My Children! My Africa!

If My Children! My Africa! occasionally falls prey to schooling us, it is at least at the hands of the very gifted James A. Williams, and it is at least motivated by the relateable frustrations of his character, Mr. M., who fears what will happen to his country when the youth finally rebel against the inequalities of Apartheid (the play takes place in the autumn of 1984). Clear passions and heartbreaks drive these lessons, as Mr. M. attempts to take two disparate debate students -- his would-be prodigy, the roiling Thami (Stephen Tyrone Williams), and the bright and affable (and white) Isabel (Allie Gallerani) -- and show them that there can be a non-violent path to unity. Fugard has the master playwright's ability to empathize with all of his characters, but given his subject matter, it's easy to assume that he writes to instruct because he truly believes that ignorance is the true root of evil: so it's important that we listen and learn, so that we might move forward together.

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Title and Deed

Photo: Joan Marcus

Will Eno's Title and Deed seems to operate in a vacuum. Christine Jones's set hangs geometric shapes in mid-air, looking like shrapnel frozen in time, and Ben Stanton's lighting is plain and straightforward: no tricks up these sleeves, it announces. The same can be said for Andrea Lauer's unassuming costume: Conor Lovett's character, after all, can be from anywhere except here, and is meant to be as nondescript as possible. Personally, this sort of work makes me uncomfortable -- fidgety -- and structurally, the show has even less of a narrative than Eno's Thom Pain. Being a critic here is more like being a dream analyst . . . but then again, sometimes dead air is just dead air.

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Other Desert Cities

Sometimes, when partisan politics piss me off, I try--with increasing difficulty as I age--to see the issue from the other side. "They infuriate us as much as we infuriate them," I reason, "and they probably think about it this way while we're coming at it from this other way." This exercise usually doesn't help much, but at the very least, it does remind me that I am not alone in my own rigidity, stubbornness, or convictions about what I am sure is right and what I know is dead wrong. Sue me; I'm human.

So are all the members of the Wyeth family, portrayed with impressive sympathy and depth by Jon Robin Baitz in his flawed but compelling Other Desert Cities. The whole family is pretty solidified in their opinions--about themselves, their relationships, their politics, their worlds. The family elders, Polly and Lyman (Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach), are old-guard Hollywood Republicans who were dear friends with the Reagans, and who remain staunchly dedicated to the party and its ideals, even as those ideals have shifted since their beloved Ron left office, and even more radically since the turn of the century. They love but don't always understand their grown children, Brooke (Elizabeth Marvel) and Trip (Thomas Sadoski), a novelist recovering from a breakdown and the producer of a lurid tv reality show, respectively. Polly's sister Silda, a profoundly dysfunctional, if currently recovering, alcoholic whom Polly has taken care of on and off for much of her life, is living with Polly and Lyman as she adjusts to life just out of rehab (again).

Brooke has traveled from New York and Trip from LA to spend Christmas with Silda and their parents in their comfortable, sterile home in the Palm Springs desert. It is winter 2004, and the entire family is on edge. Silda, shakily sober at best, sleeps for much of the day and spends most of her waking hours biting the hands that feed her. Brooke remembers well the yawning abyss of depression that she is only just learning to manage, and she, like the rest of her family, is terrified that she'll lose control again. Trip, the family's youngest and perhaps most even-keeled, is sick of falling prey to the same old family dynamics he encounters every time he comes to visit. And Polly and Lyman refuse, as usual, to acknowledge or discuss their eldest son, Henry, who committed suicide after his own descent into mental illness resulted in the accidental death of a stranger. Yet their refusal to do so is about to become a real problem: Brooke, after years of inactivity, has finished a memoir about Henry, her family, and his death, and she wants their blessings before she publishes it, first in excerpted form in The New Yorker, and later as a high-profile book.

This, the central plotline of Other Desert Cities, failed to work for me. The way the death of a child impacts a family is certainly fair game for theater (and film, for that matter): Rabbit Hole comes immediately to mind, as does Ordinary People. Other Desert Cities doesn't add much to the canon on this front. When it comes to matters regarding Henry (oops) and Brooke's fairly damning memoir about him and his family, the show feels stagy, formulaic, and heavy handed: Secrets Are Revealed. Characters Reel From Shocking Realizations. Every Character Gets A Big Moment; Screaming Is Optional. There Is Anger And Retribution, But Finally Forgiveness, Acceptance, and Healing. Fade Out. Curtain.

Yet another problem I initially had with the show ended up striking me as one of its playwright's more insightful strokes. The actors seem to have been directed (by the mighty Joe Mantello) to relate to one another in a more superficial, forcefully cheery manner when they're all together--and especially when they are around Polly, whose almost plastic smiley face and cheerfully teasing humor disguise a deep-seated defensiveness, iron will, and ability to switch from warm and motherly to icy and threatening in a heartbeat. As the action unfolds, however, and the scenes focus on relationships between various family members, the overarching family dynamic gives way to more complex, subtle interpersonal relationships.

