Miracle on South Division Street

Tom Dudzick's lovely and touching comedy, Miracle on South Division Street, focuses on the working-class Nowaks of Buffalo--Clara and her three adult children--a close-knit family who nevertheless keep secrets from one another. What makes the Nowaks notably different from millions of other people who work hard and go to (or skip) mass is that they have long believed that their family is specially blessed by the Virgin Mary.

Although their neighborhood is changing rapidly, with stores closing and old friends leaving town, the Nowaks live relatively unchanged lives. Clara maintains a statue of the Holy Mother and operates a soup kitchen. Mellow son Jimmy and energetic daughter Beverly have radically different personalities but the same goals--to be happily married and to bowl on weekends. Daughter Ruth aspires to be an actress and performs small roles in local shows. Their lives go quietly on until Ruth decides to write a one-woman show about the family and forces them to question their assumptions, identity, and the meaning of miracles

Miracle on South Division Street nicely balances humor and genunine life challenges. It starts a little slowly, and perhaps could use a few fewer one-liners, but it is funny and thoughtful. It is particularly good at showing how adults always remain children in their parents' homes. Director Joe Brancato occasionally lets the actors play the jokes instead of the reality but he keeps the show well-paced and -focused. The cast is good; in particular, Peggy Cosgrave as Clara provides a strong, likeable central presence.

Miracle on South Division Street is my favorite type of comedy: you laugh and laugh, but you also shed a tear or two. 

(Full disclosure: Tom Dudzick is my brother-in-law.)

(free ticket, 8th row center)

Fort Blossom Revisited (2000/2012)

John Jasperse's one-hour dance piece, Fort Blossom Revisited, begins when an attractive, curly-haired, and completely nude white man walks calmly onstage and lies face down, hands at side. He remains that way for quite some time, then starts slithering cross-stage with a gorgeous, slow, and odd undulating motion. Three other dancers join him, carrying transparent inflatables. One dancer, another naked man, lies on top of him, with the inflatable between them. At some points the man on top just lies there. At other points, he humps the inflatable, which could be the world's largest, strangest condom; eventually, the inflatable deflates, and one man is on top of the other, with the transparent vinyl between them. The other two dancers, women dressed in red, carry shapeless orange inflatables that they lean on, caress, swing, roll, and otherwise interact with. For a large section of the piece, the women own stage right, which is white, while the men own stage left, which is black. The lighting is stark. The soundscape is largely shrill and repetitious. The movements are slow.

John Jasperse

The piece includes an extended pas de deux in which the two men--now quit of the deflated vinyl--twist around each other in what could be slow-motion sex, or slow-motion wrestling, or both. Some of their poses are beautiful; many are odd (odd is up there with slow for a useful descriptor of this show). Many are extremely intimate, along the lines of arms in ass cracks and faces almost in genitals; yet there is also a lack of intimacy as they do not look at each other. They are deadpan throughout, and when they finally make eye contact, it is startling.

At some point, the two couples finally interact, and now the slowness spell is broken. The women smash the men with the inflatables. All four dancers throw the objects, do acrobatic moves. They dance. This section is playful and joyous and great fun.

Afterward, the four interlace their bodies, looking now like a zipper, now like a horizontal version of the cygnets in Swan Lake, now like a movement that might have been choreographed by Paul Taylor or David Parsons. All four dancers (Ben Asriel, Lindsay Clark, Erika Hand, and Burr Johnson) are wonderful.

For those too young
to know who Gumby is

The slowness of the show leaves a lot of time for rumination. Some thoughts that drifted through my head while watching: The choreographer is using the dancers' bodies like they are Gumbys. I bet that vinyl sticks to their naked bodies. I hope those two guys like each other a lot! Why are the women dressed and the men nude? What is it like being naked for such an extended period? Do they forget they're naked or just not care? If your body is your art, does nudity really matter? Maybe it's not Gumbys, maybe it's bendable Legos. Living sculpture, that's what it is. Wow, those guys have really nice bodies. Is this supposed to be funny? I think yes. Or no. Hard to tell. What's that poetry where it's all about sound and not sense? Sound poetry (duh). Is this vision dance?

I like to not read about dance pieces before I view them so I can see what they say to me. This piece says that men touching men is beautiful and that bodies can be great sources of joy. But I have to wonder if it had to take so long to do so. The artistry is too frequently outweighed by the tedium.

On the New York Live Arts website, it says, "the work invites audiences to examine contemporary notions of how we experience the body as both owners and spectators." Should I have gotten that? Perhaps. How much of this form of expression is the responsibility of the artist and how much is the responsibility of the audience?

