Don't Talk to the Actors

Tim Moyer, Kristin Wiegand, Lauren Rooney, Ellen Ratner,
Paul Dake, Joel Malazita

On the first day of rehearsal of the Broadway production of his sweet, heart-warming two-character play, neophyte playwright Jerry Przpezniak receives some sage advice from his director, Mike: "Don't talk to the actors." Luckily for the audience of Don't Talk to the Actors, currently playing at the Montgomery Theater in Souderton, Pennsylvania, Jerry doesn't exactly follow this advice. Soon he find himself hilariously in over his head dealing with the outside ego and honed manipulation skills of actor Curt Logan, who wants his role to have "more grit." It doesn't help that Jerry's fiancee Arlene, who is sitting in on rehearsal, has had a huge crush on Curt for years. Or that the other star of the show, the loud and bawdy Beatrice Pomeroy, wants her role to have more laughs, and maybe a song.

Playwright-director Tom Dudzick uses this situation to gently satirize theatre, New York, actors, and, well, humans. His delightful characters, his ability to write both jokes and character humor, and his clean, smooth, well-paced direction add up to an uproarious evening in the theater. One moment in particular stopped the show for, I would think, a full minute, as the theater shook with the audience's laughter.

The excellent cast includes Paul Dake, providing the perfect charm-smarm ratio as Curt; Kristin Wiegand, wonderfully intense as "the most sought-after stage manager on Broadway"; Ellen Ratner, an hysterical force of nature as Beatrice; Lauren Rooney, who gives full dimension to a character who is a bit too naive as written; Joel Malazita as Jerry, who takes a while to hit his stride but unravels beautifully; and Tim Moyer, the calm center amid the insanity.

The show takes a little too long to really get started, and the ending relies too much on what takes place off-stage, but in between is about two hours of solid laughter. What more could you want from a comedy?

(Fourth row center; free tickets. Disclosure: Tom Dudzick is my brother-in-law, but you don't need to take this review with a grain of salt. All those other people in the audience laughing their heads off were not Tom's relatives.) 

Planet Egg

More polished than your average tech-demo/theater-hybrid, Planet Egg takes up the baton from where the delightful Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer left it, and crafts a two-man (and one Foley woman) performance of puppet cinema, in which a film is made before your eyes. Looking like a stop-motion short (akin to something you might see at, say, a Spike and Mike festival), Planet Egg is a dialogue-less ballad between a socket-faced, red-ribbon-legged creature who crashes on the titular planet and the lonely white radish-like creature that lives in a fortress made of broccoli. (There are also banana seesaws, carrot benches, and angry mobs of miniature mushroom creatures that like to cry out "Shroom!") It's a whimsical production, less than an hour long, but at the moment, it's a little scrambled.

[Read full review here]

Blast Radius

Amy Lee Pearsall, Becky Byers, Alisha
Spielmann, Nancy Sirianni,
and Felicia Hudson
Photo: Deborah Alexander

Many years ago, a friend of mine was extolling the virtues of ants versus humans, whom she found selfish. "If ants come to water," she said, "the first ones make a bridge out of their bodies so the others can scurry over. And if one or two float away and drown, it's okay, because it's the group that's important." I asked her, "If you were in that situation, and your girlfriend floated away, would you hold onto the bridge or go after her?" She didn't hesitate one second: "I'd go after her." "Oh," I said, "you'd make a lousy ant."

In Mac Rogers' Blast Radius, the entire human race is faced with the choice between sometimes-selfish human individualism and homogenous one-mind unity when a race of giant insects takes over earth and destroys all that humans have achieved, enslaving most people, forbidding books, and generally forcing humanity backward. Ronnie (the fierce Becky Byers), daughter of the astronaut who brought the insects to earth, despises them and never stops fighting for freedom, while her brother Abbie (David Rosenblatt) falls in love with their cozy hive mind. To complicate matters, Abbie is sexually and romantically involved with the insects' ambassador (the ever-amazing Jason Howard), who has taken over a human body. (It's interesting that Rogers gives the siblings ambiguous names; it would be easy to assume that Ronnie is the male and Abbie is the female. This fits, since Ronnie takes on the traditionally male role of leading the resistance, while it is Abbie who wants nothing more than a giant family.)