And in the end, it was the subtleties of Other Desert Cities that won me over. Playwrights can so often, so easily, insinuate their own politics or worldviews into their works, by punishing or judging their characters' ideals, choices, behavior. Baitz, however, refuses to do any of that here, which strikes me as the biggest strength of his play. I didn't always agree with his characters--their opinions about their family, their pasts, their politics, their values, their (sometimes downright petty) grudges. But I rather liked them all, flaws and all, and that didn't change as the action continued and the melodrama built. I believed the Wyeths, all of them, as I believed in their increasingly nuanced, complicated interactions with one another. They end up making perfect sense if you've ever spent more than five minutes with a family--any family--in your life. After all, families can rip themselves apart over things way pettier than the death of a child. Some family members are closer than others, and all family members relate to one another in unique ways. When it comes to families, the whole is not typically the sum of its parts.

The nuances extend, in Baitz's play, well beyond his Wyeths, and out into the rapidly changing, increasingly partisan, increasingly frightening world. The show's not called Other Desert Cities, nor set in 2004, for nothing. Outside of Lyman and Polly's generically tasteful, stubbornly isolated home in Palm Springs are bigger wars being waged, other people's children dying, the American party system slowly imploding. These bigger parts of the picture are not discussed terribly deeply by the Wymans during their time together, but it's clear that they all feel the world around them, and each of them has their own solidified, unchanging opinions about it, as they do about one another. They might not ever change, really, any of them, but Baitz gracefully forgives them for being so endlessly, stubbornly, even smugly rigid in their own perspectives--and thus, for being people--nonetheless.

Venus in Fur

Photo: Joan Marcus

Most of Venus in Furs' critical reception has centered around the force of nature that is Nina Arianda, and on this front I have nothing but more praise to add. She is, quite simply, amazing. I say this as someone who is both enormously cynical and often willfully oppositional, and also as someone who has been hearing endless accolades about Arianda since Venus in Fur premiered Off Broadway in January, 2010. That's a lot of accolades. And yeah, she deserves them. She's dynamite.

David Ives's play, however, for all its twists and turns, ultimately didn't thrill me as much as Arianda did. This has probably been discussed to death at this point, too, but I haven't read much from a feminist angle. Which is odd, since the play--a play within a play, really--is all about gender and sexuality. Ives, a male playwright, has created a male playwright (and, from the get-go, an all-too-thunderingly obvious misogynist), who has adapted a play based on the 1870 novella Venus im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which, in turn, is all about gender and sexuality. Ives's fictional playwright, Thomas, is frustrated as the action begins, because he can't find a single woman to convincingly play Vanda, the idealized dominatrix at the center of his play's action: they are all, he complains via cellphone to his fiancée, stupid, needy, and crude. As he's ranting, in gusts an actress, curiously named Vanda, dressed from head to toe in bondage wear. Much to Thomas's dismay, she immediately exhibits all of the purportedly feminine traits that he has just listed as most irritating to him.

But then the two begin to read, and lo and behold, this actress, Vanda, turns out to be perfect in the role of his character, Vanda. And Thomas gets drawn in--and increasingly aroused--by her interpretation, even as he becomes more and more confused by who, exactly, this woman is. Why was she not on the audition list? Why is her name Vanda? How did she get her hands on the script, and why has she already memorized the entire thing? Why does she know so very much about his personal life? As the show progresses, Vanda slowly but thoroughly subverts Thomas's preconceived notions about women; neatly demonstrates that he is the one who is stupid, needy, and crude; challenges the deeply rooted sexism in both the Sacher-Masoch novella and Thomas's adaptation; feminizes the playwright; and finally, we assume, destroys him. Also as the play progresses, Ives sees to it that we, the audience, ask our own questions: Does Thomas, the fictional playwright, represent Ives? Or is Ives Vanda? Where does character end and playwright begin? And what, exactly, does Ives think of Sacher-Masoch's work?

Ives is clearly well aware of the overwhelming meta-ness of his creation; it's obvious in the way he's constructed Venus in Fur. For all the sexual twisting, turning, subverting and reverting, Vanda is certainly the more interesting, sympathetic, compelling character, while Thomas is a real dickhead. Vanda makes mincemeat of Thomas and everything he stands for; Thomas, evil misogynist that he is, gets what he deserves in the end. Score one for women everywhere!
 