(press ticket, F101)

A Streetcar Named Desire

Photo: Ken Howard

It's the strength of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that is reflected in the relative success of this all-black revival, not Emily Mann's directorial decisions. Well, and perhaps a little of Eugene Lee's taut set design, which brings an oubliette-like feel to the home of Stanley (Blair Underwood) and Stella (Daphne Rubin-Vega) that fits the melodrama of Blanche (Nicole Ari Parker), who announces that "Only Mr. Edgar Allen Poe could do it justice." Despite issues having to do with the miscast Rubin-Vega and Mann's interstitial atmosphere-draining vignettes and music, A Streetcar Named Desire still sweats a rawness that's undeniably powerful, tinged as it is by sorrow, delusion, and naked needs. And when two powerful actors collide -- as with Wood Harris's reversal-filled Mitch and Parker's ailing and flailing Blanche -- the audience is liable to break out in sweats, too.

[Read full review here]

(Press ticket; K2)

4000 Miles

Photo: Erin Baiano

There is a great distance between any two people, not just across generations -- Leo (Gabriel Ebert) shows up at his grandmother Vera's (Mary Louise Wilson's) door after going AWOL on a bike trip across America -- but across a gamut of emotional feelings, refracted through Leo's slightly unnatural feelings for his unseen adopted sister (voiced, I believe, by Greta Lee, who appears in the play as an immature, art-freak of a one-night-stand) and his almost unbearable love for his girlfriend Bec (Zoe Winters). Unlike Amy Herzog's previous work, After the Revolution, 4000 Miles doesn't appear to be interested in bridging that distance, so much as in quietly acknowledging it, a task that director Daniel Aukin (This) is well-suited for.

However, for all the naturalistic charm, tenderness, and sweetness of 4000 Miles, the concluding thought is that Herzog appears to have traveled largely on a treadmill. That moment of insight, of connection? It never comes, and with both Bec and Leo running away (to one degree or another) at the end of the play and with the spectre of a life-well-lived-but-also-almost-over hanging over Vera, it feels as if a second act is missing (and this in a play that's already a bit long at a hundred intermissionless minutes). The final monologue -- a sort of eulogy -- suggests that we're not meant to know everything; the catch-22 of Herzog's talented writing is that we want to.

[Read full review here]

($40.00 ticket; H109)

The Runner Stumbles

In northern Michigan in 1911, a nun was found murdered. In the early 1970s, playwright Milan Stitt wrote a murder mystery/courtroom drama based on this story and used it to examine love, religion, and god. And in 2012, Retro Productions and The Bleecker Company moved their solidly entertaining Off-Off-Broadway production of Stitt's play, The Runner Stumbles, to the Off-Broadway Arclight Theatre for an open run.

Casandera M.J. Lollar,
Christopher Patrick Mullen
Photo: Kristen Vaughan

The story is told in flashbacks as Father Rivard (the amazing Christopher Patrick Mullen) stands trial for the murder of Sister Rita (the terrific Casandera M.J. Lollar). We see Father Rivard and Sister Rita  thrown together when two other nuns come down with consumption, and Sister Rita has to move into the rectory to avoid contagion. We are witnesses as the two start butting heads. Rivard sees the church and god as strict and punishing; Rita sees them as loving and humane. Rivard believes in rules; Rita believes in emotions. Their disagreements spill over into other people's lives, as when they compete to console a woman whose mother is about to die; the differences in their approaches are enough to make the poor woman's head spin.

Rivard is an amazing creation. While Sister Rita is a fascinating study of someone coming to believe that maybe there is a place for her in a difficult world, Rivard is anger and fear and love and myth and flesh and blood. The writing is so good, and Mullen is so present and real, so mercurial yet subtle, that even Rivard's worst behavior is comprehensible. And while Rivard's trial examines whether he is guilty of murder, the play examines whether he is guilty of hypocrisy, rigidity, and an inability to love.

The show and this production have their flaws. The first act doesn't quite gel, and some of the characters are thinly drawn. Director Peter Zinn does a good job overall, but the show's pacing needs tightening, particularly in the transitions between scenes. The fights are awkwardly staged. The show gets a bit melodramatic here and there. But the cast is strong (standouts include Heather E. Cunningham as Rivard's housekeeper, Ric Sechrest as the lawyer who defends Rivard, and Alisha Spielmann as the woman whose mother is dying), the story is compelling, and the show is well worth seeing.

(press ticket; second row on the aisle)

An Early History of Fire

While watching the not-particularly-enthralling New Group production of David Rabe's new play, An Early History of Fire, I had to wonder if we really need yet another coming-of-age story in which a son breaks away from his domineering dad and outgrows his childhood friends, with everyone drinking amounts of alcohol that would leave them unconscious in real life. Well, if we do need another one, this isn't it.

Theo Stockman, Claire van der Boom
Photo: Monique Carboni

Although An Early History of Fire is full of incident--fights, fires, an extended case of not-quite-coitis interruptus--it is flat, with two-dimensional characters and little intensity (a surprising criticism for a Rabe play!). The heightened language rings false--not everyone of earth speaks in metaphors, and while lyrical dialogue can add much to a play, it feels forced here. Similarly, the period references that set the play in the early 1960s come across as too-knowing and even a little precious.

The set, direction, acting, etc, are all good, but ultimately, An Early History of Fire fails to ignite.