The plot of Blast Radius is compelling and absorbing, and I don't want to reveal too much here. Suffice to say that Rogers manages to tell a fascinating story; introduce a range of vividly etched characters; provoke thoughts about humanity, bravery, identity, values, relationships, and procreation; elicit some tears; and be quite funny. It's an impressive feat. (Blast Radius is part 2 of the "Honeycomb Trilogy." To read about part 1, Advance Man, go here.)

A few of Rogers' ideas/questions particularly intrigued me. For example, when is it better to compromise and when is it better to fight? Shirley (Nancy Sirianni, wonderful as always) has been active in the resistance for years, but she believes that it might be worth compromising with the insects to lessen the workdays of the human slaves. In contrast,  Ronnie feels that compromise is the same as surrender. During their argument, I found myself thinking of Booker T. Washington versus Martin Luther King, Jr, versus Malcolm X and how they differed on that very point.

And, what makes a good leader? For years movies have taught us that the leader is the tallest and best-looking white guy in the room, and that people will and should follow him automatically. But Rogers gives us Ronnie, a small, young, sometimes-selfish woman who wheedles, cajoles, begs, and whines and who has to earn her leadership over and over again. Why do people keep following her? Because she is smart and passionate--and an expert manipulator.

And, what makes us human? In Blast Radius, the answers include love, sex, and the written word, which seem to me to be excellent answers (Abbie, with his love of the hive mind, disagrees, saying that humans are limited to "extraordinary effort to achieve split-seconds of connection.")

Rogers' clear fascination with the meaning of humanity is superbly well-served by Jason Howard. In Rogers' magnificent Universal Robots, Howard played a robot who gradually grows human; in Advance Man and here, he plays an insect who does the same. On one hand, these are similar ideas; on the other, Rogers' writing and Howard's acting are so exact, so thoughtful, so smart, and so compassionate that the characters stand as unique--and individually brilliant--creations.

The show isn't perfect. It takes a while for it to catch fire, and some of the plotting is hard to follow. Some of the performances are a little weak. The fight scenes aren't particularly effective, and there's a slap that could win a prize for worst stage slap ever. There's a giant insect leg straight out of a bad 1950's sci-fi movie.  But, really, who cares? Blast Radius is an impressive and passionately entertaining evening in the theatre. That's what matters.

(first row center; press ticket)

Blast Radius (The Story So Far)

If you missed Advance Man, part one of Mac Rogers' "Honeycomb Trilogy," I'm sorry you did! But it's no reason to miss Blast Radius, part two, currently playing at the Secret Theatre (and reviewed here on Show Showdown by Aaron Riccio and here in the New York Times; I'm seeing it tonight and will be adding my review tomorrow).

Here's a brief recap of Advance Man, written by me based on Mac Rogers' summary:

The spaceship Celeste Farrow is sent to Mars to begin a colony for rich and powerful people to escape the tapped-out planet earth. Mars, however, is already inhabited, by an insect-like race with a hive mind. One of the aliens takes over the mind of astronaut Conor. Astronaut Bill is seduced by the aliens' way of life and decides that better than humans' colonizing Mars would be aliens' colonizing earth. The astronauts bring alien honeycombs to earth and nurture them. Bill's family finds out what is going on; his son Abbie supports the idea; his daughter Ronnie is horrified. She almost manages to stop the plan, but when Abbie stands in her way, she cannot kill him to meet her goal.

And here's the longer summary itself:

Ronnie and Abbie Cooke were growing up in Coral Gables, Florida when their father, Bill, led the first manned mission to Mars on a ship called the Celeste Farrow. In the secret briefings he and his team receive leading up to their mission, it becomes clear that the Celeste's mission is intended as the first step toward colonizing Mars, because the remaining years of Earth’s habitability are dwindling and only a the Earth’s wealthiest and most powerful people will be transferred to Mars to survive. Bill and the other astronauts are horrified, but go on the mission anyway.

When they arrive on Mars, they encounter the dying remnants of a powerful, insect-like alien race that communicatea telepathically, sharing a sort of hive mind. In an attempt to communicate with the astronauts, one of the aliens telepathically enters the mind of one of the astronauts, Conor. This results in the death of the alien’s body and of Conor’s mind—leaving the alien’s consciousness trapped in Conor’s body.

