’s production of Shakespeare’s Slave is all about the writing; and in this production, the costumes, designed with genius and ingenuity by Mark Richard Caswell. This is not to say the actors, especially David L. Townsend as the Bard himself, and director, Eric Parness, aren’t providing powerful support. They navigate some jolts in the script, some limitations of the space, and some inherent challenges in a contemporary telling of a period tale with nimble focus.

Along with Mr. Townsend, actors Chris Ceraso and Romy Nordlinger are standouts. Shaun Bennet Wilson, in a central role, has struggles that are not entirely of her creation. She is playing a theatrical device that has been written for function more than character, which brings me back to the writing.

For good and bad, this new script by Steven Fechter, is the star of the show. The best part of the script is merely that it exists, that the company commissioned it, and that this production could lead to revisions that can only make future productions stronger. Seeing a play of this quality and this potential in its infancy is a gift. It isn’t perfect, but to discover it is reason enough to see it. And to discover the Resonance Ensemble and their commitment to producing a classical play and a modern play with a common theme in rep was a treat for me.

In its current stage the play resembles a graduate school honors thesis, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. It is well thought out, well written for the most part, and well conceived. The idea of deconstructing characters from Shakespeare’s writings and casting them as acquaintances and intimates from his life isn’t a revolutionary concept, but it makes sense and provides dramatic fodder. It worked effectively for Shakespeare in Love, and works here, or is beginning to work. The dark lady of the sonnets is brought to life, into Shakespeare’s life, and changes it to the benefit of his writing and generations who might have missed out on his brilliance had these two lives and hearts not crossed.

Casting the dark lady as an African slave actually creates more problems than it solves, not the least of which is that it isn’t believable and borders on offensive. By making this slave feisty and defiant with the ability to sneak around freely, glosses over the reality and humiliation of being owned. The play is left to tell you how bad slavery is and relegates all that badness to an intellectual exercise rather than forcing the audience to confront it or feel it. The script simply tells us that many things are bad: slavery, rape, grief. All three are subjects with the power to move and compel, but there isn’t much compelling and absolutely nothing moving about the treatment of these particular subjects here. They are devices, nothing more.

With tweaks and tightening (too many short scenes, many dramatically unnecessary, too much homage, too much focus on Shakespearean references, too little focus on Mr. Fechter telling his story, and trying too hard to be significant), Shakespeare’s Slave could be liberated and soar. I personally hope the first tweak is to change that dreadful title—perhaps if the creators took slavery seriously, understood the effect of being owned, they wouldn’t apostrophize and could transform a pivotal device into an affecting character. Shakespeare’s Slave is good enough that it (and she) deserves it.

Shakespeare’s Slave is running in rep with H4, a modern, multi-media telling of Henry IV that I did not see but wish I had.

(Press seats, 5^th row, aisle in a small house with no bad seat)

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Photo: Carol Rosegg

No one is happy in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, regardless of whether they are Iraqi or American, soldier or civilian, human or animal, alive or dead. The living are tormented by guilt, and ghosts, and their own morally questionable actions; the dead can’t figure out what they’re supposed to be doing other than roaming around town, pondering morality, and driving the living insane. Whether specter or living being, everyone wandering around Baghdad is a half-mad, restless soul.

Of course, the fact that no one is happy in Baghdad in 2003 makes sense, since, as we all know, war is hell. But then, in Rajiv Joseph’s interesting, engaging, and flawed play about Operation Iraqi Freedom, so is everything else: loss, acquisition; bondage, freedom; Western culture, Iraqi culture; life, death; religion, atheism; and—still with me?—heaven. Does heaven even exist, come to think of it? Is it so bound up with the notion of hell that one becomes the other? Is it possible that God—if there even is a God—is less a benevolent force than a vicious, uncaring, neglectful punk? If so, why do we attempt to understand ourselves and others? To be kind? To even pretend that we are anything but brutes?

This is meaty, compelling, absolutely enormous stuff to ponder, and the play demands a lot of its audience in asking it. The problem is not that Joseph offers no resolutions; it’s that his play doesn’t tangle deeply enough with any one of them, which leaves the spectator hanging, and curiously detached about it, to boot.

That’s not necessarily an excuse not to see Baghdad. For its shortcomings, I was impressed by many aspects of it: it is exceptionally well-acted, beautifully lit, gracefully directed and as deserving of an award for sound design as anything I’ve seen all year. Also, how many shows get to boast about the fact that audiences may come for Robin Williams, but end up staying for Uday Hussein?