But see here, now: One can't eat one's male gaze and have it, too. And that's my problem with Ives's play. It was fun, sure, and there is nothing more thrilling than watching good actors make very physically and emotionally demanding roles look fresh, easy and graceful, especially two years into a run. But never for a minute did I forget that Arianda as Vanda--powerhouse though she may be--was being triply subjected: by Ives, by his fictional playwright, by the audience. It always strikes me as both kind of funny and kind of sad that feminism goes down so much more easily when its ideals are being touted by a woman who conforms to heteronormative perceptions of Western desireability. Call me crazy, but somehow, I just don't see this show flying quite as high or lasting nearly as long had the central female role been written for a woman who doesn't spend most of the evening in black lingerie, spike heels, and lacy garters. Call me a man-hating, ball-busting, frigid bitch of a feminist if you will, but the fact that Arianda is almost never wearing more than black, bondage-themed lingerie (well, okay, and a dog collar) while she strikes a blow for women just makes me feel sort of tired at this point.
 
As did the ending to the show. Ives's play spends a tremendous amount of time and energy admonishing its central male character to stop being so reductive when it comes to gender roles. I suppose that Ives found himself kind of stuck at the end, but his summation struck me as tremendously reductive, and thus a particularly crushing copout. This is not entirely fair of me: the questions Ives raises through the show are far too big to be answered neatly in one 100-minute play. After all, male social constructs loom long and large in these parts. And even though Thomas gets his just desserts, Ives alone is not responsible for coming to terms with the fact that Venus--and the very civilization that spawned her--were male constructions, too.

Judge Me Paris

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can send Company XIV's way is that this exciting, dance-fusion troupe (under the expert leadership of Austin McCormick) continues to evolve with each new show. Though their latest, Judge Me Paris returns to the well of their 2009 Judgment of Paris, it now does so with the operatic sensibilities that were honed in 2009's Snow White and 2010's Le Cirque Ferrique (indeed, Brett Umlauf and Amber Youell are back as Pallas and Juno), with the classy eroticism mastered in 2010's near-perfect Nutcracker Rouge, and the stunning live cinematography that was utilized in 2011's Lover.Muse.Mockingbird.Whore. (There's live music, too, from the lingerie-and-wigs-clad members of SIREN Baroque: Antonia Nelson, Claire Smith, Kelly Savage, and Anneke Schaul-Yoder.)

Photo/Corey Tatarczuk

Perhaps an even greater compliment, then, is in the way the works of Company XIV remain impossible to set down and describe on the page: such transitory images are as slippery as they are beautiful. Don't miss another chance to see them.

[Read full review here]

When Half the Sphere Is Visible

The Drafts, the acting company of the Horse Trade Theater Group, recently presented When Half the Sphere Is Visible, an unusual collaboration among four playwrights, five directors, and nine actors. The four playwrights were tasked to write in response to the word dichotomy. Their work was then weaved together into one 90-minute piece.

While I admire the adventurousness of this conceit, I'm afraid the whole was less than the sum of its parts. The constant switching from one play to another ended up interrupting each's continuity and momentum. Granted, the idea of another evening of one acts isn't as interesting as the idea of this theatrical collage, but I think it would have served the writing better.

Take the TSA storyline, in which a traveler tries to develop a method of getting through airport security without losing all privacy and dignity. It's a comic piece, and of course the secret to comedy is timing. And perhaps in a movie, with quick cutting from scene to scene, the timing wouldn't have been quite so fractured. But this was a play, and between the interruptions for scenes from other shows and the moving on and off of scenery, all hope of comic build was lost.

The story of a lonely young woman who meets a spookily familiar stranger on a train was intriguing and moving--and even more damaged by interruptions. In this case, some of them were written into the play, in flashes (the woman in bed; the woman on the train; the woman at work) that couldn't actually flash because of the physical limitations of live theatre. When a scene change is longer than a scene, it hurts a play, and this one in particular deserved better.

The other two stories were less hurt by the interruptions, yet I still think that they would have been helped by being presented straight through. One, a sort of sci fi romance between a movie star and a librarian, lost some of its potential sweetness in this presentation. The other, a character-based good brother-bad brother tale, was left looking generic as the audience didn't have a chance to really get to know this particular good brother and this particular bad brother.

The writers were Jesse Cameron Alick, Matthew Gutshick, Michael McGuire, and Germono Toussain. The directors were Ilaria Amadasi, Jaclyn Biskup, Lindsey Moore Sproul, Sara C. Walsh, and Donya K. Washington. The actors were Juliana Carr, Reiss Gaspard, Paul Herbig, Alex Hodgins, Ben Kaufman, Lauren Kate Morrison, JB Rote, Marchelle Thurman, Amanda Van Nostrand, and Gary Warchola.

While this evening of plays ultimately got in its own way, there was plenty of talent involved, and I look forward to seeing more work by this company.

(press ticket; second row)