The aliens’ bio-technology and communal mode of living strikes Bill as Earth’s best hope, so he and his team make a secret compact with the aliens for their mutual survival by means of the alien race’s takeover of Earth. The astronauts smuggle several larval Honeycombs back to Earth. Under the guise of the ecologically-minded Chinampas Swamp-Farming Initiative, they create several fertile areas around the world in which the Honeycombs can thrive and, when triggered, swiftly grow the aliens to maturity so that they may begin the war against humanity.

Bill’s wife Amelia has been focused on caring for their teenage children, Ronnie and Abbie, and for Conor, who has come to live with them. As Conor is unable to walk or speak—which Bill attributes to trauma he experienced on Mars—Amelia painstakingly and lovingly teaches him how to be human, not knowing who he truly is. Meanwhile, Amelia notices Bill’s increasing secrecy aand slowly pieces together what’s really happening, but she doesn't fully understand or act until it’s too late. Amelia discovers Bill's plan, but is unable to stop him. Ronnie pulls a gun on the astronauts, but Abbie decides he agrees with his father and triggers the hatching. Ronnie is unable to shoot to the brother she loves.

The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew can be a very funny play -- and probably should be, lest one linger too long on the sexist implications that one either believes are being mocked by Shakespeare or taken to heart -- but Arin Arbus's manic direction for Theatre for a New Audience cannot seem to bear to let well enough alone. Despite having an excellent center in the boisterous -- but ultimately not a buffoon -- Petruchio (Andy Grotelueschen) and his sharp-tongued, iron-jawed would-be-wife Kate (Maggie Siff, who has well-played similar roles on Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy), this production shoots off in a dozen directions at once. Even the program's dramaturgical notes offer only "perspectives" from other scholars, there's no thesis, no backbone.

Petruchio's reverse-psychology and fact-denying wooing are a comic delight, as always, made all the stronger by Groteleuschen's absolute confidence and by Siff's perfect partnering, from gasping double-takes and resolute put-downs to some far-flung spittle and physical comedy. John Keating (who plays Tranio), John Christopher Jones (as old Gremio), and Saxon Palmer (as Hortensio) get in on the more exaggeratedly fun aspects of the wooing, but the rest of the ensemble is a mixed bag, ranging from the diligently expository servant, Biondello (Varin Ayala), to Kate's thanklessly bland father, Baptista (Robert Langdon Lloyd), and simply unbelievable wooers, Lucentio (Denis Butkus) and Kate's sister, Bianca (Kathryn Saffell). You can literally feel the energy draining from the stage when the two leads are absent, which is further evidence that Arbus is not entirely sure what story she aims to communicate with this version of Shrew.

[Read on]

Porgy and Bess

I know that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, nor a show by its poster, but as soon as I saw the one for Porgy and Bess, I had serious misgivings about this production. For one thing, a vertical Porgy, looking down at Bess, is no more Porgy than a shy Mame is Mame or a cheerful, teetotaling Blanche DuBois is Blanche DuBois. Also, the noir-ish quality of the poster is miles away from Catfish Row.

The poster, however, turns out to be true to the show, which is not true to Porgy and Bess. Oh, there is a sort of Porgy and Bess going on up there, but in changing the book, director Diane Paulus and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks threw out the baby with the bathwater. I agree with Hilton Als that they succeed in "humanizing the depiction of race onstage," and I thank them for it. But other changes work against the show, including some of the mediocre dialogue and the drawn-out rape scene--though none of the other changes do as much damage as Porgy standing up.

I understand that many of the changes were made with the idea of making Porgy and Bess more of a musical than an opera, but too much is lost. The grandeur is gone. With the size and myth so reduced, the opera doesn't become a musical but rather it becomes a soap opera. It doesn't help that the orchestrations are often thin, the set fails to evoke Catfish Row, and Norm Lewis lacks the gravitas and voice for Porgy. (His "I Got Plenty of Nothing" is completely wrong for the show.)

Of course, it's the only Porgy and Bess we have in New York right now, and a thin version is better than none. It's more successful in my eyes than the recent productions of, for example, A Little Night Music and Follies. It has glorious voices. It has Audra McDonald, well on her way, I suspect, to Tony #5. It has that score.

It's Porgy and Bess lite, but I'm glad I saw it.

(Rear mezzanine, first act. Second row orchestra to the side, second act. TDF ticket)